Lily's Story (99 page)

“I
shocked everyone, especially those
who thought they knew me,” Cap said, shivering in his velvet robe.
Cora had the west window raised so she could put the remnants of
the supper Cap hadn’t eaten out on the ledge for the
sparrows.

“
With Lady
Marigold, you mean?”

He looked startled. “Close the
damn window, woman, I’ll shake my teeth loose!” The room was as
stuffy and warm as it always was. Cap had been off the booze for
two days, having ordered Cora to hide the supply and then yelling
at her and cursing her perfidy when she refused to change the rules
of his game. Finally he just shivered and sulked.

“
Everybody
around her knew all about you an’ Lady Marigold.”

“
Oh, that.
Sure. That was another part of the glamour – we felt like equals,
we could admire or hate one another as we chose. There wasn’t much
else going on there. Not as much as
hoi poloi
imagined,
anyway, though we enjoyed their envy and rancour
exceedingly.”

She brought a blanket over and
laid it across his shoulders. He smiled wanly at her. “It’s time,”
he said.

“
You said you
didn’t really need it.”

“
I say a lot
of things.”

She poured him a snifter of his
medicine. He sipped it slowly, breathing the restorative fumes. T
he late-winter darkness seeped into the room. “Don’t,” he said when
she started to light the lamp.

She left him earlier than
usual, walked home under the March moon and slept alone, as she
always did.

“Q
uit fussing with
those damn clothes and come here.”

She continued her work: every
jacket had its sleeves pulled inside out, like skinned
muskrats.

“
What I was
referring to the other day when I said people were shocked was my
sudden switch from the Great Western to the Grand Trunk. But my
motive was simple. I could smell a rotting carp at twenty paces. I
decided to put my money on a winner –”

“
Money you
didn’t care about.”

“–
so to
speak. Again, you see how wrong you can get things from your
restricted vantage-point. The Grand Trunk was bigger, grander, more
ambitious than the Great Western. It had plans to build from sea to
sea. It had a lion’s heart and lion’s pride.”

“
An’
teeth.”

“
Naturally.
But it’s what I wanted. And I did well, as you know. I suppose if
I’d known I would have jumped again to the C.P.R., but you see by
the mid-seventies I was over forty years of age and much of the
romance was beginning to pall. It was clear we were going to crush
the Great Western, but the C.P.R. had usurped our place in the
royal sun, so to speak, and there seemed little left for a man of
my temperament. When I sucked caviar through champagne all I tasted
was ashes.” He drew in a lungful of his Havana and held it in
defiantly.

“
Must’ve been
terrible,” Cora said, tossing clean sheets onto his huge canopied
bed and stepping gingerly around those that had been soiled by an
uncharacteristic inconvenience the night before.

“
But I had a
dream of my own, one nobody knew about but me. My parents, who’d
long ago disowned me, were now dead, and I felt the weight of some
indefinable obligation descending upon me. It filled me with
unnameable regret and remorse.”

“
We call it a
bad conscience.”

He persevered.
“I quit my directorship, I gathered my life’s savings and I came to
Point Edward, a place I hadn’t seen for years but whose beauty had
impressed itself upon me in a way I could never forget. I decided
to give back to the world some of the things I’d robbed it of.
You’ll recall much of the rest yourself: my little factory down on
the flats – still operated of course, by others – my meteoric rise
to the reeveship in return for my influence in persuading the Grand
Trunk to let this village
be
.”

Cora nodded but had no
comment.

Cap began coughing. When his
defiance had subsided, he said, “What a waste.”

“
I can see the
smoke comin’ from your factory,” Cora said. When she came over to
help him into bed and fluff up his goose-down pillows, he propped
her chin on his soft fingers and said: “Why do you do
this?”

Grasping his fingers, she said,
“For the money.”

As she let herself quietly out,
she heard his coughing start up, loose and wayward, as if he were
about to embarrass himself by crying.

“I
should have stayed there in the
factory. Hap Withers was a great manager. I’m glad he’s got it now.
But you see in this experience how the vanities of life have to be
renounced completely, they have to be expunged from the tablet of
memory, cauterized from the flesh they’ve preyed upon. After the
glamorous life of civilized debauchery I’d led heretofore, you’d
think the temptations of reeveship and regional politics would have
seemed petty or beneath my considerable talents.”

“
Maybe you had
more in mind?”

He examined her shrewdly, his
teacup at half-mast. “I’m glad you decided you were good enough to
share my table,” he said with heavy irony, pleased at the power he
still held over words. Throughout the winter Cora had served his
supper on the silver tray and then retreated to the bay-window
where she ate her own meal in a silence which he ignored with
particular satisfaction. A week ago – through Gertie, it seemed –
orders had been given to have a single meal for two prepared and
sent up at precisely six o’clock, winter or summer, sunshine or
gloom. Cora now sat opposite him on the stool he used to launch
himself back into bed.

Cora poured herself a second
cup of tea.

“
I’m sure I
did at that,” he said. “I guess all along I knew that this was not
the United States whatever name we chose to call ourselves by. In
my heart I knew the corridors of power and the chambers of decision
lay in Toronto and in Ottawa, in the legislatures and in the
sanctum of the privy council. I was getting old, Cora; I know you
can understand that. I had only one more chance for the genuine
thing, a run at the crown itself. Better men than me have been
o’er-thrown by such ambitions.”

“
Then you took
a train-ride,” Cora said, watching his face for signs and
portents.

