Lily's Story (21 page)

“
We’ll lick them,” Aunt
Bridie said. “We’ll get by. We always have, haven’t we, Chester?”
Uncle had succumbed to sleep.

One stroke of good fortune was that Bachelor
Bill, with his own farm in disarray, had abandoned it and become
more or less their hired man. Without him they could not have
managed to salvage anything of that summer. On the twenty-first of
June he brought over a bottle of mulberry wine and they all toasted
Lily’s eighteenth birthday. There was no coming out, however,
unless you counted waltzing with your Uncle in the kitchen.

After Uncle and Bachelor Bill had poured oil
on the chickens and set them ablaze – the stench of their feathers
and diseased flesh befouling the twilight air – Lily went into the
house where Aunt Bridie sat at the table with her chin in her
hands. She was ashen; the perpetual glint in her eyes was glazed
with fatigue and disappointment; and something much worse. Lily saw
immediately what it was: Auntie, with her intrinsic strength and
constitutional optimism, could face up to any temporary calamity,
indeed even to the despair and seeming hopelessness of the
near-future; she would suffer any physical pain, any mental anguish
and take any risks offered by Fate so long as there was hope of
some kind – however faint – that she could escape the one thing in
life she feared the most: being consigned to the drudgery of a
labour which merely repeats itself in days, in weeks, in years –
and gains for its victims merely a form of survival wherein the
whole scope of one’s being, one’s reaching out, one’s caring is
defined by a debilitating and inescapable regimen. Even the meaning
of seasons would be lost. In the pleading of those eyes Lily saw
the fear of a life lived without a future tense; she got her first
clear look at what it was to be a woman in such times. She felt her
heart lurch with inexpressible tenderness, unfocussed rage, and a
boundless empathy with the oppressed.

Aunt Bridie looked up. She spoke. “The worst
of it, Lily, the very worst of it is somethin’ I’ve dreaded like
the plague itself: you’ll have to go out to service.”

Lily could think of nothing to say.

“
We’ll need the cash. I got
plans to rearrange this place, I have. Next spring. When things get
better. But we’ll have to have money.”

By now Lily had found a voice to reply. “Who
wants me?” she said.

“
I dread to tell you,”
Auntie said. “Lord knows what’ll become of you in that
town.”

Lily tried as best she could to look
concerned.

“
But she’ll pay well, no
doubt, Mrs. Templeton will.”

Lily burst into tears – of mixed origin.

2

Lily hardly ever cried. She never had. It
was nothing to be particularly proud of nor ashamed of; it was just
the way she was. “Weepin’ just messes up what you should be seein’”
Old Samuels would say with special relish. “With me, it don’t
matter.” But she never saw him cry, sad as he might become telling
one of his stories of the disapora of the Attawandarons and the
demise of their ancient tongue. Sitting in her new room, couched
for the first time in her life with luxury, she examined her tiny
chest of accumulated treasures – the rabbit’s foot, pendant,
crucifix, Testament, the jasper talisman – and simply wept. Later
when she was able to stop and present a decent, grateful face to
the wonderful Templetons, she realized how utterly fatigued she had
been on her arrival here at the end of September. From pre-dawn
till deep dusk, they had all toiled in the devastated fields to
salvage what they could of the harvest, to garner seed and cuttings
for a doubtful spring, to pickle and can and store what they could
to tide them over the winter and, most important for Aunt Bridie,
to conserve their depleted supply of cash. By ten o’clock each
night, barely able to stuff some cold mutton and sourdough bread
into them, they collapsed into a drugged and dreamless sleep. In
such circumstances conversation seemed not only redundant but
threatening. Relying as she did on day-dreams and the spontaneous
hum of music inside her, Lily soon found herself laboring without
the solace of fancy or song.

It was, then, almost a week before she was
able to leave this pink and papered boudoir – young Pamela’s room
before she left for school – and join her new family. Mrs.
Templeton came in several times a day to talk to her, listen to her
incoherent weeping with patience and near-understanding, and divert
her with household talk or a display of Pamela’s “old” frocks for
which she assumed Lily would be a “perfect match”. Gradually the
numbness of the mental and physical fatigue wore off, and Lily felt
the re-emergence of the self she was most familiar with. She fell
asleep in the feather tick with the talisman in her clutch, and
that night she dreamed of a fine-boned young man with loose, sandy
hair and a careless moustache and a radium stare that held her in
its power till he dissolved in an ambiguous mist.

