Elizabeth rose. She walked down the long aisle of the church and out into the street. The sun was so fiery it blinded her for a moment. She stood at the top of the steps, waiting until she could see them. The door behind her opened. It opened again and again. The Presbyterian Girls’ Club had all come with her.
She had, they said, a pride like summer. She rode horseback, learned Latin and also Greek, which her father had never studied. One winter day she sat with all her ladies in the park, under an oak, under a canopy, stitching with her long, beautiful, white fingers. If the other ladies were cold, if they wished to be inside, they didn’t say so. They sat and sewed together, and one of them sang aloud and the snowflakes flew about the tent like moths. Perhaps Elizabeth was herself cold and wouldn’t admit it, or perhaps, even thin as she was, she was not cold and this would be an even greater feat. There was no way to know which was true.
Perhaps Elizabeth was merely teasing. Her fingers rose and dipped quickly over the cloth. From time to time, she joined her merry voice to the singer’s. She had a strong animal aura, a force. Her spirits were always lively. John Knox denounced her in church for her fiddling and flinging. She and her sister both, he said, were incurably addicted to joyosity.
Her half brother had never been lusty. When he died, some years after her father, long after his own mother, hail the color of fire fell in the city, thunder rolled low and continuous through the air. This was a terrible time. It was her time.
Her father opposed her marriage. It was not marriage itself he opposed; no, he had hoped for that. It was the man. A dangerous radical. An abolitionist. A man who would never earn money. A man who could then take her money. Hadn’t she sat in his court and seen this often enough with her very own eyes?
For a while she was persuaded. When she was strong enough, she rebelled. She insisted that the word obey be stricken from the ceremony. Nor would she change her name. “There is a great deal in a name,” she wrote her girlfriend. “It often signifies much and may involve a great principle. This custom is founded on the principle that white men are lords of all. I cannot acknowledge this principle as just; therefore I cannot bear the name of another.” She meant her first name by this. She meant Elizabeth.
Her family’s power and position went back to the days when Charles I sat on the English throne. Her father was astonishingly wealthy, spectacularly thrifty. He wasted no money on electricity, bathrooms, or telephones. He made small, short-lived exceptions for his youngest daughter. She bought a dress; she took a trip abroad. She was dreadfully spoiled, they said later.
But spinsters are generally thought to be entitled to compensatory trips abroad, and she had reached the age where marriage was unlikely. Once men had come to court her in the cramped parlor. They faltered under the grim gaze of her father. There is no clear evidence that she ever blamed him for this, although there is, of course, the unclear evidence.
She did not get on with her stepmother. “I do not call her mother,” she said. She herself was exactly the kind of woman her father esteemed—quiet, reserved, respectful. Lustless and listless. She got from him her wide beautiful eyes, her sky-colored eyes, her chestnut hair.
When Elizabeth was one year old, her father displayed her, quite naked, to the French ambassadors. They liked what they saw. Negotiations began to betroth her to the Duke of Angoulême, negotiations that foundered later for financial reasons.
She was planning to address the legislature. Her father read it in the paper. He called her into the library and sat with her before the fire. The blue and orange flames wrapped around the logs, whispering into smoke. “I beg you not to do this,” he said. “I beg you not to disgrace me in my old age. I’ll give you the house in Seneca Falls.”
She had been asking for the house for years. “No,” Elizabeth said.
“Then I’ll disinherit you entirely.”
“If you must.”
“Let me hear this speech.”
As he listened his eyes filled with tears. “Surely, you have had a comfortable and happy life,” he cried out. “Everything you could have wanted has been supplied. How can someone so tenderly brought up feel such things? Where did you learn such bitterness?”
“I learnt it here,” she told him. “Here, when I was a child, listening to the women who brought you their injustices.” Her own eyes, fixed on his unhappy face, spilled over. “Myself, I am happy,” she told him. “I have everything. You’ve always loved me. I know this.”
He waited a long time in silence. “You’ve made your points clear,” he said finally. “But I think I can find you even more cruel laws than those you’ve quoted.” Together they reworked the speech. On toward morning, they kissed each other and retired to their bedrooms. She delivered her words to the legislature. “You are your father’s daughter,” the senators told her afterward, gracious if unconvinced. “Today, your father would be proud.”
“Your work is a continual humiliation to me,” he said. “To me, who’s had the respect of my colleagues and my country all my life. You have seven children. Take care of them.” The next time she spoke publicly he made good on his threats and removed her from his will.
“Thank God for a girl,” her mother said when Elizabeth was born. She fell into an exhausted sleep. When she awoke she looked more closely. The baby’s arms and shoulders were thinly dusted with dark hair. She held her eyes tightly shut, and when her mother forced them open, she could find no irises. The doctor was not alarmed. The hair was hypertrichosis, he said. It would disappear. Her eyes were fine. Her father said that she was beautiful.
It took Elizabeth ten days to open her eyes on her own. At the moment she did, it was her mother who was gazing straight into them. They were already violet.
