Fall on Your Knees (63 page)

Someone just came out! I’ve tucked myself as far back into my doorway as possible. It was a man. I couldn’t see his face under his hat. He walked away briskly. Bouncily, you could say. Her boyfriend? I can’t imagine her with a boyfriend. I can’t imagine her with anyone. But me. I’m going round the back of the building. That’s where her bedroom must be.

4:53 am: —
Giles is asleep, thank God. I’m not the slightest bit tired. I have a friend.

Glorious Sunday —
I think the most beautiful sculpture in the world consists of fire escapes long-legging down buildings with their fancy fretwork, skinny black dancers creeping out their windows to the street below. By lamplight under a smoky moon. I’m on my favourite bench in Central Park. It’s raining but there’s a big chestnut tree over me, I have my umbrella perched on my shoulder and I’ve got my gumboots on. It’s a perfect place to talk to dear old Diary. Utterly private and the world smells wonderful.

LAST NIGHT!

I walked down a pitch-black alley to a little courtyard behind her building with clotheslines criss-crossing overhead. The windows were all dark. I looked up to wonder which was her room and there was a man sitting on the fire escape outside the open window! He was wearing a fedora and nothing else but his long striped night-shirt. I froze because he looked right at me and said, “What the hell are you doing here?” My eyes jolted in my head as Rose’s face took the place of the strange man under the hat, and I answered I couldn’t sleep and she said neither could she. And we just stood there for a moment looking at each other, not knowing if she would come down or I should go up or go home or what.

She stood up, walked down in her bare feet and swung the bottom steps to the ground for me so I climbed up. She was smiling. We didn’t hug or anything. We sat outside the church window. I peeked in. It has Bible sayings painted on the walls but otherwise it’s just chairs, a piano and, instead of an altar, a little stage with a pulpit in the centre. It’s her father’s hat. She wears it when she needs to think. I asked, “Think about what?” And she said, “It’s more like…. It keeps the world out so I can be in my own thoughts.” It’s a charcoal-coloured hat. Her father died before she was born. The hat suits her down to the ground. It brings out her cheekbones and her jaw-line. A hat can do that for you. She is not only beautiful, she’s handsome too, but I’m not going to gush any more, I have a friend and all wrong feelings are banished, they are not needed!

We talked for three hours, which sped by till I had to run halfway back downtown before I could find a cab. I don’t care. The more I run the less tired I get, the less I sleep the more awake I feel. Rose was classically trained on the piano by tutors from the New York Conservatory. I was right. Child prodigy. She started playing when she was three years old. Her father was a musician. That’s all she knows. And that he died of TB. Her mother has a friend who I guess is a quite prominent conductor who’s been paying for Rose’s lessons and connecting her to the right people since she was a kid. Rose is supposed to be the first coloured woman to play with the New York Symphony at Carnegie Hall. She wouldn’t tell me the man’s name, though, and she wouldn’t tell me why she wouldn’t tell, either, she’d just say “a friend of my mother’s”. That girl keeps her secrets, but one by one they will be mine. I had such a great time.

If she were a boy we would be in love, but it’s better this way. We can tell each other everything. She wanted to know all about home but I made her guess. She guessed that I came from parents I call “Mother and Dad,” that I had “equestrian” lessons, that “Mumsy” is a “frosty blonde” with arch blue eyes and impeccable taste in porcelain and that “Fathah” is a judge from “old money”. I played her own game right back at her and didn’t tell her if she was right or wrong. I’ll let her think she’s smart for now. Then I’ll show her my family photo. AND she thinks
I
have an accent! She said, “Where you from, girl?” And I said, “There you go again, sometimes you have an accent and sometimes you don’t, how come?” And she said, “I asked you first.” I said, “Cape Breton Island.” And she said, “‘C’Bre’n Ireland’?” I said, “I don’t talk like that.” She said, “That’s exactly how you talk.”

“Cape Breton is in Canada, not Ireland, what do they teach you in school here?”

She said, “Useful stuff like how anyone can grow up to be president.”

I said, “Don’t you know anything about Canada?”

“Freeze your ass off, right?”

I never know when she’s fooling but I do know now that she likes to get me riled. What a pair! I told her I’d been to Club Mecca and she was speechless. I love it when I can hit her with a zinger and she stops looking like there’s nothing new under the sun. I asked her to come with me next time because I can’t go alone. She said she couldn’t do that to her mother. I asked her how her mother was ever going to find out if neither of us told her. She answered after a moment, “My mother knows a lot of people.”

So I told her about Sweet Jessie Hogan and her Harlem Rhythm Hounds. Rose listened while I described the size of the Sweet’s voice. How can a voice that big be so agile, how can it groan gravel, then fly up and outdance the band? Not to mention her costumes — look out, Aida. But best of all, the dancing. The cake-walk is tame compared to what goes on there. It’s not for the faint of foot. Rose looked at me as though she were seeing me for the first time and said, “You’re not exactly a good girl, are you?”

I felt myself blush, I was actually a bit annoyed. “I haven’t thought about whether or not loving all kinds of music and loving to dance means I’m bad.”

She said, “I’m sorry. What I mean is … you’ve got moxie. You know. Guts. You make me feel like a coward.”

I was struck dumb because I can’t imagine Rose being afraid of anything.

“Then come with me,” I said. But she just shrugged. “What can your mother do to you?”

She wouldn’t answer me, she just said, “You don’t understand.”

“Then tell me. Let me understand.”

She clammed up and looked down. Her profile under the fedora. Three dark pyramids. “Tell me, Rose. Please.”