“
You’re certainly not goin’
to be a servant in my house!” Mrs. Templeton exclaimed when Lily
appeared on a Saturday morning attired in her own housedress and a
maid’s apron she had found in the upstairs hall closet. “Gracious,
what
would
Bridie
think of me, then?”

She marched Lily back up
the carpeted stairs to Pamela’s bedroom and with commendable
briskness re-attired her for her new role. Pulling Lily in front of
a long mirror on the inside of the door of the black-walnut
wardrobe, she said with satisfaction, “
There
, now. What
do you think?”

Lily was sure what Aunt
Bridie would think. Since no mirror ever graced Auntie’s house –
“Greatest time-waster and corrupter of good intentions ever
devised” she huffed – Lily had little experience in physical
self-assessment. On occasion she had peered at her rippled face in
the goose-pond and watched fascinated as that other visage – fay,
unmoored, incomplete – yearned back at her from the intensity of
its own medium. Once when no one was around, she tried to discover
in the pond’s mirror the whole, sudden shape of her body – with its
new breasts, widening hips, furred vee – but she could not catch it
all at once, only partial, curved tableaux or quick configurations
that pleased without purpose. Lily’s reverie that day had been
terminated by the lunge and honk of Booster the gander, who had a
fetish for the exposed flesh of foolish humans.

“
Well, what do
you think?”

“
The dress is
beautiful,” Lily said. “But how can I work with these petticoats
on?”

“
The dress is
not beautiful, pet,
you
are.” She beamed
like Pygmalion surprised by Galatea. “It’s high time you realized
that. Walk around for me. That’s it. See, you have no idea how
graceful you really are. Bridie tried to take it out of you, no
doubt, bein’ a closet-Presbyterian an’ all, turnin’ you into some
sort of darkie slave out there, puttin’ calluses on your hands an’
lettin’ the sun burn an’ freckle that glorious Irish skin of
yours.”

Lily was abashed. She felt she
ought to defend Aunt Bridie but couldn’t find ready words to do so.
Mrs. Templeton was not looking for commentary.

“
She ought to
be ashamed, though of course I know she ain’t – hasn’t – got any.
My, my,” she sighed stepping back, “you’re goin’ to wow the
gentlemen, you are. There’s no helpin’ that.”

“
How can I
work for you like
this
?” Lily said,
unable to prevent her mirror-image from bouncing back to
her.

“
I got Iris to
do the housework, pet,” she explained, “an’ Bonnie comes in to
serve an’ scull at parties. But I do my own cooking an’ you’ll be a
big help to me. Other times, like now, I want you to be my
‘companion’, to sit with me at teas, to talk to me when you feel
like it, an’ to let me make a lady out of you.”

Lily looked dubious.

“
I’ll send
your wages to Bridie every month,” she said, picking up one of
Pamela’s cloth-and-china dolls and fondling it.

Lily did not smile on cue, as
Pamela did, but she appeared resigned. Aunt Bridie was counting on
her. “Will you teach me to read?”

“
Of course,
pet,” said Mrs. Templeton, suddenly as serious as Lily. “Why do you
think I arranged your rescue?”

T
hey began with
recipes, just the two of them working in the kitchen. Mrs.
Templeton was amazingly patient. She sounded out the recipe words
slowly and repetitiously with Lily at her shoulder. They would say
them together, Lily’s rich alto voice melding with the older
woman’s strained soprano.

“
And I thought
my Janie was the smart one,” Mrs. Templeton said. “She should’ve
been a boy, Maurice always said when she done – did – her sums. But
you,
you
take the cake.”

After the second week Lily was
reading the familiar recipes haltingly to Mrs. Templeton who
matched her actions to Lily’s words. She felt like Old Samuels must
have when his sight darkened and he discovered a fresh way of
seeing that had been a hidden part of him all along.

“
Remember now,
pet, read them words clear, ’cause I’m doin’ exactly what you say.
If the pie wins a prize, then we’ll know you can read!” she giggled
with a twinkle as silver as her hair.

