A Beauty (29 page)

This was the world in which Elena found herself, that pressed on her. She picked at her sandwich, telling herself she had to eat, and tried to ignore the coughing man’s attempts to calm down. He’d been nearly beside himself, while the woman with him looked as if she was on a different planet, or wished she was. Elena could only sympathize with both of them. How many times had she watched couples like this, while she sat alone, quite sure she was less lonely than they were? Now the restaurant had gone so quiet she could hear her jaw click when she opened her mouth to take a bite.

She thought about her favourite café in Helsinki, and how she’d anchored herself there her first days in Finland. Quite a few people in the city spoke English, but she hadn’t initiated any conversations, any more than she would do here, in Charlesville, and only the waiters and the hotel staff had talked to her. Once they’d got to know her a little, the question they all asked her was “Why did you come here?” They’d assumed, by her looks, that she’d come to visit relatives, yet she was obviously alone.

And then she’d gone to Hattula, where she’d found some peace. Once again, thinking about Hattula, she thought about Ruth. Ah, Ruth, sitting there the whole time with that disbelieving expression on her face. They shouldn’t have talked about their fathers, about the past.
That was wrong of him
, Ruth said, but it was only to hear what she would answer.

She remembered walking through the cemetery beside Hattula Church, on her way back to her car. Tears had sprung up in her eyes
for no reason. The headstones swam, the entire graveyard shimmered, broken into bits. It was just because they were all dead, all those once-upon-a-time people; it would make anyone cry.

“How are the cutlets coming?” Jerry asked.

“As you see,” Roy said, pointing to the frying pan where syrupy pink blood was oozing on top of the meat.

“Can’t be ready too soon,” Jerry said. He should have told Roy to leave off his rule of cooking the orders strictly in sequence. Just this once you’d think he could have made an exception.

“Don’t I know it,” Roy said. After defending her earlier, he’d remembered how Betty Earle had once barged into the kitchen to tell him off when her meal had been late. “But you know, I don’t think she’s trying to scare us. I think she’s the one who’s scared.”

Jerry threw his hands up. “I don’t know why it’s so bad tonight. We’re losing business. People come in, they see Betty Earle, and they leave.”

“Usually the Earles come earlier.”

“I should have kept the corner table for them.”

“Yup. Keep ’em hidden away.”

The problem with dying of cancer was that it could be painful. He was pretty sure it had to be painful – that pain was the essence of cancer. Albert was afraid of pain. He assumed most people were, if they’d experienced it once or twice. Even thinking about it made his throat burn. Maybe he should be making an appointment with Pilgrim instead of wondering what to say to him in a friendly way when either one of them got up to leave.

Jean clattered out with fish and chips for the Thompson
kids and the shrill tang of vinegar wafted over the restaurant. A few minutes later the parents got their burgers and fries. The Kulaks asked for the apple pie à la mode, and Albert watched Jean dig out the ice cream while Jerry sliced the pie. Till death do us part, he thought. Betty rolled her eyes. He was sure she could read his thoughts. Just get us through supper and get us home, he prayed to the impersonal no one he prayed to.

Dr. Pilgrim got his meal. Betty turned to stare when Jean took it to him, but he wisely focussed on salting his omelette. The woman in the corner had finished her supper. She was trying to signal Jerry for the bill. Good. They could move to her table if she left before their food came. It wouldn’t matter what anyone thought. They could simply get up and move to the corner table, and Betty could sit in her usual spot facing the snake plants, and eat her supper and it would all be fine, it would be like any other Friday night. They’d be home by seven, seven-thirty at the latest; they’d watch TV, they’d go to bed.

