A Beauty Read online

  He shook his head; he didn’t know. He reached over and patted her wide knee and she, ever generous, shifted the cake. “Oh, I can taste this cake,” she said. “It is so good, my mother’s recipe, so moist and substantial. But the cost of lemons! Oh, yes, I know, Henrik, why you’re thinking of them. It’s our pretty Elena Huhtala, sitting on the swing. You were a picture, my dear,” she said, rearing back again to peer into Elena’s eyes. “Your hair all lit up like a halo.” She laughed as if she’d made a joke. “But this cake,” she went on. “Wait till you taste it. You can make it with vanilla filling but it’s not as good. The lemon filling is so cool in your mouth. I can feel it on the edges of my tongue when I say it. And with three layers, you put it twice so it soaks all through the cake. Now Henrik is going to tease me and say, ‘What about the frosting, Maria? You haven’t said a word about the frosting.’ Oh, look, here is Liberty Hall. And half the district’s arrived already.”

  They pulled into the yard in front of the country hall and Henrik stopped the team near the door to let them step down.

  “I’ll hand you the cake,” Maria said to the girl.

  When her feet hit the dirt, Elena turned and put her hands up for the cake. It dipped when she took hold of it, being heavier than she expected. Seeing that, Maria didn’t leave her in charge of it for long. As soon as Arnie Lindquist had given her a hand down, she took it back and sailed it past the group congregated around the hot dog stand, towards the open door and the crowd inside. It was almost as if she was carrying Elena Huhtala to them on a platter.

  Maria set her cake down beside the other offerings and faced the women who’d trailed behind her. She threw up her hands and admitted defeat – not that defeat ever cowed her. “It’s true,” she said. “I drove all the way to Trevna with the girl and I didn’t learn a thing. Good heavens, ladies, it wasn’t from lack of trying.”

  “She doesn’t know any more than we do, poor kid,” Hilda Lindquist said. “How long’s he been gone now?”

  They decided it had been about five weeks since any of them had set eyes on Mr. Huhtala, although that didn’t mean he’d been gone so long. Sometimes ages passed without any of them seeing him. He was an outsider, they’d always said, and it was only the truth, a Red Finn in a community of Swedes, who’d refused to live among his own, who’d turned his back on his own. It was said he refused to speak Finnish and hadn’t let his daughter speak it since they’d arrived in Canada, although this wasn’t anything his neighbours could corroborate. Many of them had never spoken to him. They’d seldom seen him up close; from the road as they’d passed his farm he’d looked tall and gaunt, his clothes flapping about as if the wind had intended from the day it saw him to blow him off his own fields. And now, “They say he left a note for her, on the kitchen table.”

  “The Mounties came to the house to ask if we knew anything,” Thelma Svenson said.

  “They were at the Huhtala place an hour at least. Searching for him.”

  “Do you know, I’m not sure I’d recognize Matti Huhtala if he walked in the door,” Britte Anderson said.

  “Oh you would if you’d ever spoken to him, yeah,” Maria said. “You wouldn’t forget him if you’d ever been face to face.”

  The ladies looked expectant – Maria had blushed, as if the thought of Matti Huhtala had aroused a memory best kept private – but she bustled off across the hall, her dress shining particularly brightly across her broad backside where the wagon seat had polished it.

  “Well,” Thelma said. “What does that mean?”

  “Peter’s pulling Ingrid’s braids,” Britte said. “We’ll never know.”

  Aggie Lindquist brought her Photoplay magazine with her for the times no one asked her to dance. The one she had was the one with Garbo on the cover and afterwards she never could believe she’d lost it. No, it was stolen and she knew who stole it even if she couldn’t do a thing about it. Garbo had a deep, pale fur collar like a cloud around her neck and face and she had her proud look on, as if to say she’d endured a lot of cloudiness and could withstand more. Aggie could put that look on her own face – chin up, eyes down, as if your own cheeks are more interesting than anything out there beyond you. As long as she owned the magazine she had that look down pat, but it didn’t come naturally to her, and once the thing was gone she could tell in the mirror she couldn’t get the right droop. The piece inside was “The High Price of Screen Love-making.” She’d read it to gauze. It didn’t help. She waved her hair every Saturday morning and she gazed into the distance a lot with a soulful expression that seemed to say surely, somewhere, there was a better world, and that didn’t help, either.

