Elizabeth and After

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Elizabeth and After Page 32

by Matt Cohen


  In the end it was easy. Adam called Fred at work and said Luke had something for him that he’d asked him to arrange.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fred said, his voice full of suspicion.

  It was a few days into January and the serious cold had begun. There was a familiar minus-thirty-degree crackle on the line. “Something he got from his son,” Adam explained. “A copy. You have the original.”

  Fred hung up. The next day he called back. “You want to explain yourself?”

  “I think I did,” Adam said. “We’re all just looking to do the right thing here. I want you to be in possession of this item.”

  “You can bring it by the office.”

  “I wouldn’t be comfortable doing that,” Adam said. “I don’t even have it with me. It’s hidden in one of Luke’s houses. We’ll go get it, then you’ll have it.”

  The next day Fred came to the dealership a few minutes after closing time. Adam was waiting for him. He extended his hand. Fred shook it. In the months since becoming reeve he’d developed a new ingratiating way of slanting his head and smiling. “What now?”

  “It’s out at the old Fennerty place. We’ll go in my car.”

  “I don’t mind driving.”

  “Mine needs a run. Gets all gummed up just going back and forth from the house to the office.”

  When they went outside it was after six. The Timberpost was still open, and security lights were glowing in the real-estate office and the supermarket. It was clear and cold. Adam was wearing fur-trimmed gloves but he still had to clap his hands together. January weather: there were always a few weeks like this, minus thirty at night, block-heater weather.

  They drove out of town past the West Gull Elementary. Despite the cold the spots illuminating the outdoor rink were on and the sound of frozen pucks deflecting off the boards banged angrily through the darkness.

  “Still play?” Adam asked.

  “Just old-timer hockey now,” Fred said. “Too busy for the real thing.”

  As they left town Adam was still hesitating. The previous week, in preparation, he had put the video cassette under a kitchen floorboard at the Fennerty place, which Luke Richardson had bought and was now selling, but except for the first fuzzy images of Chrissy in bed, the tape was now erased.

  The Pontiac warmed quickly but Adam kept his gloves on. Somehow that was reassuring, as though leather might be capable of more than skin. On the way he asked Fred about his plans for the township and just before the high beams picked up the old oak tree, he asked Fred if after a term or two as reeve he was planning a move to the national political stage. Fred took off his hat and looked into it, as though it might hold the answer. The sides of the road were banked with snow but where the road jogged at the oak tree, the wind always kept the shoulder bare and icy.

  “I don’t suppose they’ve already been calling you,” Adam said, his voice purring with the hum of his tires on snow, purring with the sly tone widely known for sixty years as Adam Goldsmith’s way of starting one of his inoffensive jokes.

  “Just once or twice,” Fred replied, smiling, and as he did Adam pushed the accelerator to the floor, “goosed her” as Luke would say, put so much gas to his V-8 special that his very new and very expensive French snow tires skidded for a frightening fraction of a second, just enough to start a high whine that ended as they clawed and gripped the snow, slamming Adam and Fred back into their seats as the car exploded forward shot along the icy road Adam’s gloves locked to the steering wheel and holding firm even as Fred’s elbow hammered into his face tore through the pagewire fence and into the oak tree where in a still more frightening fraction of a second it stopped.

  The coroner’s report noted the multiple fractures to the passenger’s skull, lacerations on the arm thrown up in self-protection, internal injuries unenumerated since an autopsy was not deemed necessary, and other outrages to what had been a healthy living body before it took an unplanned trip through a suddenly stationary windshield attached to a car that had accordioned into a large oak tree.

  The driver had also died, though he had been retained by the steering wheel, a padded collapsible model intended to prevent impalation. The report also noted that the alcohol content in the driver’s blood was high enough to cause the loss of a Province of Ontario driver’s licence; had they also tested for drugs they would have discovered that the driver had ingested a lethal dose of sleeping pills. As it was, Adam’s death was ascribed to cardiac failure caused by the shock of the impact, an analysis strengthened by the fact that his physician, Dr. Albert Knight, stated that he had twice treated Adam for minor heart attacks. The report also noted that Adam sustained a fractured nose, though it remained silent about the curious fact that blood from this fracture was present on the passenger’s coat, leading others to speculate that the accident had been caused by a struggle between driver and passenger.

