Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  “You did make one kind of choice in your life,” he said. “From what you’ve told me and what I’ve been able to infer from your life’s story, you chose to be an outsider. Ironically, it was a choice you admitted only when it seemed convenient – like many of us. When life treated you a bit roughly – and I concede you’ve had a touch more ill-fortune than some – you blamed your sorrows on the very society you deliberately set out to repudiate. Being hypocrites and sadists they picked on the weak – like yourself – and drove you into exile, where they could increase your suffering tenfold. In other instances, though, it is clear that you never at any time accepted the values of that society – neither its comforts nor its sanctions. You not only made yourself an outcast before they decided to, you secretly gloried in your own superiority, your own capacity to survive nicely without them, thank you. You wanted it both ways. The German fella would say that you were corrupted by two of the world’s illusory desires: pride, through which you pathetically hoped to establish an identity of your own; and what-is-worse the projection of your own failings upon the innocent and the guilty around you. The more you tried to be yourself, the less you really were. I know. I’ve been through it all – twice.”

  Cora drew his shawl against the icy draft from the window, and held his hand until she felt the relief of sleep take him.

  “I can hear the machines hammerin’ all the way from here,” Cora said. “Funny, isn’t it, to think they’re a mile under the River.”

  “They’d burrow into Lucifer’s outhouse if they thought there was anything but shit in it,” was his only comment.

  “They say it’ll be finished by the fall. Three men’ve died so far. One of them was crushed so bad his wife couldn’t recognize him.”

  “A particular talent of the illustrious company I helped to build.”

  “You want to talk, or read?”

  “Talk.”

  “I figured out what’s wrong with all them philosophers you been readin’ all these years.”

  “You have? And in such a short time.”

  “None of ’em was women.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “I’m serious, Cap. I been tryin’ for days to find the words to explain it to you. But they just keep revolvin’ round in my brain all night and I can’t get them to stay put. You know what I mean?”

  Cap was very drawn of late. Much of the puffiness in his face had disappeared, leaving flaps of vellum skin with umber grooves between, his cheekbones protruding like a pair of interrogative andirons. His eyes seemed much larger, as if he were hydrocephalic and these couriers had been thrust into the chill to bear the bad tidings. At times they were as clear of thought or malice or desire or hope as a calf’s eyes blinking into the flow of its birth-stall. Many times Cora had to lean over and wipe tears from the rungs of his cheeks, though she knew he was not weeping. He’d give her a wink and a shrug to reassure her it was just old age, irreversible decrepitation.

  “I’m all ears,” he said.

  “Well, the way I see it, all these philosophers, as you call them, are tryin’ to answer questions about how and why things happen, how they work, an’ who might be responsible – us or some greater power, like the God they all seem to miss very much.”

  “More or less.”

  “To my surprise, I must admit to you, I found these were questions everybody sooner or later starts to fret about – not just spoiled brats with too much learnin’ out of books. Many people I knew used to ask why such-an’-such had to happen, why a nice God would destroy a child’s life, why their farm failed when they did everythin’ humanly possible to make it work, why old so-an-so was always lucky an’ they weren’t. These philosophers of yours seem to be obsessed by things to do with actin’, the whys an’ the wherefores of it.”

  “Questions about the world of action, you mean, of freedom and necessity?”

  She gave him a scrutinizing stare. “More or less.”

  “Do go on. Your main point?”

  “Well, bein’ men they seem to look about them an’ conclude that all the actions in the world are carried out by men.”

  If she expected him to be taken aback she was disappointed. “True, but then all the significant actions in the world’s affairs are.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. At first. Men make the wars, they start factories an’ farms an’ make up countries to suit their fancy. They even give their names to the next generation. But there’s somethin’ wrong, I said to myself. Women. Women’s actions, as you put it. First I thought: after-all’s-said-an’-done, they worked as hard, they had babies, they raised the boys up till their fathers took them away an’ they turned their girls into women to serve men. Wasn’t that enough? Then I saw what those thinkers saw: that women didn’t make the big things of the world happen, so they didn’t seem important to their questions about how the world works. Accordin’ to them, you have to look at the actions that count an’ get things done.”

  “Yes, you do see that these men are not making value judgements about the worth of women; they are ignoring them strictly in terms of the philosophic questions they have chosen to raise. Some day those questions or new ones may involve women in a central way.”

