Lily's Story (98 page)

“
You fellas
want to help me assist this gentleman to the exit,” he said in what
he assumed was a jocular, familial tone.

The man had finally managed to
get to his feet. He pinched his nostrils to staunch the blood. He
was shaking all over. “I can pay, I can pay,” he said from under
his hand, staggered and fell again. The blood sailed in a wet sheet
down his white shirt, his skewed tie, his ripped morning-coat. He
may have been crying.

“
Leave him
alone,” Cora said, coming towards Malloney.

Malloney wheeled around,
surprised. His eyes narrowed to shut out any indecision. “Stay
outta this, Mrs. Burgher,” he said. “Ain’t your business.”

“
He needs a
doctor,” Cora said.

“
He can get a
doctor after he’s well an’ gone from here. The deadbeat owes me
three-weeks’ rent and a bar bill an’ he ain’t got a farthing to
stuff up his nose.” He turned to his supporters. “I’m out
thirty-nine dollars an’ he’s got a bloody nose!”

Malloney, his outrage
restoked, moved menacingly towards the man, who started slithering
backwards, sobbing, daubing at his split flesh, and uttering a
slurred jumble of words. Malloney reached him a yard from the door.
He raised his fist; the elderly chorus behind him gasped and hung
onto their breath; then Malloney gave a quick, clandestine glance
towards Cora, winked, and opened the double-door.

“
Go tell your
troubles to your pals up at the station. See if
they’ll
let
you get into them for thirty-nine dollars.”

“
You tell
him,” Dicer said, delighted to have recovered his voice.

“
We don’t take
to deadbeats an’ traitors in this town.”

“
You had your
chance here, fella, an’ you blew it.”

“
There’s not a
spit of pity left for the likes of you.”

“
An’ when you
hit the town-line just keep on goin’.”

Quite gently Malloney lifted
the target of his abuse to his feet and pointed him towards the sun
they could all see sinking below the west bank of the River. Behind
it, darkness beckoned.

“
Let him be,”
Cora said.

“
Stay outta
this, woman, if you want to keep on workin’ here.”

In the air Cora could
taste the stale, desiccated breath of these old, old men and their
ancient, jovial hatreds.

“
Let him
stay.”

“
What are you
sayin’?” Malloney’s eyes widened in disbelief.

“
I’ll give you
the money,” Cora said.

N
o one offered to help
her get the man back up the two flights of stairs he had just been
dragged down. She didn’t ask. The cook, Mrs. Suitor, kept Cora’s
money for her in a little safe in the pantry. Malloney went there
to get the cash he was owed but only after he had ordered the
pillars of the community out of his hotel, glared at the victim,
and muttered brave homilies to Cora about the fate of women being
stupid enough to squander their money on hopeless cases. But even
in the midst of this petulant tirade, while the deadbeat finally
got the bleeding stopped, it was clear to Cora that Malloney would
forever-after regard her in a new light – observing her with
sidelong scrutiny, a lifetimes’ prejudices set off-balance, his
natural wariness deepened and yet undercut by doubt, by something
akin to wonder.

When Cora got the man to his
room – number 3A – she washed the blood off his face, got his shirt
and shoes off, and tipped him onto his bed. His eyes were glazed
with fatigue. He had said nothing to her; she wasn’t certain he
knew what had happened. As the blood was wiped away and his hair
pushed back into place, his features – the nose puffed – came
clearly into Cora’s view, and she stepped back at the shock of
recognition. He spoke drowsily but in his normal deep voice. She
remembered it. “Thank you for helping. You were...glorious.”

“
I’m Cora
Burgher,” she said, not ready yet to believe her eyes.

“
Glad to meet
you, Cora.” He spoke now in a threadbare, weary whisper. “My name’s
Stan Dowling. People used to call me Cap.”

