A Beauty (27 page)

She’d been fine as long as she was sitting doing nothing, but when she left her favourite table and strolled through different parts of the little city, through streets of bland apartment buildings, or past the big ships at the harbour, she was overcome by a sick kind of restlessness. She hadn’t realized how little there would be for her in Helsinki, how disconnected she would feel. The days were passing and she was only wandering – in her mind as well as physically. Her time was half gone and she didn’t know why she’d come.

“You ought to go to Hattula,” someone told her. “Your father’s family might have originated there, given the name, after all. They say many people’s names were changed, the spelling was changed, over the years.”

It had been a chance remark, although in retrospect, as she knew well, what was luck, nothing more than luck, could come to seem like design. She’d booked a hotel in Hämeenlinna because she couldn’t stay in Hattula; it was only a little village. But that had been fortunate, too. Yes, because there she’d met the desk clerk and her daughter. She pictured the two of them, as if they stood in front of her again, and once again the woman raised her hand to her daughter’s brow in a tender, unnecessary gesture, brushing back hair that hadn’t fallen.

She was far away when the ferryman strolled over and asked if she was from these parts. She’d known he would, sooner or later, only the two of them on the boat, after all. “Long ago, I was,” she said, and she could hear the softness in her voice that came from remembering where she’d been. He leaned towards her, casual, but unmistakably interested, so she knew he’d heard it too and thought it was for him.

He said his name was Keith. He was quite young, or at least younger than she by a decade. He wore cowboy boots and jeans that had moulded to his thighs. He stayed beside her, leaning with
his butt against the railing, and gave her a relaxed smile. “You got family here?”

“My father, north of here.” She could have said no, put him off, but there was something about him she liked, and it was good, it was restful, to talk to a stranger.

“What’s his name?”

“Oh, I don’t think you’d know him. Matti Huhtala.”

“No, can’t say I know him.”

“I am not sure he is alive.”

It sounded odd; she knew that as soon as she said it. He broke out into a big grin. To hide it, although it was too late, he cupped his hand against the wind and lit a cigarette, then offered her one and lit it for her. He took a few appreciative drags, a meditative look in those blue eyes. Hey, you, his eyes said, as they had said fairly often before.
I’m doing nothing
, she heard Ruth say.

She tossed her cigarette into the river. “These are not good for me,” she said.

“Yeah.” He was a perceptive young man. He tossed his own smoke into the water where it bounced for a few seconds beside hers, and then he ambled off.

She watched him taking his time crossing the deck, and there was something almost like nostalgia in her feeling for his broad shoulders and long legs. A sharp pain ran through her. Confused, she called after him, “I wish you’d known my father.”

He turned around, walking backwards away from her. “If I did, you’d know whether he was alive or not, eh?” He was only teasing her a little bit; he wasn’t challenging her, even if it felt like that. He had kind eyes. He’d been hiding that, because they were unusually kind for a man of his age.

“I think he has been alive all this time,” she said. She called it out to him and it was an idiotic thing to say, completely loony,
really; she realized that as soon as the words came out of her mouth. But it didn’t matter. It was all right; he’d already turned around, and anyway, he was too far away; her words were drowned out by the grinding of the cables and the motor. Past him, the shore was advancing, the gently pleated hills leading up to the plains, greener now than they used to be.

Keith came up to her open window before she drove off the ferry. He told her there was no hotel or restaurant anymore in Virginia Valley. There was a small café, but he couldn’t recommend it. She said that was okay, she didn’t need lunch; she was heading to Charlesville.

“They’ve got a new motel in Charlesville, right on the highway, on the way into town. You can’t miss it.”

She said she’d heard that. “Keith,” she said. “Do you ever want to go down the river, instead of across?”

He looked bemused, then grinned at her. “I’d be up the river if I did it,” he said.

She drove up the hill, through the little valley town, without stopping or even thinking.

S
omething got into Albert Earle that Friday night. It seemed to begin about six p.m. when a voluptuous light the exact colours of the new peaches in Dodds’ store – and with a hint of their fuzziness – was flooding the countryside, but it probably began years before, maybe the day he was born. He’d been told he hadn’t cried on that occasion until the midwife slapped him hard. He’d also been told that life catches up to you, and he certainly thought it had caught up to him.

The light at six o’clock that evening hit Charlesville at an angle that made even dull materials reflect it. The shiny corrugated tin siding on the Sports Complex that housed the curling rink and the swimming pool could not be viewed without pain and possibly lingering damage to the eyes. A recent structure, it blocked Albert’s access to Main Street. Now to get to Main he had to exit his front yard. He had to walk around from the back of his house. (More than personal habit made that circumambulation necessary; custom dictated it. People in Charlesville did not use their front doors unless someone like the Queen came to town and knocked on them.) He
had to take Railway Street to Main, and that meant he had to round the corner, passing the side and then the facade of the Jasper Hotel. But it had to be. He might have chosen to go the opposite way, turning left at his front gate (an old-fashioned, small-town wire gate with the metal on top scrolled into the shape of an imperfectly connected heart). He might then have taken a similar but opposite route, but his wife wouldn’t countenance the extra steps it would have taken. She was annoyed enough just being prevented from walking as the crow flies, as you should be able to do in a small town. She would rather have lived in a smaller town. And the fire was decades ago, for God’s sake.