  “But –” Cora said, letting the word hang weightily.

  “The most telling word in the lexicon,” Cap murmured.

  “But then I got to thinkin’, an’ here’s where the words started to jump about on me. So I’ll just tell you where I’m at now an’ see if it makes any sense. In my view women do act, an’ not just doin’ woman’s things either. They act by not actin’.”

  Cap came out of his doze like a swimmer who’s suddenly decided not to drown.

  “I know that sounds crazy, an’ maybe it is. But I think it’s true. You see the tangle all this thinkin’ in words gets you into?”

  “Tell me. I’m listening.”

  “Let me give you an example.”

  He smiled inwardly, deeply. “Do, please.”

  “Suppose there’s a war. The men an’ the boys go off, an’ whether they win or not could change the world a lot. It could affect the lives of millions. It can change the future. Like this Buonaparte you’re always goin’ on about. The women do the usual things: they kiss their boys goodbye; they give support and comfort; they nurse; they pick up the pieces that are left; they cheer or they weep. Mostly they suffer.”

  “True, and very sad.”

  “But what if to suffer was in a way – I know this sounds silly – but what if sufferin’ was another way of actin’, a special woman’s way of actin’?”

  Cap realized he was expected to say something. She was watching his face strain towards concentration. “Interesting,” he said, feeling a flush of shame. In the silence between them, Cora reached over and wiped her handkerchief across his cheek. He tried to wink.

  “But how can not-actin’ be the same as actin’? That’s where it all starts goin’ round like a bobbin in my skull. But think of it this way: what if these women refused to suffer? If sufferin’ means, and I think it does, that we take in pain, sort of soak it up –”

  “Absorb it.”

  “Yes, absorb it, then if it ain’t absorbed, where does it go? You see what I’m headin’ for? The actions of men always cause pain, they upset the world, an’ most of that pain is simply swallowed by women. If they refused to swallow it, where would it go? What would happen to the world if all that pain were left loose in it? Would the men be able to act at all?” Cap clutched at the gleam from her eye, trying to hold on. “If the women on one side suffered an’ those on the other didn’t, would the outcome of the war not be changed? Is it just because sufferin’s mostly invisible that these philosophers don’t see it as actin’ and as important to the world?”

  Bravely he fought against the waters that closed over him, beating his arms against the green insistence like an eagle’s against the four-cornered wind. He needed air – for words, for praise, for wonder.

  “Don’t you see, C
ap. I just ain’t got the words yet.”

  His eyes locked onto hers just before he slipped away.

  “I told you to leave that section alone,” Cap said in the villain’s stage-whisper he had adopted to save wear-and-tear on his throat. “There’s nothing there to look at.”

  Cora pulled the books from the glass case into the beam of the sun from the west window. She read the titles aloud not for his benefit but her own: Whitman, Democratic Vistas; Darwin, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection; Bucke, Man’s Moral Nature; Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature.

  “Stop that magpie muttering, will you. I didn’t sleep a wink all night.”

  “Maybe that’s because you sleep most of the day.”

  He grimaced and clutched his stomach. She saw pain startle the soft points still left in his eyes, before he wedged them shut to keep this penultimate anguish in its own private darkness. She waited until he could open them again before she went over to wipe the sweat from his face and draw the shawl around his shoulders. She would kiss him sweetly along the nape of the neck, massage the tension out of his muscles, hum secretively in his ear, but she would never come around and look at him until he raised his hand to signal that he was ready. He did not want her to see him in his pain as he was: an old, fat man afraid of death.

  “You read all those books?” she said, fixing the tea.

  He glared malevolently.

  “You never talk about them.”

  “Don’t you go hiding my cigars again.”

  “Let me come in the mornings,” she said.

  “No need to read about fools, even when they might be right.”

  “But you told me –“

  “Don’t listen to what people tell you. Now give me that tea before it turns to ice, and swing me around so I can see what’s left of June out there.”

