Lily's Story (109 page)

With her and
later on with Eddie, Arthur was lively and fully at ease,
jubilantly talkative, and thoughtful, ever alert to the tones under
and between their words. With strangers he was still diffident
despite his years on the stage, and with those he knew casually –
like his acquaintances in the Church and town – he was courtly and
reserved. It was only when he got
en rôle
, as he was
when she first saw him at the Christmas concert, that the
hobgoblins and trolls and minor demons were allowed into the light,
and only when there was enough music to animate and camouflage. The
sparkle in his eye came from something so clear and aboriginal in
his childhood, it was unquenchable. He reminded her of someone
she’d known almost fifty years ago.

“
Just because
we’re gonna get ‘hitched’ in the judge’s broom closet doesn’t mean
we can’t do this thing in style,” Arthur said. And he meant
it.

O
n the first Saturday
of June, as many of the labouring men traipsed home from the sheds
and docks through the afternoon sun, and most of their women
gathered on street corners or under the awnings of the shops on
main street and all of the children roamed loose about the alleys
and vacant lots – a buggy was observed conspicuously decamping from
the livery behind the Queen’s Hotel and heading, without shame, up
Michigan towards St. Clair, where it turned and in a sedate jog
moved towards Sarnia. Everyone who looked, and there were few able
to resist, recognized the vehicle at once. It was the butcher’s
cart: actually a regular two-wheeled touring buggy of vintage
descent with scuffed leather seats and applewood doors and a garish
tin box improvised behind the passengers section just big enough to
hold ‘on ice’ a morning’s delivery of steaks and roasts. Bobbin,
the buckskin mare, was in her accustomed pace, a pertness in the
arch of the mane and the carriage of the tail. Someone had tossed a
sprig of lilac over her withers.

In the buggy
where the butcher’s boy ought to have been sat three odd figures:
an old woman dressed simply in blue with no bonnet to shield her
silver locks or dampen the audacity of the single plum-blossom
adorning them; a very old gentleman dolled up in his Sunday suit
with boots polished and shining like sin and a gray top-hat to
crown his snowy hair; and between them, a small boy with eyes
bigger than his face, the mare’s rein curled in the glee of his
grip. Many of the bystanders stood open-mouthed, some waved
reflexively, a few waved anyway, but if the occupants were aware of
such accolades, they acknowledged them only with their eyes.
Likewise, when several young defenders of the public faith offered
them a choice of catcalls, they responded to none, choosing silence
and the dignity of their own company. As the wedding-carriage made
the turn towards Bayview Park and the county seat
beyond, three smudged urchins raced
up behind it, caterwauling and hurling ill-rhymed taunts. Bobbin
kept to her course and soon the boys fell back, winded and
unrepentant. One of them, half-heartedly, flung a stone.

Arthur turned around, doffed
his hat, and said without raising his voice, “Thank you, ladies and
gentleman, for those good wishes”. And the carriage rocked with
laughter.

G
ranny and Eddie moved
from the cottage near the Lane to Arthur’s house on St. Clair
Street near the geographical centre of the village. Arthur put a
fresh coat of whitewash on the siding and managed to get one of the
shutters to hang straight before losing heart. The only hammers he
could use without injury were part of a piano. Granny got busy
right away planting perennials and a bulb garden and vegetable
patch in the rich soil of the yard. Often the three of them ate
lunch or supper on a checkered cloth spread under the giant hickory
tree where gray-squirrels convened and robins made their seasonal
stand. Inside, the house was warm and cozy, with Arthur’s piano to
brighten the evening gloom of winter and his stage-trunk crammed
with the props and memorabilia of a lifetime. Arthur insisted that
his wife would not work, as his savings and small pension would
carry them comfortably as far as they could ever wish to go, but
Granny decided to keep on working her two days a week at The
Queen’s, partly because Eddie was doing well enough at school to be
a candidate for high school and perhaps even university where extra
money would be needed, partly because she still enjoyed working
somewhere, and mostly because Duckface Malloney needed her. With
the decline of his business in the 1890’s Malloney had seen the
bustling, polyglot clientele of the boom years turn into a trickle
of tired drummers and advance men. The aged chorus had longago
deserted the lobby in favour of the barbershop and the livery
stable near the racetrack. Just after the new century dawned and
the last Grand Trunk car-man was removed to the Sarnia shops,
Malloney had a slight stroke that left him with a shuffle and
blurred speech. The only person he would speak directly to was
“Mrs. Burgher”, as he still called her. Granny relayed his weekly
instructions to the rest of the bewildered staff. When Duckface was
removed to Sunset Glades in 1908, Granny’s life of formal labour
came to an end. So did The Queen’s.

