River of the Brokenhearted (19 page)

THREE

Janie went every day, at four, accompanied by Roy, to her child’s grave. She would stay there on her knees until the church bell rang out at five, in the wet or in the snow, it did not matter. Four o’clock was the moment the child had left my father’s sight, the moment she had disappeared.

Most blamed it on Father. And Father, for some reason, suspected someone had pushed her, although he did not know who.

Rebecca had gone. He heard she had been married, and that she had been put in jail for performing an abortion. He had to look up what that was. Still, my father made little comment on anything people did. His ambivalence kept the terror away. Still, she had escaped somewhat—in some way from something. In poking around Miles found out that Joey Elias sent her money now and again, that she was a carny girl with a tattoo, and was living her life somewhere else.

“She has gone and I don’t remember much about her—nothing really. In a way it is as if she did not exist—a phantom. So if she comes back will I know her?” Then he answered, “Of course—for she will make herself known to me.”

“Why?” Someone asked.

“She will not be able to stop herself,” he said. “You see, for the life of me, I do not think it is yet over.”

In the winter of 1948, Miles, driving his old black car, with the glove compartment filled with whisky bottles, his suitcase sitting in the back, with a map upside down on the dashboard and the mirror tilted in such a way that he could read this map upside down, thinking he would make a dash for it, saw little Elizabeth Whispers hitchhiking home. He was escaping from his mother once and for all, escaping from her ironclad grasp on his life. But he could not help pulling over for Miss Whispers.

“I ain’t getting in with you,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t think you have a clue where yer going—not the way yer been coming back and forth with that map.”

“Oh this—well, I’m going to Boston, to start my life completely over. You see, my mother runs my life—but if I go to Boston, she won’t find me.” He half whispered the last part of the sentence with his hand up to his mouth, to ward off spies.

“Well, I’m not up for Boston.”

“Well, I’ll take you only to what you’re up for,” Father said, folding the map and putting it away. “You remember me, of course,” he said.

“Of course not,” she said.

“I’m the rich boy.”

“I didn’t know there were any rich boys here.”

“Well, of course there aren’t, but they think I am, you see. And anyway, it was grade eight, and I didn’t do my history and I was desperately angry with how we conducted the First World War—the Great War, remember? I was desperately angered about the poor Tardy boys—how they all were killed except—well, there you have it—I didn’t speak—”

“Oh my Lord—the deaf and dumb boy,” Elizabeth said, suddenly trying to look more presentable. “You’re drinking now,” she said.

He looked at her a long moment. “Quite,” he said and shifted gears.

“I don’t drink,” she said.

“That’s an affliction I’ve managed to overcome.” He smiled.

Her face was deathly white, and her blond hair fell from her barrette, and her stockings were twisted. She lived beyond Renous, in a house with nine children and a widowed mother, and she was the eldest girl, and had come to town to try to find work at the new Eaton’s outlet, hiring three “girls” that afternoon. She had walked all the way to town and didn’t manage to get an interview. Now the winds had come up, in bits of blinding white and blue, against the blue of the sky and snow, and she had to go home to a house without supper.

She looked at his regiment pin on his lapel. “You were in the war,” she said.

“Many of them,” he said, smiling again, and taking a drink of vodka.

“How were you at the war?” she said after a moment, straightening the hem of her old plaid skirt.

“Not very good, I’m afraid,” he said.

“Why? Did you run?” She asked.

“If only I could have,” he said.

She smiled. “What, then?”

“I believe—I haven’t been able to authenticate—or is it validate?—the account, and don’t remember, but it seems—and seems is the word, Miss Whispers—that I fired on my own men.”

“Good God. Did you kill any?”

“I think, perhaps, your brother Kenny—but—in the heat of battle—who can say—?” He took a drink while looking at her, with the face of a man as perplexed by his admission as she herself might have been; the bottle suctioned by his lip.

“Good God.”

“Quite,” he said.

My father and mother were married eight months later, after a meeting with Janie, I suppose to see whether she approved, although it would not have been billed as that. Janie did not approve, for Janie approved of so little. It may have been because the girl had grown up a Protestant.

