Fall on your Knees

“Did all women get this ugly?”

James begins the novel seemingly as a romantic hero, sweeping the young Materia off her feet and freeing her from an arranged marriage. However, the reality is much more disturbing: Materia, who is only 12, is a victim of James’s predatory hunger for prepubescent girls. Once Materia has delivered Kathleen, James rejects her for no longer fitting his pedophilic desires.

“Materia took Kathleen by the hair as usual and plunged her head backward for the first rinsing, she kept it under enough to say into the submerged green eyes, ‘Do you renounce Satan?’”

The novel uses the Catholic ritual of water baptism as a threshold event that consecrates the fallible and corrupt body to the energy and grace of the Catholic God. James, an indifferent Protestant, forbids Materia from baptizing their daughter Kathleen. Here Materia goes through the sacrament in the bathtub in the first of what will be several traumatic baptisms.

“James springs up and around, though the hammers barely winged him, belts her with an open hand then a closed fist before he realizes who it is and what he’s done.”

James’s fawning over Kathleen tallies with his emerging profile as a pedophile. In this moment, James, surprised by a playful Kathleen, hits her hard enough to jar her front teeth—a cruel and vicious reaction that reveals that beneath his affection is a raw and ugly animal brutality.

“I sent the Great War in order to shield, a little longer, the body and soul of Kathleen Piper.”

Materia, Kathleen’s mother, sees the danger and the threat in her husband’s doting attention to their daughter. Here she offers her version of the three secrets of the Fatima Mary: WWI is a huge project to protect Kathleen from her horrific father.

“Kathleen is truly and utterly and completely Kathleen in New York City […] This air is what the gods live upon.”

The novel juxtaposes the bleak and claustrophobic world of Cape Breton Island to the magnificent playfulness and creative freedom of Manhattan Island. In New York, Kathleen taps into the power of music and the power of love in ways that give her the self-determination and independence she could never have found back home.

“And James is crying. He covers his face with his hands, streaking it with mud and soot and blood […] if you asked the layer of himself that’s in charge of assumptions, ‘Where are we now?’ it would reply ‘In the war.’”

The night of the baptism of Kathleen’s twins fuses the surreal, the mystical, and the biological. As Frances tries to baptize the twins, James interrupts her—and, as a result, Ambrose is drowned in the fetid creek water. James immediately decides to bury the dead baby. The moment fuses in his mind with the worst sights of trench warfare in war-torn France.

“He is sad because Kathleen died. He needs his other little girls all the more now. It’s Daddy making the puppy sounds. Mercedes waits until the rocking chair stops and Frances slides from Daddy’s lap to join her in the doorway.”

Does James have sexual intercourse with Frances in the rocking chair? The novel never specifically confirms that, but the suggestion here is that James sexually assaults another daughter in the wake of Kathleen’s death. The scene suggests that James is an unrepentant serial molester and a threat to the young Frances and Mercedes.

“The only thing that keeps Frances from running away is Lily. She has to make sure that Lily is okay before she can let her life begin. What ‘okay’ means is not clear.”

Frances, the family rebel, yearns for freedom away from her family, away from school, away from Cape Breton. This important moment reveals, however, that Frances is not a reckless and self-focused rebel—she is protective of her sister/niece, whose disabilities from polio are at least in part Frances’s responsibility. Their bond is one of the novel’s few tender expressions of selfless love.

“Mercedes can’t find her voice. It’s autumn in her mouth and all her tongue can do is rustle. Lily doesn’t like it when Daddy looks at Frances like that. It’s not Daddy anymore. Not her daddy.”

The reptilian James sees Lily as his chance to redeem the sin of his rape of Kathleen. However, when James encounters the framed picture of Kathleen that Mercedes has put out (James has decreed no photos of Kathleen must be placed anywhere in the house), James reveals the monster lurking just beneath his loving father surface. His look turns feral and animal—the violent threat he poses is undiminished.

“Ambrose is in the creek. He is leaning out to wave, his left arm above his head […] His skin has changed from white to amber and the glow has wakened Lily from her bed of fire into soothing rose milk. She puts hand to window, hello.”

Lily’s twin Ambrose exists uneasily suspended between flesh and spirit. Having drowned shortly after birth, he lingers as a ghostly presence. Frances tells Lily his twin has become her guardian angel, explaining why Ambrose periodically appears to Lily—part hallucination, part manifestation of Christian Catholic doctrine, part dream. Ambrose is one of the novel’s supernatural mystical elements.

“She is a commando in training for a mission so secret that even she does not know what it is. But she is ready. Every night the obstacle course. Maneuvering behind the lines. Camouflaged to blend in with the terrain.”

Frances will not leave the island until Lily is safe. She begins the Lourdes fund in an effort to transport Lily to the Catholic healing shrine in France. Until then, she resolves to fight against the malignant forces she feels threaten her saintly sister with all her energy and all her resolve. To that end, Frances becomes a speakeasy sex worker at 15 years old.

“You’re not bad. You’re just lost.”

