Lily Cigar

by Tom Murphy

  For the wedding was now only two weeks away!

  Lily never knew what Brooks wrote to his parents by way of announcing the marriage. It would be impossible, naturally, for the senior Chaffees to attend in person, or even to reply to their son’s announcement.

  “By the time they hear the news, my love,” Brooks said one morning, “we will be old married people by at the very least a week.”

  “They’ll never approve. They’ll hate me.”

  “That is very unlikely, Lily, and even if they were to disapprove, what would it matter? I love them, and they love me, and what makes me happy will make them happy.”

  “I would hate to be the cause of their sorrow—or of anyone’s.”

  He took both of her hands in his, and pulled her close. “Lily, my Lily, when will you learn? One of the many things I love in you is this concern for others. But, for my parents, consider this: they have lived their lives, and by a certain standard, and that standard has worked for them. Probably—no, surely!—I share many of their standards. And here I stand, loving you, wanting you to be my wife. You must trust me, Lily, that old as they are and set as they may be in their ways, my parents are far from stupid. Don’t worry, dear: promise me you’ll worry only about important things, like the colors of the flowers in your wedding bouquet.”

  And he kissed her quick and hard and Lily forgot about everything in the world but Brooks and the day she would be his forever.

  In later years Lily could recall every precious detail of her wedding day clearly as if it had been engraved in crystal. But the day itself passed in such a rush of love and happiness that it seemed to last only a few blazing minutes.

  The day dawned blue and perfect, the air warm but dry, a light breeze blowing in from China and only a few fat white puffs of cloud grazing the sky to point up the intensity of sapphire that seemed to vibrate with anticipation above the ranch.

  The ceremony was scheduled for four o’clock, but Lily was dressed fully an hour before that, bustling about the ranch house, checking on details that had been checked many times before: the coolness of the champagne, the freshness of the flowers, the arrangement of seats in the great hall to make an informal chapel for the ceremony itself.

  The Paris dress looked wonderful; even the unshakable Gloria was delighted with it. Lily wore Fergy’s pin to do him honor, even though she felt it a bit flashy for daytime. And she also wore Brooks’s wedding gift to her, a magnificent rope of Oriental pearls, each precisely the same size as the next, their color an elusive blush that just hinted at pink, clasped with diamonds, with single-pearl ear studs to match. The pearls, she guessed, must be worth a fortune, but more valuable to Lily were the words that Brooks had said when he gave them to her: “They are warm, and true, and pure, my Lily, and that is how I think of you, and how I always shall think of you.” And even while one part of her mind knew full well that his reassurance was a deliberate thing to overcome her fears, Lily sensed a kind of magic in the pearls themselves: they glowed, and they must glow with the warm reflection of her love for him, and his for her. There was luck in the pearls. They radiated good magic. Lily promised herself most solemnly that she would do anything in her power to live up to the radiant expectations that gleamed from these perfect, unearthly little globes.

  It was a happy promise, for Lily never imagined it would be put to the test.

  The minister had been brought from San Francisco by Fergy, for Brooks was Episcopalian and Lily had long since given up the pretense of adhering to the stringent dictates of Rome.

  Reverend Weith read the service in a voice so muted it gave no indication whether or not he was aware that the bride was the notorious Lily Cigar. The ceremony was quickly over with an exchange of rings and kisses, and the guests went into the garden for champagne and little cakes before supper. It was a small party and a mixed one: the minister, Weith, who was a stranger to all the rest; Stanford Dickinson, who’d invited himself, whom Lily could not bring herself to refuse; Fergy, glowing with love but, luckily, not whiskey; the Bakers; Kate; and the two neighboring farmers and their wives, who had also been guests at Lily’s Christmas party.

  The slow twilight enveloped them as they strolled in the small, perfect rose garden that was Lily’s special pride of all her restorations after the fire. White climbing roses were espaliered against the whitewashed walls of the ranch house, and beds of specimen flowers in a dozen shades of pink and yellow and red made a rectangular outdoor room, dancing with color, fragrant with new blooms. The violin made haunting love music from behind a hedge.

