Lily's Story (97 page)

“
The deed
should be ready in two or three weeks,” Sunny said. “But you know
lawyers, don’t you, Cora?”

She did indeed.

2

C
ora Burgher surprised
the village in a number of ways when she returned a few days after
Lucien’s death. Her coming back to live there was itself a
surprise, considering what happened to her, what painful memories
must have lain all about her. Second, she did not return to the
Lane though the meagre room she rented again in old Hap Withers’
cottage was as close as you could get to the Lane without actually
being a citizen of that nether-town. Third, she not only brought
her new name with her but flaunted it all over the place, despite
the fact that it had had only a few months itself to settle in. She
seemed obsessed with having herself addressed as Mrs. Burgher or,
worse, Mrs. Cora Burgher. When she
wasn’t
– even by the
gang at The Queen’s who had known her best – she appeared not to
hear or became merely distracted. But then she
had
suffered more than a body could be expected to bear –
without the sustenance and solace of religion, poor thing. What
surprised no one who bothered to notice was that she returned to
her job at the Queen’s Hotel and to that itinerant society still
regarded by the villages with disdain and raw envy. For a few
months, then, Mrs. Cora Burgher was discussed litigiously, then
taken for granted, then forgotten.

Cora herself
was so numbed by Lucien’s death that she recalled little of those
early weeks back in the Point. She did now know why she was here,
why
she was even living at
all, except that any decision not-to-be required more effort than
merely going through some deadening ritual dredged up from the past
and substituted for existence. Happy Withers found her wandering in
front of The Queen’s and simply took her in again, as if she were
an orphan dropped on his doorstep a second time. What else could he
do? When she became coherent, he fetched her things from the St.
Clair Inn and then took her down to Malloney. Within hours she was
back at work.

When Malloney
or Gertie Flounder called her Lily or Mrs. Marshall, she flinched
and said au
tomatically in a
low, thin voice: “I’m Cora Burgher, Mrs. Cora Burgher,” and kept
repeating it till Malloney, bewildered as he always was
face-to-face with any feeling he couldn’t count, would say
“Yes,
Mrs.
Burgher
,” startling the
bench-warmers in the lobby. It took Gertie quite a while to say
“It’s all right, Cora, we know.” Thus it was soon ‘Mrs. Cora
Burgher’ almost everywhere. When some of the numbness turned to
mere pain, to the slow singe of grief she recognized and welcomed,
she carried that name in her heart like a gift, a legacy of their
brief love. For a while it would be her reason for
being.

Gertie, of course, had
been promoted in her absence, so Cora was content to clean the
lobby, beverage room, Malloney’s suite and the kitchen area out
back. This meant more scrubbing on hands-and-knees, emptying
spittoons, scraping up grease and crushed cigars, and scrubbing out
the foul toilets near the bar. Gertie was the upstairs maid, making
the beds and tidying up the half-dozen suites on the second and
third floor. When there was extra scrubbing to be done – clogged
fireplaces, debauched carpets and duvets – Cora was called upstairs
to assist. She didn’t seem to mind. She arrived shortly after
seven, had a bit of breakfast with the cook, and worked until six
or seven in the evening, when she would take a cold supper and
trudge the single block back to Hap’s cottage.

