Elizabeth and After (17 page)

He hadn’t shaved for a long time and his face had been full of anger but when he saw William and Elizabeth the scowl disappeared and his face smoothed out, the way William’s had when he went down to the creek. While the chicken found a corner and sank into the mud, William’s father stood in front of them, wiping his hands on his overalls. Now Elizabeth could see he had William’s silky eyes. A flattened variation of the same triangular nose. The thick lips that curled a bit unevenly when he smiled. He rubbed his bloody hand across the grey stubble on his jaw as if this might make him clean-shaven for the unexpected guests.

When he took his hand away the scowl was back and his eyebrows, bushier than William’s and grey instead of blond, were furrowed together.

“We were passing by,” William said.

The old man nodded his head slowly up and down as if to communicate to the as yet unintroduced Elizabeth the entire injustice of the situation—the situation in which a younger version of himself was driving about the county with a beautiful girl at his side and nothing better to do than drop in on his father while he, the father, long past driving about with girls beautiful or otherwise, with nothing to look forward to except filling out the date of the tombstone that was waiting for him, was chasing headless chickens across a stinking yard.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said to Elizabeth.
“I
guess you can see what we’re having for dinner.”

That night, in a field that smelled of new grass and apple blossoms, Elizabeth would take sprigs from a lilac bush and decorate William’s hair and her own. Then her prince did what
fairy-tale princes sometimes do: he unlocked his lady’s dress, he offered her more flowers, and under a blue velvet sky with a low-hanging moon, he took her down onto the sweet cool ground and gave her little explosions and tears of pain.

“Two months later I discovered I was pregnant and that was when I knew my life as a princess was over.”

And that was how the fairy tale ended the afternoon the Ladies of the Inner Circle—along with Adam in the basement—listened to the story of how the woman considered to be the most beautiful, the most mysterious, the most out-of-place in the whole township, mistook a McKelvey for her prince.

Leaving the Goldsmith house, Elizabeth was in a state of shock, hardly able to believe that she’d said so much. At the door, Dorothy hugged her tightly before moving off. Elizabeth went to the supermarket, then started home. It was snowing, one of those gritty twilight December snows where the grey sky and landscape blend together and as you drive the snow comes at you from every direction. Halfway home the feelings overcame her and she had to pull over to the side of the road to cry. Nothing to go back to, no way forward: she’d known for years but telling the story had made it real. The prospect of continuing home to McKelvey was unbearable. Yet she couldn’t turn back. The school would be locked, her mother had long since moved from Kingston to Chicago, she hadn’t kept in touch with a single friend from Kingston, she didn’t even have enough cash to go to a hotel.

In between bouts of sobbing she looked across the road and saw a low-slung cinderblock structure with a metal roof. McKelvey had told her its inspiring story: the small building
had been intended as an auto-repair shop. The day it was finished the man who built it put his own car inside, rolled down his windows and ran the motor until the gas ran out.

Elizabeth imagined herself in such a car, being found slumped over the wheel. Beside her would be her father’s briefcase full of papers waiting to be marked; in the trunk her groceries would be slowly freezing. McKelvey would be the one to lift her out of the car. He would feel that was his job. She imagined him carrying her through the falling snow to his truck. The cold hitting her. Her eyes opening as she discovered that she’d failed to die. “Always figured you’d try something like this,” McKelvey would say. “Can’t say I blame you.”

At the thought of this final injustice, Elizabeth wiped her eyes and started driving again. When she got home McKelvey would be sitting at the kitchen table methodically working his way through a crossword puzzle. Now Elizabeth remembered that one of the cattle had got pregnant out of season and might have given birth that afternoon. Jane Eyre, her name was. There were so few cows that Elizabeth had given them all names. There were the two Janes—Eyre and Austen—Anna Karenina, Natasha from
War and Peace
, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the Brontë sisters. Nancy from
Oliver Twist
had been sold last year to pay the taxes, though Oliver himself, the orphan bull, was still in residence. Elizabeth wanted to be home when Jane Eyre’s calf was born—what she most loved about the farm were the births, the blinding natal energy when the cows and ewes allowed her in the midst of their miraculous creations. Let it be tonight, she prayed, driving faster; let it be tonight, in the perfect silence of the falling snow.

