Gliding along in their special open sleighs (provided by the Railroad), the celebrants could lean back against their nuzzling furs and behold the earth commanded utterly by the night-sky, so dark and eons-deep that the stars appeared as tiny semaphores chilled forever in bas-relief. Around the carollers, the snow had flattened and blanched an unresisting landscape. The black, unseamed horizon folded down and over the verges of their little world so that it seemed as if they were all afloat on a bone-white saucer, riding an insubstantial ice-floe on the night’s immensity. And when their Clydes or Percherons – Pegasus every one – puffed majestically towards the confluence of river and lake, the grand-old dowager loomed ahead like a bejewelled atoll, garish and preposterous against the asperity of those panarctic constellations. Unperturbed, an ambidextrous footman, mustered in gold and vermillion, hopped down before the evergreen welcome-arch and raised a dainty mitt to the first descending lady. The festivities were underway.
The orchestra had been imported all the way from London. It remembered the fading courtly dances – gavotte, lancers, galop – and paid them due respect. Under the steadfast blaze of the chandeliers, the sets and squares whirled to their ancient, magic geometry. Speed, intricacy, the levitation of brass and fiddle – all conspired to project the illusion of momentary anonymity. Nonetheless, it was a modern age, and the sophisticates from Middlesex could bedazzle the countryfolk with waltz, polka, schatische, and once, jovially, they unleashed an exotic fandango. Here – hand-to-hand, face-to-face – even the most jaded romantic could borrow the energy of the sweeping violins, the just-harnessed tympanies, the peremptory surge of coronet and horn, and sail – accompanied or no – into the sweet amnesia of the music.
The performance was non-stop. Sets broke apart but quickly reconfigured; couples clung or recomposed: the dance contained them and carried on. Though the critical complement was never threatened, individual participants would occasionally slip away to the north section, where uniformed waiters filled crystal goblets with champagne that had been chilled in snow. At the south end stood the powder rooms and several improvised salons where a gentleman could find relief and a reassuring cigar. But always the music drew them back, out of themselves and the petty gravitation of their lives.
At precisely five minutes to midnight the orchestra ceased on a pre-arranged downbeat, the indefatigable conductor stepped aside, and the dias was occupied, somewhat unevenly, by three distinguished guests: the Honourable Halpenny Pebbles, deputy premier of the province, on loan for the occasion; Mr. Margison Dilworth, first vice-president of the Grand Trunk Western (who invited himself); and Mr. Stanley R. ‘Cap’ Dowling, reeve of the village since its incorporation back in 1878, who was present by divine right. This trio of luminaries, further distinguished by a pair of arc-lights, proceeded to lead the assembly, now formed into a huge circle of interlocked hands, in a singing of Auld Lang Syne. After which: much toasting and, as soon as the choir directors could be urged off-stage, more dancing.
Lucien and Cora danced. Lucien and Cora were dancing. Lucien and Cora sipped champagne and anticipated dancing. During the entire eventful evening, they exchanged no conversation other than the requisite formalities of greeting, thanksgiving and good manners. On the sleigh-ride from town (they met at the Sarnia depot), they clasped furred appendages, warmed a common shoulder, and let the stars look at them with their loveliness. Whatever pretence each had chosen for this extraordinary courting, it was accorded the unquestioned blessing of the other. No single note jarred the harmony of their shared narrative. They danced, sometimes alone and sometimes together, each happy to confer upon the other the prize of simple presence, however fragile or fleeting. In the dance, with all motion foreordained, they were released to their own fictions.
Lucien laughed and glided and marshalled his companion with large, commodious gestures, driven it seemed by some inward, transparent, uncalculating reservoir of locomotion. Cora smiled on her own, choreographed her partner’s laughter, and curtsied to the universe in three-quarter time. She danced as if the world cared, or mattered. She believed, for now, in the eyes that beheld her as if she had just been born.
A caress of finely powered snow greeted them as they stepped outside. Still, there were no clouds and the stars glittered over head. It was blissfully cold.
