Lily's Story (92 page)

“
Would Madam
like some more toast?” Mulligan would say with his blend of sarcasm
and hope.

“
Madam don’t
wish no toast at the moment,” she invariably replied, watching his
puzzlement, and certain that he never quite managed to penetrate
the ironies proffered.

T
he arrangements were
simple. And for two people who had led entangled and encumbered
lives, they were made with speed and no touch of regret. Yes, Cora
would be pleased to quit her job. No, she didn’t mind taking up
residence in a second-class hostel. Nor did she object in the least
to a lover who would be away more than at home. Lucien was a senior
engineer with a regular highball run from Sarnia to Toronto.
Leaving Sarnia at noon on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; return from
Toronto by three on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Which meant
overnight in a cold Toronto bunkhouse three nights a week and four
warm ones in a specially heated bower in the St. Clair Inn. After
which: a leisurely breakfast-for-two long after mid-morning, an
abrupt departure, farewells recalled and nursed till again the
sudden arrival, the brisk, physical greeting of flesh in its
loneliness. Only Saturday and Sunday were exceptional. When Lucien
arrived early in the afternoon, tired from the six-hour trip and
the layover in London, they would not make love. Instead, she would
draw him a bath in the room at the end of the hall and languidly
cleanse his rumpled, gray flesh. The sensual flapping of water and
the murmurs of their give-and-take would drive Suds O’Boyle’s blush
down to the tips of his torso, so that he had to rattle the papers
on his desk or bang the bell with his elbow for relief. Refreshed,
the couple would stroll down to the Christina Tea Room for supper,
and then it was time to prepare for the dance at the Armouries.
Though the dances were different – guest orchestras coming from as
far off as Windsor – they were both aware that each was a vital
reenactment of the first one: they did not speak, they merely
danced and lived to dance. They rode the three blocks home in a
hired cutter. They drank a tumbler of champagne from a bottle
cooling in the snow on the sill. She took his hand and led him into
the sanctum, where they made love, now alas coordinated though no
less lacking than its original in tough, sweaty, buckling urgence.
Afterwards it seemed, to Cora at least, as if they were
contributing to this fiction of reenactment more as an assurance to
themselves that they
had
a shared past of
some sort rather than as a refusal to accept the inroads of time
itself on their relationship.

Certainly the
enforced absences were crucial to their feelings for each other and
the tilting equilibrium they had established. On Sundays, for
example – their only full day together – they rented a cutter and
drove south or east of the town, down the back sideroads of the
township plump with farms and settled prosperity, laughing or
singing some improvised ditty as the bells on the Clydes jingled an
icicle tune of their own and their big breath left a fading print
on the air. Then after a dinner at three, they would relax on the
chesterfield (she’d had it exchanged for the spartan settee) with a
mug of coffee, and talk. Lucien entertained her with
slightly baulderized versions of his
folk-tales, stringing a story out till it seemed to float on its
own voluableness over the sleepy gloaming of their Sunday
communion. Embellished for her ears alone, polished or impromptu,
they made her laugh and re-see the world made over by this man who
inexplicably loved her, or wished to cast whatever love he had left
upon some image of her she was not about to question or
deny.

“
Now let me
tell you about one of the funniest characters ever to throttle an
engine or puke up in the back seat of a caboose: old Pokey
Burdette. One time when I was workin’ in the Yard Office, long
before I went on the road, Pokey comes into the place about four in
the mornin’ an’ there’s half-a-dozen fellas there smokin’ an’
warmin’ their thumbs by the heater, an’ they see right away by the
whites of his eyes that he’s as mad as a plucked gander. He’s just
come in from Montreal on a passenger – six hours late! ‘Stuck in a
snowbank as big as a buffalo’s arse,’ he cries, ‘somewheres between
Cornwall an’ Trenton. An’ you know who went an’ put it there?’
Nobody could guess, so Pokey swats his cap down on the nearest desk
an’ yells, ‘George McPherson, the president of this here railway,
that’s who!’ Then when everybody’s real quiet, he says, ‘Well, the
son-of-a-bitch goes off on his New Years’ toot, eh, gets himself
gassed up, goes outside to take a piss in the wind, jerks the wrong
lever and accidently lets a fart fly, which starts a fuckin’
avalanche rollin’ down the main-line all the way from here to Port
aux Basques!”