  Supper was predictably splendid, six courses in all, and each with its appropriate wine. Lily barely touched the wine and only nibbled at the food. The only reason she ate at all was fear of offending Gloria. For Lily was so filled with love this day that she fed on it. At last the meal was over and the final toasts were drunk and the good-byes said at the door. Their door! For they had long since agreed that Brooks would simply move in with Lily. Her house was much the bigger and better equipped to become the nerve center of their combined properties, and more.

  She looked up at him, standing tall and proud beside her, and once again Lily could not credit her luck. This time Brooks Chaffee would not go galloping down her moonlit drive, away from her into some darker kingdom inhabited by his own haunted past. This night he was by her side, his black stallion groomed and stabled, and by her side he’d stay. And forever! If there is such a thing as forever. How natural it seemed, and how very frightening. How fine he looked, framed in the strong old beams of dark oak.

  For one long moment they stood silent in the doorway watching Fergy’s rented landau grow smaller and smaller in the purple night until it disappeared altogether, and the drumming of the horses’ hooves, leaving them silent in the quiet night, and suddenly Lily found herself wondering if she was strong enough to bear this much happiness. He turned to her then, and took her in his arms and whispered, “Lily, my Lily, my Lily!”

  He took her hand in his and led her down the spacious hall and up the wide staircase. It seemed to Lily that this was the first time she had climbed these stairs, or walked down this corridor, or watched the guttering celebration candles throwing mysterious shadows on the whitewashed walls. Slowly, dreaming or waking, it mattered not, they moved toward Lily’s bedroom.

  Brooks opened the door.

  It was the same dear bedroom Lily had chosen for herself before she ever knew she would share it with a man. The room was tall and white, with old dark beams in the ceiling and three tall windows that looked up to the hills.

  The bed was plain and white and covered in a fine white wool coverlet. And on the coverlet, turned down for the night, someone had written in fresh pink rose petals: “SIEMPRE FELICIDADES.”Happiness forever.

  Lily looked at her husband and smiled. “That must be Gloria, bless her. Do you know what it means?”

  “I don’t.”

  “It means she wishes us to be happy always.”

  Brooks held her close and said, “If ever a man can promise anything, my darling, I promise you that her wish will come true.”

  Then he turned from her and went to the bed and scooped up a handful of rose petals. He came back close to Lily and lifted his hand high in the air over her head and caused the pale fragrant things to fall down in a gentle rain on her head. Slowly he unloosed the fine lace-edged scarf that had been her mother’s and set it upon the dresser.

  And soon they were sharing the big white bed with the pale silver moonlight that filtered in through the half-open windows, and the fragrance of the rose petals and an exaltation of love that surpassed anything that Lily had dared to imagine.

  Her one secret fear all these weeks, from the moment she had told Brooks she would be his, was that when this moment came, nothing in the reality of it could possibly live up to Lily’s years of dreams and yearnings.

  It was better. Brooks was gentle and strong and the fires that burned in him were bright pure fires that did not burn bu
t only made a new alchemy of love in whose dear crucible dark dreams and secrets were magically transformed into a new and golden thing, a strong and happy cage of love that promised to hold them both, together, always.

  In the gentle fury of his lovemaking, Brooks seemed to become younger, although he surely was far from old. In quiet interludes Lily would look at him, and touch his face, and see the boy of long ago.

  He said very little but her name.

  That was more than enough.

  And when she woke to find this young god sharing her bed, Lily blinked with shock. Then a slow, soft smile crept across her face. She reached out as though to touch him, but feared waking him, and contented herself with lightly tracing the outline of his face in the air, as if she held a magic sorcerer’s wand.

  Lily had never thought there could be this much happiness in the world, and especially not in her world. She stretched lazily, and yawned, and nestled back against the pillows to watch her husband till he woke.

  42

  Mrs. Brooks Chaffee sat at her desk in the small ranch office off the kitchen. Lily was frowning over her ledgers, even though the ledgers told a tale of ever-building prosperity for Chaffee Produce, which had started life so long ago as Malone Produce.

