The Queen of England — IV

A Lady-In-Waiting, No More

Weeks passed and I took Elizabeth on walks of the grounds. I picked her flowers. We picniced and made love in the bushes and behind the trees where and when no one was looking. Nature colluded with us to hide our illicit affair. We made love in a rainstorm. I took her on a drive in my car and she grinned foolishly as the wind coursed through her hair. She proclaimed that she loved Elvis. Said she never heard him before, but she loved rock 'n' roll music though it made her giggle. "It is rather silly," she added. "Wouldn't you agree?"

Of course, I agreed. We pulled off the side of the road and made love there just beside a fishing pond where no fishers fished. I was the only fisher there. And she was the pond. What I hoped to extract from her, I did not know. I don't know that I wanted anything. I realized I was crazed. Intoxicated on a sort of madness. I was insatiable. But I knew I must do something more, something else. As much as I felt in love, and as passionate as our romance was, I also felt a sense of inexplicable tragedy in our lovemaking. Some precarious sense of doom. Everytime felt like the last time and I knew it mustn't go on the way that it was going.

She lied naked in my room at the boarding house, mid-afternoon on a September Tuesday. The Widow Marple was making lemonade for us. She knew her as Elizabeth, as she had been recently introduced. It was improper for young lovers to be alone, but we had never been proper, the nature of our relationship forbade it, but the Widow Marple didn't begrudge us of this one impropriety, that of impetuous unwed lovers. She seemed to admire us because of it as though we were a living romance novel traipsing through her home.

"She's a lovely girl," she said of her to me as we crept up the stairs. I was admiring the back of Elizabeth's bare feet as they strode before my eyes on the steps. She had delicate heels. Soft, sensual curves. And no part of her body was burdened by some noticeable defect or deformity.

A cool breeze blew through the windows and the lace curtains danced away from the walls and the sunlight shone like carnival lights through the holes in the curtains and through the broad leaves of the sycamore trees. We had just made love and I told her it was time for us to leave. She was in perfect shape, in the midst of youth. She covered her small breasts with a white muslin throw blanket and wore it like a robe as she searched for her clothes, which seemed to hide about the room much to my favor. Her hair was tussled and gave her the sultry allure of those women I recall from garage calendars or from my father's risqué magazines he kept hidden in a toolbox in the shed.

I was dressed already. I straightened my tie in the mirror and caught her in the reflection and smiled at her. Yet, I was ridden with guilt and felt dishonest for our relationship. I couldn't feel anything other than passion before, but now that passion was tempered with sensibility and the improperness snd impracticality of our affair troubled me to the point that my stomach ached and my mind raced with restless conclusions of how it would end because all things end. And illicit affairs never seem end favorably.

"Walter, I feel divine. But I do not like these moments when we must return to that dreadful place. It is like the Tower."

"I can take you home."

"To England?" Her ears perked. She gazed upon me enthralled.

"To Charlottesville, Marie. To your mother and father. They must miss you."

She stopped suddenly. "Please, call me Elizabeth."

I nodded. 

"Walter, that is not home. We've been over this. The body—"

"—is merely a vessel. Yes. I know. You've said it before." Perhaps I spoke too harshly. She turned and looked at me in the mirror admonished by my tone or the harsh words. Not her true self, but a reflected image of herself altered by distance and light and the glass through which she returned. She must have sensed my rebuke. My irritability. And somewhere in my response, she too must have caught a glimpse of the inevitable end.

"I'm sorry," I said, turning to speak to her as she stood there still covered in the blanket. "But I am not Walter. I am Charlie, Dr. Charles Swan, and you are Marie. I want to take you home to Charlottesville and meet your mother and father. Because I love you. And I want to care for you. I want to marry you. I want you to be Mrs. Marie Swan."

"I cannot be."

"You can!"

"You are not Walter?" she gasped.

"Marie. I am Charlie."

She shook her head and quickly put on her clothes as though I betrayed her. As though I had undermined everything and my words killed her, slowly. As though my head was again in the bag because it refused to reunite with my body.

"Take me back, please."

I nodded and followed her downstairs. I explained to the Widow Marple that we would not be having lemonade, after all, with regrets, and Marie apologized half-heartedly, frantic as she was to be absolved of the scene.

"I am feeling — unwell," she excused.

"Oh, dear me. Well, darling, I hope you feel better and come back soon. It is so rare that I get to..."

Marie smiled and walked away before the Widow Marple had finished her sentence. The screen door clapped shut behind us, rattling on the wood frame. I helped her into the car. She didn't appear to have any hostility towards me, but she slumped into her seat as though she were dying and I drove her back to the hospital uncertain of what would become of us. I suppose Abel would contact her parents in Charlottsville and they would come get her. She would presumably see whatever psychiatrist she was seeing there. If any at all. She would go to college or get married and have a new life. Presumably so. That is the old formula, anyway. A baby and a pill for the melancholy.

