A Beauty (33 page)

He could hear the old couple hissing to one another behind the closed door. Then the knob turned. “Wipe that grin off your face,” his teachers used to say when he was a kid, and he remembered it in time to look neutral before they walked back in.

When he got to the intersection he knew which way to go, but he didn’t know where the farm was, only that it was somewhere between Addison and Trevna. It would be an hour’s drive. The map was spread out on the seat beside him, held down with his shaving kit, though he didn’t need it anymore. He could ask at a house or two along the way until he found her. He was driving a Lincoln, this year’s model, not as splendid a vehicle as the old roadster, but she’d see it coming. That’s as far as he’d let himself think except to remember he was bald, nearly bald anyway, nothing but a rim of sandy hair left on his head. His wife had said it was okay; he had a good-shaped skull, she said, but he hadn’t looked in a mirror for a day of his life, since it started thinning, that he didn’t remember his mother saying (he must have been all of five years old at the time) that red-headed men lost their hair early.

M
y mother got it into her head that my dad was coming back. She wasn’t senile. She was barely sixty and fully enjoying her life and she said it just like that. “I’ve got it into my head your father might be coming back.” Something had made her think he was returning to Saskatchewan that very day. She thought other people knew about it and had decided they shouldn’t tell her. “There’s gossip going around,” she said.

“Have you had a letter from your father?” she asked right away, as soon as I stopped by to visit before getting my groceries. We never talked about my father. She hadn’t mentioned him to me once, not once since the day he left Gilroy. I was pretty sure she hadn’t mentioned his existence to anyone on earth since that day, and I’d been proud of her for that. I had (privately, mutely) extolled her for that. Of all the qualities that made me look up to her, the first was that she was strong; nobody trifled with her.

“I have never had a letter from him.”

“I have reason to believe he’s going to show up today.”

“Show up today? Today? Where?”

“Here.”

“Why? Why would you think that?”

“On the five o’clock train,” she said.

“It’s been thirty years.”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Right. Okay. Really, Mother?”

“Of course I may be mistaken, but when old friends start getting evasive, I’ll tell you, something’s going on.” She stood up and then, I suppose, didn’t know why she had. An excess of emotional energy, likely, had brought her to her feet. “I don’t know, Ruth, to be honest,” she said. “But in case he is on that train …”

I thought I knew what was behind this, why her old friends had been acting evasive; they’d been talking about her behind her back. They’d heard about Elena Huhtala. It was only natural that Valerie would have told a friend or two, not only about the visit but about the story behind it, and gossip that provocative travels fast, and invariably gets embroidered on the way. I didn’t intend to explain; nothing would have induced me to say a word about Elena Huhtala to my mother.

Lawson was not much bigger than Gilroy had been, but my mother’s house wasn’t near the train tracks, and there was no station, just a platform by the grain elevators. I didn’t ask her how my father would know to get off here, how she thought he’d know where to find her if he did come back. I also wondered why she was so sure he was coming specifically to see her. He might, for example, have thought of returning to see me. But really, I didn’t for one minute believe he was coming. It hadn’t occurred to me for ages that he ever would.

“It’s not likely, is it?” I said.

She didn’t answer that, didn’t like the question and didn’t like me making my voice gentle when I said it. You would not call my
mother a hopeful person. I don’t think I ever saw her look as if she was anticipating something unless she was play-acting it to amuse a child, the way you do, pretending to expect one thing and then, when the opposite occurs, affecting great surprise. Sufficient to my mother was the moment she was in and the hand she was dealt. I really think she saw hope as an affront to her God and the reality He’d created. She was motivated by belief.

“I’ll come back after I get my groceries,” I said. “If you want me here.” It would mean I’d be late getting home and late getting supper on the table, and she knew it and thanked me. I held back my sigh. It wasn’t new between us that my mother expected much of me and I rose to her requirement. She had named me Ruth for a reason and I was every bit as loyal as my namesake, but when I thought of the biblical Ruth, I always pondered the fact that “ruthless” is the word that has survived.

I shopped at Scott’s, of course. The new store was bigger than the one in Gilroy had been, although not as big as the Co-op down the highway in Central Butte, where the majority got their groceries. Scott had to keep longer hours because of that, but it didn’t bother him. The store was his life.

“How is your mother?” It was the first thing he said to me every time I came in, even if he’d seen her that morning. Then, no doubt, we’d have to go through the entire family, each brother and sister, since none of them had remained in the district and couldn’t speak for themselves. I’d worked for Scott for several years and had clerked for him off and on since Leonard and I were married, too, when he’d needed extra help, and in spite of my fondness for him, his little tics irritated me. My mother used to say of Olive, his wife, that she thought she was one of the elite because she lived
above the rest of us over the store (we called it The Emporium because of her), and Scott sometimes employed the same upper-class assumptions, in spite of his innate humility. Oh, how complicated we all are, I thought as I browsed the shelves for Corn Flakes and such. And Leonard was so much like him.

How was my mother? A good question, and not one I was going to answer out loud. Nor, apparently, was I going to think about it much, because Scott was alone in the store, and we had to chat about the crops and the harvest and the weather. I wondered, as we talked and I picked up canned baked beans and dish detergent and set them into the cardboard box beside the other necessities of life, if he didn’t have any
under
things on his mind, any fires that ran underground and never stopped burning. I’d tried to put out one of those fires that morning. I’d called Bill Longmore. I wasn’t at all sure of what I was doing and I hung up a couple of times before the phone started ringing. It was likely wrong to call him, even though I’d told him I would if I ever heard any news. I knew his wife had died after her long illness and he’d been alone for more than a year. I heard his voice get hopeful, and I wasn’t doing it for him. I didn’t ask him to do anything, but I let it sound as if she might need somebody and I could hear him thinking it might be him. He was the kind of guy who responded to other people’s needs. If he thought he could be a help to her, he would try. All the time we were talking, I worried that if he did head out to find her, it would end badly for him. It had been on my conscience ever since and it made me feel like picking a fight. That wasn’t going to happen; you didn’t fight with your father-in-law, not in my world. I was saved from any confrontation, anyway, when the Milton brothers came in, gabbing nonstop, as they always did, as if they’d just accidentally bumped into one another on the street, and didn’t see each other every hour of every day and
(some said) sleep together at night. They did interrupt their conversation long enough to say, “Scott,” in unison.

“Boys,” he said.

They didn’t get far into the store. They stopped by the window, gesticulating and spouting such wisdom as, “What goes round, comes round,” and “History repeats itself.” I wondered about this applying to my own situation. Could I take it as a sign that I was hearing such phrases said? But that was a dumb kind of logic; my father had never returned, he had never written to us, he had never shown the slightest interest in our existence – so if he did show up today, it wouldn’t be a case of history repeating itself, it would be a case of a miracle occurring in Lawson, Saskatchewan. While I finished my foraging, the Miltons got well into their most recent theory that Khrushchev and Kennedy were going to start a third world war, and more than history was repeating itself.

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.