When she was three years old, they attended the silver jubilee for George V. She wore a Parisian dress of organdie. Her father tried to point out the royal ladies. “Look at the King’s horse!” Elizabeth said instead. The first movie she was ever taken to see was The Little Princess with Shirley Temple.
Her father had carried her in his arms. He dressed all in joyous yellow. He held her up for the courtiers to see. When he finally had a son, he rather lost interest. He wrote his will to clarify the order of succession. At this point, he felt no need to legitimize his daughters, although he did recognize their place in line for the throne. He left Elizabeth an annual income of three thousand pounds. And if she ever married without sanction, the will stated, she was to be removed from the line of succession, “as though the said Lady Elizabeth were then dead.”
She never married. Like Penelope, she maintained power by promising to marry first this and then that man; she turned her miserable sex to her advantage. She made an infamous number of these promises. No other woman in history has begun so many engagements and died a maid. “The Queen did fish for men’s souls and had so sweet a bait that no one could escape from her network,” they said at court. She had a strong animal aura.
A muskiness. When she got married for the first time, her father gave her away. She was only seventeen years old and famously beautiful, the last brunette in a world of blondes. Her father was a guest at her third wedding. “This time I hope her dreams come true,” he told the reporters. “I wish her the happiness she so deserves.” He was a guest at her fifth wedding, as well.
Her parents had separated briefly when she was fourteen years old. Her mother, to whom she had always been closer, had an affair with someone on the set; her father took her brother and went home to his parents. Elizabeth may have said that his moving out was no special loss. She has been quoted as having said this.
She never married. She married seven different men. She married once and had seven children. She never married. The rack was in constant use during the latter half of her reign. Unexplained illnesses plagued her. It was the hottest day of the year, a dizzying heat. She went into the barn for Swansea pears. Inexplicably the loft was
cooler than the house. She said she stayed there half an hour in the slatted light, the half coolness. Her father napped inside the house.
“I perceive you think of our father’s death with a calm mind,” her half brother, the new king, noted.
“It was a pleasant family to be in?” the Irish maid was asked. Her name was Bridget, but she was called Maggie by the girls, because they had once had another Irish maid they were fond of and she’d had that name.
“I don’t know how the family was. I got along all right.”
“You never saw anything out of the way?”
“No, sir.”
“You never saw any conflict in the family?”
“No, sir.”
“Never saw the least—any quarreling or anything of that kind?”
“No, sir.”
The half hour between her father settling down for his nap and the discovery of murder may well be the most closely examined half hour in criminal history. The record is quite specific as to the times. When Bridget left the house, she looked at the clock. As she ran, she heard the city hall bell toll. Only eight minutes are unaccounted for.
After the acquittal she changed her name to Lizbeth. “There is one thing that hurts me very much,” she told the papers. “They say I don’t show any grief. They say I don’t cry. They should see me when I am alone.”
Her father died a brutal, furious, famous death. Her father died quietly of a stroke before her sixth wedding. After her father died, she discovered he had reinserted her into his will. She had never doubted that he loved her. She inherited his great fortune, along with her sister. She found a sort of gaiety she’d never had before.
She became a devotee of the stage, often inviting whole casts home for parties, food, and dancing. Her sister was horrified; despite the acquittal they had become a local grotesquerie. The only seemly response was silence, her sister told Lizbeth, who responded to this damp admonition with another party.
The sound of a pipe and tabor floated through the palace. Lord Semphill went looking for the source of the music. He found the queen dancing with Lady Warwick. When she had become queen, she had taken a motto, SEMPER EADEM, it was. ALWAYS THE SAME. This motto had first belonged to her mother.
She noticed Lord Semphill watching her through the drapes. “Your father loved to dance,” he said awkwardly, for he had always been told this. He was embarrassed to be caught spying on her.
“Won’t you come and dance with us?” she asked. She was laughing at him. Why not laugh? She had survived everything and everyone. She held out her arms. Lord Semphill was suddenly deeply moved to see the queen—at her age!—bending and leaping into the air like the flame on a candle, twirling this way and then that, like the tongue in a lively bell.
GO BACK
I spent the first eleven years of my life in Bloomington, Indiana, but I don’t remember it as eleven years. In fact, I couldn’t tell you in what year or in what sequence anything happened, only in what season. It is as if in my mind my whole childhood is collapsed into one crowded year. And me, I grow, I shrink; I am three years old, ten, five; I am eight again and it is summer.
In the summer the tar on the streets turned liquid and bubbled. We popped the bubbles with our shoes on our way to the pool and came home smelling of tar and chlorine. In the evenings we chased fireflies and played long games of Capture the Flag. I was fast and smart and usually came home covered in glory.
The Rabinowitzes, our next-door neighbors, had a brief bat infestation in their upstairs closet. Stevie showed them to me during the day, hanging from the rod, sleeping among Mrs. Rabinowitz’s print dresses. You could see their teeth, and the closet smelled of mothballs. At dusk the bats streamed into the sky through an attic grate, which Mr. Rabinowitz then screened over. You might have thought they were birds, except for the way they shrieked.
