Lily Cigar

by Tom Murphy

  She held him tight then, for the room was reeling. It seemed that all her world was flying to pieces, and only Brooks could keep her from falling into some dark and unmeasurable void forever.

  Lily was more frightened in that moment than she could ever remember: frightened for herself, for Brooks, and for what the coming failure that she could feel in her bones might do to both of them.

  One week later found Lily and Kate in a frenzy of last-minute shopping and packing and making plans. Kate would spend a week with the senior Chaffees in New York before proceeding by train to the seminary.

  As far as they knew, Kate would be the only California girl to make this epic journey, and the thought of her eighteen-year-old innocent traveling all those thousands of miles of wild country alone, unchaperoned, sent Lily fluttering back and forth from the brink of deciding to go with the girl, at least to Chicago, or to send one of the more reliable servants.

  But Kate would have none of this; she looked on the trip as a great adventure, a wonderful lark, the watershed of her childhood, the gateway to womanhood.

  Lily looked at her daughter and thought of herself at the same age, or nearly, alone and terrified on the clipper Eurydice, under the chaperonage of Sophie Delage.

  And Lily knew that Kate would be fine on this journey, for Kate was a strong and sensible girl, high-spirited and full of fun, sure of herself and unsusceptible to the snares of strangers or cities. Lily looked at Kate and thought: This is the moment. Now is the time for me to tell the child who her mother is and what I’ve done—here, on the ranch, and before someone else does it, as they most certainly will do. But Lily could find no words to say these things. Instead, she tried to be lighthearted, tried not to show how very much she would miss the girl when the time of parting came, just next week.

  Kate’s room was in that condition of siege halfway between chaos and organization that always attends big-scale packing. The closets and drawers were flung open, half-empty, with the clothes chosen for the journey neatly arrayed on the bed and in trunks, and the rejects more casually piled for repairs or to be distributed among the servants.

  Lily went to Kate’s small white-painted bookcase, presided over by a worn but ever-game Hortense, the rag doll of Lily’s childhood and Kate’s. “You’ll want this,” said Lily, picking out a Bible and handing it to Kate, “and surely the dictionary.”

  Lily picked up the dictionary and was about to hand it on when something fell out, a rectangle of cardboard, and fluttered to the floor. Kate was on it with the speed of a hawk on a mouse, but Lily was closer and therefore quicker. And even as she crouched to pick the thing up, Lily knew with dreadful certainty what it was.

  Holding the card in two fingers as if it might contaminate her, Lily handed it to her daughter.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “In the city, a year ago, in a souvenir shop.”

  “Then you know.”

  Kate came to her and took her hand. “Mama, I have known for years and years. And it’s all right. I love you, Mama. I bought the picture because it’s so pretty.”

  The picture was one of the old souvenir postcards that showed Lily as she had been in Sophie’s house, chastely gowned in pure white and holding a white lily. The photograph was simply captioned. It just said: “LILY CIGAR.”

  To Lily it was about as pretty as a death’s-head. She turned from Kate to gather her thoughts. So here it was, the truth seeping out at last, poisonous, inescapable, even here at the ranch.

  If her past could infiltrate this private domain so very easily, what might it not do in the city itself? Lily turned back to Kate and said quietly, “All these years, Kate, ever since you were born, I have been dreading this moment, praying you might never have to know. Who told you?”

  “It doesn’t really matter, does it? Small children have big ears, Mama, and they are not always very kind. I don’t even know how old I was, but I surely didn’t know what that word meant.”

  “The word was ‘whore’?”

  “Yes.”

  “A sad thing it is to lose you to the East and to lose your respect at the same time.”

  Kate looked at her mother and thought of the day—how many years ago—when another child at the Tiburon schoolyard had taunted her with the ugly revelation. Kate hadn’t known the meaning of “whore,” but the tone Sadie had used said it all. And that night when Brooks got back from town, Kate had sought him out.