A
rthur Coote was born
in England in 1835 and raised very much to be an Englishman all his
life, a not-inconsiderable challenge for his parents who emigrated
to Montreal when little Arthur was only nine. To this day he
retained much of the tripping cadence of his upper-middle-class
upbringing in London and all of the courtly manners. His father was
a furrier, his mother a lady of the lesser aristocracy who, if she
had not had the misfortune of being overbred, would have spent her
life on the illegitimate stage of music-hall and melodeon. Even in
colonial, bourgeois Montreal she managed to find music teachers for
her only son. And a boarding school that ranked good manners above
mere academic attainments. He was such a deft
improvisateur
at the piano that the amateur theatrical groups among the
better class vied for his services as accompanist to their farces
and burlesques. At eighteen he entered McGill to prepare for law or
commerce or some useful adjunct profession his father could deploy
in the fur trade. In 1858 at the age of twenty-three, he left his
father’s second-best desk and headed for Chicago, and thence to the
gold fields of the Fraser Valley in New Caledonia, whenever that
was.

“
I
wanted to get away, anywhere that
wasn’t my family and their transplanted version of what life was.
More truthfully, I still had a lot of the old Nick in me, I was
young and I was frisky. But I’ll tell you, luv, I didn’t last two
weeks in the mining camps along the Fraser where we froze at night
and burned all day and nine out of ten ‘panners’ hailed from
‘Californy’ and spoke no English. I was very bashful in those days
and though I wasn’t afraid, I didn’t know how to go about obtaining
the least bit of information useful in becoming a successful
millionaire in the gold business. I broke my left thumb driving in
my first claimstake, and I was so worried I wouldn’t be able to
play the piano again I ran all the way to New Westminster, got a
splint put on it by a horse-doctor, and resumed running till I hit
Victoria and the Pacific Ocean.”

Once there he
got a job in a bank counting other people’s gold. To his surprise
and delight, this frontier town – deliberately concocted to stand
as a cultural redoubt against a riptide of Yankee pollutants – was
alive with theatrical and musical enterprise. “I started out
playing in the local orchestras and bands brought in to support the
professional troupes from California. When the Chapman family
started their stock company and built the Colonial Theatre, I
joined them, playing violin, squeeze-box and piano, and getting a
chance to act in bit parts. We even travelled back to New
Westminster and followed the gold fields as far north as the
Caribou County. But when we got back to Victoria, the company
folded, the winter set in, most of the Yankees went back to sunnier
climates for the season, and I slipped back into the safer world of
gentleman’s theatricals, where I was often asked to sing as well as
play. As no gentlewoman would ever be seen on a
stage
, the younger men like
myself played the female parts. I discovered that I enjoyed these
excursions; I did not creep out of my shyness, I burst out of it
with a patter-song or a frenzied rhetorical flourish in one of the
melodramas, or in the wee voice of the female I found way inside
me. Occasionally several of the ‘commercial’ actresses would be
asked to join us and that was great because then we could act out
the tragedies, even some Shakespeare. Naturally such fallen women
were excluded from the respectable dances and balls that always
followed the play.”

