A Beauty

by Connie Gault

  And then Anna Quinn came in and her eyes bugged out so far when she spied me, they nearly spurted off her face. By the time she was breathing on me, I knew why. The gossip about Elena Huhtala wasn’t only about my mother and father; there would have been talk about Leonard, too. I hadn’t been the only one in Gilroy to think he was head over heels about her that summer, and it didn’t matter that it had been long ago. Well, her visit had proved it didn’t matter. Anna wasn’t delicate when it came to dissecting relationships; she never had been back when she lived in Gilroy, and she was worse now. She was eager for fodder, happy to think of herself as the broadcaster of a bit of community scandal.

  “Heard you had a visitor,” she said.

  I tried a simple, disdainful downward glance at her shabby shoes. Awful women always wear un-self-respecting shoes.

  “That’s what I heard,” she said.

  “When you’ve heard it all,” I said, “try silence. Old World proverb.”

  She laughed as if I’d been good-natured and after that I only had to put up with Scott repacking my groceries and acting paternal, as he often did to compensate me for my fatherless youth, while allowing himself to mumble a little over the milk and butter and eggs that an industrious farmwife could have produced for herself if she didn’t refuse to keep animals other than dogs and cats on the farm. “You’re looking well, Ruth,” he said before I left, and even that annoyed me.

  I got back to Mother’s about four o’clock and unpacked the box from the back of the truck, so the milk and butter and eggs could be hauled to the fridge. The first thing I saw when I went inside was that she had changed her clothes. She was wearing her good blue dress and her white high heels. She looked elegant but it was an outfit normally reserved for weddings and funerals, and I thought: All this for my father?

  The first couple of years after my father left, I used to pretend he would drive up beside me as I walked home from school. Sometimes I stayed late on purpose, volunteered to erase the blackboard or help some kid who couldn’t do his arithmetic, so I could walk home alone, so my dad would find me alone on the road and pick me up and take me home. I’d drag my heels the whole way. I’d pretend I could hear the motor half a mile behind me, getting nearer. Often this would be in winter, and walking along, shivering, I’d imagine the car pulling up beside me and think how warm it would be inside and how happy he would be to have a few minutes alone with me before he had to face the rest of the family.

  When I was a teenager I used to imagine a kind of revenge scene in which he did what Elena Huhtala had done – drove around looking for a town that was gone from the face of the earth. Gilroy wasn’t one hundred per cent abandoned, yet, in those years, but my mother had moved us away, to Lawson, and almost everyone else had left, too.

  The terrible thing was that I’d tried to blame him for everything that had happened to us because of his leaving, but I knew in my heart I’d wanted Elena Huhtala to fall in love with him, and him with her. I’d even envisioned them leaving Gilroy so they could be together, but somehow in a crazy-kid way, I’d believed they’d take me with them. I’d even thought someday they’d send for me to join them. That was my other fantasy, that it wouldn’t be my dad in the car; it would be some messenger he’d sent with money and a note telling me to board the next train east.

  My mother made tea. I’d have liked to take it outside, but she had no patio, and you don’t sit in the dirt in white heels. The minutes ticked by until she went to her bedroom around ten to five, and I went to stand on her front step to get some air. I thought about my conversation with Ivy, the day before. I’d been fussing over that look between Leonard and Elena. More than fussing. There was a big ache growing in me with nowhere to go. I needed someone to talk to, and then Ivy came. I was so glad to see her, I had to pretend I wasn’t, or she would have thought something was wrong. She knew me so well.

  She sat at our kitchen table, in the same place Elena Huhtala had sat that morning, but as I stood on my mother’s doorstep I wasn’t picturing her there; I was seeing her up in the sky, against the clouds, in her white uniform and the cap that looked like wings on her head. I was thinking about the fortune-telling that had predicted all that white and wondering if anyone else’s future had come true or if Elena had made a special connection with Ivy when she was supposed to be connecting with me.

  I quit school in grade ten, a straight-A student. My mother had arranged a job for me at Scott Dobie’s new store in Lawson. She was excited when she told me; it was going to be such a help to the family. While I worked at the store and brought my pay-cheque home to my mother, Ivy kept on at school and got her grade twelve; I endured that by telling myself her family didn’t care about being respectable. Then the war came and she went into training with a scholarship because nurses were needed. Now she was the matron at the small hospital in Central Butte. She’d been married twice, but had less success in that line. At forty, she was a compact, stylish person, as blond as Marilyn Monroe, and it didn’t come out of a bottle.

  I told her Leonard hadn’t meant to be disloyal. I made sure to say that. But the more sympathetic she looked, the more sympathy I wanted. I wanted her to denounce him and stand up for me. “It’s his knowing what it would mean to me,” I said. “He had to know.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It’s all tangled up with my father.”

  “Yes.”

  “He knows that.”

  “Of course he does.”

  Her consternation increased as I went on and I could feel paranoia leap in my bloodstream. “Do you know something more about him? With someone else?” I was wondering if it could even be her. She knew what I was thinking.

  “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  “You looked so concerned.”

  “I am concerned,” she said. “For you.”

  “It was only a look,” I said. It sounded like a whimper.

  She didn’t reply, didn’t have to. The whiteness that suited Ivy so well had something oddly virginal about it, and restrained, and I knew, too late, that she wouldn’t have told me what I’d just told her. I had not protected myself, I had revealed too much, even to a best friend. She’d be watching me now, to see what I was going to do. She’d be expecting me to do something. Not nothing, not just let it go. I couldn’t just let it go. I’d made myself the pitiable one, the always contemptible little wife. “Where’s your pride?” my mother would say if she caught any of us kids snivelling over some slight we’d received in the schoolyard.

  “Men,” Ivy said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “They’re disappointing.” And wasn’t that a nice way to think about it? Disappointing. So calm a word, so accepting, no rage in it, and not too much pain. Like a cup of weak, milky tea. And that very minute he could be betraying me. How did I know where he went when I couldn’t see him? Maybe he’d gone to Charlesville. Maybe he was meeting her there, maybe she was waiting for him at the Bluebird Café, sitting alone at a side table, holding a cup of coffee in both hands, turning it sometimes in the saucer. People gawking at her when they came in. Jerry Wong shuffling up to her to talk about the weather. He’d recognize Leonard, standing a moment at the door, but only as a farmer from somewhere south of Charlesville.

  And why was it Elena, waiting at the Bluebird for a lover? It could be me. I could be the one sitting at that side table, with my wrists resting on the turquoise Arborite (with the flying triangles, boomerangs; tiny coloured boomerangs flew across it), with my hands warming either side of that thick pottery cup, with my eyes down, but only temporarily, my eyes waiting to look up and see my lover standing in the doorway, the screened door with the Coca-Cola banner slapping shut behind him.

  It was Leonard I pictured in the doorway. But it wasn’t me in the cafe, it was Elena, looking cool in a fresh dress, looking serene, looking free – yes, free to do what she wanted – and happy to see him. A little anxious, maybe, just a little. She wouldn’t have been sure he’d come. Pretty sure, though. Th
ere was the old attraction on top of the new one. There would be that moment at the door when he was free, too, when he could still turn away.

  And I thought: How did I end up trapped in this life I didn’t ask for?

  After Ivy’s visit, I went out for a drive, just drove around with no destination. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and it was the only way to guarantee I’d be alone. I took the old highway – it had become a back road, used only by the locals – and ended up at the Gilroy townsite. I got out of the truck and stood at the spot where the road into town once met the highway. It was the intersection where Elena got out of Bill’s car and walked into Gilroy. I was still asking myself why she’d stopped the car, and why here. Was it really that she’d seen me mooching along the railway tracks, as I’d thought back then? Bill thought she’d just decided she didn’t want to go on with him.

  Maybe we were both wrong; maybe she’d intended to go back home. I stood there at the intersection as if I was her, all those years ago, facing a decision, to walk into this little town or to turn back and hitchhike home. I thought about her father, waiting all these years for her to return. I wondered if she’d make it home and what would happen when she got there. Mr. Huhtala and I had written back and forth for years but I hadn’t seen him again. I tried to think what he’d look like so much older than before, and when I pictured his face, I was afraid for him, for what she’d do to him. I wasn’t thinking, just then, what the reunion would do to her. If anything, I was simply jealous, imagining her walking in the door, and his face when he saw her.

  The land where the town used to be was owned by a farmer, a neighbour of ours named Ted Evans. He hadn’t started harvesting yet. I looked out over his shining fields of full-grown wheat, and as far as I could see, and I mean all the way to the horizon, those fields showed no memory of houses or of people. Not a shrub or a stone or a hollow remained to mark where we’d been. I felt my father standing beside me, as if he were there, as if he really could be standing next to me, seeing what had become of Gilroy. Seeing what had become of me. Oh, yes, looking me up and down, raising his eyebrows, nodding his head, telling me – as I was sure he would do – that it’s best to remember the wider picture. Ruthie.

  Leonard wasn’t in the yard or in the house when I returned from my drive. The kids didn’t know where he was. I was late coming home; they’d been too hungry to wait for me to make supper, and Valerie had fried up some grilled cheese sandwiches for everyone, which she’d burnt. The kitchen stunk; you could barely see across it for the greasy smoke. The boys were scraping the black crust off their bread into the sink when I walked in. They all had plans, they couldn’t wait for a better supper, and were gone before I’d started cleaning up the mess.

  I put everything away and still Leonard didn’t appear. I went out to the front step and looked around the yard, to the garage and the granaries and the dugout, and down the driveway to the road. I thought maybe he really had gone after Elena. But I had replayed that little drama a few times, and I was too tired to revive it. I didn’t even imagine something untoward had happened to him, some accident that would take him from me so I wouldn’t have to make a decision. I really thought I might leave him and it was not, right at the time, a totally unattractive thought. I still had in me the vestiges of my old longing for a quiet room where I could be alone.

  I went and sat down on the edge of the tractor tire that held the marigolds, those jolly, upright little flowers that will grow anywhere, under any conditions. Marigolds have a distinctive, herbaceous scent, more bitterness than sweet, a bit like the taste of marmalade, and even now, years later, decades later, remembering that evening, I think I can smell them.