I would be congratulated and thanked and there would be another patient and another until Elizabeth was so many patients ago that I would lose her in a thousand other mad faces and maladies. Until she was so distant and there were so many years between us that I could no longer feel or smell her, or hear again the sound of her laughter in my fondest of memories. Until it was like she had never been at all but for that one faint memory that returns once in a while like some sort of glorious comet passing through my mind. It is a terrible way to die, in obscurity, in a prolonged slow erasing of what was once such a beautiful existence. To have one sharpen your senses so erotically and emphatically, only to lose them and be dull again in their absence.

She didn't say anything returning to the asylum, and as we pulled up she looked as though she had died. She was the person she was before we first spoke and I realized the progress we made had been undone. But I hadn't the heart to take her back, I realized. I wanted to see this through myself. So I walked in and told Abel I was driving her home and he smiled and nodded his head in approval. He wrote down an address and said it was the Laveau residence. He said he'd phone ahead and tell them to expect us, but I asked him not to.

"Stop at every attraction. Every greasy spoon. Make a memory of it. Take tomorrow off. Spend time in Charlottesville, and I hope to see you Monday morning. But if I don't, send me a postcard. Don't ever forget you were here, doctor. Sometimes the doctor heals the patient. Sometimes the patient heals the doctor. But patience heals us all."

I smiled without saying anything at all. Sometimes there is nothing one needs to say even when explanations or words seem warranted. His kindness and support and belief in me had given me the courage to tell her that I was not Sir Walter Raleigh. The thought had never occurred to me prior to meeting Marie, and I only said that I was out of desire to be something to her I could not ever be. You can only pretend for so long to be someone you are not. False personas will always wash away in favor of one's true self given time.

It was four hours to Charlottesville. I had worried that Marie would try to run or leave me when we got gas or when we stopped to eat. But instead she remained compliant and still, obedient even much like a beaten dog. She followed me into the diner and ate with me without speaking a word. She allowed for me to order for her, as she didn't speak, though she perused the menu. I waited outside the women's restroom for her and she allowed me to take her arm and escort her to the car. She was not apparently angry or volatile, rather just resigned to her fate. I liked to think she was contemplating who she was inside herself, and that she would at any moment speak to me with some significant break through. Perhaps in her solitude her mind was healing itself. I kept the music off so to hear her if she chose to speak. I didn't want to miss even the faintest of her words. I didn't want to miss anything that might offer me some hope.

How I desired her, even in silence. She was so maleable and compliant that I figured I could pull over to some secluded spot and make love to her and she would simply bend in my hands responsively playing her part in our dying affair. Like an actress whose body is made from molding clay. Receiving that which I gave. But I could not violate her in that way anymore for it felt that we were different people now. And it would be a sad act, molested by grief.

If ever she spoke of our affair, I knew my career would be short-lived. But I didn't think of that. I thought solely of her well-being and happiness. It was all too formal. She was the patient and I was the doctor. She was the passenger and I was the driver. And soon we would be strangers.

The address Abel had written out on the paper took us to a posh neighborhood in the historic downtown of Charlottesville. The houses were pre-to-early-post-Civil War era and stately. Lawns perfectly kept. Horse head hitching posts. Wrought-iron fences. Large looming shade trees old as the houses themselves. Enormous willows which made me think of where we first made love. I pulled up to the house and as to be expected a man and woman in fine clothes stood there holding hands watching us. I knew Abel had called.

It was early evening. I sat there for a moment and took a deep breath hoping to gather some courage in it. I told Marie that I loved her which felt final and was met with only the sound of birds and a breeze that blew through the limbs of those giant trees. Unrequited as it was, it never satisfied me less to express it. Love is not dependent upon reciprocation, as I've heard told. I wonder if those that say as much ever really loved at all if only to love someone that loved them.

I expected in my mind a plethora of different things as we walked up the walk to her door. I expected terror and agony and peace and civility and shame and indignation and a million different things all at once. To be greeted or assaulted. To be murdered or loved. I didn't know what I would say or how I would say it. I knew she would probably be put back in treatment with whoever she was seeing. I wondered if they would take her under their wing or if they would rebuke her.

The walk was lined with hostas in full bloom and there her parents stood. They embraced her, and I stood there like a statue as everyone cried besides for me. Her father was quick to shake my hand.

"Dr. Swan," I presume.

I nodded. Marie's mother still held on to her and she seemed so absurdly young to me then. I had never seen her that way. My hand was in her father's hand still and I felt a great sense of shame as he squeezed mine and shook. As he cupped my hand in his hands. 

"We cannot thank you enough. Marie has been — going through a difficult phase and — well we are happy to have her home. Thanks to you. Would you like to stay for dinner?"

Marie was still sobbing in her mother's arms. I wondered of the origin of her tears. I wondered of what I knew and didn't know. What ailment truly plagued her. What malady had a grip on her psyche. And if that would ever be relieved outside of the few short-lived weeks we spent together pretending to be people we were not. And I wondered if this is what a broken heart felt like in the tomb of my chest.

"No. I mustn't. I have to be getting back."

Her father walked me to my car as Marie went inside the house with her mother. It was almost as though he knew. Maybe, he read it upon my face. Perhaps I looked as horribly sad as I felt. Dead on my feet. Or maybe there were other men before who looked like me. Men who brought her home after having mended her wound. He put his hand on my back and I could tell he wanted to tell me something.