  She saw Elena Huhtala walk in with Peter and Ingrid Gustafson on either side of her. Before the other girls noticed her, Aggie saw her and kept the secret for the few minutes it took until they cottoned to her being there. Aggie was the one who’d first said Elena looked like Garbo, and you might as well say she looked like the queen, because Garbo was a Swede. But Elena Huhtala was a Finn. Maybe there were Swedes in her family somewhere, Aggie didn’t know. None of the girls had liked Anna Christie much. Garbo wasn’t even pretty sometimes in it, and they hadn’t liked her voice, hearing it for the first time. It was disturbingly husky and she had an accent too similar to their parents’. But she was great at the end. She won them over in the end. Elena Huhtala was the same. You couldn’t say she was always pretty, but she was always great. Grand, that was the word. And she was prettier than Greta Garbo, maybe, to start with; Aggie thought she was.

  Aggie liked to watch people when they were on their own, that is, on their own in a crowd; she’d discovered that an individual’s particularity stood out against a background of other people. Garbo was who she was partly because of all the movie stars she wasn’t, and Elena Huhtala was special because she was different from the rest of them. For the little time she had before the other girls would rush over, Aggie watched Elena standing alone by the door, kind of floating there as if she’d forgotten anyone could see her. In that old, faded, limp brown dress. The girl was dirt poor. She had only the one dress and when she washed it, God knew what she did to be decent in front of her father. She had no mother and she didn’t pretend otherwise. Maybe that was the very thing that made her so grand – she didn’t pretend about anything. They say actresses pretend, but Aggie said you watch Garbo. That was acting, not pretending, and Aggie had seen a number of her pictures. Elena Huhtala had never seen one, not one. Once or twice the girls had said they should pool their money and take her along to the Odeon, pick her up on the way to Trevna, but they never had. She wouldn’t have gone with them anyway, Aggie could have told them that, they’d only have made her feel even poorer.

  As soon as they saw her inside the hall, the girls went to her, and Aggie tagged along behind them. She was there to see when Nils Larson caught Elena’s eye from across the floor, and there to hear when Doris Knutson said, “Somebody’s happy,” rolling her eyes his way, and all of them giggled. Nils was twenty-one and had a solid job with the Sask Western grain elevator company. Lillian Larson, his sister, was among the girls gathered around Elena, and nudged her with her elbow as if she was already in their family. “Maybe tonight’s the night,” she said. Aggie kept it to herself, but she thought it would be a pity, even if he was the best catch around. Elena should have something better than marriage and staying here and turning into a farmwife. “Oh, sure,” Elena said when Lillian said maybe tonight would be the night. She went through the gestures any of them would have used, a shrug, a toss of the head, and they giggled some more, but they all knew no matter how much she tried, she’d never be one of them.

  And that was the way she was really like Garbo. Nothing that happened to her or around her really affected her. In the middle of that circle of girls, she stood apart. It was a kind of sadness! Aggie hadn’t seen that before. Maybe it was clearer tonight because of her dad. Or maybe she generally hid it more than Garbo. After all, she wasn’t trying to portray a whole life i
n a couple of hours, the way you had to in a movie. Aggie kept her eye on Elena and what she saw was that even when she’d kid around, even when she was laughing out loud, there would be a shadow to the laugh. Aggie wasn’t going to talk about it with the others. They might not have noticed it. Aggie might be the only one seeing it flicker in her eyes and cling to her mouth at the end of a smile, as if she only ever expected disappointment and she could see it coming a mile away.

