A Beauty (17 page)

Aggie was operating on the sidelines; Doris didn’t trust her with this kind of delicate procedure, so she had time to muse on Mr. Huhtala’s return. She was going to call him the prodigal father, after the bible story of the son who came back and was fed the fatted calf. She didn’t suppose he’d been prodigal and there wouldn’t have been any feast on his return, but he was the kind of person who belonged in that kind of story. Maybe it was a different one she was really thinking of, where someone went into the desert for many days and was changed when he returned. She wondered if Mr. Huhtala had come back changed. She wondered what he’d thought when he found his house empty. He must have thought his daughter would be there with open arms to greet him, the father that was dead and then alive again, was lost and then was found.

“Aggie,” Lillian said for the second time. She had her hand held out and she wasn’t pleased when Aggie didn’t know what she wanted and she had to scrabble for it herself. On the table were their pooled powder, rouge, eyebrow pencil, mascara, and lipstick, most of it supplied by Doris. It was their idea of a beauty makeover. They were guided by a
Modern Screen
that Lillian had bought ages ago and usually didn’t take out of her house, the April issue with Garbo on the cover, her face slantwise across the page and that multiplication-table look in her eyes. Aggie still suspected Doris of swiping her
Photoplay
, but she couldn’t accuse her and remain friends.

Her parents being absent – her father off to town on an errand and her mother out feeding the chickens or weeding the garden or husking old corn for the pigs, because she was shy even of Doris’s friends – Doris was telling the girls about dancing with Henrik Gustafson at Liberty Hall the night Elena took off with the stranger. “Right away,” Doris said, “he tries out the grope.”

“Really?” Lillian said, with an air of one concentrating on bigger things. She had moved up to an eyebrow.

“Really?” said Aggie, sounding even to herself like one who has no idea what a grope could be, although she could remember very well the stroking she’d received from Henrik.

“Oh, yeah. Christ, he had his hand on my bum.” Doris liked to swear when her parents weren’t around, and she was forgetting to whisper.

Lillian stopped tweezing. “What did you do?”

“Well, at first I ignored it,” Doris said. “But finally I said, ‘Mr. Gustafson!’ ”

“It was Elena Huhtala,” Aggie said.

“What? What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with her.”

“Oh yes it does,” Aggie said, and she knew she was right. “The Gustafsons were the ones who brought her to the dance. She rode with them all the way in the wagon and I bet you anything she got him all hot and bothered.”

“Aggie, really,” Lillian said. She applied herself to Doris’s eyebrow once more.

“You think everything is about Elena Huhtala,” Doris said, darting out from behind Lillian and the tweezers. “Well, it’s not. The rest of us have lives, too, you know. And I could get Mr. Gustafson hot and bothered on my own, for Christ’s sake.”

“Of course you could,” Lillian said soothingly.

“I expect anyone could,” Aggie said. “Did you dance with him again?”

“A few times.”

“Doris. Did you really?” Lillian asked.

“Why not? Most of the men around here are limp if you ask me. I met him out behind the hall, too.”

“What?” Lillian stood back and looked right into Doris’s face, thus getting her first clear picture of her eyes. The left one appeared to have migrated to a lower plane on her face. The brow swelled in a red lump above it, like a fleshy king’s-ransom ruby, with only a wavering line of hair remaining that still wasn’t arched anywhere near high enough.

It was in that still moment that Olie Knutson barged in, yelling, “I heard enough!” He’d returned from town without them noticing and had been listening for a few minutes in the shed off the kitchen. He strode over to the girls – and he was a round little man with short little peg legs who found striding difficult except in times of high emotion. When he got to them, he raised his fist. Aggie and Lillian fell back. But he didn’t hit his daughter. Wonder hit him first.

