“I don’t know what you mean.”
He lit his cigar without removing his eye from her. She could see the effort it took for him to concentrate, to keep his fingers steady, to let some of the pleasures so rigidly curtailed simmer again in a glance that once held salons and boardrooms in thrall, that skewered the witless and charmed the unwary, that had never quite become reconciled to its own delight.
“I think you’d give Socrates a hard time.”
“Who’s Socrates?”
“See what I mean?” he said theatrically, peeking back over his shoulder. Then he sighed deeply, coughed through his teeth without jolting loose his cheroot, and said: “I’ll use an example, an exemplum, to illustrate. So listen carefully. In England there has developed over the past few years a school of esthetics which promulgates the notion of Art For Art’s Sake. To a degree Schopenhauer would have approved. They believe in the creation and contemplation of beauty for its own sake – no other. You see how that view of art precludes the world out there with its phoney social and moral values. Beauty is to be loved for her beauty and that beauty-as-loved gives the beholder a momentary insight into the One Will whose expressive breath activates the heart of the universe.”
“The way I like lilacs or you like them cigars?”
He made a brief effort at filtering out the ironies, sighed, and continued. “In a homelier sense, yes, though art – in painting or music – is created by an act of the individual will, and is not merely nature.”
“Oh.”
“But you’re getting me sidetracked. The point I’m making is that that school itself, in practice, has become perverted to the sorts of desire that we must renounce – the kinds of the things I have given up to live as I do in this hermitage.”
Elmer arrived with hot water and Cora made the tea.
“I’m speaking of young Oscar Wilde of whom you might have heard.”
“So I have.” The memories stirred by the mention of that name lapped and stung.
“Came here in ’eighty-two. I met him in Toronto, showed him the sights. He was marvellous. He gave a speech in the botanical gardens about making your house itself a work of art. Impressive. He told me he planned to actually live the esthetic credo, to be a breathing, walking objet d’art. You’ll recall I was in Toronto at that time to help with the merger of the railways. My genius had not been forgotten. What few people know is that I was asked by the Grand Trunk in ’eighty-five to go to England and help sell the idea of the Tunnel to the British owners. They thought a little charm might help. What they were worried about, of course, was that Joseph Hobson, the only engineer bold enough to attempt the feat was, alas, a native Canadian.”
“You saw Wilde again?”
“Yes. I went to Paris and Rome and when I returned to London I discovered that he was still notorious and that he had indeed tried to live out the purely esthetic life. I was invited to his house on Tite Street, the most infamous household in the Empire. I saw for myself the results of a philosophy based solely on the exigencies of beauty.”
His eyes drooped and glazed, as they often did when he talked too lengthily. Sometimes he would just drift into sleep, waking minutes or hours later, not remembering what had driven him to repose and occasionally getting irritated when Cora tried to renew the lapsed discussion. It seemed that as long as he was talking, uninterrupted, his thought was coherent and edged, but if he tired or was distracted, the coherence faltered and could not be recovered – the very thought itself might well be lost for days or weeks, sometimes resurfacing in unexpected intervals as whole and vital as before, and yet as unconnected as ever to any of the other sequences that emerged in their own time and circumstance. It was a mind, Cora thought, in brilliant disarray.
“This life – of Wilde’s – it didn’t work,” Cora said, gently.
He thrust his lidded gaze at her. “Desire,” he rasped. “All desire.”
She waited. His breathing slowed. He was asleep.
“It looks like another one of them days, almost beautiful enough to tempt you into walkin’,” Cora said at the bay-window. “There’s no shade of purple quite like the milkweed flower. I used to walk out on those marshes every fall as long as I can remember. With my kids, too. I like to see the pods shrivel an’ dry out an’ then surprise everybody when they crack asunder and all that white silk billows an’ floats in to the air, not carin’ very much that winter’s almost on it, just happy to be born an’ to fly in the little sun that’s left.”
Cap watched her from his chair, saying nothing, afraid to cough or breathe too hastily. He watched her slim form, and the strength it never telegraphed while it was at rest: the chin set in expectation; hands folded peacefully in her lap, forgotten; the eyes – as clear and blue as the moment they popped from the shell – moving in a meditative sweep over the landscape of their attention, not afraid to let the possibility of some truant beauty penetrate and flense the ancient, sealed wounds underneath. In the autumnal silence, her still-life composed itself for contemplation.
“Of course, not all the arts are equal. Mr. Wilde was perhaps too overzealous concerning the visual. Schopenhauer suggests that music is the highest of the art forms, closest to the sublime, less tainted by the coarseness of individual life. In short, more universal, more in tune with the circulation of the spheres, so to speak.”
“You like music?”
For a while he appeared to ignore the question; then: “When I was in Europe I heard the most sublime music, the kind that must have moved Schopenhauer to advance such a claim for it. You have to hear it played by orchestras so grand and multitudinous and cohesive and stirring that no one in this province could even imagine. Sometimes I lie in that ugly bed and try to recall it. I can’t. No one can. The old German fella was right.”
