Cora poured herself a second cup of tea.
“I’m sure I did at that,” he said. “I guess all along I knew that this was not the United States whatever name we chose to call ourselves by. In my heart I knew the corridors of power and the chambers of decision lay in Toronto and in Ottawa, in the legislatures and in the sanctum of the privy council. I was getting old, Cora; I know you can understand that. I had only one more chance for the genuine thing, a run at the crown itself. Better men than me have been o’er-thrown by such ambitions.”
“Then you took a train-ride,” Cora said, watching his face for signs and portents.
He sat back. His side-whiskers quivered like a tom-cat’s in front of the master’s cheese. His thin lips tightened, causing the jowl to ripple and rebel. But his eyes danced with the kind of joy a ballerina might feel pirouetting on a sprained ankle. “What a way of putting it,” he said, snarling out a laugh. “I took a train-ride I didn’t buy a ticket for. And derailed. What a spectacular fall that was! Wolsey would have been envious.”
“Who’s Wolsey?”
“A fat man who couldn’t swim.”
“Tell me, I’d really like to know.”
Elmer knocked at the door and she took the tray over to him. She felt Cap’s eyes on her. She didn’t turn around right away. It was still light. The summer wind floated in, bringing with it the swallow’s song, Queen Anne’s Lace and other intimations.
Next day when Cora came into the room she discovered it was as tidy as a monk’s study. Cap was seated in his chair with a smoking jacket neatly vee-ed over his paunch and a gray tome open on his knees. He was turned so that he could observe the motions of the sky to the north; a pleasant breeze lifted the brushed hair back from his strong brow; a bowl of mints rested at his side. He pretended not to hear her. It was only when she let out a cry of surprise that he could bear to turn and face her.
“It’s for you. Go ahead. Sit.”
Cora put her mop down and stared at the chair which Cap had ordered Elmer to bring up and place opposite his on the other side of a walnut gate-leg table he’d also ordered from the collection he recalled seeing in one of the ‘luxury’ suites on the second floor. The table had been covered with a lace cloth and graced with a silver tea-setting. The new chair was high-backed, cushioned and beautiful. The mahogany legs shone.
“Please, sit.”
She did,
“It’s time we had a proper tea and conversation.”
After their meal, Cap poured himself a brandy and lit up a cigar. He kept his eyes on Cora, as if he thought she might bolt at any minute like a flushed pheasant.
“Now that you’ve heard my life story,” he said, “it’s time for you to tell me something about yourself.” When he saw that she was indeed going to say something, he averted his gaze, slouched back into his comfort, and listened.
Cora soon found herself responding to his request. She realized that she had not talked for a very long time. Not merely aloud, to others – for that was only a minor form of talking – but not even to herself in those sinuous dream-monologues she could detach herself from, if she wished, and listen to her own thoughts as clear and necessary as her heartbeat. She didn’t tell him very much, of course. Much he would be unable to understand; some would be too strong for a man in his condition; some would not be told – ever.
She had come, by a circuitous route, to Lucien. She hesitated. She felt the strange security of this chamber she had seen only in the late afternoon and early evenings of four full seasons. We are exchanging our voices only, she thought, we do not know or even want to know each other outside the safety of this collaboration. For now, that is enough, it is a lot; it is a kind of miracle. When Lucien’s name left her lips, she felt at once like a traitor and glanced across to see how much she’d given away, how much was irretrievable.
Cap was sound asleep.
2
The sparrow lay unresponding in her cupped hands. She waited for the heart’s flutter, the spasm of blood in the misted eye.
“Leave go, Cora,” Cap said from the hutch of his bed. “You can’t save them all, you know.”
Several of the dead bird’s cousins flapped against the pane, then settled into the snow on the sill, where they pecked away contentedly at the crusts left there by the same providence that caused one’s blood occasionally to congeal.
“Bring me the Schopenhauer,” he called. “The one with the gray cover.”
“I can read,” Cora said.
“Pardon me, but I forget little things like that.”
Cora brought him the book.
“You don’t expect me to read in this light?”
“Sometimes, Cora, I think you deliberately try to misunderstand me. Is it your way of getting back at me, pretending to be stupid just because you never had the benefit of an education?”
“I’m a woman, remember?”
“That is an unforgettable verity. But my point, to get back to it, was that I consciously, by choice, by an act of the invisible personal will repudiated my life of vanity and power-seeking. Only I know what went on inside my head during those weeks after the calamity up in Woodston. Just because the world around us assumes that a combination of x and y conspired to undo us, to turn us along a certain path, does not mean that we followed that course for those reasons. What people think is never the sufficient cause. If you’d been listening carefully to what I told you about Schopenhauer’s statement on the issue, you’d understand that perfectly.”
“And if you’d given it all up one minute before the train left the Sarnia station, then more people would be ready to believe you.”
