Queen

“She’s tiny,” my father told me when he was preparing me to meet the queen. “Don’t move suddenly, don’t try to shake her hand. Curtsey – that’s appropriate, even for an American.”

“But she’s not our queen,” I argued. I was thirteen, already tall.

“A sign of respect,” he said. “Remember your grandfather’s position” – his had been the star we were all to steer by.

My mother was gone by then, disappeared back to her native Columbia. She’d never agreed to curtsey, or so I told myself; she’d already become the banner for my rebellion, leaving us like that: “Pure self-indulgence,” I heard my father’s mother say. Indulgence was what I was seeking, under the guise of some other names: independence. Adventure.

Already I’d set my mother in that heaven of thoughtful rebellion, of eternal questioning, where even a queen’s crown is only another dim star. I never saw her again during my father’s life, because of his anger, and, in the kindly way of things, she gradually became emblematic.

Many things in my life then were emblematic, especially our position, as my father – bless his heart – called it: we were poor relatives of a glorious destiny. His father – my grandfather, the ambassador – died not long after the incident I’m describing – I scarcely knew him – and his position, although not really inheritable, was all we had to fall back on.

There was very little money. Father for all his dreams was only a tenured professor at a small college in Iowa, and most people there didn’t know or care about his past. He was raised, as he used to say, in the twilight of the gods, that time after the Second World War when it seemed Americans owned everything.

Some of Grandfather’s ties still held, and one of them led to an invitation to meet the British queen on her latest American foray.

“We won’t actually talk to her,” my father reminded me. “A lot of people will be there. But we’ll see her, up close – “that was the reason my curtsey would be needed.

Finally I agreed.

We had a good deal of discussion about what I would wear. Father played the organ at the Episcopal Church on Sundays and kept a good dark suit brushed and pressed for those occasions; I used to see him standing in his undershirt at the ironing board on Saturday nights, sweating and bearing down. This suit would be appropriate for meeting the queen.

I had the female equivalent – navy suit, white blouse; I even had a leghorn hat with a ribbon, and white gloves. “Suitable,” Father called my appearance when I was dressed. I’d have preferred “beautiful.”

We were a dark pair in the hotel reception room – my father bending, almost swooning, it seemed to me, so great was his pleasure at the prospect of seeing the queen, and me, too tall already, leaning back, as though she might give off harmful rays.

“Here she comes,” my father whispered, and there indeed she came, parting the crowd like a prow – a steadily-smiling woman carrying a hard-looking purse. I was disappointed by her round hat and nose veil; my mother would have called them dowdy. (Being so little acquainted with my mother, I’d invented a whole cabinet of her opinions.) And her little turquoise pumps, turned out on splayed feet! And the rigidly corseted stoutish body under the regulation A-line and matching coat! A queen was only her clothes to me then. Well, every woman was only her clothes.

And is still, to some degree.

She passed within a foot of me, steadily smiling, eyes set blankly ahead, and the women around me sank down like threshed wheat. She was a tiny woman; I’d read that somewhere but only felt it when I saw her. For this tiny woman and her kin, I would think later, the Revolution was fought, another war that undid nothing except lives.

I felt my solitariness not for the first time, upright among those prostrate (or nearly) bodies. I’d intended to curtsey, but my knees just wouldn’t bend.

Then I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder, pressing, the first time I’d felt the weight of his character, directly applied.

“You promised,” he hissed.

I managed to slide out from under his hand without ducking. How, I don’t know. My father was – is – a powerful man.

“Papa would be so disappointed in you,” he muttered between his teeth.

Now he was bowing, that shaggy, partly white, partly gray head lowering like a buffalo’s. I heard the creak of his heavy shoulders, saw his clenched fists swing forward, near his knees. His eyes were closed, his big nose aimed at the floor.

The tiny queen passed, smiling, oblivious.

During the tea and cakes that followed, a fellow diplomatic corps cast-off recognized us – recognized my father, that is – and came up to talk over those days in London: the end of the best of times.

“You were out of there by thirty-nine, weren’t you?” this amiable person asked, as though the timing of my father’s escape was a personal triumph.

“Thirty-eight,” my father said. “The handwriting was on the wall. Papa saw it before anyone else had a clue. Of course he thought Hitler would win.”

”A lot of smart people thought that,” the old pal said with a conspiratorial wink. His head reminded me of an umbrella’s hooked handle, with bead eyes.

“I remember that summer, perfect weather, sun from June till September even in England,” my father said.

I was remembering his drawer of inherited medallions and faded ribbons, lined up meticulously, layered with tissue paper; also the silver coronation mug I first sipped milk from, and the creaking leather photograph albums with their tiny, deckle-edged, black and white snapshots of people I didn’t recognize.

“Your girl here going to college?” the intrepid colleague asked, trying – I give him credit now – to draw me into their charmed circle.

“She’s only thirteen,” my father murmured apologetically while I studied the tips of my patent-leather pumps.

“Big,” his friend sighed as though he felt my heft.

“Too big to listen,” my father said.

I wanted to recite the facts of the Revolution into their faces, I wanted to blast my own trumpet of truth; but of course I did nothing of the sort.

My father gave me a single glance as we left the reception, one that was too easy to interpret.

True to the fashion of his character, though, he didn’t mention his disappointment for forty years.

Then, near the end of his life when I’d moved back to Michigan to be near him (not to help him – he’d never have stood for that), he mentioned it briefly, in passing.

We were in the little garden behind his house, walking on the cracked cement path beside a row of hollyhocks.

“You wouldn’t even curtsey to the queen,” he said. “I’ve yet to see you bend the knee. No natural ability for reverence.”

“I’ll kneel at your funeral,” I said to cheer him up.

“I was thinking the other day – it explains everything.”