  Doris Knutson had green eyes so maybe it was natural that among the girls she was the one most jealous. She’d stand back sometimes at gatherings, putting a curse on Elena Huhtala that would have her dead or at least ugly by the next morning. They all respected her so much. You had to pretend to like her as much as they did. Just try being catty about her and you’d catch sight of someone’s lifted eyebrow. The momentary pleasure of giving in to temptation would be swamped by the extra sympathy Elena would get just because of it. Still, when old Mrs. Sundstrom came over and drew Elena aside to complain to her about her arthritis and her husband, Doris saw a chance and started talking out of the side of her mouth. “Did you hear what Peter Gustafon’s going around saying?”

  It made them into a clique, her talking like that; it made a tight little fist of them. The girls leaned their heads in, all except Aggie Lindquist.

  “Peter Gustafson,” Aggie said, snorting.

  Doris ignored Aggie and cleared the frown off her forehead that came with the desire to murder her, and waited until every one of the girls looked right at her. She was going to get her money’s worth out of this one. She was going to see it on their faces – that they wanted to hear what Peter Gustafson had said. It was a triumph for her to make them do that. “He says she sent her dad to the cellar for a jar of pickles and while he was down there,” she took the time to look into their eyes, “she pulled the chesterfield over the trap door!” She had a few seconds to enjoy the girls’ reaction and then they all looked away; every one of them looked some place else, at the floor or at the ceiling or at somebody over by the door. Doris was no dummy; she knew what she’d find when she turned around. And there was Elena, staring at her with that puzzled look she got on her face when she wanted people to feel sorry for her. Right away she lowered her eyes as if she might hurt Doris if she went on looking at her, or embarrass her even more than she already had. Doris knew that she’d begun discreetly, and she also knew she’d ended up quite loud. The quietness was awful, now. But it was thrilling, too. It was a moment of realness, at least. Doris threw back her head. Why shouldn’t Elena know what people were saying about her?

  Somebody had to say something. Lillian coughed and they thought she was going to speak, but she only got red in the face. Finally Aggie said, “Peter Gustafson,” again, with another snort. Then even she started searching the hall for someone to save them. It was a relief when the music started up. It was like they all sighed. The Harmonics. A group from Charlesville, a couple of towns away, that hadn’t played at Liberty Hall before. Usually they had accordions at dances, but this band had a piano, a cornet, drums, a sax, and a violin. And wouldn’t you know it, the first song they swung into was “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?”

  “Golly,” Aggie said right out loud, and they all knew what she meant. They all stared hard at the lady sitting at the piano who was wagging her whole thick body, revving up the energy to belt out the words. The song wasn’t about a father, but even so.

  “She seems very composed,” one of the women said.

  “She’s a strange one,” Thelma Svenson said. “Maria told me she called on her yesterday and she looked as if she didn’t recognize her at first. She’d seen her sitting on that swing the way she has every day all summer, and turned in to invite her to the dance tonight.”

  “I heard she said no.”

  “She was very close to her father, was she?” one of the women murmured.

  “Maybe too close,” another said. “Just the two of them there on that lonely farm.”

  Thelma cleared her throat. As the Huhtalas’ nearest neighbours, the Svensons might have been thought to know them best, even to have some responsibility for the girl, but Thelma pointedly had nothing to add to the conversation. She was well aware of the resentment in the community that led to this kind of gossip. Just because Matti Huhtala was aloof. To some that meant arrogant. It was said he’d taught at the university in Helsinki, and to those same people, this was grounds for believing he thought himself superior to mere farmers. The failure of his farm would have seemed like justice to them if it hadn’t been that most of the farms across the west were failing.

  They were all trying to look at Elena Huhtala without seeming to look at her. They didn’t realize it didn’t matter if they looked. They would see her dress, her figure, her hair, her face; they wouldn’t see her, not the way Aggie saw her. They didn’t know how. She was invisible to them. It didn’t matter if they were shocked, if they gossiped, if they worried about her. All they wanted was an answer; they wanted an ending, and whatever it was they’d bring meatballs and stew, they’d bring pies and cakes and platitudes.

  “It’s the not knowing that’s hard,” the women said.

  It was Aggie’s opinion it was the not knowing they liked.

