Dicer rose from his stool. “What’s he done?” he said to Malloney.
“Ain’t paid me a fuckin’ cent of rent for three weeks. Nor his bar bill of eighteen dollars. So out he goes. You got trouble with that?” He put a threatening edge to the last comment but it was unnecessary. In truth, he had gone as far as he intended to go. Farther.
“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.
No 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.”
Cora 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 governmen
t, 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.
“The 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.
“I shocked everyone, especially those who thought they knew me,” Cap said, shivering in his velvet robe. Cora had the west window raised so she could put the remnants of the supper Cap hadn’t eaten out on the ledge for the sparrows.
“With Lady Marigold, you mean?”
He looked startled. “Close the damn window, woman, I’ll shake my teeth loose!” The room was as stuffy and warm as it always was. Cap had been off the booze for two days, having ordered Cora to hide the supply and then yelling at her and cursing her perfidy when she refused to change the rules of his game. Finally he just shivered and sulked.
“Everybody around her knew all about you an’ Lady Marigold.”
“Oh, that. Sure. That was another part of the glamour – we felt like equals, we could admire or hate one another as we chose. There wasn’t much else going on there. Not as much as hoi poloi imagined, anyway, though we enjoyed their envy and rancour exceedingly.”
She brought a blanket over and laid it across his shoulders. He smiled wanly at her. “It’s time,” he said.
“You said you didn’t really need it.”
“I say a lot of things.”
She poured him a snifter of his medicine. He sipped it slowly, breathing the restorative fumes. T he late-winter darkness seeped into the room. “Don’t,” he said when she started to light the lamp.
She left him earlier than usual, walked home under the March moon and slept alone, as she always did.
“Quit fussing with those damn clothes and come here.”
She continued her work: every jacket had its sleeves pulled inside out, like skinned muskrats.
“What I was referring to the other day when I said people were shocked was my sudden switch from the Great Western to the Grand Trunk. But my motive was simple. I could smell a rotting carp at twenty paces. I decided to put my money on a winner –”
“Money you didn’t care about.”
“– so to speak. Again, you see how wrong you can get things from your restricted vantage-point. The Grand Trunk was bigger, grander, more ambitious than the Great Western. It had plans to build from sea to sea. It had a lion’s heart and lion’s pride.”
“An’ teeth.”
“Naturally. But it’s what I wanted. And I did well, as you know. I suppose if I’d known I would have jumped again to the C.P.R., but you see by the mid-seventies I was over forty years of age and much of the romance was beginning to pall. It was clear we were going to crush the Great Western, but the C.P.R. had usurped our place in the royal sun, so to speak, and there seemed little left for a man of my temperament. When I sucked caviar through champagne all I tasted was ashes.” He drew in a lungful of his Havana and held it in defiantly.
“Must’ve been terrible,” Cora said, tossing clean sheets onto his huge canopied bed and stepping gingerly around those that had been soiled by an uncharacteristic inconvenience the night before.
“But I had a dream of my own, one nobody knew about but me. My parents, who’d long ago disowned me, were now dead, and I felt the weight of some indefinable obligation descending upon me. It filled me with unnameable regret and remorse.”
“We call it a bad conscience.”
He persevered. “I quit my direct
orship, I gathered my life’s savings and I came to Point Edward, a place I hadn’t seen for years but whose beauty had impressed itself upon me in a way I could never forget. I decided to give back to the world some of the things I’d robbed it of. You’ll recall much of the rest yourself: my little factory down on the flats – still operated of course, by others – my meteoric rise to the reeveship in return for my influence in persuading the Grand Trunk to let this village be.”
Cora nodded but had no comment.
Cap began coughing. When his defiance had subsided, he said, “What a waste.”
“I can see the smoke comin’ from your factory,” Cora said. When she came over to help him into bed and fluff up his goose-down pillows, he propped her chin on his soft fingers and said: “Why do you do this?”
Grasping his fingers, she said, “For the money.”
As she let herself quietly out, she heard his coughing start up, loose and wayward, as if he were about to embarrass himself by crying.
“I should have stayed there in the factory. Hap Withers was a great manager. I’m glad he’s got it now. But you see in this experience how the vanities of life have to be renounced completely, they have to be expunged from the tablet of memory, cauterized from the flesh they’ve preyed upon. After the glamorous life of civilized debauchery I’d led heretofore, you’d think the temptations of reeveship and regional politics would have seemed petty or beneath my considerable talents.”
“Maybe you had more in mind?”
He examined her shrewdly, his teacup at half-mast. “I’m glad you decided you were good enough to share my table,” he said with heavy irony, pleased at the power he still held over words. Throughout the winter Cora had served his supper on the silver tray and then retreated to the bay-window where she ate her own meal in a silence which he ignored with particular satisfaction. A week ago – through Gertie, it seemed – orders had been given to have a single meal for two prepared and sent up at precisely six o’clock, winter or summer, sunshine or gloom. Cora now sat opposite him on the stool he used to launch himself back into bed.
Lily's Story Page 71