Cora was helping him into bed. He had talked for almost two hours, in bursts interrupted only by brief forays into the brandy supply or more lengthy appraisals of his audience – Cora didn’t know which manoeuvre discomfited her more. He was pallid, palsied in his attempts to get his nightshirt over his mountainous stomach, and yet as she guided him onto the sheets she could feel a strange resolve in him.
“I wish you could have heard it,” he said, not rolling under the comforter but turning with great difficulty and balancing, egg-like, on the precipice of the bed. “I wish we could leave this place sometime and go there and hear it. Where else could we come as close to the transcendent?”
He patted a spot beside him and Cora, wary, joined him. She felt light-headed. It was past ten o’clock.
“What kind of music do you people around here have, eh? The bugle band?” He draped his hand over hers. She sensed the fear in it.
“I dance.” Cora said.
“Don’t go, please.”
“You seem awful tired.”
She allowed her hand to curl up inside his. Sweated and blood-warm.
“I watched you all afternoon. In that window.”
Gently – afraid, unafraid – she tugged against the pull of his hand, the room, the momentum of the seasons behind them.
“You don’t even know how beautiful you are. That is the wonder of it. That’s what takes my breath away, my shrivelled old-man’s breath away. Still...” With his free hand – the other clasped to hers – he reached over and staring steadily at the vee of her throat, he tried to unbutton her blouse. She let him fumble there just long enough to let him know she didn’t mind, then raised her hands so she now held both of his in front of her.
“Cap,” she said, “I love you in a way I’ve loved nobody else. That’s the truth.”
She saw his eyes moisten, his lip quiver, his fingers tense to overpower or take flight.
“But there’s no need. Please understand. You don’t have to –”
He peeled her hands back, startled at his own strength, and with a prisoning tenderness he took her breasts beneath the thin cotton. She wore no corset; they came willingly into the shape he imagined for them. Then with
a sort of forced, grotesque humour, he closed his eyes and whispered. “I must. You’ve been walking home every night for more than two years now, with every lecherous eye on the street pursuing you. Not once have you stayed till morning. People will begin to think you’re a respectable woman.”
His grip slackened; she felt the shuddering right through him, and knew it was not desire.
Softly she planted a kiss on his brow, easing herself out of his limp embrace. “It’s all right, Cap. My dearest. I know. I’ve known all this time.”
“Know what?” he said, but it was not really a question, for already he was scanning her face for the ill-disguised signs of disgust and repudiation. There were none.
“You always liked the young men,” she said.
3
The Night-Dream had pursued her here, as she knew it must, for its abode was in the bone’s blood and in the mind that imagined it daily into being, it cared not for Arthur’s house or a widow’s comforts, she lay in its icy grip and felt its absolute breath against the last tenderness and heard it whisper sinuously of treacheries and mocked promises and she was Lily once again, squeezed tiny and tight into the last of the longago scenes but the branched dark was still vivid after seventy-one years, the ether of mosses and sweating fern and marooned violets awash in the nostrils and shut eyes, and Papa’s voice, clear and unquenchable, mouthed its sweet prevarication: “To my dearest princess, the Lady Fairchild, from your Papa who loves you forever” and forever was less than a night, less than the time it took her to dream of a father with arms like brass buttresses and breath as warm as wool and a stare as strong as Sampson’s and truer than Troilus under the Trojan wall, and she woke to find Papa gone and the gift of the Testament with its perjured inscription forlorn in her hand, her heart frozen and not caring one whit that the whole greenwood around her was weeping for all its lost children and crying out against the perfidy of a world cursed with the fickle seasons and tides of propagation.
48
“If we look at man with his industry and trade, his inventions and technology, we must admit that all this striving serves only to sustain and bring about a certain amount of additional comfort to ephemeral individuals in their brief span of existence, and through them to contribute to the maintenance of the species.”
“Well done! You see, when you read you can put the ‘d’ on the ‘ands’ and the ‘g’ on the participles. Now why on earth do you pretend that they don’t exist in free speech?”
“Tell me what ‘ephemeral’ means again?”
“Like us. We don’t last very long. Plump in the spring, bust by fall.”
“I’m sick an’ tired of the German fella.”
“Me too, but you can’t deny the cogency of his arguments.”
“Tell me about some of them other fellas you studied before I come here.”
“Have it your way, then.” He stared out at the Lake, wistfully noting a four-master as it bellied before the south wind, its glory as ephemeral as the June breeze it collaborated with. He proceeded to give her capsule accounts of Hegel, Feuerback, Marx and others, delighting for a while in his own clarity of recall. But the drowsiness of the late afternoon overwhelmed, and when he woke he was ravenous.
“Let me brush your hair, you look like a dandelion.”
“I feel like one.”
“I want you to write down the main ideas from one of them fellas. They sound interestin’.”
“I bet I know which one.” He wrote something on his pad.
“That Danish fella.”
“I knew it!” He shoved the pad triumphantly towards her. “Soren Kierkegaard.” Gleefully he recited his earlier encapsulation: “Existence was for Kierkegaard a category relating to the free individual. To exist means to realize oneself through free choice between alternatives, through self-commitment. To exit, therefore, means to –”
“I didn’t say I believed him,” she said, cutting him off. “I just said it sounded interestin’.”