But when the
good weather brought a new crop of American speculators and
entrepreneurs, Arthur was drawn back into the greasier, tinsel
world of the troupes. In 1861 he joined for a spell the John S.
Potter Dramatic Troupe, quitting his job so he could travel with
them to the Lyceum in San Francisco. “And there I fell madly in
love with our resid
ent
ingénue
, Miss Lulu Sweet, seventeen-years-old with a figure like
Aphrodite’s daughter and the lilt of a Siren. We billed her as
‘Juvenile Actress, Songstress and Danseuse’, and she was all of
those and more.” “Do go on,” Granny prompted. “When I asked her to
marry me, I was thunderstruck when she said yes, and we eloped with
half the San Francisco police force on our trail, but not before
we’d tasted enough bliss to make our trespass
unforgivable.”

“
How long did
it last?”

“
Longer than
you might imagine. About two months, the first month being a
disaster and the second a total disaster. The only thing sweet
about Lulu was her voice. I think.”

The bank, short on men of
probity, gave him his job back, and for a while he drifted again
into the ‘English set’ of Victoria society where his soaring tenor
voice and his engaging piano were in steady demand. By the mid
1860’s, though, the Colonial Theatre had become a music-hall –
American style with minstrel shows, olios and seedy burlesques –
and Arthur regaled Eddie and Granny with stories of his sneaking
out of his respectable boarding house, incognito, and joining the
banal drollery of the ‘box-house’. Vaudeville sketches and routines
were added to the minstrels in the late 1860’s and Arthur’s
versatile pianoforte was judged one of the wonders of the age.
“Once I even put on a blackface when one of the regulars took ill,
and I forgot to wash it off before coming down to breakfast at Mrs.
Tiffen’s; well, she went white and green and raspberry, and before
I could interpret her gasps and think up a plausible excuse – like
having fallen down in the mud of Governor Street so perfectly flat
that only the front of my face was besmirched – one of the young
rams around the table quipped, ‘Why don’t you-all sing us a chorus
of Massa’s in de col’ co’l ground?’”

Arthur was
quick at arithmetic and helped Eddie almost every night during the
long winters. Granny and Arthur took turns reading aloud to him.
Between or after, there was music and treble singing and the sizzle
of the coal-fire. Many hours were passed in silent reading, Arthur
in his chair, Granny in the rocker, Eddie curled on the
chesterfield. Arthur loved romance novels and devoured the latest
works of W. D. Lighthall and Sir Gilbert Parker and a newcomer from
the States named Zane Grey. Sometimes he would go on at length
about a book like Lighthall’s
The Young Seigneur
or
Nation-Making
,
amplifying its idealism and its plea for a belief in essential
goodness till his eyes glistened and even little Eddie stopped his
reading to watch. Later on, when Eddie brought some of his
high-school chums to the house, Granny would use her special way to
cajole Arthur out of his reserve and soon he would begin with a
song at the piano, perhaps a vaudeville classic like:

I saw Esau kissing Kate

And in fact we all saw
three

For I saw Esau, he saw me

And she saw I saw Esau

t
hen, warming up,
burst fully into the role as the Lord High Executioner, at which
point the lads would join in and whole scenes would be spun out,
impromptu and cavalier and self-engaging, and the mood set for one
or more of Arthur’s true-life tales. When he was finished and
Granny served the tea or mulberry wine, Arthur reverted instantly
to his courtly, gentle self.

A
rthur subscribed to
all the papers and read them avidly. He regularly tried to engage
Granny in political discussion, which turned easily into harmless
jousts of words. He never did learn how she could dismantle one of
his arguments, ardently developed from the latest hard-data and
editorial disquisition, without recourse to similar foundations of
fact and opinion. He tried to catch her reading anything but the
local pages of
The
Observer
but never
did.

“
How can you
be so critical of the Tories when you haven’t looked at one blessed
statement they’ve made since Laurier got in?”

“
I’ve known
about Tories for a long time, since I was a child. I don’t need to
hear their latest lines.”

“
No wonder
they don’t consider giving women the vote.”