  Oh yes, he came along eventually. He’d been delivering the combine to Ted Evans, and then Ted dropped him off home. I’d forgotten all about that, I’d forgotten we’d agreed to rent our combine to him. I should have remembered; I’d been on his property that very afternoon. In fact, we’d planned that I would follow Leonard in the truck and bring him home myself. And then neither I nor the truck could be found when Leonard was ready to go. I didn’t apologize and he didn’t question or even mention my absence. He sat down with me on the tractor tire. I remember his body sitting there beside me, and my resistance to his tug on me.

  After we’d sat there a while, I had to say something or hit him. I’d have preferred to hit him. It would have been quicker and more satisfying to flail at him with my fists, but I had to be civilized. Strange to remember how savage I felt, how savage a person can feel beside a bed of marigolds. “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Elena Huhtala didn’t stop at our place by accident. She didn’t just happen to pull into our farmyard to ask whoever might be around why she couldn’t find Gilroy. It was deliberate. She asked around and found out where we lived.”

  He was supposed to ask, “Why would she do that?” He wouldn’t, but I answered it, anyway. “She was looking for you.”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” he said. “Yeah, you are. You get an idea in your head and you stick to it no matter what.” Then he said some other things. I was going to say he said something about my father, about how I’d always idolized him and how unfounded it was to care about him at all, but I wasn’t listening and I don’t really think Leonard would have said anything like that. More likely I was thinking it, reading it into whatever he said, just so at last we could fight. And soon we were on our feet, facing each other, and I was yelling at him. I was yelling so hard I made all the colour leave his face. I don’t know what I said to him, but I remember what he answered. “Oh, no,” he said. “You’re getting confused. Don’t confuse me with your father.”

  “Are you different? Are you any different? Can you answer that?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m here.”

  My mother joined me on the step, wearing white gloves and with her good white purse hung neatly over her arm. I tried not to look surprised, but I’d thought we’d wait at her house for the train to uneventfully pass. I hadn’t realized we were going to walk to the tracks. In a small town, it was an excessively public thing to do. What would she say when people asked her where she was going and why, and who she expected to be arriving on that train? What would I say? We were bound to meet someone on the way. And she was all dressed up. It was clear she’d made a special effort, and for what? For the arrival of a man who wasn’t coming.

  It’s hard to explain my mother’s strength of character, except to say that she tended to carry all before her, certainly to carry me along. Rather than have her go out on this fool’s errand, maybe I should have tried to stop her, told her what I knew, or what I thought I knew: that this was all due to gossip about Elena Huhtala’s visit. But to say that to my mother was beyond me. And there was something else. As she strode past me and I followed her along the path out of her yard, just as we set out, I took note of that straight back of hers ahead of me, and I understood the only thing that mattered. This was business she needed to transact. And she needed me, she needed me at her side, because there was no way he was on that train that every day passed by Lawson, that seldom stopped.

  Miraculously, we met no one as we walked through town, avoiding Main Street, although I was aware we were being watched. I distinctly caught the glint of Anna Quinn’s protuberant eyes behind her plastic lace curtains. Oh yes, there were noses pressed to windows in several of those little shops and houses, and soon we’d reach the road; we’d be fully exposed. We couldn’t pretend we were simply out for a walk, not with my mother in her high heels. By the time we got to the road, a few of the watchers would have phoned a few more, people originally from Gilroy, who might be able to explain our behaviour. People tend to think you can do that.

  We clacked along the wooden sidewalk towards the road that led to the tracks, and I started talking to my father in my head. I said, “There are two endings to this story, two possible endings, although one is so far-fetched as to be laughable. Either you’re on that train or you are not, and neither one is happ
y.” And then I thought about him standing beside me at the old Gilroy townsite, advising me to see the wider picture, and I had to wonder if he could ever have imagined, in his wildest, widest dreams, that my mother would come to meet him if he came home.

  Then we were on the road with nothing but the open fields and the sky around us, and the earth was trembling under our feet, and the train was coming, yes, from Gilroy direction came a long, low whistle. We could hear the hustle and bustle of the wheels on the tracks, and an answering hustle and bustle rose in our blood.

  We didn’t walk all the way to the platform. We stopped on the road, side by side, and watched the train roar past, not even slowing as it sped past Lawson. Our eyes followed it out of sight, and then we stared at the place it had been, the fields bisected by the long rail line, the empty sky above.

  “I’m sorry, Ruth,” Mother said.

  We didn’t turn back right away. I think, like me, she wanted a few moments to picture him standing there alone on the platform, the train pulling away, leaving him behind. Just a few moments to imagine him turning and seeing us waiting for him, his wife and daughter, twenty-eight years after he’d left us.

  Mother touched my arm and we began the trek back to her little house, past the gauntlet of unseen eyes. I emulated her, walking calmly, naturally, easily along. It wasn’t long before we got quite a rhythm going as we strode over the springy boards, our bodies moving so freely I thought we must look almost cheerful.