Something had changed in the room. For a few seconds he listened, conscious of the fan whirring above him, and then he realized that Jerry and Jean had gone to the kitchen. Both of them. They’d left the café at the same time, deserting them all, abandoning them to their little islands.
Whir, whir
. Nothing else. Not even the Thompson kids were talking. It was pathetic to be anxious just because Jerry and Jean weren’t among them, moving around the room, ministering to their imagined needs, and how contemptuously Betty regarded him, reading his thoughts. Why would he care what these people thought? The Kulaks eating like pigs, Dr. Pilgrim blinking like an advertisement for medical incompetence, all of them small-town people with small-town minds. Except for the woman in the corner. She definitely had a sophistication that set her apart from them, an urban gloss. She
had absolutely no eccentricities, not that he could see. She’d done nothing untoward or odd, and he thought she never would. She could sit in the corner, facing them, where he usually sat, without intruding on them, without making anyone uneasy, somehow even seeming to imply she liked them all. He felt that she liked him, or would like him if she knew him. But he wasn’t going to spend any time looking at her. If Betty saw him – too late. She’d seen him. Oh no, now she had that cynical expression in her eyes, the one she got whenever anything made her think of Peg. His throat hurt. Maybe the pain wouldn’t be so bad, not much worse than this. And it would make no difference if he lost his voice completely. And if he couldn’t swallow, he’d heard starvation was not actually a bad death. He wondered if it would really take forty days. Not if he couldn’t take water. That would be much faster, as long as he told no one it was happening so he wasn’t put into the hospital. He would have to find some kind of personal ice floe, and then it would be a matter of days.

Finally the kitchen door swung back and Jerry came bearing roast beef and Jean came bearing veal cutlets. The Kulaks both turned around. Why did they turn around and stare, their big, wide faces open with wonder? Holding their forks aloft, dripping mangled pastry and soft, moist apples (dead apples – they had the discoloured and melting look of death, of decay and dissolution). Jerry and Jean set the plates down, one at either side of the table, and it was all happening as if it was a dream, or a dance; it was all choreographed with uncertain, unknowable meaning; and all the while he was seeing that, he was ticking each action off. There would only be the eating to get through. So move away, Jerry, don’t hover. We don’t need you now. See, Jean’s already escaped to the kitchen. You go too, and leave us to get this over with. Then he saw the knife, where Jerry had left it after cutting the pie, a long,
sharp knife, gleaming silver on the turquoise countertop. He saw it because Betty was staring at it. He thought if he turned his gaze and looked at her now, their eyes would meet.

His fingers found the Band-Aid on his chin and pressed, so he could feel the delicate pain that caused. He could smell his roast beef; it had a canned smell. His mother used to can beef. A nagging weight pulled his innards down. How could he eat? He couldn’t eat. He was sick. She wasn’t eating, either. They’d finally got their food and now they couldn’t eat. He didn’t know how much time had passed since their meals had arrived, or if any time had passed. Maybe he was in some dream state. Maybe she would do exactly what she was thinking. It would happen in slow motion. He wouldn’t feel a thing.

It occurred to him, while time stretched and no one in the café moved or even breathed, and some part of him sat outside himself, ready to mock, that Betty’s second trial would cause less public consternation than the first. The murder of a spouse would surely be at least understandable to most people. Just the experience of living with another person and putting up with their irritating peculiarities would be enough to elicit some basic comprehension of the act, and Betty had endured way more than that. People who knew them – or rather knew of them, because no one really knew them – would come up with all kinds of reasons for her behaviour, although they wouldn’t be considered excuses. His betrayal of their marriage while she was incarcerated would form the dominant theory, and would be enough, in most minds, to explain her homicidal rage.

He found himself smiling over the phrase, actually smiling down at his plate, tenderly, as if one of his slabs of beef had sat up, separating itself from its gravy, and whispered the words aloud to amuse him. Homicidal rage – it sounded pretty grand for a stabbing
at the Bluebird. But it didn’t take a huge leap to think he might be able to provoke her to it. He’d seen anger close to it flare in her eyes after he’d done something as seemingly innocent as asking her to pass the salt when he could easily reach it himself, and nothing irritated her more than his attempts to smooth over her roughness with others. Funny, in her early life she’d wanted her edges smoothed; she’d wanted to be someone she wasn’t. She’d tried to hide her background. She’d been ashamed of being Ukrainian, of coming from a big, rough, unhappy Ukrainian family. In fact, he figured it was entirely possible she’d married him to get a legal right to his solid Anglo-Saxon name, thinking Earle had an upper-class sound, too. He’d known her last name, of course, but he hadn’t realized until the day of their wedding that her first name wasn’t Betty. People in the Charlesville area hadn’t known her identity until the newspapers published her birth name after her arraignment, and her old classmates, from the one-room country school she’d attended up to grade nine, realized that it was Oksana Pawluk – who’d been nicknamed (predictably if not affectionately) Ox – who was notorious.

