Elizabeth and After (19 page)

“It must be hard,” she said. “I know I was very upset after my father died. Losing a parent is always a shock.”

“To tell the truth, I think I was relieved. In her quiet way my mother was very overpowering.”

On the far side of the driveway outside the barn, Anna Karenina and Jane Eyre were standing head to head, as though having their own bizarre conversation. By the time Elizabeth had finished fixing the date with Adam, the cows had gone back to chewing away at the new grass. She couldn’t imagine why Adam had found his mother overpowering. Perhaps she’d had secret vices. She could just imagine how he’d be in her class. A quiet boy always staring out the window. Never having any particular problems or showing any particular intelligence. A carefully cultivated blank waiting to be discovered but afraid to put himself forward.

When careers day arrived and the participants were gathered in the staff room, it seemed to Adam that they all felt—as did he—that their younger selves had been summoned for an unwanted interview with the principal. Aside from Adam there was Senator Merriwell Richardson, a sleekly silver-haired mountain in his late seventies; his son Alvin, a pig and chicken farmer; Hugh Greenley, the furniture store owner;
Arnie Kincaid, the insurance man; Peter Farnham, the publisher of the weekly and owner of the local printing shop; and of course Dr. Knight, who immediately approached Adam and began talking to him about the possibility of buying a small used car for Maureen. By the time the speeches began, Adam had agreed to meet Maureen at the lot on the weekend and let her test drive two or three possibilities.

After each of them had given his brief talk, the senator was summoned to the stage. Having announced that the title of his “short speech” was to be “Virtue Is Its Own Reward,” he offered twenty minutes on “The Need for Capital Punishment to Keep Canada Safe from Murderers and Rapists,” then an hour on “The Sacrifices Demanded by Public Life,” for which the only compensation, despite the ill-informed comments of journalists who should know better, was The Affection and Respect of His Own Community as demonstrated on Occasions Like This One.

Afterwards came tea and cookies. Tea from a giant metal urn in which tepid water had been assaulted by enough tea bags to stain it the colour of crankcase oil. Shortbread cookies baked by the home economics class and topped by fossilized maraschino cherries. Adam was trying to pry one of those carbonized pebbles out of a back molar when the senator singled him out, shook his hand enthusiastically while congratulating him on working for Luke, and announced he’d known Hank Goldsmith back in Ottawa. All this while keeping his back to Peter Farnham, who had recently devoted the front page of the
Weekly Bugle
to publicizing the senator’s good fortune in being a member of the board of directors of a company that had just landed a lucrative contract selling attack helicopters to South Africa. “West Gull’s Treasure,” the article had been headlined, and ever since Luke had been
muttering phrases like “in the hands of lawyers.” Eventually the senator interrupted himself to look at his watch and remember an appointment. By the time Adam had returned from seeing the senator to his car, Elizabeth McKelvey had gone home.

Just before the August library meeting Adam received a request from the senator, passed through Luke, to drive him from his cottage to a committee hearing in Ottawa. “I hear you’re in pretty thick with him,” Luke grinned. “Guess he wants to see what you’re made of.”

Adam arrived at the senator’s cottage early in the afternoon of the appointed day. His son Alvin struggled out to meet the car, his weekend stubble splotched with fried egg, tobacco stains, the stigma of being the only Richardson unable to find a way to fleece people, then pound them to a pulp. His “daddy,” as he called him, was ready to go: shaved and powdered, resplendent in white gabardine, he was carrying two black attaché cases with multiple locks that he stowed carefully in the trunk of the Cadillac Luke had insisted Adam use for this errand. Adam expected a continuation of the capital punishment talkathon but shortly after they reached the highway, the senator fell asleep, snoring in a smooth and unwavering tenor vibrato. As they entered Ottawa he woke up and gave Adam directions to his apartment building. After unloading his cases he pressed a hundred-dollar bill on him—which Adam reluctantly accepted—then disappeared into his apartment.

It was a beautiful July day. Adam, six years away from the city, decided to park his car near the canal and take a walk.

