Elizabeth and After (18 page)

After the party he returned to his routine. Kingston in January meant slogging to and from work through ever-increasing mounds of snow, occasional evenings drinking and playing bridge with other bachelors who worked for the city, endless dark hours reading the stacks of books he now found so uninteresting that he’d end up outside again, restlessly pacing Kingston’s streets to exhaust himself enough for sleep.

Late one January night when Adam still felt restless despite walking Princess Street until it became Highway 2, he sat
down to force himself to think through his problem. He took out a sheet of paper and printed two words:

The problem was the message: either the message Elizabeth had actually been sending him or the message he had wanted to receive. Adam closed his eyes and ran his remembered movie of the New Year’s party. He wrote:

Now that he had the list of scenes, Adam could see the drama. He even knew its title:

Standing next to Elizabeth, listening to what he’d thought to be her words of encouragement and staring avidly at her mouth—these might have been moments from a latter-day Shakespearean romance. Even having to check his pants for spills could have been a comic Freudian sign of future intimacies. Elizabeth’s wooden response to Luke had accelerated these hopes. But then there was the arrival of the husband. Adam closed his eyes, saw again McKelvey’s flushed wide face, his undone jacket and sloping belly. His big hand on
Elizabeth’s arm and the way Elizabeth had turned to him, her eyes filled with some kind of marital adoration or—an uncertain alternative—the reflection from the fire.

For this uncertainty, Adam now saw, he had spent hours every night ploughing through the snow and slush of Kingston. Yet having listed the scenes, he recognized the obvious: for weeks he had been concentrating on the opening and middle instead of the conclusive and penultimate scene: 5. Husband arrives.

Elizabeth McKelvey was
married
.

The next morning Adam abused his position in the city tax department to make sure the records of her marriage were in order, to check over her and her husband’s tax returns, to discover that Elizabeth’s maiden name was Glade and that she had been born September 12, 1933, in the maternity ward of the Kingston General Hospital. While he was being irresponsible and possibly even a criminal, Adam ascertained that William McKelvey’s income-tax return—a pitiful testament to his uselessness—had been prepared by Elizabeth. He also found out some things about himself:

What Adam might have done in the absence of external events is impossible to know. Thrown off his prissy clothes and joined Kingston’s small club of beatniks and naturalists? Quit his job and used his savings to take a trip around the world? Gone into therapy and ended up in Vienna training to be a Jungian analyst? Compared to his real life, each of these options had its attractions. But external events are never absent
for long. One wintry Monday Luke Richardson phoned with the news that Flora Goldsmith had been found by the mailman sitting dead in her living room.

That evening Luke met Adam at the West Gull Funeral Home and helped him make the arrangements. On the morning of the funeral he showed up at Adam’s to instruct the caterers. Afterwards he stayed with Adam until everyone had left, then invited him to come sleep at his house since, “after everything, you might find it hard to be alone.”

“I’m fine here,” Adam said. They were in the kitchen. The mourners had drawn the chairs into a circle and Luke was sitting across from Adam, twirling the ice in his glass.

“You know I’ve taken over the dealership,” Luke said.

“I heard. Congratulations.”

“You know,” Luke said, “I’ve always admired you, Adam. I always knew you’d turn into something. And I always knew I’d stay here. And I would think Adam Goldsmith, someone like Adam Goldsmith, shouldn’t end up in the city working for someone else. Adam Goldsmith shouldn’t be leaving West Gull.”

Ever since Luke’s phone call Adam had been amazed it was Luke who was shepherding him through this situation, Luke who had been able to take charge and arrange everything, Luke Richardson who was four years younger than him and not so long ago had been sitting on top of him preparing to smash his fists into his nose.

