Lily's Story (86 page)

“
He’s living
out there in that shack with some tramp,” Bradley pouted. “Why
don’t you do something about him?”

“
With Sue
Potts, you mean,” Lily said and Bradley went white, then
silent.

But in the fall of Bradley’s
entry into grade eleven, Wee Sue eloped with the baker’s son.

P
aul Chambers was
bright and ambitious and rich. Mrs. Tideman, throwing up her hands,
declared him “a bad influence” capable of leading “the Virgin Mary
astray”. But vexed and puzzled as she was by the whole affair, Lily
was inclined to believe that he was a kindred spirit that Bradley,
for reasons she could not yet define, had sought out and bonded
himself to. His head is full of words he hasn’t found things to pin
them to, was one way she thought of the restless, tethered creature
he kept inside him; if he stays here he’ll suffocate, he’ll tear
his own brains out. So she watched and hoped, and kept putting
money into the crockery jar under the bed. There’s love inside him,
too, she consoled herself when the rheumatism started up; words are
a way of feeling, I know, and Bradley’s only got to get them aimed
away from himself and towards something bigger and more
wonderful,
out
there
.

In Paul
Chambers he found a purpose for poetry and politics – Canada First,
the frenzied ultra-nationalist club of writers and apprentice
thinkers that was sweeping the salons and tearooms of the
confederation. Chambers had founded a local chapter of the society,
used his father’s money to rent a club room at the St. Clair Inn
every Tuesday and Thursday evening, and gathered about him a group
of like-minded believers. It was reported that they smoked cigars
and drank French wine. Most of the adherents were between seventeen
and twenty-two years of age, youthful, idealistic, bent on literary
careers and affecting (without achieving) the Byronic form of
ascetic Hedonism. Only Bradley was successful in getting a poem
accepted for publication in the society’s national organ,
Rose-Belford’s Canadian
Monthly
. For a time the
legendary Goldwyn Smith was their idol and mentor.

On the rare
weekends when Bradley did come home during his senior year, Lily
was made an honorary inductee and subjected to lengthy expositions
of the Canada First manifesto. Bradley’s eyes would flash with
righteousness and confidence of youth, and there was in them a
purity of purpose that frightened Lily, but also amazed and
gratified. Mostly, though, she was inundated. It seemed that people
like her were representative of the provincialism, the
parochialism, the homespun timidity that was keeping Canada from
taking her place among the senior cultures of the world; that was
holding back the natural development of a larger national spirit, a
more capacious transcontinental loyalty and a more transcendent
view of citizenhood; that was, moreover, sabotaging the very free
and unlocalized and politically independent forms of literature and
philosophy which were necessary to the growth of civility itself.
When Lily protested that she failed to see how she personally was
at fault in these matters, he merely grew more vehement and
repeated his arguments with an increasing number of polysyllabic
words. And when she had the temerity to ask him how much of the
Maritimes and Prairies and Rockies he had seen, or questioned the
sincerity of ‘St. John’ Macdonald, he threw a tantrum, then
retreated into his morose/remorse routine. She soon realized that
she was not meant to comment or defend or reprove but merely to
listen as the lava of his words hardened in the clear air around
them, to become – as she had once done so long
ag
o when he had been afraid to
sing to the dark – the trustee of his secret self. And so she came
to accept in silence his wheedling and badgering and elocutionary
harangues until tears shattered and regrouped behind her eyes and
Bradley slumped exhausted on the table, staring at her with the
look of a pneumoniac. Once, Rob was in the shed chopping wood
during one of these gruelling sessions, and came in just as Bradley
finished. Bradley glowered and went out, slamming the door. Lily
released her tears more in annoyance than hurt. She felt Rob
watching her, axe in hand. She looked up at him for some gesture of
help, comfort, understanding – anything. He flung the axe-blade
into the floor and stomped out the back way.

W
hen Bradley
graduated
magna cum
laude
in June of 1881, Lily
was fussed over by Hazel, Betsy and Winnie until they could declare
her ‘a regular town lady’. Hazel contributed a fancy hat and Betsy
a parasol – both of which Lily politely refused. But she did allow
them to stitch and tuck the dress they’d created out of partial
cloth until she was respectable enough to pass muster. She did not
want her son to be embarrassed on the most important occasion of
his life. In fact Bradley seemed surprised and not altogether
pleased by the bearing of his mother during the ceremony and the
apparent ease with which she made polite conversation with her
betters at the reception. “I bet she could joke with the old Queen
and get away with it,” Paul Chambers burbled. “Where
have
you been hiding your mother, you rascal?” Bradley was not
amused, though he too was unable to take his eyes off his mother.
When Counsellor Chambers himself asked her to dance, Bradley
blushed from half a dozen contending emotions. Rob did not
come.

The following week, just after
the news of Hazel’s decision to leave reached her, Lily was buoyed
by word from Mr. Axelrod that Bradley’s application to University
College in Toronto had been accepted and that a modest scholarship
of twenty-five dollars was proffered with the promise of much, much
more down the line. That night as an early summer storm raged
around them, Lily and Bradley sat down to map out the details of
his future. Bradley held the principal’s letter in his hand as if
it were an executioner’s telegram. All the blush and bravado had
drained from his face. In his trapped blue eyes Lily watched a
boy’s fear of the crooked dark, sly moonlight, bat-shadows under
eaves, the giant’s fee-fi-fo-fum. She braced herself but he would
not say it.

“
You must go,”
she said.

“
I will, I
will,” he said, “but I can’t. Not yet.”

“
When?”

“
As soon as I
have enough money. I was expecting a much bigger scholarship.
Twenty-five dollars is an insult.”

“
How much do
you need?”

“
Paul says at
least four hundred dollars over the four years.”

“
But I got two
hundred an’ fifty already – in the crockery jar. An’ the principal
says you can expect more scholarship money by second
year.”

“
What in hell
does he know? He’s never been east of London.”

“
Okay, then,
tell me when.”

“
I need a year
off. I’ve talked it over with Paul and his father. He has agreed to
take me on as a clerk for a year; I’ll earn enough money to put
myself right through, and we won’t have to be beholden to
anyone.”

“
Is Paul
going?”

Bradley paused before he
answered, scanning his mother’s face with anger and amazement.
“No,” he said almost inaudibly. “Paul’s going to tour Europe for a
year, and then register at University College after that.”

W
hen Violet left, Lily
tried to carry on alone with her business. But the summer was
exceptionally hot and she soon became exhausted. Rob found her one
day in a faint, seated beside the mangle as if she were taking a
snooze. She couldn’t remember where she was or how she’d got there,
and when Rob clasped her arm to raise her up, she screamed with
pain. She spent three weeks in bed exorcising the fever. Rob was at
her side much of the time. Bradley came on weekends.

“
You don’t
need to do this, you know,” Rob said in exasperation as she
tottered back to the shed and surveyed the accumulated laundry Rob
himself had not been able to clear away. “There’s only yourself to
take care of.”

“
I’ll get a
couple of the McLeod girls to help me. They need the
money.”

And she did.

2

F
rieda and Mitsy
proved to be good workers and kind, grateful neighbours. But
nothing could replace the loss of Violet and the others, and Cap
Whittle’s fall and Honeyman’s death made Lily feel very much older
and very, very tired. Rob was lugging freight full-time and talking
about adding some animals to ‘his place’ in the spring, and Bradley
was working diligently in the law office and starting to talk again
with enthusiasm about university, particularly, Lily noted, after
the arrival of a letter from Paul with a postmark from Rome or
Paris. So Lily wrapped herself in sweaters and plunged each morning
into the frost and singe of the laundry shed in winter. Frieda and
Mitsy sang off-key in shy, tin-whistle voices, but sing they must,
and laugh – as everyone around Lily eventually did.

Paul Chambers arrived home on
the first of May for a month’s visit before touring New York,
Baltimore, Chicago and the far west by train. Bradley informed Lily
that he and Paul were going to Toronto for a few days to inspect
the campus and make preliminary arrangements for their entrance in
the autumn. “We’re going to stay at the Royal York, and see the
sights,” he said, his guilt at the twenty dollars or so he would
have to spend drowned in his excitement. When he left, with an
extra five dollars from Lily to buy some new clothes, she sat by
herself and drank a slow cup of tea. It’s going to happen at last,
she allowed herself to think, very quietly and scarcely in
words.

When he returned five days
later with his tweed jacket torn and a bruised carnation in his
lapel, Lily heard little talk of the university. The subject was
Wilde, Mr. Oscar Wilde, whom they had heard lecture twice at the
Botanical Gardens and spied up close in the flesh during one of his
‘progresses’ up York Street.

Bradley’s eyes blazed
with something hard and radium and irreducible. They held Lily in
their spell while their author paced back and forth across the
kitchen like a frantic Socrates, gesticulating and querulous, his
pale, thin body whipped and fanned by a zealot’s fire.

“
We’ve been
wrong, Paul and me, all along. Not completely wrong because we’ve
been trying to expand our sense of the world, to cut all the ties
that bind us here, and to reach for something larger and more
wondrous and unknowable – like the spirit of a nation, something
beautiful and sacred because it is
bigger
than the
miserable little lives that combine to make it up, the wretched
lives that have no poetry in them unless they’re stretched and
broken and consumed by the
idea
of nationhood.
Not blind, stupid patriotism but the noble conception of a
collective consciousness, an invisible oversoul that moves and
directs a country’s destiny, just as Emerson has said. And you know
how passionately Paul and I have held to this notion, and how we’ve
begun to put our own poetry and our schoolboy philosophy at its
service, but then, then to have heard Oscar Wilde speak to us as he
did from that dais, and tell us in words I shall never forget – I
shall take them to my grave – that we were only partly right, that
Beauty, and the arts that create Her, are valuable
for their own
sake
, that there’s a magic
universal truth that inspires beauty and goes beyond the spirit of
nation-states, German philosophies and pious moralities. Don’t you
see, Ma, we were headed in the right direction, we were trying to
learn more and more about the world out there, about the unseen
powers that regulate its fate, about ideals that would allow us to
transcend our petty day-to-day lives, about the forces of poetry
and art and history – but we just didn’t go far enough. There are
universal truths we can’t begin to grasp until we’ve disentangled
ourselves from politics and moralizing, until we are ready to
devote our lives to the pure contemplation of what is
beautiful.”

Lily picked up the carnation
that had fallen on the table and brushed it partly back to life.
“This was Mr. Wilde’s?” she said.

Bradley nodded, then sat down,
still shaking, and let Lily pin it carefully back onto his lapel.
“I’ll stitch your jacket up before you leave.”

Bradley caught
her hand in flight. “You
do
see, Ma, why I’ve
got to go to Toronto. There’s so much I have to know. There’s so
much out there to see. There’s so much buzzing around inside my
head I think someday it will just explode and that’ll be the end of
me. I got to keep going, Ma. I got to find out what I
am.”

R
ob was actually the
one who found the note on the table and the smashed crockery jar
beside the bed. Lily had been over at Peg’s helping her nurse the
babe through the whooping cough. Frieda, terrified by the look that
Rob had given her, came dashing across the Lane to fetch her. Lily
and Rob read the note:

Dear Ma and Rob:

I love you both more than my
life. I’m sorry I have never been able to show it or prove it to
you. But I must make the break now and for awhile it must be
complete. I’ve got to have a look at the world out there. When I
do, I’ll be back.