Elizabeth and After (33 page)

“Excuse me,” Amy said. “My gas goes down the wrong way.”

Outside Carl waited until Amy and Luke had closed the door, then asked Moira if she wanted to come back with him. “You could follow me in the car or I could come with you to the R&R and drive you.”

“Just like that,” she said, as though all the little signals he’d thought she was sending him were now supposed to be forgotten.

“Don’t worry about it.” He turned back to his truck, wishing he hadn’t said anything. “Nice to see you, anyway.” He got inside, started the engine, waited for her to leave first. Winter manners. Can’t leave a woman alone in a car when the temperature is below freezing. Even if you wouldn’t mind her digging a hole and disappearing into it.

She pulled out ahead of him, then stopped, blocking his car, and came back. “I want to come with you. Still okay?” The exhaust was clouding around her and she looked almost frightened.

“Very okay.”

“I’ll leave my car in town. This time you can drive me.”

Just in case Luke was watching, Carl turned the opposite way from Moira, circled around and picked her up at the R&R. She got into his truck, shivering, and slid across the seat to press against him.

“I’m glad we’re doing this,” she said. And rushing on, as
though it was a speech she’d prepared, “Let’s just be ourselves, no big deals, no lectures about why we can’t get married. We’ll just do this now. Deal?”

“Deal,” Carl said. He liked the way she felt against him, the way her eyes and her voice were filled with the moon’s sharp light and he felt eager to get home. He put his hand on her knee, pulled out of town onto the highway. But everything Luke had said started swirling through his mind and there was something about the snow on the edge of the road that reminded him of another time, this kind of night when the snow was scattered thin, the night when—Chrissy pregnant with Lizzie—Carl had the crazy idea that this budding new life might expiate his mother’s death. When he told this to Chrissy she’d suggested they drive out to the cemetery and stand beside his mother’s grave so that she or her spirit or whatever was left of her would somehow know her son’s seed had been planted in the small white welcoming belly of the girl on the other side of the ground, that there was to be new life where before there had been none. That was coming up on three years after Elizabeth’s death.

As Carl had stood above the grave trying to get himself in the mood for this solemn communication with the possibly-still-extant soul of his dead mother, Chrissy, leaning close to him, had murmured, “You know, graveyards are so romantic. If it wasn’t so cold like this, Carl…” That had been Chrissy when she was pregnant, so sexy, all body. And then he saw himself and Chrissy in the graveyard again but this time she was lying on the ground, wearing the big nightgown she’d always had, cold and stiff. And he, in his suit, hands folded devoutly in front, was standing in front of her, looking down.

“What are you thinking?” Moira asked.

Her voice surprised him. He had almost forgotten she was
there. “I don’t know. I was thinking about Chrissy, the graveyard. I was standing in the graveyard with Chrissy and suddenly she was lying on the ground dead.”

“We could call the police about Fred.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“Luke could have been lying.”

“I don’t think so. She’s always wanting Lizzie home before dark. Like it’s for protection. And one time I picked Lizzie up and Chrissy had a big bruise on the side of her face. She said she’d tripped going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and that’s what she got for drinking too much beer.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. Chrissy doesn’t drink beer.” Because now he was thinking of that night at Frostie’s and he could see Chrissy’s green ginger-ale glass with its lipstick-tinged straw.
How are things going with Fred?
Chrissy’s stare.
I was just asking.
Chrissy nodding.
Not bad. Not so good. You know. We’ll work it out. Fighting?
he had asked.
A kind of fighting. Not like we used to. Fred’s kind
.

“Why don’t you talk to Fred?”

“Before I left here, after Chrissy started with Fred again—I went a bit crazy one time. With Fred. I guess that was one of the things he was paying me back for.”

Moira took his hand from her knee, raised it to her mouth. Kissed his fingers. “You still feel the same way about Chrissy. The way you always did.”

Moira’s lips on his fingers brought him back.

He stopped the truck. The wine in her breath was mixed with her flowery scent and he was suddenly so thirsty for her he wanted to drink her all down, right there on the highway with the snow in the headlights like a white curtain falling over them.

D
URING THE FIRST THIRTY YEARS OF
their marriage, Elizabeth and William McKelvey attended every one of the Richardson New Year’s Eve celebrations.

