River of the Brokenhearted (13 page)

TWO

Sometime after the death of Jimmy McLeary, my grandmother closed the Regent (which Walter kept as his house) and opened the Grand on the town square. For a long while it was the largest and most imposing structure in our town. It signalled in the age of the great production companies, the big studio lots—Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Jimmy Cagney. There were five hundred seats in our theatre, gold exit curtains tied back with gold sash, and the faces of comedy and tragedy at the four exit corners. Our carpets were red, and the seats upholstered, and the snack bar sold Cracker Jack and candy. A picture of our grandfather was in the foyer. Over time this would be replaced by a picture of Janie herself.

Miles entered the theatre with a gasp in 1931, and was filled with a kind of urgency to become, as he once told me, “a great man, and to do a great thing—just as those heroes of ours were doing on the screen.”

Rebecca stayed with our family, for there was no one more dutiful in keeping herself and the children clean. Far at the back of the house she had a room. She was often seen walking the two children to church.

Roy Dingle stayed as well and, in a suit and tie, acted as something of a greeter at the theatre door.

So if there was no real bliss in Janie’s life, there were moments of triumph.

The one in town who watched these events with skepticism was Joey Elias. He had people inform him about the change that had overcome poor simple Dingle. And he decided this change had come about because of exasperating Father Carmichael, who had spent his time with alcoholics and the mentally ill, here and in Saint John. He was a radical priest for his time, or for any time, and was suspected by the bishop and others. He had taken Dingle under his wing, and it was whispered that he had prevented Walter McLeary from jumping off the Morrissey Bridge when Putsy left him. Elias liked to tease her about this.

“Oh,” he would say about Dingle, “he’s like all the rest of them. I know better men than he start to act like him. He’s changed aright. He had a little scare and thinks ‘Ow, I’d better act better.’ ”

Elias’s men would howl with laughter, even though many of them had been exactly like Dingle and from time to time sought some respite from the dark cold glazing their souls. But they had found Elias, and believed in him, for in money can morality be seen—watches and jewellery and better clothes signalled to many of them a respectable life.

One night when Rebecca visited her sister, he said to them, “I will tell you this—terms like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are bygone words. They don’t apply to us. That’s what Father Carmichael don’t know—nor does anyone. It stopped last century, those words. They were used in centuries when people did not know their own nature and relied on fixed words to explain unfixed man. There is no evil in the world any more. I carried my brother on my bony back all around Poland and not once did I think I was any less off than anyone else—eh? In fact I was better off than my brother, who was sickly and had a cold.”

Putsy was the one who argued with him as Rebecca listened. “How can you say there is no good and evil—”

“Well, there you go, I’ve just said it—”

“Does that mean Jimmy McLeary trying to burn down his own daughter’s theatre didn’t matter?”

“It mattered only to those who could profit or lose by it,” Elias said. “Profit and loss, that’s what we’re here for.”

“But what about inside?” Putsy said, putting her hand over her breast and looking at him, and then at Rebecca, who looked curiously at both of them as if trying to fathom which one was going to win.

“What
about
our insides,” he said, “filled with blood and bile and nothing much more?”

Here Rebecca laughed, for Elias made a funny face.

What he liked was this: how clever he would be to use Rebecca’s arrangement with Janie King. It would be easy to do. Rebecca wouldn’t remain faithful—most servants were not, especially if they wanted to impress people with knowledge of their employer’s foibles. And Rebecca had already advised him on certain things that went on in the house, always saying as a prelude, “Oh, she’d kill me if she knew I told. But it’s a little sip of gin from a spoon every night—and ordering special bloomers for the little girl. But the little girl loves
me
, not her. Now Miles is her momma’s boy, but Georgina is all
me.”

After she had worked a few months, Joey knew every room and what was behind those doors. She was his mole. And Putsy was jealous of this. And so this contest, just like every other contest, worked in his favour. The more Putsy and Rebecca suspected each other and repudiated each other, the more it validated him as their protector who was disappointed with either one or the other.