“The man was a fool.”
“But you’ll write out his thoughts? Without cheatin’?”
He was wounded. “Of course. A fool never hurt anybody for long.”
“I’ll get supper now.”
When she had the door open, he called over: “Free choice is just an illusion unless it’s used to renounce the world that tempts us with it.”
Cora came back. “I made my own choices.” She looked him straight in the eye. He saw that the game had ended, with no warning.
“So you see now that all those flirtations I was notorious for, even my flamboyant escapades with Lady Marigold, served a very special purpose. When one is known everywhere as a roué, it is much easier to indulge one’s illicit proclivities, so to speak. You’d be surprised how many lonesome young men the army produces and how much comfort an older, wiser, more licentious gentleman can provide in times of stress.”
Cora was curled in the bay-window seat – reading, half-listening, mildly annoyed at his attempts to shock, to keep the attention flowing his way.
“I knew that pervert of a Calvinist Dane would get to you,” he said. He started to cough, in extremis.
“Your medicine’s three inches from your ring finger,” she said without looking up.
The coughing wound down to a pathetic nickering sound: “Cora, come over and talk to me.”
She did. “This Danish fella is sayin’ that we have to know who we are by makin’ up our own minds about what we do, an’ being strong enough to take the consequences. The key to it, as you’ve written out for me, is makin’ choices.”
“I choose, therefore I am.”
“I like that.”
Cap shook his head ruefully. “Cora, you’ve told me more about your life and your travails than any one man ought to know, and I’ll be damned if I can see where you had much choice. Like most women you’ve been devastated by wars you never started, diseases you can’t cure, and children who die on you or run off to lead their own lives without a pennyworth of gratitude. The world cares only for the species, and women bear the brunt of that reality.”
Cora mulled that over for a while. “May be,” she said. “But I chose somethin’. Every time.”
“And what would that be?”
“I chose to love.”
When Cora came in, Cap was sitting in his chair, but the chair was next to the bay-window where he could see the cardinals in the bushes along the Lane, bright as blood against the fresh snow. She pulled her chair over to his, took up her knitting and sat down – as if this were the spot he had chosen over all others for them to contemplate the rejection of the world. They never again sat by the north window. No explanation was offered.
“That bird, bless his heart, thinks he has chosen to stay the winter while all others have succumbed to the herd-instinct and flown south.”
“I’m glad they stay.”
“In a sense, we all choose to love,” he said, his eyes still on the birds foraging hopelessly among the sterile drifts.”I loved a young man in my regiment so desperately I would have given my life in exchange for his. Luckily that passion thinned before I was put to the test. By loving so, and choosing to do so, we simply fall prey to a larger desire that does not liberate us or refine our feeling of who we are or who we might become – as the Dane implies – but rather one that pulls us into desire itself and its compulsive yearning after something that threatens to overwhelm us or leave us feeling foolish and often so bitter we’re not capable of dealing with the world on any terms. What is left of our precious self then? Our power to choose is progressively reduced as each new passion rages through us, and the indifference of the universe drops its accidents upon us. History has no time for lovers.”
Cora was silent for a bit, but he knew from the way she chewed at her lower lip that there was more to come. He sucked on his cigar and waited.
“I admit there’s not a lot we have any choice about,” she said.
He was poised to make his customary interjection-with
-homily but stopped short.
“I mean women,” she said to forestall him. Not that again, he would be thinking, but she pressed on. “Some people might say I lived my life for others, an’ that I took my existence from them. I loved my children but they’re gone. I loved my husbands an’ they’re gone. I don’t know now, and I never will, if they knew who I was. But I can tell you this: I was myself long before I knew them. I think this Danish fella was wrong in a way, though I like what he says a lot more than Mr. Arthur Schopenhauer.”
The pedagogue’s gaze narrowed. “Wrong, in what way?”
“You can be yourself even when you can’t choose.”
Cap was not prepared for his pupil’s sudden apostasy. He blinked, then coughed.
“I loved my children: Rob an’ Brad and even the little dead one I never saw the livin’ eyes of, an’ most of all the little girl they took away from me because they thought I wasn’t good enough to –” She saw the flinching in Cap’s look and stopped. Then: “They took everything I offered them. So did my lovers. But I tried not to give myself away, I really did.”
“I know,” Cap said.
Weeks later with the frost-fronds thick upon the glass, the glacial wind howling around the corners, the lamps lit throughout the afternoon – Cap seemed to pick up the thread of an earlier conversation. Cora was surprised because he’d had a bad night, soiling his sheets and writhing helplessly in the grasp of the pain he didn’t acknowledge the existence of. She had been reading aloud to him from Leaves of Grass (which he informed her was real poetry), fully expecting him to be carried into sleep on the perambulating, narcotic rhythms. When she finished his favourite – ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed’ – she stopped, then looked over at the weary, gray pachyderm’s flesh hunched in the chair by the bay-window. He began: lucid and didactic, as if the lecture-hall were jammed with sophists.
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