Fall on Your Knees (3 page)

The piano was the centrepiece in a big front room full of plump sofas, gold-embroidered chairs, florid carpets and dainty-legged end tables with marble tops. A perpetually festive chamber — even slightly heathen, to James’s eyes — with its gilt mirrors, tasselled drapes and voluptuous ottomans. Dishes of candy and nuts, and china figurines of English aristocracy, covered every surface, and on the walls were real oil paintings — one, in pride of place over the mantelpiece, of a single cedar tree on a mountain.

James would be let in the kitchen door by a dark round little woman who he initially assumed was the maid, but who was in fact Mrs Mahmoud. She always fed him before he left. She spoke little English but smiled a lot and said, “Eat.” At first he was afraid she’d feed him something exotic and horrible — raw sheep, an eyeball perhaps, but no — savoury roast meat folded in flat bread, a salad of soft grain, parsley and tomatoes with something else he’d never before tasted: lemon. Strange and delicious pastes, pickled things, things wrapped in things, cinnamon….

One day he arrived to find Mrs Mahmoud chatting in Gaelic with a door-to-door tradesman. James was amazed but glad to find someone with whom to speak his first language, since he knew few people in Sydney and, in any case, Gaelic speakers were mostly out the country. They sat at the kitchen table and Mrs Mahmoud told him of her early days in this land, when she and her husband had walked the island selling dry goods from a donkey and two suitcases. This was how she had learned Gaelic and not English. Mr and Mrs Mahmoud had made many friends, for most country people love a visit, the mercantile side really being an excuse to put on the kettle. Often the Mahmouds carried messages across counties from one family to another, but good news only, Mrs Mahmoud insisted. Just as she did when she read a person’s cup — “I see only good.” So when she peered into the tea-leaves at the bottom of James’s cup he was neither frightened nor skeptical, but felt himself drawn in with an involuntary faith — which is what faith is — when she said, “I see a big house. A family. There is a lot of love here. I hear music…. A beautiful girl. I hear laughter…. Water.”

When the Mahmouds had saved enough, they had opened their Sydney shop, which thrived. Mr Mahmoud had bought his wife this splendid house and told her to stop working and enjoy her family. And yet James never saw a sign of the family. Her children were all at school, and the big boys were at the shop with her husband. Mrs Mahmoud missed her Gaelic friends in the country and looked forward to grandchildren. She never spoke of her homeland.

On this New Year’s Eve day, Mrs Mahmoud greeted James with
Bliadhna Mhath Ūr
but didn’t show him into the front room, remaining in the kitchen to work alongside the hired Irish girl, who had a lot to learn. He proceeded there by himself, quite comfortable now in this house, took off his jacket and got to work.

He had already removed a few ivory keys and was bent under the lid behind the piano’s gap-toothed smile, so he didn’t see Materia when she stepped into the archway.

But she had seen him. She had spied him from her upstairs bedroom window when he came knocking at the kitchen door below, toting his earnest bag of tools — a blond boy so carefully combed. She had peeked at him through the mahogany railings carved with grapes as he entered the front hall and hung his coat in the closet beneath the stairs — his eyes so blue, his skin so fair. Taut and trim, collar, tie and cufflink. Like a china figurine. Imagine touching his hair. Imagine if he blushed. She watched him cross the hall and disappear through the high arch of the big front room. She followed him.

She paused in the archway, her weight on one foot, and considered him a moment. Thought of plucking his suspenders. Grinned to herself, crept over to the piano and hit C sharp. He sprang back with a cry — immediately Materia feared she’d gone too far, he must be really hurt, he’s going to be really mad, she bit her lip — he clapped a hand over one eye, and beheld the culprit with the other.

The darkest eyes he’d ever seen, wet with light. Coal-black curls escaping from two long braids. Summer skin the colour of sand stroked by the tide. Slim in her green and navy Holy Angels pinafore. His right eye wept while his left eye rejoiced. His lips parted silently. He wanted to say, “I know you,” but none of the facts of his life backed this up so he merely stared, smitten and unsurprised.

She smiled and said, “I’m going to marry a dentist.”

