Mrs. Royalty by Richard Cumyn
If you believe legend, Willis Aulty, the closest thing to celebrity
in Clayton Township, began his march to material largesse with one
cow. The beast may well have been named Bessie. Add what
paraphernalia you will: three-legged stool, pungent barn, autumnally
lidded pre-dawn sky, the easily confused sound of a stream of warm
liquid hitting the bottom of a galvanized steel bucket. Should you be
determined enough to engage him in conversation after church, near
the coat rack with the other men standing in wait for their wives,
you will find Willis Aulty to be a resolute and honest man. A quiet
and uncomplicated prize. A man made all the more mysterious for his
seventy years of vigorous bachelorhood. A man Aunt Myrna assumed was
as unlike her dear departed Solomon as is the curd from the whey. A
man who, if ever he had loved another woman, kept it a secret.
Aunt Myrna made certain demands that appeared to preclude her
unwrapping her prize all the way. The first was that she refused to
comply with Uncle Willis's wish that she sell her house, although the
building was half the size and twice as drafty as the Aulty place.
She was not going to move from the home she and the Judge had built,
a miniature castle constructed of the same stone as had been used in
both the Ottawa Parliament Buildings and the San Francisco
Legislature. That, she proclaimed, was that. Compliant Willis turned
over the maintenance of his farm to his brother's daughter, Bethany
and her husband, newlyweds themselves and only too thrilled to be
moving into the Big House.
The second rift in the alliance came when Myrna suggested that her
youngest, Chester, who was back after three years out west, also be
allowed to take up residence in the Big House. Cousin Chet was thirty
and between positions, as he put it, a state of being that had lasted
longer than either of his marriages. "Between positions" was always
paired with the qualifier, "on the verge of a breakthrough," the
exact meaning of which depended on the particular venture of the
moment. In the last such scheme that I can recall, Chet had been
awarded a provincial grant to help him construct and sell indoor worm
composters. Sales proceeded winningly until he began receiving phone
calls from angry people demanding refunds. The vermiculture sets
worked remarkably well for about a week and then stopped, the halt
coinciding in each case with a sudden infestation of houseflies.
"Look," he admitted defensively to his lawyer, as they reviewed the
claims against him, "you go out and find a goddamn brandling worm, or
whatever the hell you're supposed to use. Jeez!"
In theory the Aulty estate was large enough to accommodate a dozen
Chester Roys without the risk of their colliding with each other.
Willis had built the mansion fully expecting that it would one day
house a wife and a brood of ten children, but as he grew richer and
as single women and the mothers of single women grew bolder in their
pursuit of him as an object of matrimony, he retreated, hermit-like,
into his work. His niece knew better than to object to the arrival of
her and her husband's house guest, someone she remembered vaguely to
have been a banal clown in high school. She had no grounds for
complaint. This was a fine place to live, and rent-free at that.
In his new home, the dark little castle with its narrow hallways and
low ceilings, Willis tried not to feel claustrophobic. Memorabilia of
the Judge smothered the stone walls: musty hunting trophies, awards
from the legal community, framed honourary degrees, and primitive art
that Willis suspected old Roy had manufactured downstairs in his
dungeon of a workshop. Myrna would not let Willis smoke his
cigarettes inside, although the Judge's pipes were still prominent in
their holder on the mantle, and so he took regular furloughs outside
with the toy poodle, Annette. His work was no longer the refuge it
had been; since passing the day-to-day management of the business
over to his younger associates, Willis had very little to do at the
dairy except get in the way. His sense of entrapment complete and
unbearable, he began taking the dog for longer and longer walks
through town, and when that was not enough, he began driving with
Annette all the way out to the Big House where he would spend first
the mornings and then the entire day until suppertime. The day he
called to tell Myrna he would not be home for supper, she immediately
called her old friend, Mrs. Palmer.
"Why don't you get on out there and see what he's up to, dear, if
it's killing you so much to know?" said Mrs. Palmer.
"Oh, I can't chase him down. He has to want to be with me."
"Perhaps he's taking the time to get to know your son. He certainly
has some catching up to do there, wouldn't you say, Myrna?"