“What – my failure to curtsey to a foreign ruler?”

“Hardly foreign.” He stopped to poke with his cane at a cluster of roses. “You never married, you never had children -“

“Not entirely a lost cause, you know.”

“- because you lack the ability to bend.”

“Did my mother bend?”

In the old days, mention of her always made him bristle and shoot fire.

“I can’t remember,” he said, sounding surprised.

When we buried him a few months later in that vast rolling field of the great and their hangers-on across the Potomac from the capital, people I hadn’t seen in years turned out. These old men were in the habit of going to funerals, I knew as I saw them totter out of limousines; they hardly saw each other now anywhere else. They reminded me that father had held a place, if a small one, in that world, and I felt a deep pulse of pride, as though my life, whatever it is or may be, was finally justified.

His real achievement was something entirely different: the students who came to his memorial service in Iowa, or sent nice cards, and the six books of criticism I keep on a shelf near my desk; but that day I was only aware of the respect and sorrow of that company of old men and how they intensified the somber shades of my father’s life.

When I knelt at last in front of my folding chair on the thin carpet of artificial grass that covered the raw lips of his grave, I knew I was giving him the homage he’d longed for and perhaps even deserved the day the tiny queen passed with her purse and her smile.

Getting up, I saw a woman staring at me from the other side of his grave. As the coffin made its descent – the machinery functioned smoothly, with a sound like a half-suppressed sigh – , she leaned forward to see how far down he was going, and I knew she was my mother.

She came quickly around the grave – I felt her rather than saw her, then smelled her delicate, expensive perfume – and put her arm around me. I realized how much shorter she was: tiny, really.

My sobs seemed to come between us. She handed me her serviceable big white handkerchief.

Then she fielded the handshakes and nods, the deft consolations –

“A great man. A great friend – “one untrue, I knew, the other unproved – while I stood behind her, blowing my nose. I was surprised the old men knew her, but then she could have passed for one of their wives.

I’d expected an exotic bird of rare plumage; what did I know, after all? The few snapshots I’d identified in the albums showed a lot of teeth and leg, and I had the North American’s traditional ignorance of the continent to the south. So even her pale-gray suede gloves surprised me; had she bought those in Bogota?

“Lord and Taylor’s,” she told me later when we were sitting in one of those dark little Georgetown restaurants, nearly deserted because it was summer. “The one charge account your father allowed me. He thought the name sounded sensible. It’s gone now, of course.”

“Anything with a Lord in it.” As I said it, I studied this stranger, looking for a recognizable detail, but all I could see was that she was true to type: the kind of older woman who never tells her age and is said to be “handsome”. The flash, the Carmen Miranda-like jazziness I’d thought I’d detected in those snapshots was properly translated into the vocabulary of early old age: discretely dyed black hair, cut in one of those caps that are easy to maintain, an even coat of make-up, expertly applied, pruned and shellacked nails. The age spots were there, though, tiny medallions on the backs of her hands; I found those reassuring.

“You must not speak that way about your father,” she said after I’d already forgotten my comment.

“He wasn’t so great to you,” I blurted, startled, and at the same time I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind my mother. Who is that old girl? I wondered.

“That’s long in the past, I never think of it,” my mother said, unfolding her napkin. She’d somehow guided me to one of the tables.

So the most surprising lunch of my life began.

I realized that my mother did not expect or want me to fill her in on the more than forty years that separated us; “water over the dam” – her English seemed remarkably colloquial – she said when I tried to tell her about my education. She was only slightly more interested in my career: I’m a tenured professor of English at Northern Michigan University. She didn’t even ask why I have never married.

This unnerved me. I’d been looking forward to explaining . Finally I decided to go ahead: “After what I saw at home – “

“What did you see at home?” she asked quietly.

“You ran off.”

“Is that the way you remember it?”

“Well, of course now I imagine you had your reasons,” I hedged. “But then….”

She smiled. “I hardly remember what my reasons were. Oh yes, I didn’t like Iowa. And I never have been able to stand babies.”

“Maybe I inherited that.”

She was not to be buffaloed into agreement. “What?”

“My – distaste.”

“You always were peculiar,” she said.

There were many responses I could have made but her immaculate, tailored poise left me silent.

“You should cut your hair,” she said when we were eating our sorbet. “And try a different kind of clothes. Not slacks.” For the first time, she sounded foreign.

So we spent the hot afternoon of my father’s funeral in true mother-and-daughter fashion, going in and out of shops.

When I was outfitted to her satisfaction – two expensive dark suits, silk blouses to match, and heels higher than I’ve ever worn – she kissed me goodbye and headed for the airport. I was left with my heavy shopping bags, looking after her departing taxi.

The only item she’d insisted on paying for herself was a spray bottle of her own discreet old-fashioned perfume: L’Air du Temps.

“Where is your guilt? Where is your sense of responsibility?” I wanted to shout after her. Even my forlorn appearance (as she would have phrased it), my utter aloneness in the universe, had failed to ignite any recognizable maternal feeling.

I trudged back to my hotel and spread my expensive purchases out on the bed – where would I wear them, in Michigan? – and considered returning them. But I never did.

This should be the end of my story. But several months later, I received a handsome engraved Christmas card from Bogota. There sat my mother, in a throne-like armchair, surrounded by several generations of smiling, well-turned-out men and women: her family? She’d never mentioned them.

The chair was huge. She looked tiny in it. The people around her were all a great deal larger. But she was the queen there, no question about it. At last I knew what my father couldn’t stand.

I’m going to visit her in the new year. I want to find out how she was able to move along so fast, to invent and create another life, on her own. It’s time for me to begin to move along fast, too, to invent and create, and I think she’ll be able to give me some advice.