Above the Rabinowitzes’ bed hung a star of David made of straw. Mrs. Rabinowitz’s wedding ring was of tin. They came from Germany and spoke with accents. Mrs. Rabinowitz was much calmer than my mother would have been about the bats.
Stevie Rabinowitz was my best friend. He moved in next door when we were both four years old. Stevie could already read. He learned off the sports page. He would come over in the morning for toast and juice and to tell my father the baseball standings. We played Uncle Wiggily and he read both his own cards and mine. When I played with Stevie, we drew cards I never drew with anyone else. After I could read for myself, the cards were ordinary again. But when Stevie read them, Uncle Wiggily said that he would play for the Pirates when he grew up. He went ahead two spaces. I would play for the Dodgers. I would be the first girl to bat leadoff in the majors. I went ahead three spaces. Uncle Wiggily said Stevie would have a baby sister and his parents would pay her all the attention. He went back three spaces. Uncle Wiggily said I was too bossy. I was supposed to go back three spaces, but I wouldn’t.
“Sometimes going back is better,” my mother told me when I complained about it to her. “Sometimes it only looks like you’re losing when really it’s the only way to win.”
Uncle Wiggily said that we would meet movie stars, and in the summer Jayne Mansfield came to the Indianapolis 500. We went to the airport to get her autograph. She signed pictures of herself, dotting the i in Mansfield with a heart. Her husband was furious with her, but it probably didn’t have anything to do with us. She looked like no woman I had ever seen.
In the spring my brother entered the science fair with a project on Euclidean principles in curved space. He took second prize. Spring was the season for jacks and baseball. My father bought an inflatable raft for fishing trips. When I came home from school, it was fully inflated, filling our living room. “How did I get it in here?” my father asked, tickling me under the chin like a cat. “It’s a boat in a bottle. How did I do it, Yvette? How will I get it out again?”
In the winter he bought us skis, although there was nowhere in Indiana to go skiing. One snowy morning I looked outside and saw a blue parrot in the dogwood tree. My mother went out to it and coaxed it onto her finger. We put an ad in the paper, but no one ever called. My own parakeet was an albino who could talk. “Yvette is pretty,” it said. “Pretty, pretty, pretty.” And sometimes, “Yvette, be quiet!”
In the winter we went sledding on Ballentine Hill. When we came inside again, the heat would make our fingers ache. There was an ice storm that closed Elm Heights Elementary for a whole day since no one could keep their footing. I stayed home with my mother and brother and father, as if it were Christmas already.
Uncle Wiggily said the Kinsers’ house would burn down and this happened in the winter. One Sunday morning, my mother answered the door. She was already up, cooking breakfast; I was lying in bed waiting for the house to get warm. I couldn’t hear what she said, but the tone of her voice made me get up and I met my brother in the hallway. The five Kinser children were crying in our kitchen. They were all in their pajamas, their slippers wet with snow, holding toys and books in their laps.
There’d been a fire in Meg’s closet, Barbara, the oldest, said. Barbara found it and then she had to hunt for Meg, who was hiding under her bed and didn’t answer for a long time. And then her mother wouldn’t let her go back and get Tweed.
“Where is the dog?” my father asked.
“She sleeps on the back porch,” said Barbara.
We could hear the sirens coming now. “I think you should wait,” my mother said, but my father went into the snow, his pipe in his mouth, sending streams of smoke around his face. We all watched him from the kitchen window.
He passed the Kinser parents, who were standing in the street watching for the fire trucks. They spoke to him briefly. The Kinser adults didn’t like my father, who didn’t go to church. The rest of my family didn’t go to church either—my brother and I considered it a great gift our parents had given us, our Sunday mornings—but my father drank and was nois
y about it. Bobby Kinser, Stevie Rabinowitz, and I argued religion. Bobby’s family believed in God and Christ, Stevie’s in God but not Christ; my family didn’t believe in either one. Also, my father wouldn’t go to the local barbershop, because they wouldn’t take black customers. The barber was a friend of the Kinsers’. My father went up the steps of the Kinser house and in through the front door.
The fire trucks arrived and began unrolling the hoses. My father did not come back. Flames were visible through the glass of the upstairs windows. A net curtain burned, browning and curling at the edges as if it were newspaper. The glass cracked and black smoke came out, thick as oatmeal. The firemen spoke to the Kinsers; there were gestures and shouting. The ladder went up. And then, finally, Tweed bolted into the front yard with my father behind her.
My father had burned his hand, but not badly. The firemen were very angry at him. “You’re not just risking your own life,” one of them shouted. “Someone has to go in after you. You have children. Did you think about them?”
My father hardly paused. He came through the kitchen with Tweed. Tweed checked for each of the Kinser children in turn. My father went to my mother. He was still smoking his pipe. She put his hand under the water faucet. “You’re proud of me,” my father said to her. “You might as well admit it.”
“I shouldn’t be,” she said, holding on to his hand, smiling back at him. “Sometimes I just can’t help myself,” and suddenly, just like that, I was in love with fires and storms, thunder and wind. I can remember a lot of fires and storms in Indiana when I was growing up, but what I remember is that they were never big enough. No matter how much damage they did, I was never satisfied.
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