  Elena was standing apart from the other girls now, nearer to the little kids, who were chasing one another, bumping into people and getting told off. Aggie thought she looked tired. She thought about going over and showing her Garbo’s picture. “You can’t tell what she’s thinking, can you?” she could say when they put their heads together, studying the photograph. “But you can see her whole life in her face.” This was a contradiction that Aggie had mulled over. Elena would understand, but it would embarrass her, especially tonight.

  Doris’s green eyes darted around the dance hall, searching for someone who could compensate her for not being Elena Huhtala. Then she saw the stranger. “Who’s that?” she said. All the girls gawked and then pretended not to gawk, and wondered about their hair.

  The stranger waited near the door for a while, lounging against the wall with a friendly expression on a face that looked as if it naturally fell into friendly lines. He wasn’t in a hurry. He waited there until people got used to the idea of him. He’d obviously come to country dances before. He was good-looking without being handsome, which in that community meant he looked clean and respectable and quite a lot like one of them. He had his red hair slicked back, his shirt pressed. His suit had a drape to it that must have cost money. He chatted in a low-key, laconic way with the men who went by on their way in or out of the hall. It was the same way they talked to one another. Before long, word got around he was the owner of the flashy Lincoln roadster parked down the road, and the men started trooping out in twos and threes to inspect it, and then returned, eager to ask him about it and privately wondering if he might be a gangster.

  Elena wasn’t the first girl he asked to dance, but he’d had his eye on her, even when he was dancing with somebody else. Nobody had asked Elena onto the floor. They were waiting for Nils Larson to claim her. Then the stranger walked up, and without a word or a moment’s hesitation, she stepped into his arms. Before they’d turned twice, Nils was crossing his arms and Lillian was frowning so hard she looked just like him.

  Mrs. Gustafson came over to the wall where Aggie was standing and said nice things to her about her magazine and then gave that up when she saw Aggie only wanted to watch the stranger dance with Elena Huhtala.

  “That girl is getting too thin,” Mrs. Gustafson said.

  The band was playing “Always.” Aggie couldn’t for a minute take her eyes off the two of them as they travelled along the outside of the crowd, as swoopy and swoony as the music. Mrs. Gustafson started whistling along with the song. It was funny to hear the skinny little trills come out of her thick-packed body. The lady at the piano sang, and Mrs. Gustafson trilled along, and Aggie, smitten with the mystery of everything to do with the mingling of men and women, remembered with a quiver down
her spine that where Elena Huhtala came from, nothing was for always. Her mother had died when she was barely two.

  When the song was over and his hand was no longer firm on the small of her back but only lingering two-fingered on her shoulder, the stranger returned Elena to the place he’d found her beside Doris and Lillian. He knew enough to seek out other partners. “Thanks,” he said as if it was anybody he’d just danced with. Aggie expected him to ask Doris or Lillian next, but he looked past them. He came right up and stood in front of her, smiling on her as if she’d magically turned into a door prize. She let the Photoplay fall to the floor. The nicest frilly tremble zipped through her entire body before he even put his arm around her.

  Over by the open door, a group of men who’d just come in from visiting a whisky jug set up near the livery barn were discussing Matti Huhtala’s disappearance and agreeing that the conclusion they’d come to was unanimous. The RCMP were pretty sure, weren’t they? The man had tried to sell his farm and failed. His machinery, the little he’d owned, was long gone. He’d killed the last of his chickens, one of the men said, and another joked that even his dog had died. So one day he went off with nothing but his rifle. What did that lead you to think?

  “The daughter says no,” Arnie Lindquist spoke up.

  “Well,” another drawled.

  She wouldn’t want to think it, would she?

  The Mounties had asked Elena about the note, if she thought it was a suicide note. “I don’t know,” she said. That was only a few days after he’d left and she didn’t want to prejudice them against him in case he was still alive. It was a crime to attempt to commit suicide, they told her. They watched her for a reaction, but she didn’t have one. The idea didn’t shock her; she’d already considered it a possibility.

  “What do you think?” they asked.