Towards the
end of October Mrs. Templeton would sit with Lily before a blazing
fire in the parlour – surrounded by daguerreotypes of her daughters
and husband (“We’ll get you done soon, pet, when all the bloom in
you is through workin’”) – and read from
The Arabian Nights
, a book that Auntie would have found scandalous not
because of its racy tales but rather for its utter “silliness”.
Lily began to ‘read’ parts of these stories aloud, easy sections
carefully picked out by Mrs. Templeton and abetted by repetition
and memory. One evening she was allowed to take the book to her
room where she struggled once again through the early paragraphs of
Aladdin and his magic lamp. There was some imperative in this story
that drove her to try and decipher the huge, exotic words, to grasp
at the central thread of events whose import she sensed but could
not pin down. Suddenly the aura of meaning faded and went out like
the genie himself. In frustration and disappointment she threw the
book across the room and sat shaking for five minutes before she
hurried over in panic to see if she had damaged it. Only her pride
was bruised.

Even his
Worship the Mayor got into the game. He would call Lily into his
den, detonate a cigar, wave her to a plump chair, and begin to read
aloud from one of his legal tomes. “Know what
that
word
means, Lily?” he’d say with mock-sternness, rolling off his tongue
some arcane polysyllable. Lily would shake her head. “Neither does
Judge Maitland!” he’d rumble. “And I doubt if the dolt who thought
it up does either!” Then he’d go dead-serious again. “But that’s
the law, Lily dear. Men have been hanged on it!” Lily soon realized
that his was a game he had played with both his daughters before
they left for school in London and marriage in Toronto. And some of
the words she did remember.

Lily found herself doing little
work. The calluses on her hands shrivelled and dropped off. Bonnet
and parasol soon whitened her skin. The freckles remained as
permanent record of a different past. Lily even went to Church –
the Anglican one – with the Templetons, though no word was ever
said about baptism or question raised about her not taking
communion. The Church of England seemed to be quite catholic and
commodious. Lily watched, listened, and learned. After Church she
would be given the pony-and-surrey and allowed to drive out to
visit her Aunt and Uncle. Chester was always overjoyed to see her,
though he would sometimes embarrass Lily and Bridie – for different
reasons – by bursting into tears without proper notice. Aunt
Bridie’s assessment of Lily’s gradual transformation to ladyhood
was not discernible in her talk or her manner. She continued to
refer to Lily’s “work” and as the girl prepared to leave each
Sunday, she would grasp her hand and say, “Thanks, lass. You’re a
good girl.”

M
ost of Lily’s ‘work’
consisted of being at Mrs. Templeton’s side during her frequent ‘At
Homes’, given in deference to her role as the wife of the new
mayor. “Sweet but dreadfully quiet,” Lily overheard one of the
dowagers remark to one of the duchesses. “Might be pretty, in time,
though Lord knows where she comes from.” Because of previous
experience with them during her days as an egg-lady, Lily had
little trouble dealing with the women at tea. The surprise and
challenge came from the gentlemen and grandees who frequented the
bi-weekly political ‘socials’ (salons was a word not infrequently
heard) held by his Worship. As hostesses, Lily and Mrs. Templeton
engineered the distribution of food and drink by the servants
co-opted for the evening, and were expected to provide casual
divertissement for those gentlemen who found the strain of
political discussion too hard on a thinning intellect.

The political topics of that
month in 1858 were about the coming of the Great Western and the
machinations of its rival, the Grand Trunk. Much bitterness, not
fully assuaged by the good brandy and home-made chocolates, was
educed over the shabby treatment of the town’s noblest citizen,
Malcolm “Coon” Cameron, whose moderate reformers had been
outflanked by the chicanery of the Clear Grits who had recently
abandoned “Coon” and his gang to the uncertain mercies of the new
liberal-conservative party taking shape under John A. Macdonald.
Lily was thus exposed to the intemperate talk of radicals as well
as the lamentations of old-compact Tories and the hollow
bellicosities of the local Orangemen – for though his Worship would
soon depart Port Sarnia and later join the coalition as a repentant
reformer, his hospitality was so lethal that the warring factions
in town not only answered all invitations to attend, but often
broke protocol by appearing unannounced. The result was a series of
spirited and spirituous soirees which furthered Lily’s education in
ways that might have surprised the participants.