  All that summer the dreams and meditations of the villagers were accompanied by the steady throbbing of the steam-powered hydraulic rams against the wrought-iron shields they drove inch by battering inch into the millennial rock under the St. Clair River. Children awoke whimpering, afraid of thunder that rumbled past the ear to inner bone. Tornado warnings were ignored in deference to more impressive manifestations of omnipotence. It was rumoured that mothers’ milk was drying up. Old men in their cribs at night fretted like babies. In September the noise stopped. On the eighteenth, three days before the sun began rolling backwards towards the equator, the first Grand Trunk express roared unimpeded under the ancient waterway that had stymied bison, glaciers, and herds of brontosauri lured to the faithless sun.

  “It’s done,” Cora said.

  “It’s never done,” Cap said.

  Elmer helped her get him down the back stairs and through the kitchen, but he insisted on going the rest of the way with Cora’s help only. “I’d like to go for a walk,” was all he said when she had come in early that afternoon.

  When the warm sun struck him, he blinked like a hibernating bear, and she nudged him forward half-a-step, then let him stop to savour its blessing on his face and hands.

  “Don’t need this,” he growled, and she unwound the scarf. “It’s almost July, isn’t it?”

  Behind the hotel and paralleling the backyards of the boarding houses along the street was a winding pathway used mainly by draymen and delivery boys and lovers out for a semi-public promenade. Aging board-fences lined it on either side, adorned by hollyhocks deceptively frail in the light breeze that now and then lifted their petticoats. Orange blossoms and honeysuckle bloomed wildly over rusted gates and abandoned sheds. Roses, planted with some care or purpose years before, rebelled lustily, overwhelming trellis, rotted arbour, sapling maples. At the far end near Victoria Street, they could see the ice-wagon and the ragamuffins from the Lane trailing it like gulls in a trawler’s wake. Their cries rose in delight, tangled in the green branches overhead and then faded as the horse wheeled away up the main road.

  Cora held Cap firmly by his right arm, but not as a nurse would: she lay her head near his shoulder, and from time to time she moved her free hand over and patted him possessively.

  “People will think we’re lovers,” Cora whispered.

  “They already do.”

  She hugged him sharply, saying we already are. She felt laughter ripple somewhere inside him.

  They made slow, halting progress. He glanced from side to side, taking everything in; she watched his nostrils flare as the odours and aromas quickened them; in the tart air his eyes watered but he waved off her handkerchief. Just before the lane ended they turned together, as if they were both reading the same map, and started back. Cap stopped. He inhaled deeply, resolutely. He reached over and seized her hand. She felt the reserves of its strength. He moved forward, pulling her with him. He wanted her to feel the rhythm of his stride – a wonderful, easy, lover’s ambling, as if this kind of afternoon, this larcenous beauty, this accidental pastoral bower were designed for those pure and dedicated enough to deserve it.

  Elmer met them at the gate and together they carried him back up to his room.

  Cap was in a rare lively mood. Some of the old, teasing humanity of the would-be rogue shone through and gave every word and every gesture an extra fillip.

  “You’re always going on and on about suffering. When I suffer, you call it self-pity; when you suffer, it’s martyrdom on the road to beatification.”

  “I feel sorry for myself every day,” Cora said, “but I don’t go makin’ a religion out of it.”

  “A philosophy, you mean.”

  She caught the flint in his eye. “Whatever that German fella called it.”

  He mouthed the bait but didn’t bite. “I meant what I said. I’m asking you to tell me about how you women suffer that makes it any different from men.”

  “Do I get twenty years in a sea-side cottage to come up with an answer?”

  “As you’ve never stopped telling me, men traipse off to the great capitals to play at politics and death. They deliberately find ways to make wars just so they can play the roles of soldier and field-marshall, so they can take the little-boy dreams their mommies tried to stifle and make the rest of the world believe them, or else. According to your version of reality, they never get over playing truth-or-dare. Well, I agree. Nevertheless, they do make the world happen. Napoleon ravaged Europe and left it a better place. And in the meantime other boys-become-men are writing great poems and composing great symphonies, and building bigger bridges and faster locomotives.”

  “Are you through?”

  “I have a feeling I am.”

  “An’ they suffer, of course, all through this?”

  “That was my main point, yes.”

  “They get killed an’ maimed? They die young? They suffer for their beliefs an’ their talent?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So they’re the true martyrs?”

  “Martyrs to time and history…and circumstance,” he said in a different tone, seemingly astonished that the mental apparatus was still operational. For several days now he had been mysteriously free of all pain.

