Lily's Story (69 page)

Lily was about to speak but
sensed there was more.

“
Your father
came back to Canada once. I learned this from Harriet Tubman, who
told me about it only a few weeks before my trip up here. He had
been present at the famous Constitutional Convention John Brown
held in Chatham in April of 1858. Still afraid of being apprehended
by the Canadian authorities, he dyed his hair black, shaved his
beard and sneaked into the province for the two key days of the
Convention. However, he told Brown he had to take part of a day to
ride north to visit his sister and daughter in Port Sarnia. She
recalled this because she said she had rarely seen him so agitated.
When he got back late on the Friday, she took special pains to talk
with him about the trip, and he told her – in a calm, sad voice –
that he had found his sister’s farm easily enough, had walked up
the lane till he heard voices in the garden beside the cottage, and
then stopped. The two women, he said, were in the garden, working
and humming and seemingly content despite the Black Frost that had
ravaged both our countries that spring. He told Harriet that he
watched them for a long time, hoping that they might glance up and
see him and force him to come out of his cover, but they didn’t,
and he found he couldn’t speak, and then he left.”

“
After a while
Lily said, “Did he ever talk about us?”

“
Ah yes, Mrs.
Marshall, all the time. He told me once that as soon as his mission
was ended, he planned to go back and bring his daughter to live
with him in the States. That thought was on his mind
constantly.”

From the sadness of his smile
Lily knew he was lying.

2

W
hen Lily came around
the bend towards her house, her thoughts were so roiled that she
almost bumped into the woman standing patiently by the front stoop.
A white glove shot out.

“
I’m Miss
Stockton,” announced a voice crisp but distant. “Bradley’s
teacher.”

“
How do you
do,” Lily said in a tone she herself didn’t recognize.

“
May I come
in?”

Lily stood by the door,
puzzled.

“
I’d like to
discuss your son’s future with you,” Miss Stockton said, avoiding
the railing as she lurched up beside her host.

Inside, Lily became aware of
the lunch dishes piled in a basin where the flies were noisily
congregating. The dank odour of wet sheets and soda drifted and
adhered.

“
I’ll get a
fire goin’ for some tea.”

“
Thank you,
no. I’ve got an appointment in a few minutes uptown.”

“
Please sit
down, then.”

Miss Stockton’s reserve
came close to failing her as she searched about for a safe place to
deposit her petal-pink, delicately flounced dress. She decided the
middle cushion of the chesterfield was the least lethal of the
available sites and perched on its edge like a fledgling on a wire.
Lily sat opposite her on the easy chair and waited.

“
You may not
be aware of it, Mrs. Marshall, but your son is the brightest pupil
I have seen in five years of teaching, here and in Toronto.
Inspector Whitecastle was here last week and fully corroborated my
own intuitions.”

“
He’s a real
good reader,” Lily said to be helpful.

Miss Stockton flashed an
ambiguous smile and continued. “What I’m saying in practical terms
is that your son will undoubtedly score highly on all of the papers
of his Entrance Examination next week. He will be eligible to go to
the high school in Sarnia, and it is my considered opinion that he
will be a first-class candidate for the University of Toronto, in
whatever field he chooses.”

Lily appeared to be absorbing
this revelation.

“
You
have
thought about sending Bradley to high school?”

“
He’s been
askin’ me about it, yes.”

“
Good, good.
With the extra coaching I’ve been giving him in the evenings this
month – I do hope you don’t mind his being away from home too much
–” and here she chanced a more searching appraisal of the
second-hand ambience of the room: the blotched window-glass, the
marauding flies, the absence of a study or desk, the pathetic
little titled bookcase in one corner. “But I fully expect him to
get straight A’s.” Lily gave no sign of being overwhelmed by this
news. “The main reason I’ve come is to discuss a very delicate
matter, and since I’ve always been a straightforward person, I’ll
get directly to the point. While there are no tuition fees for the
high school, Bradley will have to buy his own books, mathematical
instruments and supplies. He will have to take the trolley to
Sarnia every day. He –”

“
He’ll need
some money,” Lily said.

“
Precisely,
Mrs. Marshall, how quickly you see my point. He’ll also need, how
shall I word it, a more fashionable kind of clothing – not to show
off, mind you, or get a swelled head, I certainly couldn’t approve
of that – but just so he won’t stand out for the wrong reasons or
be picked on by city pupils who can, you know, sometimes be quite
cruel in these matters.”

“
I been
puttin’ money aside all along,” Lily said.

“
Splendid. And
since we’re obviously seeing eye-to-eye on these critical matters,
may I make one final suggestion. If you can see your way clear –
perhaps not the first year since Bradley’s just thirteen – but by
the second year or so, you might consider letting him board at one
of the many fine homes near the school.”

Lily’s eyes narrowed
slightly.

“
That way he
won’t have to spend an hour a day on the trolley, and more
important, he’d be able to use the school library after hours or
the public library down the street, and –” she aimed her pity
towards the cubicle where the boys slept, “– of course he could
have a quiet room of his own in which to study. My purpose today,
Mrs. Marshall, has been to relay Inspector Whitecastle’s enthusiasm
for, and my own endorsement of, Bradley’s genius to you in order to
make these decisions more comfortable for you to
consider.”

Lily showed her visitor
out.

Miss Stockton suddenly turned
on the stoop and said in her own cabbagetown cadence: “You’re gonna
let him go, aren’t you?”

Lily nodded, and touched her
reassuringly on the arm.

B
ack inside the warm
room, Lily felt woozy and sat down at the kitchen table. Must be
the heat, she thought. Robbie clumped in from the back shed. “No
supper?” he said.

“
You seen
Brad?”

“
Yeah, he’s up
at Redmond’s fussin’ over that Potts’ girl. They were stuffin’
their faces with chocolate the last I saw of ’em.”

“
Miss
Stockton, his teacher, was just here. I thought he’d be home to
find out what was goin’ on.”

Robbie went over to the
tinder-box. “He knows, all right,” he said bitterly. “But he won’t
come home till dark.”

“
Why
not?”

“
He’s ashamed
to.”

27

1

Dominion Day
that year marked the first decade of the new nation and in Sarnia
the opening of Lake Chipican and the surrounding Canatara Park. The
new recreation facility – yet another outward sign of man’s steady
ascendance to perfection – festooned with picnic benches, a
bandstand and a mammoth open-air dance pavilion big enough for a
whole village to jig upon. The grand
debut
of the facility
would be celebrated with the usual political speech-making,
boosterism and fireworks, but by far the greatest attraction was to
be the regatta on Lake Chipican itself, starring
no-less-a-celebrity than Ned Hanlon, the legendary world-class
punter. Sophie decided that Lily ought to go because she had been
down-in-the-dumps lately and needed a little music and dancing to
cheer her up. When Lily protested mildly that Lake Chipican was
just their own Little Lake with a fancy name attached to it to make
it sound vaguely Indian, Sophie appealed directly to the boys
seated nearby, and the day was carried.

As it turned
out, almost everyone from both the town of Sarnia and the
unincorporated village of Point Edward came out to watch the races
and the mighty Ned Hanlon – whose combination of strength and
agility, power and grace, bravura and
humility appealed in their different ways to the ages and
sexes that rimmed the pond seven-deep that Saturday
afternoon.

