Lily's Story (120 page)

“
Oscar was
seated on a throne-shaped, white wicker chair, delicately latticed
and coifed with ostrich feathers not too distant from the moulting
season. Around him everything was white – the eggshell walls, the
ivory casements, the bleached wool of the sofa and settee – or its
opposite among the decorated paraphernalia – black walnut, blue
crystal, imperial crimson, chinese jade, polished onyx. The effect
was of a brilliant chill, an exquisite tastefulness purged of
feeling and the lesser niceties.
The sun had not quite gone down yet, so the natural light
still streamed in through the capacious windows unencumbered by
curtains. The room, like the man himself, seemed an awesome
combination of the austere Grecian and the sumptuality of
Rome.”

“
Wilde was
ornately polite to the guests, waving us with a plump sigh of his
hands towards two cushions set out near the throne. He began
immediately to regale his audience with
drolleries from his visit to America, making certain
to include us in the amusement by tilting his brow in our direction
in the most confidential manner he could muster. Whistler and
Bosie, a blonde leonine figure with a touch of Adonis in the face,
mounted a mock counter-attack to accelerate the repartee, and as
the banished shadows poured out of their burrows and worm-casts to
engulf the ersatz aesthetic of the room, I never took my eyes off
Wilde’s face. Shorn of ambient light and the corona of the
beautified room itself, his features – mercurial, wit-quick,
tightened by tenderness, ransomed by inexhaustible humour – lapsed
into shadow. Though the elegance of phrase and the swift épée-cut
of his wit continued unabated, under lamplight I began to notice
that the mobile lips, hedged by shadow, now seemed bloated; the
cheeks more rounded, their translucent skin pulled by the jaw’s
swerve across rancid flesh; the impudent tumble of his Byronic
curls now coiled and sensitive and raven. I turned my gaze at last
to the manilla folder beside his chair, where my poem lay, my last
bid on the future.”

“
Without
preface, Wilde reached down and took up into his flaccid
grasp
The Ruins of
Arcady
. At that precise moment
I became aware of the odour of incense; only one lamp burned in a
far corner. Wilde did not acknowledge the ripple of chatelaine
laughter as he flipped the folder open to the title page. I watched
his face; the smile was gangrenous.”

“
I have read
this epicurean saga with great care and much expense of time and
spirit, not to speak of sweat. About the monumental text itself I
can find nothing to say, which in its own way might be the highest
form of perverse praise possible in these dreadful pedestrian days.
Nonetheless, I do have some personal advice for you which I hope
you will take to heart.”

“
It was
suddenly still and silent; the air was perfumed with belladonna as
the room readied itself for a proclamation from the messiah of the
Beautiful. “My suggestion is that you should concern yourself with
writing ab
out...
bricks
. A word,
wouldn’t you agree, that has a certain granite ring about it, that
conjures up – if that isn’t too cogent a phrase – wonderfully
rustic images. And think of the bucolic possibilities for rhyme:
sticks, ricks, picks, ticks, hicks, not to mention the
myriad
cricks
which I am assured decorate your
unlettered landscape in America.”

“
Naturally
there was appreciative laughter, and for a moment, despite the
terror just below my throat, even I was willing to believe for a
few seconds that these remarks were just a preliminary but
necessary part to the game. But soon Wilde began quizzing Robbie
Ross about life as it was presently lived in the backwoods of
Ontario, tossing severe glances in the direction of Bosie – now
slumped in a comatose embrace with a startled young man who
professed to be a playwright but was at the moment beginning to
doubt the authenticity of his muse. The shadows deepened and
exposed. The conversations continued, desultory and fragmenting. I
was numb, beyond panic. I closed my eyes. Wilde’s voice carried on
through its own fatigue.
He
was arguing with Whistler in a whining, strident tone that said
‘we’ve been over this ground before, why are we doing it again, why
can’t we let the damn thing lie, what is left to be gained – not
pride or point or jot of mother wit, we are tangled in the
wearisome toil of language itself’. In rumpled corners I heard the
slithering contact of septic flesh.”

