A Beauty (31 page)

He got to the phone on the fourth ring. He’d been in the shower. It was unusual to get a call so early and it set his heart pounding.

“It’s Ruth.”

“Ruth?”

“Sorry, did I alarm you? I just wanted to catch you before you left for work.”

He brought his breathing back to normal. She always called like this, as if a couple of years hadn’t passed since they’d last talked. “What’s up, Ruth?”

He shivered while she talked; he had only the bath towel around his middle and the house was chilly. He pictured her shivering, too, he didn’t know why, and standing in a dark room by herself. He’d never seen her in her house, had only met her once, and she was just
a kid then, she was just around twenty. She’d contacted him, called out of the blue. It was nine or ten years after his ill-fated trip across Saskatchewan, when he was teaching at the Air Training School at Currie Field, getting young pilots ready to go overseas and see action he would never see. He was already married and two of the three kids had been born. It was a Saturday and he was home. His wife answered the phone and gave him a funny look when she passed the receiver over and that was why for a second he thought it could be Elena.

He asked how she’d found him. She said she was visiting in Calgary and had looked up his number in the phone book. That wasn’t what he’d meant. He thought he’d travelled through Saskatchewan without leaving a trace. It was quite a surprise to find out his actions and his identity had been known and remembered.

“My father took off with Elena Huhtala after you left her at Gilroy,” she said, almost as if it was his fault. “I’m trying to find him,” she said.

He’d met her for coffee; his wife hadn’t wanted to come. He’d already explained on the phone that he had no information for her – he’d never heard a word from Elena and didn’t expect he would – but he felt sorry for the girl and curious, too, he couldn’t deny it. He remembered driving past the little town of Gilroy on his way back to Calgary that summer and not letting himself turn in, and he felt a bit flattered now to think Elena had been talking about him. He’d forgotten about her father until Ruth brought him up. She said it was Mr. Huhtala who’d told them about him, about following him and the Lincoln to Regina. “I wrote down everything he told us,” she said. She was a cute kid, wire-rimmed glasses and a pompadour kind of hairstyle she didn’t quite pull off. She had some theories about why her father had never been in
touch with his family, mainly to do with her mother’s pride. She thought if she could locate him, she could let him know she understood. “Now that I’m older,” she said.

“All I have to go on is what Mr. Huhtala told me,” she went on, trying to act efficient, like a newspaper reporter tapping her pencil against her notebook just before she makes a discovery that will save some guy from the gallows. Mr. Huhtala had told her quite a few things, from the sound of it. They were things he’d never told his own daughter, she said with a secret smile, about Finland and the ideas Finnish people have.

The man had of course gone to Gilroy, looking for Elena. Right after they’d talked in the hotel lobby, he must have left. He’d arrived too late, as it turned out, too late for him and too late for Ruthie and her family. Ruthie, that’s what she’d called herself when she first phoned him; it was only later that she’d changed to Ruth. She’d phoned a few times over the years, after that, just checking, she said, even though he assured her there was almost no chance Elena would ever get in touch with him. His wife said probably it gave the kid some comfort, having even such a slim connection with her dad. “I’ll say it’s slim,” he said. He didn’t mention that there was often a flirtatious edge to her conversation, and that he thought the phone calls gave her a bit of a thrill, and what they actually connected her to was that summer romance long ago.

This time was different. Ruth’s voice alerted him right away, it was so tense and it got more strained the more she talked. “Is something wrong?” he asked, and then she gave him the news. Elena had returned; she’d shown up at Ruth’s house the day before.

“Hey,” he said. “That’s – that’s surprising.” He tugged the towel tighter with his free hand and shivered.

“Thought you’d want to know,” she said.

He thanked her. “It’s kind of unreal, isn’t it?” he asked. “How is she?”

“Fine,” she said. “Herself.”

“I bet you never expected her to turn up at your door,” he said. “After all these years.”