He sat back. His
side-whiskers quivered like a tom-cat’s in front of the master’s
cheese. His thin lips tightened, causing the jowl to ripple and
rebel. But his eyes danced with the kind of joy a ballerina might
feel pirouetting on a sprained ankle. “What a way of putting it,”
he said, snarling out a laugh. “I took a train-ride I didn’t buy a
ticket for. And derailed. What a spectacular fall that was! Wolsey
would have been envious.”

“
Who’s
Wolsey?”

“
A fat man who
couldn’t swim.”

“
Tell me, I’d
really like to know.”

Elmer knocked at the door
and she took the tray over to him. She felt Cap’s eyes on her. She
didn’t turn around right away. It was still light. The summer wind
floated in, bringing with it the swallow’s song, Queen Anne’s Lace
and other intimations.

Next day when
Cora came into the room she discovered it was as tidy as a monk’s
study. Cap was seated in his chair with a smoking jacket neatly
vee-ed over his paunch and a gray
tome open on his knees. He was turned so that he could
observe the motions of the sky to the north; a pleasant breeze
lifted the brushed hair back from his strong brow; a bowl of mints
rested at his side. He pretended not to hear her. It was only when
she let out a cry of surprise that he could bear to turn and face
her.

“
It’s for you.
Go ahead. Sit.”

Cora put her mop down and
stared at the chair which Cap had ordered Elmer to bring up and
place opposite his on the other side of a walnut gate-leg table
he’d also ordered from the collection he recalled seeing in one of
the ‘luxury’ suites on the second floor. The table had been covered
with a lace cloth and graced with a silver tea-setting. The new
chair was high-backed, cushioned and beautiful. The mahogany legs
shone.

“
Please,
sit.”

She did,

“
It’s time we
had a proper tea and conversation.”

A
fter their meal, Cap
poured himself a brandy and lit up a cigar. He kept his eyes on
Cora, as if he thought she might bolt at any minute like a flushed
pheasant.

“
Now that
you’ve heard my life story,” he said, “it’s time for you to tell me
something about yourself.” When he saw that she was indeed going to
say something, he averted his gaze, slouched back into his comfort,
and listened.

Cora soon found herself
responding to his request. She realized that she had not talked for
a very long time. Not merely aloud, to others – for that was only a
minor form of talking – but not even to herself in those sinuous
dream-monologues she could detach herself from, if she wished, and
listen to her own thoughts as clear and necessary as her heartbeat.
She didn’t tell him very much, of course. Much he would be unable
to understand; some would be too strong for a man in his condition;
some would not be told – ever.

She had come, by a circuitous
route, to Lucien. She hesitated. She felt the strange security of
this chamber she had seen only in the late afternoon and early
evenings of four full seasons. We are exchanging our voices only,
she thought, we do not know or even want to know each other outside
the safety of this collaboration. For now, that is enough, it is a
lot; it is a kind of miracle. When Lucien’s name left her lips, she
felt at once like a traitor and glanced across to see how much
she’d given away, how much was irretrievable.

Cap was sound asleep.

2

T
he sparrow lay
unresponding in her cupped hands. She waited for the heart’s
flutter, the spasm of blood in the misted eye.

“
Leave go,
Cora,” Cap said from the hutch of his bed. “You can’t save them
all, you know.”

Several of the dead bird’s
cousins flapped against the pane, then settled into the snow on the
sill, where they pecked away contentedly at the crusts left there
by the same providence that caused one’s blood occasionally to
congeal.

“
Bring me the
Schopenhauer,” he called. “The one with the gray cover.”

“
I can read,”
Cora said.

“
Pardon me,
but I forget little things like that.”

Cora brought him the book.

“
You don’t
expect me to read in
this
light?”

“S
ometimes, Cora, I
think you deliberately try to misunderstand me. Is it your way of
getting back at me, pretending to be stupid just because you never
had the benefit of an education?”

“
I’m a woman,
remember?”

“
That is an
unforgettable verity. But my point, to get back to it, was that I
consciously, by choice, by an act of the invisible personal will
repudiated my life of vanity and power-seeking. Only I know what
went on inside my head during those weeks after the calamity up in
Woodston. Just because the world around us assumes that a
combination of x and y conspired to undo us, to turn us along a
certain path, does not mean that we followed that course for those
reasons. What people think is never the sufficient cause. If you’d
been listening carefully to what I told you about Schopenhauer’s
statement on the issue, you’d understand that
perfectly.”

“
And if you’d
given it all up one minute before the train left the Sarnia
station, then more people would be ready to believe
you.”

“
But quantity
is irrelevant here. Only what I do and know is significant. Look at
it this way: just because the society I sought to exploit decides
to strip me of opportunity and honour – dump me down the shit-hole,
so to speak – does not mean that I, at the same moment, cannot have
a sudden insight into the very hollowness of that society – both
its rewards
and
its so-called punishments. The fact
is, I did. Long before they defrocked me and cast me out like a
leper, I had decided to renounce both the pleasures and the pains
of that community of hypocrites. That was my way of coping with
their petty retributions and with the horror of my own past. I
decided to retire from social intercourse of all kinds, to follow
Schopenhauer’s path of ascetic withdrawal to the life of
contemplation, shorn of vanity and pretension. I would devote the
rest of my allotted days to studying the great thinkers of our age.
Over there you see the expanding fruits of the labour.” He waved a
loose sleeve towards the glassed-in bookcase already filled with
volumes which arrived weekly from a bookseller’s on King Street in
Toronto. Elmer carried them in reverently, as if they were Bibles
fresh from Caxton’s press. Cora had to dust them daily in spite of
the glass parapet.

“
Seems to me,”
Cora said, “most of them saints you talk about had themselves a
fair old time before they saw the light.”

“
Woman, there
are times when I’m sure you’re a hopeless case!”