She had an accent that she never did outgrow. A softening of consonants, a slightly liquid “r,” a tendency to clip not with the lips but with the throat itself. What she did for the English language was pure music.

“I’m not a dentist,” he said, then rushed pink to his ears.

She smiled. And looked at the loose piano teeth scattered at his feet.

She was twelve going on thirteen.

Had she hit E flat things might never have progressed so far, but she hit C sharp and neither of them had any reason to suspect misfortune. They arranged to meet. He wanted to ask permission of her mother but she said, “Don’t worry.” So he waited for her, shivering on the steps of the Lyceum until he saw her come out the big front doors of Holy Angels Convent School across the street. The other girls spilled down the steps in giggling groups or private pairs, but she was alone. When she caught sight of him she started running. She ran right into his arms and he swung her around like a little kid, laughing, and then they hugged. He thought his heart would kill him, he’d had no clue what it was capable of. His lips brushed her cheek, her hair smelled sweet and strange, an evil enchantment slid from him. The salt mist coming off Sydney Harbour crystallized in the fuzz above his lip and alighted on his lashes; he was Aladdin in an orchard dripping diamonds.

She said, “I got five cents, how ’bout you, mister?”

“I have seventy-eight dollars and four cents in the bank, and a dollar in my pocket, but I’m going to be rich someday.”

“Then give me the dollar, Rockefeller.”

He did and she led him to Wheeler’s Photographic on Charlotte Street, where they had their picture taken in front of a painted Roman arch with potted wax ferns. He felt, before he learned anything about where she came from, that the photograph had made them one.

They continued on to Crown Bakery, where they shared a dish of Neapolitan ice-cream and melted their initials onto the window. He said, “I love you, Materia.”

She laughed and said, “Say it again.”

“I love you.”

“No, my name.”

“Materia.”

She laughed again and he said, “Am I saying it right?”

She said, “Yes, but it’s cute, it’s nice how you say it.”

“Materia.”

And she laughed and said, “James.”

“Say it again.”

“James.”

It was when she said his name in her soft buzzy way that his desire first became positively carnal — he blushed, convinced everyone could tell. She touched his hair, and he said, “Do you want to go home now?”

“No. I want to go with you.”

They walked to the end of the Old Pier off the Esplanade, and looked at the ships from all over. He pointed. “There’s the Red Cross Line. Someday I’m going to get on her, b’y, and go.”

“Where?”

“New York City.”

“Can I come with you?”

“Sure.”

She really was betrothed to a dentist, promised when she was four. The dentist was still in the Old Country but was coming to marry her when she turned sixteen.

“That’s barbaric,” said James.

“It’s old-fashioned, eh?”

“Do you like him?”

“I never met him.”

“That’s so … backward, that’s savage.”

“It’s the custom.”

“What does he look like?”

“He’s old.”

“For God’s sake!”

They walked back up the Old Pier hand in hand. To the right of them sank the tepid sun, while to their left the blast furnaces of Dominion Iron and Steel erupted into a new day’s work. A light orange snow began to fall.

Sydney is only small. By then several people had seen them together and word reached Mrs Mahmoud, who kept it from Mr Mahmoud. Materia was forbidden to have anything to do with the piano tuner. She was cross-examined. “Did he touch you? Are you sure?” And the nuns were alerted. She was never alone, and at night her mother locked Materia’s bedroom door.

Materia had been just six when they docked in Sydney Harbour and her father said, “Look. This is the New World. Anything is possible here.” She’d been too young to realize that he was talking to her brothers. On the night of her thirteenth birthday, Materia climbed out her window and left the Old Country for ever.