47

1

“I
told that pinch-faced marmot down
there I was no deadbeat. People like that, with no education and
less breeding, assume that because a man gives up his worldly goods
and vain ambitions in favour of a quiet and contemplative life he
must be impoverished, a fool, and a cheat. I told that creature a
dozen times my great aunt would not survive this heat-wave, that if
he showed the slightest scintilla of patience he would get his
money back threefold. If I were a vindictive man, or if I still
cared for such normal pleasures as spit and vengeance, I’d have my
lawyers on him. But then I’ve had my fill of lawyers, haven’t
I?”

Cora, who was dusting off the
crystal decanters and watching the boys on the flats playing some
ritual tag-game against the ritual sunset, nodded in general
approval. Cap was in his plush chair beside the narrow north
window, looking across the room at her as she worked.

“
There’s just
enough in dear Auntie’s legacy to keep me comfortably here for as
long as I wish to stay, and not near enough to tempt me back into
those ways I renounced with such flourish and finality.” He waved
his solicitor’s letter at her as if it were a flag. “And of course
I shall write my first cheque in your name, with a few extra
dollars for you and your loved ones.”

Cora finished dusting the sill,
sweeping the shrivelled flies into her dustpan. “No hurry,” she
said. “I don’t need the money.”

“
But your
family –?”

“
Got no use
for it,” Cora said at the door.

“
Just a
minute!”

She waited.

“
Ah, Mrs.
Burgher, would you tell Malloney not to send Gertie up here any
more.”

C
ora loved the view
from here. You were so high you could see both banks of the River
where they stretched into the Lake. At eye-level the herring-gulls
reconnoitred or bullied the breeze over the soft shoreline. Way
below her a fisherman swung his net rhythmically through the
current to some slow music inside him.

“
I was the son
of a struggling merchant in London. My father sold hardware, but he
wanted a lot more than that for me. He got religion just so I could
attend the right church and go off to study law in Toronto. There,
I learned a lot about gambling, the fast track, and how the money
is made to ensure that such luxuries are maintained throughout
one’s life. In short, I met and was liked by the right people. I
started collecting that useless pile of haberdashery you try to
straighten out every afternoon.”

He flicked a finger at the
wardrobe with its doors jammed irreversibly open – suitcoats,
vests, silk shirts, trousers stuffed in and threatening to abscond.
Cora would reorganize these habillements at least once a week, but
when he’d had a brandy or two, he’d go fishing for some poignant
moment of his past, and though always successful – she’d find him
the next afternoon slumped in a flawlessly matched outfit for
dinner, dancing or a royal audience, with a bib of vomit down his
vest – he left the haberdashery itself in chaos. Sometimes he even
managed to get into one of his three-dozen pairs of shoes.

“
Why don’t you
give some of these things away,” Cora said, “to people who could
use them?”

“
They are
reminders of what I have repudiated. I don’t believe you could
understand.”

“
You don’t
keep them just in case?”

He began to cough as he often
did this late in the day after a dozen cigars. He always seemed to
go limp and let the coughing shake him this way and that, then peek
over at Cora as if to say “there’s no help for this, you know.” But
a cup of hot tea with lemon and honey was rarely refused.

“
I cut quite a
figure in Toronto and in London society when I returned there in
1852. It was a small pond and I was, to put it as modestly as I
can, a glittering gander in their midst. With a little help from my
friends in government, I bought and sold some property that made me
at the age of twenty-five independent of my father’s influence, so
to speak. In short, I enjoyed myself. I explored each of the seven
deadly sins with a Franciscan zeal. You may not guess but I was as
slim and trim as a birch in those days. The ladies were, as they
say, drawn to my company.”

