A Beauty (22 page)

He watched as Mr. Huhtala stepped onto the ferry and nodded to the ferryman and handed him his ticket money. He wasn’t as old as he’d first seemed. For a second Jerry saw the pretty daughter standing at the railing, looking out to the far shore; then she was gone.

He thought about his wife and the pleasure he’d had in doing a thing she would have disapproved of. Maybe there are times, he thought, when it is best for men to be alone. The thought did not lighten his steps as he trudged back up the hill to the Windsor. Some of Mr. Huhtala’s gravity had rubbed off on him, that was certain.

I
f you’d told Bill Longmore he would some day be old, he wouldn’t have believed you; he would not have believed he’d ever look like a deflated balloon, thin-skinned and puffy and wrinkled at every edge like the pie-eyed old coot who’d stopped him in the street. “Say, ain’t you the fella I seen with that fancy gold Lincoln in front of the Hotel Saskatchewan?”

“Sold it,” Bill said.

“There’s someone looking for you.”

“Well, I sold it.”

“Not about the car.”

“A woman?” He heard his voice rise ludicrously. He could have punched the old fart in the face.

“No, sir. Maybe her father,” the old guy said slyly.

Bill started walking away, and the old man cackled behind him as if he’d made a joke anyone around would share. Forgetting he was in the city now, Bill stepped off the curb without looking and a Ford truck blasted past, its horn blaring. He had to back up on the curb and then decided to cross the other way. He didn’t
care what direction he was going, anyway; he couldn’t remember why he’d left the hotel. Out for a smoke, he thought, as if he had to answer to himself, for Christ’s sake, but even so he lit one. The Lincoln, that’s what this would be about, somebody half-interested in the car. Or it might be the owner of the Cadillac he’d been sniffing around, come to see if he could drum up a better offer. Good luck on that. The guy needed to sell that Caddy a whole lot more than he needed to buy it. All he’d needed was to dump the Lincoln. He couldn’t stand driving around with that empty seat beside him, imagining her sitting there, snuggling back into the soft amber leather like the whole goddamn car had been manufactured with her in mind. He’d kept her bag. All the way to Regina, he’d thought about ditching it, and he hadn’t been able to do it. He’d kept thinking he was going to see her again. He still couldn’t believe he’d never see her again. He’d hung around Regina a couple of weeks, now, in case she changed her mind and showed up. He’d kept the roadster parked out front so she’d know where to find him. What a big, dumb sap. She’d taken him for a ride. He stopped and pitched his cigarette and laughed at himself. A kid was watching him, an Indian girl about fifteen, lounging in a café doorway, kind of cute. He gave her a look and she giggled and covered her mouth with her hand. More like twelve. He passed her by. He’d head back to Calgary right today, he figured, and was already speeding down the highway in his mind.

“Hey. Mister.” It was the kid from the doorway. Saucy little nose and an overbite that was going to make guys want to kiss her hard in a couple of years.

He kept walking. She hastened up beside him.

“Hey. Hey,” she said, gesturing to him to bend so she could whisper in his ear.

Keep walking, he told himself, but he couldn’t get that soft upper lip off his mind. It made him feel mean. He bent down to hear what she had to say. Her breath was hot on his neck, her lips fluttered into his ear, and then he realized it was a kiss – she was kissing him – and he yanked his head back.

She laughed and laughed, still trying to keep up with him as he strode away.

By the time he reached the broad steps of the hotel, he was feeling so sorry for himself, he had to give her credit. Just a kid, but she’d seen through him, recognized him right away for the asshole he was. He passed by the uniformed doorman, hating him and his oily smile.

He knew who it was as soon as he saw the man. He looked like Elena, or it would be the other way around, he supposed; she looked like him. The same arrogance, that’s how he labelled it, and it stopped him from asking how in hell he’d tracked him down. There were no introductions, nothing like that, just, “I’m looking for my daughter.”

“Well, I don’t have her,” Bill said. He crossed his arms and rocked back on his heels.

The man nodded as if this was not unexpected news. “Do you know where she is?” he asked, so quiet he could barely be heard, as if in spite of his faded old farmer togs, he belonged in a fancy hotel lobby where the plush upholstery swallowed up your words and the deep carpets left your footprints behind you.

He almost refused to say. He had that bit of power – to refuse – and he didn’t know which option would be a favour to her or how that would help him decide if he did know. He didn’t take the time to speculate. He picked the one that seemed likeliest to
get her off his mind for good. “I have an idea, yeah. I dropped her off along the way. She took a fancy to a little town, I guess, or an aversion to me.”

Mr. Huhtala waited with a prodding kind of presence, patient and impatient at the same time, and Bill remembered the man was supposed to be dead. Elena had said her father was dead. This came to him late, he figured, because the man had such a strong presence, or maybe it was a strong need. A twinge of sympathy didn’t stop him from thinking he’d like to say it out loud. Say, your daughter told me you were dead, mister.

“Place called Gilroy,” he said. “On the highway between the river and here.” For some reason he was ashamed he’d remembered the name of the town; he wished he hadn’t. He wished he’d walked away as soon as he’d caught sight of the man. He had the feeling he was being played, and played for a sucker. “You’re happy now,” he heard his mother say, and she sounded spiteful, like she was on their side, the side of everyone against him. She sounded old and bossy and angry, and he wondered if that was the fate of every woman, so that in the end they were all unlovable.

“But who knows if she’s still there,” he added over his shoulder as he walked to the desk to retrieve his key. Then he stopped. “Wait,” he said. “Wait there, okay? I have something of hers you might as well take.”

