Lily Cigar

by Tom Murphy

  She urged her horse to run faster, and thrilled to the sound of Stanford’s mount receding into the distance.

  And what was love anyway, that people made such a fuss about it?

  For a man to pay five thousand dollars for one night with Lily Cigar, for another man to offer ten times that and be refused! That was real madness, and they called it selling love. But no, it most certainly was not love that demanded and received such prices. Sophie Delage had named the thing, defined it, and time had proved her right: “It’s the idea of love you’re selling, the dream of a thing that maybe never happened.” Well enough. But for herself, Lily had another kind of dream, another kind of love. And that love was for this very earth flying under the horse’s hooves, and what would grow out of it, and the life it would bring them all: to Kate, to the Baker family, and to Lily herself. And in that moment Lily realized the time had come for her to leave the Fleur de Lis forever. She smiled a welcoming smile at that thought, and urged the horse on ever faster.

  32

  The tissue paper crinkled merrily as Brooks Chaffee opened the paperboard boxes lately come from his tailor. But the mood in the house on West Eleventh Street was anything but merry.

  Caroline stood in the window of their bedroom on the third floor, gazing pointedly at nothing in particular. Brooks often came upon her thus, these days, looking into the far distance as though she expected a message that the horror they were living through was all some practical joke that had gone too far.

  But the message had never come, and the tension in their marriage had deepened as the war careened down its gruesome course toward what outcome they could only guess.

  Brooks was ashamed at being so late to enlist. It had been his own damned indecisiveness, his sensitivity to the pain Caroline must feel, the isolation of a Southern girl trapped here in New York, her soul wounded with every anti-Confederate headline, for all her many Northern friends, for all the splendor of her marriage to a Chaffee. Brooks sighed, slipped off his suit coat of bankerly gray, and pulled on the custom-made British broadcloth of his second lieutenant’s deep blue jacket trimmed with gold.

  He stepped up behind his wife and put his arms around her. Caroline shuddered, as if a sudden chill had forced its way into the cozy apple-green and pink and ivory room.

  Finally she regained control of herself, turned in his arms, looked up, and made herself smile.

  He could see the effort in it but thanked her in his heart at least for trying.

  “It has always been a good color on you, Brooks, dark blue.”

  “I’m glad, at least, they’ve cut out that Zouave nonsense, with the baggy red trousers and all.”

  “The rebels loved them, I hear: they made such fine targets.”

  “It was all a game then, and just a year ago.”

  “Centuries ago, my darling, aeons.”

  “At least I’ll be with Neddy.”

  “Yes. I daresay you’ll see more of him in the army than you ever did in town.”

  “If the good general can spare his brightest aide.”

  “The good general’s a moron, Brooks, unpatriotic though it may be for me to suggest it.”

  Her eyes glittered with a faint unfocused mockery. Brooks knew it wasn’t directed at him particularly, but rather at the massive ironies fate had been throwing at his bride these last few years. Still and all, the bitterness was not a pretty thing to see, nor to live with. He held her tighter, as though by doing this he might squeeze the sweet poisons right out of her.

  “Neddy wrote Dad—in great secrecy—that McClellan’s sure to be replaced.”

  She laughed, but it was not a happy sound. “Y’all just betta be keerful, Yankee boy,” she said, deepening her gentle drawl into something out of a minstrel performance, “for y’all’s talkin’ to a Confed’rate gal shonuff, an’ honey, you just never can tell who I might tittle-tattle to.”

  He kissed her cheek, and she instinctively turned away from his lips.

  “Please, Brooks.”

  “Please what?”

  “Please don’t remind me of how lonely I’m going to be this time tomorrow.”

  “My darling. I know how terrible it is, and that it must be even worse for you than…most people we know. But I must do what I must do. I’ve waited too long as it is. If we can’t please ourselves, my darling, then how can we please anyone else?”

  “Ah, you’ve finally said it! To please yourself. As though this were some matter of which dessert to order at Delmonico’s, or whether to go to this play or that opera. You don’t have to go, Brooks, and well you know it. You could just buy out like Jack Wallingford did.”

  “Jack’s a good fellow in many ways, my dear, and Jack has to live with himself the rest of his life. Just as I must live all my life with my conscience. Can’t you see that?”

  “I can see you dead. Which means I might as well be in the grave with you, I guess, just like that. Two birds with one stone.”

  “If I don’t do what my heart knows is right then just as well might I be dead, even though I’d be walking around, for it’s dead I would be inside, and that’s where it counts.”

  He released her then, and slipped off the uniform and hung it in his closet. Tomorrow he’d be wearing the damned thing in earnest. Tomorrow they marched off to join McClellan’s army somewhere in Maryland. Maryland, by God! That was inches away from Pennsylvania. The rebs were really giving them what-for. And this was the three-week war!

  Caroline’s voice reached him softly, almost a whisper. “Do you hate me so?”

  He looked at her and felt her beauty cut into his soul. Caroline seemed to ripple and change as he held her in his glance, reflecting her quicksilver moods. It was like trying to hold water in your cupped hands, and Brooks felt a deep and poignant longing for that lovely time not so long ago when he was absolutely sure of himself and of her and the durability of their love. What exactly had changed between them, or when, or why, he could not have answered if his life depended on it. The change was there, uninvited, a sea change, unpredictable and sly, and under the dancing ripples of the surface there lurked, he feared, sleeping monsters.

