Elizabeth and After (15 page)

“Thank God. It was the first time I ever heard someone talk about her life as though it was something real, actually being lived every moment, and not a Sunday school lesson.” At first what caught him was her voice. Between the thunking of the logs and his own panting he couldn’t even hear her
actual words. Until he found himself sitting on one of the stumps, mesmerized by the bittersweet honey of her voice.

“My parents had developed a fascination with British royalty, which is why they named me after a princess. Then Edward VIII abdicated to marry the Duchess of Windsor and George VI became king, putting my princess, as my parents always called her, in line to be queen.

“As I grew older I began to realize that the king was everywhere. On stamps. On money. And when I went to school I saw the king’s picture in every classroom. Of course I thought he must be looking directly at me, keeping track of me just as I was keeping track of him.”

She had started by explaining why her parents had named her after Princess Elizabeth and by the time Adam was really listening she was up to 1951, the year Princess Elizabeth—the British one—came to Canada. Elizabeth recounted how she and her parents gave this royal tour all the attention due a famous family member travelling through the region. Articles in the newspaper were cut out and read aloud. The best ones were scotch-taped to the kitchen wall. Sometimes certain sentences were underlined.
The Princess was in good spirits despite the fact that she has been on the train 23 consecutive days
. Or,
Elementary school students from Sudbury lined the track for two and a half miles in anticipation of the Princess’s arrival
. Louis Glade, the acknowledged family master of protocol, was in charge of the underlining. He also initialled each clipping with a tiny italic flourish in the upper right-hand corner.

As the clippings took over the kitchen walls, Elizabeth’s mother began to tease Louis Glade about his royal obsession. Then one Friday night when he had carved the chicken and had in front of him a crystal glass filled with the sickly sweet
red wine that was dispensed once a week from a matching crystal decanter—fortunately he was no longer alive when scientists discovered that the lead contained in crystal might have brought down the Roman Empire—Louis Glade made his speech.

“If I may bring up such a subject on the Sabbath”—when about to launch an attack Louis Glade always liked to establish that he had the floor—“I understand I am being reprimanded for my overenthusiastic attitude regarding the British royal family. Am I correct?”

“The chicken is getting cold.”

“Forget it,” Louis Glade said and sat down. What he meant them to forget was unknown. It was October 18—the day Princess Elizabeth had toured an egg-processing plant in Sarnia. Louis was seated behind a mound of carved chicken. In the bright light of the Sabbath candles, his cheeks looked slightly drained, his forehead clammy. He had let go of his glass. Elizabeth was still trying to decide what she was meant to forget when she realized that Louis Glade was the one doing the forgetting. Dr. Blum later told them he had probably begun to lose consciousness even while he was standing. Certainly by the time he uttered his final words he would have known he was dying. That was the way Elizabeth always remembered her father. Shirt faultlessly white, cuffs and cufflinks shot from his blue Sabbath blazer, leaning forward, his neck corded, his eyes closed, his long fingers clutching at the carved walnut arms of his dining chair.

The next year King George VI also died unexpectedly. Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth Glade was by then twenty years old and in her second year at Queen’s University. On the morning of the new queens coronation address, which was scheduled to hit the Canadian airwaves at
six a.m., Eastern Standard Time, Elizabeth set her alarm clock for five-thirty. Groggily she got up in the dark, wrapped herself in the pink quilted housecoat she’d received for her sixteenth birthday and set out for the kitchen to make coffee. There she found her mother, dressed in the black suit she had used for her husband’s funeral, eating breakfast on her yellow rose wedding china. After the broadcast Lillian said that she had been thinking: life wasn’t forever; it was time to begin finding joy in the present.

To set an example she made French toast out of white bread and poured on generous helpings of maple syrup. At seven o’clock that evening a man who radiated money showed up at the door. His name was Lionel Meyers and he told Elizabeth he was from the meat business in Chicago.

Several months after her mother’s declaration Elizabeth was in a Queen’s University cafeteria, drinking coffee from a cracked white porcelain mug and writing an essay on the thorny question of Henry II’s contribution to the British legal system. But though she had surrounded her lined notepad with numerous reference books and had a list of quotations ready to insert at critical moments, her mind’s eye was filled with pictures of Robin Hood.