  The more than ten thousand acres of ranchland that made up the core of Chaffee Produce was fully developed now, and what wasn’t farmed was grazed, or used for poultry, cider-making, and the other small but vital enterprises that fleshed out a great produce supplier. And they’d invested, wisely, in other farmland, down near Los Angeles, for growing citrus. Now there were Chaffee lemons and oranges and tangerines. Hawaii beckoned, but they were considering that at some length: Hawaii was paradise, and tremendously fertile, and available. But it was also the very devil to control, what with irregular shipping and the basic communications problems attendant on anything several weeks away by ship. Hawaii, as far as Lily was concerned, could wait.

  But the other thing that troubled her couldn’t wait.

  Lily could look back on the ten years of her marriage as a great success. Happiness had followed happiness, success had piled upon success. Brooks, who loved children, and dearly loved Kate, had been overwhelmed in 1868 when Lily presented him with a squirming, screaming, but nevertheless handsome son, Edward Hudner Chaffee, named for poor dead Neddy. Jonathan Fergus Chaffee had followed two years later. And here it was 1875, with the war long over and new scientific and economic wonders appearing almost daily.

  Back East the wounds of the great war still bled and festered, and scandals rocked the land. But the West had a destiny of its own, and during these ten years the raw land seemed to open up like a flower, revealing unsuspected treasures whose profit would find its way down from the craggy granite and sandstone mountains to San Francisco, there to finance undreamed-of pleasures. And if gold would forever be the battle cry in the avant-garde of greed, now there was a wider, deeper, and apparently endless flow of silver out of the Sierra Nevada, and a millionaire’s palace was none the less ornate for being founded even on such homely items as copper, sulfur, gypsum, or even iron. A British team prospecting for gold in Montana found gem sapphires beside a roaring trout stream called the Yogo River. There was a sense of magic to all this abundance, a feeling of being inside Aladdin’s cave.

  Little Neddy Chaffee was barely a year old when the continent was linked in fact and in symbol by a solid gold railroad spike. Now the journey that was three months at least by clipper around the Horn could be achieved in relative comfort in plush-trimmed parlor cars in just two weeks, New York to Sacramento.

  San Francisco now boomed more than ever. Excess was the norm, and new extravagances appeared with the impulsive thrust of gilded mushrooms after a silver rain, so thick and so fast that today’s wonder carried with it the seeds of destruction, doomed by the very seething spirit that called it into being to become tomorrow’s half-remembered novelty. The biggest theatrical stage in all America was in the California Theater. The Occidental Hotel somehow contrived to outclass even the grandiose Lick House, which had set new standards of opulence not a decade past.

  Lily was aware of these things, but they touched the core of her life hardly at all.

  If she went into the city once in six months, that was a lot, and then it would be to see Fergy or to go with Brooks to some business conference, for he asked her advice in all his transactions, and especially those that affected the Chaffee Produce Company.

  All the fire and gaiety in her were reserved for those she loved, and whom Lily Malone Chaffee loved she worked like a demon to keep close by her so the sharing could be stretched and made to last the longer and enjoyed to its fullest. This was unconscious, done partly from pure love, partly for convenience, and partly from fear that this magic and sacred circle might somehow be broken. For it was ever close to the surface of Lily’s feelings that she was living a charmed life, as though she had stolen her happiness rather than earned it, as though her happiness might somehow be recalled like a bad debt and forever locked away out of her grasp. Lily remembered with an almost physical revulsion all the people she had loved in her life who had left her or been taken from her, and every time she stood in the big doorway and waved to Brooks as he rode off to town, a small and quite terrifying voice inside her would whisper: “Maybe this time he won’t be coming back!” But he always did come back, and every day of her life she loved him more than the day before, if that were possible, if such things could be measured. Lily could laugh at herself and her fears, and they would go away meekly then. But always, always, they would come back, sneaking, probing, hissing, building a cage of self-doubt that was no less terrifying for being imaginary.

  When Brooks’s aged parents had risked the long train journey across the continent to see their new grandchildren, they had been kindness itself to Lily. Whatever they knew about her past affected their joy in seeing Brooks again not one whit. Old Mrs. Chaffee had brought Lily a touching gift: an antique English necklace set with Roman cameos framed in gold. The necklace had belonged to Mrs. Chaffee Senior’s mother, and the gift of it had hardly been a sign of disapproval.