“
Somehow I
managed to reach over and retrieve my manuscript – the labour of
eight years – and held it in my hands as if I were gazing at my own
corpse not quite confined. Wilde’s hand was on my shoulder.
He swung his tall, sad face down to
mine, and said for my ears only in the voice he might have used
when talking to himself in a dream, ‘Go home, lad. Your people are
merely crazy; here they all claim to be sane. If you must grow
roses for the world’s consumption, start by digging in your own
shit.’ For a moment no hint of mockery creased his gaze. Then as if
he sensed he might have been overheard and realized how much might
have been revealed under the mask, he flicked open the high-speed
shutter of his eyes just as a purpled lip pursed around the barb of
his blackened tooth: ‘I speak metaphorically of course,’ he said
with a fatigued glance at the revived Bosie.”

“
Somehow I
found the courage to say goodbye to Paul Chambers, whose devotion
to a cause and selfless loyalty to his friend’s was a galling
contrast to my own wasted existence. There was no one I had not let
down. Everyone who had dared to love me I allowed to suffer with
callous indifference as I pursued some demon disguised as an angel.
He pressed some money on me and saw me off at the quayside. He said
tearfully that he himself could never go home; I told him I had no
other choice. When Landsend was no longer visible and I had not yet
taken my first drink, I walked out onto the stern-deck and sitting
on a canvas stool I opened the folder containing my epic to Eternal
Beauty.
There was a heartening
breeze from the west, and one by one I lifted up each of those
thousand misbegotten pages and let them blow into the wayward
swells where they hung for a moment like swan’s feathers before
melting into the universality of the sea. I did not weep for a
single page.”

“
When I
finally got off the train in Toronto, after a typically rough March
crossing, I was too sick to take another drink. I staggered into
the station and fell onto a bench, trying to breathe. With the few
dollars remaining, I planned to buy a ticket on the Grand Trunk
express for Point Edward. Above me a calendar, with a fresh page
turned, told me it was April1, 1891. My birthday. I was
twenty-seven years old.”

“
A cabbie came
over when he heard me coughing, and asked if there was any place in
the city he could take me. I started to tell him I was going on to
Lambton County when I was wracked by a coughing spell that left me
dizzy and helpless. I could hardly hang on to his arm as he lifted
me into the coach. I whispered an address to him, the only one I
could remember. When we came to the wholesaler’s on King Street,
the old fellow kindly went upstairs to see if anyone there still
knew me. When he returned, Sarah Crawford was running ahead of
him.”

“
Isabella had
died four years before but Sarah had stayed on, living with a
succession of distant cousins eager to try out the big city. Her
beauty had deepened, and sick as I was, I was terrified by those
eye
s where I saw undiminished
the love she had long ago squandered on some evanescent ideal.
However, I was too weak to make any protests as she took me in that
weekend, cared for me, talked to me, veiled whatever disenchantment
she must have felt, and finally got me into a profound, restorative
sleep. By Sunday afternoon I was sitting up, taking soup and eager
for the taste of news, some sign that the world had kept going in
spite of my personal apostasy. Of course, nothing I thought or felt
or said during those hours made any real sense – I was a man
benumbed, hollowed out, incapable of coherent speech. That Sarah
was ready to bless it with comprehension was a miracle I only dimly
realized the danger of. Some thread of decency, voiceless but
pressing, was telling me I must escape before it was too late, that
I had no right to put another life at risk. The last thing a
condemned man wants is salvation when he’s already resigned himself
to something less painful. But sometime later in the evening I felt
her warmth unbending beside me; her flesh, never ample, descended
like a comforter over my everywhere-aching; her breath, her
murmuring, her cry of completion spun transcendent through my
desperate dreaming. Before I woke to regret her absence, I dreamt
that Isabella was across the room from me, seated in her
straight-backed chair, her hands steadfast in their clasp against
reality, the eyes in quest of the myths locked in the landscape’s
obscure angularity, the courage-to-be and of being-in-verse still
shining out of the unshadowed face not yet ready to acknowledge the
stopped heart. Even then I knew, as I did later when I read her
poems again, that she had always been right. So had
Wilde.”

