Lily's Story (118 page)

B
radley had no sooner
stepped into Hap Withers’ cottage that night when he staggered and
collapsed on the linoleum. The swaddled child struck the floor
before she could catch it, and began crying. Holding it in her
arms, she forced the door shut with her body, already soaked from
the wind-driven, icy rain pouring in on them. She stripped off the
wet rags and wrapped the baby in an old quilt, its cries shuddering
through her, its tiny face wizening as if it were trying to squeeze
all the blood out with whatever pain or terror was twisting inside.
Bradley groaned and heaved onto his side. Something black and oily
dripped from his mouth. The baby shrieked. She hurried back to the
kitchen, but the stove was cold. She lay the baby down on her bed
and returned to the front room. Somehow with the child wailing and
the storm lashing about the eaves and sills, she managed to haul
Bradley’s unconscious form onto Hap’s bed. She could not get more
than his jacket off because each time she pulled at his clothes he
jerked back as if he’d been jabbed by a cattle-prod. She pulled the
large comforter over him, tucked it firmly in all around, and went
back for the baby. Covering it with her own coat, she ran into the
fury of the storm towards Peg’s house, just across the
tracks.

Despite her
good marriage and religious conversion, Peg Potts Granger was still
an Alleywoman. She asked no questions; the desperation in Lily’s
face was all the testimony she required. Two of her boys were
dispatched to rouse the doctor in Sarnia. She herself took charge
of the baby, and while Lily – Peg called her Mrs. Burgher because
she could not bring herself to call her mother’s lifelong friend
‘Cora’ even though most of the village had grown
accus
tomed to the change –
while Lily stood shivering in uncharacteristic helplessness, Peg
dug out an old bottle, warmed some milk and soon had the baby’s
wailing damped down for the night. “Go back to Bradley, missus. I
won’t say a word till you tell me. The baby’ll be here when you’re
ready for him.”

After
satisfying herself that Bradley was still breathing, Lily went into
the kitchen and got a roaring fire started. Then she walked grimly
back to her son. She was not even sure just how she had come to
recognize him, something in the eyes perhaps that no metamorphosis
however savage could disguise. The once-thin, ascetic face was
monstrously bloated, his skin had the pallor and touch of
gray-white mushrooms too long in the rain. The top of the head was
bald but not smooth – as if the hair had been pulled out in
frenzied tufts. What hair remained – on the sides and back of the
head – was a weathered, colourless fungus no amount of scrubbing
would ever make blond again, or curly. As she pulled away the vest
and shirt, she saw that the body flesh was similarly puffed and
shapeless. Under her touch, it oozed. As
she drew his trousers down, she caught sight of the
swollen, lopsided protuberance stretching out below his right ribs
– like a blooded liverwort. His breathing came in short, gasping
seizures followed by a death-like quiescence – equally
frightening.

It was dawn when the rain
stopped and Dr. Dollard arrived, white-haired and exhausted after a
night in the township. He accepted Lily’s offer of a cup of hot
coffee and a biscuit, and they sat in a grateful silence for a
while – though there was much that lay between them. Finally he
said to Lily in a grave tone: “I’m afraid he’s come home to
die.”

“
How much
time?” Lily said.

“
A few days, a
week. No one can say for sure. He’s slipping in and out of hepatic
coma, and it appears from his breathing as if pneumonia’s setting
in. His liver’s finished.”

“
Drink?”

“
I’m afraid
so.”

“
Did you
recognize him?”

“
To be honest,
no. I’ve seen a lot but I didn’t think a young man could change
that much in so short a time. I’m sorry, Mrs. Burgher.”

“
What do I
do?”

“
Keep him warm
or cool as his temperature varies, get some liquid into him if you
can. I must warn you, he may go into
delirium tremens
if
the pneumonia don’t work fast enough. If he does, get some help
quick. And call me.”

“
Thank
you.”

A
t the door he said,
“You take care, Lily.”