When he saw Elizabeth she was standing in the dappled shadow of an old maple, leaning against the rail overlooking
the canal, gazing out over the rippling surface of the water. She wore a yellow-orange flowered dress and carried a white straw hat. Her hair, highlighted by the sun, was drawn back and gathered loosely at her neck. Her eyes seemed to be following a group of sculls. Her face was so composed and still, so perfectly concentrated, she might have been posing for a portrait.

He stopped, unsure of whether to speak. Suddenly she turned towards him, catching him in the act of spying.

“You,” she said. She laughed. “I didn’t expect to see you here. …”

Adam started to explain about the senator, but Elizabeth just shook her head.

“Never mind. It’s too nice a day. Isn’t the water just lovely with the shadows?”

Adam stood beside her looking into the rippling surface. The reflections of the trees, the long railing, even their own silhouettes magically shimmered and merged on the slowly moving water. This, he thought, watching as the water put them together then drew them apart, was as close as he was going to get to Elizabeth.

“I could stand here for ever,” Elizabeth said.

“I’ll bring you a coat when it starts to snow.”

“Don’t say snow.” The light from the water had filled her eyes. Adam was transfixed. “I have to catch my bus,” she said.

“Bus?” he managed.

“I came here for a one-day conference. I skipped out on the last session but I have to get back to the hotel and catch the bus for Kingston. William’s going to meet me there.”

“But I could drive you. I have Luke Richardson’s car. His very best Cadillac with air conditioning and four speakers.”

“Four speakers,” Elizabeth said gravely and Adam felt foolish.

“I think so.”

“I’ll go back and phone William. He’ll be glad to avoid the drive. If you don’t mind dropping me at the house…”

They drove to Bank Street and Adam sat in the car watching Elizabeth call her husband. From the way his heart was beating it seemed clear this must be the climax of his life so far: twitching anxiously behind the wheel of Luke Richardson’s black Cadillac while a married woman, almost a stranger, stood in a dusty phone booth speaking words he couldn’t hear. A few moments later she came back and joined him in the car. “Thank you,” she said.

As Adam drove out of Ottawa he pointed to various places he had gone as a student until, afraid he was playing the tourist guide without having been asked, he suddenly stopped talking. At first the silence was almost unbearable but then he began to see the comic side of things. The prospect of being alone with Elizabeth might have been the climax of his life but the reality was just a heightened version of the torture he had experienced in the Knight living room or listening to Luke boast about his various plans. What was needed, as always in those situations, was a distraction: he asked her about the library, she responded in kind, and soon the emptiness was filled.

As they drove he began to feel more sure of himself. Being with Elizabeth required only the same routine as being with one of the Inner Circle ladies or even his mother: undemanding conversation, a casual tone of voice, the pursuit of minor forbidden pleasures. At a gas station they bought two chocolate cones and a huge chunk of cheddar that Elizabeth convinced him could be frozen. For years the yellow wedge stayed in Adam’s freezer. Bit by bit frost grew out of its centre and broke through its surface. There was a decade in which
he watched the last vestiges of yellow disappearing beneath the encroaching white fur, until one day he had a vaguely triangular snowball. Still he kept it, hoping that one day Elizabeth would come to his house and he could show her this amazing memento. Finally, two years after she was killed—in one of those moments when he felt he ought to purge himself of her—he threw it in the garbage.

But back on the day when the cheese was merely “medium aged,” when Adam still had the taste of chocolate in his mouth, he decided that things were going so well he would do what he would have done had he been on a chocolate-icecream-eating excursion with his mother: he would tell an amusing anecdote, something light and lacy that would spin out the time and leave the listener filled with admiration. It was the story of what he thought to be his very humorous attempt to step out from the accounting office and actually sell a car. Not to Maureen. That had been too easy. In the chosen episode, exaggerated for effect, Adam tried to convince a local farmer who didn’t want to pay the price for one of Luke’s trademark boat-sized Pontiacs that a compact car, only slightly used and an unfortunate shade of piggy pink, would in fact be a bargain, especially since—this was a trick he had heard the other salesmen use—he could probably exert his influence to get him a five per cent rebate.

“That thing!” the farmer exploded. “That’s the kind of car a
fairy
would go for.” And then he’d stalked off.

But instead of laughing Elizabeth gave Adam a close look. “It can’t be easy for you here,” she said. He started to reply—then realized what she meant.

