Lily's Story (100 page)

Cora jumped up and Cap jerked
back against his pillow, spilling his tonic. “Look, I’m sorry –” he
said.

“
It’s alive,”
Cora cried. She drew the fluttering creature out of her apron
pocket, lifted it to the window and let it beat its way into the
blackness of a winter-sky. Her thigh still tingled where the bird
had made the decision to live.

“I
don’t need no raise,” Cora
said.

“
That’s not the
point. You’re the best worker that sleazy leprechaun’s ever had
slaving for him. I told him to give you more money or I’d hire a
gang of thugs from the Alley to break his knees and then his Irish
mouth. He seemed impressed by my logic.”

“
I thought you
was supposed to have ‘renounced’ the things of this
world?”

“
I have.” He
gave her one of his philosopher’s looks – bristling with protective
ambiguities. “By the way, did you get me those cigars?”

E
very evening about
ten o’clock, Cora walked to her room in Hap Withers’ cottage. She
missed the outdoors, the pleasant walks along Canatara beach, a
sleigh-ride to Little Lake to watch the skaters in the winter,
flower-hunting expeditions into First and Second Bush. The odd
time, in the month of June when the sun stayed until almost ten
o’clock, Cap would fall into a brandy doze and she would slip out –
sometimes as early as eight o’clock – and walk briskly in any
direction, drinking in whatever Nature offered the senses and the
gluttonous memory it fed without conscience or care. Most of the
time, however, she arrived home by ten, fell into a dreamless
sleep, and rose early enough to help Mrs. Suitor with the breakfast
and chat amiably with Elmer or one of the new girls Malloney had
not yet frightened out of a job. At four o’clock sharp she went up
to the third floor – her duties for Malloney completed – and
entered Cap’s retreat. How he survived his night or what he did
during the morning to recuperate and justify his existence she
could only guess at from the detritus he left about, or read in the
scavenged slag of his face.

“
The salient
point in all of this, then, is not
when
you discover the
truth but the fact that you
have
accepted it into
your life to the extent that all your subsequent actions are
consonant with it. That is pure Schopenhauer. I read that only
after I had come to similar conclusions myself. My disgrace, if you
will, was merely one of the means which prompted me to see what was
there to be observed all along: that as long as one persists in
pursuing one’s own desires, which means working against the world’s
will, one will never be in the position of making a choice. It’s
strange, I know, but the more you try to be yourself by desiring
the things of the world and lusting for dominion over them, the
more you play right into the hands of a universe that cares nothing
for such vanities or will-o-the-wisps. The only choice we can make
is to renounce all vanities, all desires except the pursuit of
truth through contemplation. One can choose to do that.”

“
When you
tempt fate, it gets you.”

“
Well, that’s
oversimplifying a grand notion, but yes, that’s part of it. Sooner
or later one of the world’s accidents will drop its careless hammer
on your hopes – which you thought you could direct and manage to
some personal conclusion. Certainly you would concede that an
impromptu train-ride at the hands of a drunken suicide was one of
the world’s more bizarre examples of happenstance?”

“
Maybe the
German fella was in love,” Cora said.

For a second Cap caught
the edge in her voice, waited, but when she added nothing more, he
said, “Love has nothing to do with it. Love is one of those desires
we must purge ourselves of. I speak, as Schopenhauer does, of Eros,
not Caritas or Agape. These latter await those who can approach the
best in themselves, and thereby come close to the spirit of the
World’s Will itself, which is suffused with sympathy and the kind
of knowledge that cannot help but issue in the complete affection
of Agape. When we know fully, then we sympathize, then we love with
utter acceptance. That’s the hope that Schopenhauer offers
us.”

“
He had no
vanity?”

“
None.”

“
Why did he
choose to lecture at the same hour as the great Hegel at the
University of Berlin?”

“
You’ve been
reading these books,” he said, astonished and not a little
befuddled.

“
Only when
you’re asleep. I don’t take them out of the room.”

“
How
long?”

“
Just a little
while. You seem to be snoozin’ more these days.”

“
It’s the damn
soft coal,” he said.

“
But I can
only read some parts. Usually the part about their lives. The rest
is too hard.”

His gaze narrowed. “What else
do you know about Schopenhauer?”

“
He saw the
world as a dark place, full or horrors, from a lonely room. Maybe
he needed to get out more.”

Cap’s face
relaxed visibly. He flashed an indulgent smile and surveyed his
pupil as from a great height. “You think his magnum opus,
The World as Will and
Idea
, was coloured by an
unhappy, friendless existence?”

“
Some of it,
yes.”

“
That’s why
women aren’t encouraged to study philosophy,” he said, fumbling for
his silver lighter. “The man
chose
to be alone. To
think. As I have.”

Cora took the lighter from
under his napkin and handed it to him. She waited until he had his
cigar lit and was sucking greedily on its adrenalin. Then she said:
“He kept a dog with him. All his life.”

T
hat second spring Cap
had a bad time with his cough. Cora would wrap him in blankets and
get Elmer to help her carry him to the bathroom, where she would
fill the air with steam from the water, and sit with him till be
could breathe again. She begged to be able to stay with him through
the night but he insisted she leave: “You’re a respectable widow,”
he would say, winking a smile as best he could. “I’ll survive. Or I
won’t,” he added with Schopenhauerian resignation, but Cora knew
the look in a doubter’s eye – she’d seen it more often than she’d
wanted to, seated at many a sick bed with the smell of camphor in
the air like a gruesome incense. But she went. Malloney followed
her footsteps down the block from his bedroom vigil. Cap survived.
He went back to the cigars.