“I didn’t tell you,” Lucien said as he helped her onto the back of the sleigh, “but I been livin’ here in Sarnia for almost a month.”
“You left Toronto?”
He hopped aboard. “Uh huh. I hang around the bunkhouse, of course, for obvious reasons.”
She smiled and let him wrap his heavy arm about her. She snuggled in, not thinking of any moment before here, content with this.
“I been livin’ down by the River. On Front Street.” He squeezed against her, testing. “At the St. Clair.” He waited for some part of her body to reply. Then, softly so as not to disturb the sleepy revellers on either side of them, he said: “I got a suite. Two rooms.”
2
“I started watchin’ you the second I spotted you in the waiting room. I found out from Big Meg when you was due to work in the bunkhouse.” He poured her a tumbler of champagne from a bottle that had been cooling on the window-ledge, catching her eye so she could nod to tell him when to stop. She did.
“There wasn’t much to see,” she said. She took the glass, tipped it in his direction, and sat on the edge of the settee in the ‘sitting area’. He stood – tie askew, shirt adrift – leaning on a balky commode.
“That depends on how experienced an eye is lookin’,” he said. “An’ this pair’s seen plenty. I’m no yearling, you know.” He patted his paunch reverentially. “You tried to fool me, I suspect, with those aprons an’ bandanas an’ steam-bath hair-do’s. You might’ve tricked a few of the greenhorns ’round the Yard, but not a veteran like me. I know beauty when I see it.”
“And I know blarney when I hear it,” she said, glancing past him to the other room, the wink of a brass bed just visible.
“But you love it just the same?” His face, flushed from cold and drink, lit up in a broad grin. Only the creases there and the bitumous glow behind the dancing eyes belied the boyishness of the attempt. Somehow, unlike most men of his vintage and temperament, he did not look ridiculous when he allowed his high spirits to overwhelm his fatigued, resisting flesh. Always, there remained a residue of dignity.
“I used to,” she replied. “Quite a long time ago.”
His face teetered on the verge of collapse, then brightened: “You weren’t thinkin’ of long ago tonight.”
“I don’t think either of us was,” she said, holding out her glass as he refilled it.
“Happy New Year,” he said.
“So you left home,” she said.
“Uh huh. Just packed up an’ packed it in. Nothin’ to it,” he said, “once you make up your mind.”
“I guess you could say I left home, too,” she said, startling him. “Though I didn’t come as far.”
“Point Edward?”
“You knew.”
“The miles make no difference,” he said, sitting down beside her, but not close. “The truth is, I saw something in you I can’t explain. Me, with the big mouth and a smart story for every occasion. When I asked you to the dance, I’d never done anything like that before in my life. I didn’t even know what I wanted or wanted to do – to talk, to have some laughs, to feel a woman dancin’ near me again, to turn a caterpillar into a butterfly –”
“No need to talk,” she said, unlocking the tumbler from his grip one finger at a time. “It mostly spoils things.”
“I know.”
“Promise me just one thing,” she said, blowing out the lamp and letting the snow-brushed starlight in. “No talk of what’s gone before. None.”
He followed her – amazed – to the inner chamber.
Neither of them made a move to light a bedside lamp. They undressed, apart in the shadows, and slipped under the nearest half of the com
forter. Their bodies met, without ceremony, and gave way to their individual hungers.
Cora and Lucien were past middle-age. They felt no urgency to have their flesh explored nor to be reminded – by an accidental touch or a gesture of forgiveness – of scar, stretch-mark, crease, sag, weathered muscle. Cora needed to know if the dead thing in her belly could be revived long enough to die with her consent. Lucien needed to know that he could waken, with the vestige of his lust, some flesh more drugged than his own.