She didn’t answer and he thought he understood. This was one momentous return. It almost obliterated the time in between. And now there was only one question. He looked out the living room picture window at the lawn and the linden tree framed by the drapes. He remembered planting that tree and the way doing it had made him feel permanent, planted here at this house, in this neighbourhood. “And what about your father?” he asked finally. From her tone he didn’t expect any good news in that quarter, but he couldn’t not ask.

“Oh, she lost touch with him long ago.”

“I’m sorry.” He paused. “Ruthie, I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah, I know. She says she’s going home.”

“Home,” he said. “Is her father still alive?”

“Yes. Well, as far as I know. He’s so old …” Her voice faltered and she stopped and cleared her throat. “I guess anything could have happened to him since I last heard. We write back and forth a couple of times a year.”

He remembered the way she’d talked about Elena’s father, the day he’d met her for coffee, how she’d almost glowed with feeling special, talking about the things he’d told her.

“That’s good, Ruthie,” he said. “That’s nice.”

He could feel her shrug him off.

“I don’t expect she’ll stay with him long,” she said. “She’s not exactly stable. But I suppose she never was.”

He asked what she meant by that, but she was vague about it and sounded distressed, and he didn’t push her. After they said
goodbye he set the receiver down gently into the cradle and stood a moment with his hand on the phone. “Poor kid,” he said. He’d got so used to talking out loud to himself lately, half the time he didn’t notice he’d done it. He was thinking about her writing back and forth with the old man all this time, and wondered what it would mean to her if Elena went home and stayed there. He hadn’t asked her if she’d phoned Mr. Huhtala or if she was planning to let him know. Maybe she’d hold off on that. You could never tell what Elena would do; she might not make it all the way home. No use getting the old fellow’s hopes up. He must be at least eighty by now. He would see her before he died or he wouldn’t. Or maybe he’d passed away already, too late again.

He went to the bedroom and dressed automatically. Buckling his belt, tying his tie and then his shoes, he stared into the past as if it existed in the next room, as if it could explain itself if he walked through the door. He could recall a nebulous version of the face and form that had haunted him more than a few years after she’d left him, he could almost see her searching eyes, he could feel her watching him, and distantly, he could hear her laughing; he thought he could.

Ten minutes later he called his office and talked to his secretary. “Just postpone what you can’t cancel,” he asked her.

“Two weeks?” she said, incredulous.

“Maybe longer.” He cut her questions short. “Nothing’s wrong. I just need a vacation.”

She was a good person but tended to get too solicitous. He apologized for being curt and made a joke about his age and the quest for the meaning of capital L life and was sorry when he heard her listening for more.

He packed a suitcase and thought of the day he handed Elena’s bag over to her father in the lobby of the hotel in Regina. He could
still remember the look on the man’s face at that exact moment. And he had tried not to remember it. He’d tried to ignore it. There was some poem he’d read about hollow men or a hollow man that came to mind. No, he hadn’t wanted to see that face. It had made his own pain look trivial, and he was holding onto that pain; it was all she’d left him with.

He went around the house snapping lights off, making sure nothing was running that shouldn’t be, and it occurred to him that these actions were endings and that endings were supposed to be the precursors of beginnings. He had no clear idea what he wanted when he walked out the door and he felt disloyal when he locked it. In the car he felt better, as he always did. He had more of a sense of purpose when he was behind the wheel than any other time except when he was flying, which nowadays wasn’t often. He backed out of the garage and drove down the lane into a sunny day. As usual he had the top down, and two young women who were waiting at the bus stop at the corner waved to him.

M
erv wouldn’t go for a walk in case the woman from Pioneer Villa phoned, so Pansy set out on her own.
Pioneer
was a word she detested, but she’d move in before you could say Jack, she’d move in whatever they called it, they could call it Shit Hotel and she’d haul her ass there with her glad rags on. The apartments were modern (running water, flush toilets), subsidized, and in Charlesville, three things that made them perfect. And supposedly she and Merv were next on the waiting list. Pansy couldn’t take another winter in Addison. At least in the summer Bob Pearson’s son lived in town while he farmed his dad’s land and looked after his cattle. In the winter it was just the two of them, and the ghosts of people who’d always disapproved of her, hanging about their falling-down bungalows and gaping cellar holes. She didn’t like walking on her own. Without Merv’s company she was always seeing the others, picturing them wagging their fingers at her, wagging their tongues – but she liked her routine. We’ll seize up if we don’t move, she told Merv. Funny that she was the one, that he’d proved lazier than her, after all these years, looking for any excuse to avoid exercise.