She’d put her head down and was steadily eating. For a big woman, she ate with little enjoyment, the same way she drank herself most evenings into a stupor. A fly was buzzing around her head, but she didn’t notice it. Of course she would plead insanity. Her lawyer would insist on it. Self-defence would be no defence in this case, given the number of witnesses to the act. At her trial for Angela’s death, she’d refused a plea of temporary insanity, although people might have understood you could go crazy watching your child’s constant, excruciating pain. She maintained it had been a sane thing to do, to end that suffering, the only sane thing to do. That got her some of the wrong kind of sympathy, from people who supported eugenics and viewed children like Angela as a drain on society. She’d hated that. Her own sister, who had been “a little
slow” (especially, Betty said, when it came to running away from the boys who wanted to take advantage of her), had been institutionalized and sterilized after giving birth to an illegitimate baby.

He set his fork down. All this time he’d been holding it without eating. He wanted to put his head in his hands. Just that. Nothing more. But he couldn’t do even that, sitting as he was in the middle of the café. If only he could believe she would pick up that knife and finish him off, end it all, here and now.

Little Tammy Thompson, seeing her parents absorbed in their burgers, slithered down from her high chair and toddled over to the Earles’ table to see what they were having for supper. Albert saw her – and everything was still happening in slow motion – set her hand on Betty’s knee. He saw Betty look down, not at the child but at the hand. He did a rehearsal in his mind, as Peg used to say she did when she got anxious about something she was going to do. With a mental pang, he saw, in a brief flash, her sharp-featured face and her dark, knowing eyes. At the same time, he was seeing what he was going to do. He was going to bend over – quickly – and pick up that little body in his two big hands before Betty could give her a shove or a slap or whatever would occur to her demented mind. And then he was doing it. He swooped down, he swooped up, and before he knew it, he was holding little Tammy Thompson in front of his face. He was watching her tiny face crumple, her eyes close, her mouth open. He was seeing all the way past her pearly little teeth to her spongy, rosy tonsils and uvula (he knew the right name from his research on throat cancer, and watched it vibrate with particular horror before a sound came out). It was a long moment, and then she wailed, she sobbed, she screamed for her mother. She screamed so loud, he held her out at arm’s length, and that’s when
he noticed everyone in the café was staring at him, with shock on their faces. He scanned them all. They were all absolutely stunned. Of course they were. What in the world was he doing? And how could he be stopped?

He was grateful when her parents jumped to their feet. He was grateful when her dad crossed the room in two bounds and snatched her out of his hands. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Earle?” he said. But he didn’t wait to hear what Albert thought he was doing. He took Tammy – still screaming as if she’d been defiled by Satan or one of his minions – back to her mother. Albert turned to Betty to tell her they should go home. He could see himself flapping around her like an old man, plucking at her sleeve. She wasn’t there.

Elena had forgotten time; she’d been halfway between now and next. When the child toddled across the floor, she realized she probably didn’t need the bill, that in a small place like this you just walked up to the cash register at the end of the counter when you finished your meal, and she was about to do that when the man in the centre of the café scooped the little girl up and set her screaming. Then the woman with him took up her purse from the floor by their table and stood. Elena thought she meant to leave, but she slid the purse to her forearm and picked up her plate and her cutlery and carried them over to Elena’s table. She said, “You won’t mind if I finish my supper here? This is my usual table.” And when Elena said she would go, the woman asked her to stay.

Albert was still standing by their table, his feeble “Betty!” echoing in his own head. He wasn’t sure whether or not he’d said it
out loud. His life had gone from slow motion to stop, but he could see that others were carrying on. Betty was chatting with the woman in the corner. The Kulak brothers remained turned towards the rest of the café, both of them sucking on toothpicks. The Thompsons were packing up. Jean was helping them gather up all the bits and pieces they’d dropped. Tammy was hiccupping with the same dedication she’d given to screaming. Dr. Pilgrim had gone back to his omelette, and was chewing in a manner that implied professional dignity. Jerry came sliding up to Albert’s elbow. “I get lady’s bill,” he whispered. Albert sank down onto his chair.