Cap was still awake.
“An’ there’s more. You say this God, that neither of us believes much in, made women to help an’ support men in their hopes an’ dreams. Maybe so. But what you forget or don’t know is that we have dreams too. You tell me about Christopher Wren buildin’ the monuments in the great city of London, but I ask you whether there would ever be villages with cozy homes an’ hearths, with meadows for the children to play in, with neighbourhood squares an’ markets for gossipin’ an’ friendliness, an’ cottages surrounded by flowers an’ green growin’ things – what I’m getting at here is this: though men may dream up the grand design an’ the monuments an’ bridges, it’s the women of this world who dreamt the home an’ the village an’ all the little objects of beauty that men learn about as boys at their mother's knees while papa’s off huntin’ or fightin’, an’ later when they’re grown up try to make into…grandiose – is that the right word? – objects you call works of art. But I ask you, who sings to the babe? Who tells him his stories? I tell you, Cap, there’s more to this than I can work out in my head. But I think what I’m sayin’ is that at least part of the dreamin’ you say is man’s contribution to history is really a woman’s. Without women, there’d be no history or only part of it. Can you follow that? Think for a minute what men would make out of the world without their mothers an’ wives – an’ I don’t mean just their job as nurse an’ helpmate an’ so on. I mean what if they were only raised by their fathers an’ fed only their father’s dreams an’ hopes – what would the world be like? What ‘better’ world would their wars bring us? Would the wars ever end? An’ one last point. If what I’m thinkin’ might be true, if some of the dream that’s made the world as it is now is a woman’s dream – if that’s true, then why can’t women share in workin’ it out? If mankind’s dream is really a village turned into a city full of love an’ beauty an’ harmony an’ justice, then we’ve got a lot to offer it.”
She was finished. Her own words had taken her breath away. She sat amazed, as a painter might when the landscape he’s been labouring at suddenly quickens with symmetry. Cap’s eyes were closed. For a second she felt like Schopenhauer’s dog. Then they opened and took her in, and she knew he had understood something he had already prepared himself to believe.
“I’d like that drink now,” he said.
Most days now Cap did not get out of bed until Cora arrived. Elmer came in early in the morning to help him to the water-closet and to prop him up in his chair or help him back to bed. Cora never entered before the designated hour, though she often sneaked up to his door during her chores and listened to the wheezing cough that had replaced his breathing – asleep or awake.
“You’re like an old trout gulping air,” she teased.
“A sturgeon, amusing the caviar.”
He never dressed now. When Cora closed and locked the wardrobe for good, he applauded like a seal behind her. Instead, he wore a silk dressing-gown trimmed with ermine that Cora had been ordered to retrieve from a musty trunk. “To remind me of my past sins,” he explained.
One day in late September she arrived to find him sitting by the window. A book lay open in his lap, several more were scattered nearby.
“I do love that goldenrod along the River,” he said. “It seems so pleased with itself.”
Cora pulled her chair close, and fussed at his robe.
“I read all of these books,” he said, “long before I came to that German fella. I guess what I found in them – though it was better than the mess I’d made of the world – was not to my liking. Nonetheless, there’s both truth and illusion in them – in their pure forms.”
Cora squeezed his hand and looked out across the prospect they had marked out as their own: marsh, river, lake, dune.
“Terrifying. Positively terrifying. Mr. Darwin got most of it right. There’s more order and more chaos out there than we’ve yet dreamed of. What he didn’t know – or didn’t care to say – was that man has already freed himself from those laws, he has loosed the bonds of evolution, he has exorcized the ghost of god; he’s inventing his own future. I’ve seen some of it already, but it’s just begun. We’ve got the steam-engine, the gatling gun, the screw-prop battleship, we’ve got the power up here to unravel the laws that’ve governed our behavior and held it in check for thousands of years. It’s wonderful and terrifying. A part of me wants to live longer just to see the outcome. But I’m afraid, Cora. I’m terribly afraid. I look into the blackness where my heart used to be and I say: what will become of us when we have invented everything? How much of our being human depends wholly upon our need to be a part of the mystery itself?”
Cora entered the room as quietly as she dare. The morning brightness of Indian summer suffused the air, coming from no discernible direction, like altar-light in a sunny cathedral. Cap was seated in his philosopher’s chair, the familiar German tome, covers closed, on his knee. His gaze was aimed outward, his white beard radiantly professional. His right forearm was raised above the chair, its forefinger tenderly pointing out an error or an omission. Cora moved soundlessly to his side. She looked at him for a long, commemorative second, then reached over and closed both of his eyes.