But that night there was only Elizabeth, late, marking papers at the kitchen table. A kerosene lamp, just for the glow of it,
flickering over the stained oak. She was looking at the flame, passing her life through it like a knife. She was in the kitchen weighing her life against the flame and she could hear her bed creaking with McKelvey’s weight as he turned.

She was looking into the flame and she was watching her futures melt into each other as she invented the lives she might live. For example, only two months ago in Toronto she had gone to meet her mother and Lionel Meyers. The trip, the long weekend at the Windsor Arms, the theatre tickets and dinners were all courtesy of the smoked-meat king. One afternoon her mother had insisted on taking her shopping and bought her a long wool coat, tight leather gloves that would surely split the moment they touched a snow shovel, a pair of shoes she would seldom have occasion to wear. That evening they went to a fancy Italian restaurant near the hotel. “This is La Scala,” her mother announced as they entered, “restaurant of the stars.” They were seated at a table that had, following Lionel Meyers’ request, an unimpeded but discreet view of the entrance. When they received the menus—embossed thick paper with elaborate calligraphy—her mother insisted on going through it from top to bottom, explaining each of the items as though Elizabeth were still eight years old. When the waiter came Elizabeth had to be presented.

“We wanted you to meet my daughter, Elizabeth.”

“A pleasure, signorina.”

“She is named after a very famous person, you know.”

“Si
. Elizabeth Taylor. She was here just two nights ago. What a pity you missed her. Would you like the same wine she had?”

“No thank you,” Elizabeth’s mother said. “What I’d like, if you could recommend, is something you personally are familiar with, something from your own village or town.”

The waiter leaned closer. “Uruguay is my home. But when it comes to wine, everyone prefers Italian.”

Staring at her kerosene lamp Elizabeth decided that the waiter’s comment had perfectly summed up her situation: the place she was from—a strange immigrant household in back-street Kingston—was as interesting to the rest of the world as Uruguayan wine. She was going to have to cover herself with a layer of something else. The only question was what. West Gull? Toronto? Chicago? Lillian had made it clear that should she decide to “resume her studies”—a code for leaving McKelvey—she would be welcome to live at the smoked-meat king’s while she attended the famed University of Chicago. Or if she wanted to go elsewhere, his pockets were both deep and willing. Lillian herself had taken on a new veneer: fancy clothes, jewellery, annual trips to Europe with stops in London for theatre, Paris for shopping, Milan for opera. Without ever saying one thing for which she might later be reproached, Lillian Meyers seemed constantly to be asking Elizabeth: Why, if this door is open, won’t you walk through it?

After her first year teaching she’d had the furnace installed. For comfort of course but also to counter the guilt she felt at leaving McKelvey alone to manage while she was spending the days in town. Now the fan switched on—in a few moments the burner would light and the house would begin to vibrate as the furnace heated up. London? Paris? Milan? What would she be there? A tourist worth the exact weight of her pocket book, that item having been supplied by Lionel Meyers. As the hot air came surging out of the vents, she had a sudden image of herself on a dark London street, a lost Dickensian waif stumbling in the mist. Then it came to her that she
wanted,
needed
, that mist to be there—because beneath the mist was an emptiness, the world she had failed to invent for herself.

Elizabeth packed her papers away and blew out the lamp. It was a clear night and the half moon glimmered on the snow, stretched pale broken rectangles of light across the kitchen. Inside, Elizabeth had that grinding feeling these nights sometimes gave her, a dissatisfied self-consuming void that had started after her miscarriage. Not that there was, according to Dr. Boyce, any real reason for her not to conceive again. And certainly she and McKelvey had continued to try. But as hope dried up with the years that passed, she began to feel that with her own doubts and skepticism she had brought down a curse of barrenness on herself. And the tenuous comfort of late night silence would turn to this unwanted raw edge.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1958, just a few weeks after Elizabeth’s testimony. Adam Goldsmith and his mother were in the great front room of the Richardson mansion. The featured theme was jazz, which meant that gold and silver cut-outs of trumpets and saxophones had been strung around the picture mouldings.

“There’s the one I was telling you about,” Flora Goldsmith said to her son. “Shy. Why don’t you go talk to her?”