  When Albert Knight checked Adam’s medical records he found that Adam had been killed on the eve of his sixty-fourth birthday. Those who remembered such things also noted the fact that Adam Goldsmith and Fred Verghoers were killed on the same corner, against the same tree, as had Elizabeth McKelvey eleven years before. The centre of impact was halfway between the driver and the passenger side. Both airbags had been disabled and neither passenger had been wearing his seatbelt.

  The anniversary was not exact: Elizabeth was killed early New Year’s Day, Adam Goldsmith’s car lost control the night of January 11. Because Fred was a newly elected politician, someone who had made a certain public splash, the tragedy of his sudden death received wide coverage. There was even a wire-service story that showed Chrissy standing over the wrecked car, wiping her eyes.

  Carl is driving from the Balfer place across the flatlands towards West Gull. Lizzie has her hand in his pocket for warmth and her head on his shoulder, the way she’s taken to doing these winter mornings. He has Lizzie all the time now except every second weekend and holidays. Chrissy has moved to Toronto to live with an aunt and take courses at a business school. Midweek she calls Lizzie. When Carl answers he talks to her for a few moments. Her voice has new layers of fatigue and distance. “I’m starting again,” she’s said to Carl, twice, and he understands what she’s doing: she’s trying to make herself small, small enough to slide backwards in time to that Richardson New Year’s Eve party when she first asked him to dance. He can’t tell her it’s a place he’s also tried to get to, or that he used to tell himself that had he turned away from Chrissy he wouldn’t have fought with Fred, wouldn’t have guzzled half a bottle of brandy to kill the pain, wouldn’t have driven his mother into a tree. Over Long Gull Lake the sun is coming up grey-gold and along the concession roads small clusters of children are waiting for the school buses. A few other vehicles, like his own, are homing in on West Gull. In a few minutes the school will be open, the supermarket working its way to daytime temperature levels, the bank computers processing the night’s numbers. Richardson’s New & Used will have unlocked its doors. Adam’s office, a corner cubicle off the showroom, will be lit and waiting for Carl who ever since the reading of the will has been cleaning and organizing Adam’s files.

  When he gets to the New & Used, Carl parks at the back of the lot and buys a coffee from the Timberpost before going into Adam’s office. He closes the door with its frosted-glass window, puts his jacket on the hook, opens the top drawer. Every day for a week, he’s looked at the wax-sealed envelope with his name on the outside. He takes the lid off his coffee, brings the steaming surface to his lips. He opens the letter Adam has written him. For the next two days his tongue will be scalded and he’ll always associate what he reads in the letter with the overheated bitter Timberpost coffee.

  It was the beginning of September, the first week of school, and the warmth and humidity of a late-August heat wave still blanketed the township. With a cup of coffee in her hand, Elizabeth stood at her kitchen window, soaking up the morning light and wondering if her geraniums would last o
ut the month.

  Carl and McKelvey came down for breakfast radiating a great mute wooden wall of hungry maleness. In their collective silence they ate, they drank, they piled the dishes, after which McKelvey went out to the barns while Elizabeth prepared to take Carl to school.

  On the highway she said to him, for no reason at all except that it had come into her mind, “If there was one thing you could have different, what would it be?”

  Carl was twelve that year. He had developed a transparent fringe of fuzz on his upper lip and his sideburns were growing wispy extensions. He sat silently for a while and Elizabeth thought about how essentially reserved Carl was, how he always seemed to be holding something back, as though he’d divided himself off to keep from finding out the secret that he’d never be told. “Be someone else, I guess,” Carl said.