“But quantity is irrelevant here. Only what I do and know is significant. Look at it this way: just because the society I sought to exploit decides to strip me of opportunity and honour – dump me down the shit-hole, so to speak – does not mean that I, at the same moment, cannot have a sudden insight into the very hollowness of that society – both its rewards and its so-called punishments. The fact is, I did. Long before they defrocked me and cast me out like a leper, I had decided to renounce both the pleasures and the pains of that community of hypocrites. That was my way of coping with their petty retributions and with the horror of my own past. I decided to retire from social intercourse of all kinds, to follow Schopenhauer’s path of ascetic withdrawal to the life of contemplation, shorn of vanity and pretension. I would devote the rest of my allotted days to studying the great thinkers of our age. Over there you see the expanding fruits of the labour.” He waved a loose sleeve towards the glassed-in bookcase already filled with volumes which arrived weekly from a bookseller’s on King Street in Toronto. Elmer carried them in reverently, as if they were Bibles fresh from Caxton’s press. Cora had to dust them daily in spite of the glass parapet.
“Seems to me,” Cora said, “most of them saints you talk about had themselves a fair old time before they saw the light.”
“Woman, there are times when I’m sure you’re a hopeless case!”
Cora jumped up and Cap jerked back against his pillow, spilling his tonic. “Look, I’m sorry –” he said.
“It’s alive,” Cora cried. She drew the fluttering creature out of her apron pocket, lifted it to the window and let it beat its way into the blackness of a winter-sky. Her thigh still tingled where the bird had made the decision to live.
“I don’t need no raise,” Cora said.
“That’s not the point. You’re the best worker that sleazy leprechaun’s ever had slaving for him. I told him to give you more money or I’d hire a gang of thugs from the Alley to break his knees and then his Irish mouth. He seemed impressed by my logic.”
“I thought you was supposed to have ‘renounced’ the things of this world?”
“I have.” He gave her one of his philosopher’s looks – bristling with protective ambiguities. “By the way, did you get me those cigars?”
Every evening about ten o’clock, Cora walked to her room in Hap Withers’ cottage. Sh
e missed the outdoors, the pleasant walks along Canatara beach, a sleigh-ride to Little Lake to watch the skaters in the winter, flower-hunting expeditions into First and Second Bush. The odd time, in the month of June when the sun stayed until almost ten o’clock, Cap would fall into a brandy doze and she would slip out – sometimes as early as eight o’clock – and walk briskly in any direction, drinking in whatever Nature offered the senses and the gluttonous memory it fed without conscience or care. Most of the time, however, she arrived home by ten, fell into a dreamless sleep, and rose early enough to help Mrs. Suitor with the breakfast and chat amiably with Elmer or one of the new girls Malloney had not yet frightened out of a job. At four o’clock sharp she went up to the third floor – her duties for Malloney completed – and entered Cap’s retreat. How he survived his night or what he did during the morning to recuperate and justify his existence she could only guess at from the detritus he left about, or read in the scavenged slag of his face.
“The salient point in all of this, then, is not when you discover the truth but the fact that you have accepted it into your life to the extent that all your subsequent actions are consonant with it. That is pure Schopenhauer. I read that only after I had come to similar conclusions myself. My disgrace, if you will, was merely one of the means which prompted me to see what was there to be observed all along: that as long as one persists in pursuing one’s own desires, which means working against the world’s will, one will never be in the position of making a choice. It’s strange, I know, but the more you try to be yourself by desiring the things of the world and lusting for dominion over them, the more you play right into the hands of a universe that cares nothing for such vanities or will-o-the-wisps. The only choice we can make is to renounce all vanities, all desires except the pursuit of truth through contemplation. One can choose to do that.”
“When you tempt fate, it gets you.”
“Well, that’s oversimplifying a grand notion, but yes, that’s part of it. Sooner or later one of the world’s accidents will drop its careless hammer on your hopes – which you thought you could direct and manage to some personal conclusion. Certainly you would concede that an impromptu train-ride at the hands of a drunken suicide was one of the world’s more bizarre examples of happenstance?”
“Maybe the German fella was in love,” Cora said.
For a second Cap caught the edge in her voice, waited, but when she added nothing more, he said, “Love has nothing to do with it. Love is one of those desires we must purge ourselves of. I speak, as Schopenhauer does, of Eros, not Caritas or Agape. These latter await those who can approach the best in themselves, and thereby come close to the spirit of the World’s Will itself, which is suffused with sympathy and the kind of knowledge that cannot help but issue in the complete affection of Agape. When we know fully, then we sympathize, then we love with utter acceptance. That’s the hope that Schopenhauer offers us.”
“He had no vanity?”
“None.”
“Why did he choose to lecture at the same hour as the great Hegel at the University of Berlin?”
“You’ve been reading these books,” he said, astonished and not a little befuddled.
“Only when you’re asleep. I don’t take them out of the room.”
“How long?”
“Just a little while. You seem to be snoozin’ more these days.”
“It’s the damn soft coal,” he said.
“But I can only read some parts. Usually the part about their lives. The rest is too hard.”
His gaze narrowed. “What else do you know about Schopenhauer?”
“He saw the world as a dark place, full or horrors, from a lonely room. Maybe he needed to get out more.”
