Lily's Story (101 page)

Elmer arrived with hot water
and Cora made the tea.

“
I’m speaking
of young Oscar Wilde of
whom
you might have heard.”

“
So I have.”
The memories stirred by the mention of that name lapped and
stung.

“
Came here in
’eighty-two. I met him in Toronto, showed him the sights. He was
marvellous. He gave a speech in the botanical gardens about making
your house itself a work of art. Impressive. He told me he planned
to actually
live
the esthetic credo, to be a
breathing, walking
objet
d’art
. You’ll recall I was in
Toronto at that time to help with the merger of the railways. My
genius had not been forgotten. What few people know is that I was
asked by the Grand Trunk in ’eighty-five to go to England and help
sell the idea of the Tunnel to the British owners. They thought a
little charm might help. What they were worried about, of course,
was that Joseph Hobson, the only engineer bold enough to attempt
the feat was, alas, a native Canadian.”

“
You saw Wilde
again?”

“
Yes. I went
to Paris and Rome and when I returned to London I discovered that
he was still notorious and that he had indeed tried to live out the
purely esthetic life. I was invited to his house on Tite Street,
the most infamous household in the Empire. I saw for myself the
results of a philosophy based solely on the exigencies of
beauty.”

His eyes drooped and glazed, as
they often did when he talked too lengthily. Sometimes he would
just drift into sleep, waking minutes or hours later, not
remembering what had driven him to repose and occasionally getting
irritated when Cora tried to renew the lapsed discussion. It seemed
that as long as he was talking, uninterrupted, his thought was
coherent and edged, but if he tired or was distracted, the
coherence faltered and could not be recovered – the very thought
itself might well be lost for days or weeks, sometimes resurfacing
in unexpected intervals as whole and vital as before, and yet as
unconnected as ever to any of the other sequences that emerged in
their own time and circumstance. It was a mind, Cora thought, in
brilliant disarray.

“
This life –
of Wilde’s – it didn’t work,” Cora said, gently.

He thrust his lidded gaze at
her. “Desire,” he rasped. “All desire.”

She waited. His breathing
slowed. He was asleep.

“I
t looks like another
one of them days, almost beautiful enough to tempt you into
walkin’,” Cora said at the bay-window. “There’s no shade of purple
quite like the milkweed flower. I used to walk out on those marshes
every fall as long as I can remember. With my kids, too. I like to
see the pods shrivel an’ dry out an’ then surprise everybody when
they crack asunder and all that white silk billows an’ floats in to
the air, not carin’ very much that winter’s almost on it, just
happy to be born an’ to fly in the little sun that’s
left.”

Cap watched her from his
chair, saying nothing, afraid to cough or breathe too hastily. He
watched her slim form, and the strength it never telegraphed while
it was at rest: the chin set in expectation; hands folded
peacefully in her lap, forgotten; the eyes – as clear and blue as
the moment they popped from the shell – moving in a meditative
sweep over the landscape of their attention, not afraid to let the
possibility of some truant beauty penetrate and flense the ancient,
sealed wounds underneath. In the autumnal silence, her still-life
composed itself for contemplation.

“O
f course, not all
the arts are equal. Mr. Wilde was perhaps too overzealous
concerning the visual. Schopenhauer suggests that music is the
highest of the art forms, closest to the sublime, less tainted by
the coarseness of individual life. In short, more universal, more
in tune with the circulation of the spheres, so to
speak.”

“
You like
music?”

For a while he appeared to
ignore the question; then: “When I was in Europe I heard the most
sublime music, the kind that must have moved Schopenhauer to
advance such a claim for it. You have to hear it played by
orchestras so grand and multitudinous and cohesive and stirring
that no one in this province could even imagine. Sometimes I lie in
that ugly bed and try to recall it. I can’t. No one can. The old
German fella was right.”

Cora was helping him into
bed. He had talked for almost two hours, in bursts interrupted only
by brief forays into the brandy supply or more lengthy appraisals
of his audience – Cora didn’t know which manoeuvre discomfited her
more. He was pallid, palsied in his attempts to get his nightshirt
over his mountainous stomach, and yet as she guided him onto the
sheets she could feel a strange resolve in him.

“
I wish you
could have heard it,” he said, not rolling under the comforter but
turning with great difficulty and balancing, egg-like, on the
precipice of the bed. “I wish we could leave this place sometime
and go there and hear it. Where else could we come as close to the
transcendent?”

He patted a spot beside him and
Cora, wary, joined him. She felt light-headed. It was past ten
o’clock.

“
What kind of
music do you people around here have, eh? The bugle band?” He
draped his hand over hers. She sensed the fear in it.

“
I dance.”
Cora said.

“D
on’t go,
please.”

“You seem awful
tired.”

She allowed her hand to curl up
inside his. Sweated and blood-warm.

“
I watched you
all afternoon. In that window.”

Gently – afraid, unafraid – she
tugged against the pull of his hand, the room, the momentum of the
seasons behind them.

“
You don’t
even know how beautiful you are. That is the wonder of it. That’s
what takes my breath away, my shrivelled old-man’s breath away.
Still...” With his free hand – the other clasped to hers – he
reached over and staring steadily at the vee of her throat, he
tried to unbutton her blouse. She let him fumble there just long
enough to let him know she didn’t mind, then raised her hands so
she now held both of his in front of her.

“
Cap,” she
said, “I love you in a way I’ve loved nobody else. That’s the
truth.”

She saw his eyes moisten, his
lip quiver, his fingers tense to overpower or take flight.

