by Tom Murphy
“You are too kind, Mr. Rich Banker, husband of my heart.”
“Impossible to be too kind to the likes of you, my angel!”
Caroline held the jewel out, turning her slender white hand this way and that to make the ruby and its attendant diamonds catch the light. “It’s lovely, Brooks. Just lovely.”
Still, there was a distance in her voice. Her thoughts were not in this room, Brooks realized, and why should they be? Abraham Lincoln had been elected just over one month ago, and already the country was in flames. Just as Caroline had been among the first to predict. Deep in Carolina, Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie were in imminent peril from the secessionist troops of South Carolina. And the news from Caroline’s own family, what was left of it, in New Orleans, was spotty, for the mails had suffered along with every other form of communication. There was talk—and maybe more than just talk—of blockades soon to come. Suddenly the sound of drumbeats was being heard in the land, and young men were appearing in uniforms that shocked the peaceful eye with their quick splendor, their air of instant gallantry.
And still there were complacent voices, the droning of men who refused to take any of it seriously, who were comfortably oblivious of the fact that the Union, less than one hundred years old, was in immediate and deadly peril. “They’ll never dare.” That was part of the conventional wisdom, and the other part was: “It could never last; even if they do declare war, it’ll all be over in a few weeks.”
Sometimes Brooks thought he might be losing his mind, to see what he saw, and feel what he felt, the abyss gaping just underfoot, and to be alone in seeing it.
Caroline had changed.
Caroline spoke of politics no more. Caroline was merry, Caroline entered upon a round of social activity that left all New York gasping, such was its energy, such was her sparkle. But it was a desperate, feverish sparkle, and Brooks sensed this without knowing what to do to ease her worry. How could he placate Caroline, when he was so deeply plagued by his own doubts and fears? To the world, Caroline was the star in an especially lovely firmament, beautiful and witty and clever in all she did. To Brooks, there was a growing sense of loss, a feeling that he was somehow failing the girl, losing touch. The ruby in the ring was bigger than it needed to be, and the very size and richness of it was a kind of admission of failure on his part. It was a strange, haunting failure, made all the sadder by the fact that there was no one fact or incident that he could put his hand on and say: “This is where I went wrong, that’s what I must do to make it all right again.”
For it had been all right, Brooks was sure of that. And very lately, too. He took her hand in the dim, rich room, and for just that moment Brooks Chaffee felt like a little boy once more, lost and afraid of whatever might happen next, terrified that the bottom of this world might drop out from underneath him the way the trap is sprung for a hanged man. The warmth of her hand comforted him, and the dark unfathomable secrets in Caroline’s eyes seemed to be retreating now.
They stood like that, in companionable silence.
The fire crackled, and the big old clock that Grandmother Chaffee had brought from London in 1762 ticked eloquently in the twilight.
Then the doorbell rang, and Brooks could hear a muffled sound of laughter.
For Lily, all the best hours of her life were the ones that she enjoyed at the ranch. The new year came, and the war was coming with it. But while Lily hated the very thought of war—any war, no matter who was wrong or right—her thoughts and her energy and the very considerable force of her bank account were now all focused on Malone Produce, Inc., and the dramatic changes she was working on the former Velasquez grant in San Rafael in the hills across the bay.
And dramatic they were.
Fred Baker was working out better than Lily had dared hope. Already, despite a severe shortage of skilled farm labor, Fred had put together a good working crew, fifteen men, some skilled, some willing to learn. They were clearing some of the land now, and in early spring they’d plant. And the restoration of the main house was moving forward too, although quite slowly, for the place was truly a ruin and Lily wanted it perfect, this fine old house that would soon become her only home. The whitewash must sparkle, and the dark wood gleam. The crumbling stables must be recreated, with new stalls for dozens of horses, and pipes for water, and a huge new water tank high on the nearest hill so that the whole ranch might have running water, even the bunkhouse and the stables themselves. A right showplace it would be, but above all a working farm, horse breeding and cattle grazing and hundreds upon hundreds of acres of vegetables for the growing San Francisco market.
