SUVs to Whitehorse. They tour a museum, the MacBride Museum. It holds a stuffed albino moose, interesting pictures of the gold rush and the Klondike, and the cabin of someone called Sam McGee. Sam McGee was a prospector who was made famous in a poem by Robert Service. Robert Service was a poet who worked as a bank clerk in Whitehorse when he wrote his best-known poems. In “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” the prospector dies and his body is burned; in real life, McGee was still alive when the poem was written. Many years later, he returned to Whitehorse, where he found shopkeepers selling urns filled with what were supposed to be his ashes. The museum also has a telegraph office. Here an old man helps them tap out a message in Morse code. The telegraph machine is connected to Twitter, and the message they tap out is published as their first-ever personal tweet. It reads, “The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, September 2016, Whitehorse Yukon.” William jokes (but he is teasing) that the telegraph operator has made a spelling mistake with their tweet.
Arts festival on Main Street. A tall totem pole is being dedicated to the healing of former students of the residential schools, which attempted to forcibly assimilate First Nations children into white Canadian culture. First Nations children were taken from their homes, beaten for speaking their first languages, made to convert to Christianity, in many cases abused, in some cases experimented on. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has declared that the schools were a form of cultural genocide. She considers the totem pole solemnly. The street festival is full of music and balloons and food smells. She walks through slowly in her red dress, squeezing hands and smiling. Flowers are placed in her hands. She looks behind her and laughs with delight. Here is a baby in a fuzzy white snowsuit; here is a little girl with a tiny Canadian flag stuck through her headband. She stops and asks their ages, really interested: a mother speaking to mothers.
A quick change of clothes, then the SUVs set out for Carcross. The SUVs are Yukons: commendable attention to detail. She is wearing slim dark jeans, suede cowboy boots, and a gray cardigan coat by Sentaler. The drive takes almost an hour.
In the village, they sit on a log bench beneath a yellow and red totem pole and watch tiny Native children perform Raven and Wolf dances. The children caw and howl. Then the children sing songs. The children are from the Tagish nation and the language of their songs is called Tlingit. She and William smile and laugh with the children. Then the chief—his name is Andy Carvill—gives a speech. He asks William to help his people protect their land. He presents them with a carved totem of a killer whale. All around her are First Nations people in their traditional dress: bright robes and vests, fur hats, round shields, turquoise paint. Some wear masks; the masks are ferocious, snarling, really impressive examples of aboriginal art.
A steep road brings them to Montana Mountain. She climbs out into the clearing. The clearing is high on the mountain, on the site of a condemned mine. It is time for the mountain-biking demonstration. They were not, originally, supposed to watch mountain biking on the site of a condemned mine. Originally, they were supposed to bike down the mountain themselves, William and she, with young people from Carcross and the Tagish nation. They are here to support an organization called Single Track to Success, which teaches young people to build mountain-biking trails. Young people from Carcross and the Tagish nation have built world-class trails on the mountain. Serious bikers travel from far away to ride on them. She and William would have enjoyed biking with the young people. She has been biking, and swimming, and skiing, and playing tennis, her whole life. In school she was on the field hockey team; she and William are both athletes. Sport is important to her whole family. Two years ago her sister, Pippa, and her brother, James, rode their bikes three thousand miles across the United States, in support of the British Heart Foundation. Her family have always believed in supporting charity and trying to push themselves. William’s and her representatives, however, felt that the bike trails were too dangerous, that from a public-relations standpoint it would be disastrous if the future king of England were to faceplant down the side of a moraine. And furthermore they felt that the scenery on the trails was not dramatic enough. William’s press secretary in particular felt that there should be peaks for William to be photographed in front of. So the Single Track to Success organizers had to build a fake trail in a high, flat clearing, so that she and William might support them by walking slowly around it.
The makeshift trail is a circular track scraped into the dirt. Orange safety cones divide the track into different zones. Children, some quite small, are riding in circles around particular sets of cones. Adult volunteers urge them along. “Not much longer now! Keep those feet turning, Abby! Guys, Survivor Island starts now!” It is unclear whether the children know who she and William are. A handsome young representative of the Yukon government appears to escort her around the track. His name is Currie Dixon. Another representative, a woman, walks with William. They all walk slowly: asking grave questions. She has no choice but to take the demonstration with total seriousness. Twenty cameras are trained on her. She gestures, then nods, walking slowly around the track, frowning. The air up here is clear and thin. Many spectacular peaks. The future king of England stands dramatically before the mountains, just as his press secretary had hoped. Yet the photographers all want pictures of her coat. The press will later report that the coat she is wearing retails for £707. The coat will be far more widely talked about than either the bike-trails program or William’s kingliness.
They come to the end of the track and linger, making further small conversation with their representatives. Then it is time to greet the volunteers. Several onlookers are standing nearby, holding floral teacups. How did floral teacups make it to the top of the mountain? The scene has the quality almost of a dream. Someone is playing music: “Royals,” the song by Lorde, drifts thinly toward the peaks.