“What I was thinking,” Luke said, “was that you could do the accounts for the dealership. I’ll start you at whatever you’re getting in Kingston plus ten per cent of the profits. If it works out after a year, we can negotiate a raise plus I’ll make you a one-third partner. Adam, I’ve had my eye on you for a long time. I know you don’t like me much but sometimes the most
important thing is to be honest. Let’s face it, Adam, I’ve got everything you don’t. And vice versa. Between us—what do you say? Take as long as you like to think it over.”

At twenty-seven Adam Goldsmith had not had the opportunity to make a lot of decisions. But as Luke spoke he had been thinking about some of his colleagues in the tax office, men ten or twenty years older than him and on their way through their last cube to retirement and death, men with their stooped backs, their tax-department shuffle, their endless lunchtime games of cards, their afternoon coffee-break jelly-filled doughnuts to kill the boredom, the way they lined up at the door waiting for the hour so they could punch out with a clear conscience.

Adam Goldsmith had left West Gull as a timid young teenager mostly remembered for his fits of possession. When he returned at twenty-seven, he was suddenly a member of the town’s elite—an educated businessman and homeowner with a stake in West Gull’s most prominent commercial landmark: Richardson’s New & Used Pontiac GM. He was also, as Luke Richardson put it, “West Gull’s most eligible bachelor—the only male between twenty-five and forty who has never been married, has no bastard children and isn’t on welfare.” The proof: during his first month home he was twice invited to dinner by the new doctor, Albert Knight, the proud father of a certain Maureen Knight who was “taking a year off” after graduating from McGill in French. On both occasions Maureen was seated opposite Adam, smiling awkwardly, like a single mussel placed on a large platter and destined for the invited guest. From Mrs. Elspeth Knight flowed a constant stream of commentary about Maureen’s amazing accomplishments in the domains of academe and housekeeping, and
despite Dr. Knight’s efforts to make it appear the dinner signalled only the routine association between two West Gull professionals, Adam felt Maureen’s embarrassed silence as a reprimand. She had mousy brown hair, small pleasant features slightly marred by close-set eyes and an odd anxious smile. Whenever Adam spoke to her that anxious smile came on and she answered him in a low-pitched distant voice that sounded as though her real brain and self were hiding behind a wall and spying on them.

Adam knew where his duty lay. As West Gull’s most and only eligible bachelor, he would surely respond to this situation by picking up the telephone and asking Maureen to the movies. After that would come a gradually accelerating series of engagements leading to the much desired and inevitable marriage of two people who were each other’s only alternative. Yet the more inevitable and transparent this future became, the more stubbornly Adam balked.

One afternoon he was in his office when the telephone began to ring. He had been thinking about Maureen Knight and was sure this call would be another invitation for dinner. He looked from his office into the showroom. The salesmen were out, Luke was in Kingston. No one would know if he simply let the phone ring until it stopped. As the ringing continued he realized that never before had he had someone in his power, someone whose heart was beating wildly at the prospect of hearing his voice. His own heart began to race and overwhelmed with a peculiar mixture of triumph and guilt, Adam picked up the receiver.

“I’ve wanted to say how sorry I am about your mother. I met her only a few times but she struck me as a very remarkable woman.” Eventually Adam would learn Elizabeth always started her conversations this way, in the middle and without
warning. “How are you finding it to be back home? Do you miss Kingston?”

“Not much,” Adam managed. Remembering Kingston was Elizabeth’s home town, he asked her the same question. There was a silence he wondered how to interpret. Could she have guessed he had looked up her birth certificate?

“We’re not exactly
Rome
here,” Adam said, “but as you know my mother had a lot of books. I hope you and your husband will feel free to come and help yourselves.”

“I’ll tell William,” she said dryly and they both laughed. “In fact, books were the other reason I was calling. The roads department is moving out of the township office; it would make a perfect place for a library. The senator is donating the money to refit the office and he’s also agreed to be chairman of the library committee as long as he doesn’t have to come to meetings. You’ll be the treasurer, that’s the hard part. Mrs. Farnham is secretary. First meeting isn’t until August but I thought I’d let you know now in case you hear from the senator. Aside from him, you’re the main donor.”