Cora herself
had little to offer to this exchange beyond her enthusiastic
response to Lucien’s efforts. Under his encouragement, however, she
was persuaded more and more to tell him about the odd ducks she’d
seen in the dining room or about her running series of
contre temps
with Mulligan:

“
Top of the
mornin’ to you, Mrs...Burgher. A menu?”

“
The usual,
I’m afraid.”

“
Oh, I do hope
you haven’t gone an’ lost your wedding ring,” – staring hard at her
left hand exposed upon a soiled napkin.

“
Not at all.
As a matter of fact, my
husband
keeps
it...”

Pause: the silence
delicate.

“
...
in his
nose
.”

To which Lucien would applaud
with a bray of guffaws loud enough to make the clerk’s bell jump
with alarm in the lobby below them.

But of course there was mainly
the long Sunday to fill and a few scattered hours over meals and
after naps during the week. There would not have been enough
stories to plug the silences that a day-to-day, hour-to-hour
relationship would have demanded. Nor could they have sustained the
bruising-healing quality of their love-making outside of regulated
absence and joyous reacquaintance. When they were separated, and
alone, though, the hours were hard won. Cora walked, made polite
conversation with young Suds and several of the benchwarmers in the
lobby, and waited for the black moments to engulf her. When they
did, she tried to muffle her sobbing with the comforter – Lucien’s
smell lingering there – but sometimes she forgot or did not care,
and woke up in a daze in the sitting room with a broken glass at
her side and the window wide open to let the wind howl through –
whetted by ice, neutered, pneumoniac.

She supposed that he too
suffered such relapses, though she saw only the wreckage in his
fatigued flesh as he slumped into sleep after a difficult shift. He
works it out, though, she thought, he rides that locomotive through
the dark, I can hear its singing whistle in the words of his
stories. But I am alone, without work, without recourse. I am mad,
with little islands of sanity bubbling up and mocking me several
times a week. Then Lucien would come back – needing her to need
him. I am sane, she concluded. When I go mad, I won’t know it.
That’s a comfort.

“
You need a
story,” Lucien said, “even though it ain’t Sunday yet. A Pokey
Burdette story by the look of ya’.”

She stirred his coffee.

“
Well, Pokey
comes into the Yard Office one time an’ he’s all hunched over an’
humble-lookin’, an’ he’s got his cap by the brim an’ turned over
like an organ-grinder without a monkey, an’ this time he waits till
everyone’s lookin’ his way an’ he says, ‘I’m passin’ the hat, boys,
and I expect you to be generouser than a church warden ’cause we
got a charity case right here in our own little family, an’ who
might that be, you ask?’ Then he says, ‘Would you be shocked if I
told you it was none other than vice-president Margison Dilworth.
Yes, it’s true, I swear on my grand-daddy’s underwear, so dig deep
fellas’, and all the time he’s anglin’ around with his cap
outstretched lookin’ for donations an’ brushin’ a tear from his
eye. ‘Poor bugger’s broke,’ he says, ‘down on his luck so far his
kids need shoes, eh, his girls’re ashamed to go to school, they
are, ’cause of the holes in their last pair of patents, an’ the
eldest lad’s got his feet wrapped up in little red bandanas with
G.T.R. stamped on the toe.’ By now everybody’s laughin’ an’
whoopin’ an’ trying’ to ad-lib but he keeps it up and at last he
jumps up on the counter an’ hollers, ‘Bleedin’ Christ but I ain’t
collected a red cent, not a copper for a man who’d give you guys
the skin off his – nose, if he hadn’t of worn it out kissin’ arse’.
He’s got them right where he wants them now, eh, keepin’ a
perfectly straight face till the guffaws die down, then he says,
real quiet, ‘Now what am I gonna tell Mrs. Marge when I go over
there this mornin’ an’ she begs me to give her some comfort afore
hubby comes back from the office?’”

