by Tom Murphy
Lily looked at him, reflected for a moment, and saw the sense in it. Maybe I’ve underestimated Fergy, she thought, maybe we all have. “You come back right quick, or I’ll come after you. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Fergy. You’ve saved my life.”
“As you have saved mine, and time and again. Now, how about buying your old brother a glass of celebration?”
“Champagne, ’twill be, to wash the foul taste of Jack Wallingford out of our mouths forever!”
“Don’t be too hard on him, Lil, it’s only weak he is, and spoiled, and he didn’t cause that to happen. If there’s a blame to blame, it must be on his parents.”
“Who spoiled him rotten.”
“If he relaxed more—and were a bit cleaner—why, he might not be such a bad sort after all.”
“Better for you than me,” she said, laughing for the first time since Jack’s letter had come.
And laughing they walked up the white stone steps of the Chaffee mansion on Nob Hill.
47
Brooks was delayed down the peninsula, negotiating for land.
So Lily had her farewell supper for Fergy quite alone in the library of her house on the hill, just the two of them at a round table near the fire, for the dining salon was of a size to make any number less than two dozen seem like mice in a cathedral. Lily preferred the library in any event, with its warm oak panels and jewel-colored leather bindings, its brass fireplace fitments and tall French windows giving onto a terrace.
It had worked better than Lily dared hope.
Wallingford had signed the paper—for whatever that was worth—had accepted a draft on the Bank of Honolulu for one hundred thousand dollars of Fergy’s money, and passage for the pair of them had been hastily booked on the clipper East Wind that sailed at dawn.
Lily had invited her brother to choose the menu and the wines: a bisque of lobster, sautéed trout from the Sierras, a small roasted turkey, Chaffee Produce’s finest asparagus, and strawberry ice for dessert, with champagne served throughout Lily sipped and nibbled, Fergy ate and drank prodigiously, laughed, sang snatches of popular tunes, and generally kept his sister in stitches.
Fergy sang with a pure lilting tenor, and some songs were bawdy and some were sad. And always he sang the song about Lily. She sat now, slowly turning her glass, as he sang it again:
Her golden hair in ringlets hung,
Her dress was spangled o’er,
She had rings upon her fingers,
Brought from a foreign shore:
She’d entice both kings and princes,
So costly was she dressed,
She far exceeds Diana bright,
She’s the Lily of the West!
Lily smiled. She was wearing the emerald ring Brooks had given her, and now she waved it flagrantly in the air, breathed on it with an exaggerated gesture, and polished it on her bosom. They dissolved in laughter.
But there was a strangeness in the air. Maybe, Lily thought, it’s just that we’ve seen so little of each other, alone like this, these last several years. Maybe he couldn’t afford the hundred thousand. Not, God knew, that he had to worry about her making good on it. Or maybe it was coming from inside herself, this strangeness, this feeling that Fergy’s gaiety was only the first and most opaque of many veils, that it might or might not lift to reveal other veils, layers of meaning, things he meant to say, serious things, hopes, untold joys or losses. And how could she know for sure? It might well be the wine, or the simple fact of his long-buried wanderlust calling him to the sea again.
She looked at him over the sorbet and said gently, “Do you remember, back at St. Paddy’s, when it looked like the end of the world, you vowed you’d come back and rescue me, Fergy? You were going to come for me in a coach with seven footmen. And that’s just what you have done.”
His laugh had an edge to it. “God help you, Lil, if you’d been holding your breath, waiting for that to happen all these years.”
“I feel closer to you right now than I have in a long, long time.”
“I love you, Lily, and I ever have, even though I’ve taken some strange ways of showing it.”
“You’ve just saved me from becoming a murderess, more likely than not, and saved Kate from God knows what. Not to mention the loan of a hundred thousand.”
“It’s a gift, Lil.”
“I won’t hear of it.”
“A wedding gift to Katie. I’ve wasted my life, Lil, don’t think I don’t know it. I’ve been drunk and gone whoring and dreamed mad dreams. I’ve taken from you a thousand, thousand times more than ever I’ve given. Sometimes I think that all the good in Big Fergus, in Mama, all came out in you, and all the bad—however much there was—came to me.”
Lily looked at him in quiet astonishment, for what he said was true, and sad, and sadder for his being aware of it. Until these last few days, Lily would not have given him credit for such keen awareness. She reached across the table and took his hand, and smiled.
“Get on with you! You’ve been a fine brother, the best a girl could want.”
“I’ve been nothing of the kind, and well you know it. I’ve run away from every problem life ever threw my way. Ran away from you, even, with hardly a thought. Could have tried a lot harder than I did to find you, too. I’ve been weak, Lil, very weak, and that’s a fact.”
“You’ve just not…found yourself.”
“Ha! I’ve found myself all too well, and not liked the look of what I found. But it’s glad I am if I can help you this little bit, at least, even after all these years.”
“Well”—she laughed, willing to try anything to change the subject—“they do sail by, don’t they? Katie to be married. It doesn’t seem like more than twenty years, not with all that’s happened.”