In his room he hated himself for feeling like crying. He picked up the bedside lamp and cracked the porcelain base into pieces over his knee, and then hated himself for fussing that he should have unplugged the goddamn thing first. He could hear Elena laughing at him. Or was it the kid? Both of them, together.

Her father was standing by the reception desk, looking at the upside-down register, when Bill returned and handed Elena’s bag over.

“Thank you,” the man said with a formal nod of his head that was like his daughter’s way of acknowledging the slightest debt. “It was her mother’s.”

Bill shrugged in an effort to indicate how little he cared for her parentage of any gender, this girl he intended to never think about again.

T
he pumphouse was a little wooden hut built over the town well, with a hand pump to bring up the water and splash it into your buckets so you could take it home to drink and cook and wash your dishes and clothes. Every pail did triple duty; you’d reuse the dishwater to bath the baby and then dribble it along your puny carrots. You’d fill the pails no fuller than you could carry. Every drop spilled was a drop lost; you’d watch it hit the dirt and puff up, bead up, and then soak a star on the path.

I was leaving with a pail in each hand, balanced. I looked up and into the distance before I set out. When I saw Mr. Huhtala, I set the pails down. He was walking into town on the slantwise road from the train station. He was carrying a dusty old bag. He was tall and had a long stride, but he was staring down at the road in front of him, and so he looked humble, or more precisely, he looked humbled. I thought of Jesus. No beard, no halo, but that same sad and annoying air of ineffectiveness. Whatever he hoped he was going to do, he’d already figured it wasn’t going to be enough.

It was an ordinary day, meaning the sky was a pale blue, with the usual number of innocuous clouds; the fields were heat-bleached, nearly the same colour as the road. He looked like Elena. Even from that distance I knew he was her father. He had come to take her home with him, to take her back where she belonged.

“Hah!” I said, right out loud, because he was too late. Her little time with us was over.

Mr. Huhtala went to Dobies’ store first, as a person would, knowing nobody in town. That morning Scott and Mrs. Dobie had motored to Charlesville – as the
Charlesville Gazette
would no doubt record for posterity – where their oldest daughter lived. She’d just had her first baby, a feat that would also be memorialized in the newspaper. Their youngest daughter, Franny, had gone with them for a glimpse of maternity, so Leonard was minding the store. Mr. Huhtala didn’t even have to open his mouth; Leonard knew at once who he was.

“I’m afraid I can’t be much help,” he said. “She took the train east yesterday afternoon, but I don’t know where she was heading.” He didn’t tell her father she’d gone off with a married man. He didn’t say he’d seen her walking to the station a good hour before the train was due, she was that happy to be doing what she was doing. He didn’t mention that he’d gone to the station, himself, afterwards, and asked about her destination, and had been told she’d paid her way to Toronto. Mr. Huhtala could find that out for himself. He could go to Toronto and good luck finding her, if she was still living there, if they hadn’t moved on by the time he got there.

“You could talk to Mrs. Knoblauch,” he said. “She stayed with her a while.” He took Mr. Huhtala out on the sidewalk, and in
the gap between the store and the post office, he pointed out Mrs. Knoblauch’s bungalow at the far southwest corner of town.

When he turned back to go into the store, there was the bench without her on it.

Elena Huhtala didn’t know a thing about telling fortunes. She’d had her palm read at a fair that had gone the rounds of some of the bigger towns the summer before, only because the woman had called her over and offered her a free reading. She hadn’t paid attention to it; she hadn’t believed a word of it and couldn’t have repeated any of it two days later. She knew there were lines that were supposed to mean things; she thought she remembered a heart line and a life line, although she couldn’t recall which was which. But it didn’t matter. She was a big success those few days she sat on the bench in front of the store because she had the right approach. She sat straight and relaxed and did not smile at people. She took them more seriously than they took themselves.

And she knew these people. They were citizens of a town not more than twenty years old. They had no history behind them other than the culture and geography they’d given up in order to settle here. They’d had high hopes at first, the way people do, starting out, and they’d never been afraid of hard work, but work was supposed to bring rewards; it was supposed to make their children’s lives better than theirs had been. And when their crops failed year after year, and the price of wheat fell, they got disappointed in themselves.

She knew about disappointment. She didn’t tell them: You will die at a good age, you will have six children, a handsome stranger will change your life. She let them talk. At the fair a fortune teller would have a tent you could go into, apart from everyone else, so
your meeting with her was private. You could hardly get more public than a store bench on Main Street, so she tried to create a space around each person who came up. You can do that with silences, by taking more time than would be usual with the hesitations in conversation. There was no hurry. I think she honestly hoped to give them something worth ten cents.

Of course they all wondered how she dreamed up her predictions – if you could call what she told them predictions – as if she conjured words from air, as if that was the mystery about her. Something made them feel stronger when she let go of their hands; they didn’t know how to label what it was. Her body was unusually present to them and that confused them. It wasn’t just sex, even though most people understood, without even thinking about it, that they were being seduced.

In those days people kept photos in their wallets; I kept a picture in my mind: Elena Huhtala walking barefoot through the dark, barely moonlit streets of our town, carrying her pretty shoes, piled high with silver dimes. On her way to Mrs. Knoblauch’s house. It wasn’t a true picture, but I held onto it, even though it was common knowledge that her first day in Gilroy, Elena had gone into Dobies’ store and bought herself a purse.

I remember watching her bend to slip the dimes into her shoes, that first day she came to town. I remember how she looked at me, as if we had a secret, and how much that look meant to me. Later on, she eased her shoes off, one at a time, and gathered the dimes from inside them. She had to wriggle her feet to get the tight pumps back on, and then stood up with the coins in both of her hands. When she came into the store, blinking, Leonard stood back and let his sister Franny ask if she could help her.