At first Cora
preferred to work alone in the back corners of the place, but
gradually she came to like those moments when she could slip into
the lobby – a large front room really with a double door and scenic
window overlooking the flats leading to the River and the Lake –
and quietly dust or empty the brass ashtrays while the commerce of
a busy railway village passed before her. The three suites on the
third floor were still advertised as elegant and often played host
to smartly attired executives, officious politicians or blustering
entrepreneurs – all of whom were in themselves worth the observing
and who provided fodder for days of follow-up analysis and
commentary by those seated on the sidelines. For the lobby, with
its hospitable stove, drew to its domain an unchanging cast of
locals: a half-dozen or so elderly denizens who spent half the day
in the barbershop up the street and the other on these benches (and
the two stools given to those with seniority). They called
themselves the Smokehouse Gang, comprised of whey-faced pensioners,
discarded elderly uncles and a pair of defrocked patriarchs – all
from the respectable pa
rt of
town and all with much to say about the decline and fall of the
human race. Some of them Cora knew from earlier days – when they
were unwrinkled and God-fearing – Pudge Grogan, Tubby Trout,
Ballroom Baker. Others she knew only by their trade names: Wart,
Dicer, Shotgun. Through some pact worked out years ago, it seemed,
they were never to arrive before two o’clock nor stay later than
five-thirty. And though they would always be certain to arrive one
at a time to establish their independent worth, the benches were
full by three-fifteen and deserted by five-forty. Soon Cora was
organizing her chores so that the lobby required her presence in
the late afternoon. Malloney seemed relieved, though he never said
anything to Cora about that night in his room and made no overture
that might be misconstrued as friendship.

More than a year passed. If the
great world around her were moving, Cora didn’t notice.

“T
unnel don’t matter a
fig’s tit,” opined the Wart. “Railroad ain’t gonna move the shops
an’ sheds outta here till the day before doomsday.”

“
How d’ya
figure it?” Shotgun said, watching for an opening.

“
They still
own half of this here town, that’s why. A crow don’t shit in its
own nest.”

“
Just in
everybody else’s,” Shotgun said and sat back to bask in the stringy
laughter of his easily amused colleagues.

“
Never get her
built anyways,” said Pudge Grogan, who used to build
things.

“
Why’s
that?”

“
Gravity,
that’s why. Never heard of Newt’s first law of
gravitations?”

Before the
next riposte could be delivered, all eyes turned in silent
appraisal upon two figures just coming through the double-doors.
Both were dressed in expensive business suits but the young one – a
bright-looking chap with a scrubbed face and soft eyes – was
supporting almost the full weight of the older man, who stumbled on
the doorjamb, uttered a ghastly cough and fell to his knees.
Duckface Malloney stood at his ledger behind the desk-counter,
grimaced, but did not look up. None of the onlookers made a move or
sound. The young man reached down and as gently as he could raised
the older one to his feet. “He had one too many at the meeting,”
the fellow said. A dozen heads nodded
we know
. “I’ll
need some help getting him up to his room.”

“
Elmer, get
out here!” Malloney shouted without looking up, and moments later a
skinny lad appeared from the barroom and helped gather the drunk
into a manageable lump to be carried upstairs.

Cora came in just in time to
hear them clumping onto the second-floor landing. Someone up there
let out an elongated retching noise, Elmer cursed, and the clumping
resumed. Cora went for her mop and pail.

O
ver the course of the
winter, it became evident that there was one spot she was never
asked to clean – the spacious bed-sitter on the northwest corner of
the third floor, the one with the view of both river and lake. When
she asked Gertie about it, all she got was a blush and a forefinger
laid against the lip. Gertie herself, as far as Cora could tell,
seemed to go in there intermittently. Finally she confided: “He
don’t go out much, an’ till he does, I got orders to stay outta
there.” No more was said on the subject.

One day early in July Gertie
was off sick and Cora was told to do the third-floor rooms. “Stay
away from 3A though,” Duckface said and Cora detected more fatherly
admonition than command in his voice. When she searched his face
for more, he swung abruptly away. It was stifling up there, even in
the morning with the hall windows wide open and a hot breeze
wafting the curtains. When she had finished the other two suites,
Cora came down the hall to do the water-closet. As she passed the
mysterious bed-sitter, she thought she heard a groan, as if someone
were in extreme pain. She eased over to the heavy door and put her
ear against it. Nothing. She was about to leave when it came again,
a breathy groan as if someone were being punched, followed a
half-second later by the tight whine of a second voice, descant and
linked to the pain of the other. Again: in a staggered cadence and
vocal accompaniment which she had heard inadvertently many times
before from these rooms around her – unmistakably sexual. As she
headed back towards the stairway, wondering only vaguely who the
lovers might be, she was pursued by the coupled climactic cry, and
there was something alien in it, chilled and yearning, not even
close to pleasure. She shivered and descended.

