A Beauty (26 page)

“It was only a few weeks,” Elena said, and then she stopped as if she’d lost the words she’d had in mind. “A few weeks I was here,” she said at last.

“She read palms,” I said.

“You did?”

She shrugged. “It was all I could think of to earn some money.”

“Would you read my palm?”

“Oh, I am not good at it. I never was, and that was a long time ago.”

Valerie held out her left hand and examined the palm. Elena reached across the table and took it. Slowly, she traced the lines with her forefinger. “I’d had my palm read once,” she said. “But I’d forgotten what the lines were, what they were supposed to mean. I forgot about these ones going up the hand. They’re faint, anyway. I concentrated on these two that run across.” She drew her fingertip, twice, across Valerie’s palm. “I thought of them as the life line and the love line. Do you see how they go, parallel to one another? Let me see your other hand. Yes,” she said when Valerie obliged. “In your left palm they separate at either end. In your right, they come together, here at your pointer finger.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means you have the same choice in life that everyone has. To love or not to love. It means love is possible for you.” She smiled into Valerie’s eyes and Valerie melted. Just melted. Of course she did, faced with that smile. “But also, there is much more, of course, in your future. I see intelligence. And caring. A sense of humour. Some impatience. You will have a life of adventure, I think. You will travel, you will go to school, to university. Your mother will be proud of you.”

“Hah!” Valerie said. “What did you say when you read
her
palm? I bet you didn’t tell her she’d end up a farmwife.”

“She wouldn’t read my palm,” I said.

That made Valerie sit up.

“You were too skeptical,” Elena said. “You knew it was all made up; I could have said anything to those people. You didn’t for a minute believe. Like Val. She’s not one to get taken in, either.”

“You’re wrong. I was taken in.”

“Then I am sorry.”

“And you didn’t say just anything to people. Not back then. You didn’t talk about love and adventure and travel. You knew about people. You understood them.”

The kitchen clock started ticking loudly.

“I was younger then,” she said.

“You had a gift.”

“We all have gifts, when we’re young.”

Valerie peeked at me and then at Elena. When neither of us spoke, she asked, “So, how did you end up in Gilroy, anyway, back then?”

“Oh, it was – a stop along the way.”

Like this little visit, I thought, just a stop along the way. “Did you know your father came here?” I asked her.

I could see she didn’t know. “You are mistaken,” she said.

“He came looking for you.”

“No, it could not have been him.”

She looked stricken. She looked like she’d stepped off a cliff. Valerie went and got a Kleenex and handed it to her.

“It was him,” I said. “He tracked you down. Went from town to town, followed your trail, found the guy you were with – in Regina, I think it was, and he said he’d left you here, in Gilroy.” I thought about her doing that, just getting out of Bill Longmore’s car and walking away. I figured she was likely good at leaving people. I said, “It was your father. He came and talked to us.”

She clapped her hand over her mouth. The tears that had been swimming in her eyes blinked out. “Maybe he is still alive,” she said.

I didn’t answer that. I chose that moment to ask Valerie to take her bike and find her dad and bring him to the house. She was reluctant to leave, but I knew once she was out on the road, scanning the fields for the combine, she’d be happy to think of telling him who was visiting and what was going on. She’d use the time on the way back to question him, try to worm some answers out of him. I didn’t know what Leonard would think, but if I didn’t let him know Elena was here, he would wonder why. He would think it silly of me to prefer to keep them apart. After all the years?

Elena asked to use the washroom so I sat alone in my kitchen and wondered if I would have to ask what I wanted to know. That was all I thought about those minutes, whether she would have the decency to tell me without my having to ask.

She returned with her makeup gone. I hadn’t realized she was wearing it until then. She looked younger without it, but the dress clashed, too bright against the paler face. I thought likely she
wished she’d picked something else to wear that morning, something more subdued, like that brown dress she was wearing the day she came to Gilroy. She avoided looking at me when she sat down. It took her a minute, but finally she started talking nervously. She told me she’d left my father long ago. They’d stayed together only a year or so, and she’d lost track of him.

“Where?” I asked.

“We were in Fergus, Ontario, when I left him. An old friend of his took us in for a while. I don’t know where he went after that.”