Cap’s face relaxed visibly. He flashed an indulgent smile and surveyed his pupil as from a great height. “You think his magnum opus, The World as Will and Idea, was coloured by an unhappy, friendless existence?”
“Some of it, yes.”
“That’s why women aren’t encouraged to study philosophy,” he said, fumbling for his silver lighter. “The man chose to be alone. To think. As I have.”
Cora took the lighter from under his napkin and handed it to him. She waited until he had his cigar lit and was sucking greedily on its adrenalin. Then she said: “He kept a dog with him. All his life.”
That second spring Cap had a bad time with his cough. Cora would wrap him in blankets and get Elmer to help her carry him to the bathroom, where she would fill the air with steam from the water, and sit with him till be could breathe again. She begged to be able to stay with him through the night but he insisted she leave: “You’re a respectable widow,” he would say, winking a smile as best he could. “I’ll survive. Or I won’t,” he added with Schopenhauerian resignation, but Cora knew the look in a doubter’s eye – she’d seen it more often than she’d wanted to, seated at many a sick bed with the smell of camphor in the air like a gruesome incense. But she went. Malloney followed her footsteps down the block from his bedroom vigil. Cap survived. He went back to the cigars.
“Can’t give them up,” he said. “They fuel the gray-matter up here. And I don’t mean my hair. But I’m giving up the brandy. You were right. It is a desire, a vestige of my former vainglories. More symbolic than real, but significant all the same. It goes.”
The day after these resolutions, Cora arrived to find a pad of lined paper set on the table in front of her chair. There were notes made in a neat, printed hand.
“They’re for you. I’m summarizing the main points of Schopenhauer so you can read and study them and ask me questions.”
She stared at the notes, wary and elated. “Can I ask him questions, too?”
He smiled shakily, and she could see he had both hands tucked into his trousers. His flesh was the colour of grass along the flats in November. “Only if he’ll let me answer for him.”
When Cora came in she knew immediately that something was wrong. The room was frigid, the charred coke lifeless in the grate (Elmer got it started early morning, she banked it at night). Her eye caught the snow beating its fletched fists against the narrow north window. His chair was empty.
“Cap?”
The bedding had been tossed aside as if in anger, the white sheets glowed eerily in the winter dusk fast descending. Sparrow-wings flapped against glass, begging entry. Cap’s moan answered from somewhere behind the bedstead. Cora strode to the end of the bed and peered around it into the shadows that hovered between it and the west wall. Cap had fallen out of bed, the covers had gone one way, their tormentor the other. Automatically she lit the beside lamp and then knelt down to him.
“Go away. Let me die in peace.”
He was sitting precisely where he had landed, propped obliquely on one bruised elbow, his brittle spindle-legs flopped uselessly to either side of the fattened toadstool of his belly. The hand that was free pawed compulsively at the fringes of the mattress the way a gutted woodchuck might claw in hope at his burrow wall. The only visible wound was the fractured brandy decanter, forlorn against the wainscotting.
“You people got nothing better to do than sit and stare at me? I’m no traitor. I’m just a man, just like you. So leave me be.”
His eyes peered out of their devastated flesh but did not see her, even as she bent and kissed them and her arm slipped under his numbed shoulder to begin easing him up. “It’s only me,” she said.
“Let me die in peace.”
His face came up into the lamplight. The flesh was sallow yet as puffed as if he’d been beaten with a cuckold’s fists. His beard and hair were matted with vomit from some previous misadventure, and his speech, his pleading whine, was squeezed through his stunned lips without once jarring them.
Later, scrubbed and remorseful, he said to Cora: “Whatever I said to you, I didn’t mean it. I’ve been told I’m a mean drunk.”
“And a sweetheart when you’re not.”
“Be kind. I fell three bloody feet off the bed.”
“A
n’ the wagon.”
Cora paused, drew the razor back and seemed to be contemplating her unfinished handiwork. Either that or the opium of the lilacs drifting in from the four quarters of the town had induced a reverie of its own. “You didn’t tell me that German fella said there was more than one way to give up thinkin’ about the world.”
“Schopen – hauer.”
“Don’t put me off.”
She finished the left cheek, wiped the blade and sat back. He reached over and touched her wrist. “A day like this and I’m almost tempted to venture into the chaos out there just to see the trees again.”
“Almost.”
“Schopenhauer, as you well know and are pretending not to, suggests that although the ascetic life of contemplation is the only permanent way to avoid the wrath of the universal Will, one can indeed obtain temporary relief and insight into the more benign, spiritual side of the life-force by studying and appreciating works of art.”
She sat back again. His hand lay where it had fallen.
“Have I got it right?” he said.
“But why can’t it last? He don’t seem to say much about that.”
“I didn’t write that part out, I guess.”
After a moment she said, “Why?”
He feigned annoyance. “Because it’s deductible from the system as a whole. Too much exposure to, or an obsession with, art constitutes yet another form of desire and egocentrism and becomes, therefore, self-defeating. Now would you fetch me my cigars?”
Lily's Story Page 72