"Doctor. Marie has periods of delusion where she believes she is someone other than herself. She goes on about an Elizabeth. She has been afflicted with this all her life. We don't know why. No one seems to know. No one can tell us. She sees a specialist, Dr. Burke, at the University and he doesn't know, either. Some days she is fine. For weeks she will be herself, then she will hardly speak a word and act like an entirely different person. Like we are foreign to her and she doesn't belong with us. Who was she with you?"

"The Queen of England," I said opening my car door wishing no longer to feel anything. I looked back to see if her face might appear in a window. A faint hope that sanity would be restored by some miracle before I left. But it did not appear. Sadly, the windows were just panes of empty glass and behind them were only curtains that were as still as death.

"Doctor, if I may, what is your professional opinion of lobotomy?"

I looked at her father then back to the house. I parted my hair with my fingers and I could feel a part of me incensed by his question. Incensed, perhaps, because he asked it so passively. Like he was asking about a root canal.

"In the professional opinion of Dr. Burke and Dr. Marcus " he went on, "there are many advantages of lobotomizing someone with a condition like Marie's."

"How old is your daughter, sir?" I asked, my hand clinching the door handle.

"Eighteen. May I ask why?"

"Eighteen is a liberating age. Have you had her declared incompetent by a judge so that she would be legally bound to your authority despite being eighteen?"

"Why, no. We haven't felt the need to do so, yet. Marie trusts us, we feel. We only want what is best for her. But now with her running off..."

With that I changed course and walked up the walk and into the house. Marie was with her mother on the sofa, still sobbing. Her father followed me inside and stood behind me.

"Elizabeth, let's go!"

She perked up and looked at me. Oceans in her eyes. She wiped the tears from her face and stood up. Her mother reached for her, but she walked quickly to me. She begged for her, but Elizabeth didn't listen.

"Mr. Laveau, I am formally asking your permission to marry your daughter. I will be her husband and her doctor responsible for her care. I will love her every day for the rest of my life to death do us part."

"No! That is preposterous. You can't possibly..."

"Well, I hate to inform you that we are getting married anyway and your permission is not required. We will send you a postcard."

Elizabeth smiled and her mother covered her mouth with her hands and gasped. I could only tell that she was stunned and couldn't stand. I suppose that they felt they owned their daughter, but the lease was up and she was an adult capable of making her own decisions, at least, in my medical opinion.

"I think we ought to consult with Dr. Burke and talk this through."

"Dr. Burke can go to hell," I said.

I took Elizabeth's hand and we walked out the door. Her parents implored us to stay, but we would not stay. There would be no Dr. Burke. No lobotomy. No more psychiatric wards or hospitals. There would be green grass and sunshine. Fields and baseball. Greasy spoons and beaches. Motels and Elvis.

"Dr. Swan!" her father cried as we walked away.

"That is Sir Walter Raleigh to you, sir," I said as we got in the car and pulled away. Elizabeth waved and somewhere on that street, in that neighborhood, she left Marie Laveau behind, once and for all.

We married on a beach in North Carolina that was said to have been walked by Blackbeard the pirate who romanced a North Carolinian girl. A preacher and his wife stood with us near 11 o'clock at night. Their hospitality was overwhelming.

"A lady-in-waiting, no more," she remarked with a grin as we took our vowels. The ring I bought in an antique shop earlier that afternoon. It was a black pearl.

We sent a postcard to the Laveau's and to Abel. We, of course, honeymooned in England, though we agreed to return to the United States. But one night while half-drunk in a pub in Cambridge, Elizabeth insisted we rent a truck which we drove to a graveyard in Hampstead that was appropiriately veiled in fog. She then demanded I dig up a certain grave whose headstone bore the curious inscription —Rest in Peace/Lord Horace Cheese.

"I carried your head in a bag for 29 years. It is the least you can do for me, darling."

So I dug up Lord Cheese, sure I was going to be arrested. And when I got to the casket, Elizabeth who sat on the side of the grave amused by my labor or my terrible jokes and dry wit, with her feet dangling like a child's off a bridge, urged me to open the lid.

"You didn't dig up the whole grave to not, did you, my darling?"

"I suppose not, my love. My apologies, Mr. Cheese, for this intrusion."

"Lord Cheese, mind you," she grinned.

"Lord Cheese," I corrected myself. In that moment as the nails wailed free and the lid creaked open, I questioned everything but my love for her. But when that casket was finally opened, there lied the most wondrous thing I'd ever seen apart from Elizabeth in the nude. There lied a casket full of gold.

"Lord Horace Cheese, otherwise known as El Dorado," she announced gleefully and half-drunk. "That which you brought back from that ill-fated voyage so long ago, to the knowledge of no one but your dear wife, a lady-in-waiting no more, who so cleverly hid it. So what do you think of us now, Sir Walter Raleigh?"

"Well. I'm thankful I didn't let them lobotomize you."

She laughed and we brought the gold up, bar by bar, and loaded it into the truck, under the glow of a full and watchful moon.