Stanley Elkin: The Magic Kingdom

On the strength of a condolence letter—“My husband and I were distressed to read in the Times of your son Liam’s death. We have been following the course of your boy’s tragic ordeal and his valiant struggle. Our hearts are with you in this gloomy hour”—he wrote Her Royal Highness’s Appointments Secretary and was promised an audience just as soon as one could be worked into her busy schedule.

Which is why Eddy Bale finds himself on a fine spring day at Buckingham Palace.

He is dressed in a suit of black funeral clothes, the one he’d purchased for Liam’s burial service. He wears his mourner’s band, tight on his arm as a blood-pressure cuff. He is, he’s surprised to learn, not in one of the public rooms at all but in a sort of royal rec room in the Queen’s private apartments. To get here he has climbed the Grand Staircase and come down long elegant corridors behind a tall, slim young woman in custom jeans and a sort of country-and-Western shirt with the royal arms emblazoned on the back in an elaborate filigree. Her expensive Western boots seem to click on the carpet. “Bess normally sees subjects in the Appointments library, Mister Bale, but we’re fitting you in.”

The young woman, who has not bothered to introduce herself, leaves him in a very high and plush chair beside a card table on which a Scrabble game is still set up. Eddy means to ask about the protocols, but she is gone before he can even frame his question. Bale is able to read a few of the words the players have formed and abandoned—“peasant,” “serf,” “primogeniture”—but a child of perhaps seven or eight, either a page or one of the young royals, comes up beside him, and Eddy glances quickly away as if he has been caught poring over state secrets.

“What’s your name?”

“Eddy Bale.”

“You a commoner then?”

“I’m afraid so,” Eddy tells the boy.

“That’s all right,” the kid says. “Oh,” he says, “Bale. That was the name of that boy who died — Liam.”

“I’m his father.”

“Oh, I say,” the boy says, “he was quite a brave chap, wasn’t he? All those operations, all those heroic interventions and procedures. He won all us nobles, just walked off with our hearts. Many an aristocratic eye was moist when Liam succumbed. Did he really say, ‘I’m proud to have been English’?”

“We never falsified an interview,” Eddy says uneasily but can’t recall the quote. He’s a little startled by the child’s T-shirt: Buckingham Palace in embossed Gothic above what would have been the breast pocket. It’s less outlandish than the rampant lion filigreed in tiny pearls and gold leaf on the blouse of the young woman who conducted him here, but somehow he would have been less surprised if the child had appeared in a tiny bowler or carried a miniature furled umbrella, cute, like a kid in a sailor suit. Perhaps, among themselves, the royal family — he is in their private apartments, after all — enjoys a bit of high-camp informality now and again. Perhaps it’s their idea of patriotism.

Bale is uncertain about the child. He could be anything from a duke to a baron, could command the income on great estates in Surrey or collect the rents in downtown Leeds. He seems a kind enough young fellow, and Bale, who for all his interviews with the kingdom’s most powerful men, has never yet had audience with peerage, sketches his idea for the kid.

The child hears him out and concedes, “That’s a smashing plot!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Blast, I wish I’d the lolly, but I don’t come into my inheritance for just ages yet. Your troubles would be over if I did.”

“You’re very gracious, Your Grace.”

“Not a bit of it, Mister Bale. We all admired young Liam.”

“Thank you.”

“Twenty thousand,” he says, considering, stroking his chin, imagining ways it might yet be done.

“Yes?” Bale says.

“Well,” he says, “it’s just a thought, of course.”

“Yes?”

“We could put on a horse show.”

“A horse show.”

“Or sell lemonade.”

“Lemonade’s a thought,” Bale says.

“I know! We could hunt for buried treasure, raise the Spanish armada from Davy Jones’s locker. There must be just thousands of doubloons lying about.”

“Well…”

The Queen of England enters the family room carrying her purse. Bale rises and improvises a few courtesies. He completes his obeisances by pulling a chair out for his Queen on the other side of the Scrabble board. Queen Elizabeth II gestures for him to be seated, and Bale returns to his chair. The Queen is silent and Eddy clears his throat, is about to speak, when he sees that he does not have her complete attention. Covertly, she appears to be studying the rack of letters before her.

They play for money, Eddy thinks; they play for trips and dogs and horses. They play for cooks and butlers, for invitations and the use of castles. They play for gossip and regiments. He is a long way from his cause, and he thinks not of the children — in any case he hasn’t come to save the children; now his old notions are tempered, toned, almost temperate — but of himself.

He is calmer than he has been in months. Eddy Bale and the Queen of all the Englands are in a strange conspiracy of mood, she because she is Queen, unaccountable, irreproachable, the kingdom’s most private citizen as he is its most public beggar, and he because he has volunteered for scorn and is in the presence of one who has set all scorn aside, who has had it flushed from her system, an emotion not so much above her character — he doesn’t know her character — as beyond her biology, who could not have lived so long with such power and such privilege and not have dispensed with it, scornless from birth, from lifelong pet and pamper, public croon and cherish. Perhaps even surprise itself would be vestigial in her, useless to her as her appendix, and Eddy realizes he could not have offended her with his makeshift bowings and scrapings, his quick and nervous touch-flesh salutes. A woman who’s seen it all — though the empire is shrunken now — a queen shaped to tolerance and ceremony, who has sat in whatever place someone has told her to sit and observed all the strange dances of welcome, all the queer inverted struttings and high-souled arabesques and flashy, prescribed abasements and ceremonial mortifications, who has heard the odd music and seen the war paint — all the leaf mascaras, all the bark rouges and earth cosmetics, for whom the world and all behaviors are only a sort of anthropology and fierce loyalty, a kind of ethnic nationalism. She would never scorn him — for if he does not know her character she hasn’t a clue to his — and for a few seconds Bess and Eddy have this mutual moment. It’s as if — the child has left the room — they are married, in bed, side by side, reading…

Which puts Eddy into a sort of remission — gives himself back to himself, that is — and for the first time since Liam died and Ginny left him, for the first time since he’s had his idea about the children or delivered his new pitch to his famous but secular patrons, he is suddenly quiet, not at rest but unobsessed. The refusals he’s so patiently listened to — and understood, and even in his heart embraced — from men who’ve listened so patiently to him, have depleted him; just arranging all the appointments that have so conflicted other people’s schedules has: living by deadline, his opportunities foreshortened — despite their patience — spliced into ten- and twenty- and thirty-minute intervals, and even his own eye on the clock, not, as you might think, because he has just so many minutes to make his point before he is politely dismissed but because he has buses to catch, underground trains, other appointments to make.