“Apparently no one does.”

I went for the pot and poured us both more coffee.

“You haven’t heard from him.”

“No,” I said when I sat down again. “No, I have no idea where he is or how he is.” She almost looked right at me then, but it was too difficult, I suppose. She started talking about her own father, instead. She said she’d always believed he’d killed himself. She said he’d walked away one day with nothing but his rifle. Left her with a note that had implied it was his intention to take his own life.

I watched her while she talked, observed the consternation in the forehead, the still-red eyelids, the leaky eyes, the lips trembling before each word. She was upset, all right, but I didn’t believe her. Mr. Huhtala wouldn’t have done that, not the Mr. Huhtala I knew. I couldn’t imagine him writing her a note and walking out on her, leaving her to think he’d killed himself. He’d left her money, I knew, and I noticed she somehow hadn’t mentioned that. I wondered if this talk about suicide was a story she’d invented while she’d washed her face, if she’d looked into the mirror and thought she needed to be pitied. Or maybe she was trying to excuse herself for taking off and never going home and not thinking about him. Letting him worry all these years.

“That was wrong of him,” I said, to see if she’d go on.

She dismissed it. “His life was hard.”

“He had you to think of,” I said. “But then, where would we all be if we were always thinking of others?”

She ignored my sarcasm, or accepted it. “Do you always think of others?” she asked.

“I was raised to. I resent it. Sometimes I think I’d be happier if I were more like my father.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“At least your father came looking for you,” I said.

Her hand went to her mouth again, and she calmed herself. “All these years,” she said, “I have raged at him.”

It was after that announcement, every word given its melodramatic weight, that I remembered she’d had no money when she landed in Gilroy. She had no purse and no pockets. Maybe she’d lost it somewhere along the way. I wondered what she would say if I asked her. Mr. Huhtala had been insistent about it; I’d guessed that giving her that money had been a point of honour with him. And my father sure as hell hadn’t given any to us. Right then she sat forward as if to say now we had come to the heart-to-heart.

“Your daughter reminds me of you,” she said. “So serious. And at the age when – everything –” She stopped and looked around the kitchen for something she couldn’t find, and ended up looking down at her hands. “I didn’t want to read your palm that day, Ruth,” she said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know – truly, I don’t remember why.”

“Oh, I forgave you long ago,” I said. “You were just being yourself.”

“Maybe I was afraid you could make me be honest with myself. You see,” she said with a little laugh, “you’re doing it now.”

“
I’m
doing nothing.”

She laughed, then, really laughed, and I was glad because it made it easy to despise her.

When Leonard came in he was covered in dirt, every inch of him. Only his teeth and his eyes shone out. He met her with that lopsided smile of his, that slight stoop, the farmer’s tan under the black grit, the white band of skin at the forehead when he took off his cap. She stood up. Held out her hand. But it was all right. He evaded her eyes.

“I am glad to see you again,” she said formally.

He asked her how she’d been. When Leonard asked that question, people answered; he had that two-feet-firm-on-this-earth gravity that demanded more than an offhand response.

“Oh,” she said. “I have been – peripatetic.”

He smiled at that. Valerie looked to him for an explanation. “Wandering,” he said.

“All over the place,” she added, as if it was some kind of accomplishment.

I brought him a coffee. Valerie hung over his chair, her arms around his neck. Good girl, I thought, you hang onto your dad. It was small talk after that, Kleenex no longer required. She said she intended to head out soon, since she wanted to make the ferry to Virginia Valley by noon.

“Not much there anymore,” Leonard told her. “You’ll want to drive straight on to Charlesville. It has the only decent motel between here and Edmonton.”

“I’m amazed,” she said. “Gilroy – gone. It’s nothing but farmers’ fields. Just abandoned, Ruth said. As if no one had ever lived there.”

“As if we’d never existed,” Leonard said. He winked at me.

“Oh, you two have been married a long time,” she said.

