Fall on Your Knees Read Free Page B

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