  Elizabeth was stunned. Finally she asked, “Who?”

  “You, maybe.”

  That night Carl came into the kitchen while Elizabeth was doing dishes. “If you were me you’d be washing these,” Elizabeth said.

  Carl sat down. “I was just kidding. Giving the teacher the smart answer.”

  In the middle of the night Elizabeth woke up, uncomfortably warm. McKelvey lay beside her, his usual night mountain, breath rising and falling in that noisy chorus that grew louder every year. She got out of bed, put on her slippers and a robe, went downstairs and outside.

  The sky had a thin veil of clouds and the moon, tinted orange by the pollen held in the mist, hung ripe and heavy over the barn. “You, maybe,” Carl had said in that flat, diffident way he had when something truly mattered. She should have stopped the car and hugged him. She should have crowed in triumph or gratefully wept at having mothered this child she had touched just as he’d touched her.

  A breeze came up and she found herself surrounded by the familiar rustle of leaves. Tomorrow she was seeing Adam for lunch at the Timberpost. Not a word would be said about Carl. They would chatter about the library, his work at the New & Used, her new class. Maureen Knight had returned to town; according to Dorothy Dean she was thought to have Parkinson’s and Adam was spending a lot of time with her. He should have married Maureen Knight, Elizabeth knew. And her telling Adam that Carl was his son was what likely prevented him. And yet, just as she had been helpless to resist the strange passion for him that had overcome her for so many years, so had she been unable to let him go. Of course she had stopped their afternoons. And at first, afterwards, she could hardly bear to see him. Later it was as though they were fellow survivors of a brushfire that had burned everything around them. She could even look at his hands without blushing or melting, walk by his side without wishing they were back in the make-believe motel world, a world she could only truly remember on New Years Eves when she’d had too much to drink and Adam waltzed her slowly around the Great Hall.

  “If there was one thing you could have different…?” she’d asked Carl. And what about herself? The wind had got under her robe and nightgown; her skin contracted with cold. And suddenly from the barn, like an echo of her dream, came the questioning moo duet of Jane Eyre and Anna Karenina. Had she, like Anna Karenina, ruined her life over a man? Or was it that she had been too frightened to ruin her life and wished she had? The cattle, sensing her presence, had put their heads out the barn door and were staring at her as if to say they wouldn’t be able to sleep until she solved the riddle of her life. “Maybe what I’d like,” Elizabeth said to them, “is to have it both ways, the way you do: my rear end in the barn, my front end free to admire the beauties of nature, speculate on the foolishness of others and have a few snacks.” Anna Karenina and Jane Eyre, unmoved, continued chewing their cud, jaws slowly grinding in harmony with Elizabeth’s slowly grinding thoughts. Her skin was tight, painful with desire and the need to be released. She walked to the fence and leaned against it, trembling. The cows took a step closer. The pain that had started in her skin, her breasts, was now radiating out from her groin, a screaming reproach to everything she had denied in herself Just as she opened her mouth to scream back, the pain faded and she was left clinging to the cedar rail, soaked in sweat and wondering if it was pain that she’d felt or something else, some excess of unlived life demanding to be born. “You tell me,” she said to her cows. They nodded their heads slowly, either in sympathy or confusion, then backed into the barn as Elizabeth went towards the house to make tea.

  When she had the cup in her hands, steaming and aromatic, a candle lit to keep her company, she stood at the window looking out at the barn. She saw the yellow flame reflected in the mirror of the glass, the blurred image of her own face, the night-black lawn sloping down to the driveway where her car’s chrome gleamed in the moonlight.

  In addition to receiving the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for Elizabeth and After, Matt Cohen was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize and the Toronto Arts Award for Writing. His previous novel, Last Seen, was a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award, and was chosen by Margaret Atwood as Best Book of 1996 (Maclean’s). He was the author of thirteen novels, as well as collections of short stories, translations and books for children. Matt Cohen died in December 1999 in Toronto.

 

 

 


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