Lily and Fred Baker became addicted to the seed catalogs that came with nearly every pony-express delivery. Carrots they’d have, and lettuce, beans and tomatoes and cauliflower. And orchards! Apples. Maybe lemons. Pears, surely.
Lily looked at her scrubby hills and saw clouds of fruit-tree blossoms, looked down her valleys and envisioned neat rows of cabbage, lettuce, possibly asparagus. The earth itself seemed to thank her, and the sun, for everything in these golden hills was pregnant with the possibility of growth. Lily learned to ride, and with Fred she’d spend long afternoons exploring the huge place, riding for miles and miles, seeing no living thing but for the odd startled jackrabbit, soaring hawk, shy deer. She learned to love the silence of it, the wind murmuring, the resonant percussion of their horses’ hooves, a neighing, deep intake of stallion breath. Fred, blessedly, spoke only when he had a thing to say.
Lily came to realize that the ranch meant a new and happier future for Fred Baker, almost as much as it did for her. He had done well, the best one man could, with his little place in San Mateo. But not so well that he was above taking in a foster child, nor so well that he could afford to buy more land or hire more hands.
Lily had made all of these things possible to Fred, and in one fell act, on the wings of her ill-gotten gains, the wages of sin. Well, she told herself, let who will call it sin, it’s wages all the same, and I’m going to make the most of them or die doing it!
The parlors of the Fleur de Lis were often half-filled with tense young men in dark blue uniforms now, dripping gold braid and gallantry, talking in half-poetic terms about the great conflict to come, and how they’d carry the noble Union cause into the very mouth of hell itself if necessary, right to the front door of that devil incarnate, old Jeff Davis. And hang him from that sour-apple tree, as the song went. And Lily would smile and agree, but her mind would be twenty miles away, across the cold swift currents of the bay, high in her golden hills, thinking about turnips. The contrast often made her laugh: to behold a gilded whore in satin, sipping French wine and smoking a slim cigar in Stanny D.’s jade holder, while her most lustful thoughts dwelt upon the subtle differences between McIntosh and Northern Spy apples, or a new French hybrid grape she’d read about in a British journal.
One day, and for no special reason, Stanford brought her flowers, always a great luxury in San Francisco, and Lily found herself thinking even as she thanked him: Surely flowers could become a fine cash crop for us, and easier in some ways to raise than vegetables, with less digging. She put them in a vase and made a mental note to discuss the prospect with Fred tomorrow.
The weeks passed. Spring this year meant more to Lily than any spring she could remember. The new leaves and the sudden astonishing deep yellow flags of the wild poppies dancing over the hills—her hills!—were a signal to Lily more urgent and more profound than the mere passing of time.
She learned just after her twenty-fourth birthday that the Confederacy had declared the existence of a state of war between it and the United States. But another, more significant event happened at almost exactly the same time.
Fred Baker and his men began a small spring planting. The war was a distant rumbling and showed every sign of remaining so, for surely the actual fighting could never come this far west, surely California was well and firmly committed to the Union cause, there was no need or desire for slaves here! And some of th
e young men enlisted, for the patriotic fever was contagious. There were California brigades, and the color and dash of uniforms, and now and again a parade, with brass and drums and bunting. But it all seemed a showpiece. It was hard to believe that those gleaming sabers, so proudly worn, would ever draw blood, or the rifles kill, or the gallant young men in blue fail to come home again.
The ports of all the South might be blockaded, but the way around the Horn was free and clear, and no one seemed about to stop the trade routes overland. Lily’s seeds from England would come on schedule, and go into the land on schedule, and if God smiled, there would be a harvest, and maybe two, before this year was out.
So Lily watched her new-plowed fields begin to sprout and grow under the careful hands of Fred Baker. And she watched Kate grow too, nearing five now, and still in happy ignorance of her birth.
Somehow the war brought on a new burst of romantic ardor in Stanford Dickinson.
He had talked of joining, of taking command of some regiment or other, but Lily sensed his heart wasn’t in it. At forty-two, the man was simply restless. Stanford was ever a very physical man, roaring with unspent energy, always wanting to be in the place he was not, pacing floors, urging his fastest horses even faster toward no goal in particular, and giving off sparks of an almost electric force even when sitting still.