“Why, you look like –”

Aggie could have told him she looked like a painting by Picasso – her
Photoplay
issue had offered a full two-page spread on Art and its effect on Hollywood – but Olie Knutson hadn’t ever read
Photoplay
and he had no comparison ready. In the pause that occurred while he sputtered, Lillian tried to slide the tweezers into her pocket, but ignorant as he might be on art, he was up on girls and their sly movements, and he grabbed them from her hand and flung them across the room. He was aiming at the window. As it was closed, they clattered against the pane and fell to the counter where they lay looking less than lethal but also
leggily less than innocent. One sweep of his hand had the makeup on the floor. “Out!” he bawled, and Aggie and Lillian scattered.

At the roadside, as they parted, Aggie said, “You’ll never see that
Modern Screen
again.”

Lillian said she didn’t care. She was still shaking. Her own father didn’t use violence, but she had an imagination.

“He’d better not pitch my lipstick,” Aggie said. That was as much bravado as she could muster as she set out to walk the hour home. The lipstick was all she’d had to contribute to the pile, all her parents allowed her to buy. She didn’t believe Doris had really gone behind the hall with Henrik Gustafson. That was just showing off. Wasn’t it?

The incident with Olie Knutson had rubbed the gloss off the secret about Mr. Huhtala. When Aggie came to the shortcut she took it, although she was picturing the empty swing at the farm and could almost feel herself sitting on it.

Some days even the shortcut seemed a long way to walk. The wind had moderated and the sky had turned sulky and stretched out all over the place. Was the world showing its bigness, its lack of ends and edges, or was it just the opposite – was she too big and pushed and bumped out corners? Whichever, the fit was wrong now.

She wondered if he’d seen her there, earlier, from the house or from the yard somewhere, seen her sitting on the swing and for a moment thought it was Elena. How his heart would have leapt, to think it was
her
sitting there.

Maria Gustafson didn’t drop the jelly bag when she heard the authoritarian knock at her door; it didn’t plummet to the floor and splat open, spraying pink crabapple mush up the cupboards and the legs of the table and chairs. But she was caught, incapacitated, her hands to the wrists rosy red and slick with syrup. She’d just wrung the juice out of the bag, not having the patience to let it drip until it could drip no more. A strand of her hair, impatient, too, fell over her nose and stuck there. That morning she’d made up a batch of setting lotion from flax seed and with her head saturated, she’d dragged her comb back and forth, pinching each ridge with a metal clamp. So here she was, in the middle of swinging the jelly bag over to the sink, with a sweating head that looked as if it could electrify the nation, and someone who felt important was banging on her door.

“Come in,” she yelled. “It’s open, yeah.”

In walked Olie Knutson and Mrs. Knutson, dragging Doris between them. Doris had been crying. Her eyes were little pink holes in her swollen face. One look at that face and Maria knew why they were here. It had come, at last, as she’d always known it would: a reckoning, judgement and punishment rolled into one. She pursed her lips and turned her back on them. She stood at the sink with her hands dripping onto the jelly bag, and thought how much like a breast or a cow’s udder the bag was, so soft and warm and female – and now vulnerable-looking flattened against the unforgiving porcelain.

“Sit down,” she sighed, not turning around. No need for politeness when it came to this kind of conversation. Perspiration ran down her neck into her limp collar. Well, it was hot in the kitchen. The sink was next to the wood stove and the roast was already in the oven because men need meat, even on the hottest days. She wasn’t sure where Henrik was. He’d taken Peter and
Ingrid to the Svensons, to a birthday party for one of their children. If she was lucky, he was still there and would remain for an hour or two. Best if she handled this herself.

One of the wave clamps slid down the back of her head and landed on the floor. She looked down to where it lay on the linoleum by her foot. She nudged at the pump with her forearm and forced a trickle of water to rinse her hands. She shoved the coffee pot onto the fire – reheated would be good enough for this little visit – and then she was out of tasks because the cream and sugar were already sitting on the table along with a glass full of spoons. She turned to look at the Knutsons. “Well,” she said. All three of them stared at her hands. A bright, almost shocking stain still extended well over the drape of flesh at her wrists; the nails were rimmed in red and all the wrinkles at her knuckles were outlined, too.