No, Putsy was as wild as a cat, but she was no Rebecca. He needed Rebecca Druken now. Janie made the mistake of some employers—she felt that if she gave Rebecca a job, Rebecca would be grateful and therefore more loyal to her. And Rebecca did seem loyal. But Joey Elias could manipulate certain events in the house, little lacklustre things that might not be noticed. He told Putsy this as if she would delight in this as well.

In every advantage taken over the weak or unsuspecting there was a glimpse into banality. And it was that glimpse that caused Putsy not to laugh.

Instead she continually asked herself questions about that night. Had she been so drunk as not to remember where her key had gotten to? Had she been at Elias’s house all the time? Who took off her stockings? Why was she so depressed now, when everything had turned in her favour? What did it matter if old Jimmy McLeary had died? It could have been any one of a dozen of his cronies from the past. He was always threatening the world at large with his saint, saying his saint would go out and beat them up.

She listened from the dark of their room. Their room was large, with a canopy over their bed, and pictures of stallions in a field. A large white bedspread, with soft pillows spread under her. She wore a full-length housecoat, and had her nails manicured and painted red. She was twenty-one years of age, and her husband was thirty-eight. Yet it was she who wanted to change, and not her husband. Besides, the marriage had been so hastily arranged and done so strangely, with a justice of the peace at the local courthouse, that she did not feel married at all. She had not wanted to be married like that. She thought she would have a white dress, but Joey said, “Who needs one? It’s just for people to gawk at. Who cares? What are ya worried about—it’s legal.”

Legal, yes—but it had not made her feel any better. And two weeks after their wedding he had driven over to Fredericton to be in a big card game, while she sat at home. She asked to go, but he told her she wouldn’t be interested.

“You’ll have no fun over there,” he said. “I wouldn’t put you through that.”

As always, the way he denied her wish was to make her feel ungrateful if she asked. Things continued like this, until one of her “best friends” wrote a note to tell her that Joey wasn’t alone going to Fredericton.

“No,” her friend wrote, “I have heard that Rebecca went with him—keeping it all in the family, I hear.”

She knew by certain signs that this was true.

After the friend wrote this letter, she started to pack and leave but Joey came in, and asked her what was wrong. He looked incredulous. How could she think that—her own sister? Never mind what a man might do—for a man was a man—but her sister, now that she was married?

Putsy, confused and crying, sat on the edge of the bed, with her head down. Yet in a strange and very uncomfortable way—Rebecca always left a clue about where she was and what she had done. Putsy, not nearly as bright as her sister, had noticed this herself. And the clue she had left Putsy—a jigsaw puzzle that Rebecca loved to do—given as a present to Putsy three days after the trip. It was a jigsaw puzzle bought in Fredericton. The tag named a Fredericton shop. Yet Putsy could not be sure.

Joey Elias usually went to bed at six in the morning and woke about one or two in the afternoon. His day started with his strong coffee and a cigarette. He was usually uncommunicative when things were going badly—and things were.

One night Putsy woke to a racket, the sound of a shout and a chair splintering against a wall. Her husband had been drinking all week. He had invited men in to play stud poker and he had marked cards. Now she listened, as a man from Fredericton, who had won against Joey in the card game in Fredericton had come here. A lot of men were losing their money tonight. One was no more than nineteen, and he had every cent he had earned in the lumberyard in his pocket. He was engaged to be married, and was bragging about this. Elias knew he had been paid, and had asked him to the house to have a good time. The boy came, with a bright smile because he had remembered Putsy as an innocent child in the lumberyard. He wanted to see her again, yet when he did, his smile faded; she was no longer the child he had remembered, who had played with him in the sawdust, and there was something strange in his look—a look of searching for the person inside the person that had delighted him with her love of life.

He wanted to go home, but Elias asked her to entertain him for a while, and, like so many many Miramichiers, he was too polite to say no. Then, after the boy was drinking with her, Elias came back with the cards.

“Do you want to double your earnings, Danny?” he asked. “Well, I’ll show you how to—it’ll be easy for you. Look—I’ll deal five cards, see …”

Now, she listened for a long time. She could hear the boy mumbling.

“What do that mean—I lose again? Well, no—look, I had three fours, so—oh, yeah, okay. No, I’m not saying you’re cheating.”

Then there was a great deal of laughter.