He was hard in seconds, and she guided him in. Aware of his own craggy weight, his angular need against her seeming-frailty – he hunched, catapulted elbows-first, found some ballast, lanced, withheld, thrashed, and crushed two pillows. She winced joyfully at the pain, then tried to right his lopsided fervour and find some balance or rhythm one of them could use, some pressure-point that would trigger something they could ride out together. Nothing worked. Unwilling to call up those memories that might have established some sort of order, however bogus it might have been, and not yet knowing enough of each other to improvise the event – they staggered to separate states of incompletion. Nor was there the impetus of youth to rally them to a further attempt. They had contended in good faith, and discovered nothing but their age and the extent of their weariness.
But the Druid moon, almost full, had risen in the east and was just now tilting over the west edge of the room’s window, flooding it with light borrowed and preserved from defunct suns. Side by side they lay just as they had failed to disentangle. No word was exchanged – of apology, consolation, promise, regret. Into a silence fed only by moonlight and across the long hour before dawn, they reached accommodation, and more. A hand that bruised and commanded, settled like a wing upon a thigh. A girl’s grip surprised and softened. A whisper lingered in the ear like a long, shy kiss. Someone’s lips plucked a tear prematurely from a cheek.
Much later, it might have been in a common dream or in a fantasy shared with the moonless dark, they made love that was both violent and tender, that was as synchronized as the music it was made of, that threatened to touch the ache abiding so deep inside them it had been perfectly protected by the stratum and acre of orthodox pain.
When they woke, it was January.
43
1
Throughout the winter of 1886 Lucien and Cora lived together in the St. Clair Inn on Front Street. Their love, if that term be at all appropriate to their curious co-existential relationship, was founded upon a strict set of covenants, unspoken but mutually – compulsively – observed. They did not speak of their own past, even when – secure in the embrace of a lover or vulnerable in the sinking aftermath of passion – they were sorely tempted. They asked no question that might carry them, however innocently, beyond the moment of their meeting. They took their dark time alone, suffering through it as best they could. When they came back together, though, to make love or talk about the long January afternoons, there was no camouflaging of that private pain, that burden from their deep night-dreaming. They did not use their passion nor any of its incidental pleasures to ease or soothe or sedate. Their lovemaking – frequent, intermittent, often unpremeditated – was a way of transmitting not the detail of sufferings minutely lived and defined but rather their gravity, the bone-density of them, the sudden echo in them of all the ruptured joy that once had been. Such surprise was enough. They accepted the blunt physicality of their comingling almost if it were a phenomenon outside their instigation or control. Each was content to let the other translate the results in his own way.
Their cohabitation quite naturally caused a stir and a buzzing abroad. However, since they were both strangers in a sense, the radius of the gossip was limited to the fringes of the beverage rooms, the quiet corners of the foyer, and the lively but closed network of fancy that followed the main-line of the amalgamated Grand Trunk Western. Percy O’Boyle – Suds to his customers – who clerked behind the registry desk by day and slung beer by night, blushed a deeper red than his hair whenever Cora came down to breakfast sometime before noon and smiled her ingenuous ‘good morning’ not a foot from his chin. “Mornin’, ma’am – missus uh – ma’am,” he would blurt out, stuttering without fail, then blush more carnally as his eyes rose up on their own to trail her figure through the doorway to the dining room. Except for Mulligan, the owner and principal waiter, she found herself anonymous among the carpetbaggers, drummers and occasional couples who drifted in and out – off the boats, ferries or trains, and always en route to somewhere else. Sarnia, like the place she had left, was a stopover town, all bustle and hubbub. But seated unobtrusively at her regular table near the west window, she could sip tea shyly (she never got used to being waited on, ever startled by Mulligan’s shadow at her elbow, embarrassed by his incessant, waterless hand-wringing) and look over the traffic along Front Street towards the ferry dock and beyond to the thin artery of the River suspended now between frozen shores, rigid and deep. She would keep her eyes fixed upon that blue pulse, its tiny ventricle breath as whispered and hesitant as her own.
“Would Madam like some more toast?” Mulligan would say with his blend of sarcasm and hope.
“Madam don’t wish no toast at the moment,” she invariably replied, watching his puzzlement, and certain that he never quite managed to penetrate the ironies proffered.
