I’d do anything for you, anything you’d want me to …,
all I want is loving you and music, music, music.
Now that there’s entertainment, men start bringing the occasional date to the speak. Jameel sets up a couple of tables. Puts on an apron. The women watch the show with varying degrees of disbelief, scorn or fascination while their men affect indifference. Frances has gutted the player-piano of its music rolls and she hammers away at the keys, at first playing Mumma’s old vaudeville music from the hope chest, and then by ear from the records that sailors bring her up from New York City.
Frances is a bizarre delta diva one night, warbling in her thin soprano, “Moonshine Blues” and “Shave ’em Dry”. Declaring, an octave above the norm, “‘I can strut my pudding, spread my grease with ease, ’cause I know my onions, that’s why I always please.’” The following Saturday will see her stripped from the waist up, wearing James’s old horsehair war sporran as a wig, singing, “I’m Just Wild about Harry” in pidgin Arabic. She turns the freckle on her nose to an exclamation mark with a stroke of eyeliner, rouges her cheeks, paints on a cupid’s-bow mouth and dances naked behind a home-made fan of seagull feathers, “‘I wish I could shimmy like my sister, Kate’”.
She invests her early profits in face paint and costumery. She’ll start out as Valentino in a striped robe and turban. While one hand teases the piano keys, she removes the robe to reveal Mata Hari in a haze of purple and red. The seven veils come off one by one to “Scotland the Brave” and, just in case any one’s in danger of getting more horny than amused, there’s always a surprise to wilt the wicked and stimulate the unsuspecting. For example, she may strip down to a diaper, then stick her thumb in her mouth. “‘Yes my heart belongs to Daddy, so I simply couldn’t be ba-ad…. ’”
Her act is fuelled by “jazzoline,” for at first Frances takes most of her pay in liquid form, till she gets wise. Drink is just a means to an end: it inspires her one-woman follies, and it makes her untouchable when she takes the men outside one by one. Because the real money is not in the speak. It’s out back.
Frances is a sealed letter. It doesn’t matter where she’s been or who’s pawed her, no one gets to handle the contents no matter how grimy the envelope. And it’s for sure no one’s going to be able to steam her open. Frances will bounce in your lap with your fly buttoned for as long as it takes for two bucks. Expensive, but consider the overhead in wardrobe alone. A hand job costs two-fifty — she has a special glove she wears, left over from her first communion. Another fifty cents buys you patter, a song, any name you want to hear. Touch her little chest and cough up an extra buck; nothing below her belt. That’s the menu, no substitutions. If she laughs at you don’t whack her or she’ll holler for Boutros.
Frances starts to make money. Once she has acquired enough trinkets and trash to keep her gussied, she starts saving her money in a secret place. It’s for Lily. Not for a “cure” — Frances does not subscribe to Mercedes’ devout yearnings. In fact, Frances is unsure why she is sure the money is for Lily. She is putting it away “just in case”. In case what? In case.
Frances remains a technical virgin throughout. What is she saving herself for? She can’t say. It’s a feeling. There is something left for her to do. “For Lily.” What, Frances? Something.
Every night, when the last drunks are being peeled off the floor and deposited outside, Frances passes through the tired curtains to the back room and changes. One night, early in her career, she tiptoed up the back stairs and discovered her Aunt Camille sitting in a kitchen, playing solitaire under a dim yellow bulb. Again Frances was struck sad by the sullen heap so like and unlike Mumma. Camille was too absorbed in her cards to notice Frances peering around the door-jamb. Frances watched Camille sip her tea and cheat.
Frances can’t help but wonder how Camille wound up here, married to Jameel. But then, look where Mumma ended up. Maybe Camille eloped too. Frances’s reflections on the subject of romance are summed up by the last scene of Pandora’s Box: when Louise Brooks finally gives it away to a fella for free, he ups and kills her.
Frances has no desire to penetrate any further the shabby mystery of Aunt Camille, so she hasn’t repeated her foray into the upper domestic reaches of the speak. Come closing time she removes her costume among the crates and kegs of the chilly back room and washes her face and hands at the pump. She never washes the costumes. She climbs into her beige woollen stockings, her black button-boots, Girl Guide uniform and beret, and heads back to New Waterford.
Lily is always faithfully at the window, ready with the sheet, even though Daddy never gets home before Frances on weekends any more. James doesn’t want to be there when Frances “sneaks” in or out. He doesn’t want to know where she goes. In the mornings he glances into her room, half expecting to find her gone. Run off with a man, perhaps. Perhaps dead in a ditch.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!” rasps Frances, and Lily lowers the knotted bedsheet. Frances is usually fairly sober by the time she climbs in the window, unless she has nicked a jar for the road.
“Want a sip, Lily?”
“No thank you.”
“C’m’ere, dollface.” Lily steps onto Frances’s feet and they spin about while Frances sings, “‘Let’s dance, though you’ve only a small room, make it your ballroom, let’s dance’ —”
Mercedes stands in the darkened doorway, spectral in her white nightgown.
“Join me in a nightcap, toots?”
“Frances, you’re drunk.”
Frances rattles, “The-sheet-is-slit-who-slit-the-sheet-whoever-slit-the-sheet-is-a-good-sheet-slitter. Say it fast, Lily.”
“Frances, it’s time to go to bed.” Mercedes tries to sound calm and bossy at the same time.
“Piss on you, sister.” Frances laughs.
Occasionally, if she’s feeling up to it and Frances is sufficiently intoxicated, Mercedes will seize her round the waist, carry her to the waiting tub and bathe her forcibly, uniform and all. Otherwise Frances would not be fit to live with, for she only ever washes her face and hands. And she never washes her uniform. Mercedes rifles the Guide pouch in search of soiled hankies but finds only a dirty white glove.
“Where’s your other glove, Frances?”
“I only use one.”
“Oh. Well, it may as well be clean.”
Mercedes wrings it under the hot water, asking, “Isn’t it rather small for you now?”
“It does the trick.”
Mercedes does not enquire further.
On relatively sober evenings, Frances curls up next to Lily and whispers whiskey in her ear: “Lily. We are the dead” — Lily pretends to be asleep — “except we don’t know it. We think we’re alive, but we’re not. We all died the same time as Kathleen and we’ve been haunting the house ever since.” Lily prays for everyone, in case Frances is right.
On quite sober evenings, Lily confides her fears.
“Frances, do I have to go to Lourdes?”
“No. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
Lily tucks her little foot between Frances’s ankles.
“Frances. Al akbar inshallah?”
“In fallah inti itsy-bitsy spider.”
“Ya koosa gingerbread boy kibbeh?”
“Shalom bi’ salami.”
“Aladdin bi’ sesame.”
“Bezella ya aini Beirut.”
“Te’ berini.”
“Te’ berini.”
“Tipperary.”
Every night, pissed or stone sober, Frances puts her money in the secret place for Lily.