G
ertie returned the
next day and Cora forgot about everything except surviving in the
swelter of that summer. She took to walking down to the River in
the cool of the mornings and evenings, catching the wind off the
water before the parched fields heated it up for distribution over
the village. Malloney suggested that she and Gertie lie down in one
of the empty rooms during the blaze of the afternoons and finish up
their chores after supper. So it was that Cora happened to be
scrubbing out the pantry one evening about seven o’clock when she
heard a commotion in the lobby. She put her pail down, got up and
walked along the hall in the direction of the noise, which now
became more clearly defined: men’s voices raised in anger and the
thump of bony flesh on wood. She hurried into the front
room.

First of all she was surprised
to see four or five of the Smokehouse gang seated in place; then
she remembered that they too had taken to coming in after the heat
– with Malloney’s grudging permission. The Wart, Shotgun, Dicer and
several others were all staring towards the stairs near Malloney’s
desk. Their eyes were popping as if they’d all just inherited the
same goiter. Cora stepped further into the lobby until she could
see the stairway itself. She went no further.

Malloney, his duckface squeezed
horribly inward in rage, had a huge hand on the collar of a man
whom he was, it appeared, dragging down the stairs and across the
carpet towards the door. The man was resisting by flailing his arms
and digging his black leather oxfords into the rug. His bulk, which
was considerable, was entirely in Malloney’s fierce grip.

“
Get on your
feet you fat-assed bum an’ haul yourself outta here,” Malloney
shouted into his ear.

The victim’s gray hair was
askew, covering a good portion of his face, but Cora could see the
flush of humiliation and amazement there. His arms flopped
uselessly, girlishly, about him, as if he felt he ought somehow to
be striking out though all the time knowing it was hopeless.

“
You’re lucky
I don’t call the constables to come down here an’ kick the livin’
shit outta you!” Duckface opened his fist and the man dropped to
the floor. The crack of his elbows shot through the room like a
whiskey-glass on a bar-top. The Smokehousers flinched en masse,
their mouths agape, salivating.

Cora watched the man. He rubbed
at the smudges on his worsted trousers, got himself seated upright,
then peered out to see where he was, where the next attack might
come from.

“
Get on your
feet, you drunken deadbeat. You got thirty seconds to haul your ass
outta here.” For the first time Malloney seemed aware that he was
not alone. He whirled towards the benches, his beady eyes defiant
and daring. He got no challenge. The old men rocked back onto their
seats, appalled and thrilled. Their collective rheumy-eye swept the
room with the instincts of a gunsight. Malloney did not see
Cora.

The man was now up to a
crouching position. The sweaty hair had fallen away from his eyes.
He had the look of a pig the second after the sledge hits – when no
regret will do. She could see him desperately trying to garner some
fury, some outrage, some word of reprisal. Nothing could penetrate
his amazement.

With no warning, Malloney
kicked out his foot and caught him in the lower back. Stupidly, he
seemed to teeter towards uprightness, pause at the suddenness of
his ascent, and then he canted forward onto his face. For the first
time he let out a cry, high-pitched, a little boy’s stunned by
undeserved pain. When he rolled over onto one side, blood spurted
from his smashed nose.

Malloney, who had his foot
raised for another blow, froze. The man whimpered, caught sight of
the onlookers and said in a whisper, “Please help me.”

Dicer rose from his stool.
“What’s he done?” he said to Malloney.

“
Ain’t paid me
a fuckin’ cent of rent for three weeks. Nor his bar bill of
eighteen dollars. So out he goes. You got trouble with that?” He
put a threatening edge to the last comment but it was unnecessary.
In truth, he had gone as far as he intended to go.
Farther.