They were on horseback, high on a hill overlooking the soft brown of Lily’s new-plowed fields, fields just beginning to be dappled with the gentle green of tender new carrot tops and the darker thrust of bean vines.
Stanford reached for her hand: they were that close. “Lily’s kingdom. It’s beautiful, Lil, nearly as beautiful as its owner.”
“Go on with you,” she said, pleased that he saw progress, brushing back a vagrant strand of red-gold hair that had tumbled out from under the black wide-brimmed Mexican horseman’s hat she wore to shield her eyes from the brilliant June sunshine. “Lily the whore is exchanging all her finery for a fine new threshing machine from England, and then we’ll have wheat, Stanny. I’m a simple farming woman more and more, and don’t forget it.”
“Marry me.”
He said it rather than asked it, and the words came out so smooth and sudden that Lily thought she’d misheard him.
“Do what?”
“Marry me. Become my wife.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I don’t mean it funny. I mean to say I love you, Lily. I guess I always have loved you.”
He had talked of marriage before, but Lily had never taken it seriously. She sat for a moment in silence, thinking how she might have reacted only a few years ago, had he—or anyone else as rich and respectable and passionate as Stanford—asked her such a question, meaning it. The hill they were riding on was high enough to see the length of Lily’s ranch, the hills growing gentler and diminishing in size as they spread out and down toward the bay. Just one flash of white against the rich greens of the land signaled the stables, freshly whitewashed, waiting for the shipment of purebred horses that Fred told her was due any moment now. And beyond the stables, more land reached for the restless blue bay, much of it her land. And beyond the bay, the city struggled up its seven hills. On one of those hills, invisible in the distance but solid as any rock in the hard reality of Lily’s brain, was another woman, sad perhaps and bitter, but very real and wearing the name “Mrs. Stanford Dickinson” along with her expression of almost perpetual disapproval.
Lily extracted her hand from his and gestured toward the city. “And her?”
Stanford’s eyes followed Lily’s hand. She did not have to tell him who “her” was. “I’ll ask for a divorce. It doesn’t take so very long.”
Lily laughed then, and hoped it didn’t sound too cruel. “One reason I’m so fond of you, Stanny D., is that there’s not a drop of bitterness in all your body or soul.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that she’d die first. Before giving you your freedom. I’d bet anything on that—this ranch even.”
“She would be very well-off.”
“As well-off as she is now? What has she to gain but the burden of having been rejected? It isn’t easy to be left, Stanford. And no matter how just it might or might not be from where you sit, the pain’s none the less. To be cast off, tossed aside—money can’t buy the cure for that hurt, for it cuts too deep. Deep as a woman’s heart.”
“You’re too young, Lily, and far too lovely to know that much about being cast off. Who in their right mind could ever leave you?”
She closed her eyes for just a moment, but it was a moment long enough to remember everyone who had ever meant something to her, and then left. The list was a long one and heartbreaking, for it included both her parents, and Fergy as a child—and for all she knew, Fergy as a man, too. For wasn’t he always in danger of slipping away from her yet again? And Lily’s list went on, for Jack Wallingford was on it, who had left her by sending her away, and Brooks Chaffee, although the poor lad could never know it. And Luke had left her maybe at the worst time of all, Luke with his golden hair and his promises. And his bag of gold nuggets on the table in the empty room.
Lily opened her eyes quickly, and soothed the horse, which had begun to paw the earth. She looked at her friend—and lover, mentor, protector—and smiled a thin sad smile.
“Ah, Stanny, thank you, but I couldn’t. Even if it were possible, it would not be fair, not to either of us. For you deserve better, and I…well, I don’t know what I deserve. Eternal damnation for my sins, more likely than not.”
“You are the only woman I have ever loved.”
