Lily Fairchild. Don Gutteridge

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СКАЧАТЬ she would go about Tippy’s modest indiscretions – his poor grades in school, his truancy, his current “escapade” in Toronto, where he was supposed to be learning the law in a respectable firm, but was more often seen elsewhere in unmentionable establishments. Lily listened, quite content to nod assent or demurral as the moment dictated, watching the concern and vulnerable kindness play across the face of this affectionate stranger woman.

      Is this the way it is, the way it’s going to be? Lily thought. These sudden, powerful, random bondings followed by the wrenching of separation, bleak rides in the night towards dawnings we have not even had time or the wonder to dream of?

      Finally, a month after her arrival, Lily received a letter from Bridie. She spotted her own name in capital letters on the envelope, and could make out the name of the street and city, but Mrs. Edgeworth had a little difficulty following her aunt’s scrawl.

      Port Sarnia, C.W.

      May 2, 1861

      Dear Lily:

      Sorry to be so long in writing to you. Word has been got to us that you are doing fine. Things are so confused here that I ought to wait until the news is good before sending it along to you. Uncle Chester is getting stronger by the day. Old Bill is about the same. We all miss you terrible. Just after you left, some bigwigs from the railroad came over here and made an offer to buy our property. I told them no, this land was our living, we would never leave it. Then they said the railroad needed the land for the town-site of Point Edward. They now own all of it but our section. They said they would expropriate it; that’s a two-dollar word for taking it and paying us as little as they can get away with. If they take the farm, I don’t know what we’ll do. A friend of Uncle Chester’s has written from London with a business proposition but nothing is about to happen very soon you can rest assured. So we don’t want you to worry, just stay healthy and bring us back the babe. We’ll be here waiting. We’ve always got by and we always will.

      Love,

       Aunt Bridie

      xoxoxo Uncle Chester

      But Lily did worry. Bridie’s hopes, pinned so precariously to the railway’s expansion, were about to be dashed by the very instrument expected to fulfill them. Whatever happened with the farm, she knew it would not fatten itself at the expense of the Grand Trunk.

      No more letters came. June arrived and with it the time for her lying-in.

      Lily did not lack for either care or advice. Lucille’s household duties were lightened so that she could play the role of nursemaid, a part she relished, though her ministrations in the stuffy, darkened room where the patient was forcibly detained, were more colloquial than therapeutic. Mrs. Edgeworth herself supervised the serving of the meals and spent part of each afternoon and evening reading to or regaling her “dear-heart.” Dr. Hackney now came once a week to take her pulse, depress her tongue and poke or stroke the protuberance that used to be her belly. Giving it a farewell pat he turned, on his last visit, to Mrs. Edgeworth and proclaimed: “It will come on time, Elspeth. Of course it’s no great accomplishment to predict the exit day when the entry point, so to speak, has been so accurately documented.” Being a woman of the world, Elspeth did not blush, much. Then seeing the entreaty in Lily’s eyes, he said for all to hear: “A son: one week: on the fourteenth most probably.”

      Unbeknownst to Dr. Hackney, his visits were invariably followed by the arrival, through the back-garden gate, of Elsie Crampton, the regional midwife. Elsie’s examination was more probing, inquisitive and jovial than the good physician’s. Lucille and Elspeth followed her in, trailed by her assistant, a buxom, overblown Irish girl named Maureen, who had recently delivered a son to the skeptical world. The midwife’s smile was lop-sided (she had teeth only on the left side) but generous, and Lily felt strangely comforted in her presence, even though her confinement in this canopied, velveteened chamber seemed out of tune with the raw germination inside her. Mrs. Crampton held her hand, talked to her, and gave her instructions for the ordeal of the birthing day.

      “It’s gonna be a bit late, I think,” she announced to the curious assembly. “About the twenty-first or twenty-second, I’d say. Which means she’s gonna be a stubborn little cuss, but a genuine beauty.”

      The women of the chorus agreed.

      “On my birthday?” Lily said, looking at Lucille “Could be, dearie, but I wouldn’t pray too hard for it, ‘cause the longer you stay penned up here the paler and weaker you get. I don’t believe in all this lying-in stuff.”

      Lily didn’t pray but she hoped, all the same. The fifteenth passed with no signs of the contractions she’d been alerted to. Dr. Hackney arrived for his weekly check, feigned puzzlement, let his fingers linger affectionately on Lily’s pumpkin bulge, and muttered to Mrs. Edgeworth at the door: “No question: I’ll be back before the night’s over.”

      In the early hours of the morning of June 21, the first spasm struck. Lily was startled by its severity, and not a little frightened. She had been well-prepared for the sequence of calamities to follow: Lucille was the middle child of a family of thirteen and reported graphically upon the numerous, horrific births she claimed to have witnessed. Mrs. Crampton had described to her in clinical terms the necessity of these discomforts and added the assurance that “when you see the babe you’ll have already forgotten the pain.” Cold comfort that was here in a stranger’s house in a foreign town with her belly squeezing her stomach into her throat and her bowels into her spine. She gritted her teeth and let the aftershocks knit their way through her flesh; she would not cry out. When the third contraction gripped and held, Lily reached over to pull the bell-cord.

      In the blackness of her pain, Lily was aware that she was surrounded by women. Their faces, their detached, consoling hands floated intermittently above her: Mrs. Edgeworth trying to mask her anguish, Mrs. Crampton too busy to register feeling, Maureen impassively efficient, Lucille agog with fright and devotion. Just after sunrise her body, now totally outside her control, gave one last convulsive heave and banished the little beast forever to the far outports of air, space, time and consanguinity. The pain was now bearable; she released her grip on Lucille’s hand and could feel instead the midwife’s fingers stretching, pulling, yielding.

      There was a smack like the crack of a stick, followed by a stuttering wawl that rose to a series of well-defined shrieks before settling into the regular breathing and occasional gurglings of a healthy newborn. “It’s a girl,” said Mrs. Crampton between commands.

      “How wonderful!” said Mrs. Edgeworth, almost hiding her disappointment.

      Moments later, the baby – wiped clean, its umbilical cord neatly knotted – was laid beside Lily on the linen sheet. On the canopy overhead she noted the cherubs and the lambs and the crenellated walls in the distance. Then she gazed across at the child curling in the arch of her shoulder and breast. The eyes peering back were her own.

      You’ve given me great pain, she thought, as its miniature mouth nudged towards the expectant nipple, but you needed the pain to separate yourself from me, to put something between us, to be yourself. Now I can hold you, love you, and give you your name. And she did, saying the syllables in a low murmur over and over as sleep closed in. Soon after, she did not feel her daughter being gently extracted from a mother’s grip.

      When Lily woke it was afternoon, of what day she didn’t know. She was fevered and ached all over. She reached for the baby. It wasn’t there. In the hazy light allowed by the curtain, she could make the form of Maureen seated in the armchair across the room. Her blouse was open with one puffed breast shining and stiff-nippled and the other hidden behind the head of the suckling child. The noise of its feeding filled the room.

      “Now СКАЧАТЬ