Lily's Story (102 page)

Cora mulled that over for a
while. “May be,” she said. “But I chose somethin’. Every time.”

“
And what
would that be?”

“
I chose to
love.”

W
hen Cora came in, Cap
was sitting in his chair, but the chair was next to the bay-window
where he could see the cardinals in the bushes along the Lane,
bright as blood against the fresh snow. She pulled her chair over
to his, took up her knitting and sat down – as if this were the
spot he had chosen over all others for them to contemplate the
rejection of the world. They never again sat by the north window.
No explanation was offered.

“
That bird,
bless his heart, thinks he has chosen to stay the winter while all
others have succumbed to the herd-instinct and flown
south.”

“
I’m glad they
stay.”

“
In a sense,
we
all
choose to love,” he said, his eyes still on the
birds foraging hopelessly among the sterile drifts.”I loved a young
man in my regiment so desperately I would have given my life in
exchange for his. Luckily that passion thinned before I was put to
the test. By loving so, and choosing to do so, we simply fall prey
to a larger desire that does not liberate us or refine our feeling
of who we are or who we might become – as the Dane implies – but
rather one that pulls us into desire itself and its compulsive
yearning after something that threatens to overwhelm us or leave us
feeling foolish and often so bitter we’re not capable of dealing
with the world on any terms. What is left of our precious self
then? Our power to choose is progressively reduced as each new
passion rages through us, and the indifference of the universe
drops its accidents upon us. History has no time for
lovers.”

Cora was silent for a bit, but
he knew from the way she chewed at her lower lip that there was
more to come. He sucked on his cigar and waited.

“
I admit
there’s not a lot we have any choice about,” she said.

He was poised to make his
customary interjection-with-homily but stopped short.

“
I mean
women,” she said to forestall him.
Not that again
, he
would be thinking, but she pressed on. “Some people might say I
lived my life for others, an’ that I took my existence from them. I
loved my children but they’re gone. I loved my husbands an’ they’re
gone. I don’t know now, and I never will, if they knew who I was.
But I can tell you this: I was myself long before I knew them. I
think this Danish fella was wrong in a way, though I like what he
says a lot more than Mr. Arthur Schopenhauer.”

The pedagogue’s gaze narrowed.
“Wrong, in what way?”

“
You can be
yourself even when you can’t choose.”

Cap was not prepared for his
pupil’s sudden apostasy. He blinked, then coughed.

“
I loved my
children: Rob an’ Brad and even the little dead one I never saw the
livin’ eyes of, an’ most of all the little girl they took away from
me because they thought I wasn’t good enough to –” She saw the
flinching in Cap’s look and stopped. Then: “They took everything I
offered them. So did my lovers. But I tried not to give myself
away, I really did.”

“
I know,” Cap
said.

W
eeks later with the
frost-fronds thick upon the glass, the glacial wind howling around
the corners, the lamps lit throughout the afternoon – Cap seemed to
pick up the thread of an earlier conversation. Cora was surprised
because he’d had a bad night, soiling his sheets and writhing
helplessly in the grasp of the pain he didn’t acknowledge the
existence of. She had been reading aloud to him from
Leaves of Grass
(which he informed her was real poetry), fully
expecting him to be carried into sleep on the perambulating,
narcotic rhythms. When she finished his favourite – ‘When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloomed’ – she stopped, then looked over at
the weary, gray pachyderm’s flesh hunched in the chair by the
bay-window. He began: lucid and didactic, as if the lecture-hall
were jammed with sophists.

“
You did make
one kind of choice in your life,” he said. “From what you’ve told
me and what I’ve been able to infer from your life’s story, you
chose to be an outsider. Ironically, it was a choice you admitted
only when it seemed convenient – like many of us. When life treated
you a bit roughly – and I concede you’ve had a touch more
ill-fortune than some – you blamed your sorrows on the very society
you deliberately set out to repudiate. Being hypocrites and sadists
they picked on the weak – like yourself – and drove you into exile,
where they could increase your suffering tenfold. In other
instances, though, it is clear that you never at any time accepted
the values of that society – neither its comforts nor its
sanctions. You not only made yourself an outcast before they
decided to, you secretly gloried in your own superiority, your own
capacity to survive nicely without them, thank you. You wanted it
both ways. The German fella would say that you were corrupted by
two of the world’s illusory desires: pride, through which you
pathetically hoped to establish an identity of your own; and
what-is-worse the projection of your own failings upon the innocent
and the guilty around you. The more you tried to be yourself, the
less you really were. I know. I’ve been through it all –
twice.”

Cora drew his shawl against the
icy draft from the window, and held his hand until she felt the
relief of sleep take him.

“I
can hear the machines hammerin’ all
the way from here,” Cora said. “Funny, isn’t it, to think they’re a
mile under the River.”

“
They’d burrow
into Lucifer’s outhouse if they thought there was anything but shit
in it,” was his only comment.

“
They say
it’ll be finished by the fall. Three men’ve died so far. One of
them was crushed so bad his wife couldn’t recognize
him.”

“
A particular
talent of the illustrious company I helped to build.”

“
You want to
talk, or read?”

“
Talk.”

“
I figured out
what’s wrong with all them philosophers you been readin’ all these
years.”

“
You have? And
in such a short time.”

“
None of ’em
was women.”

“
Good
Lord.”

“I
’m serious, Cap. I
been tryin’ for days to find the words to explain it to you. But
they just keep revolvin’ round in my brain all night and I can’t
get them to stay put. You know what I mean?”

