Free Fall on Your Knees by Ann-marie MacDonald Page A

you.”
    “Don’t worry, sir.”
    James reflected that he’d rather have a timid youth drive his daughter than a leering man. The fact that Taylor was coloured made James feel all the more confident of the necessary distance between driver and passenger.
    Although she no longer had any buddies in the boom town, Kathleen was relieved to be living at home again. Boarding at Holy Angels had been lonely. At first she’d cried herself to sleep, comforted only by the notes and treats that her daddy sent. But she knew that sacrifices were being made, knew what was expected of her, didn’t flinch. She studied hard, obeyed the nuns and never complained, though she did pray for a fairy godmother to send her a friend, for there was no one to play with at Holy Angels. No boys. No cinders embedded in her knees. Other little girls weren’t interested in swordfights and adventure or in who could enact the most spectacular death scene. Other girls were preoccupied with meticulous feminine arcana of which Kathleen knew nothing; what was more, none of them had careers. Initially, her schoolmates had vied for Kathleen’s friendship — she was so pretty, so smart. But she failed to decode pecking orders, declined gracious invitations to braid other girls’ hair and made a lasso of the skipping-rope. They put her down as odd until, finally, they shunned her altogether.
    Kathleen threw herself into her work and cultivated an insouciant nonconformity — her sash low-slung and tied in front, hat pushed back, hands jammed into the pockets that she ordered her mother to sew into her uniforms, her long hair waving loose. The nuns made allowances. She had a gift.
    In the fall of 1911 they sailed to the mainland — James, Kathleen and her singing teacher, Sister Saint Cecilia — to a recital at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Halifax. An invited audience of professionals.
    “Look me in the eyes.”
    She did. He invoked the spirits,
    “What did Stendhal say of Elisabetta Gafforini?”
    “‘Whether you see, or only hear her, your peril is the same.’”
    “That’s the stuff.” His usual affectionate bonk on the head. “Now go out there and show ’em who’s boss.”
    Kathleen sang Cherubino’s love poem to Susanna from Le Nozze di Figaro . Teachers from New York City gave James their cards, they were looking for the next Emma Albani. Told him what he already knew.
    Henriette Sontag debuted at six, Maria Malibran at five; Adelina Patti was younger every year, her legend already way ahead of her mortality; but James was so serious about Kathleen’s career that he could wait for it to begin. Patience is the mark of the true player. Her voice would last, not burn out in a blaze of adolescent glory. He would send her to Halifax for a year to get her sea-legs. Then on to Milano at eighteen.
    Kathleen turned twelve.
    “When Malibran’s father told her she must go on for Giuditta Pasta, as Desdemona to his Otello, he looked her in the eye and swore that if she did not sing perfectly, when it came to the scene where Otello murders Desdemona, he really would kill her.”
    Kathleen laughed and said, “You’re a melodramatic old feller, aren’t you.”
    Materia marvelled. The girl was saucy, she deserved a good slap talking to her father like that, but never got one, got a chuckle and a wink instead.
    Kathleen had a way of swaggering a little even standing still, and especially when leaning against a piano. She didn’t yet know how beautiful she was, but she’d begun to suspect. She’d begun to care about how she walked, to gauge her effect on others. She practised world-weary expressions in front of the mirror. She looked up the word “languid”. She adopted a tone of amused scorn and loved to kid her father about his romantic obsession with la Voce , ordering him to fetch her grapes and peel them too. “If I’m going to be a diva, you’d better start treating me like one.”
    He loved her way: acting casual, working like a