by Matt Cohen
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 too
k 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.
The next afternoon she was back in the cafeteria, her notes recovered, working away on her essay. She had decided to be in favour of Henry II. Queen Elizabeth had her royal tours, her gold- and red-velvet wardrobe, her old masters and her hounds, but she didn’t really have anything to do. Worse, her father had died of being king and her uncle had been glad to get out of it.
Henry II, on the other hand, had swashbuckled through the primeval forest, guzzling beer and decreeing decrees. A British Caesar, he had stamped the world with his mind and more than seven hundred years later, Elizabeth Glade, a second-generation Galician-Canadian Jew studying in a small city in the heartland of a continent Henry II hadn’t dreamt might exist, was admiring his accomplishments.
In the millennia to come, in the library of a space-station university orbiting an as yet undiscovered planet, no one was going to read about the accomplishments of George VI. At best he would be a royal footnote to his brother’s story, the story of a man who had traded an empire for his bride.
Elizabeths mind had swerved to the Plantagenets—the royal blood, the good old sword-waving banner-crackling days when a king was a king, the days when her own ancestors were getting ready to be racked and roasted in Spain—when she felt someone standing behind her.
Before she could turn, William McKelvey had circled the table and sat down opposite. His face looked pink, as though scraped with a too-sharp razor and his dirty-blond hair was firmly slicked into place.
“How are you?”
“Okay,” Elizabeth said.
He wasn’t wearing a coat, just a bulky cable-knit sweater with sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His forearms were thick and sunburned. He would have a made a good knight, she thought, the kind of man a Plantagenet could use, arms strong enough for shield and sword.
“Do you want to go for a drive?”
“A drive?”
“In my car. We could—” He fell silent.
It was early afternoon. Too late for a picnic lunch, too early for a drive-in.
“Where were you thinking of going?” Elizabeth asked, afraid he might find her difficult.
“I don’t know.”
“Okay,” she said. She began closing up her books, placing them with her notes in her father’s old briefcase which, aside from his ghost, seemed to be her main inheritance. When she stood up William reached across the table and took the case.
His car was an ancient pre-war snub-nosed Ford. Dusty and bulbous, it seemed to belong to a different species than the salami king’s sleek sedan. “Still runs most of the time.” The inside of the car was as newly washed and scraped as William himself. There were wipe marks on the dashboard and beneath the smell of soap were the stale odours of tobacco and oil.
She had supposed he would drive along the lake. That was what Lionel Meyers did when he took her and her mother for “a spin.” They would appreciate the view of the water, drive slowly past the large gabled brick waterfront houses military money had built, maybe continue to the ferry landing and ride across to Wolfe Island where they would take tea at the General Wolfe before riding the ferry home again.
But William was heading north, away from Lake Ontario, away from historic Kingston with its historic money, its historic fort, its historic parliament that its historic city-wise legislators from Montreal and Toronto had found too historic and boring to occupy. Soon he was on a narrow paved road that wound between farms and increasingly craggy hills crowned by huge spreading maples and oaks. The landscape was a hilly explosion of mud and green swarming with life. There were cows, sheep, horses, even goats. Peeling clapboard houses with long burdened clotheslines, barns surrounded by clusters of pigs and chickens and geese and sometimes a swaggering nose-ringed bull that would turn its red eyes to them as they passed. Overhead the sky was a deep luminous blue encircled by woolly clouds that floated whitely above the horizon. The sun came in William’s side. He had his window open, his left arm hanging out. The way the light came through his hair made him seem to be wearing a golden halo, and as the road wound the halo shifted but never went away.
After a while they came to a gas station beside a lake. Its windows were shuttered, waiting for tourist season but the door was open. William went inside and brought out a large man wearing overalls. While they gassed up the car, the man in overalls talked to William, his words tumbling out quickly, punctuated by toothless laughs. William seemed to understand, nodding vigorously as the man spoke and replying with a few of his own enigmatic grunts.
William and Elizabeth started off again, supplied with bottles of orange pop that William had fished out of the cooler. William was still driving north.
“Are we going anywhere special?” Elizabeth asked.
“I don’t know,” William said. “We have to get a bit closer, see how it feels.” He looked across the seat at her, then turned back to the road.
“How I felt was nervous, afraid. I knew some kind of test was coming and I wasn’t sure I wanted to pass. Suddenly I felt like my own skeptical parents, needing to know more about him. I asked his plans for after he graduated. ‘We vets get offered jobs,’ he told me. ‘Insurance companies, government. Or I could go into some kind of engineering—I was a sapper during the war.’ Then he asked me about myself and I explained that I was studying history and English, that I was planning to go into teaching.
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br /> “History and English? What was that supposed to mean to someone who specialized in blowing things up? What was I doing choosing Robin Hood over the British legal system? But I needed to be with William. Nothing fancy, just sitting in his car or standing in the middle of the street or going for a walk to nowhere, anything at all so long as I was with him, just like those women in the silly stories my mother read in the magazines she bought to amuse herself between visits with the smoked-meat king.
“On top of a hill, William pulled the car over. We were beside a cemetery. Beyond us the road curved slowly until it disappeared behind a row of trees; then it picked up again, a long black ribbon leading finally to a town flattened against the side of a lake. I asked him what the town was. West Gull, he said, on Long Gull Lake, and so there it was—so bizarre—this man had led me to the mythological place where I’d supposedly been conceived after my parents had an accident on the ice.”
While Elizabeth admired the towering stone archway of the West Gull Cemetery, William undid the latched gate. Early dandelions spotted the grass as, of course, did graves. At the front there was a section marked by flat rectangular stones, hardly larger than shoebox tops, pushed so far into the earth their engraved surfaces were level with the grass. The dates there were all a hundred years old or more—this, Elizabeth saw, must have been the original settlers’ cemetery, a northern boot hill placed high for the view or because of some superstition. Beside and behind the horizontal markers rose the tombstones. Shiny, dull, large, small, expensive, modest, adorned, plain, fronted by flowers real or plastic or entirely absent—the hundreds of tombstones were a random testimony to lives and fortunes unpredictably gained and lost. Along a small crest stood a few trees, ancient wind-tortured maples, gnarled trunks and boughs offering their still-dense burdens of leaves to the sun. Just beyond the trees, William pointed at a double gravestone. One side read: