Lily's Story (91 page)

Gliding along in their
special open sleighs (provided by the Railroad), the celebrants
could lean back against their nuzzling furs and behold the earth
commanded utterly by the night-sky, so dark and eons-deep that the
stars appeared as tiny semaphores chilled forever in bas-relief.
Around the carollers, the snow had flattened and blanched an
unresisting landscape. The black, unseamed horizon folded down and
over the verges of their little world so that it seemed as if they
were all afloat on a bone-white saucer, riding an insubstantial
ice-floe on the night’s immensity. And when their Clydes or
Percherons – Pegasus every one – puffed majestically towards the
confluence of river and lake, the grand-old dowager loomed ahead
like a bejewelled atoll, garish and preposterous against the
asperity of those panarctic constellations. Unperturbed, an
ambidextrous footman, mustered in gold and vermillion, hopped down
before the evergreen welcome-arch and raised a dainty mitt to the
first descending lady. The festivities were underway.

T
he orchestra had been
imported all the way from London. It remembered the fading courtly
dances – gavotte, lancers, galop – and paid them due respect. Under
the steadfast blaze of the chandeliers, the sets and squares
whirled to their ancient, magic geometry. Speed, intricacy, the
levitation of brass and fiddle – all conspired to project the
illusion of momentary anonymity. Nonetheless, it was a modern age,
and the sophisticates from Middlesex could bedazzle the countryfolk
with waltz, polka, schatische, and once, jovially, they unleashed
an exotic fandango. Here – hand-to-hand, face-to-face – even the
most jaded romantic could borrow the energy of the sweeping
violins, the just-harnessed tympanies, the peremptory surge of
coronet and horn, and sail – accompanied or no – into the sweet
amnesia of the music.

The
performance was non-stop. Sets broke apart but quickly
reconfigured; couples clung or recomposed: the dance contained them
and carried on. Though the critical complement was never
threatened, individual participants would occasionally slip away to
the north section, where uniformed waiters filled crystal goblets
with champagne that had been chilled in snow. At the south end
stood the powder rooms and several improv
ised salons where a gentleman could find relief and a
reassuring cigar. But always the music drew them back, out of
themselves and the petty gravitation of their lives.

A
t precisely five
minutes to midnight the orchestra ceased on a pre-arranged
downbeat, the indefatigable conductor stepped aside, and the dias
was occupied, somewhat unevenly, by three distinguished guests: the
Honourable Halpenny Pebbles, deputy premier of the province, on
loan for the occasion; Mr. Margison Dilworth, first vice-president
of the Grand Trunk Western (who invited himself); and Mr. Stanley
R. ‘Cap’ Dowling, reeve of the village since its incorporation back
in 1878, who was present by divine right. This trio of luminaries,
further distinguished by a pair of arc-lights, proceeded to lead
the assembly, now formed into a huge circle of interlocked hands,
in a singing of Auld Lang Syne. After which: much toasting and, as
soon as the choir directors could be urged off-stage, more
dancing.

Lucien and Cora
danced. Lucien and Cora were dancing. Lucien and Cora sipped
champagne and anticipated dancing. During the entire eventful
evening, they exchanged no conversation other than the requisite
formalities of greeting, thanksgiving and good manners. On the
sleigh-ride from town (they met at the Sarnia depot), they clasped
furred appendages, warmed a common shoulder, and let the stars look
at them with their loveliness. Whatever pretence each had chosen
for this extraordinary courting, it was accorded the unquestioned
blessing of the other. No single note jarred the harmony of their
shared narrative. They danced, sometimes alone and
sometimes together, each happy to
confer upon the other the prize of simple presence, however fragile
or fleeting. In the dance, with all motion foreordained, they were
released to their own fictions.

Lucien laughed
and glided and marshalled his companion with large, commodious
gestures, driven it seemed by some inward, transparent,
uncalculating reservoir of locomotion
. Cora smiled on her own, choreographed her partner’s
laughter, and curtsied to the universe in three-quarter time. She
danced as if the world cared, or mattered. She believed, for now,
in the eyes that beheld her as if she had just been
born.