“
Can’t give
them up,” he said. “They fuel the gray-matter up here. And I don’t
mean my hair. But I’m giving up the brandy. You were right. It is a
desire, a vestige of my former vainglories. More symbolic than
real, but significant all the same. It goes.”

The day after these
resolutions, Cora arrived to find a pad of lined paper set on the
table in front of her chair. There were notes made in a neat,
printed hand.

“
They’re for
you. I’m summarizing the main points of Schopenhauer so you can
read and study them and ask me questions.”

She stared at
the notes, wary and elated. “Can I ask
him
questions,
too?”

He smiled shakily, and
she could see he had both hands tucked into his trousers. His flesh
was the colour of grass along the flats in November. “Only if he’ll
let me answer for him.”

W
hen Cora came in she
knew immediately that something was wrong. The room was frigid, the
charred coke lifeless in the grate (Elmer got it started early
morning, she banked it at night). Her eye caught the snow beating
its fletched fists against the narrow north window. His chair was
empty.

“
Cap?”

The bedding had been
tossed aside as if in anger, the white sheets glowed eerily in the
winter dusk fast descending. Sparrow-wings flapped against glass,
begging entry. Cap’s moan answered from somewhere behind the
bedstead. Cora strode to the end of the bed and peered around it
into the shadows that hovered between it and the west wall. Cap had
fallen out of bed, the covers had gone one way, their tormentor the
other. Automatically she lit the beside lamp and then knelt down to
him.

“
Go away. Let
me die in peace.”

He was sitting precisely
where he had landed, propped obliquely on one bruised elbow, his
brittle spindle-legs flopped uselessly to either side of the
fattened toadstool of his belly. The hand that was free pawed
compulsively at the fringes of the mattress the way a gutted
woodchuck might claw in hope at his burrow wall. The only visible
wound was the fractured brandy decanter, forlorn against the
wainscotting.

“
You people
got nothing better to do than sit and stare at me? I’m no traitor.
I’m just a man, just like you. So leave me be.”

His eyes peered out of their
devastated flesh but did not see her, even as she bent and kissed
them and her arm slipped under his numbed shoulder to begin easing
him up. “It’s only me,” she said.

“
Let me die in
peace.”

His face came up into the
lamplight. The flesh was sallow yet as puffed as if he’d been
beaten with a cuckold’s fists. His beard and hair were matted with
vomit from some previous misadventure, and his speech, his pleading
whine, was squeezed through his stunned lips without once jarring
them.

Later, scrubbed and remorseful,
he said to Cora: “Whatever I said to you, I didn’t mean it. I’ve
been told I’m a mean drunk.”

“
And a
sweetheart when you’re not.”

“
Be kind. I
fell three bloody feet off the bed.”

“
An’ the
wagon.”

C
ora paused, drew the
razor back and seemed to be contemplating her unfinished handiwork.
Either that or the opium of the lilacs drifting in from the four
quarters of the town had induced a reverie of its own. “You didn’t
tell me that German fella said there was more than one way to give
up thinkin’ about the world.”

“
Schopen
–
hauer
.”

“
Don’t put me
off.”

She finished the left cheek,
wiped the blade and sat back. He reached over and touched her
wrist. “A day like this and I’m almost tempted to venture into the
chaos out there just to see the trees again.”

“
Almost.”

“
Schopenhauer,
as you well know and are pretending not to, suggests that although
the ascetic life of contemplation is the only permanent way to
avoid the wrath of the universal Will, one can indeed obtain
temporary relief and insight into the more benign, spiritual side
of the life-force by studying and appreciating works of
art.”

She sat back again. His hand
lay where it had fallen.

“
Have I got it
right?” he said.

“
But why can’t
it last? He don’t seem to say much about that.”

“
I didn’t
write that part out, I guess.”

After a moment she said,
“Why?”

He feigned annoyance. “Because
it’s deductible from the system as a whole. Too much exposure to,
or an obsession with, art constitutes yet another form of desire
and egocentrism and becomes, therefore, self-defeating. Now would
you fetch me my cigars?”

“
I don’t know
what you mean.”

He lit his cigar without
removing his eye from her. She could see the effort it took for him
to concentrate, to keep his fingers steady, to let some of the
pleasures so rigidly curtailed simmer again in a glance that once
held salons and boardrooms in thrall, that skewered the witless and
charmed the unwary, that had never quite become reconciled to its
own delight.

“
I think you’d
give Socrates a hard time.”

“
Who’s
Socrates?”

“
See what I
mean?” he said theatrically, peeking back over his shoulder. Then
he sighed deeply, coughed through his teeth without jolting loose
his cheroot, and said: “I’ll use an example, an
exemplum
,
to illustrate. So listen carefully. In England there has developed
over the past few years a school of esthetics which promulgates the
notion of Art For Art’s Sake. To a degree Schopenhauer would have
approved. They believe in the creation and contemplation of beauty
for its own sake – no other. You see how that view of art precludes
the world out there with its phoney social and moral values. Beauty
is to be loved for her beauty and that beauty-as-loved gives the
beholder a momentary insight into the One Will whose expressive
breath activates the heart of the universe.”

“
The way I
like lilacs or you like them cigars?”

He made a brief effort at
filtering out the ironies, sighed, and continued. “In a homelier
sense, yes, though art – in painting or music – is created by an
act of the individual will, and is not merely nature.”

“
Oh.”

“
But you’re
getting me sidetracked. The point I’m making is that
that
school itself, in practice, has become perverted to the
sorts of desire that we must renounce – the kinds of the things I
have given up to live as I do in this hermitage.”