  “You don’t have to tell me about that,” Cora said. “I already lived a good deal of it. I seen it close up.”

  “There you go,” he said, “proving my point again. As a woman you suffered, certainly, and you feel sorry for yourself like all women because you weren’t part of any of it, or if you were likely an Austrian virgin casually raped by a French soldier, or your lover was killed at Austerlitz –”

  Cora had turned away and was staring out the window at the heat-haze.

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  “What for?” she said softly, looking directly at him again and speaking through her tears. “I’ve never been afraid of my sufferin’ an’ grief. It’s nothin’ to be proud of nor ashamed of either. It’s there, like my eyes an’ my heart.”

  Cap was devastated. His hands shook. He tried to get up to a full sitting position. Cora was beside hi
m, she had his right hand in hers. Her fingers rose and brushed back what remained of his boy’s cowlick. The tremors ebbed into sweat.

  “It’s all right…it really is.”

  After a while he was able to rest his head back on the chair cushion. She kept his hand firmly in hers. Finally he spoke. “I really do want to know,” he said. “If you could find the words for me.”

  “Well, I ain’t had a sabbatical on the Baltic to think it over,” she said, fluffing up the pillows under his head the next afternoon, “but I’m gonna try an’ put some real knowledge into that decayin’ brain of yours.”

  He essayed a smile. “Where’d you hide the medicine?”

  “You get a dollop when I’m finished talkin’. I been up all night rehearsin’ what I got to say, so don’t put me off the rails. Just open your ear-flaps an’ listen for once.”

  Through his exhaustion and through the layers of resistance he had learned to build into the face he presented to the world, Cora spotted the wick of curiosity fired, at great expense, just for her. Her throat thickened.

  He whispered, “I think you need the drink.”

  She drew a deep breath like a girl about to recite at a Christmas concert, and began. “A great deal of what you say is true because it’s already what’s happened in the world and is still happenin’. I myself’ve seen enough to believe it. I’m not so sure it will always be that way. I hope not. You say history is made by men who are dreamers an’ soldiers an’ builders. Women are put here to make sure they do the things well they were meant by their maker to do. That means, I suppose, bein’ their mothers an’ lovers an’ companions an’ nursemaids. When wars happen or great changes come like they have in this country since I was a girl, the victims who suffer are everywhere – not just women but children and old people an’ the young men who die for these causes. You claim that soldiers an’ dreamers suffer somethin’ even worse: the collapse of their dreams, the ruination of what they tried to build, an’ so on. I agree. But what you can never understand is the special suffern’ of the women, and I’m not talkin’ just about the loss of a husband or a son in battle, or the pain of bein’ uprooted an’ havin’ to follow your husband wherever, or the anguish of a nurse when she tends the broken body of a lover or a brother. All these kinds of sufferin’ can be understood by anybody with a heart to feel them. No, what I’m talkin’ about – what it took me all last night to figure out in words – is not the sufferin’ that comes at the time of the loss or the inflictin’ of the pain or the ache that follows ever afterwards, but the sufferin’ that happens before all that: the private, invisible sort of sufferin’. Think for a minute about the young wife whose husband marches off in uniform with his head full of glories to be won. Her sufferin’ starts the moment she knows he might leave. She’ll have fears an’ nightmares an’ premonition, but of course she mustn’t let her husband or her neighbours see any of this. She holds it all in till the hour of his leavin’ when she’s allowed to burst into woman’s tears for a while an’ be comforted by her own kind. But then every single day or hour he’s gone, she’s sufferin’. And there’s no thoughts of glory to keep her mind off the horrible possibilities of life without him, without means to support her family, without a father for her children. There’s no daily action for her that does not remind her of these horrors. She looks at her children an’ thinks of him. She looks in her neighbour’s face an’ sees the same terror she herself is tryin’ to hide. At night her bed is empty. There’s no lover, no camp-follower to lie between her legs an’ help her fall into a safe sleep. Her dreams make love to her but they’re the soldiers of Buonaparte mockin’ her tears. An’ when she hears of his death, it’s almost a relief because at least, she says, somethin’ visible has happened, I can go out into the town among my neighbours an’ grieve an’ be consoled, an’ play some role in this terrible thing you call history an’ progress, an’ you claim so loudly to have renounced.”