A Beauty (35 page)

In some ways she’d been an antidote to his parents as much as to Elena. She’d seemed to understand his fear of his mother’s
disapproval and his shame at his father’s eagerness, which he knew he’d inherited. She’d understood he loved them and needed to put those feelings about them behind him. The main reason he wanted to meet up with Elena again was to show her he’d put a whole lot behind him – and maybe that she’d been mistaken in her assessment of him in the first place. He didn’t think anything more than that would come of it.

The old fellow at the Addison Hotel had reminisced about bringing the two of them breakfast in bed and Bill tried to think back again, to capture something concrete from that morning years ago. There were the things that had happened – the sex; her falling to the floor, utterly collapsed; the breakfast they’d shared afterwards – and then there was his experience of them. For a second, suspended in the moving car and at the same time in memory, he could recall exactly how he had felt back then, being him. But as soon as he fixed on the feeling, it vanished. He remembered standing in front of the movie poster in that bigger town they’d stopped at, how she’d thought the title was referring to sex.
It Happened One Night
. Maybe she’d thought that was all they’d had going on between them. But it was more than sex, a whole lot more than sex. For him it was. It was a kind of expansion beyond himself. That was about as close as he could come to nailing the feeling he knew he’d experienced with her body next to his as they sat up in bed that morning and ate the dry toast they’d been given for their breakfast; the heat that rose from her flesh had somehow expanded him. But that thought recalled to him the stronger warmth of his wife’s body next to his over all the past years.

He should turn back. He should go home. He didn’t know what he was doing, chasing after a woman he hadn’t seen for decades. Yet for some reason, as soon as he doubted himself, he
felt suddenly and unduly optimistic. This was only a lark, anyway, wasn’t it? Hope for the best, expect the worst. Yup, and a well is a deep hole.

He began to whistle as he drove along the old road, loose stones pinging under his car and spurting out from the wheels. He glanced to the empty seat beside him and it seemed to him his wife’s spirit was there, smiling on him.

“And there you have it, hints from the hinterland. Thank you Mrs. Gustafson!”

The announcer had a voice that slid like melting lard over the air waves. Maria went back to chopping her onions, which was what she’d been doing when he’d called. Tears rained down her cheeks. It had gone well. Soon the phone would ring. Some would call her, others on the party line would call friends to ask if they’d caught her on the radio. The announcer’s voice, not to mention the silly nature of the call, had made her feel witty. She was funny in her old age. Sixty-six, she thought. Well, thirty dollars’ worth of cake mixes isn’t to sneeze at, and I’ll use them. Homemade is twice the work and it seems I’m the only one can tell the difference. She turned away from the onions and swiped at her eyes and cheeks with her sleeve. The phone rang, her number, and she went and received congratulations. “Ah, it was only how to fold fitted sheets,” she said, but Britte said Maria had explained it so well, she’d gone to the linen closet for one of her own and tried it, and it had worked like a charm. “And you had me in stitches, Maria. You’re so funny.”

“I’m just myself,” Maria said, as if that was being modest.

Two more called while she was caramelizing the onions and then Wendy, her daughter-in-law, ran across the farmyard to tell her she’d
heard it, too. “All the way from the old house,” Maria said out loud after she’d gone. “Quite the celebrity.” Peter wouldn’t like it, wouldn’t approve. He’d never forgiven her for Henrik’s obituary, though he knew what she’d written was a mistake. She was no writer. He should have composed the thing himself, but he was too shook up. She’d tried to tell him most people wouldn’t have noticed, they’d have read it the way she intended, but Wendy had pointed it out to him and he’d thought everyone would be smirking. She’d simply said Henrik Carl Gustafson had waged a long and courageous battle with dignity. And then, when Peter had castigated her for it, months after Henrik’s death – because he’d been unable to speak of it at the time – she’d laughed, compounding the error. When she saw the effect of her laughter on Peter’s face, however, she regretted it, recalling how much he was his father’s son.

She’d mixed the ground beef and pork with the onions by this time and somehow forming sticky meatballs wasn’t conducive to deep thoughts. She began to sing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” She was a celebrity, after all. She tapped herself on the shoulder and then shook her head. She’d left a knob of pale, fatty pork on her blouse. But she didn’t stop singing and she didn’t stop working. Every day she made up meals for Aggie Lindquist. Aggie ran a small business, although she didn’t think of it as a business, only as a way of making money. She drove around the countryside cleaning house for bachelors and widowers who didn’t have females to mop up after them. The district had prospered, and women – unless the men married them – would no longer work as live-in servants for their bed and board and the occasional new apron. The problem was that the men wanted meals and Aggie had never learned to cook, but the solution, the lucky solution, was that Maria loved it so much, nothing could make her happier than to think of her casseroles and stews, her salads and desserts, going out across the
land. And every evening, when she brought the empties back, Aggie ate her supper with her.

The meatballs were simmering in their gravy when someone knocked on her door. She glanced at the clock. Too early for Aggie, who never knocked anyway. Nearly suppertime, an odd time to call.

