Mr MacIsaac is also a veteran, though of the Boer War. It too was a bad war. He has said there’s no such thing as a good one. He and Lily both limp on the same side and he likes to tell her they’d run one heck of a three-legged race together. He tells her how like she is to her beautiful sister Kathleen, “God rest her soul.” Especially now that the red is coming out in her hair. “Faery hair” Mr MacIsaac calls it, a twinkle in his kind bleary eye. “Don’t worry, lass, that’s a good thing.”
They went through a canvas door into the greenhouse. The air was mysterious to breathe, damp like an underground lake. There were plants in boxes everywhere, each with a special power but none, it seemed, that could cure him.
But the miraculous thing was overhead. Lily looked up at the glass roof. The sun came out from behind a cloud and filtered through the tiny panes. Before her eyes a host took shape. Shadows of green and grey, a ghostly army in uniform, smiling down at her. For ever young.
Glass photographic plates. Mr MacIsaac collected them — so many were discarded after the war, there being no demand for additional prints of such photos once their subjects had been killed.
“They’re my children,” he said. “We were never blessed with our own, so I think about all the people who lost theirs and how maybe I’d have lost mine too anyhow, things being what they were.”
Mrs MacIsaac had died early that year and people expected Mister to follow soon at the rate he was going, constantly quietly soused.
Lily said, “I’ll be your child.”
He laughed his wheezy laugh, then covered up his face. He reached for her hand and placed it on his bald head. After a while he gave her back her hand and looked up again. He asked her to do something for him.
“Whenever you pass by my door, say a Hail Mary for me. Will you do that?”
Lily promised she would, and she did. Still does. She didn’t tell anyone because it seemed private. Soon people were saying it was a miracle that Mr MacIsaac had quit the bottle. Even though there was barely a soul in town who didn’t owe him money, there was no one who wouldn’t rather see him spry behind his counter.
MacIsaac would live long enough to extend credit right through the Great Depression, and die a rich man on paper.
Lily did not feel disloyal to Daddy when she told Mr MacIsaac she would be his child. Frances would say, “That’s because Daddy’s not your real father.” But Lily knows he is. Just as she knows that it is possible to love everyone the most. Even if she can’t help loving Frances most of all.
The Ginger Man
Jameel has been charging admission on show nights. He makes Boutros wear a fez. He has replaced the faded curtain with a beaded one. There are ashtrays. There are glasses. He ups the price of poison. He’s still paying Frances a nickel a night. In September he has the nerve to demand a cut of her earnings from her private customers. What he gets is a new deal.
“Look buddy, I’ve turned this dump into a cultural Mecca, so don’t you be talking to me about cutting you in, you’re cutting me in, pal, I’m in for fifty percent of the door or I walk and talk.”
“Fuck you.”
“Sixty.”
“Forty.”
“Auryvoir.”
He grabs her arm. “Forty-five.”
“Kiss my arse.”
“Fifty.”
“Gimme a light.”
He lights her cigarette. “All right. You’re in now, so if you foul up I’ll cut your throat just like I would a man’s.”
“Get me a decent piano in here.”
Boutrous neither confirms nor denies Jameel’s threat, he just counts out half the evening’s admissions and hands it over to Frances.
“Hey Boutros,” she says. “I didn’t know you could count, b’y.” She winks at him and heads for the back room to change out of her diaper and merry widow.
In a place like this it’s best to get a man’s status — the threat of throat-cutting and only throat-cutting simplifies a woman’s survival. Frances trades in her coins and two-dollar bills for larger notes at the bank in order to fit it all into her hiding-place.
When the sweetheart of Whitney Pier turns seventeen there’s a cake and presents and everything. The clientele, which has grown more checkered along with Frances’s reputation, sings “Happy Birthday”. A woman whom Frances calls “The Countess” because she looks like the lesbian in Pandora’s Box gives her a one-way ticket to Boston. The Countess has got a big education and some kind of set-up down there — she’s described it to Frances a thousand times but Frances, though she keeps her eyeballs pointing in the same direction no matter how much she’s had to drink, still can’t get it straight whether this woman runs a nightclub or a home for wayward girls. “My intentions are entirely honourable, Fanny,” says the Countess, at which Frances yawns in her face and winks. A stoker named Henry gives Frances the latest Bessie Smith, “Black Mountain Blues”. She gives him a big sloppy kiss, then holds her hand out for a quarter, and everyone laughs. Archie “White-Socks” MacGillicuddy, who everybody knows is a sissy-boy, comes wearing his thing outside his pants gaily gift-wrapped with a bow and a tag, “For Frances”. Frances tells Boutros to open it for her, “Go on Buttress, good things come in small packages.” Boutros declines. Leo Taylor shows up at the front door in time to see Jameel parading through the crowd bearing a pint-size painted whore with a parasol on his shoulders. Taylor yells over the din, “Mr Jameel, I got what you ordered.”
Jameel sets Frances down and numerous hands cover her eyes before she can turn around, “Who toined out the lights?!” Boutros leaves with Taylor. After a few moments they return, veins bulging in their necks, inching a good-as-new upright piano through the door.
Taylor delivers the booze on weekday afternoons so he has never seen the place in action, which has been just fine by him. He dislikes drunks, and prostitutes dismay him — they are all someone’s daughter. This one is small enough to be a child but surely that’s impossible — he is just as glad that her face is obscured by someone’s hands. There’s no missing the oversize red ringlets of her wig, however, or her hands spinning the parasol — lily-white to the wrists, where two sleeves of grime begin. Grime that has accumulated through contact with nothing but time. And he can’t avoid her scent as he sets down his end of the piano before her. She smells like a neglected baby, that sad sour-milk pee-stain smell. Taylor leaves and comes back with a piano stool, but she’s already seated with her back to him, demurely rendering “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”. It disturbs him: such a little-girl voice.
Frances doesn’t miss a sweet beat as Boutros gets up off his hands and knees and is replaced by the stool.
Leo Taylor leaves feeling a bit sick. The steel door closes behind him and he hears the piano become a pie-anny as schmaltz transmogrifies to boogie. He steps up into his truck and starts the engine. He would like to go home and kiss his wife and kids again for the road but there’s no time. Along with liquor, he’s hauling live lobsters to New York City for all the fine old families and newly minted gangsters who can afford them.
He points his truck south on Highway 4 and conjures his wife’s voice and image to keep him company. He calls up every precious detaiclass="underline" rusty wire hair, dark brown freckles across her light brown face, sharpshooter eyes. Lean and mean, it makes him chuckle. They commune all the way to the Strait of Canso, till he’s off the island and he figures he ought to let her get some sleep. “Goodnight, Addy,” he says, smiling at how she’d raz him for his sappiness if she could see him chatting to her out loud in his truck as it rolls onto the ferry-boat. He sees her wry smile as she reaches up to kiss him, “Goodnight, Ginger,” she says. “Drive safe, baby.”