A
caress of finely powered snow greeted
them as they stepped outside. Still, there were no clouds and the
stars glittered over head. It was blissfully cold.

“
I didn’t tell
you,” Lucien said as he helped her onto the back of the sleigh,
“but I been livin’ here in Sarnia for almost a month.”

“
You left
Toronto?”

He hopped aboard. “Uh huh. I
hang around the bunkhouse, of course, for obvious reasons.”

She smiled and let him wrap his
heavy arm about her. She snuggled in, not thinking of any moment
before here, content with this.

“
I been livin’
down by the River. On Front Street.” He squeezed against her,
testing. “At the St. Clair.” He waited for some part of her body to
reply. Then, softly so as not to disturb the sleepy revellers on
either side of them, he said: “I got a suite. Two
rooms.”

2

“I
started watchin’ you the second I
spotted you in the waiting room. I found out from Big Meg when you
was due to work in the bunkhouse.” He poured her a tumbler of
champagne from a bottle that had been cooling on the window-ledge,
catching her eye so she could nod to tell him when to stop. She
did.

“
There wasn’t
much to see,” she said. She took the glass, tipped it in his
direction, and sat on the edge of the settee in the ‘sitting area’.
He stood – tie askew, shirt adrift – leaning on a balky
commode.

“
That depends
on how experienced an eye is lookin’,” he said. “An’ this pair’s
seen plenty. I’m no yearling, you know.” He patted his paunch
reverentially. “You tried to fool me, I suspect, with those aprons
an’ bandanas an’ steam-bath hair-do’s. You might’ve tricked a few
of the greenhorns ’round the Yard, but not a veteran like me. I
know beauty when I see it.”

“
And I know
blarney when I hear it,” she said, glancing past him to the other
room, the wink of a brass bed just visible.

“
But you love
it just the same?” His face, flushed from cold and drink, lit up in
a broad grin. Only the creases there and the bitumous glow behind
the dancing eyes belied the boyishness of the attempt. Somehow,
unlike most men of his vintage and temperament, he did not look
ridiculous when he allowed his high spirits to overwhelm his
fatigued, resisting flesh. Always, there remained a residue of
dignity.

“
I used to,”
she replied. “Quite a long time ago.”

His face teetered on the verge
of collapse, then brightened: “You weren’t thinkin’ of long ago
tonight.”

“
I don’t think
either of us was,” she said, holding out her glass as he refilled
it.

“
Happy New
Year,” he said.

“
So you left
home,” she said.

“
Uh huh. Just
packed up an’ packed it in. Nothin’ to it,” he said, “once you make
up your mind.”

“
I guess you
could say I left home, too,” she said, startling him. “Though I
didn’t come as far.”

“
Point
Edward?”

“
You
knew.”

“
The miles
make no difference,” he said, sitting down beside her, but not
close. “The truth is, I saw something in you I can’t explain. Me,
with the big mouth and a smart story for every occasion. When I
asked you to the dance, I’d never done anything like that before in
my life. I didn’t even know what I wanted or wanted to do – to
talk, to have some laughs, to feel a woman dancin’ near me again,
to turn a caterpillar into a butterfly –”

“
No need to
talk,” she said, unlocking the tumbler from his grip one finger at
a time. “It mostly spoils things.”

“
I
know.”

“
Promise me
just one thing,” she said, blowing out the lamp and letting the
snow-brushed starlight in. “No talk of what’s gone before.
None.”

He followed her – amazed – to
the inner chamber.

N
either of them made a
move to light a bedside lamp. They undressed, apart in the shadows,
and slipped under the nearest half of the comforter. Their bodies
met, without ceremony, and gave way to their individual
hungers.

Cora and Lucien were past
middle-age. They felt no urgency to have their flesh explored nor
to be reminded – by an accidental touch or a gesture of forgiveness
– of scar, stretch-mark, crease, sag, weathered muscle. Cora needed
to know if the dead thing in her belly could be revived long enough
to die with her consent. Lucien needed to know that he could waken,
with the vestige of his lust, some flesh more drugged than his
own.