49
A cold uncalled-for wind with the bite of December in it swept down from the Lake and over the dunes and through the shanties along the Lane and around the cozy homes of the townsite and past the little windbreak of firs at the north edge of the village cemetery, rippling the late-summer grass at Cora’s feet. She shivered. The sing-song intonations of the Reverend Baddeley sailed past her, warped by the wind beyond reason or faith. She kept her eyes on a tiny corner of the coffin – red cedar, all she could afford – and the ridge of soil near it. According to the worthies, she should have been grateful that the good parson, placing Christian compassion above Anglican orthodoxy, had offered to render the burial service to such an apostate – conspicuously unrepentant to the end, cohabiting in squalid sin with a woman who changed her name more often than her address. She didn’t care, though it occurred to her, despite the rector’s graveside drone, that Cap might well be savouring the ironies of the situation. This ground won’t hold you long, she thought. You need an audience.
Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay…
A brief service had been held in the lobby of The Queen’s. Duckface Malloney was there, Elmer, Gertie and Mrs. Baddeley, who sang a sad hymn in a high sunny soprano. Only Elmer accompanied the undertaker, the parson and Cora as they clopped up Michigan Ave., barely noticed, though several workmen mechanically doffed their caps. No church bells offered their petition to the autumn air. The crunch of box-cars coupling echoed past them into First Bush and beyond.
…we therefore commit his body to the ground,
earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
Cora glanced around her, once, to see if anyone else had come in behind them. With solemn gaze the undertaker, Josiah Smiley from Sarnia, kindly remained beside the minister as he intoned the familiar words of intercession and false comfort. Elmer stood nearby, watching Cora. She half-expected the two cousins from Toronto to show up, sooner or later, to claim what was left of Cap’s fortune. When Cora had suggested that he make a will, Cap scoffed at the notion: “I’ve never been able to will anything while alive, how could I manage it when I’m dead? Besides, what would the old German think?” But no one had followed them in.
When she had asked Malloney if they could use the lobby for the service, he said yes immediately though without any enthusiasm, without any apparent feeling of any kind. Cap was never discussed between them. That Malloney must have been under some pressure from the community to purge it of this pariah whose treacheries were even this instant being felt throughout the village, Cora had little doubt. How or why he resisted it, she did not know, though she suspected that he, like her, had chosen to
come to accept a life on the periphery. Were you right after all? she wanted to shout out loud to Cap.
The minister’s orthodox lamentation was suddenly challenged by a stifled sob, then several unstifled ones more or less in unison. All eyes sidled right even as the Reverend picked up the dropped stitch. Two elderly, arthritic ladies – adorned in mourning clothes – had apparently slipped into the quietude unremarked and had been observing the ceremony from a short distance. Overwrought by the holy litany and the sadness of the situation, they had given vent to their sorrow. The cousins from Toronto, Cora thought, and fought against a strange feeling of resentment. Their cries and lyric whimperings seemed heartfelt. She tried to block them out. At least they’re weeping: you deserved that, at least. I’m glad they’re here. Really, I am.
Reverend Baddeley carried on doggedly, doubling both volume and tempo.
…in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ who shall change our corruptible body…
The cross he had nervously essayed with the sand through his fingers looked more like a crooked question-mark waiting for someone to ‘dot’ it. Brushing past Cora, he strode effusively over to the strangers and waited for them to receive his outstretched hands. She heard the ritual exchange, the timbre of inconsolability in the voices of the women.
“We’re only second cousins,” she heard one say, “but we grew up with him, we went to school together and you never forget that sort of experience, being so young and attached.”
“Never, indeed,” said the good parson, his relief both obvious and immense. He was back on home-ground. “And you haven’t seen him in some time, I assume?”
“Years and years,” said a thinner, more aggrieved voice. “But once you knew Emery, you never forgot him. He was a sweet, sweet man.”
“Emery?”
“We always called him by his middle name. He wanted us to call him Stan when he got older, but we never would. We always were a bit of a tease with him.” She interrupted her encomium with several more sobs that left even Mr. Smiley discomfited. He began mumbling endearments to his horse.
“May the blessings of Our Lord ease your sorrow in the days to come,” said the Reverend Baddeley, searching for an exit-line.
“We come all the way down from Owen Sound and then up from London on the train. It was late. The taxi brought us right here from the station.”
The taximan’s mare, obscured by the cedar-hedge near the road, whinnied in the direction of the undertaker’s gelding.
“Emery was from Owen Sound, you know,” said the stronger cousin. “The whole family, what’s left of us.”
Her sister added a sniffle for emphasis.
“But I understood Mr. Dowling was born and raised in London.”
A silence deeper than death itself seized the cemetery and its grieving occupants. The gelding’s tail whiskered an imaginary fly. Cora turned to look. Mr. Smiley, as shocked as if one of his cadavers had sat up and saluted him, came over to the ladies, who were looking pathetically about them for some explanation.
“Your cab-driver’s gone an’ made a terrible mistake,” he said, hat in hand.
“But we told him, didn’t we sis, we was late, we’d missed the church service but would he please take us as fast as he could to the interment of Stanfield E. Dowler.”
“And he brought us here.”
“Saints preserve us,” said the minister.
They were all gone: even Elmer, reluctantly, his great sad moon’s face turning away at last down Michigan Ave.; the cousins, poor souls, to grieve all over again at another site; the minister and undertaker to the call of their respective professions. Later, under the cloak of darkness, the sexton would come with his boy to lower the coffin and seal it off, with dirt and grass-seed, from the morning sun. For the moment she and Cap were alone once again. The chill wind sent some of the fallen leaves chattering across the grass, the limbs of a maple stretched and complained, but Cora was no longer cold. She thought of the cousins jouncing and breathless in the taxi-cab, afraid they would be too late to expend their grief so loyally husbanded all the way down from Owen Sound and all the way up to Sarnia on the Grand Trunk, which was, alas-as-usual, late again. And Reverend Baddeley trying to retract his hasty, misdirected condolences, saving them up for a more appropriate occasion. She felt a bubble of laughter disrupt the numbness around her heart, then the tears intercepting it.
As soon as she got back, Cora went to the pantry to continue the cleaning she had started the day before. Malloney came to the door and called her out into the hall.
“You don’t have to work today, Mrs. Burgher. Why don’t you go home, or just find a place to rest around here. You been through a lot.”
“I’d like to work,” she said, “if it’s all right.”
He seemed very uncomfortable, the wrinkles in his face tensed against some certain ambush. Suddenly they relaxed, and his eyes doubled their size, gripping everything in their ken. “Cora,” he said quietly, “you been hearin’ the same rumours I’ve been, about the Grand Trunk packin’ up an’ desertin’ this place after thirty years. Well, even the rumours, which I don’t for one second believe, are keepin’ people away. Business is real slow right now. You can work if you like, but I suggest you take a few weeks off. Go somewhere. See somebody. Get the hell outta this place.”
“I got no other place to go,” she said evenly.
His face twisted in preparation for some kind of speech or gambit, his eyes shrivelled in their casing, but nothing came out. His drayman’s hands swung loosely at his side, and finally he slouched towards the lobby.
“Mr. Malloney.”
He looked back over his shoulder, then came fully around. “Kevin,” he said.
“You may be hearin’ from some cousins Cap had in Toronto, once they read about his funeral in the papers.”
He came close to her, alert.
“His aunt left him some money, not a lot, but all the same I expect they’ll be comin’ down to find out.”
Malloney looked straight at her, hesitated, then said: “Dowling’s got no money to leave to nobody.”
“I thought –”
“His aunt’s money run out. He’s bust.”
Cora could barely get the next words out. “How long?”
“A year ago.”
She felt his eyes shiver on her back all the way down the hall. They were as soft as a doe’s.
The wind blew harder and colder that night, the last one of September, 1892 – the date some stranger’s hand had chiseled on Cap Dowling’s tombstone. Doors were locked and shutters tightened. There was talk of a tornado, of gales on the Lake wild enough to send tremors through the sailors’ wives alone in their beds, through the captain’s helpmate measuring the minutes along her widow’s-walk. On nights like this the Point was all maritime. Later on, foghorns would wail against the driving sleet, proclaiming loneliness and fear in the cold tongue below the gut. Cora made a pot of tea and sat by herself in the gloom. Hap was at the factory helping his sons batten the hatches. Above the clatter of rain on the windows, she heard the Grand Trunk express roaring around the bend by the River and steaming towards the station. She thought of the hoboes in their encampment beyond the Lane, rain dancing on the tin of their lean-to’s and dripping into the hot, flameless fires below. She thought of the outcasts, the exiles, the forsaken, the unforgivable. She pulled the comforter off her bed and sat down in Hap’s rocker. Let it rain, she thought. Let it not rain. I am here.
Lily's Story Page 75
