Lily's Story (103 page)

“
Stop that magpie
muttering, will you. I didn’t sleep a wink all night.”

“
Maybe that’s because you
sleep most of the day.”

He grimaced and clutched his stomach. She
saw pain startle the soft points still left in his eyes, before he
wedged them shut to keep this penultimate anguish in its own
private darkness. She waited until he could open them again before
she went over to wipe the sweat from his face and draw the shawl
around his shoulders. She would kiss him sweetly along the nape of
the neck, massage the tension out of his muscles, hum secretively
in his ear, but she would never come around and look at him until
he raised his hand to signal that he was ready. He did not want her
to see him in his pain as he was: an old, fat man afraid of
death.

“
You read all those books?”
she said, fixing the tea.

He glared malevolently.

“
You never talk about
them.”

“
Don’t you go hiding my
cigars again.”

“
Let me come in the
mornings,” she said.

“
No need to read about
fools, even when they might be right.”

“
But you told me
–“

“
Don’t listen to what
people tell you. Now give me that tea before it turns to ice, and
swing me around so I can see what’s left of June out
there.”

All that summer the dreams and meditations
of the villagers were accompanied by the steady throbbing of the
steam-powered hydraulic rams against the wrought-iron shields they
drove inch by battering inch into the millennial rock under the St.
Clair River. Children awoke whimpering, afraid of thunder that
rumbled past the ear to inner bone. Tornado warnings were ignored
in deference to more impressive manifestations of omnipotence. It
was rumoured that mothers’ milk was drying up. Old men in their
cribs at night fretted like babies. In September the noise stopped.
On the eighteenth, three days before the sun began rolling
backwards towards the equator, the first Grand Trunk express roared
unimpeded under the ancient waterway that had stymied bison,
glaciers, and herds of brontosauri lured to the faithless sun.

“
It’s done,” Cora
said.

“
It’s never done,” Cap
said.

Elmer helped her get him down the back
stairs and through the kitchen, but he insisted on going the rest
of the way with Cora’s help only. “I’d like to go for a walk,” was
all he said when she had come in early that afternoon.

When the warm sun struck him, he blinked
like a hibernating bear, and she nudged him forward half-a-step,
then let him stop to savour its blessing on his face and hands.

“
Don’t need this,” he
growled, and she unwound the scarf. “It’s almost July, isn’t
it?”

Behind the hotel and paralleling the
backyards of the boarding houses along the street was a winding
pathway used mainly by draymen and delivery boys and lovers out for
a semi-public promenade. Aging board-fences lined it on either
side, adorned by hollyhocks deceptively frail in the light breeze
that now and then lifted their petticoats. Orange blossoms and
honeysuckle bloomed wildly over rusted gates and abandoned sheds.
Roses, planted with some care or purpose years before, rebelled
lustily, overwhelming trellis, rotted arbour, sapling maples. At
the far end near Victoria Street, they could see the ice-wagon and
the ragamuffins from the Lane trailing it like gulls in a trawler’s
wake. Their cries rose in delight, tangled in the green branches
overhead and then faded as the horse wheeled away up the main
road.

Cora held Cap firmly by his right arm, but
not as a nurse would: she lay her head near his shoulder, and from
time to time she moved her free hand over and patted him
possessively.

“
People will think we’re
lovers,” Cora whispered.

“
They already
do.”

She hugged him sharply,
saying
we already are
. She felt laughter ripple somewhere inside him.

They made slow, halting progress. He glanced
from side to side, taking everything in; she watched his nostrils
flare as the odours and aromas quickened them; in the tart air his
eyes watered but he waved off her handkerchief. Just before the
lane ended they turned together, as if they were both reading the
same map, and started back. Cap stopped. He inhaled deeply,
resolutely. He reached over and seized her hand. She felt the
reserves of its strength. He moved forward, pulling her with him.
He wanted her to feel the rhythm of his stride – a wonderful, easy,
lover’s ambling, as if this kind of afternoon, this larcenous
beauty, this accidental pastoral bower were designed for those pure
and dedicated enough to deserve it.

