Five thousand dollars: not much of a buy — a seaside wreck with a view over another damaged roof. All the same, said my aunt, her hand shading her eyes, there was the sea. “When you start to earn money, Steve, you should buy that other place and tear it down.” She wanted me to have something. If it could not be Lily, let it be a tumbledown house.
Lily never needed to own an inch of Europe. She could make it up. She began to invent her own Europe from the time she learned to read. There were no mermaids in Canadian waters; no one rode to Canterbury. She had to invent something or perish from disappointment. She imagined a place where trees were enchanted, stones turned into frogs, frogs into princes. Later, she seemed to be inventing Bach and Mozart, then a host of people who lived with Bach and Mozart easily, so that she could keep good company in her mind. Sometimes I hear a dash of Lily’s music over a radio and I wish I were still young — twenty-four would do — and could find Lily’s inventions, and watch her trying to live in them again.
I would like to provide the justice lacking in her biography. I would like to say that she married an Italian composer-conductor. A German novelist-essayist-political thinker. An Argentinian playwright-designer-poet-revolutionary: nothing harebrained — a fellow respected, consulted by chancellors and presidents. Better still, the billionaire grandson of some Methodist grocer, generous toward the arts and all his wives. But she married me, young and broke and hardworking (Lily’s transcription: immature and tightfisted); left me for a nineteen-year-old English vagabond employed to work in the garden of an ambiguous bachelor neighbor; surfaced in Montreal as Mrs. Ken Peel; lived in a series of tidy and overheated apartments; had Carlotta and sent her to one of the Catholic schools she had once professed to despise. After the rocking-chair disaster she married Harrower, got the income, the travel, the friends in Paris and Monaco, with or without magic. (According to Carlotta, Lily’s chronicler, Harrower had been in the background for some time, “chasing after Mummy.”)
When she finally deserted me, in the southern house, the elements of my work in plastic bags to protect them from the seeping rain, I thought she might have waited, might have found the place more to her liking with the roof tiled. She had nothing against Talleyrand, even took a bus to Nice to look things up in the municipal library, so that she and I could talk as equals. Came back with the news that Talleyrand was the father of Eugène Delacroix.
I had to tell her that history is contrary in position to gossip. What offended her? That I wouldn’t play games with my work? I think it must have been then she decided I might not turn into an ambassador (she was miles ahead of me) but a teacher of history at some boggy university. She saw her-self driving children to basketball practice. Saw a row of tiny shoes, cleaned with liquid whitener, on a kitchen windowsill, drying in the sun. Saw icicles dripping and snowy backyards.
I was ready for university at fifteen, won a gold medal for history two years later. My photograph was in the Montreal Star. When an interviewer on CJAD said I looked like F. Scott Fitzgerald, everyone my Aunt Elspeth knew tried to find Fitzgerald’s books. Most of the work was out of print, and French translations were banned in Quebec. (Not that anyone in my aunt’s circle could have read them.) My aunt owned two novels and a collection of short stories which she would not lend: she had the habit of underlining, and she did not want outsiders to know her private thoughts and feelings. Besides, the books were hallowed now, in some way connected to my prospects.
At twenty-four, the best the prodigy had to say was that history isn’t gossip. Was that my whole mind? When Lily asked me that, I saw I had hurt her feelings. I apologized. She said, “It doesn’t matter what you’re sorry about. You’re still the same man.” I thought she was being unreasonable because she was a woman. We were sitting half turned away from each other on the stony beach. We had expected the French South to be something like Florida, but the sky was wet flannel and we wore sweaters over sweaters.
My aunt never liked my engagement to Lily: she saw Catholic entrapment, a soul floundering in the Vatican net. She still spent most of the year in Châtelroux. Some of the furniture in her house was supposed to have been brought north by ancestors who’d refused the American Revolution. Family legends had them walking all the way from Virginia, carrying chairs on their heads.
Engaged to Lily, I sat in my aunt’s green-and-white kitchen, at a table drawn up to the window. There was a crust of spring snow on the sill, melting in the sun. I had a room in Montreal, near the university. I came down on weekends whenever I could, whenever Lily was not available. She had a job in Montreal, secretary to a dentist in the Medical Arts Building. Quale relatives in one of the suburbs — Verdun, I think — kept an eye on her. She must have been twenty-two, but her family pretended she was fourteen and still a virgin.
My aunt was making pancakes. She walked back and forth between stove and table; I’d never known her as restless. She said that if I really meant to marry the Quale girl the marriage had to work. Catholics won’t divorce. (It couldn’t fail, I knew — buttering pancakes, smiling.) Let me tell you what women won’t stand for, she said. They don’t want to be deprived of sex or money. One or the other, if it can’t be helped, but never both. Well, sometimes even both, so long as there is no public humiliation. “Such as the husband’s spending a lot of money on another woman,” she said.
She had mentioned two subjects, sex and money, that until now she had pretended did not exist. I had just been made an honorary member of a closed society — the association of women who stop talking when a man (or child) comes into the room.
About money: I had none — not yet — but Lily knew. Later, I tried to remember if I had ever neglected her or tried to make a fool of her. The public teasing to which Harry Lapwing subjected his wife disgusted me. No; what went wrong had nothing to do with either of the things my aunt had mentioned. Lily must have seen me — my mind, my life, my future, my Europe — as a swindle. She began to enjoy long conversations with Watt Chadwick’s gardener. He had thin yellow hair, was drifting, desperate, homesick. Told her he was a music student, that gardening was destroying his hands. Talked about the glories of England: he must have glossed over Oliver Cromwell. One day the two blond truants plodded up the hill to the railway station. “Leaving everything,” said Mr. Chadwick, when he came over to cry about it. (Such tears! No woman could have inspired them.) In fact, they had left nothing but two men who could not even comfort each other.
Carlotta looked with strengthened disgust at her surroundings — the flagged courtyard and rusted cannons. The tour was over. “We were ripped off,” she said. “We never got up the tower, and the German guide told his group a lot more.”
“It’s just the language,” I said. “It sounds like more.”
“I’ve never been anywhere important. I need to know the right things.” So that was the trouble. I made her tell me some of the places she had been to — New York, Boston, Jamaica, Bermuda — and tried to explain why they mattered. Her parents had never taken her really away, she said, shaking her head. Ben and Lily went to England, or Japan, or those other, great destinations, during the school term, when there were out-of-season rates.