Elizabeth and After

by Matt Cohen

  LORNA ARNOLD MCKELVEY 1900–1932

  Carved into the other side was:

  SAMUEL ARNOLD MCKELVEY 1895–

  “There’s my mother,” William said. “My father still hasn’t made it but we know where he’s going.”

  “You must have been—”

  “Twelve years old,” William said. “They were some kind of cousins. When the second baby came along it was made wrong and my mother died trying to have it.” While William told this his face jerked, as though he were back there watching. “Sorry,” he said. “Since we were in the neighbourhood—” Elizabeth was calculating that William must be thirty-three, which was older than she had thought, and now that she could put a number to his age the confident way he had of just doing things without preliminaries made more sense. And then William turned, took her hands in his, looked straight into her face.

  The May grass. The fragrant breeze coming across the fields. The soft sounds of leaves. His hands were squeezing hers, hard. Just as the pressure began to turn into pain, he loosened his grip. Elizabeth stepped away. The lake, the town, the farmland. The dizzy richness of the grass. The dizzy thumping of her heart in the centre of this strange universe. She had a weird presentiment that she was being introduced to the place where she would be buried. Somehow this idea seemed normal.

  “Walk?” McKelvey now asked. Before Elizabeth could answer he was off again, past the gravestones and out a gate at the back of the cemetery that gave onto a path twisting down into a cedar-filled valley.

  The fragrance was thick, a sweet full odour Elizabeth inhaled until she felt her lungs would burst. Further down a small creek zigzagged through a rocky descent that wound between the cedars. They sat on a large flat boulder at the water’s edge. Elizabeth took in the moss, the trilliums, the ferns, the strange gradations and shadings of colour of the layered cedar bark. She picked a wild violet and as she brushed its velvety petals against her cheek a burst of blue butterflies swept by like a convoy from another world; and then mixed in with the bright rush of water she could almost hear the echoes of the voices of children come to fish or make little boats or watch birds like the small yellow-bellied canary-like creatures fluttering nearby. The children could never have guessed that one day there would be a cemetery and highway just a few steps away from their tiny paradise.

  It occurred to Elizabeth that just as the children had been unable to see the future so wholly concrete to her, so was she blind to her own future. The future she and William would or wouldn’t share. Perhaps one day this moment would be a remembered aberration, a fragrant unexpected digression in which she glimpsed her own beginning as a prelude to her launch into the kind of life her parents had in mind—teacher, wife of a secure professional or businessman, carrier of the Glade blood into a lakeside brick home complete with family silver and other accoutrements. That would be no place for someone like William. William was someone else, Elizabeth thought, but she was as blind to his invisible chains as he was to hers. Meanwhile William, who had taken out a penknife, was entirely concentrated on whittling a twig of cedar. He looked like a twelve-year-old in permanent hiding from being the kind of man the parental Glades wanted for their daughter. His skin was flushed with the open air and his usually angular and ironic face had gone smooth and round.

  Now he raised his head, smiled at her, folded up his knife. He stood up. “Better get going.” He started walking, out of the grove and towards the cemetery.

  Back in the car Elizabeth felt she’d been enchanted. How was it he always knew what to do and she just ran after him? To break the spell she said, “What about your father?”

  “Don’t worry,” William answered. “We’re getting to him.”

  They drove into West Gull and out the other side. There was a gas station, a few stores, a church, sidestreets lined with neat frame houses each fronted by an emerald patch of May grass. Elizabeth searched in vain for a spark of recognition but it was just a small town with empty streets.

  The fields on the other side of town were orderly and prosperous. The alfalfa and clover were dense and uniform, the fences solid and unbroken, the clusters of barns augmented by shining silver silos poking up like so many incongruous and boastful rockets. Between the fields and along the roads stretched long rows of elm and maple. “When men get old, they plant trees,” Elizabeth remembered her father saying. If so, whoever had planted these neat lines of trees must be under the flat stones at the cemetery.

  After a while the paved road turned to gravel and the car began to jostle and shake in a bone-rattling dance that set Elizabeth bouncing on the seat. She looked over to William. He was watching her, grinning. Suddenly he jerked the steering wheel so violently the car skidded around a corner and onto a narrow dirt road.

  It was late in the afternoon and the light was beginning to slant through the trees. They were so far from anything Elizabeth knew, they might as well have been on a polar expedition. Except that instead of being winter it was spring, and instead of a sky filled with a screaming blizzard they were driving beneath a bower of newly leaved maples. William turned onto a dirt path and continued until they came to a rusted mailbox.

  “This is it,” William announced. They were parked at the top of the drive. On one side was the letterbox on its tilted post. On the other, a rotting platform Elizabeth would learn had been used for milk in the days when William’s father had set out cans for the truck going to the cheese factory.

  William was still wearing his little boy’s face, the face he must have worn when he walked up this drive on the way to school, a school in which he would have been taught by a woman perhaps similar to the woman Elizabeth intended to become.

  “Don’t worry,” William said. He turned the car towards the house, a ramshackle frame structure, the remains of its white paint hanging from the siding in shreds. Behind it were two large barns. Wagons, farm implements, old tires, two cars that might have been parked for a thousand years or more, a tractor, a truck with one side of the windshield bashed in were scattered between the barns. A few pigs and cattle grazed among them, pushing at the weeds and mud.

  Elizabeth stepped out of the car. The smell was strong and ripe. From the other side of the house, in the direction of one of the barns, there came a loud shout. “Jay-sus! I’m coming after you!”

  Around the corner appeared a headless chicken, running at full speed and spouting an impossibly thick geyser of blood. William’s father followed. He was wearing rubber boots and overalls and carrying an axe. The chicken suddenly veered towards William and Elizabeth which was when William’s father looked up.

  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.”
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  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 h
er 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.