But at the beginning of December 1984, Elizabeth received a letter from her mother informing her that since Lionel Meyers the salami king had, at the age of eighty-four, retired to a nursing home for the duration, she had decided to pay her daughter a winter visit. At that time Elizabeth McKelvey was forty-nine years old. Her husband, William—a decorated war veteran, unsuccessful farmer, sometime hunting and fishing guide, uxorious husband and dedicated alcoholic—was sixty-two. Their son, Carl, who looked like one grandfather but was apparently intent on acting like the other, was seventeen. They were, in sum, a family with a couple of ribbons and more than 130 years of life experience between them. Surely that century plus of intelligence and resourcefulness should have enabled them to deal with the visit of a
close and semi-bereaved relative for a few days. Or is any family ever in such a state? William, who was unrelated and thus apparently unconcerned, said, “We’ll just fix up the back bedroom for her. Paint the floor, buy a new bedspread and wash the curtains. She can have Christmas with us and then we’ll take her to the Richardson New Year thing. It’ll give her something to complain about.”

Her mother at the Richardsons’! Elizabeth could just imagine it. William, his shirt stained from the Richardson annual chili, his gut bulging over the trousers of the wedding suit he still wore, though buttoning his jacket had retreated from a possibility to a joke to a dream, would be in the kitchen socking back the rye and planning hunting trips. Meanwhile Carl and his high-school buddies would be dancing wildly, pulling moronic practical jokes on each other, behaving, in brief, like all those hysterical teenagers the parental Glades had always disapproved of. She and her mother would be in the Great Hall with Adam, standing at the mantlepiece as they always did. She would be holding the glass Adam always kept full. And Adam, tall and pearishly elegant, his round baby face peering down at her, would be emptying and filling his own glass; until gradually that round baby face grew dark and angular, and the Adam-in-the-Adam appeared, the unexpected genie popping out of the unremarkable pale bottle. What was it about Adam? There had been that one martini-soaked night that led to Carl. Then, much later, the year they spent their dozen afternoons sneaking off to motels. Now Adam was once more the pearish gentleman of elegant and distant refinements. William was the primitive, the caveman, the unremitting pulse of whatever kept the creatures of the planet reproducing. Even his fifty extra pounds and thirty extra years hadn’t changed that, just made him bigger and
heavier and furrier and more intermittent; but when he bore down on her in the night, whatever it was that opened up in her had nothing to do with the little princess her father had wanted to be raising.

Adam’s appeal was in being William’s opposite. He was another case of the accidental king. The dutiful but noble brother following in the footsteps of the primitive rule-breaking cad. She’d stopped their motel afternoons because she didn’t want to get caught. Not that way. Either they would make themselves a life or they wouldn’t. In the meantime they would have lunch at the Timberpost. When she told Adam she was shocked by his nonchalance. There were no declarations of love, no pleas, no tears, no bursts of rage. He just nodded, then drove her back to her car which she had diplomatically parked a dozen miles away at the shopping centre. Two weeks later, when they met for their usual lunch, it was as though the clock had been rolled back. There were no cow-eyes, no double-edged reproaches, nothing but a normal lunch between a schoolteacher and the manager of the car dealership who were both on the local library committee.

This year she and Adam and her mother would stand in front of the fire and politely sip at their drinks. The problem: she’d finally made up her mind. She had decided that since Carl was now seventeen he could fend for himself. Meanwhile she couldn’t. Fend for herself. She had decided to tell Adam that if he was still willing, she was too. All she asked was that they get into a train or a car or an airplane and head off to some place thousands of miles away. England or Australia or Vancouver or wherever—she didn’t care so long as it was far. She was feeling the call, the call her mother had felt with the salami king, the call the Duke of Windsor had heard from his sexy divorcée; she was hearing the call and she wanted to
answer it. Just as her father, at the moment of his greatest clarity, had decided to make an announcement, she too had an announcement to make:
Family, I’m gone
. But she wasn’t going to tell them in words, just disappear.

A week before her mother’s visit, when Elizabeth in preparation for her departure had already moved her savings into an account at a Kingston trust company, William got kidney stones and needed an operation. The visit was cancelled. They missed the New Year’s Eve party and Elizabeth didn’t have a chance to get drunk enough to tell Adam she had decided to run away with him.