"Willis has known Chester since he was a baby, ever since they used
to pass him around from hand to hand downstairs in the church hall
during coffee time. He was such an active child. I would lose track
of him and feel a sudden stab of panic in my chest." She was feeling
the same pain now.
"It's another thing for a man to come to know a grown son, another
thing altogether, Myrna. I stand on my own experience of Bill and the
boys, and that has been one thorny path, let me tell you. It wasn't
until they came to be men that the trouble started. But leave us not
get into that."
"No, Willis is not the type to seek out another man to find out
what's in his heart. I'm trying to think of him, now, the man we have
known all these years -- I wish I had thought about him as hard as
this before I decided to go after him. This all has something to do
with me, I dare say, and I'm panicked about it. I really am at a hard
loss over it."
"You and Willis have been married scarce a month now. At least you
have your time with the Judge to fall back on, but Willis is new to
all this. He has to have time to adjust. You can't take a seventy-
year-old bachelor boy and turn him into a husband over night."
"Judge Roy loved coming home. He really loved the home I kept for
him," and she began to weep into the receiver.
"He did. He did at that. Everyone knows how much he did. You go ahead
and let it out," said Mrs. Palmer.
As Myrna dried her eyes, Willis sat contentedly at his old kitchen
table. His niece, Bethany, was adding a panful of cooked ground beef
and onion to the pot of chili, the aroma of which swirled around him
and bound him seductively to his chair. He took a sip of ginger beer
from the bottle, and watched his niece's young husband, Gatien, whom
she called Gates, gambol outside the kitchen window with the
delighted poodle. Gates played the way Myrna was always after Willis
to run the dog, but Willis drew the line at cavorting.
Then Chester came in talking on a cordless telephone. Willis watched
him open the refrigerator and stand before it without taking out any
food.
He heard him say, "I know what I'm doing."
"Another can of worms, Chester?" said Bethany as she laid a place mat
and cutlery in front of her uncle. Willis chuckled as he picked up
his drink and leaned back helpfully.
Chet pocketed his cellular and turned around without closing the
refrigerator. "Oh, hello, New Dad. I didn't notice you there. How
goes the cheese game these days?"
Willis nodded gravely at his stepson and took another mouthful from
the bottle.
"The Head Cheese. Man of few words. King of all he surveys. By the
way, have I thanked you for the room and board? You are one generous
padre. Isn't he generous? We is some lucky, we young'uns."
Bethany closed the fridge door and then returned to the stove to stir
the chili. Chet continued to chatter.
"This could not have worked out better. To have returned to the hive
and the Queen Bee -- I mean, can you imagine me back in the Tower
with Her Majesty? Stifling is not the word. At least when His Honour
was still around it gave her someone to fuss over. Don't take this
the wrong way, Willis, but you don't strike me as the type who lets
people make a fuss over him. That would leave me with no one running
interference. She'd be back rooting through my laundry again."
Willis finished his ginger beer, pushed back from the table, and
stepped outside. He could feel something forming in the back of his
head, a buzz surrounding a gradually congealing notion, something
that only just now had been served the particular spin it needed. The
grey sky was just the blank shade required to set aflame the big
maple in front of the house. The dog lay stretched out on her tummy
on the grass, snuffling her snout under a heap of leaves that were
dry and ready to fly. Willis raised his open hand in greeting and
Gates waved back.
"Rain coming. Maybe tonight, feels like," said Gates.
"Not until morning," said Willis.
"Ah," said the young man, knowing there was little else to be said
about the weather after such a pronouncement. He waited uneasily in
the pause between them.
"Now those gutters need to be cleaned out before snow."
"Yes sir."
"Got time, scrape down the peeling spots just under the eaves there.
Should be some primer in the basement."
"Will do," said Gates, who had the feeling that preparing the house
for winter was not what was foremost on the older man's mind. "You
want me to go ahead and match the colour there? Beth's got a fair eye
when it comes to that sort of thing. Me, I'm practically blind when
it comes to that."
"Well, all right."
"We'd probably need two litres."