“You did it all yourself, and God bless you for it.”
“Bless is highly unlikely to be what that gentleman has in mind for your wicked sister, Fergy, quite the contrary, I expect.”
So finally she got him laughing, and his mood lifted. He poured a second brandy and Lily had more coffee and they talked for hours about the old days, and the days to come. At last she saw him to the door.
“Have a good voyage, Fergy dear.” Lily stood on tiptoe to kiss him.
“My love to Katie, and Brooks, and her young man.” Fergy spoke softly now, almost in a whisper, although there was no one to hear. “I’ll be thinking of you, wherever I am, with great love.”
“Come back to us soon, Fergy.”
“Good-bye, my Lily.”
She looked at him as he climbed into the waiting landau and drove off down Nob Hill. “Vaya con Dios, Fergy,” she whispered to the purple night. And God go with you. And angels watch over you. Then she turned and walked slowly back into the great stone house.
The wedding came and went all too quickly, vanished in a cloud of happy memories, without incident or scandal. Soon, too soon, Katie and her charming new husband had climbed aboard the private cars once more, after two blissful weeks of honeymooning in Lily’s small cottage on the hill. Kate’s happiness was an almost physical thing; she glowed and radiated joy to everyone around her, and most of all to Lily. Thus Lily’s sadness at her departure was leavened by the general and unmistakable pleasure that the newlyweds took in each other and in all the world around them.
It seemed to Lily that she stood with Brooks for an eternity upon the station platform, waving until the last of Katie was the tiny white flutter of her handkerchief against the dark side of the diminishing train.
It was almost one month later to the day that Lily got the news.
She looked up from her little desk in their bedroom on Nob Hill, and was startled to see the expression on Brooks’s face.
He hadn’t looked this grave in years and years, not since that terrible, wonderful day when he’d told her about his first marriage and asked if she could love him.
Instinctively she stood up and quickly went to him. “My darling, what’s wrong?” Instantly she thought
of Kate, of their two boys, of…what?
He held her tightly, with both of his arms around her, comforting her and cradling her as if that alone could defuse the words he hardly dared to speak.
“It is,” he said gently, “very bad, my dearest. We must be brave.”
“Quickly, tell me. What? What?” Whatever the news might be, not knowing, not to share his grief, was the worst possible torture for Lily.
“Fergy is dead.”
“Fergy? He can’t be.”
“A reporter came calling, just now, to ask if you had any comment.”
He handed her a fresh, folded copy of the day’s Chronicle. And even as she reached for the paper, Lily felt herself drowning in a dream. For was this not the second time in her life that she’d been handed a newspaper account of her brother’s death? She looked at the headlines.
SWEPT OVERBOARD! FERGUS MALONE PERISHES IN MYSTERIOUS TRAGEDY AT SEA.
Mr. Wallingford of New York Also Missing
Honolulu, July 27, 1878. The clipper East Wind docked here yesterday with a strange tale of violent death at sea. The captain’s report to the local police indicates that on the night of July 12, Mr. Fergus Malone, well-known businessman and gambler of San Francisco, and one Jack Wallingford, late of New York, fell or were swept overboard after a violent struggle on deck. Some witnesses suggest that one of the men might have thrown the other overboard and then jumped after him, but in the darkness it was impossible to discern the details of the fight. The clipper turned back in an attempt to find the two passengers, but all efforts failed in the moonless night. It is certain, in those shark-infested waters, and more than a thousand miles from the nearest landfall, that both men must have perished. The Hawaiian police labeled the tragedy “death by misadventure,” and since both participants in the struggle were lost no charges have been brought. Mr. Malone is survived by his sister, Mrs. Brooks Chaffee, of Nob Hill and San Rafael, whose daughter, Katharine, was lately married to Mr. Dane Atkinson of New York. Mr. Wallingford is survived by his sister, Marianne, Baroness West, of Westover, England.
All she could see was Fergy at fourteen, just before he’d run away from St. Paddy’s, and another vision, of Fergy just lately, just before he’d left her to sail on the East Wind. And over the years a faint lifeless voice, her mother’s voice, dying, rang loud in Lily’s brain, “Save your tears, child, for one day you may truly need them.” She did need them, and they came, those tears. For a long moment Lily just stood there, her head buried in Brooks’s chest, and then she gave out a sigh that might have come all the way round Cape Horn, all the way from New York, a sigh that echoed through all the years of Fergy’s mad adventures, his wild dreams, flashes of charm and of real kindness, and now this final gallantry, the ultimate justification of his love for her.
For Lily knew as surely as she had ever known anything that what the newspaper article really spoke of was a simple case of murder and suicide, and that the cause of it all was Lily Cigar, and that she could never tell a soul in all the world, not even Brooks, to whom she always told everything.
The sigh built into a sob, and the first sob was followed by many more.
Brooks tried to comfort her with words, with kisses, and failed.
For Lily, who had cried so seldom in her life, was crying now for herself as much as for Fergy, and for the sins of the past that had a way of sneaking back to attack you where and when you least expected them. Finally she stopped, gasping, runner of a long and losing race, breathless, defeated.