“I’m not—” He stopped. His eyes flicked to the mirror and he saw the way his mouth had twisted in surprise. What wasn’t he? What was he? He could feel his face burning.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” Elizabeth said. She reached out and touched his arm. “It’s all right. It’s just—”

“Please. I’m not one of those narrow-minded. …” Then she herself began to stammer with embarrassment.

That night Adam did penance for falling into the river of Elizabeth McKelvey’s eyes and asking her to drive home with him, by getting down on his knees on the kitchen floor and scrubbing the star-patterned linoleum on which he used to writhe through his trances of babble and jabber. By the time he was finished cleaning the kitchen it was one in the morning. He poured himself a Scotch—a habit, Flora assured him, that Hank Goldsmith had indulged “every night of his life”—and cleared a seat in an armchair in the living room. “Wouldn’t it be interesting,” Adam suddenly said aloud, “if I was in love with Elizabeth McKelvey? If this isn’t a game but real? Wouldn’t that be something?” For a long time he considered what his voice had proposed to the empty room, then he began to feel weighed down, as though he had just heard a judge pronounce his life sentence.

Senator Merriwell Richardson had been appointed to office after the war as a reward for decades of fruitless service organizing the fortunes of the governing Liberal party in the infertile regions of Eastern Ontario. “Good thing he didn’t have to get elected” was the local verdict. When his son Alvin faltered, Luke was chosen to carry the flag. His first test was to get himself elected to the township council.

Following the senator’s instructions, 144 large cardboard signs announcing
LUKE RICHARDSON FOR COUNCILLOR
were made up by a printer in Kingston and delivered to the dealership at closing time on a Friday. Adam stayed late that
night, helping nail the lawn signs onto the wooden stakes Luke had bought. Afterwards, the back seat of his car loaded with signs for distribution in the morning, Adam followed Luke back to his place for a barbecue—steaks with Luke and Amaryllia had become a Friday night ritual.

In those days Luke’s father still lived in the mansion. Luke had bought the land he’d eventually build on but meanwhile he and Amaryllia were “camped” in a small cottage a few miles south of town on one of the long shallow fingers of Long Gull Lake.

After dinner, while Adam watched the last of the light emptying from the water, Luke sipped at a cognac, puffed a cigar and mused about his prospects. Suddenly he leaned towards Adam, put his hand on Adam’s shoulder and confided that being town councillor was only the first step to living in the prime minister’s residence on Sussex Drive. “So,” Luke said, as satisfied as if he were already in the PM’s study treating Adam to a snifter of Sir John A.’s best Confederation single malt, “what do you think of that?”

When Adam got home, Luke’s
What do you think of that?
was still ringing in his ears.

He made himself a pot of tea, got out his mother’s old typewriter and a stack of paper. On each of almost a hundred sheets he typed, in capital letters,
BEWARE THE LESSER EVIL
. Then he folded and stuffed the sheets into one of the batches of envelopes he occasionally picked up in Kingston, and with the helpful inspiration of the telephone book, addressed them.

Writing and distributing these messages—the kind of homilies his mother used to propose as subjects for meditation—had become an occasional hobby since his return to West Gull. One Valentine’s Day he had gone out at three in
the morning with several dozen letters proclaiming
REMEMBER THAT LOVE
is
ALL
and the newspaper had written a column about “our local anonymous Cupid.” On that same Valentine’s Day he had left one of the envelopes, addressed to “Elizabeth and William McKelvey,” in the McKelvey mailbox, thinking with great satisfaction as he drove away that this message would surely cause a painful examination of her heart, but if it did she never mentioned it.

The morning after Luke’s declaration, before dawn, the signs still piled in his truck and back seat, Adam seeded West Gull’s mailboxes with
BEWARE THE LESSER EVIL
. After a return home for coffee and toast he set out to search for abandoned fields in which to plant his signs. When he came to Gerald Boyce’s, Gerald was standing in the middle of the road, waving. Adam stopped and got out.

“Look at this crap! Did you put this in my box?”

Adam took the piece of paper,
BEWARE THE LESSER EVIL
had been stained with butter and jam. He showed Gerald the signs in the back of his car. “Want one?”