Little of that glamorous figure
had survived the rigours of middle age: he was now a gray,
greasy-haired, obese man with pink, deflated flesh, side-whiskers
long ago left to their own vices (Cora shaved him twice a week but
was not allowed to trim or cut there), a gourmand’s paunch, skinny
legs that complained constantly of the burden they had to bear, and
milky, shapeless fingers that had spent too much time coddling
brandy-snifters, fondling Cuban cigars, and coaxing dollar bills
into or out of wallets. Only his eyes gave any sign that a life had
been lived here before and remained to tell the sad story. When he
wasn’t drinking, when he had slept a full night, when Cora found
him as she occasionally did in his chair by the north window with a
book open on his lap and his face turned outward to the sky above
the Lake – then his eyes seemed alone in this jettisoned flesh,
grotesquely out of place but to Cora beautiful, shining with
intensity of a life lived and only partly regretted.

Most afternoons when she
came up after finishing her duties, she found him snoring in his
chair, half-dressed or half-undressed, cigar-ash littering his
paunch, a snifter overturned and bleeding on the table, and a
thick, calf-covered tome open on his knees at about the same place
as it was the day before. His snores scattered the sparrows on the
sills of the wide west window. Carefully she would wash his face
and torso, wrestle him into a clean shirt, and as he muttered his
way grumpily towards consciousness, she tidied up the room, humming
to herself and giving the decanter an extra clink.

“
Stop that
racket!” he’d holler, stung by his own voice. After waking he would
often ignore her presence for upwards of an hour. He would sit in a
sort of stupor as if he were trying to recall and identify the
various parts of his quisling anatomy. Sometimes he pretended to
read the book before him as if he’d accidentally dozed off and was
now resuming his onerous intellectual responsibilities. Or he’d
reach over for his toppled brandy glass and appear surprised –
amazed even – that it had disappeared without his permission. Cora
would continue her work regardless, tidying the pillaged wardrobe,
taking fouled garments down to the water-closet where she washed
them out in the tub, and finally just curling upon the bay-window
ledge to watch the autumn afternoon linger in the fields and
resting dunes.

“
I’d like some
tea now,” a small voice would say from a farther part of the
room.

Cora then went down and brought
up their supper. Cap had the lamps lit. Their evening began.

“T
he real power and
the real money lay in the railroads. And the glamour. Contrary to
what most people assumed, I was never that fond of money. In fact I
could have made a hell of a lot more in real estate, safe in the
arms of the Family Compact, so to speak. It was the sheer
excitement of being in a position of power or being close to its
centre. It has a glamour unknown to those who’ve never reached for
it.” His eyes glinted in the winter light of the late
afternoon.

“
You got to
meet the Prince of Wales and all that.”

“
Exactly.
That’s exactly my point. I not only got to shake his hand among the
self-professed dignitaries of London, but as an investor and young
executive for the Great Western – bless its memory – and then the
Grand Trunk, I got to chat with him over dinner in the presence of
Lady Marigold and Mr. Dunbar Cruickshank at the inaugural luncheon
of that very palazzo you spend so much of your time admiring from
this distance.”

“
It burned
down,” Cora said.

“
Pardon me,
but you’re right, and the barons of steel from Threadneedle Street
built it back up in a wink.
That’s
power. And
believe me, glamour and romance flow directly from it. You couldn’t
imagine, I’m sure, how it feels to ride out into that lake on a
fragile craft bearing you and the future king of an empire, of a
vassalage half the size of the earth, to share a brandy and cigar
with him, to wink with him at the lecherous virgins prowling the
foredeck. And of course to treasure the flow of that sort of
feeling – that brief kinship with monarch or potentate or railroad
magnate or dark lady of the drawingroom or boudoir – as it keeps on
surging through you for days or weeks, months even, spicing every
emotion and sensation you subsequently feel, casting a halo over
the most mundane liaison, spiking your lusts in whatever shape of
luxury they care to take. Imagine, the prince-in-waiting was mine
for an afternoon and for years to come. I saw it in the eyes of
others as they envied me, and curried their pathetic little
favours. For a time, Cora, I was afire, ablaze, one of the
elect.”

“
I hear you
give all that up,” Cora said from her window-seat.