“Josephine, Evan, come here till I annihilate the both of you, what’s this?”
“I’m sorry, Mumma — Sorry, Mumma.”
Two soft earlobes pierced between stiletto thumbs and forefingers,
“I’ll tell what’s this, this is your baby brother Carvery playing with the stove!”
“Yes ma’am — Yes ma’am.”
Release earlobes, ah.
“He is your brother. You are responsible for him and you are responsible for each other.”
“Yes ma’am — Yes ma’am.”
“You never, ever let your family come in harm’s way.”
“No ma’am — No ma’am.”
Then she threatens them with retribution by their father when he gets home and the two children breathe a sigh of relief, because what they’ll get from their father is “Well now, how did that happen?” and a seat in his cushiony lap.
At the kitchen table.
Adelaide sits down to her buttons and bolts of precious fabric. Princely knickerbockers for Frederick, gentleman trousers for Evan, white shirts and collars for them both, Sunday dresses decked with ribbons for the girls, a swashbuckling shirt of sun, moon and stars for Leo and a matching one for baby Carvery. And finally, although she is mortified to spend the time on it — “I’m only doing this to please you, mister” — sleeveless, slinky, low-slung, black satin and tropical green polka-dots. When you see Adelaide in this dress, you’ll have to ask her to dance just to feel her slip through your arms like a flashy fish.
At the matinée.
“Has the picture started?”
“Nearly over with.”
“One, please.”
Ginger hands over his nickel and enters the Empire. It’s a silent, Diary of a Lost Girl starring Louise Brooks. Not many people. It should be easy to spot Frances if she’s here. He stands at the top of the raked aisle and waits until his eyes resolve the shadows into shapes. The outline of her beret. Front row centre, but she’s not alone.
The picture ends, “IF THERE WERE MORE LOVE IN THIS WORLD, NO ONE WOULD EVER HAVE TO BE LOST.” The lights come up and he watches Frances rise from her seat. Her companion looks to be a child, though Ginger is wary of jumping to that conclusion any more. But no, it’s definitely a real little girl, he sees that when she stands and turns to collect her sweater from the back of her seat. A really pretty child, with long red-gold hair past her waist, familiar in some way. Now that he sees Frances next to a real child he can’t imagine how he ever mistook her for one. Actually, her face looks quite old. He watches. The two of them start along their row to the aisle and the long-haired child seems to stumble to one side. Then again, and with each step. She must have hurt herself somehow, he thinks, but he understands when she rounds the last seat in the row and walks towards him up the aisle. Pretty little gal, what a shame. The youngest Piper child, of course, and that’s who she reminds me of, her older sister Kathleen. The closer she gets, the more uncanny the resemblance.
Ginger waits for Frances to see him. But if she does, she doesn’t give any sign. She’s chatting to her little sister, “Next Saturday is The Wind starring Lillian Gish, it’s about a beautiful girl who goes out west but when she gets there the wind buggers her mind.”
“How does it bugger it?”
“Don’t say ‘bugger’, Lily, say ‘derange’.”
“Derange.”
Frances puts an arm around Lily and walks right past Ginger.
“Hello, Frances.”
The long-haired child turns and gives him her green eyes — so like the girl Kathleen, but so unlike too because Kathleen never once looked at him. Frances doesn’t turn, just yanks the little sister after her, nearly knocking her off balance. Ginger is confused. Is this a slap in the face? If so, what for? He feels like someone’s dirty secret. But I’m not. I haven’t done anything wrong and don’t intend to. Don’t want to!
But he has to talk to her. Tell her she can’t be skulking around his house like that, and not to be coming on like a whore with him, he’s not that kind of man. Yes, he has to talk to her as soon as possible. That means the speak. Tonight, Saturday.
Ginger has no intention of ever entering that Pandora’s box again, so he doesn’t even bother to leave his house until three a.m., when he knows she’ll be leaving.
“Sorry, Addy, I forgot to tell you, Jameel said for me to come at closing.”
The second lie. How is Adelaide to protect her family when she doesn’t know what from? She had seen with a chill that the fake Girl Guide bore no good will towards her husband. Like a fiend she looked at him: starved but patient.
Adelaide hears the front door shut behind Ginger. She rolls over in bed wondering, what does she want with him? And what could Leo possibly see in that dirty little white thing? Crazy girl, bad pixie, nobody’s child…. Adelaide sits up with a jolt as it hits her: he feels sorry for her. Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no.
Ginger waits behind a wooden support under the rail bridge as the clientele spills out of Jameel’s. The piano is going a mile a minute — “The Funeral March”. With the last of the revellers gone, Ginger goes round back. He figures he’ll catch her before she gets into whatever car takes her home. He watches from the corner of the building as she comes out. In the cast of light he sees she’s back in uniform but still in make-up and costume jewellery. A lot of those men in there, and the women too who laugh along, they see her as their clown. The whore part is bad enough, but who ever heard of a whore clown? Ginger wonders what it must be like to see through the eyes of those who could find her funny or sexy. She locks the storage-room door and Ginger is about to reveal his presence when she takes off into the dark — what? Where’d she go?
He doesn’t want to holler, doesn’t want Jameel in on this. He goes round the front. No waiting car, and he’s heard no engine. Overhead, the rat-a-tat of a stick along the railway ties. He looks up through the trestlework at the shadow feet flying between the slats and follows at a trot below. The ground rises to meet the rail line and he runs up the bank, getting winded, but she’s still sprinting ahead, taking the ties three at a time with her arms flying out from her sides. By now they’re on the edge of town, she tosses away her stick. He bends over to get his breath — he’s not the sporty type. When he straightens up he can see her way ahead in the moonlight, seeming to jump up and down on one spot in a wild step-dance but getting smaller, smaller. He trots on.
To his left the water gleams dark silver beyond the cliff, the sound of his breath and pounding chest drown out his own footfalls along with the crickets and frogs singing now in the high weeds that line the tracks. They’re travelling parallel to the Shore Road. She’s running the whole way, this is how she gets home. Lord. They’re way past town, it should be safe to call, “Fra —” and he’s flat on his face on the piss-reeking tracks, his gut shocked airless, his back only now registering the impact that sent him flying forward — something grabs a fist of his hair and slams him into the gravel again and again and again, and darkness.
Tonight, Frances extinguishes her candle before she steps into the attic. It’s the moon. Four rectangles of light have swooned through the latticed window onto the floor. The moon may drive men mad but it can calm a savage girl, for it is cool, precise, it is lucid. Especially in such an empty room. Frances pauses and allows herself to be soothed. Then she goes to the window. It’s a good night for gazing.
One floor below, at the rear of the house, Lily is at her bedroom window watching the creek. Her lips are moving slightly as though whispering to someone down there, but there’s not a soul to be seen, just shimmering segments of the moon in the water. Across the hall, and directly beneath the attic window where Frances has just seated herself, James is sound asleep, dreaming plentifully, the way he has since Frances receded from his life. He is a little boy again, and it’s just he and his mother in a field of wildflowers. Mercedes is sleeping too, in her spare room, the whites of her brown eyes just showing in slits through nearly closed lids. She dreams of steel, of the colour grey, of skeins of grey hair on a loom.