"Go ahead and buy the paint, then. Charge it to the dairy."
"I can borrow an extension ladder from work," said Gates, intrigued
now and intent on keeping the ball in play.
"Might just do her myself."
"Really? I don't mind. It's the least I can do."
"Nope," said Willis, abruptly ending the volley.
Back in the kitchen, Willis looked at the table set with bowls of
steaming chili and a basket of freshly baked rolls and plates of his
dairy's butter, and felt the spinning mass in his mind coalesce to a
denser, cooler certainty.
"One thing," he began.
"Yes, Uncle?"
"How many children you plan to have?"
"Children? I don't know. We've not really talked seriously about it.
Gates keeps talking about how he wants a big family."
"Lots of kids, then."
"Well, yes, I think so, if we can afford to."
Willis left his niece as abruptly as he had her husband. He found
Chester upstairs in his room. The young man lay with his booted feet
propped on the bed.
"Supper ready yet, Dad?"
"Pack your stuff," said Willis. "Meet me outside in the car in ten
minutes."
"Ten minutes! What's the problem? I didn't do anything, I swear."
"Nine minutes," said Willis.
He drove Annette and Chet back to the castle stoop where he deposited
them. When Myrna came outside, he told her to get into the car. She
hesitated before turning to her son.
"Chester, tell me what this is all about."
"I have no idea, Mother."
"Just climb on in here, Myrna," said Willis. "I have something to say
that touches on the two of us."
They drove east on Number Two through Crane's Mills and then turned
north on the Baseline Road.
"Myrna, the first day I saw you I was sitting in church. It was a
spring day in May and you wore a spiffy little purple hat that I
couldn't keep my eyes off of. Missed most of the service looking over
at you. Can't tell you what the preacher said in his sermon. Can tell
you that a sunbeam came in through the stained glass right under Our
Saviour's armpit and lit up that hat and your pretty face under it.
"I spent the better part of the summer waiting for my chance to win
you. You know as well as I do I had plenty of chances. It wasn't a
big town back then. Still isn't. Bet you don't remember the Harvest
Dance."
"Vaguely," she said.
"You weren't much interested in the boy you were with. I had come
stag with my brother. Most the night I stood against the wall,
watching you twirl around with every boy who asked you. Then, last
dance, Ladies' Choice, you walked right across the room and picked
me. I near as died I was so nervous. It was a slow song. I can still
remember the way your hair smelled of lemon juice. I wasn't much of a
dancer, but you didn't stop smiling and listening to me the whole
time. You even told me you thought I was swell.
"Did I? Well."
"I was all set to ask you out to the next dance, when Davey Roy come
home from the war and you married him and I went to work making
something out of the broken down farm I was left with when my father
died. I hated that place for the longest time. Caved-in barns and
rotten silos. Hated it, Myrna, every time I saw you with him. After a
while the bad feeling in my chest got smaller and I just went on
working. Every time I found I had money in the bank I threw it back
into the dairy, because I was afraid I'd take it and spend it on a
diamond necklace or a sable coat to steal you away with. A person can
work to avoid and work to forget just the same way he can use drink
to achieve the same ends."
"All this time," she said. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Wouldn't have changed anything." He waited a beat. "Would it?"
"No, probably it wouldn't have, Willis. But I'm glad you're telling
me now," she said, sitting taller in the passenger seat and smoothing
out the lap of her skirt. "This makes me feel quite...I can't say,
exactly. Girlish, I think." She gazed at his profile, and when he
glanced over, she was smiling at him, her eyes brimming and fluttery.
"I would have to say I approve, sir."
"That's neither here nor there. Thing is, I brought Chester back with
me because I don't have room for him."
"Of course there's room for him."
"There's no room for him if you and I move into the Big House
together."
"We've been over this before."
"Myrna, let the boy have the castle. Let him bang around in there.
It's sturdy enough, he can't do too much damage, unless he tries to
burn the place down."
"Give him some credit, Willis."
"Credit is the last thing that young fellow needs."
"Why are you attacking my son all of a sudden?"