Elmer met them at the gate and together they
carried him back up to his room.

Cap was in a rare lively mood. Some of the
old, teasing humanity of the would-be rogue shone through and gave
every word and every gesture an extra fillip.

“
You’re always going on and
on about suffering. When I suffer, you call it self-pity; when you
suffer, it’s martyrdom on the road to beatification.”

“
I feel sorry for myself
every day,” Cora said, “but I don’t go makin’ a religion out of
it.”

“
A philosophy, you
mean.”

She caught the flint in his eye. “Whatever
that German fella called it.”

He mouthed the bait but didn’t bite. “I
meant what I said. I’m asking you to tell me about how you women
suffer that makes it any different from men.”

“
Do I get twenty years in a
sea-side cottage to come up with an answer?”

“
As you’ve never stopped
telling me, men traipse off to the great capitals to play at
politics and death. They deliberately find ways to make wars just
so they can play the roles of soldier and field-marshall, so they
can take the little-boy dreams their mommies tried to stifle and
make the rest of the world believe them, or else. According to your
version of reality, they never get over playing
truth-or-dare
. Well, I agree.
Nevertheless, they
do
make the world happen. Napoleon ravaged Europe and left it a
better place. And in the meantime other boys-become-men are writing
great poems and composing great symphonies, and building bigger
bridges and faster locomotives.”

“
Are you
through?”

“
I have a feeling I
am.”

“
An’ they suffer, of
course, all through this?”

“
That was my main point,
yes.”

“
They get killed an’
maimed? They die young? They suffer for their beliefs an’ their
talent?”

“
Exactly.”

“
So they’re the true
martyrs?”

“
Martyrs to time and
history…and circumstance,” he said in a different tone, seemingly
astonished that the mental apparatus was still operational. For
several days now he had been mysteriously free of all
pain.

“
You don’t have to tell me
about that,” Cora said. “I already lived a good deal of it. I seen
it close up.”

“
There you go,” he said,
“proving my point again. As a woman you suffered, certainly, and
you feel sorry for yourself like all women because you weren’t part
of any of it, or if you were likely an Austrian virgin casually
raped by a French soldier, or your lover was killed at Austerlitz
–”

Cora had turned away and was staring out the
window at the heat-haze.

“
I
am
sorry,” he said.

“
What for?” she said
softly, looking directly at him again and speaking through her
tears. “I’ve never been afraid of my sufferin’ an’ grief. It’s
nothin’ to be proud of nor ashamed of either. It’s there, like my
eyes an’ my heart.”

Cap was devastated. His hands shook. He
tried to get up to a full sitting position. Cora was beside him,
she had his right hand in hers. Her fingers rose and brushed back
what remained of his boy’s cowlick. The tremors ebbed into
sweat.

“
It’s all right…it really
is.”

After a while he was able to rest his head
back on the chair cushion. She kept his hand firmly in hers.
Finally he spoke. “I really do want to know,” he said. “If you
could find the words for me.”

“Well, I ain’t had a sabbatical on the
Baltic to think it over,” she said, fluffing up the pillows under
his head the next afternoon, “but I’m gonna try an’ put some real
knowledge into that decayin’ brain of yours.”

He essayed a smile. “Where’d you hide the
medicine?”

“
You get a dollop when I’m
finished talkin’. I been up all night rehearsin’ what I got to say,
so don’t put me off the rails. Just open your ear-flaps an’ listen
for once.”

Through his exhaustion and through the
layers of resistance he had learned to build into the face he
presented to the world, Cora spotted the wick of curiosity fired,
at great expense, just for her. Her throat thickened.

He whispered, “I
think
you
need the
drink.”

