Three minutes or three hours later, Ginger recognized the number as “Honeysuckle Rose,” but this did not prevent him from confusing his left arm with his right when he went to lift his glass of beer. The odd thing was, Ginger had homey taste in music. If it could be sung by the whole family, it was great by him. He certainly didn’t claim to be any kind of connoisseur. And yet when the pianist allowed his fingers to settle like mist onto the keys for the next interstellar tune, Ginger had to stay and listen.
It was on the night drive back up to Cape Breton that he became aware of the fault line opening inside his head, and twice he had to remind himself to stop when the land ended: once because it was time to coast onto the ferry, and once again because he was home. He hugged Adelaide as though she were the first solid food he’d had in weeks.
Still, he hasn’t been able to shake the unease, and sights like the lost little Girl Guide are bothering him perhaps even more than they normally would. The third time he sees her, Ginger means to tell Adelaide, but it slips his mind only to return that night in a dream. He sees the thin white face in the side mirror up close — the serious brown green eyes, one freckle on the nose. It still looks like a child, but an unspeakably old one. It is the saddest face he has ever seen. Ginger wakes up even though it’s not a nightmare. For the first time it occurs to him that the little Girl Guide may be a ghost. What is she saying to him with her eyes? “Here is how I died…. Pray for me.” Ginger wipes his face — it’s wet but none of the rest of him is so it couldn’t have been a night sweat. How strange. He goes and checks on all his children in their beds. When he returns he looks down at his rusty-haired wife, who appears ready for a fight even in her sleep. Thank God for Adelaide.
Ginger means to tell his sister Teresa about the little Girl Guide and about his dream the next day at lunch when he brings Mr Mahmoud his ginger-beer treat, but again it slips his mind.
Jameel squints down at Frances. “What for?”
“Just tell me.”
Frances has awakened him in the middle of the day, he’s jaundiced as the sun.
“Why?”
“Because I’ll burn your fuckin house down if you don’t.”
Jameel horks out last night’s nicotine. “You just watch yourself, that’s all I’m sayin, Leo Taylor’s got a mean wife.”
“It’s not his wife I’m interested in.”
“He lives in the purple house on Tupper Street.”
Frances turns to leave; Jameel shakes his head and warns, “Just don’t come cryin to me.”
But she ignores him.
Ginger Taylor gets a jolt when he looks up from the shell in his youngest child’s hand to see the little Girl Guide standing in his back yard staring at him. She is a ghost. What does she want?
“May I have some of your ginger beer?”
Adelaide comes to the back door. “What do you want?”
Frances looks up at her. The woman’s reddish hair indicates to Frances the ability to see through people. Best not to answer.
Adelaide doesn’t take her eyes off Frances. “Who is she, Ginger?”
“I don’t know, honey.” Then he turns back to Frances, “What’s your name, little girl?”
Frances walks away. The child moves to follow her but Ginger picks him up.
Adelaide and Ginger watch Frances trail off down the alley, then Adelaide says, “That’s not a little girl.” And walks back into the house.
Salt
The first thing Mahmoud notices is that one of the sterling combs is missing. That leads him to the rosewood jewellery box. He opens it. An empty metal post pops up and rotates to the strains of “The Anniversary Waltz”. The box is bare but for the pearls. Shaking with disbelief, he snatches them up — they slide down their severed string and spray across the floor.
“Teresa!” he roars.
She’s up in an instant, wiping her hands, white grains of burghul clinging to them — she’s making kibbeh — and the next instant she’s lucky he hasn’t called the police; “Get your things and go.”
Mahmoud contacts his youngest daughter and she organizes a bucket brigade of female relatives. The family is hugely attentive anyway, but full-time housekeeping for an old man is another matter. They’ll have to find a paid replacement because Mahmoud’s family is so successful that there are no spare females lying around.
A line of Irish girls and Coloured girls and country girls is paraded before him but Mahmoud can’t seem to decide on a new Teresa, so it falls to Camille to take up most of the slack. She is the closest thing to a widow there is.
What enrages Mahmoud is that he let himself be lulled into trusting Teresa — into thinking she was different. That’s when the viper strikes. He should never have forgotten her colour. They can be the nicest people in the world but, like children, they mustn’t be overburdened with responsibility. They’re like the worser sort of woman in that way, even the men — which reminds me, I wonder if the brother was in cahoots.
It’s enormously aggravating at Mahmoud’s age to have to explain every little thing to each of the female relatives looking after him. They all do their best but the evil truth is, none of them knows him like Teresa did. And — this is the most evil truth — none of them makes Lebanese food as beautifully as she did. Better than his own wife, God rest her soul and God forgive me. Teresa seemed to read his mind. She made everything so easy. And Mahmoud knew that, when the time came, he could have accepted her most intimate ministrations without yielding a particle of his dignity. Now that is a good woman. And what is her price? Above rubies. Damn it. What were a few trinkets in exchange for that? He’d have willingly given her the whole kit ’n’ caboodle, every bauble and — what am I thinking? I’m a foolish old man. And what is my price? An ass if I’m not careful. I need my daughters at a time like this, my own flesh and blood, this just goes to show it.
It wounds Mahmoud to observe that the thefts do not end with the departure of Teresa. They resume under the increasingly continuous care of his daughter Camille.
Mahmoud blames himself. In the Old Country he never would have given a daughter to Jameel, because there the crucial distinction between their two families would have been clear. The Jameels are Arabs. We Mahmouds are more Mediterranean. Closer to being European, really. Such distinctions are apt to get blurred in the new country, where you open wide your arms to a brother from home who speaks the same beautiful language as you. The same shapely humorous language with earth and water in it. What a relief it is to sit down to a meal or a game of cards with someone, a Jameel for example, who shares this language. What a relief from the chill of English, which is exactly like immersing your tongue in ice-water. And after all, to the enklese you are all “black Syrians”. Mahmoud didn’t recognize until too late that his Old Country standards had eroded to the point where he had given his most beautiful daughter to a dirty half-civilized Arab. Poor Camille, a good girl who has borne sons only, and five of them — what a waste. And he’s lost Teresa to boot.
Tears are shed by Mahmoud sitting next to his bed. He has come up here to get away from a bungling granddaughter. He sits in the skirted chair that matches the bedclothes — Giselle’s taste, French provincial, God rest her soul — and his eyes fall upon the carved mahogany reproduction of Dürer’s Praying Hands hanging on the wall. My wife bought that. A distant tremor for Giselle gives way to hot tears because they are Teresa’s hands.