Question: If England was so proud of its legal system, why was a thief, Robin Hood, its most beloved symbol of justice?

“Because Robin Hood is more interesting,” said a young man who was standing opposite her.

She flushed. But if you have the tendency to speak aloud when you mean to think silently, you should expect such intercessions.

“We could go for a walk,” he said.

William McKelvey was in a couple of her classes and she’d met him several times at parties, the coffeeshop where students
often went in groups, even the Royal Tavern where a few fellow escapees from Early Medieval British History would occasionally pass a Friday evening. McKelvey was older: one of the “mature students” who had gone to war instead of finishing high school and ended up in university years later on a Veteran’s Scholarship. Like most of the ex-soldiers he seemed surrounded by an almost visible shell, beneath which Elizabeth had always suspected there must be a tough little knot formed by various unthinkable experiences.

But where the other ex-soldiers appeared mature and certain of what they were doing, McKelvey gave off a vaguely Bohemian air. His flannels bagged at the knees, his blazer strained across his broad back, and the two strands of his tie appeared to have divorced. All winter he’d worn a shapeless navy overcoat that might as well have been made from a blanket and his blond uncut hair stuck out like so many clumps of straw from beneath his red toque. Once Elizabeth and a girlfriend had thrown snowballs at the red toque. McKelvey had laughed and the three of them had ended up drinking hot chocolate and eating fries at Morrison’s, a downtown eatery that served the kind of food and clientele the Glade family had always avoided.

“When William suggested a walk I was glad to go. I wasn’t looking for a husband—I had plans to be a teacher. Anyway, I’d never even had a boyfriend, unless you count Herman Bowles in Grade Seven, who wasn’t exactly my boyfriend but we liked each other and everyone knew it. In Grade Eight we were both invited to Sarah Rosen’s party with dancing in the basement. We were sent into the closet to kiss. He put his hand on my chest and I was so scared that I laughed. After that he was afraid of me and I didn’t know what to do. In Grade
Nine we went to different schools and I haven’t seen him since. But then I gave up, there was no one my father would have approved of. But I didn’t mind William and I wanted to get out of that cafeteria and away from worrying about the foundations of the British legal system.”

Soon they had crossed the campus and were at the lakeshore. The wind was from the south, warm, full of foreign thoughts and unknown adventures. McKelvey offered a cigarette, then lit up with the kind of sigh still permissible in those prehistoric times.

Crocuses and bluebells had already flowered in the gardens edging the lake, and from the budding branches of nearby maples the gently piercing cries of red-winged blackbirds and evening grosbeaks could be heard.

“This place drives me crazy,” McKelvey said.

“We could sit somewhere else.”

“This city, I mean. Sometimes I just wish I was in a car, driving.”

She was at a comfortable distance from him on the bench, half turned towards him, looking at his hands; they were broad and muscular, the skin rough, the nails bitten to the quick. Bitten nails give you away, her mother had once told her.

He stood up. Elizabeth was unsure if he was stretching, getting into position for a speech or on his way back to the library. When he started walking she followed along. Without speaking they wandered along King Street, then cut across to Princess. He took her not to the Royal, where all the students went, but to a restaurant where he ordered fish and chips and half a litre of red wine.

They drank the first half-litre and ordered another. William had hardly spoken. The wine had made his lips fuller
and darker and Elizabeth kept watching the way, after he put his glass down, they glistened and caught the light. She felt drunk. Maybe the wind had got hold of her after all. Waiting for the new wine she took one of his cigarettes and started talking about her father.

“You can’t meet him,” she began. It seemed a clever way to introduce Louis Glade’s current situation—i.e., dead—but as she spoke she realized William McKelvey would think she meant he was not the right sort of person to bring home. By the time she corrected herself on this account, described the sudden circumstances of Louis Glade’s passing, then moved back to recapitulate the royal tour of 1951 and her own family’s peculiar and personal relationship to the British monarchy, she required a second cigarette.