  Once, during the month-long visit of Brooks’s parents, old Mrs. Chaffee had taken Lily aside and said, “It is plain as sunrise, my dear, that you have made my son happy, and there are no words in the language to tell you how happy that makes me and his father. Thank you, Lily.”

  Lily had said nothing, but gasped, and suddenly found herself in tears. The old lady had comforted her, and when at last the visit was over, Lily felt they parted good friends, for she had liked both of his parents, and felt they liked her in return. And there was a special sadness in their leaving, for despite the speed of the train compared to the old clipper routes, they all knew this was probably a final visit.

  Kate was blossoming into a lovely girl, and the boys were shooting up with a velocity that both amazed and delighted their parents.

  But there was a problem, and it was a persistent and worrisome one. Brooks was growing restless. Not—and Lily thanked the gods for it—in any romantic sense: their love flourished and seemed to increase with the years. But having nurtured the produce business to spectacular success, Brooks was looking for new worlds to conquer.

  The peaceful and isolated life that Lily had striven to create here in the remote hills of San Rafael had served an important purpose for Brooks. It had healed his emotional wounds and given him a new sense of himself, of who he was and what he could do. And Brooks was truly devoted to the ranch. Yet, as Fred Baker and Lily herself got the place ever better organized, the day-to-day business of sowing and harvesting and shipping and selling seemed to take care of itself.

  And every time Brooks went into San Francisco, he seemed to come back fairly teeming with new ideas. After all, Lily told herself, he was a city man, he had a banking background, his mind was a fine far-reaching thing that could see an infinite distance beyond the next cornfield.

  And Lily supported him in his enterprises. For, unlike
Fergy’s ever-wilder schemes, the plans of Brooks Chaffee made sense, and they made money.

  Every year since he’d arrived—long before he fell in love with Lily—Brooks had invested in San Francisco real estate, and his investments had prospered and grown year by year. Now he had considerable holdings in the city and its growing suburbs. And now Lily could see a pattern forming, a pattern that she feared and dreaded to the bottom of her heart.

  Lily could see a time coming when Brooks would want to move into the city and take a more active part in its life.

  As he had every right to. As she had every reason to support him in so doing.

  And Lily feared it like death itself.

  For she knew that Brooks would want a full social life, should he set himself up in town. And Lily knew that the past could and would reach out and damage her, and Brooks, and the children. How Mamie Dickinson would jump at a chance to snub Stanford’s former lover! How all the smug dowagers who hung on Mamie’s gilded apron strings would cackle with glee at such a performance. And how Lily would be mortified at the prospect.

  Lily looked from the ledgers out the window to her well-tended green hills. But still she was frowning.

  Lily sat in the little office thinking about Brooks’s restlessness until she could stand it no longer, then stood up so quickly she made herself laugh. Always, in the past, whenever a mood of doubt or of sadness would come on her, Lily had one certain cure: to busy herself with something else, some new task or an old one that had temporarily been put aside.

  It was in search of such a project that she strode purposefully out of the ranch house into the pure clear spring afternoon.

  Lily walked smiling into a scene of well-ordered activity. Two of Fred Baker’s new mule trains waited patiently by the warehouse for their drivers, six mules in each, with each team of six pulling four large wagons—gentle, patient, stupid, and immensely strong they were, special mules whose proper name Lily could never remember, imported by Fred from Mexico, and well worth it. The wagons behind them were heaped with baskets and crates filled with the earliest cabbages and lettuce, with a consignment of honey, poultry both dressed and alive, eggs in baskets lined with fresh straw, fresh milk and cream in glass bottles, and small fat tubs of sweet butter made daily by the farmers’ wives and older children. When the mule trains got to Tiburon they would meet with coastal freighters carrying lemons and oranges and limes from the Chaffee citrus ranches north of Los Angeles, with pineapples bought on subcontracts from Hawaii, but culled to Chaffee standards and bearing the Chaffee label. Lily could look at these mule trains and see a perfect little cross section of her world, of the new world she loved so well and felt so happy in, the world she had given herself to building these last thirteen years.