But what woke Lily were Mercedes’ whispered prayers.
Lily asks, “How come you’ve got a black tongue, Mercedes?”
Mercedes cries, “Oh thank God — Daddy! Daddy!”
He swerves into the room — “Oh thank God” — and kneels next to Mercedes at Lily’s bedside.
Lily says, “I’m hungry.”
Daddy and Mercedes laugh and hug each other and thank God again. Frances loiters in the doorway and tells God, “There’s no way I’m being a nun out of this.”
Mercedes is careful to avoid the slightest idea of Lily’s miraculous cure being at all connected with her own acts of contrition in the cellar. That would be inviting more of God’s infinite mercy. So she is relieved when Lily offers an explanation of her own.
“Ambrose cured me. He washed me in the creek.”
“Who’s Ambrose?”
“He’s my guardian angel.”
Mercedes tells the priest. He nods but tells her that it is of the greatest importance not to be premature about these things. Rome requires more than an isolated event, while the laity require almost nothing to make a shrine out of a creek and a saint out of a ten-year-old girl. Best to keep quiet and watch for signs.
So Mercedes does. She tries not to dwell on the signs that are suddenly evident in retrospect: Lily’s shrivelled leg — saints are often stricken in childhood. Her pretty face — the mirror of her soul. The tragic circumstances of her birth — poor motherless child. Just imagine if Lily were revealed to have a healing power. Or if she were the instrument of a posthumous miracle by Bernadette at Lourdes. Mercedes does her best to chasten these thoughts, knowing from bitter experience how the Devil masquerades. He is a mocker and a mimic, a dealer in reflections and parallel lines. Just look at all the supposed saints the Church had to burn a few centuries ago. Saints and satanic vessels tend to start out the same way. You have to watch closely to see which force will rush in to claim the highly conductive soul of the candidate — for it is bound to be one or the other. Mercedes knows that if the Devil catches the slightest whiff of ambition on her part, he will come and get Lily.
But since Mercedes can’t help but want Lily to be revealed as a saint, she tries to want it only for Daddy’s sake. The ultimate vindication.
Frances doesn’t need to tell Lily any more Ambrose stories after this because he has become Lily’s story. Frances has finally succeeded in giving him to her. Lily is okay. For now. Frances can get on with other things. Her life.
She raids the Lourdes tin. She puts on her Girl Guide uniform and stows away in the Hupmobile. Once at James’s still, she slides out and hides in the bushes till Leo Taylor’s truck pulls up. She waits till he’s finished loading and has returned to James to get his pay, then she makes a break from the trees to the truck, leaps into the back and disappears behind the crates and barrels.
“Thank you, Mr Piper.”
“All right, Leo. Drive safe.”
Frances pokes her head out between the tarpaulin flaps and watches the Shore Road speed away beneath her. She turns and grins like a dog into the sunny sea wind, and lets her braids fly out behind her.
The truck slows when they reach Sydney and stops in the Coke Ovens section of Whitney Pier. She ducks as Taylor gets out, comes round, and undoes the tarps for his first delivery. When his broad back is turned, she hops out, lightening his load by an additional forty ounces. She waits behind a tar-smelling timber of the C.N. rail bridge until he drives away. Then she walks over to the run-down clapboard house and knocks at a big steel door.
If I should take a notion,
to jump in to the ocean,
t’ain’t nobody’s business if I do, do, do, do….
I swear I won’t call no copper,
if I’m beat up by my Poppa,
t’ain’t nobody’s business if I do….
The roses all have left your cheek….
Saturday, August 31, 1918
Dear Diary,
I don’t know where to begin. I have to get it all down now while it’s fresh. I’m here under my tree in Central Park and we have all afternoon till supper-time. I’ll have to go back a few days because despite all that whining about nothing ever happening, I realize now that tons was happening and it was all leading up to what I have to tell you which is EVERYTHING.
… I have no shame in front of you, Diary, for you are me. You won’t squirm, you can’t be shocked, you know that nothing in love is nasty so I will try to be as free with you as I am in my own thoughts. Lest I forget, let me offer up a sincere orison of thanks for Giles. She is the least curious person on the face of the earth. Without her total lack of vigilance my life could never have got started. If Daddy knew what a lackadaisical gatekeeper she is he would be down here in a second to board me with the nuns. Which reminds me, I’d better write him. Oh but I’m teasing you, aren’t I, Diary. You’re in an agony of anticipation. Be still, open your heart, and I will begin at the beginning and unfold it for you as it unfolded for me….
I’ve watched them fade away and die….
Book 5. DIARY OF A LOST GIRL
Baby Burlesque
A six-inch panel thwacks open and two brown eyes take aim at her beneath a single eyebrow. Frances holds up a bottle of James’s finest. The panel slides closed and after a moment the steel door opens. Standing there is a big man. Wavy black hair, nose like a fist, arms like cannon, would-be olive skin but he obviously doesn’t see much sunlight. Young and, Frances has to figure, dopey. He stares down at her blankly, blocking the inner gloom she is so longing to glimpse.
“Close the friggin door, Boutros, it’s broad fuckin daylight, b’y.”
A small man elbows the younger one aside and, with a glance not at Frances but over her shoulder, grabs her arm. “Get in, get in.”
She’s in.
The interior of the speakeasy lives down to its exterior. It’s the only drab house in The Coke Ovens. Peeling grey paint, boarded windows, you’d have to know what you were looking for to find it because it appears deserted — with the exception of the upper storey, where a few tired petunias and chewed marigolds cling to life in a window box overlooking the slag dump of Dominion Iron and Steel. Above is the train bridge. This is Railway Street.
Frances blinks into the dusty shadows and the room takes shape. Benches line the walls. Wallpaper strips with traces of lords and ladies flap from ceiling corners dingy with nicotine and neglect. On the floor, a genuine brass spittoon awash in brown slime, and several rusty tin cans that serve the same purpose. A pile of cigarette butts has been swept to the centre of the floorboards. A makeshift bar — sheet of scrap metal on two oil drums — bottles and barrels, not a mirror, not a shot glass, no engravings of ships or trains, no regimental photo, no boxing heroes grace the walls. In the far corner stands a scarred player-piano.
Frances looks into the taut sallow face of the small man. His black stubble matches his eyes.
“Who sent you, you’re not selling cookies.” He snickers. Frances feels suddenly ridiculous in her Girl Guide uniform, which she thought was the perfect disguise.
“It’s a costume,” she falters. “I’m a….”
“You’re a what?”
She can’t answer. Her eyebrows quiver. She’s mad at herself — baby. Sooky baby, Frances. She bites her cheek and looks down.