He didn’t mean to be disloyal. It was the furthest thing from his mind. He knew how complicated anything to do with Elena Huhtala would be, had to be, under the circumstances. He had no interest in the woman; it was only politeness to ask her to stay to lunch, and she declined, anyway. Not that the invitation was the problem. We could have sat through a meal with her, or had her stay overnight, for that matter, if it hadn’t been for a momentary indiscretion. And momentary was all it was, but it was enough.

We didn’t speak of it after she went; we acted as if nothing had happened. Well, not quite as if nothing had happened, but certainly as if nothing needed to be discussed. Valerie was full of questions, and we talked a long time about the summer my father left. I even got out my old scrapbook and showed it to her. Leonard ate his lunch and then went back to work. I think he thought we could ignore the incident, or at worst it would become like one of those bumps that grows under your skin, shows up one day and sits there, doesn’t ever change, and doesn’t go away. But just because you’ve got it there forever, you’re a changed person. It was only a look. She’d been clutching that Kleenex and dropped it on the floor and bent to pick it up. And then she gave him that look, kind of under the table, but I saw it. The thing was, his response hadn’t been automatic. He could have stopped himself from returning that look, and he didn’t.

I kept seeing the look that had flashed between them; I saw it over and over again. I knew so well what it was. I’d seen it before; I’d
seen it on Main Street thirty years before. Even then I knew what it meant, that two people have recognized each other, that they’ve identified the spark in one another’s eyes and claimed it.

I figured this kind of exchange must be routine for Elena, almost mechanical: see a man you’re attracted to, let him know. Any man would be flattered. You’re overreacting, I told myself. Because of your father, because it was the same look she gave him. Doesn’t mean it was the same thing.

“What does skeptical mean, really, Mum?” Valerie asked that day.

W
ithout resorting to landscape, it can be hard to think about the past. She had to drive by a cemetery just before the little town of Lawson, the last town that side of the river. She didn’t stop, but slowed and glanced at the graveyard as she drove by. A couple of crooked, blasted trees; a few headstones ostentatious enough to see from the road, sticking up in the untended grass; three or four crows circling over the bare limbs of the trees. And all around, the harvested fields shone, the straw left behind in gold stripes, the bales scattered over them like gold bricks. Soon she was parking at the river, nosing in to the ferry landing, the only one around, watching the barge come towards her, crossing empty.

The young ferryman accepted her money. She couldn’t remember how long it would take to get to the other side and almost asked him, but she didn’t want to start a conversation. When she stood at the railing, staring into the black water, she thought about her father, or tried to think about him; her mind kept sliding away. The noise and the heaving barge under her feet lulled her. The rich fields under the bright sky were imprinted on her mind, the grey
road, the green verge, the white, innocent clouds. She heard Ruth’s words:
He had you to think of
. But he’d been weak, and he hadn’t thought of her, not at all. The same could be said of Ruth’s father. Again, she heard the sarcasm:
Where would we all be if we were always thinking of others
? No answer to that one.

The ferry motor droned, the water lapped against the boat. She was grateful for this spell of in-between, grateful, too, that she wouldn’t be able to reach the farm today; there were a few hundred miles to go, miles that would give her time to gather herself. She should have told Ruth about Hattula. The thought struck her like a revelation. But why in the world think that? Ruth hadn’t wanted to hear anything she had to say. And what she’d heard she hadn’t believed.

She had gone to Finland in July. She couldn’t have said why. It had been an impulsive decision; she knew before she went it would be like going to a completely foreign country. She was only six when her father brought her to Canada, and she couldn’t trust her memories of those early years, the childhood years before they’d emigrated. Trees were what she thought of. Thinking of Finland had always led her eyes upwards through speckled light to the branches and leaves of trees that truly might have rooted anywhere.

She had spent a week there. In Helsinki, the first few days, she sat and sipped coffee in the outdoor cafés along the Esplanadi, content to be alone, listening to the babble of voices she didn’t understand. The waiters were solicitous. A table in the shade? In the sun? A glass of water with your coffee? The purchase of one cup included a seat for hours, if you wished it, and she did; it felt like luxury. She brought a book she didn’t read, a notepad she didn’t open, a camera she didn’t use. She sat with her hands in her lap, watching the people who walked past her. She saw her father in men who were her own age. Of course he’d been about that age the last time she’d seen him.