They turned right. Beside their house was an empty lot, for which he was grateful. Knee-high grass and weeds and a lot of ironic clover flourished there, and Sanderson, who owned it, had parked his old half-ton at the back, the hood torn off, the motor torn out. The truck stood sideways across the back of the lot, but its front wheels were turned towards the street as if it would drive away if it could, as if it was embarrassed to be splayed open and found empty. If it could speak, Albert thought it would announce it was decomposing as fast and as decently as it could. Albert thought about dying quite often lately, because he was pretty sure he had throat cancer. He hadn’t told his wife, or anyone else, his suspicion.

While the Royal George had been a three-storey brick building and sat foursquare on the corner of Railway and Main, the Jasper, half the size, was a white stuccoed box they’d tarted up with pale green trim, the colour of green Albert associated with hospitals. The paint was flaking off the crumbling foundation, it had gone chequered across the false front, and whole strips of it had lifted off the window frames. It had worn off most of the pitted cement front steps that led to the double doors (also painted
pale green). In every way the Jasper was a far cry from the intended elegance of the old Royal George.

Of the Plains Hotel across the street, Albert wouldn’t speak, because Stuart Flint, who owned it, wouldn’t speak to him. The Plains had prospered by default, being for years the only place to stay in town. Albert had made Flint install fire escape doors at the back of the building, with two sets of iron stairs zigzagging down the wall. He’d had to fight to get him to do it. Now the hotel was up for sale because of the new Park City Motel out at the highway.

In back of the Plains, across the alley, was the
RCMP
detachment. You couldn’t see it from Main Street, another thing for which Albert was grateful. Oh, he was full of gratitude for the small favours of happenstance, and as they passed between the Jasper and the Plains, heading south, strolling because his wife didn’t walk fast unless she wanted to, he tried to gaze on Main Street without hatred.

It wasn’t the changes he hated – many of them had occurred years ago – it was the optimism that lay behind the idea of change. He felt badly that he felt that way. He thought he shouldn’t. The sun came bouncing off the bakery window and he shielded his eyes, but too late. Just a minute, he said, not out loud. She stopped, sighing, to wait for him to haul out his handkerchief and dab at his eyes. He looked back as he did, and the first thing he saw when his vision cleared was the corner of the Mounties’ building in the gap between the bakery and Dodds’ store. When he faced the street again, he decided it wasn’t the optimism he hated, it was the ugliness: the squat, square, small buildings that seemed to him to advertise squat, square, small minds; the ridiculous false fronts; the tacky signs, the oily puddles in the rutted side streets; the cringing weeds along the sidewalks; the cracks in the cement; the two fire hydrants, stupidly painted to look like British policemen.
Why British? Why policemen? And the immodesty. The pretension. Would anyone believe that the Plains Hotel had a Banquet Room? That Boyles’ Bakery made the best cheesecake this side of New York? That Shirl’s Salon could advise the women of Charlesville on anything remotely close to the latest styles? The only properly named, properly advertised establishment in town was the new Pioneer Villa, and it was already housing the last of the
pioneers
. The great laugh was that the people who’d built it – people his age or younger – didn’t realize they were next in line. They’d built it for the old folks without a thought that they were getting older every day themselves and that it would be their own last stop before they hit the cemetery out by the Park City Motel.

On their way down Main, the Earles had to nod and say something about the weather to a few people, or rather Albert had to, but they only slowed down, they never stopped, until Old Sally came rattling towards them pulling her wagon – a child’s red-painted wagon full of jiggling, clinking, dirty-bottomed pop bottles and beer bottles she’d collected out by the drive-in and the cemetery, where the town kids liked to drink. She ploughed down the middle of the sidewalk, and they were obliged to stop and wait for her to pass. His wife insisted on saying hello to her and asking her if she needed anything. Old Sally said the same thing she always said. She said, “Hah!”

His wife picked up the pace after that, and he recalled they were late tonight, his fault. He’d cut himself shaving, a tiny scrape that had bled like the dickens. He’d walked around with a piece of toilet paper stuck to it for ten minutes, and it had bled again when he’d peeled it off. So now he had a Band-Aid on his chin. Not that it mattered. He was a sight, anyway, pockmarked all over his scalp, nose, and cheeks. Polka dots, Peg had called them. And there, kitty-corner across the street (that was filling up with
angle-parked cars and trucks because they were later than usual), was Lynn’s Style House, just where he’d known it would be, just where it always was, needing to be faced, needing to be passed by on the way to the Bluebird Café, and calling up, as it always did, the same
needling
question. Was it or was it not valid to consider the possibility that his having to face the Style House every Friday night was the reason Betty insisted on eating at the Bluebird? To make him, in her company, read Lynn’s name imperfectly covering Peg’s on that sign, to force him to pass that door he’d never open again, to remind him that he’d renounced Peg and their life together and taken her back, taken her back because she’d needed him, because he’d pledged till death do us part and he’d meant it, because he’d prized loyalty above all qualities. He was pretty sure it was part of her grand design to remind him on a weekly basis that he’d given up everything for her and had thought well of himself for doing it.

Soon they would make him retire. (He’d caught sight of the Fire Hall down the street.) The town would give him a gold watch and sentence him to spend the rest of his days in that little bungalow by the railway tracks with Betty beside him. It was unbearable. He said it right to her, if not aloud, while he held the screen door of the Bluebird open for her. “I can’t bear it,” he said, and she passed through.

Charlesville’s population had topped two thousand and it served a wider district than Virginia Valley had, but Jerry Wong knew just about every person who walked in the door of his café. Most of them sat at the same table every time they came in unless it was already occupied by someone who didn’t know better, and
most of them ordered the same meal every time. There was one “Chinese” dish on the menu and that was chop suey, which every one of them said with a sing-song intonation meant to amuse him. On this particular August evening, the Kulak brothers had been the first to arrive.