  “When I first heard about it,” said Kate softly, “I went to Father. And I will never forget what he said then, for there was no hiding the truth in it, or the way he looked when he spoke of you. He said that Lily Cigar was the best and most honorable woman he had ever known, and that’s why he loved you, and loves you still. And all at once I knew that nothing a mean little girl might say could truly harm me—or us. So you see, you’re wrong on all counts, Mama: you will never lose me. Wherever I am, I will love you and Father, for aren’t I part of you, and you of me, and all of us together? And how could a girl have better parents, I ask you.”

  “Oh, Kate. Katie-Kate! You’re better than your old mother deserves, girl.”

  Then they were in each other’s arms, half-sobbing and half-laughing, and it seemed to Lily that the world that had made her the gift of a child so loving could never do her harm.

  Brooks looked at his wife as he helped her off the Chaffee Produce tender that had sailed them across the bay. Thirty-eight, and she never looked better, he thought. Even if she refuses to dress in the height of fashion or wear much jewelry, other women look pale beside her.

  Brooks was happy this fine summer’s afternoon.

  The visit to town was an act of conciliation on Lily’s part, a gesture more symbolic than functional, viewing the site of their new house and meeting the architects. Brooks knew Lily still hated the town and dreaded living any part of the year there, but he was proud that she would come here, thus, for his sake, and he vowed to make it worth her while.

  The town glittered: it seemed to reflect his happiness. A bright July sun burnished the new brick and limestone facades that seemed to be springing up everywhere. Brass sparkled, glass shone, and the very hides of the horses that pulled their carriage up California Street to the building site seemed more silk than stallion.

  The horses strained with the effort of climbing to the very summit of Nob Hill, but that was the destination. And when they alighted, there, just as Brooks had described it, was the finest building lot in all of San Francisco, five acres right on the crest of the hill, with views in every direction. From here they would see the first rays of dawn and the sunset’s last glowing. From here they could count the clippers pouring through the Golden Gate, see their own busy barges plying back and forth from Tiburon.

  Lily stood silent for a moment. Then she said, taking Brooks by the hand, “If one has to live here, my darling, there could hardly be a more beautiful place to do it.”

  He squeezed her hand, delighted. “You can look down on all the city.”

  And the city can look down on me. Lily’s mind was still infested with doubts, but she kept them to herself.

  The architect came just then, and for a pleasant hour they looked at sketches and talked of elevations. Lily began to see the site in terms of terraced gardens, and her farmer’s eye imagined flowering plum and cherry trees, banked evergreens, beds of flowers, a reflecting pool, terraces upon terraces, and a tall, simple house with a great deal of glass to let in the light and let out the view.

  “Not,” she said emphatically, “one of these vulgar fun-fair creations with so many fancy towers and carpenter’s lacework everywhere.”

  “Something a bit Palladian, perhaps?” The architect spoke in a too-refined voice that was neither English nor Eastern but somewhere in between.

  “What,” asked Lily, “does that mean?”

  The architect’s eyebrows rose just a fraction of an inch. “A very famous architect, madame, of Italy in its great days. He reinterpreted the classical fee
ling quite beautifully.”

  The man’s pen flew over a sheet of paper and a light but sober design took form, with a pillared Grecian portico flanked by tall, wide, pedimented windows, and the windows starting at ground level so that they could also serve as French doors opening out onto terraces.

  “And the whole thing, you see, opening onto courtyards and terraces on all sides, and the stables and carriage houses built underneath the gardens, down the hillside a bit, so that nothing at all interferes with the main house—the great house—itself.”

  Lily could see the essential elegance of the scheme, for all its great size and stately proportions. It had a simplicity that looked as though it might last, as opposed to the suddenly fashionable and quickly outdated styles that proliferated elsewhere on these hills.

  “I think,” she said, “that it could be lovely.”

  These words fell like music on Brooks’s ears. He would have agreed to building a million-dollar doghouse if it made her happy.