Sometime in November of 1949, my mother’s water broke when she was alone in our small bungalow, surrounded by mean little hedges and shallow trees gnarling up over the picket fence she had dreamed of having as a girl, and the beginnings of a flowering garden on a half acre of slope. My father was away, on an errand, across the river to pick up a movie from a broken-down bus, for in our family movies came before almost anything else. My mother always maintained that Janie knew she was about to go into labour and sent my father across the river anyway, to demonstrate her control over him and his loyalty to her.

“No one is needed at a birth except the mother,” Janie once said to me, as if in explanation.

So with the trees bare and the sidewalks glazed with shale ice, Elizabeth made her way alone to the hospital. I was born that afternoon and placed in an incubator, where to this day I remember the glass and the lights in my eyes. Of course I am my father’s son, so you may think this exaggerated.

When I was three, I began to smoke. (I know this sounds exaggerated too, but I could get them from my mother’s purse without her knowing and smoke them under our porch steps.) My sister, Ginger, was born in 1952, and we grew up in a small grey bungalow my grandmother owned, at the intersection of Blanche Street and the street that was named after her by the town council, which wanted to do something to honour a woman most of them had scorned in their youth.

After my sister was born, my mother went to Gram to ask her for a raise for Miles. Never had Janie been so livid. How dared she ask for a raise of any sort. This was a matter only between her and Miles, and no one else had any right to say anything. Miles, on hearing this, did not take my mother’s side, but his own mother’s. And that essentially was how Elizabeth was frozen out of any decision in our family life.

Once, I took off my clothes in church, and I was forced to quit smoking when I was five. I was often put into the corner during supper because of some infraction, my father saying I could come out and join the family as soon as I stopped thinking of the chocolate pudding on the counter. An hour or so later he would tell me to come out anyway.

Very early on he gave me talks against alcohol. “It is a practice I do not want you to take up, for it is—Well, I see nothing wrong with it myself, but Miss Whispers, your mother, does, for some strange reason, religious or not I do not know. However, this talk is to humour her and instruct you and I will get nothing from it myself.”

I remember how happy we were. The door would open at night and we would shout his name, and rush to him, my sister and I, and he with snow on the collar of his coat and smelling of a certain brand of what he called his tonic would put us up on his shoulders and carry us about the house. Now and again there would be a small dispute between him and Mother. My sister would cry and plead with them to hold hands, and after a time they would, and the fight was ended. Such gigantic concern and such easy relief was supposedly the life of children.

At six I began to realize that my father was somewhat different. I do not know to this day why I wanted him to be any other way—looking back now he was perhaps as good a man as most. But different. He spoke of flowers when other men spoke of sports. He talked about “the radiant leaflet I just found in the bog beyond town” to men who cringed when they heard such a thing. And why would they cringe? Weakness on their part, my father assured me. Did Walter cringe? No, never—for Walter understood the mind and soul of the dispossessed. So saying, he thought I would be relieved. So saying, I was not.

He took me fishing dressed in his suit and tie, and strode back and forth on the beach looking for strange pebbles or flowers, which he would dig up with excruciating care and place in the trunk of our car and bring home to his garden. Often he would carry his briefcase with him into the woods. And of course this caused a crisis, if not in his life then certainly in mine. It also caused hilarity among many people on the shore—hilarity my father never seemed to notice, though I would turn beet red. Once, some kids were pointing to him and laughing at his gentleman’s attire as he carried a basket of flowers slung on his forearm.

“God, who in heck is that?”

“Hell, don’t ask me,” I said.

Still, when it became known that in that briefcase under his arm were not the papers for some business but a full bottle for anyone who wished to have a drink with a so-called businessman, they forgot he was a sissy. When they found out he could drink 90 percent of them under the table they suddenly decided he was a man!