A woman’s voice cries out. “I loved your mother!”
There is polite laughter among the onlookers. “William,” the voice calls again, “I loved your mother! I’ve been watching you since you were born!”
Less laughter now. The voice belongs to a small, owlishly round First Nations woman in a long black Canada Goose parka. The woman is standing near the Single Track to Success van. Two green mountain bikes are racked upside down on top of the van. “William!” the woman calls. The woman is holding up her cell phone, pointing the camera at William and at her.
William walks over to the woman. He speaks to her for a moment, then gives her a hug. The ecstatic woman rubs William’s back. William throws her, Kate, a glance. She walks over to speak to the volunteers near William and the woman. She is smiling, gracious: not a flicker of concern. William steps back from the woman’s embrace. The woman opens her arms and asks for another hug. She is standing next to William: also greeting the woman. The woman does not want to let William go. Everyone is staring. She asks the woman a question, and during the answer she slides herself between William and the woman. William moves away. The woman grasps her and hugs her in William’s place. She hugs the woman back loosely, bent slightly at the waist. She allows the woman to hug her until William is well out of reach.
Then she slides toward the other volunteers. Still smiling. “Give my love to the babies!” the woman calls.
It is time to go. The SUVs are ready. It is true, the woman knows their itinerary: In a few hours they will be back with their children. They will drive down the mountain, to the airport where she met David Johnston, and from there they will begin their journey to Government House. They will continue with their tour. They will have a party for the children. They will ride in canoes to see ancient Haida villages. They will hang a plaque at a hospital. They will dedicate a monument. They will sail on a tall ship. They will support student leadership in mental health advocacy work across Canada.
When the SUVs have gone, the music stops playing. Volunteers gather the teacups. Photographers hoist their gear. Parents make plans for groups to ride down the mountain. Adults look at each o
ther a little searchingly, like, Something just happened, but what? One by one the vans head back to Whitehorse. The town is a low pale scatter against the mountains. Clouds have blown in. At twilight the sky is like smoke viewed through blue glass.
But Not Like Your Typical Love Story
1
In 1952, the year before she loaded a stack of oil paintings into her run-down Studebaker convertible, sputtered onto the highway, and disappeared, Lydie Marland carried a nickel-plated automatic pistol in her handbag, along with rolls of cash, sometimes fat ones, because she didn’t trust bankers, she said. She needed cash more often than usual that year, and in larger sums, because her lover, Louis Cassel, kept asking her to finance his schemes, and she didn’t like to disappoint him. Possibly she was afraid to disappoint him. Louis was always dreaming up something. He’d have an idea for a business that would make his fortune. Or else he’d say, let’s get us a little booze and round up the boys, hit the road a few days. Louis never had any money and neither did his friends, but Lydie had a little—it was hard to say how much. There were some heirlooms, objects from her past. A few stocks. She didn’t have a job and she wasn’t rich, in fact she often made do with little, but there were things she could sell. She never expected to see any of the money again. Louis wasn’t the sort of man whose plans came to anything, you could tell that right off. But he was young and handsome, and he was fun, and Lydie hadn’t had fun in a while.
The relationship had begun two years earlier, when Lydie was fifty and Louis was thirty-one. Lydie lived in a cottage on the grounds of a Felician convent in Ponca City, Oklahoma. The estate had once belonged to a powerful oil tycoon who built an enormous mansion on the prairie near the town. Now nuns walked the grounds in twos and threes and Lydie occupied the former chauffeur’s quarters. She couldn’t afford to keep the cottage maintained, or else she neglected to maintain it, so it was falling into disrepair, but in any case she had few visitors. She was a well-known figure in Ponca City, but there was something about her that made people stay away. When they saw her in town, they pointed her out to each other—look, there’s Lydie—in a tone that meant, See the eccentric.
Partly this had to do with the way she dressed. She was a small woman, just five feet four and 115 pounds, with dark hair and a wide mouth. The thought of aging alarmed her, so she read endless articles about hair and skin care; she knew that scientists were continually making discoveries that could delay or even reverse the effects of time, and she wanted to know what these were. People sometimes said she looked younger than she was, and she liked hearing that. But when it came to her clothing, it was as if she had frozen in time. She wore cloche hats that had been stylish twenty-five years earlier, antiquated flapper dresses cut for a young woman long before the war. Her outfits were carefully chosen and had been beautifully made, long ago. But at her age, in her conservative small town, they made her look like a Jazz Age scarecrow.
In fact she couldn’t always be sure how she looked, because her eyesight was failing. Her vision was so bad that she needed a magnifying glass to read, but she thought spectacles would make her look old, so she refused to wear them. When she went out in the green convertible, she drove slowly and commandeered the road, veering from the right lane to the left, following the center line as it revealed itself. She’d never had a driver’s license. Patrolmen stopped her more than once, but they always let her off with a warning. She ignored the warnings. Thinking about other drivers—thinking about other people—made her nervous. It would be better if other people could simply keep out of her way.