She took a month off school to nurse William. The next time she met Adam for lunch it was mid-February. Her money was still in Kingston, burning to elope. Adam looked pale and exhausted, as old and worn out as her own husband. He had taken to wearing his spectacles in public, thick lenses encased in steel frames that made him look like someone’s grandfather. Not that she’d ever wanted Adam for his
youth
of all things, but a blizzardy February day seemed a strange time to declare what she had planned to tell him weeks before. At the end of the lunch she walked away glad she’d kept her mouth closed. At least William had his drinking, his hunting, his ever-mounting rages against his dead father and the fact that he had wasted his life running down the already run-down farm that his father had managed to graft onto him. Adam—crazy Adam who’d been brought up as the mouth of the Church of the Unique God—seemed to have simply worn himself out. The slim transparent moonlit pear was now only transparent. Empty. It was as though he had disappeared in front of her eyes.

The next New Year’s Eve she couldn’t bear to drink with Adam again and she found an excuse for them not to go. Then Luke Richardson built a new house and announced the coming
New Year’s celebration would be the last. That was December 1986. Elizabeth went out and found a new dress. The following week she took William and Carl into Iron Mike’s at the shopping centre and made them buy suits.

At seven o’clock New Year’s Eve, 1986, she called her men downstairs to be photographed in their new suits. That was when William surprised her. Over the years William had been turning into the nightmarish figure she’d seen chasing a headless chicken the first time he brought her to the farm. Like his father he now drank too much, ate too much, complained too much. No one could have been less suited to farming. Every decision he made was the wrong one. When the milk marketing board had told the McKelveys they’d have to renovate their operation or give up their licence, William sold his quota to go into cheese instead. When shortly after the local cheese factory was put out of business by the American conglomerate that had bought all the township’s factories only to close them down, he went into beef. Now, his “farming” like his father’s, consisted of chasing a few chickens around the yard, harvesting ever-shrinking crops of hay for his ever-shrinking beef herd and sneaking off to hunt at every opportunity.

But suddenly, that New Year’s Eve, he appeared in the kitchen of his own house wearing a suit that transformed him from a shambling wreck into a large Dickensian patriarch. His white shirt covered his sloping belly like a richly textured tablecloth and the dark luxurious blue of his suit enveloped the shirt, the swollen body, the six decades of physical abuse and decline, and re-presented them as a large and undeniably impressive gentleman. His ruddy cheeks shaved close, his bushy white eyebrows matched by the dazzle of his shirt, his usually unkempt thatch of hair carefully brushed, William McKelvey had suddenly emerged as the man Elizabeth, when
she married him, knew he could become. And Carl, Carl
gleamed
. His hollow cheeks, his slicked-back hair black with moisture, his narrow waist cinched tight in a black belt that glowed against his grey suit and the fitted blue shirt that made him look like some sort of television muscle-boy. He had always seemed so small beside William but in the photograph she took of them that night, he was, as McKelvey later said, a tall narrow pencil beside a fat crayon. Elizabeth, framing them for this last picture she would ever take, felt absurdly moved to see the man she’d chosen and the man she’d begotten standing side by side this way, worthy of a princess she might have said, at least until after the photo was taken when William McKelvey cracked open a bottle of rye to christen his new suit.

“Just a moment,” Carl said. He picked up the camera and made his parents stand together.

In the photograph William McKelvey is leaning against the refrigerator. In one hand he has his bottle of rye. The other is on his wife’s shoulder. Steady and relaxed, the same hand Elizabeth had watched with such fascination thirty-odd years before as he drove her towards this same place, an as yet nonexistent point on the map of a future that was opening up so quickly she was only just beginning to see the contours of its landscape. On William McKelvey’s face plays a full contented smile, in part the smile of a man holding a bottle full of New Year’s promise but mostly in celebration of his great triumph, his most enduring victory over the meanness of life and fate: Elizabeth herself, the wife, as he called her, that coolly beautiful and enigmatic female upon whom his hand had somehow settled, with her unpredictable seasons of fire and ice, her strange idea that she had arrived in this bizarre landscape of rock and wood as a privileged visitor from some other cosmos.
Fine-featured still, chestnut hair carefully waved around her ears and falling to just above her shoulders, narrow lips unusually tinted with a dark red lipstick that contrasted with the severe blue of the dress and jacket she’d chosen for this occasion, icy blue regal eyes that too often blinked in school-mistresslike disapproval but in this photograph turned up in mock submission to William’s victorious smile. It would be months before Carl realized, looking at the camera he had so carelessly shoved onto the pile of magazines that topped the refrigerator, that inside might be this unprecedented image of togetherness. And after it was developed and he showed it to his father, William McKelvey shook his head and muttered something about knowing he shouldn’t have wasted good money on that suit, though he supposed they could use it to bury him in if the moths didn’t get it first.