The arrangements were simple. And for two people who had led entangled and encumbered lives, they were made with speed and no touch of regret. Yes, Cora would be pleased to quit her job. No, she didn’t mind taking up residence in a second-class hostel. Nor did she object in the least to a lover who would be away more than at home. Lucien was a senior engineer with a regular highball run from Sarnia to Toronto. Leaving Sarnia at noon on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; return from Toronto by three on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Which meant overnight in a cold Toronto bunkhouse three nights a week and four warm ones in a specially heated bower in the St. Clair Inn. After which: a leisurely breakfast-for-two long after mid-morning, an abrupt departure, farewells recalled and nursed till again the sudden arrival, the brisk, physical greeting of flesh in its loneliness. Only Saturday and Sunday were exceptional. When Lucien arrived early in the afternoon, tired from the six-hour trip and the layover in London, they would not make love. Instead, she would draw him a bath in the room at the end of the hall and languidly cleanse his rumpled, gray flesh. The sensual flapping of water and the murmurs of their give-and-take would drive Suds O’Boyle’s blush down to the tips of his torso, so that he had to rattle the papers on his desk or bang the bell with his elbow for relief. Refreshed, the couple would stroll down to the Christina Tea Room for supper, and then it was time to prepare for the dance at the Armouries. Though the dances were different – guest orchestras coming from as far off as Windsor – they were both aware that each was a vital reenactment of the first one: they did not speak, they merely danced and lived to dance. They rode the three blocks home in a hired cutter. They drank a tumbler of champagne from a bottle cooling in the snow on the sill. She took his hand and led him into the sanctum, where they made love, now alas coordinated though no less lacking than its original in tough, sweaty, buckling urgence. Afterwards it seemed, to Cora at least, as if they were contributing to this fiction of reenactment more as an assurance to themselves that they had a shared past of some sort rather than as a refusal to accept the inroads of time itself on their relationship.
Certainly the enforced absences were crucial to their feelings for each other and the tilting equilibrium they had established. On Sundays, for example – their only full day together – they rented a cutter and drove south or east of the town, down the back sideroads of the township plump with farms and settled prosperity, laughing or singing some improvised ditty as the bells on the Clydes jingled an icicle tune of their own and their big breath left a fading print on the air. Then after a dinner at three, they would relax on the chesterfield (she’d had it exchanged for the spartan settee) with a mug of coffee, and talk. Lucien entertained her with
slightly baulderized versions of his folk-tales, stringing a story out till it seemed to float on its own voluableness over the sleepy gloaming of their Sunday communion. Embellished for her ears alone, polished or impromptu, they made her laugh and re-see the world made over by this man who inexplicably loved her, or wished to cast whatever love he had left upon some image of her she was not about to question or deny.
“Now let me tell you about one of the funniest characters ever to throttle an engine or puke up in the back seat of a caboose: old Pokey Burdette. One time when I was workin’ in the Yard Office, long before I went on the road, Pokey comes into the place about four in the mornin’ an’ there’s half-a-dozen fellas there smokin’ an’ warmin’ their thumbs by the heater, an’ they see right away by the whites of his eyes that he’s as mad as a plucked gander. He’s just come in from Montreal on a passenger – six hours late! ‘Stuck in a snowbank as big as a buffalo’s arse,’ he cries, ‘somewheres between Cornwall an’ Trenton. An’ you know who went an’ put it there?’ Nobody could guess, so Pokey swats his cap down on the nearest desk an’ yells, ‘George McPherson, the president of this here railway, that’s who!’ Then when everybody’s real quiet, he says, ‘Well, the son-of-a-bitch goes off on his New Years’ toot, eh, gets himself gassed up, goes outside to take a piss in the wind, jerks the wrong lever and accidently lets a fart fly, which starts a fuckin’ avalanche rollin’ down the main-line all the way from here to Port aux Basques!”
Cora herself had little to offer to this exchange beyond her enthusiastic response to Lucien’s efforts. Under his encouragement, however, she was persuaded more and more to tell him about the odd ducks she’d seen in the dining room or about her running series of contre temps with Mulligan:
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