The faster she talked, the dryer grew her throat and the more she had to drink; and the more she drank the more clearly she could see William McKelvey’s face. Just as an hour in front of the mirror gradually draws you into the topography of your own features, so did an hour of non-stop babbling to William McKelvey draw her into his. Which was peculiar, she thought even while she went on, because although she was the one doing the talking, he was the one she was getting to know.

His dirty blond hair, a bit too long, was roughly parted on one side. A cowlick which he kept pushing back hung over his forehead and his eyes had turned a shimmering silky brown. She had developed no romantic intentions as yet but she was already thinking she had never known, or at least never noticed, anyone whose eyes shone in this particular way. With the wine, she now saw that the whole set of his mouth; the mysterious unspeakable grimness she had attributed to the war had smoothed away. Suddenly he was just like any other young man. Except for those big hands that looked like they
should belong to a labourer, not a university student. The bitten nails that made her feel safe. The voice, though he hardly spoke, that lacked the supercilious tones of the other Queen’s boys she’d met.

“Later I understood that what had attracted me to McKelvey was everything that was missing: the blazer-flannel uniform, the condescending voice, the calm would-be ruling-class assurance the other students exuded as though it were a perfume they showered in each morning. That perfume, that assurance, was what my father, Louis, had tried to invent for himself and his family. But what did it do for him? Turned him into a ridiculous royalty-worshipping parody of some imaginary aristocracy; just remembering him drove my mother into the arms of her Chicago meat king. What attracted me to McKelvey, I finally understood, was that he was strong enough to be nothing but himself—a man with silky eyes, a suicide tie, big comfortable hands, a way of mocking the pretensions of others that made me feel we shared something.”

The bill came. McKelvey stood up and, as though he knew how dizzy and unsteady she felt, came to her side of the table and casually took her arm, helping her to her feet.

That gesture was important. She came to interpret it and its occasional successors to mean that despite everything, beneath everything, or possibly just beside everything, he was a gentleman and he understood her. Ideas like these, especially the idea that you are understood, can take years to lose. Although certain ideas, once lost, can never be regained. But in the end Elizabeth would have said being understood was never the point. What you hope for is an acceptable mix of
comfort and passion. In the end Elizabeth would have also said that what you hope for is not the point. It’s what you do with what you have. Unless it’s throwing what you have away and not having anything.

Outside it was dark and the wind off the lake had turned cold. Adjusting her coat, Elizabeth staggered slightly and it seemed natural for her to slide her hand into the crook of William’s arm.

William was lighting a new cigarette as though her hand weren’t there. Again she found this infinitely tactful because she had meant only to be holding herself steady. The cloth of his navy coat was surprisingly rough. She squeezed her hand around it, running into his arm which felt thick and solid. They started walking. She kept her hand in place, letting it be pressed between his arm and his side, letting the whole length of her arm sometimes rest against his as he matched his stride to hers.

When they got back to the cafeteria it was locked. She had taken her hand away at the door, a gesture she’d been planning for a few minutes, and now they stood, separated, looking in the dark windows.

“Sorry,” William McKelvey said.

“It’s not your fault.” She could see their reflections. They looked like a couple.

“I could walk you home,” he offered.

“Eventually we’re in front of my house. My mother is off in Chicago so the curtains are closed, the hall light off. I feel stunned and get ready to invite him in because the idea of him leaving makes me feel confused. But William just says ‘Goodnight,’ puts his hand on my shoulder, turns and strides away.

“Unlocking the door I already have a new theory: the reason William McKelvey seems so substantial is that he is alive, flesh and blood, whereas the man I’m used to, my father, is just a ghost.”

She sat at the kitchen table drinking her tea. On a piece of paper listing housework to be done before her mother’s return, she drew a picture of a giant bed in the shape of a sandwich. The bed was tilted forward. She gave it pillows that looked like mustard bottles. She drew the heads of her mother and Lionel Meyers on the pillows. They were smiling. They were in the kingdom of smoked meat and spiced salami; so long as their supply of cola and chips lasted, they would be happy.