And when it was discovered (or should I say “thought”) that my father had a great deal of money, old army buddies came to our door in valiant attempts to relieve him of it, by investing toward a future moment that, they all said, would make us millions. And my father, the butt of army jokes, barbs of all sorts, had no idea why people were friendly with him now. Or if he did, and reflecting upon this, I am sure in some true way he always did, he never let on. That interior life that we all live day to day, the most important life, was hidden to others, who gloated at him like one would at a prize they had just discovered at the bottom of some Cracker Jack box in our theatre. They gloated at him as an inanimate thing that would suddenly make them better in their own eyes. They spoke about him in bars and at parties, saying, “There’s the man that might help us.” And surely if he did “help,” it would be a benefit to everyone concerned. There was also hidden a slight anger here—for how could this man they mocked (and all of them had) suddenly hold the key to their future, without them having realized it when ingratiation was more readily allowable. But this anger could be masked in a kind of elemental rethinking of their position. Phone calls were made to him, invitations given, dates of meetings that were once unthinkable, now quite evidently assured. He and my mother were actually invited out.

“I think I have improved,” he said to Mother one afternoon in the living room. “None of these chaps would speak to me in uniform. Civilian life has done wonders for me. Well, I am a finely disguised botanist, so perhaps it’s my treatment of flowers that has reached them, and they have come down say from Grand Falls to see my fireweed—you think?”

“I do not think that at all,” my mother said, angry at the moral superiority that masked the avarice of these people. Moral superiority saying they were far too good for him when his money didn’t matter, now making the case that he was morally sanctioned by them for his coin. My father of course knew this—as he looked at me one afternoon I was certainly cogniscent of the fact that nothing much escaped him. But he did not speak.

So it was our mother, who registered the intent of lackeys who had once smirked in his direction coming upon our house, in beat-up automobiles, briefcases filled with fabricated wealth, calling him their friend. Contracts for new knives that would be major breakthroughs in cutting through a steak stuffed in the pockets of their double-breasted suits, like well-attired gangsters; showing us the Hula Hoop, the spin top that spun for precious moments on my little sister’s head while the man oohed and aahed at her ability to balance it there, her eyes focused upward upon it; and of course the best of the lot, the Slinky that wobbled down the stairs in unison with their open-mouthed gestures, as if they were cheering on a horse in the Kentucky Derby.

My father said, “My God, Elizabeth—it’s a wire that moves. Now I will ask one defining question: does it move up stairs? I see how it comes down. No? Well, it would be splendid—I mean, even more splendid than it is right now—if it could climb up the stairs, saying at the top of the precipice, ‘I’m off to bed, Dad and Mom—see you in the morning?—Ha.”

Or he would say, “A knife! How does it work?” Astonished for the benefit of people who seemed to be much duller than their product. “Look, Elizabeth, darling—a knife. The man is selling—a knife.”

They would stand out in our raining yard in the drizzle as Father punctuated about the June lilacs, saying almost nothing to them as they made their pitches, or saying:

“H’m—no—I am not so sure I could help with a marina—first because I am no boatswain—Mark Twain—ha ha—and have the unnatural ability to be deathly frightened of water—it took me some few years to get over my hubris but I now admit it gracefully.”

Or sometimes we would hear from our small upstairs playroom, filled with a patchwork of sentiment, of torn colouring books scribbled upon and dolls with no legs, a volley of curses out in the yard, because my father refused to do what it was they wanted him to.

“You are a Christless stupid bastard who has never understood anything, and if it wasn’t for yer damn mother you wouldn’t be able to wipe your arse.”

“The exceptional thing about that is,” my father would respond as he clipped a pussy willow, “none of us would be able to wipe our arses—I mean without the help early on—or is it guidance, or forbearance even—of our mothers.”

“Goddamn you!”

“And you, sir.”

One of these men, Corporal Gary Fallon, came many days, sat outside in his old Pontiac and spoke to Father about dishwashers, how the modern married “girls” would go ape for them, how handsome I was and how a darling my sister.

Introducing me to this corporal, a dull mustached man of forty, with a loud voice and blunt unmoving eyes, a white shirt against the implacable grey pocking of his skin, the bloated August turbulence in the sky and with the innate complexion of a fish, Father said of me, “I was going to name him Harold, after Lloyd, or Peter, after Lorrie, but I thought he may well end up hanging from clocks or killing a pawnbroker—”