One summer day she answered the door and there he was, smiling in his uniform. He was with the Water and Light Department, he said. He had come to read her meter. Louis had black hair, which he wore slicked with grease and parted on one side, and he had a big forehead and jug ears and full, drooping cheeks. His eyebrows were low, which gave him a hard look, as if he were peering out at the world from under the brim of a fedora. But he grinned easily, and although he was rough, he had a way of suggesting life was a game, not to be taken too seriously. She found herself inviting him inside. Then she found herself searching for reasons to invite him back. Her books, she remembered, were in grave need of organizing. The window in the bedroom was awfully hard to close. She would pay him, of course. Couldn’t he come around one day soon, and help?
He could. Louis had lived in Ponca City his whole life, except when he hadn’t. It was his home, but things had a way of coming along. When the war came along, for instance, he shipped out with an artillery company. A job as a brakeman came along, so he spent some time on the rails. He’d been a soda jerker, a night watchman, you name it; he never stuck in any job for long. He liked doing what he wanted and he didn’t like being told no. His second wife was a theater cashier. Cops put him in handcuffs three times for beating her, and when she left him, he slashed his wrists open with a pocketknife, but he was married again by the time he met Lydie. This time his wife was a nurse.
Louis quit his job as a meter reader. He started spending most of his time at the cottage, ostensibly as a handyman, though in fact he did little work. Lydie was finding that she could not do without his presence, and she was happy to pay if it meant freeing him from the need to go elsewhere, such as to a job. They started going out together in public, to restaurants and bars, and that opened a new dimension of life for her, reclusive as she’d been. What a thrill it was to drop a coin in a jukebox! Of course she would pick up the check. They went on trips; Lydie bought the tickets. It was a strange sort of love affair, even she could see that. But it had been a long time since anything so exciting had happened to her, and in any case, she had reason to believe that love stories sometimes were strange.
In the summer of 1952, Louis came to her and asked for five thousand dollars. He had a mind to take up wheat farming, he said, and he needed money to buy land. By now, two years after their first meeting, the relationship was troubled. Lydie worried that Louis was bored. He no longer seemed so grateful when she sold some little memento to buy him a present or pay for a vacation. When she talked, his eyes wandered. The force of her jealousy frightened her. Once, on a trip to Phoenix, he’d given her the slip, and she hired private detectives to track him down. They caught up with him near San Francisco. Another time she pulled her pistol on him. There were screaming telephone calls, scenes in public. There were fights that left her gulping for air. Surely, she thought, things between them would settle as soon as he had a place in life, a proper home. Then they could be married, and she would never have to give him up.
She gave him the money, having sold some stocks to get it. He used it to buy the acreage, as he’d promised. But before long, in February 1953, he sold the land for six thousand dollars, paid what he owed in child support, and skipped town with a friend named Lewellen, traveling west. A few weeks later, Lydie herself left town, in her dinged-up Studebaker. A few weeks after that, she vanished.
I’m lifting most of these details from reports that appeared years later, in the late 1950s, when the mystery of Lydie Marland briefly became a subject of interest to newspapers and magazines. The most complete version of the story appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, though “complete” is in this case a misnomer; neither the official police investigation nor subsequent investigations by journalists turned up much real information. No one knew the exact date on which she left. No one knew precisely what had caused her sudden flight from town. It seemed reasonable to conclude that Louis Cassel’s betrayal had something to do with it, but no one could say for sure. It was even hard to say when, exactly, she’d last been seen by a reliable witness. Some of her movements after she left Ponca City could be traced. It was certain, for instance, that she had taken some paintings with her, because she had tried to sell them, so there were gallery workers who remembered seeing her, dates on which she could be placed in particular locations. After a while, however, once she’d been away from Ponca City for a few months, the trail went cold.
The Post’s article appeared on November 22, 1958. The cover art for the issue was Norman Rockwell’s painting Den into Nursery. The lead feature was a profile of Yul Brynner, whose Technicolor remake of The Buccaneer, costarring Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson, was about to open in theaters. The story about Lydie, “Where Is Lyde Marland?,” began on page 19. It continued, with a couple of jumps deeper into the issue, for six densely set pages. The writer, John Kobler, later produced a well-regarded biography of Al Capone, but in 1958 he was known mostly for lurid, gossipy true-crime stories; he’d published two collections of middlebrow micro-noirs under the titles Afternoon in the Attic and Some Like It Gory. His tone in discussing Lydie’s disappearance keeps to this wink-wink, imitation-Hitchcock vein, playing up a smirking sordidness for a readership of middle-class voyeurs.
Among the local belles he was noted for his cinematic profile, and generally frisky spirits.
In Kobler’s telling, Lydie Marland spent her final months in Ponca City oscillating between hysteria and denial, confronting Louis’s friends and their families.
Impossible Owls Page 23