Cap was very drawn of late.
Much of the puffiness in his face had disappeared, leaving flaps of
vellum skin with umber grooves between, his cheekbones protruding
like a pair of interrogative andirons. His eyes seemed much larger,
as if he were hydrocephalic and these couriers had been thrust into
the chill to bear the bad tidings. At times they were as clear of
thought or malice or desire or hope as a calf’s eyes blinking into
the flow of its birth-stall. Many times Cora had to lean over and
wipe tears from the rungs of his cheeks, though she knew he was not
weeping. He’d give her a wink and a shrug to reassure her it was
just old age, irreversible decrepitation.

“
I’m all
ears,” he said.

“
Well, the way
I see it, all these philosophers, as you call them, are tryin’ to
answer questions about how and why things happen, how they work,
an’ who might be responsible – us or some greater power, like the
God they all seem to miss very much.”

“
More or
less.”

“
To my
surprise, I must admit to you, I found these were questions
everybody sooner or later starts to fret about – not just spoiled
brats with too much learnin’ out of books. Many people I knew used
to ask why such-an’-such had to happen, why a nice God would
destroy a child’s life, why their farm failed when they did
everythin’ humanly possible to make it work, why old so-an-so was
always lucky an’ they weren’t. These philosophers of yours seem to
be obsessed by things to do with actin’, the whys an’ the
wherefores of it.”

“
Questions
about the world of action, you mean, of freedom and
necessity?”

She gave him a scrutinizing
stare. “More or less.”

“
Do go on.
Your main point?”

“
Well, bein’
men they seem to look about them an’ conclude that all the actions
in the world are carried out by men.”

If she expected him to be taken
aback she was disappointed. “True, but then all the significant
actions in the world’s affairs are.”

“
That’s what I
thought, too. At first. Men make the wars, they start factories an’
farms an’ make up countries to suit their fancy. They even give
their names to the next generation. But there’s somethin’ wrong, I
said to myself. Women. Women’s
actions
, as you put
it. First I thought: after-all’s-said-an’-done, they worked as
hard, they had babies, they raised the boys up till their fathers
took them away an’ they turned their girls into women to serve men.
Wasn’t that enough? Then I saw what those thinkers saw: that women
didn’t make the
big
things
of the world happen, so
they didn’t seem important to their questions about how the world
works. Accordin’ to them, you have to look at the actions that
count an’ get things done.”

“
Yes, you do
see that these men are not making value judgements about the worth
of women; they are ignoring them strictly in terms of the
philosophic questions they have chosen to raise. Some day those
questions or new ones may involve women in a central
way.”

“
But –” Cora
said, letting the word hang weightily.

“
The most
telling word in the lexicon,” Cap murmured.

“
But then I
got to thinkin’, an’ here’s where the words started to jump about
on me. So I’ll just tell you where I’m at now an’ see if it makes
any sense. In my view women
do
act, an’ not just doin’ woman’s things either.
They act by not actin’.”

Cap came out of his doze like a swimmer
who’s suddenly decided not to drown.

“
I know that sounds crazy,
an’ maybe it is. But I think it’s true. You see the tangle all this
thinkin’ in words gets you into?”

“
Tell me. I’m
listening.”

“
Let me give you an
example.”

He smiled inwardly, deeply. “Do,
please.”

“
Suppose there’s a war. The
men an’ the boys go off, an’ whether they win or not could change
the world a lot. It could affect the lives of millions. It can
change the future. Like this Buonaparte you’re always goin’ on
about. The women do the usual things: they kiss their boys goodbye;
they give support and comfort; they nurse; they pick up the pieces
that are left; they cheer or they weep. Mostly they
suffer.”

“
True, and very
sad.”

“
But what if to suffer was
in a way – I know this sounds silly – but what if sufferin’ was
another way of actin’, a special woman’s way of actin’?”

Cap realized he was expected to say
something. She was watching his face strain towards concentration.
“Interesting,” he said, feeling a flush of shame. In the silence
between them, Cora reached over and wiped her handkerchief across
his cheek. He tried to wink.

“
But how can not-actin’ be
the same as actin’? That’s where it all starts goin’ round like a
bobbin in my skull. But think of it this way: what if these women
refused to suffer? If sufferin’ means, and I think it does, that we
take in pain, sort of soak it up –”

“
Absorb it.”

“
Yes, absorb it, then if it
ain’t absorbed, where does it go? You see what I’m headin’ for? The
actions of men always cause pain, they upset the world, an’ most of
that pain is simply swallowed by women. If they refused to swallow
it, where would it go? What would happen to the world if all that
pain were left loose in it? Would the men be able to act at all?”
Cap clutched at the gleam from her eye, trying to hold on. “If the
women on one side suffered an’ those on the other didn’t, would the
outcome of the war not be changed? Is it just because sufferin’s
mostly invisible that these philosophers don’t see it as actin’ and
as important to the world?”

Bravely he fought against the waters that
closed over him, beating his arms against the green insistence like
an eagle’s against the four-cornered wind. He needed air – for
words, for praise, for wonder.

“
Don’t you see, Cap. I just
ain’t got the words yet.”

His eyes locked onto hers just before he
slipped away.

“I told you to leave that section alone,”
Cap said in the villain’s stage-whisper he had adopted to save
wear-and-tear on his throat. “There’s nothing there to look
at.”

Cora pulled the books from
the glass case into the beam of the sun from the west window. She
read the titles aloud not for his benefit but her own:
Whitman,
Democratic
Vistas
; Darwin,
On
the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural
Selection
; Bucke,
Man’s Moral Nature
; Carlyle,
Sartor Resartus
;
Huxley,
Evidence as to Man’s Place in
Nature
.