Ginger’s insightfully empathetic assessment of Frances determines her mission to sleep with him and have his child. In part, Frances wants to corrupt the mild-mannered and gentle man—in her head, this will be his punishment for fathering Kathleen’s twins (which is what Frances believes must have happened). Out of this coupling comes the Pipers’ last opportunity for hope and a future—Frances’s son Anthony, who illuminates the closing of the story.

“God did not put on this earth to stand by while my sister Frances is killed. Beaten is one thing. Wrongly touched is one thing [...] There’s only one saint in this family and I’m not it. God has made Mercedes a judge.”

At last, the dysfunctional Piper family finds its moral center. Mercedes emerges as the power of the judgmental God struggling to bring moral order to the mess that is her family’s dynamics. Here, she acts forthrightly and morally, pushing James down the stairs to stop him from going after Frances.

“Now Teresa is suspended with the smoking rifle floating out in from of her, trying to get a hold of what she’s done.”

When Ginger’s sister Teresa shoots a pregnant Frances in the belief that she is avenging Ginger’s wife, Frances’s pregnancy takes on an aspect of the miraculous. Frances and the fetus survive the attempted assassination, and Frances casts her baby as a singular expression of God’s abiding love.

“The one thing Mercedes hadn’t counted on what that her father might return a penitent. Such a thing might interfere with her plans. She had no energy left to be the daughter of a good man.”

James illustrates the frustrating nature of Catholicism’s acceptance of repentance, even of such horrific actions as pedophilia. James’s crimes are so awful that when his strokes transform him into a reformed man, Mercedes cannot bear the fact that her religion dictates forgiveness—it is too much for her to handle emotionally.

“At last, Mercedes thinks, we are a family. Daddy is senile, Frances is crazy, Lily is lame and I’m unmarried. But we are a family.”

Mercedes here is funny and brutally honest in her gallows humor. This moment, however, foreshadows the closing scene, in which Lily has a similar willingness to accept her dysfunctional family as something to build a future out of. The tone here is of resignation, an attitude previously missing in Mercedes the “Judge.”

“My first advantage: I have everything. My second advantage: this is just another island. My third advantage: I am bigger than it all.”

Kathleen escapes Cape Breton and arrives in New York in the chapter titled “Hejira,” her flight is both liberating and newly spiritually engaging. The energy of the city unleashes her creativity, individuality, courage, and confidence. In her relationship with Rose and her discovery of Harlem nightlife and music, Kathleen gets to know the depths of herself.

“I got there and there was music rollicking out the second-floor window—if church were like that where I come from, I’d be religious. It was fantastic.”

Raised a Catholic and accustomed to the quiet reserve of the Catholic service, Kathleen taps into the evocative energy of the Black church when she follows Rose through Harlem. “Rollicking” is hardly a word to describe the circumspect and moribund services back on Cape Breton. Kathleen is suddenly alive, her soul bursting into songs with percussive energy and flamboyant melodies—a vision of what faith could be.

“Dear heart. I felt her cheek against mine. I’ve never felt anything so soft. I kissed her lips. In my mind. It felt so natural, but I knew it couldn’t be right.”

The passionate sex scenes between Rose and Kathleen provide a novel centered on sexuality its only pure image of healthy romantic love between adults. Their relationship is the consensual bond of peers, not the predatory and horrific imposition of unhealthy desire on an unwilling victim. And yet, even this seemingly perfect union is riven by external and internal problems. Relationships between members of the same sex are outlawed, and relationships between white and Black people are deeply frowned on. Most alarmingly, however, Rose goes behind Kathleen’s back to write an anonymous letter to James warning him about Kathleen’s Harlem exploits—a betrayal of trust that leads to tragedy.

“I don’t believe in God, I believe in everything. And I am amazed at how blessed I am. Thank you.”

The doomed Kathleen utters these joyous words just hours before her father breaks down the door of her apartment, throws her lover out into the street, and rapes her. It is Kathleen’s last happy moment, the last time she will feel empowered and free.

“That red-haired devil who ruined our Miss Rose has come back to life as a shrunk-down raggedy cripple.”

In the novel, the Piper family’s sins are passed, like the polio virus, from generation to generation. The Pipers’ inescapable toxicity and the family’s circular rather than tree-like growth, in which younger generations recapitulate the horrors of the older ones, recurs in this identification of Lily and Kathleen. Rose fears that Lily has come to complete the emotional harm done by Kathleen’s abrupt departure from New York years earlier. But the trusting friendship that develops between Rose and Lily suggests that finally, there is a way out of the Piper morass.

“Everybody should have a sister Frances.”

In the end, Frances—despite her apparent immorality, bad life decisions, and indulgences—emerges as the guardian angel of the family’s recovery. Her son Anthony, named for the patron saint of lost things, is the key to finally redeeming the Pipers.

“To save our souls we must worship God by faith hope and charity that is we must believe in Him hope in him and love Him with all our hearts.”

To the end, the Catholic faith that has driven so many of the novel’s characters and their decisions continues unabated—here, in a punctuation-free litany of prayer that underscores the rote nature of calling on God and its ability to comfort.