Free Man Descending by Guy Vanderhaeghe Page B

you doing?” said the boy, advancing cautiously into the room. He thrust his tattered head from side to side like some wary buzzard fledgling.
    What an ugly child, Tollefson thought, and was immediately ashamed. He glanced at the hairbrushes on his hands and remembered he had originally intended to have them initialled. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity rang in his mind.
    What exactly had his married sister, Elizabeth, said to him forty-five years ago on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday party?
    “Carlie,” she had sung in the lilting voice he had been pleased to hear her daughter Lydia had inherited, “you’re a handsome young devil. You do know that, don’t you?”
    No. He hadn’t. Never dreamed it. The notion had surprised and confounded him. He would have liked to ask someone else’s opinion on the matter, but that was hardly the thing a person did.
    This startling information, however, did lead him to begin to take great pains with his appearance. He refused any longer to let his father cut his hair. Instead, he went to the barber in town for a “trim” and his first baptism with bay rum. His sideburns crept past his ear-lobes; his hair appeared to be trying to mount a plausible pompadour. He bought elastic-sided boots, took to looking at himself in store windows when he sauntered past, and lounged on street corners with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. Carl Tollefson began to suspect more than one girl of being in love with him.
    Nobody told him any different until, in a moment of fanciful speculation, insane even for him, he remarked to his brother-in-law Roland that he thought the butcher’s wife had her “eye on me.”
    Elizabeth spoke to him a second time. “Carlie, you remember what I said to you about being a handsome devil? I’m sorry, but I only meant to give you a little confidence – you’re so shy around girls. The thing is, Carlie, there never was a Tollefson born who was anything but plain. I swear to God Roland married me out of charity. Still, I learned some time ago that nothing much helps; you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. So let me give you a little advice – the girls around here don’t much run to hair oil and elastic-sided boots. What they want is steady, and God knows you’re steady. Just remember, Carlie, we’re all in the same boat – there never was a Tollefson who turned a head with his profile.”
    “You think I don’t know that,” he had replied with a tight, pinched laugh. “What kind of fool do you think I am?”
    Studying his face in the mirror he was puzzled by the mystery of how he had been able to believe in his supposed good looks, even for a second. Evidence to the contrary stared out at him from the mirror as it had every one of those mornings forty-five years ago as he had so carefully shaved.
    Of course, age hadn’t improved him. But, by and large, it was the same old face, only a little more used up. An indifferent kind of face: mild blue eyes which in a certain light appeared unfocused; a limp mouth which he often caught himself breathing through; a decent, ordinary, serviceable nose for a decent, ordinary face; and a set of small, neat ears which lay close to his skull and gave him the surprised look of a man caught in a fierce wind.
    Perhaps it was from the moment he realized what he was in comparison with what he hoped to be that he turned in upon himself. And although he bore no resentment against his sister for planting the seed that flowered in his humiliation, he always sensed that the story of his life might have been very different if she had never said what she had. Not better, only different.
    After all, he did not renounce all of what he had come to be; that would have been an admission that everything stemmed from self-delusion, and he was too proud to do that. The sideburns disappeared and the never-to-be-completed edifice of his pompadour crumbled from neglect, but the