She looked away and I thought, oh no, I’ve done it again. But the next instant she said in an icy voice, “The fact is, I’m not terribly interested in Darktown music.” Then she turned to me with a polite smile, “But if you’d like to come to the symphony with me, I have tickets for Thursday evening.”

I didn’t want to upset the apple-cart again so I said, “Oh thenk you. I’d be uttehly delighted, rally I would.” At which she grinned.

She doesn’t have a boyfriend, I asked. I told her a bit about David. She asked me if I was in love with him and I said, “At times I thought I was. But now I know I wasn’t.”

“How do you know that?”

I couldn’t look at her, but I did say the truth. “Because if he came back right now, I wouldn’t leave this fire escape to go meet him.” My face started to prickle because I didn’t feel like that came out right, and I could feel Rose watching me, ready to hate me all over again, so I pressed on, “I’m a lot happier to have a friend.” I finally looked at her but she turned her eyes forward and nodded. “Me too.” I was so relieved. Thank God I didn’t do anything really foolish the other day in the park. Thank God I only mortified myself in front of you, Diary.

Tues — 20 —
Symphony divinely dull. Schumann. People stared at Rose. I’m beginning to understand why her normal expression is so forbidding. She has concert tickets but lives in a three-room apartment. Built like an Ethopian queen with a dimple and a Roman nose. Draped in a flowered dress from 1905 fit for little girls and old ladies. La Mystère de la Rose.

Wed. —
I’m not ashamed of my mother.

Thurs. —
Stayed in bed today.

Fri. —
I have no friends. I have only colleagues. The Kaiser is right. I suppose most people would run home about now but what is there to run to? It’s the capital of nowhere. Only Daddy is there and when I’m rich and famous I’ll sail him first class to all my performances. I feel so lethargic. I can’t even muster any ambition. It all seems dead and flat. Yes, I will work hard and get to all those places. I can see it stretching out, straight through to the triumphant end. I hate it when I can see through to the end of something. All that’s left is the plodding to get there. Knowing too much is a kind of death. I pray that I don’t know everything. That’s my religious faith: to believe I really don’t know. But it’s so hard sometimes. And in my religion, the only mortal sin is boredom.

Sat. —
My feelings about Rose that I wrote down seem like a dream. They happened to someone else in some other country.

Sun —
Nothing ever happens.

mon —
Ditto.

tues. —
Ibid.

fri. —
plus ça change

Saturday, August 31, 1918

Dear Diary,

I don’t know where to begin. I have to get it all down now while it’s fresh, I’m here under my tree in Central Park and we have all afternoon till supper-time. I’ll have to go back a few days because despite all that whining about nothing happening, I realize now that tons was happening and it was all leading up to what I have to tell you which is EVERYTHING.

But first things first: I’m working up Carmen. The Kaiser “objected strenuously” but gave in, for what choice does he have after all? He still snipes that I’m being “perverse” working against my “natural freshness and youth” — “My God, Miss Piper, you are an
ingénue
, Carmen is a whore.” Thinks the idea that I’m a mezzo is professional suicide, “witches and bitches, dahling,” he says, but I refuse to get stuck anywhere. I don’t intend to be Gilda for ever. Not when I’m a wizened thirty-two, and I certainly don’t intend to take my final curtain a moment before I absolutely have to. Mezzos live longer. I’ll sing Carmen and I’ll sell Tosca. And there will not be a single pair of trousers left unsung. Kaiser doesn’t know whether he is witnessing my first divinely inspired diva fit, or me falling on my face. Neither do I, but at least I’m no longer bored! He does see the wisdom in showing Gatti-Casazza the extreme outposts of my range, however, not just vertically but dramatically. Because that’s where it really counts. It’s not enough to have the most beautiful voice. If I have to sing ugly to put the feeling of a scene across, I’ll do that. Opera isn’t supposed to be “pretty”. Women stabbing themselves and everyone else half the time isn’t pretty, it’s wild, it’s passionate and gruesome and beautiful and you can’t tell me that such women don’t snarl as much as they sing. And that’s not counting the comic roles, which are even more grotesque. But I digress….

All right. Oh dear. Here goes. I have no shame in front of you, Diary, for you are me. You won’t squirm, you can’t be shocked, you know that nothing in love is nasty so I will try to be as free with you as I am in my own thoughts. Lest I forget, let me offer up a sincere orison of thanks for Giles. She is the least curious person on the face of the earth. Without her total lack of vigilance my life could never have got started. If Daddy knew what a lackadaisical gatekeeper she is he would be down here in a second to board me with the nuns. Which reminds me, I’d better write him. Oh but I’m teasing you, aren’t I, Diary? You’re in an agony of anticipation. Be still, open your heart, and I will begin at the beginning and unfold it for you as it unfolded for me. The joyful mystery of the Rose….

On the ferry in the middle of the Strait of Canso, Lily puts the diary down and looks behind her at Cape Breton because she will never see it again. She takes her last scent of salt island air, harsh, coniferous and cool, the indescribable grey that contains all things. Home. Farewell.

She wonders about the soles of her new red boots. Eleven days of gravel on Highway 4, a hundred miles to the Strait of Canso. Many people are kind so Lily is only a bit hungry. It is important not to spend any of the money in her boots. Not until she has arrived. She has sucked water from bright moss and slept beneath the low boughs of pine trees, their needles soft and young with May. The nights are cold but Lily is not. Every night as she falls asleep, she feels someone walk through the soft dew and cover her. And every morning she is warm and dry.

The ferry-man took her coin and gave her a worried look. “What’s your name dear? Who’s your father?”