“Pleased to meet you,” Elizabeth McKelvey said when Adam introduced himself. Slim, gleaming dark hair drawn back in an old-fashioned style to cover her ears, a narrow face with a thin nose arched at the bridge, lips that seemed a little too full for a schoolteacher, beautiful large hazy blue eyes like an undecided summer sky. She was standing to the side of the big hearth, a glass in hand.

“My mother says you come to the Inner Circle meetings. I only visit weekends and holidays, I guess that’s why we haven’t met before.”

“She told me about you,” Elizabeth McKelvey said. “You’re the Kingston accountant. She’s very proud of you.”

Her lips had a way of staying parted after she spoke, as if to signal that her actual words were only the beginning of her message.

“Your suit,” Elizabeth said suddenly in a strict schoolmistress voice that made Adam think he must have something hideous spilled on his pants. “It’s the same colour as my dress. And your eyes. They match mine, too.”

At that point Luke Richardson slid smoothly between Adam and Elizabeth like a shark separating his prey from some vegetarian pretender. He was in his early twenties, full of his own gas and eager to swallow a match.

Adam was forced to listen as Luke Richardson explained to Elizabeth the histories of all the people whose photographs adorned the great hearth. But even afflicted with the first stirrings of jealousy, Adam could see Elizabeth wore the stiffly attentive expression women use when they need to endure a man’s monologue. Then McKelvey appeared. Adam saw a light go on in her face and a feeling of despair swept through him so heavy and unexpected he had to remind himself Elizabeth was married. Yet as he backed away he began to convince himself that in turning towards McKelvey, Elizabeth had also turned her face towards the hearth, that the apparent glow of her response had been nothing but reflected firelight.

The next week, while trying to investigate an entirely different topic, Adam discovered an article in
The New England Journal of Medicine
that analyzed infatuation as a chemical event. It seemed that the initial sighting of the to-be-beloved
causes certain chemical and hormonal reactions, creating various new substances that form what people call love; this love fluid bathes vulnerable and crucial brain cells, setting up neural pathways and synapses that repeat the process predictably each time the newly beloved reappears or is mentioned. In the absence of further love production, the original crop lasts an average of two years. Unless, of course, owing to particular and as yet imperfectly understood circumstances, obsession develops; in such cases, the troika of eminently qualified researchers cautioned, symptoms such as criminal behaviour and psychotic outbreak may occur.

A
DAM
G
OLDSMITH AT TWENTY-SEVEN:
a tall young man slightly awkward in his movements as though he hadn’t yet committed himself to inhabiting his current body, always carefully dressed, sandy hair growing darker every year, thick eyebrows tipped with blond in the summer, a pale face marked by a soft mouth always ready to smile or offer a courtesy. Something childish about that mouth, the way before speaking a brief quivering of his lips telegraphs an inner hesitation. Some thought his brain must have stripped its gears in the days when he spoke in tongues. His eyes gave the same impression—they didn’t so much look at things as light on them, blue butterflies poised for flight. Those pale looks, the tic that invaded every aspect of his body and speech, made people feel safe with Adam. Especially people like the Ladies of the Inner Circle. Shy but pleasant, they called him. Because with his hesitant looks, his tended clothes, his courtesy, Adam Goldsmith had always been
the kind of boy who pleased. Not only elderly ladies but also higher-ups and politicians able to appreciate a man with deference, competence and unfailing modest politeness. In his few years at the Kingston tax department, he had already received three promotions and was putting aside money for his graduate degree in economics.

As might be expected Adam had a head for numbers. Take twenty-seven: 27=3×3×3=3 cubed. Adam had last been a cube—2×2×2—at eight years old. He’d next be a cube—4×4×4—at sixty-four. After that he could anticipate being 5×5×5—125 years old. But even the prospect of unforseen medical advances was unlikely to persuade an accountant he’d live that long. So Adam told himself life might be made up of a relatively large number of years—seventy or eighty—but all those years came down to only four cubes plus some loose change and he had just started on his fourth. Not to sound the alarm but … In addition, the fact that twenty-seven was three cubed had a special significance because three was the age when according to his mother his piercing cry had inspired the collision that had inspired the conception of Elizabeth McKelvey, whose testimony he had heard at the age of twenty-seven and whose presence at the Richardson New Year’s bash had thrown him into turmoil.