Cora laughed in all the right
places, reassured once more by the unaffected ease of her response
and the certain knowledge that Pokey Burdette had never had any
existence beyond the confines of this room.

2

E
arly in February
Lucien arrived from Toronto bearing under his arm a cardboard
carton tied up with string. “For you,” he announced, grinning and
wary. She sensed something forced in his voice.

“
Nice
wrapping,” she said.

“
Did it
myself.”

“
A
shame.”

“
Go on, silly
woman, open it.”

She did. Inside were a dozen or
so very large books, several of them uncut, their calf bindings
unsmudged.

She stared.

“
From my
mother’s old place. She liked to read.”

“
They’re
beautiful.”

“
Dickens,
Trollope, some fella named Hardy. A Yankee called Fenimore
Cooper;
Uncle Tom’s
Cabin
. She liked them
all.”

“
They must’ve
cost an awful lot.”

“
They’re for
you – to read on the days when I’m on the road.”

She was holding the largest
book in her hands, as if guessing its weight.

“
You
do
like to
read?”

“
Yes. I do. Really.” She
seemed strangely touched, and he knew enough to say nothing more,
though words of all sorts ached for release. She saw the desperate
reconnaissance of his eyes, but could not help.

T
he books remained on
the little mahogany table where they had been opened, and the
weekday routine continued as before. The next morning Lucien left
for the Yard earlier than usual. She felt the extra tension in his
shoulders as he held her.

“
When you hold
my arm like that,” she said once, “I get the feeling you’re
squeezin’ a throttle.”

“
My hands
never leave it,” he said, trying to grin.

“
You can’t set
still for long.”

“
Had St. Vitus
dance when I was a kid.”

“
I’m
serious.”

“
It’s not so
much that I like bein’ on the road,” he said at last. “After all, I
don’t get anywhere. It’s just that I can’t stand bein’ cooped up.
Makes me feel like a badger in a hutch.”

So he was off again, to ride
down whatever demons had chosen him long ago. As usual, though she
still felt badly sometimes, she was relieved. The rooms were hers.
They were sanctuary. And now there were the books. She went right
to them.

At first she treated them like
sacred texts, circling them, easing them open, glancing quarterwise
at the black type as if it were a set of shimmering runes about to
divulge something clandestine. Gradually her anxieties diminished,
and though she was not ready to tackle an entire book, she would
flip open one of them to a random page, and sit for a long time
reading and re-reading a single paragraph. An hour might go by
before she looked up long enough to realize that the sun had moved
above the sash.

“
I see you
been readin’ a bit,” Lucien remarked as soon as he got in. She
caught the strained casualness of his tone right away.

“
A little bit.
They’re beautiful books. Your mother must’ve been a beautiful
person.”

The book froze in his hand.

“
I’m sorry,”
she said. “I really am. I didn’t mean –”

“
These were
her favourites,” he whispered.

“
I’ll read
them, Luce,” she said. “All of them.”

First, she had
to read one of them. It had been a little while since she had read
anything, and while the trick of it came back quickly to her, the
associations it brought with it were not pleasant. After an hour or
so of trying to decipher the opening of
Bleak House
(she
was drawn to the title), she found herself dizzy and faint. She
went to lie down on the bed. She did not remember reaching it,
though she was evidently asleep for the black dream was now upon
her, its pestilential winds sweeping her along, as always, while
she lay begging that other half of her self – the one that would
not speak – to succumb, to give it all up, to let the greater will
have its way. When she opened her eyes she realized with dread that
she was lying on the carpet in the hallway outside Mr. Stewart’s
room. The hall table was tipped beside her, its little genie-lamp
shattered.