  “You know that’s not true, darling.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to tell. A man who leaves a woman usually is in disagreement with her.”

  “Caroline, let’s not torture the thing. I’m not leaving you. I’m joining a cause I believe in.”

  “Ah. Not leaving, but joining. I see. And the fact that I will be alone in this big house is only an incidental little result of that…your joining?”

  “I’m afraid so. It isn’t my war, darling.”

  “Not your war. No, I guess it isn’t. But it will be, by this time tomorrow, won’t it?”

  “I just want to see the damn thing over!”

  She walked up to him and took his big hand in her tiny one. “You are taking more of a chance than you know, Brooks Chaffee.”

  And Caroline smiled a strange and bitter smile, stood up on tiptoe, and kissed his cheek. Then, suddenly, she was gone.

  Brooks stood alone in the bedroom for a moment, pondering the deep and inexplicable mysteries of beautiful women. Then he unpacked the rest of his crisp new uniforms and hung them in neat regimental rows in his closet.

  Lily looked at her brother and couldn’t help but smile. Fergy was in his element, for sure! He’d arranged this last party at the Fleur de Lis, at Stanford’s suggestion. Lily’s own instinct had been to simply slip away to the ranch and never come back, and leave the explaining to Fergy. But Stanford said they’d never forgive her if she did a trick like that: the press and her old customers would count it mean and deceitful, and at last Lily agreed. The arrangements had been left to Fergy, and Fergy had done her proud.

  It was still a secret that they’d sold out of the Fleur de Lis, that a syndicate had bought the building and its reputation for an astonishing four million, six hundred thousand dollars. And tomorrow she’d see the last of it, and not a moment too soon.
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  The main parlor was crammed with newspapermen, with old friends and curious tourists, with the mayor and the disgusting chief of police, O’Meara, with half of the richest men of the town and, of course, with Stanford. If there was anything San Francisco liked, it was a party, and if there was anything Fergy excelled at, it was giving parties. Drinks flowed and laughter followed. Popular songs came rollicking out of the big pipe organ they’d installed last winter. Finally Fergy took his sister’s hand and led her to the first landing of the staircase, a natural platform for speech-making. He gestured to the organist, and the notes swelled to a thundering climax.

  Fergy broke the silence that followed the last organ notes.

  “Gentlemen, there is news today that will alter the history of our fair city, a tale so astonishing that you might not credit it from me. So here, to give you that news, is our own beloved Lily Cigar!”

  Lily bit her lip, knew a moment of sudden fear, then began enjoying herself, buoyed by the thought that this would be her last appearance, anywhere, as the notorious Lily Cigar. She smiled and spoke in a low, clear voice.

  “Boys,” she began, and the room was more quiet than any church, “Lily Cigar is quitting. This is my retirement party. You’ve all been good to me, and I’ve tried to run an honest house. But now that’s over, and Lily Cigar is moving up to San Rafael to become a farmer.”

  There was a chorus of groans and protests, howls of disbelief, rumblings of consternation. Lily waved her hand for silence, and silence came.

  “Believe it or not, all my life I’ve wanted to be a farmer, and a farmer’s what I’m going to be. So you can say goodbye to Lily Cigar, boys, and say hello to Mrs. Lillian Malone, of Malone Produce. I’m trading my cigars for cabbages and beans, and I couldn’t leave without saying a proper goodbye—if anything in the Fleur de Lis could be called proper. Now, the drinks are on the house, folks, so let’s all have a fine time on Lily!”

  Her slender white hand on Fergy’s arm, Lily descended the stairs with a gracious smile on her lips but a heart that was already in residence in the hills of San Rafael. She turned to her brother and kissed him on the cheek.

  “And now, Fergy,” she said happily, “could I have a glass of that champagne?”

  Their dark blue uniforms spread over the red plush train carriage like spilled ink. The first-class carriage of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad made a strange contrast to the sober dress and deadly intentions of its passengers. The carriage was carpeted and upholstered in burgundy-colored fabrics, paneled in rich wood, fitted with fringed window shades that were all raised now, as the windows were opened to the blistering heat of late August to take in the air and to offer a view of the Pennsylvania landscape as it rumbled past their window.

  Brooks Chaffee was tired. He hadn’t slept the last night, nor the night before that, partly from worry and partly from loving, from fear of leaving Caroline and fear of his conscience if he stayed behind. It was all mixed up in his brain, and seething. This was a more terrible feeling for being unfamiliar. Brooks had always prided himself on being able to think quickly and clearly, to know the difference between good and bad, be the question a business deal or a choice of wines, or the love that smoldered incorrigibly inside him, the love of Caroline Ledoux.

  She had kissed him, and smiled when they parted, and pledged her love forever. But this did not make him rest easy, nor forget her strange, impulsive behavior these last few months, her bitterness, her gallant tries at gaiety, her rather desperate mockery of the entire political situation, both sides attacked unsparingly, North and South. Well, Brooks thought, she’s young yet. I forget that sometimes in her beauty and her cleverness. We’ve plenty of time, Caroline and I, to solve whatever it is that’s bothering her. But first there’s a job to do, a cause to serve, a war to win.