“I know,” Brooks said gently, “what it is to lose your only brother. I am terribly sorry, my darling.”
Lily looked up at him. “He was as good a brother as he knew how to be, poor, poor Fergy.”
“I’m sure he tried.”
“And Jack Wallingford.” Lily feared that when she said his name some bolt of lightning might come down from on high and strike her dead for a murderess.
“Jack’s no loss to anyone, but still it’s a terrible coincidence.”
“It is that.”
“Well, my darling, you have me, and Kate, and the boys.”
“And I thank God for you all, every day.”
“About the funeral services…”
“I think not, darling. Fergy wouldn’t have wanted that. We can leave a memorial at the academy, build something in his name. That’s a fine way to remember someone, orphan that he was.”
“We’ll do that. Lily, is there anything I can do, anything you’d like me to get for you?”
She stretched up to kiss him. “No, thank you, my dear. But I think I will go to the ranch for a few days, if you’ll excuse me, and think about him, and try to get over it all.”
“Of course.”
She left the next day and went directly to her little cottage on the top of Lily’s Hill. There she stayed for five days, bright blue summer days, days of blazing noon and chilled nights, nights when the stars seemed to reach out for her, days when the distant blue sea looked more like an ornament than Fergy’s grave.
And peace came to her there, as it always had, a troubled peace, maybe, but when Lily came back into town, she was calmer. The thought of Fergy no longer sent her quivering with unnamed dreads. And she could say the name “Jack Wallingford” without feeling nauseous.
And for the first time in her life Lily felt old.
This was not a physical feeling but an emotional one. Fergy’s death, Katie’s wedding, somehow the two events conspired against her usual soaring hopeful spirit. Kate a radiant bride and Fergy a murdering suicide, or very likely. That was quite a weight for Lily to carry in secret. Now her debt to Fergy could never be rightly paid, not if she lived to be a hundred.
She thought of all the forces that had shaped her life and how very little control she—or anyone—had over them. But as the Chaffee Produce tender brought her to the San Francisco side of the great bay, Lily thought, too, of other and happier things.
She thought of Brooks, whose love and strength were and always had been like a friendly beacon for her darkest hours. She thought of Kate, and the boys, glowing with health and promise. She thought of the ranch and all she had dreamed of there, and how the dreams had come sprouting, thrustingly true. Lily looked up at the seven haughty hills of the town and realized that they held no threat for her now, that no secret fears lurked behind any doorway in the city.
For that she could thank Fergy, and Brooks, and her own force of will.
A sailor helped her down the gangway. Lily thanked him. And, for the first time in days, she found herself smiling. For there, unexpectedly, stood Brooks Chaffee with a bouquet of fresh white roses, and her two sons. She ran to them, laughing, and was young again.
48
Lily stood in the open door of the ranch and watched him come galloping up the long drive, a tall hatless figure all in black and riding on a huge black stallion, his hair flying in the breeze, hair in which pure white now competed with the gold. I never saw a finer figure of a man, on horseback or off.
Lily smiled to herself and wondered how many thousands of times she had stood thus, waiting for Brooks Chaffee to come riding home to her.
Well, at least he always came.
Yes, he’d always come home, and through all the years of their life together Lily had learned to live with the insistent whispering terror inside her that said: One day he won’t be coming back to you. One day there will be another woman, younger, prettier, fancier. One day will come the bandit on the lonely road, the sinking ship, the maddened horse.
Lily could not stop the doubts and the questions, silly as she knew them to be. But she had a way of dealing with them. Now, and for some years, every time the doubts crept in, Lily would simply thank God and all his angels for the good years that could never be taken from her, the years, she felt, that Brooks had given her for no reason but luck so extraordinary it would not be false to call it miraculous. For she never felt she deserved this man, this love, and for that reason Lily cherished it all the more, a
nd the man who brought love to her in hundreds of ways, knowing and unknowing, every day and night of their lives, apart or together.
These days, they were more and more together, for the boys were grown, Neddy fast learning to take over the many businesses that had sprouted from this very ranch, and Jon back East practicing law in Boston.
Lily didn’t feel anywhere near sixty-three, but sixty-three she would be, shortly after the century turned, which it would, at the end of the year, irrevocable as any ocean’s tide.
1900!
Lily remembered the excitements of 1876, Centennial year, but in ’76 her life had been a flurry of taking care of the children, of moving into town, followed the next year by her great triumph over Mamie Dickinson.
How small that seemed now, and what an overblown word “triumph” was, a word fit for the deeds of emperors, hardly to be applied to the case of scheming hostesses on Nob Hill!
A new century was rushing at them with the velocity of an express train, glittering and unstoppable, the past gathering all of its awesome energies in one mad dash for the future that held…who knew what?
America was in love with its future and ever had been. Lily felt that this was not a bad thing, for the future had always held fine promises for her, for Lily personally, and more often than not those promises had been fulfilled beyond her modest expectations.
Brooks dismounted with a boy’s elastic grace, tethered the great horse with a flick of his hand, and ran to her.