She walked to the Pearsons’ dugout at the edge of town. It wasn’t as hot as it had been the day before, but that would be far enough. She stood on the road gazing at the churned mud where the cows had stepped around one another on their way to the water. About a hundred, no, about a thousand tiny toads were hopping on the mud. “Where the heck did you come from?” Pansy said out loud.

On the way home she thought about telling Merv about the toads. She decided she wouldn’t. Just mention toads and he’d go on about the cat gagging on one. That was decades ago but it stuck in his memory the same way the goddamn toad had stuck in the cat’s throat – as she’d pointed out to him more than once. And when he talked about it, he swallowed all the time, over and over. She hadn’t pointed that out. She hated it. Swallowing like that, as if he was the one gagging. It made her scared he would gag. She stalked through the high weeds that grew up in the middle of the seldom-used dirt road, making towards the shortcut to the hotel. She could see his scrawny old face going purple in front of her. She could see his eyes bulging, the stubble sticking out on his chin. And what was gagging him? What made it so he couldn’t speak and couldn’t breathe? Was it her? Something she did to him? Something he couldn’t tell her? What nonsense. She knew him like the back of her hand, like the ache in her back. And Christ, if there was a single thing he ever thought that didn’t come out his mouth, she’d like to know it.

At the Vierlings’ lot, she skirted the dent in the grass that marked where their outhouse had stood. At the bigger hollow, where their cellar had once stored their preserves and bacon and crocks of fermenting sauerkraut, she stopped. The grass rippled over the land, dipping into the ladle-like depression. Soon the earth would fill in and the grass would grow over everything.
She’d told herself a lie. There were things she didn’t want to know about him. Or rather, if there was anything she didn’t know, she was happy to protect that ignorance, thank you very much. She thought of the magazines she’d ferreted out occasionally through the years; but if he had secrets, they’d be bigger than that, harder than that to understand, and they would be his own secrets, belonging to him as hers belonged to her. She kept on trudging down the wreck of Main Street, and it came to her that if he had submerged some part of himself, it was so another part could be fulfilled. It was so he could love her. She took the few steps up to the door and stalled with her hand on the knob, stalled there so long she almost did seize up. It almost seemed her old hand and the knob were one, and then she turned it.

“Got the call,” Merv said before the door closed behind her.

She sat down to change from her shoes into her slippers.

“We can move in the end of the month.”

“Give me a hand, will you?” she said. He hauled her to her feet and kissed her. She shook her head. “Christ,” she muttered. “Let’s not go overboard.”

“You see now the value of procrastination,” he said.

“I do?”

“It makes you wonder, though, if we hung around here all these years because we’re lazy, or because we’re optimistic. Did we see a glimmer of this brighter future? Or was the past not as rotten as we thought it was? Which makes you wonder, which comes first, hope or fear?”

“Hope,” Pansy said. “Babies are born with it. They learn fear.”

But Merv said only one thing could end fear, and that was hope.

“It don’t matter which comes first,” Pansy said.

“
Egg
-sactly,” Merv replied, darting his face in front of hers.

“Don’t start that.”

He followed her down the hall. “I’m agreeing with you. Don’t you find it
egg
-citing? Oh dear, no response
egg
-cept a per-
egg
-nant pause?”

“Christ,” she said over her shoulder.

“Ah, at last – an el-egg-ant egg-spletive.”

“I notice you didn’t pick the chicken to harp on.”

“Oh, a challenge. A challenge from my loving wife. Chicken, chicken …”

“Hah! You’re stumped.”

“No, no, I’m slowed, I admit it, but I’m not giving up yet.”

“Maybe you need to think quietly for a few hours,” she said.

He laughed and laughed and told her she was witty.