  And what a cause! The new uniform felt good on Brooks’s young body. It fit superbly and the very fabric itself seemed invincible, the tightly-woven, richly lustrous broadcloth, the glint of gold braiding, the sparkle of new brass buttons, the sweep of his saber. Brooks could sense the enthusiasm bubbling and rising in the other men on the train. A few he knew slightly, but most were strangers, and a very mixed lot at that, mixed in their ages, in their physical types, in the towns and farms that bred them.

  There were boys who looked almost like children, and some few men who must be past fifty, with graying hair or no hair at all. Fat and thin, loud and pensive, scholarly and bawdy, louts and gentlemen: how grand it all was, to have such a human stew so tightly bonded together by one just cause.

  Until this very train ride Brooks Chaffee had never stopped to think about the huge and invincible fortress of privilege inside whose shining towers he had lived all his life, cheerfully unaware that outside was another world entirely.

  Brooks had quite naturally taken the ease and gentle manners and education of his family and friends and schoolmates all for granted, for these things came to him as naturally as the air he breathed, and always had. Brooks had ever been a happy boy, and he was now a happy man, especially in his love for Caroline.

  Brooks had never been forced to strive or scheme, to manipulate people or to knock on doors and know the silent shame of an advance rebuffed. In this sense he was an innocent; in being kind to Brooks Chaffee, life had paved the way for disillusionment.

  The train clattered, rumbled, and jolted its way through a countryside so green and peaceful, it might have served as the illustration of a child’s book. This was farmland, and pregnant with the coming harvest. Tall cornstalks saluted them as they passed, branches of fruit trees bent languorously under the weight of fat green apples just beginning their final blush of ripeness. Wheat rippled. Cows grazed. Barefoot farmgirls scattered grain for snow-white geese and motley chickens. There was no cloud in the sky, no hint of thunder; a perfect late summer’s day stretched the length and breadth of the Union state of Pennsylvania.

  Mercifully, the fat Bostonian sitting next to Brooks had fallen asleep. Brooks, too, closed his eyes and dreamed, awake, of the girl he had left behind in the house on West Eleventh Street.

  How infinitely lovely Caroline had looked that morning! And how sad. What sweetness could match that kiss, what marble from the masters of ancient Greece could compare to that slim, yet deliciously rounded body?

  Caroline had worn blue for his leaving, a morning dress of soft blue calico, sprigged with tiny white flowers, hooped and trimmed with deep blue ribbon. And she had smiled, fighting tears; Brooks could understand that, for hadn’t he been fighting back the tears himself?

  And hadn’t she been brave, then, as she kissed him and held him with more strength than he could imagine in those slender arms! In the quick sweet urgency of her goodbye kiss Brooks could feel all his doubts and confusion of the last few months slipping away as though they had never existed at all, for in that wild magical place that was the kingdom of their love there could be no doubt or disagreement; only pure bright things lived there, joy and hope and the highest exaltation of love.

  Brooks stretched luxuriously on the stiff plush train seat and his lips floated into a slow and appreciative smile at the memory of Caroline and her kiss. He thought himself the luckiest man in the world just then, for who of all the other men on this train, in this country, in all of God’s creation, for that matter, who among them all had a woman like his Caroline?

  He imagined Caroline as she must be right this minute, late afternoon; probably she’d go out to try to shake off her despair, shopping maybe, or to take tea with a friend. Tea at Delmonico’s, with music in the background and the merry chatter of female voices stirring the great potted palm trees. At least she had plenty of friends, a busy life; there would be parties—she’d promised to overcome her shyness about going alone, and she’d promised, too, to have people in, just as always, as though he were still there. And his own friends would rally round, Brooks was sure of that. Jack Wallingford would cheer her up, no doubt, and there were his parents, althoug
h Caroline was still not quite at ease with the Old Gentleman as yet. Well, that too could be remedied, when all this was over. In a few weeks, with luck, or a few months at the very latest.

  Brooks kept his eyes closed, feigning sleep, not wanting to let some casual stranger break the spell he was weaving around Caroline’s day. Just thinking of her made him feel better. The time would pass, he knew this intellectually, but even now, even on the first day of their separation, the minutes dragged painfully across his brain.

  Caroline! Even the separation might be beneficial, in the long run, for surely it magnified his longing for her, surely it would make him cherish her more deeply, if that would be possible. Suddenly Brooks understood why men sometimes betrayed family and flag and honor for the love of a woman. Caroline was a cause all in herself. Caroline could make the war shrink to insignificance. Well, nearly. Caroline was the future. Caroline was why he was going to this terrible war. He must believe that, must keep telling himself it was all for her, even if Caroline herself could not be made to believe that.

  The train rumbled on through the gentle green hills of Pennsylvania.

  33

  Lily grinned.

  The sight of her trunks and baskets and valises made her as happy as anything she’d seen in months, not counting Kate’s smiling face or the hills of the ranch across the bay.