“Well?” she said again, more quietly this time. Doris dropped her face into her hands. Mrs. Knutson moaned. Olie pulled out his handkerchief and snorted into it. Maria stood over them, waiting for some momentum to gather, the event to play out however it had to. Then everything changed because Henrik came home.

“Maria!” he called from the open door. She recognized that tone; it was the sing-song way he said her name when he was pleased with himself. And in he walked with Mr. Huhtala.

In the brief chaos that ensued, Olie Knutson jumped to his feet. His wife shouted, “You!” At first Maria thought she meant Mr. Huhtala. She could have shouted at the man herself, she was so amazed to see him walk in, back from as good as the grave. But of course Mrs. Knutson’s finger was pointed at Henrik.

It was always hard to tell what Henrik was thinking under the flowing moustache and the yellow beard, and he’d so long practiced
making his eyes benevolent, even now they beamed a general, latent goodwill that hardly seemed suitable for the occasion, as if, even now, he could not grasp that he’d ever done wrong. Maybe it was the very inappropriateness of his gaze that drove Olie Knutson to leap for his throat. As for Matti Huhtala, he stepped neatly out of the way, as far from the others as the walls would allow.

The scuffle didn’t last long. Henrik was taller, meatier, and tougher-minded than his opponent. He soon put his arm around poor Olie and led him outside as if to impart a piece of older-brother advice.

“Sit down, Mr. Huhtala,” Maria said. “I will bring you some coffee.”

Mr. Huhtala did go and sit, nodding briefly, first, to Doris and Mrs. Knutson, who were standing together, staring at him as if he’d grown a second head. Poor man, Maria thought, he must be wishing he was anyplace else right now. His entire body and even his soul – for she thought she could discern it – expressed resignation. But of course. He had rejoined the land of the living and had to play by their rules. Oh yes, she understood him very well. She brought him a cup and sat down with him. “So,” she said. “You have come back.”

Olie Knutson returned just then, leaned into the kitchen and bellowed, “Doris! Mother!” and the women came to life and went to the door he held open for them. It seemed they would drift out and away, but at the last moment Doris turned to Matti Huhtala and set her hands on her hips. “So. You have come back,” she said, sounding exactly like Maria. Then she laughed, looking at all their surprised faces. She laughed louder and longer than was necessary and not as if anything was very funny.

“Tsk, tsk,” Maria said. She rose from the table and scooped a dipper full of water out of the stone crock that sat near the door. She
was an efficient person, always, and didn’t spill a drop. The entire contents went into Doris’s face and then quite naturally down the front of her dress. Mrs. Knutson and Olie stalked off, but Doris only laughed a real laugh and wiped her face on the hem of her skirt, not caring if anyone saw her underpants, and then she left, too.

Maria returned to the table, for once at a loss for words. The entire incident with the Knutsons had been unseemly and Mr. Huhtala was always so reserved. Even today, in his old clothes that had bleached to grey from being outside a long time under a harsh sun, he maintained his dignity. He was famous all around Trevna for his composure, but resented, too, for keeping to himself. People who liked him, men who had worked with him even once and women who had felt his charm – because he had charm, although he didn’t use it – explained it away, saying that the Finnish were odd to begin with, and none odder than Matti Huhtala, the only Finn in the world, probably, who hadn’t built a sauna on his property, hadn’t wanted anything to do with his homeland. Henrik had explained it differently. Where there has been a civil war, he said, even as short as the one in Finland, bitterness endures for decades. And Matti Huhtala had fought on the losing side.

“Crabapple jelly,” she said, noticing him staring at her hands. He nodded solemnly; she might have confided a dread disease.

If it was difficult to walk back into the kitchen, Henrik would not show it. “I brought Mr. Huhtala to talk to you,” he said to her. He was still wearing his elderly, brotherly demeanour. He got his own coffee before he sat down. “We met in the road, as I was on my way back from the Svensons’.” He coughed, a single, only slightly apologetic cough, such as might have erupted from the throat of a poet or a philosopher or a statesman, and then both men examined
the embroidery on the tablecloth. It was a piece Ingrid had worked on and you couldn’t decipher the rabbits and mice and other small creatures she’d intended.