Lily’s eyes met his. How well I know these eyes, she thought, and yet ’tis little enough I know of the man behind them, for haven’t I accepted his help and his kindness and his money all these years, and given him—what?—in return. In the deepest and most private recesses of her soul Lily felt that she had forfeited the right to love, to being loved by a man, and the words fell strangely on her ears, and stranger still was the recognition that Stanford Dickinson meant exactly what he said. Lily felt a great sadness then, an overwhelming sense of loss, not for losing the love of this particular man, but for trading the right to love any man for her daughter’s future security, and her own.
She reached out to him and touched his arm. “Oh, Stanford!”
He repeated himself, in a low steady tone, looking out beyond her now, out over the hills to the sea. It was as though he were talking to himself, and sadly. “You are the only woman I have ever loved.”
There was a dull edge on his voice as he said this, and somehow Lily knew that this moment was a very important one for Stanford, a moment that might never come again, for usually he was all hearty good cheer, not at all a man to reveal the secret depths of his soul, not even to the woman he so convincingly claimed to love. The years of whoring had taught Lily many things about maneuvering the emotions of men. It was so very easy that she disdained to do it. Yet surely it could be done: the well-timed smile, the half-hidden tear, the lightest touch, the gentlest whisper of a suggestion—all had more force than bullets or screaming. She thought instantly and instinctively: Right now, right in this moment and on this hill, I could make him do anything, anything at all. If Mamie won’t give him a divorce, he’d probably even kill her for me. The things people do for love! Just thinking such thoughts frightened her profoundly. Lily reached out and touched his cheek. “I would give anything I have to be able to say the same thing to you, Stanford, but I cannot, and no more could I deceive you. Will you not have me for a friend?”
He laughed, a sudden startling laugh that might have been half a sob. “I’d have you any way I could get you, Lily, don’t you know that? Do you think it’s been easy for me all these years, paying your price, knowing when I wasn’t with you someone else was?”
“I’m sorry, then. Surely I never pretended to be a nun. Men who use whores, Stanford, must accept that they are whores, and accept who helped them get that way. It does take t
wo.”
He sighed so softly that it might have been the wind making love to the pine trees nearby. “At least you’re dead-honest, Lil, and ever have been.”
“Which is not easy.”
“I guess not. There’s women in plenty who’d kill to get an offer like that from Stanford Dickinson.”
“He said modestly.”
“Don’t mock me, Lily.”
“Ah, Stanny, I’d never do that, not really. If life were fair, all donkeys would fly, and isn’t that the truth?”
“You won’t consider me at all, then?”
“Not as a husband. You said I’m honest. Well, at the least I try to be. And that would not be an honest thing, Stanford, not by any measure.”
He laughed for sure then, deep and hearty and loud enough to startle up a fat mother quail from some brush nearby. “I am high on a hill in the bawdiest state in the wickedest country in the world, being lectured on truthfulness by a whore!”
“And well you should be, since it seems to be news to you.”
The laughter died the death it deserved, a quick one. “I love you, Lily Cigar,” he said flatly, “and I will probably always love you. But never again will I pay your price. Some things are too expensive.”
Lily turned to him as she might turn to a wounded animal. “Some things,” she said gently, “can never be bought.”
Then she kicked her spirited horse to a sudden gallop and rode off down the hill ahead of him.
And as she galloped and felt the horse surging to the challenge of it, and the wind rippling past her, losing herself in the thunder of hooves and the sheer excitement of the ride, Lily knew that something had changed on that hill, permanently and irrevocably. Whatever Stanford had been to her—and he had been many things, important things—he would now be cast in a different role, and by her own choosing. Is it because I don’t truly need him, because his money means so little to me now I’ve got money of my own, and land, and plans for it? But Lily knew that her quick decision had been based on something deeper and more solid than that. If I don’t love him, then whom could I love? She thought of a time long ago, many lifetimes ago, or so it seemed, and she saw a fine golden head and a face that matched it, and a smile that would make the sun itself go into hiding. And all this seemed a dream. Maybe it had been a dream, and maybe she ought to forget it, as most dreams are best forgotten lest they shatter against the unyielding surfaces of life in the real world. But Lily’s dream was a persistent one, and she knew that however seldom it might come and however small the chances of its ever coming true, it would never go away completely.