  They ended their excursion on a happy note, with a quiet tea in a small hotel nearby, where—Lily was delighted to note—no one recognized her. Soon they were back on the Chaffee tender and headed into the westering sun toward Tiburon.

  The great house was eight months building, and yet it seemed to rise overnight, looming tall and dark in Lily’s imagination, haunted by her old doubts and fears long before she ever set foot in the place.

  Oh, sure and it would be beautiful. All of the grace and taste and richness that money could buy were being bought, regardless of cost, for the Chaffee place.

  That’s what the people on the streets of San Francisco called it already, “the Chaffee place on Nob Hill.” And the rumors of its great cost and elegance spread like fire.

  “They’ll be fighting to get in,” Brooks said.

  Fighting to get in they well might be, and fighting to see who’d be the first to snub the pretensions of Lily Cigar.

  But Lily had made a bargain with herself to hide her fears, to give no voice to the doubts that plagued her now more vividly than they had ever done, or her terror of letting her husband down, of disgracing him by the simple juxtaposition of her lurid fame with his blameless honor.

  Well and good, Lily told herself when the fear crept up on her in the night, you’ve fought and won many a battle before this one, and you will fight now, and you may win or die trying, but fight you shall, and with every weapon at your command.

  Who, precisely, the enemy was in this dreaded contest, Lily could never be entirely sure. Her frightened brain distilled all the respectable and disapproving matrons of the town into the stiff, chinless, sneering form of Mamie Dickinson, so well remembered from that harsh interview of long ago when Lily had been seeking work as a seamstress.

  Lily’s nightmares included an avenging Mamie on a tall white horse, leading an army, racing up Nob Hill with lances leveled and drawn swords glittering in the sun, charging the Chaffee place, all set to skewer Lily Cigar to make San Francisco safe for respectable women like themselves. They had lowered lances and swords drawn, and for some inexplicable reason, in the other hand of every galloping matron was a neatly filled cup of China tea.

  The dream had comical aspects that were obvious even to Lily, yet there was a dreadful reality to it that never failed to move her.

  She would awake in the night stifling a scream, and feel Brooks next to her, warm and easy and confident, and then Lily would smile in the darkness and ridicule her own fears and gather her courage again.

  For the next assault could not be long in coming.

  Furnishing the new house and staffing it were occupations that required constant generalship, and these tasks fell to Lily.

  She was a commuter into the city now, and the Chaffee tenders plied their way back and forth across the bay carrying Mrs. Brooks Chaffee along with their golden burden of fruits and vegetables, poultry and beef, and dairy produce.

  Lily never learned to like the architect, but she gave good taste its due, and he had taste to spare.

  Living in the handsomely proportioned and simply furnished old Spanish-colonial ranch house had altered Lily’s taste.

  Whereas the Fleur de Lis had been calculatedly furnished to dazzle the eye and delight all the other senses, and although Brooks assured her that the standard of decor in the great new mansions of the town was indistinguishable from a good class of whorehouse, Lily wanted a different feeling entirely for their new house on Nob Hill.

  She wanted elegance, but it must be a simple, understated sort of elegance.

  Lily found herself in the bookstores more often than in the decorators’ showrooms, for the decorators were forever spilling over with the latest and the newest and the costliest fancies from Paris or London or New York, a vulgar cornucopia where silk jostled velvet, where gilt-bronze writhed as if in agony and androgynous marble maidens cast chaste unseeing eyes toward heaven in vain supplication, as if asking for release from the clutter.

  Lily was too well used to the clear open air and soaring skies of San Rafael, and to the spare clean-lined sweep of her own ranch house, to tolerate the fussiness she found everywhere in this strange new San Francisco. The overcrowded rooms seemed to close in on her, even if they were not filled with people. And the people she saw were as cluttered and overfussy in their dress as the houses they lived in. There was a sense of suffocation in the corseted, hooped, bustled women draped with overskirts and fringes and peplums, furred and jeweled and bonneted, hair sculptured like bronze, trimmed and tinseled, booted and parasoled within an inch of their lives. The most fashionable women seemed to be wearing enough clothes for a whole village: they were unable to walk, really, and so they had cultivated a peculiar gait somewhere between a glide and a waddle, made up of innumerable tiny restricted steps whose effect was rather like a not very well-rehearsed ballet dancer in a hurry to go nowhere.