“
But there’s
no need. Please understand. You don’t have to –”

He peeled her hands back,
startled at his own strength, and with a prisoning tenderness he
took her breasts beneath the thin cotton. She wore no corset; they
came willingly into the shape he imagined for them. Then with a
sort of forced, grotesque humour, he closed his eyes and whispered.
“I must. You’ve been walking home every night for more than two
years now, with every lecherous eye on the street pursuing you. Not
once have you stayed till morning. People will begin to think
you’re a respectable woman.”

His grip slackened; she felt
the shuddering right through him, and knew it was not desire.

Softly she planted a kiss on
his brow, easing herself out of his limp embrace. “It’s all right,
Cap. My dearest. I know. I’ve known all this time.”

“
Know what?”
he said, but it was not really a question, for already he was
scanning her face for the ill-disguised signs of disgust and
repudiation. There were none.

“
You always
liked the young men,” she said.

3

T
he Night-Dream had
pursued her here, as she knew it must, for its abode was in the
bone’s blood and in the mind that imagined it daily into being, it
cared not for Arthur’s house or a widow’s comforts, she lay in its
icy grip and felt its absolute breath against the last tenderness
and heard it whisper sinuously of treacheries and mocked promises
and she was Lily once again, squeezed tiny and tight into the last
of the longago scenes but the branched dark was still vivid after
seventy-one years, the ether of mosses and sweating fern and
marooned violets awash in the nostrils and shut eyes, and Papa’s
voice, clear and unquenchable, mouthed its sweet prevarication: “To
my dearest princess, the Lady Fairchild, from your Papa who loves
you forever” and forever was less than a night, less than the time
it took her to dream of a father with arms like brass buttresses
and breath as warm as wool and a stare as strong as Sampson’s and
truer than Troilus under the Trojan wall, and she woke to find Papa
gone and the gift of the Testament with its perjured inscription
forlorn in her hand, her heart frozen and not caring one whit that
the whole greenwood around her was weeping for all its lost
children and crying out against the perfidy of a world cursed with
the fickle seasons and tides of propagation.

48

“I
f we look at man
with his industry and trade, his inventions and technology, we must
admit that all this striving serves only to sustain and bring about
a certain amount of additional comfort to ephemeral individuals in
their brief span of existence, and through them to contribute to
the maintenance of the species.”

“
Well done!
You see, when you
read
you
can
put the ‘d’ on the
‘ands’ and the ‘g’ on the participles. Now why on earth do you
pretend that they don’t exist in free speech?”

“
Tell me what
‘ephemeral’ means again?”

“
Like us. We
don’t last very long. Plump in the spring, bust by
fall.”

“
I’m sick an’
tired of the German fella.”

“
Me too, but
you can’t deny the cogency of his arguments.”

“
Tell me about
some of them other fellas you studied before I come
here.”

“
Have it your
way, then.” He stared out at the Lake, wistfully noting a
four-master as it bellied before the south wind, its glory as
ephemeral as the June breeze it collaborated with. He proceeded to
give her capsule accounts of Hegel, Feuerback, Marx and others,
delighting for a while in his own clarity of recall. But the
drowsiness of the late afternoon overwhelmed, and when he woke he
was ravenous.

“
Let me brush
your hair, you look like a dandelion.”

“
I feel like
one.”

“
I want you to
write down the main ideas from one of them fellas. They sound
interestin’.”

“
I bet I know
which one.” He wrote something on his pad.

“
That Danish
fella.”

“
I knew it!”
He shoved the pad triumphantly towards her. “Soren Kierkegaard.”
Gleefully he recited his earlier encapsulation: “Existence was for
Kierkegaard a category relating to the free individual. To exist
means to realize oneself through free choice between alternatives,
through self-commitment. To exit, therefore, means to –”

“
I didn’t say
I believed him,” she said, cutting him off. “I just said it sounded
interestin’.”

“
The man was a
fool.”

“
But you’ll
write out his thoughts? Without cheatin’?”

He was wounded. “Of course. A
fool never hurt anybody for long.”

“
I’ll get
supper now.”

When she had the door open, he
called over: “Free choice is just an illusion unless it’s used to
renounce the world that tempts us with it.”

Cora came back. “I made my own
choices.” She looked him straight in the eye. He saw that the game
had ended, with no warning.

“S
o you see now that
all those flirtations I was notorious for, even my flamboyant
escapades with Lady Marigold, served a very special purpose. When
one is known everywhere as a roué, it is much easier to indulge
one’s illicit proclivities, so to speak. You’d be surprised how
many lonesome young men the army produces and how much comfort an
older, wiser, more licentious gentleman can provide in times of
stress.”

Cora was curled in the
bay-window seat – reading, half-listening, mildly annoyed at his
attempts to shock, to keep the attention flowing his way.

“
I knew that
pervert of a Calvinist Dane would get to you,” he said. He started
to cough,
in
extremis
.

“
Your
medicine’s three inches from your ring finger,” she said without
looking up.

The coughing wound down to a
pathetic nickering sound: “Cora, come over and talk to me.”

She did. “This Danish fella is
sayin’ that we have to know who we are by makin’ up our own minds
about what we do, an’ being strong enough to take the consequences.
The key to it, as you’ve written out for me, is makin’
choices.”

“
I choose,
therefore I am.”

“
I like
that.”

Cap shook his head
ruefully. “Cora, you’ve told me more about your life and your
travails than any one man ought to know, and I’ll be damned if I
can see where you had much choice. Like most women you’ve been
devastated by wars you never started, diseases you can’t cure, and
children who die on you or run off to lead their own lives without
a pennyworth of gratitude. The world cares only for the species,
and women bear the brunt of that reality.”