She drew a deep breath like
a girl about to recite at a Christmas concert, and began. “A great
deal of what you say is true because it’s already what’s happened
in the world and is still happenin’. I myself’ve seen enough to
believe it. I’m not so sure it will always be that way. I hope
not.
You
say
history is made by men who are dreamers an’ soldiers an’ builders.
Women are put here to make sure they do the things well they were
meant by their maker to do. That means, I suppose, bein’ their
mothers an’ lovers an’ companions an’ nursemaids. When wars happen
or great changes come like they have in this country since I was a
girl, the victims who suffer are everywhere – not just women but
children and old people an’ the young men who die for these causes.
You claim that soldiers an’ dreamers suffer somethin’ even worse:
the collapse of their dreams, the ruination of what they tried to
build, an’ so on. I agree. But what you can never understand is the
special suffern’ of the women, and I’m not talkin’ just about the
loss of a husband or a son in battle, or the pain of bein’ uprooted
an’ havin’ to follow your husband wherever, or the anguish of a
nurse when she tends the broken body of a lover or a brother. All
these kinds of sufferin’ can be understood by anybody with a heart
to feel them. No, what I’m talkin’ about – what it took me all last
night to figure out in words – is not the sufferin’ that comes at
the time of the loss or the inflictin’ of the pain or the ache that
follows ever afterwards, but the sufferin’ that happens
before
all that: the
private, invisible sort of sufferin’. Think for a minute about the
young wife whose husband marches off in uniform with his head full
of glories to be won. Her sufferin’ starts the moment she knows he
might leave. She’ll have fears an’ nightmares an’ premonition, but
of course she mustn’t let her husband or her neighbours
see
any of this. She
holds it all in till the hour of his leavin’ when she’s allowed to
burst into woman’s tears for a while an’ be comforted by her own
kind. But then every single day or hour he’s gone, she’s sufferin’.
And there’s no thoughts of glory to keep
her
mind off the horrible
possibilities of life without him, without means to support her
family, without a father for her children. There’s no daily action
for her that does not remind her of these horrors. She looks at her
children an’ thinks of him. She looks in her neighbour’s face an’
sees the same terror she herself is tryin’ to hide. At night her
bed is empty. There’s no lover, no camp-follower to lie between her
legs an’ help her fall into a safe sleep. Her dreams make love to
her but they’re the soldiers of Buonaparte mockin’ her tears. An’
when she hears of his death, it’s almost a relief because at least,
she says, somethin’ visible has happened, I can go out into the
town among my neighbours an’ grieve an’ be consoled, an’ play some
role in this terrible thing you call history an’ progress, an’ you
claim so loudly to have renounced.”

Cap was still awake.

“
An’ there’s more. You say
this God, that neither of us believes much in, made women to help
an’ support men in their hopes an’ dreams. Maybe so. But what you
forget or don’t know is that we have dreams too. You tell me about
Christopher Wren buildin’ the monuments in the great city of
London, but I ask you whether there would ever be villages with
cozy homes an’ hearths, with meadows for the children to play in,
with neighbourhood squares an’ markets for gossipin’ an’
friendliness, an’ cottages surrounded by flowers an’ green growin’
things – what I’m getting at here is this: though men may dream up
the grand design an’ the monuments an’ bridges, it’s the women of
this world who dreamt the home an’ the village an’ all the little
objects of beauty that men learn about as boys at their mother's
knees while papa’s off huntin’ or fightin’, an’ later when they’re
grown up try to make into…grandiose – is that the right word? –
objects you call works of art. But I ask you, who sings to the
babe? Who tells him his stories? I tell you, Cap, there’s more to
this than I can work out in my head. But I think what I’m sayin’ is
that at least part of the dreamin’ you say is man’s contribution to
history is really a woman’s. Without women, there’d be no history
or only part of it. Can you follow that? Think for a minute what
men would make out of the world without their mothers an’ wives –
an’ I don’t mean just their job as nurse an’ helpmate an’ so on. I
mean what if they were only raised by their fathers an’ fed
only
their father’s
dreams an’ hopes – what would the world be like? What ‘better’
world would their wars bring us? Would the wars ever end? An’ one
last point. If what I’m thinkin’ might be true, if some of the
dream that’s made the world as it is now is a woman’s dream – if
that’s true, then why can’t women share in workin’ it out? If
mankind’s dream is really a village turned into a city full of love
an’ beauty an’ harmony an’ justice, then
we’ve
got a lot to offer
it.”