Come with me from Lebanon, O my sister
. February 17 1899, a moonless night,
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys
. They set out before dawn on a hired horse and got married that day at Irish Cove, in a Protestant ceremony performed by an ex-navy chaplain who asked no questions in exchange for a quart of rum.
Thy lips, O my bride, drop as the honeycomb, honey and milk are under thy tongue
. They snowshoed in to a hunting cabin on Great Bras d’Or Lake that was used by rich Americans in the fall,
thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my bride
. It was all boarded up but he set to work —
thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes —
prying planks off windows, healing the blind. Inside, he wouldn’t let her open her eyes till he’d swept, lit a fire and laid the table. He’d thought of everything; there was rosehip wine, new linen sheets, and the moth-bally tartan from his late mother’s hope chest,
and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon
. He sang her a Gaelic lullaby which made him cry because, if such a thing was possible, he loved her more in his mother tongue,
a garden inclosed is my sister, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed
. He kissed her so gently, didn’t want to frighten her, he’d mail-ordered
What Every Husband Should Know
but decided never to touch her in that way if necessary, he’d rather die than frighten or hurt — she reached up and stroked the back of his head,
“Habibi,”
she whispered,
“BeHebak.” With my own hands I opened to my love
.

On the second day she said, “Let’s live here for ever, let’s never go anywhere except New York City.”

And he said, “Don’t you want a lovely big house and fine handsome children and to have your parents say, ‘Well, you were right all along, Mrs Piper’?”

“No,” rolling over to lie on him, her elbows on either side of his face, “I want to stay right here for a long long time,” curving her belly against him, “for ever and ever …”
kiss me with the kisses of your mouth
. “And ever and ever …,” he sighed.

When he came out of the woods for provisions on the third day, James was seized by two large men and taken by cart to Sydney and the back room of Mr Mahmoud’s Dry Goods Emporium on Pitt Street. Mr Mahmoud sat on a pressed-back wooden chair, a long narrow man with leathery cheeks and black wavy hair.

“Sir —” said James.

Mr Mahmoud had splintering brown eyes. James looked for Materia in them. “Sir —” said James.

Mr Mahmoud raised his forefinger slightly and the two younger men removed James’s boots and socks — James noted with some distaste that they both of them could use a shave.

“— where’s my wife?”

Mr Mahmoud took a leather thong and whipped the soles of James’s feet so that for days they swelled and peeled and leaked like drenched onion paper.

They put him in the YMCA and brought him meals. When he could walk again with the aid of a cane, the two men escorted him to Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church. “Take your hands off me,” James said, but he hadn’t heard either man speak a word of English. “Oily bastards,” he added.

Materia was waiting for him alone at the altar, veiled in black. She wouldn’t look at him. Her hair had been cut off. They exchanged vows once again, this time before a priest of Rome. It was James’s first time in a Catholic church. Smells like a whorehouse, he thought, although he’d never been in one of those either.

At the back of the church Mrs Mahmoud’s heart broke, because how could that pale boy with no family and no real religion possibly know how to treat a wife? It’s a terrible thing for a mother to know that her daughter will not have the happiness she herself has had. But more than that — more than sorrow — was a chill. For she had seen something in his cup.

Mahmoud didn’t beat his daughter, and he counted it a weakness that he’d never been able to bring himself to raise a hand to any of his girls for there was the root of the problem. The day after the horrible wedding, he instructed his wife to purge the house of Materia. He went to his shop and sealed himself in his back room while Mrs Mahmoud burned, snipped and bundled off his daughter’s memory. Materia’s favourite little sister, pretty Camille, cried for days. She and Materia had dreamed of marrying two handsome brothers: they would live side by side in big white houses and their children would grow up together; Materia would brush Camille’s beautiful straight black hair every night and they’d share a room just like always. Camille wrote a letter to Materia in large neat printing with x’s and o’s at the bottom, but Pa found it and burned it. He called Camille to him in the cellar and beat her.

It wasn’t so much that the piano tuner was
“enklese,”
or even that he was not a Catholic or a man of means. It was that he had come like a thief in the night and stolen another man’s property. “And my daughter yielded.” There was a word for all this in the Old Country:
‘ayb
. There was no translation, people in this country couldn’t know the depth of shame, of this Mahmoud was certain. There was no taking her back, she was ruined.

But God is merciful and so was Mr Mahmoud. He allowed James to convert to Catholicism in exchange for his life. And Mr Mahmoud arranged for a good-sized house to be built for the newlyweds nine miles up the coast near Low Point. This was so he wouldn’t have to toss them from his doorstep a year from now when they turned up destitute. Such a thing would kill his poor wife.