Sophie and Lily spent the
day together. The young people went off by themselves in twos and
threes, returning only for supper or an extra nickel. Wee Sue and
Brad took Bricky swimming. The sun shone benevolently down upon the
festivities, glistening on the muscular arms of the rowers and
deepening the contrast of their white-duck trousers and red-striped
shirts. They pulled in furious unison, skimming the surface of the
pond with the seeming ease of Argonauts, their rhythmic, guttural
grunting muffled by the adulating crowd and the evergreen-and-oak
of Canatara Park. Sophie was apparelled in a peach-yellow sundress
and a billowing bonnet that gave her the appearance of a ruffled
bobolink. She clasped Lily by the hand and pulled her here and
there in order to improve their view of the racers and get a
close-up gander at Ned Hanlon himself. Sophie’s ken, however, soon
narrowed to the hefty coxswain of one of the rowing eights, the
largest of the shells in the competition, requiring men of
fortitude and amplitude to propel her manfully forward, stroke and
counter-stroke. Lily preferred the scullers, the solitary racers
whisking daft as dragonflies, commuting water to air.

During the picnic supper
the Sarnia Bugles entertained from the bandshell and the husky
athletes mingled with their worshippers. Several of them had
volunteered to supervise the children’s races. Robbie won a prize
and was presented with a ribbon by Ned Hanlon himself. With the sun
behind them making them mere silhouettes, Lily watched her son and
this illustrious Torontonian during the brief ceremony in which she
knew much more was being exchanged than a mere ribbon. He’s just
like Tom, she was thinking; he can’t live long on small rations of
hope. The smile he flashed her way was like a reprieve. When Lily
looked around for Sophie, she was gone. Bricky had been laid under
an oak to sleep off his indigestion, the young folk had disappeared
again, and in the distance the orchestra was just striking its
first chord in the new pavilion.

By the time Lily got over
there, the hardwood dance-floor was already covered by couples
enlinked in a Strauss Waltz, animated by the strings and muted
horns of the Detroit City Orchestra just arrived by lake-steamer.
The underside of the pagoda-like roof over the raised platform was
hung with coloured lanterns and pastel ribbons even though the sun
would provide all the illumination required for two hours yet. No
one noticed the anomaly. The air of early evening was cool, the
music exotic and seductive. Sophie was dancing with the ‘eights’
man, who was smartly attired in yachting white. Lily could see that
he too was surprised – and not a little flushed and exhilarated –
by the nimble ponderance of her step, the grand sway of her
circling: a panda’s waltz on its home ground. Lily was so absorbed
in observing this scene that she hardly felt the pressure on her
arm guiding her gently into the slipstream of music and dance. Did
I say ‘yes’? she thought, settling into the stranger’s embrace. I
must have.

He was one of
the scullers, who had come second only to Ned Hanlon himself. In
his oar’s grip he held Lily as lightly as he would a falling
rose-petal. His sandy hair fluttered in the breeze of their own
making. In the whirling fandango his fingers on her back praised
and applauded. In the slow waltz she put her brown against his bare
chin, and they navigated the shoals and eddies of the music with
such mutual acuity Lily could feel no part of his motion but the
point where brown and chin swivelled on a single bead of sweat.
During the jigs she lifted her skirt above her knees and closed her
eyes until she could hear, somewhere behind the fiddle’s slither,
the bounce of a breath-driven harmonica.
When it stopped, she leaned against the railing to
steady herself; her
premier
danseur
– Shamus O’Huguin from
Burlington – was catechizing her with insatiable sea-green
eyes.

As dusk descended and the
mosquitoes began rising from the swamps and pools around, the music
slowed to a last waltz, and young and old and many between clung
together in pairs and danced as if they believed such bonding –
such congruence of purpose and desire and hope – were as permanent
a part of the human condition as war and depression and the facing
of fidelity. “We’re all goin’ over to the Grand Trunk for a party,”
he whispered. “You’ll come?”

Around her, jostling couples
pushed towards the steps, a bass-viol accidentally groaned, illicit
laughter percolated from the shadows, Sophie Potts was waving
goodbye with her baby finger and ambling into the brush with her
amiable paramour. Lily turned back to the young oarsman and she
could tell from the smile on his face that she was about to say
yes.

“
You comin’,
Ma?”