Elizabeth’s voice broke into a laugh. Adam tensed. “You’re the accountant. You must know how to hide these things. I just didn’t want the senator to think he was alone.” She hung up—the way he would learn was also her habit—in what should have been the middle but for Elizabeth was the end. Adam stood up from his desk. On the black arm of the receiver he could see the sweat marks left by his fingers.

Adam’s peculiar bachelor status had not escaped Elizabeth’s notice. “They say it’s marry or burn,” McKelvey commented, after that first New Year’s Eve when Elizabeth asked him about Adam, “but I don’t see any signs of smoke damage on his pants.”

At that particular moment they were sitting at the kitchen table, McKelvey with his crossword puzzle and Elizabeth with her battered copy of
Pride and Prejudice
, which she was planning to begin reading to her class.

“That’s a nice way to put it,” Elizabeth said. “I liked Adam Goldsmith. He’s the only man in West Gull whose face isn’t covered in hockey scars.” She opened her novel and read aloud: “ ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ ”

“Like I said,” McKelvey repeated, “marry or burn.”

Elizabeth looked out the window through the falling snow to the barn. A year or possibly three years ago, she would have poured herself another cup of coffee and then explained at length to McKelvey that the two sentences were entirely different. Jane Austen, she would have claimed, was proclaiming a sociological truth—though it had an individual application. McKelvey’s crude but accurate expression, the opposite. In a nasty mood she might even have gone on to say—or at least to think—that marry
and
burn was more or less what had happened to them. Finally, had she been feeling positively vitriolic, she might have pointed out that in
Pride and Prejudice
, Elizabeth had gone on to marry Mr. Darcy, whereas she had married Mr. McKelvey.

Shocked at her own disloyal thoughts, Elizabeth glanced across the table. McKelvey had put down his newspaper and was looking at her. Elizabeth softened. Mr. Darcy would never have married a girl whose Galician-Jewish father had named her after a princess. Mr. Darcy would never have courted that girl he would never have married by taking her to a cemetery. Mr. Darcy would have spent his life trapped in a book, doing only predictable things that could be described in long well-formed sentences.

“You’ve got that killer look,” McKelvey said. “Your students must have nightmares.”

“Thanks.”

McKelvey leaned back in his chair, his eyes still on hers and Elizabeth knew he was thinking, as was she, that if there was a child things would be different.

“I was going back to the maple bush to check the rabbit snares before lunch,” McKelvey said. He got up, moved heavily towards the door where his coat was hanging.

“I’ll make pancakes,” Elizabeth said, knowing he would like that. “I’m in the pancake mood.”

When she called Adam about the library she thought how peculiar it was that he should seem so nervous about the senator. A couple of months later she was given the duty of organizing West Gull Elementary’s annual careers day. The participants were almost always distinguished former students who had gone on to successful careers in nearby cities, and of course the star of these occasions was invariably Senator Merriwell Richardson.

“Now here’s your chance to meet the senator,” she began. Adam coughed and Elizabeth found herself wondering what it was about this Adam Goldsmith—an accountant and a car salesman, after all, not a piano tuner or a harpsichordist—that made him so decorous and hesitant that his nervous system stammered.

“The senator, the library,” she reminded him.

It was an April Saturday morning and she was calling from her kitchen. The snow had finally melted and her lawn was a sodden brown, sloping down to the muddy driveway. McKelvey was over at Gerald Boyce’s helping out on some project that would require coming home at suppertime with a case of beer in his belly and another cradled in his arms.

“Yes, the library, an excellent project,” Adam said.

“This is a different favour,” Elizabeth said, “I wanted to ask you for careers day at the elementary. We’ve never had an accountant.”

It occurred to Elizabeth she shouldn’t be telephoning Adam. The other men she’d asked had simply checked their schedules and given her a quick answer. Perhaps Adam, with his mother’s death and this move back to West Gull, was having a nervous breakdown.