  It was comical, and sad, and Lily vowed to have none of it.

  She read her architecture books with the same growing interest with which she had once scoured the farming journals.

  Slowly, as the walls and terraces began to take shape, a plan for decorating the great house took shape in Lily’s mind. It would be simple, and vastly underfurnished by the standards of the day. And it would be spectacular.

  Where the fashion was for fat gilded chairs and sofas and draperies over draperies, and marble inlaid and carved and tortured, the Chaffee house would glow with the warmth of old wood, and come alive with pale light colors, the colors of faded frescoes instead of the overripe plums and murky umbers and malachite greens that fashion decreed. There would be space, and only the simplest of rare old lace draperies at the many windows, so that the vistas over the courtyards and terraces and sunken gardens would forever be a part of the furnishings in every room. The fashion of the day so draped windows that little light came in, and it was a matter of some physical exertion to look out. This seemed nonsensical to Lily: Why, indeed, have windows then? It would be more economical to live in a cave.

  Lily began to tour the antique shops, but she bought little.

  She wrote to New York for dealers’ catalogs, and began corresponding with three of the leading dealers. Lily learned to value one fine object above six mediocre examples. And with her inborn sense of the dramatic, she evolved simple but unexpected ways of displaying her treasures.

  The things that attracted her most were simple and fine. An unadorned old Chinese vase, for example, shaped like an elongated teardrop, whose glaze faded from near-raspberry to a pale bluish white. It entranced her, and she splurged on it. Country French furniture from the period of Louis XVI pleased Lily with its warm fruitwoods and gentle curves, its sense of containment and ease. This was radical taste in an era that valued everything lush and plush and golden, where there was no such thing as an excess of Baroque curlicues, where no velvet was too deep or too red, where Society with a capital S glided through its days and its nights in a perpetual murky twilight, where the difference between midn
ight and noon was more a matter of changing costumes than of a change in the atmosphere in the rooms.

  And it happened that Lily began to take a kind of unexpected pride in the house that Brooks had forced on her.

  She found, and had the wit to grin at her folly in resisting the thing, that much of what Brooks had said was true: the new house was opening up new vistas in her imagination. She was learning new things, acquiring new tastes, deepening her education, and thus making herself more valuable to Brooks. This was a pleasure and a consolation, and for a time it kept her fears at bay.

  There were days when Lily wished the house would never quite be finished, when she secretly hoped they’d never have to move into the place, that she could just go on forever planning gardens and vistas and the colors of rooms.

  But the eight months passed like a week, and suddenly Lily found herself in a frenzy of hiring servants. This was vastly different and more complicated than getting help for the ranch. Here, she must have a serious chef, legions of maids, coachmen and footmen, gardeners and grooms. Brooks must have a proper valet and she a maid for her own wardrobe and for Kate’s. The boys must have a nursemaid, although they would surely rebel at the thought.

  It was only when she was well along in her seemingly endless interviews that Lily realized she was now to play the role of Mrs. Wallingford, mistress of a huge and ambitious establishment more like a grand hotel than a home.

  This made her shudder with foreboding.

  Lily wondered where Mr. and Mrs. Groome were, not to mention the estimable Louise Dulac. And wouldn’t that be a fine ironic twist of fortune‘s wheel, to have all those good people at her beck and call, who once had been the lowliest and most thoroughly terrified serving maid at the Wallingfords’? But the Wallingford mansion was no more, or at least the Wallingfords were no longer holding forth there. Lily wondered if that huge white limestone pile still stood, or was New York as fickle in its fashions now as San Francisco had become? Surely the house had been big enough to be a small hotel, or a school even, or who knew what?