It was a stranger, a salesman, she supposed. He had a salesman’s smile. Unlike Aggie, who had every Rawleigh and Watson product known to man, Maria wasn’t a sucker for anyone’s patter. For a second she wondered if it could be her cake mixes, but of course it was much too soon for them to be delivered. The man went into a sorry-to-be-interrupting-you spiel. Nice-looking fellow, friendly-looking. Trying to find a person who used to live somewhere around here when she was a girl, he said. A woman called Elena Huhtala.

“Wait!” she said. “My potatoes are boiling over!”

While she was at the stove, she brushed at her shoulder in case the blob of meat was still there. Twenty minutes later, Bill Longmore was sitting with her in the dining room, telling her his hopes and his plans while he waited for his supper.

What Elena thought about, while she drove to the place she still called home in her mind – which was definitely illogical since most of her life had not been lived there – was that her father would be an old man, if he was still alive. Also, that he was a person who had a life separate from hers. So he would be a stranger to her.

Fatherland. The word popped into her mind. She’d gone to his, and now wondered if she had one, if this was it, this landscape, these people. Her gaze travelled over the land and she saw a strange
phenomenon. More like a fabric than light, a gold veil was floating at the same speed as the car, a long veil unrolling and unravelling. She began to rehearse what she would say if she found her father at the farm. It seemed as if her words lay on the veil and were borne across the fields. But they wouldn’t be gifts if they reached him; they wouldn’t be welcome. He would nod and glance up once into her face, or maybe he’d refuse to look at her.

“I went to Finland, to a little town called Hattula.” That was how to start. No, she should tell him about arriving in Hämeenlinna and about the desk clerk and her daughter.

The desk clerk had seemed aggressive, at first. “Why don’t you speak the language?” was practically the first thing she said. Of course, the woman was struggling to communicate in English.

It was a relief to escape to her room. Later, returning to the hotel after dinner, she was glad to see there were two of them behind the desk, the bossy woman and another who was about thirty, who had to be her daughter, she looked so much like her. The desk clerk nudged her daughter and shoved her forward. “My mother is nosy,” the daughter said. “She wants to know who you are. You have a Finnish name.”

“I was born here.”

“In Hämeenlinna?”

“No. In Finland.” In spite of herself, she added, “I don’t know where.”

“Why do you come here?” the mother interrupted.

She told them she’d come to see Hattula because of her name, because maybe the spelling of her last name had been changed and maybe her people had come from here. She didn’t want to explain all this and was wondering if she could be rude and tell
them to just hand over the key, when the woman, the mother, erupted and shouted, “No!” as if she’d been lying.

“There is a small village called
Huhtala
, where your people may come from, but it is far from here,” the daughter said. She had put her hand on her mother’s arm, apparently to stop her from bolting over the desk.

“North,” the mother said.

“North of here,” the daughter said.

The mother spewed something more in Finnish, her eyes fierce. The daughter still held her arm. She sighed. “It is in the northwest, Huhtala. Near Kokkola. You know where that is? On the coast, north of Vaasa.” Her mother prodded her. “It’s many of Swedish descent, that place. Huhtala, the name means woods or glade.”

“Does it?”

“You are pleased. It is a nice name.” Her mother’s entire body expressed a counter-opinion. “The north was White; Vaasa was their capital,” the daughter explained. “You know of our civil war? In 1918.” She sighed again and glanced at her mother. “For years no one spoke of it. And now, oh, all these people are suddenly doing research into records, visiting prisons, battle sites. My mother thought you are one of them. This area was Red, the other side. Hämeenlinna had the biggest prison camp after the war.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Little war, long memories.” She went on to explain that her mother had been a soldier in a woman’s unit. “She was later in prison, here. She has a grudge still.”

“But my father fought with the Red Guard. I do know that.”

The daughter spoke to her mother, then turned back. “I tell my mother you can’t decide from a name.” The mother interrupted with another flood, pushing at the air with her hand as if to sweep the words across the desk. “My mother says your father
lived a hard time, you should know that. Maybe he fought here. A big battle was held in Hattula, in the cemetery there. The men they captured were executed. Many. Her fiancé. Her brothers. Shot down, between the graves where they stood. Thousands died also in the prison camps. It was merciless there. They starved to death, yes, or they got very sick and died.”

“Typhoid. My mother died in a camp, of typhoid. She was a doctor.”

The daughter told her mother this. For once the mother had nothing to say. “Maybe the same camp,” the daughter said. “Maybe here. Who knows? You could find out in records, I think.”

The mother was crying now.

“She isn’t angry at you,” the daughter said. “She was very young, just twenty. It’s hard for her when people come wanting to find out what happened. You see, it’s easy to ask, to look, to wonder. Different to live it. Some things you don’t get over.”

“Today you go to Hattula?” the daughter asked the next morning, when Elena dropped off her key.

“I suppose so. I’ve hired a car, and it’s too far to drive to
Huhtala
.” She said it as if it were a little joke. Surely it was paradoxical, that she should come all this way, cross the ocean, to land in the wrong place.

The daughter took it seriously. “Yes, much too far unless you have more time.” Her mother interrupted. “My mother wants to know how old you were, when your mother was in prison.”

“Oh. I would have been about two.”

“What happened to you? Who looked after you? My mother says your father would have been in prison, too, or else in hiding. He would not be let to be with you.”

“I don’t know.
It never occurred to me to wonder.” They seemed surprised. “He didn’t tell me,” she said. “I didn’t know.”