“
I left next
morning while Sarah was at work, leaving her a jumbled excuse of a
letter. I still had some of Paul’s money left, but I never got to
the station. I was hale enough to reach The Tankard, the old haunt,
and promptly got drunk with two journalists I recalled having
despised. I remained drunk for a year. I was a beggar, a skid-row
bum. I had hit bot
tom.”

“
I knew that
Sarah would try to find me, so I arranged for my ‘pals’ to
intercept her and tell her that I had gone home, and when I was
recovered would return to Toronto. Under no circumstances was she
to contact me first. With that good deed completed, I could settle
down to destroying myself in earnest.”

“
It was August
of this year – sixteen months later – when I woke up in a hospital
and lay there helplessly while doctors and nurses forcibly revived
me. I’d had my third bout of the D.T.’s, and the next one, the
doctor reassured me, would be the last. Penniless, dried out and
looking fifty years old, I tottered out into the midsummer heat of
downtown Toronto. Sarah was waiting at the gate. Someone had been
suborned. She too looked much older, much wearier. I was unable to
offer resistance anyway, and
allowed myself to be escorted home. Eddie was waiting for
me. My son. Seven months old. Whole. He smiled at me as if it were
the natural thing to do to your enemy.”

“
It was hard
but I didn’t take another drink. I knew full well that I couldn’t
build another life for myself. There was nothing left. But I
thought I could perhaps borrow whatever of me remained in Sarah and
the boy, and hang on as long as I could. I owed the world
something. As soon as I was better, I planned to bring Sarah and
Eddie here for a while. At long last I realized what I could never
admit all those years, whether I was up or down: that it was you I
must see – not to reconcile or expiate, but merely to release.
Though less merciful, love is more binding than death.”

“
Suddenly a
few weeks ago, I began writing poems, scraps of verse, lines only
but powerful ones, expunging ones, untranslatable, with images so
stark they seemed to have been drawn with the ink of dreams. Every
one of them was about Sarah. I finished only one. It’s in my
satchel; I want you to have it. It’s not much, but it’s all that’s
left of me. I read it to Sarah in the evening before she
died.”

3

G
ranny woke up with
the sun on her back, streaming through the kitchen window and the
open doorway behind her. Stiffly she rose and went in to put the
kettle on. She fidgeted with the new-fangled gas range until it
popped into flame. Well, well, she thought, that wasn’t too
difficult, was it? Maybe I’ll even get used to it.

At least you came home, Brad.
That’s something.

59

1

K
nowing she would not
sleep much the night before the ceremony, Granny switched off the
electric lights in the front room, lit the coal-oil lamp and placed
it on the table beside Arthur’s trunk. She sat down and began
leafing through the memorabilia of a lifetime. Each of the
playbills recalled the story Arthur had associated with it,
something bizarre in event or character, something that always
ended with a chuckle or a wink in her direction that said ‘the
world’s a funny place if you don’t die laughing’. The lingering
twilight – they were just past the high solstice – had just
succumbed to the deep darkness of the summer night when she reached
into Bradley’s satchel and drew out the loose scraps of paper on
which he had scrawled his last words. Among their blotted,
unfinished number she found the copy of his poem to Sarah, the one
she had made before sending the original off to Eddie. Had he read
it before he died? Did it make any difference?

She stared at the five stanzas
– not quite filling a single page with lines that touched neither
margin. So this is it, she thought, this is what all the pain of
birth and loss and absence and wishing-to-be has come down to? A
few lines of shrunken verse. This is where all the joy of foolish
affection and helpless love and desire under the dark has finally
landed? In this let’s-pretend house confected out of pity, with a
worn-out skin-and-bones scarecrow of a crone who can’t even say
hello or goodbye or it’s time to go. All that energy of genesis,
all that procreative hope, all that suffering smothered in the
mouth and held in and mined against the future. For this. For
nothing.