Fall on your Knees

With the crib death of Lily, the novel reintroduces the theme of The Terrifying Immediacy of Death. The death of Lily introduces what will become a major motif in a novel infused with Catholic doctrine. The mystery of Lily’s short life confounds Materia: “There was nothing out and out wrong with it, it was healthy, even a big child” (81). Her inability to find some explanation combines with the fact that Lily was not baptized—because of the Catholic Church’s strictures on baptism, the unbaptized child, which Materia refers to as an “it,” cannot be buried, at least not in consecrated ground. Lily’s death foreshadows the senseless deaths of other characters to come; Materia’s quest for answers only underscores her need for humility in the face of God’s inscrutable ways: “Crib death. It just happens, children stop, why? It’s a mystery […] God has a reason” (81).

Similarly, James’s horrific experiences fighting in France continue the theme, evoking the pointless carnage that characterized WWI combat. The war takes a deep psychological toll on James, who becomes numb to the bloodshed, the screams of the wounded and the stench of the dead—an apathy that drives him to volunteer for the most dangerous missions as part of the medic corps, where high-risk rescues compel him to work in the most violent stretches of No Man’s Land: “He could do all this [heroic stuff] because he felt terribly sorry for the men he rescued. They harbored the saddest and most foolish desire of all. The desire to go on living” (107). In three years, James comes to see death as a chemical process that smacks of engineering: “Chloride of lime to kill the stench, cordite to kill the lice, whale oil to keep the feet from rotting” (105). Rather than rally to the heroics of his actions or take satisfaction in his accumulation of medals, James settles into indifference as the campaigns grind on with no clear tactical purpose. He returns a changed man, and MacDonald plays with contemporary understandings of mental illness when she describes James as “an unexploded shell” (109)—the term for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the 1920s was shell-shock.

James’s time overseas is a therapeutic interlude for his family. Even as Kathleen monitors war reports on the family’s cathedral radio, the sisters thrive and bond with their mother. Materia, who has struggled with her growing awareness of James’s twisted interest in Kathleen, maintains her grasp on her family despite the loss of Lily. She is at her strongest in these chapters: “Materia gets on with things. She cleans the house in the night, bumping and scouring from pool of light to the next. She begins to bake and bake and bake” (83). This reanimation is in part owed to the record she receives from her estranged sister Camille, a recording of the tunes from her native Lebanon. Materia plays the record constantly, happy at the songs of her childhood and nostalgic for her Mediterranean homeland. She shares the music with her daughters, and the four of them dance, giggling and singing: “Their hands were supple seaweed, waving on unresisting wrists, encircling, grazing, flirting with each other” (88), In a novel centered on the power of music, the Mediterranean melodies and the Piper women dancing offers a positive, exuberant expression of this art form, in contrast to the way James’s piano tuning and his violent obsession with Kathleen’s singing have defined music so far in the novel. Similarly, as soon as she is free of James’s abusive influence, Kathleen can thrive musically as well. In New York, as she begins to grow into the creative freedom of her voice training, she meets Rose and experiences what few characters in the novel ever do: the emancipation of the heart and the discovery of joy, and “Kathleen is truly and utterly and completely Kathleen in New York” (118).

James’s newfound desire to secure wealth through boot-making is another of the novel’s feints into antiquated genres—in this case, the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story. When James talks his estranged father-in-law to invest in his grandiose scheme to provide all of eastern Canada’s working class with quality boots, the plot echoes the classic business success narrative: A young entrepreneur gets that one great idea that will guarantee wealth, respect, and dignity. However, as has been the case before, MacDonald twists this trope into the Gothic. James’s backyard boot-making shed hides his true activities—concrete evidence of The Corrosive Effects of Secrets that echoes his attempts to conceal his pedophilia. With the Prohibition, James sees a much easier way to make money, directing an underground empire of the booze via dozens of runners, among them Ginger Taylor, who deliver his homemade hootch to clubs. The novel links James’s illegal secrets with his sexual ones in Chapter 22: The novel’s most disturbing example of the corrosive effects of secrets is Kathleen’s rape.