"I'm not. I'm just saying that he needs room of his own and we need
to make ourselves part of something bigger."
"I don't understand. Everything was working so well between us."
"For you, Myrna. For you. See, there's one thing I want now even more
than to turn the clock back fifty years, and that's to be part of a
family. Babies, puppies and kittens, hockey practice, ballet lessons,
mumps, measles. The whole kit-'n-caboodle!"
Willis slowed the car and pulled off the road into the entrance to a
fenced compound. A series of low, connected green and yellow
buildings stretched beside them for two hundred metres parallel to
the road.
"You ever been inside there?" he asked.
"Why no. Of course not." Myrna wrinkled her nose at the smell coming
from the nearby heaps of compost.
"I was working here when I met you. It's cool and dark in there. You
have to wear a miner's helmet with a lantern on it. You go in and
it's like stepping into a damp bank vault. Instead of gold bars,
there are racks and racks, ceiling to floor, aisle after narrow
aisle, of white mushrooms. It doesn't smell the way you'd think it
would, either. It's like you've pressed your nose down into the
leaves on the forest floor. And in each rack are hundreds of tiny
white helmets pushing through the soil, and not a single one of them
has anything to do with the sun."
"Willis, I fail to see -- "
"Come inside with me. I want to show you."
"No thank you. I will take your word for it. Right now, if you don't
mind, I would like you to take me home."
"Home."
"Yes. Home. My home."
"That dance, the Harvest Dance when you picked me, do you remember
what we talked about?"
"No, I don't. How am I supposed to remember what I said to a boy with
whom I danced one dance a half century ago? Really."
"I told you about my various duties here. I told you about how I
started off hauling and dumping the old soil. Gardeners would come
and buy it by the truckload. I was in charge of that. Then I worked
my way up until I was in charge of one whole stage of production. It
was a big responsibility. It took the entire song to tell you about
it."
"Back when you were a chatterbox."
"You said, "Will you take me there to see it sometime?" and I
promised you I would."
"I don't think I would have said that."
"You as sure as did."
"I don't remember. Oh, Willis, to you, this is a place full of
important memories, but to me -- I'm very sorry -- to me these are
just a bunch of ugly buildings full of fungus."
He took hold of the steering wheel at ten and two o'clock and
stretched his arms out straight so that his spine was pushed back
into the seat. Then he released.
"Myrna, you've always been my queen. I could take a quarter out of my
pocket and look at Elizabeth Two and I would always see you. Every
couple of decades the image would change to show your maturity, but
it was always you. Sometimes it was a sharp picture, sometimes
blurry, depending on the coin. Always the same, though." Then he said
in gentler voice, "Come with me, now."
"Willis."
"Come jump with me into another picture, while there's still time."
She turned her face away from him towards the mushroom factory. He
knew that she had as much interest in it as she had in the stubble of
corn stalks remaining in the field on the other side of the road. Or
in cheese. Or coins. Or babies. She had removed herself from him so
easily, he wondered what had brought her to him in the first place.
He could well imagine. He was usually right about such things. He was
the richest man in Clayton Township because he had nurtured an icy
right sense about just such things. Things that had nothing to do
with dance cards or sunbeams in church or anything as fragile and
dependent upon decay as a mushroom.
He said, "I'll only be a few minutes. I want to bring some fresh
mushrooms home to Bethany and Gates. Got my heart set on sirloin
tomorrow. Golly, listen to me. Must be my stomach doing the talking
now. I won't be long, Myrna."
She murmured something indistinct to him.
"Then I'll drive you straight home."
She raised her left hand in an abbreviated, back-handed wave, but
kept her face turned away from him and continued to look out the
window.
Now our mother's sister, Myrna, was the Mrs. Judge Roy all her
married life, some forty-three years. Uncle David died seven years
ago, and this year, when Aunt Myrna married Willis Aulty of Aulty
Cheese, she was one of the last to catch the significance of her new
compound name. While most still called her Mrs. Roy or Myrna to her
face, behind her back, and long before she had even begun reeling in
the sweet line of love on Mr. Aulty, they had been calling her "Her
Majesty."
...................... 
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