She turned her face to the wall.

What was good and evil? he had asked her and Rebecca that day. Well, he said, there was no good, no evil, and nothing in between. Just people, he said sadly, doing the best they could do. (He always sounded sad when he spoke like this, as if he was disappointed.) The world was against them from the start. Why worry if they attained some degree of comfort by doing something against the world?

Yet if that were so, why did he hurt her so much, why did he humiliate others? If there was no good, then the line she had heard, “every beast has pity except man,” did not mean anything—no words used meant a damn thing. For what did it matter if man did or did not have pity, did or did not murder, did or did not care for his children? She asked this of Rebecca one day, but Rebecca was busy doing the jigsaw and did not seem to understand what Putsy was trying to say. She looked up at her quickly and smiled, as if she knew something and wanted to give a clue, and then looked at the jigsaw piece in her hand.

“It’s all up to us, isn’t it, Putsy,” she said quietly, so that Putsy was not sure she had heard her correctly.

“What is?” Putsy asked.

“H’m?” Rebecca said.

Putsy could not help thinking that what Elias told her was wrong. For if it was true that there was no right and wrong, no good or evil, why did Elias become enraged at a slight? Why did she, why did Rebecca, why did anyone feel hurt and lost and alone when the world turned its back on their best intentions?

She had to go to confession and confess about the key, even though she did not know where it was. The priest would never be able to say anything, and she would be free of the guilt.

She put her head back into the sweet-smelling pillow and waited for the noise, the laughter to go away.

Or perhaps she had to go to the police. Go to the police! What would they do? She didn’t know. Worse, she saw the poor old man. Sometimes she’d look over into the corner and he’d be there nodding his head at her:

“ ’Lo there, Putsy,” he’d say. “It’s just me, Jimmy McLeary. Do you know, Putsy my girl, I love how you used to say Jamie, instead of Jimmy. Say Jamie for me, Putsy. As you know I’m dead and don’t hear it that often. Hey you ever think you might take a jaunt down to the
Police?”

She decided to go and stay with her mother. But her mother did not want her there, for the little bit of money Putsy managed to give Mrs. Druken would stop if she left Elias. (Rebecca did not give money, though her mother and father could not do without her.)

“You’re going to make yourself sick,” Putsy’s mother told her. “You’re thin, and don’t even look good. Go back to him now—you don’t need to be here. He has done a lot for us—don’t you hurt his feelings. One thing about Joey, he has tender feelings.”

So, she went back to Elias’s house. Janie had finally forced him out of business, but he was not through. He would open a dance hall. He needed some money in order to do this. So he took to gaming to try and get the money. He lost. Now he was cheating to get back what he had lost. Everything was that way with Elias and in every way he thought he was determining his own destiny.

Very early in the morning he came into the room, sat on the stuffed rocker in the corner and unbuttoned his vest. A loose card fell from his shirt, and he looked over at her. The ceiling lights were still on. Elias had played a trick on the boy who wanted to get married, and couldn’t look at himself in the mirror. A dull dawn was coming. He took eight hundred dollars he had managed to win and put it on the dresser.

Elias didn’t want to give up what he had, and he needed more. For if he gave up what he had, he would have nothing, he would be less than the people who looked up to him now. He was sure the man from Fredericton had seen him sneak the ace into his hand. Now, he would have to do something else.

So Elias left Putsy at dawn and walked along the street to the wharf. There in the empty and freezing wind, he turned toward the cliffs that lined the shore, craggy and pocked by caves. It was here he found Leon Winch.

Leon was not a stupid man, but he could hardly read and write, had no formal education, and was frightened of men who could talk well, like Elias. He was deathly afraid of Elias.

Leon barked an order, and a little dog came up from under a blanket and jumped in his lap. Leon had been put out of the house by his wife—this had happened after Christmas, after “the night.” She did not know why he was so nasty and angry and terrified, but she wanted him gone. So he came here. Elias was afraid he would say something, and so had brought him some money—forty dollars. This is what Elias brought him every couple of weeks. But Leon had tuberculosis, and Elias was happy this was the case. Leon watched Elias carelessly and said, while roughly hauling at the dog’s fur, “When will it be over?”