B
radley had his first
seizure before noon. Asleep on the chesterfield, Lily was brought
upright by some loud muttering from the bedroom. When she went in,
he was still unconscious and shouting violently at some antagonist
in his dream and thrashing his arms about as if warding off savage
blows. The comforter was knocked askew, and suddenly both of his
knees shot up, flinging it to the floor. With a fierce cry he rose
up and began flailing at his invisible assailants; she could
distinguish only ‘no, no, no’ as he fell back in a crumpled ball,
knees up and against the belly like a monstrous foetus. Then
everything began to quiver, then tremble, then quake – skin, puffed
flesh, the elastic bone, the pale lids of the eyes. She heard the
scraping of his clenched teeth and the embowelled groan trapped
behind it. The force of it unbent his body and popped his eyes wide
open.

H
ap Withers, bless
him, promised to stay close, but Lily assured him there was no
need. She was not frightened. After one of his brief seizures,
Bradley was calm and perfectly lucid, as if some kind of exorcism
had occurred without his blessing. Although his voice was thin and
without colour, it was one she remembered, and from the ruined
housing of that flesh it was Bradley’s eyes that looked at her. On
these occasions he was usually able to speak for half an hour or so
before he tired and slipped into a sleep which was both shallow and
fathomless. In the seven days that he lived – during which she left
his side for brief moments only, trying to sleep when he did,
eating with him, suffering with him as she had so many times before
when the fever and the fever-dream chose to strike – they never
really had a conversation. If he were quiet but alert, she would
speak for a while, telling him what she thought he ought to know or
just letting him hear the strength of her voice. He would dip his
chin slightly or move his eyes in a certain way to let her know she
was to continue, and sometimes, though rarely, he would murmur in
assent or acceptance. At other times she would find him awake and
before she could utter his name, he would begin talking in his
whispered monotone. When this happened, she had to sit close to him
to catch every word; if she moved an inch to loosen the crick in
her neck, his eyes would widen with a childish terror and he would
start to speed up his speech towards a frantic blur until she moved
in close enough, once more. At times she felt he was talking right
past her to some more unconvinced ear beyond this room – the words,
the jumble of ideas, the arcane references, the assumed knowledge –
all tending to puzzle and estrange. Yet even when the flow of his
talk became trancelike or confessional, she had only to turn her
head to one side before he seized upon the gesture as a betrayal.
Every word that he uttered during the last week of his life was
something he needed to say, and, in a way she never fully
understood, something he needed to say to her or in her presence.
Though all of it was obviously not meant for her, every word and
every deed behind it required a sanction only she could give. She
made it her business to cherish each syllable.

2

W
hen Bradley and Paul
Chambers made good their escape to Toronto in June of 1882, they
knew precisely what they wanted and where to find it. They set
themselves up in a bachelor quarters on King Street, close to the
city’s centre and some distance from the academic community they
had vowed to repudiate. Though there were no salons in which they
could instantly expose their superior talents, they knew which
coffee-houses and taverns to frequent and which clubs to infiltrate
to promote the cause they were now celebrating with selfless
gratuity – art for its own sake, beauty because it is beautiful,
the ideal of the mind transcendent and nudging towards cosmic
consciousness. Or something like that. Bradley lugged his satchel
of poems everywhere there was a potential audience and Paul
Chambers his sheaf of political pamphlets. They badgered the
journalists and cub reporters in the beverage rooms along King and
Bay, they tried to impress the cognoscenti of Canada First who
loitered about the coffee houses around Yonge and Adelaide, they
even costumed themselves as gentlemen and passed undiscovered
amongst a gathering of the literati at the Grange, a cabal whose
bourgeois decadence they took pleasure in disparaging. They spent
not a little of their time in haberdasheries searching for clothing
appropriate to the Wildean image they had preserved intact from
their encounter with the great man. They shunned black. When the
University term began in September, they took a cab up to College
Street and stood in the sunshine of the walkway below the Main
Building, dazzling in their improvised Pre-Raphaelite finery,
purveying disdain to the wretched freshmen by their mere presence.
Paul’s father, ever gullible, believed his son had settled in to
school and continued to send money until the Dean’s letter at
Christmastime disabused him. Paul was summoned home, and for a few
black days Bradley sat in the rooming house, out of money, and
wondered when the walls would crash mercifully in upon him. Several
times he started to write a letter home, the words tangling and
seizing in his remorse. He could find no words to describe the
aloneness deep within, impermeable to love or loathing alike. His
poems seemed trivial, a mocking impertinence in the face of his
suffering.

