A muskiness. When she got married for the first time, her father gave her away. She was only seventeen years old and famously beautiful, the last brunette in a world of blondes. Her father was a guest at her third wedding. “This time I hope her dreams come true,” he told the reporters. “I wish her the happiness she so deserves.” He was a guest at her fifth wedding, as well.
Her parents had separated briefly when she was fourteen years old. Her mother, to whom she had always been closer, had an affair with someone on the set; her father took her brother and went home to his parents. Elizabeth may have said that his moving out was no special loss. She has been quoted as having said this.
She never married. She married seven different men. She married once and had seven children. She never married. The rack was in constant use during the latter half of her reign. Unexplained illnesses plagued her. It was the hottest day of the year, a dizzying heat. She went into the barn for Swansea pears. Inexplicably the loft was cooler than the house. She said she stayed there half an hour in the slatted light, the half coolness. Her father napped inside the house.
“I perceive you think of our father’s death with a calm mind,” her half brother, the new king, noted.
“It was a pleasant family to be in?” the Irish maid was asked. Her name was Bridget, but she was called Maggie by the girls, because they had once had another Irish maid they were fond of and she’d had that name.
“I don’t know how the family was. I got along all right.”
“You never saw anything out of the way?”
“No, sir.”
“You never saw any conflict in the family?”
“No, sir.”
“Never saw the least — any quarreling or anything of that kind?”
“No, sir.”
The half hour between her father settling down for his nap and the discovery of murder may well be the most closely examined half hour in criminal history. The record is quite specific as to the times. When Bridget left the house, she looked at the clock. As she ran, she heard the city hall bell toll. Only eight minutes are unaccounted for.
After the acquittal she changed her name to Lizbeth. “There is one thing that hurts me very much,” she told the papers. “They say I don’t show any grief. They say I don’t cry. They should see me when I am alone.”
Her father died a brutal, furious, famous death. Her father died quietly of a stroke before her sixth wedding. After her father died, she discovered he had reinserted her into his will. She had never doubted that he loved her. She inherited his great fortune, along with her sister. She found a sort of gaiety she’d never had before.
She became a devotee of the stage, often inviting whole casts home for parties, food, and dancing. Her sister was horrified; despite the acquittal they had become a local grotesquerie. The only seemly response was silence, her sister told Lizbeth, who responded to this damp admonition with another party.
The sound of a pipe and tabor floated through the palace. Lord Semphill went looking for the source of the music. He found the queen dancing with Lady Warwick. When she had become queen, she had taken a motto, SEMPER EADEM, it was. ALWAYS THE SAME. This motto had first belonged to her mother.
She noticed Lord Semphill watching her through the drapes. “Your father loved to dance,” he said awkwardly, for he had always been told this. He was embarrassed to be caught spying on her.
“Won’t you come and dance with us?” she asked. She was laughing at him. Why not laugh? She had survived everything and everyone. She held out her arms. Lord Semphill was suddenly deeply moved to see the queen — at her age! — bending and leaping into the air like the flame on a candle, twirling this way and then that, like the tongue in a lively bell.
GO BACK
I spent the first eleven years of my life in Bloomington, Indiana, but I don’t remember it as eleven years. In fact, I couldn’t tell you in what year or in what sequence anything happened, only in what season. It is as if in my mind my whole childhood is collapsed into one crowded year. And me, I grow, I shrink; I am three years old, ten, five; I am eight again and it is summer.
In the summer the tar on the streets turned liquid and bubbled. We popped the bubbles with our shoes on our way to the pool and came home smelling of tar and chlorine. In the evenings we chased fireflies and played long games of Capture the Flag. I was fast and smart and usually came home covered in glory.
The Rabinowitzes, our next-door neighbors, had a brief bat infestation in their upstairs closet. Stevie showed them to me during the day, hanging from the rod, sleeping among Mrs. Rabinowitz’s print dresses. You could see their teeth, and the closet smelled of mothballs. At dusk the bats streamed into the sky through an attic grate, which Mr. Rabinowitz then screened over. You might have thought they were birds, except for the way they shrieked.
Above the Rabinowitzes’ bed hung a star of David made of straw. Mrs. Rabinowitz’s wedding ring was of tin. They came from Germany and spoke with accents. Mrs. Rabinowitz was much calmer than my mother would have been about the bats.
Stevie Rabinowitz was my best friend. He moved in next door when we were both four years old. Stevie could already read. He learned off the sports page. He would come over in the morning for toast and juice and to tell my father the baseball standings. We played Uncle Wiggily and he read both his own cards and mine. When I played with Stevie, we drew cards I never drew with anyone else. After I could read for myself, the cards were ordinary again. But when Stevie read them, Uncle Wiggily said that he would play for the Pirates when he grew up. He went ahead two spaces. I would play for the Dodgers. I would be the first girl to bat leadoff in the majors. I went ahead three spaces. Uncle Wiggily said Stevie would have a baby sister and his parents would pay her all the attention. He went back three spaces. Uncle Wiggily said I was too bossy. I was supposed to go back three spaces, but I wouldn’t.
“Sometimes going back is better,” my mother told me when I complained about it to her. “Sometimes it only looks like you’re losing when really it’s the only way to win.”
Uncle Wiggily said that we would meet movie stars, and in the summer Jayne Mansfield came to the Indianapolis 500. We went to the airport to get her autograph. She signed pictures of herself, dotting the i in Mansfield with a heart. Her husband was furious with her, but it probably didn’t have anything to do with us. She looked like no woman I had ever seen.
In the spring my brother entered the science fair with a project on Euclidean principles in curved space. He took second prize. Spring was the season for jacks and baseball. My father bought an inflatable raft for fishing trips. When I came home from school, it was fully inflated, filling our living room. “How did I get it in here?” my father asked, tickling me under the chin like a cat. “It’s a boat in a bottle. How did I do it, Yvette? How will I get it out again?”
In the winter he bought us skis, although there was nowhere in Indiana to go skiing. One snowy morning I looked outside and saw a blue parrot in the dogwood tree. My mother went out to it and coaxed it onto her finger. We put an ad in the paper, but no one ever called. My own parakeet was an albino who could talk. “Yvette is pretty,” it said. “Pretty, pretty, pretty.” And sometimes, “Yvette, be quiet!”