He was hard in
seconds, and she guided him in. Aware of his own craggy weight, his
angular need against her seeming-frailty – he hunched, catapulted
elbows-first, found some ballast, lanced, withheld, thrashed, and
crushed two pillows. She winced joyfully at the pain, then tried to
right his lopsided fervour and find some balance or rhythm one of
them could use, some pressure-point that would trigger
something
they could ride out together. Nothing worked.
Unwilling to call up those memories that might have established
some sort of order, however bogus it might have been, and not yet
knowing enough of each other to improvise the event – they
staggered to separate states of incompletion. Nor was there the
impetus of youth to rally them to a further attempt. They had
contended in good faith, and discovered nothing but their age and
the extent of their weariness.

But the Druid moon,
almost full, had risen in the east and was just now tilting over
the west edge of the room’s window, flooding it with light borrowed
and preserved from defunct suns. Side by side they lay just as they
had failed to disentangle. No word was exchanged – of apology,
consolation, promise, regret. Into a silence fed only by moonlight
and across the long hour before dawn, they reached accommodation,
and more. A hand that bruised and commanded, settled like a wing
upon a thigh. A girl’s grip surprised and softened. A whisper
lingered in the ear like a long, shy kiss. Someone’s lips plucked a
tear prematurely from a cheek.

Much later, it
might have been in a common dream or in a fantasy shared with the
moonless dark, they made love that was both violent and tender,
that was a
s synchronized as
the music it was made of, that threatened to touch the ache abiding
so deep inside them it had been perfectly protected by the stratum
and acre of orthodox pain.

When they woke, it was
January.

43

1

T
hroughout the winter
of 1886 Lucien and Cora lived together in the St. Clair Inn on
Front Street. Their love, if that term be at all appropriate to
their curious co-existential relationship, was founded upon a
strict set of covenants, unspoken but mutually – compulsively –
observed. They did not speak of their own past, even when – secure
in the embrace of a lover or vulnerable in the sinking aftermath of
passion – they were sorely tempted. They asked no question that
might carry them, however innocently, beyond the moment of their
meeting. They took their dark time alone, suffering through it as
best they could. When they came back together, though, to make love
or talk about the long January afternoons, there was no
camouflaging of that private pain, that burden from their deep
night-dreaming. They did not use their passion nor any of its
incidental pleasures to ease or soothe or sedate. Their lovemaking
– frequent, intermittent, often unpremeditated – was a way of
transmitting not the detail of sufferings minutely lived and
defined but rather their gravity, the bone-density of them, the
sudden echo in them of all the ruptured joy that once had been.
Such surprise was enough. They accepted the blunt physicality of
their comingling almost if it were a phenomenon outside their
instigation or control. Each was content to let the other translate
the results in his own way.

Their cohabitation quite
naturally caused a stir and a buzzing abroad. However, since they
were both strangers in a sense, the radius of the gossip was
limited to the fringes of the beverage rooms, the quiet corners of
the foyer, and the lively but closed network of fancy that followed
the main-line of the amalgamated Grand Trunk Western. Percy O’Boyle
– Suds to his customers – who clerked behind the registry desk by
day and slung beer by night, blushed a deeper red than his hair
whenever Cora came down to breakfast sometime before noon and
smiled her ingenuous ‘good morning’ not a foot from his chin.
“Mornin’, ma’am – missus uh – ma’am,” he would blurt out,
stuttering without fail, then blush more carnally as his eyes rose
up on their own to trail her figure through the doorway to the
dining room. Except for Mulligan, the owner and principal waiter,
she found herself anonymous among the carpetbaggers, drummers and
occasional couples who drifted in and out – off the boats, ferries
or trains, and always en route to somewhere else. Sarnia, like the
place she had left, was a stopover town, all bustle and hubbub. But
seated unobtrusively at her regular table near the west window, she
could sip tea shyly (she never got used to being waited on, ever
startled by Mulligan’s shadow at her elbow, embarrassed by his
incessant, waterless hand-wringing) and look over the traffic along
Front Street towards the ferry dock and beyond to the thin artery
of the River suspended now between frozen shores, rigid and deep.
She would keep her eyes fixed upon that blue pulse, its tiny
ventricle breath as whispered and hesitant as her own.