Paul Chambers arrived on New
Year’s day, in time to pay the rent and nurse his friend through a
bout of pneumonia. He had succeeded in convincing his father that
he needed merely to ‘sow his oats’ for a few months more, to ‘get
Europe out of his system’ and then he would settle down. He even
made flagrant promises to consider engagement to a plain young
woman of resistible virtue who lived just down the street. He
kissed her once on the front porch. The upshot was a guaranteed
monthly income for as long as he needed it, the sum total to be
deducted from his considerable inheritance if he turned out to be a
bad investment. Paul grinned and said, “Now we can begin to live,
you and I. We shall make things happen.”

Bradley
continued to have some success in getting his poems published in
Goldwyn Smith’s journals and elsewhere in underground circulars.
Paul managed a few biting letters-to-the-editor in the
Mail
and one in the
Globe
. What happened,
of more significance, was their meeting up with the Crawfords
sometime late in January. Sarah Crawford was a journalist of sorts,
who wrote and sold fleeting pieces for the papers and did
copy-editing when she needed to eat. “We met in a coffee-house, she
was sitting alone in a dusky corner of the room; she was elfin and
spare, with porcelain skin and starveling eyes; she exuded a
brittle, painful beauty. When she spoke to me I fell madly in love.
She knew who I was, we talked, I returned to my den and began
pouring out breathless anapests to love and beauty and faithfulness
– every one dedicated to the goddess Sarah.”

They met
again, and one day Sarah led Bradley and Paul back to her lodgings
not far from their own. She wanted them to meet her cousin, a ‘real
poet’. Whatever they had prepared themselves for, the bard they
were introduced to when they entered the drafty second-storey
walkup
over a wholesaler’s
depot was not one of the imagined possibilities. First of all, it
was a woman, who also bore an odd name: Isabella Valancy Crawford.
She did not resemble any picture of a poetess they were ready to
accept. She was a plain woman in her early thirties, though her age
was hard to determine because she was consumptively pale with
luminous dark eyes that were simultaneously childlike and agedly
wise, releasing only half the pain they were feeding upon. The rest
lay hidden below a brave smile, waiting, as they were soon to
learn, to be ambushed by words. Her speech was courteous but
up-country Irish, unadorned by wit or felicity of phrase. Though
she appeared to listen politely to the young men and her cousin
while they postured and pamphleteered through the long evening
hours in a room with the fire dead, the coal run out, the lamps
sweating – she had little stamina for argument, lapsing into a
trance interrupted only by a requisite smile now and again. She
found no passion to respond to the great debates the young lions
arranged on their tri-weekly visits throughout the
winter.

Sarah lived
with Isabella and the latter’s mother in three rooms above the
hubbub of a warehouse quiet only on Sundays.
They were bitterly poor, lighting a fire in the
morning and again in the evening though the winter was severe. The
two young women wrote occasionally for the newspapers, but Isabella
spent most of her time composing stories and poems. “I would come
in with Sarah late on a wintry day; the room would be filled with
the lurid light of sunless snow, the fire perished in its grate.
Isabella would not immediately turn to greet us; she was always
seated in a hard-backed rocker, facing at a quarter-angle the
window which overlooked the frozen gardens to the south. She
appeared to be gazing
through
the landscape,
catching it with an odd perspective, you could still see the
surprise in her whole face as she swung slowly round to acknowledge
our presence. Sometimes I would ask Sarah to stay downstairs while
I slipped unnoticed into the room to watch her there by the window,
her hands gripping one another across her lap as if it was their
task to hold back the petty anguish of daily existence while her
eyes were freed to interrogate the bleak details of the universe
out there. Once Paul said to me, ‘She has a haunted look about
her,’ but I said, ‘Yes, though it appears to me that when she
stares outward at the world
she’s
attempting to
haunt
it
.’”