River of the Brokenhearted (20 page)

The corporal did not respond, except to look completely perplexed, as if the men continually scurrying through his brain taking orders didn’t snap to this one, and I felt an acute embarrassment for him, and of course for my father, standing in front of him.

Still, whatever error people had of him, my father had either no ability, nor any interest, to make right.

I at that time did not know who Harold Lloyd was, or that the most famous scene in movie history was his hanging from a clock. I did not know either that Peter Lorrie acted in 1935 as Raskolnikov, who of course killed the pawnbroker (and her mentally disabled sister) in
Crime and Punishment
. But these things my sister and I would ferret out over the years, as if they were composed of vapours and thrown to us by a magician in gloves. I became better in the end to understand these signals from him.

One day, after he was cursed because he would not help open a restaurant for a man he hardly knew, I saw my father standing in front of me, holding a cigarette in his right hand, his eyes shining, his lapel carrying his regimental pin, and wearing a sad smile, looking somewhat like James Mason, in one of his finer British roles, acutely alone in the world and poignantly brilliant.

Still Fallon had talked my father into giving him three thousand dollars—for dishwashers. My mother, Elizabeth Whispers, found out about this, and rushed into the kitchen one morning while we were sitting at breakfast.

“You are not giving him any money—”

“I already have,” Father asserted, buttering his toast and puffing out his chest, and looking at us as if we would stand up and cheer. “It seems like a wonderful deal—in fact, one of the stipulations is his help in gaining attention for my play.”

“How in God’s name is he going to gain any attention for your play?” my mother said.

“I have no idea—but in the middle of the conversation I said, ‘What about my play?’ and he said ‘Of course, your play—certainly your play—’ That made me believe that he would—it’s a play about—well, I hate to harp about this, but it is a play about the poor policy of trying to do in widowed mothers.”

He looked at me with a quirky smile, as if I, if no one else, would fathom what it was he was saying. And strangely, what I took from his smile, what I fathomed from this, is that my father actually wanted to die. And he was searching for a way to do it without God knowing. That’s what made it difficult. He was trying to kill himself without God finding out—hoodwinking God into killing him, or killing himself behind a bush, and burying himself before God checked on him for the night.

I am certain of this—there was a desire in my father since that August day in 1932 to destroy himself. I know that he bided his time, went to work in silence and ran the projectors and walked to and from the theatre every day, even joined the Rotary sometime in 1955.

“I’m a member,” he said to Elizabeth, “I am a member of the damn Rotary, although as you know I agree with Groucho, I’d never want to belong to a club that would have me for a member. I also believe that it was Mother that got me in, simply because they couldn’t take her—being, as you know, a woman—so they took me, as kind of a backup.”

He started calling other Rotarians Brother. “There’s Brother Pete,” he would say, and he would hurry me across the road to meet him. “Hello, Brother Pete. How are you?”

I was open to the wound of the Brother Petes and Brother Johns of our town ignoring him. Of course. And was this expected by him—of course. It had to be.

For inside, in the inner life, there was something, some Quasar pulse that I am sure said, at least once or twice a month:

“Well, my good chap Miles, why don’t you take the shotgun there. See it, nice and shiny that it is. Well, boy, pick it up—yes, the same one your mother held at bay the jaunty riffraff of the town paid by Joey Elias to be morally outraged not only at her womanhood, but her mixed marriage to boot (well, it was the age)—and squeeze a fine spray into your skull—h’m? Your indeterminist struggle against indeterminist people will be over with a solicitous blast.”

I surmise, and Ginger can verify this, that my mother had absolutely no patience with people who killed themselves, and forbade him to do it.

I do not know any more except this:

“Why would anyone blow their head off?” Elizabeth Whispers asked in rhetorical fashion one night, just at supper in February of 1955—which to me was as good a time as any for a speedy dispatch. My father had been pacing up and down and down and up, in a random self-induced terror about something that had happened to him as a child of nine, and about the idea that our lives, and especially the life of Ginger, would not be safe until he took some kind of action.

“Why blow one’s head off? A change of pace, I suppose,” Father said, looking over at her drearily. “A change of pace, my good woman—a change is as good as a cure, as they say.”

“Biscuits?” she offered.

“Quite,” he said, sitting down.

My mother was not like my father. She fought Gary Fallon until she got the money back. She phoned his family and told them she would go out to the house. But they said they did not know where he was.

“He’s a bastard,” my mother said.

“I’ve often suspected so!” Fallon’s father exclaimed.

She went to the house—she was tough enough—and went about their windows looking in, as my father stood near the car with the door opened. It was one of the defining moments of my life—realizing how different Elizabeth Whispers was from my father, seeing how my father yielded to her the responsibility of taking on the world.

“You get out here, Gary, or I’ll get the sheriff, I swear I will. I’m not allowing you to ruin my family.”

“Do we have sheriffs?” my father whispered out of the side of his mouth rhetorically to my sister and me, sitting wide-eyed in the car.

Gary came out, this honour-bound corporal, hands in his pockets, and shrugged.

“I know you—you’re a Whispers,” he said. “You grew up without water and a shitter in a goddamn bog.” He laughed raucously, and I am sure he thought we would all laugh along with him, for this is what he had laughed at all of his life—the tragedy of the poverty of others.

“And I know a thief and a corrupter of innocents,” my mother yelled, her stringy hair falling down her back, her nose sniffing, her white boots covered in dooryard mud.

“And who is this innocent?”

“Why—him,” my mother cried, pointing her clenched little fist at my father.

My mother did not give in, and our money was gotten back—well, except for five hundred dollars—and Gary Fallon was out of our life.

“Did he happen to say anything about my play? I suppose it’s all up with that too?” Dad asked. My mother looked at him, and started crying in the car. She sat in the car for hours crying that night. She would not come into the house until eleven o’clock. And she cried for days after, saying she would leave, go away and never be back.

“Never!” she yelled.

My father would bow his head.

“Never!”

My father would nod.

“I said never!”

“Yes, I have heard you. You have said never. Well, remember it is you I love, my Miss Whispers!”

My father stood, sometimes in the den, sometimes in our hallway, smiling whenever my mother passed by, watching her collecting “things” to take away.

“Get me the box in the basement,” she would say, “get me the box.” And he would run to get it. “Get me the trunk in the cedar closet—go get me the trunk!” And he would run and get the trunk.

But she could not leave him. A week or so later he asked her not to tell his mother or press the matter any more, or what he was most afraid of: “Tell the press itself” and:

“If Janie finds out, I will never hear the end of it.”

“You don’t deserve to.”

“You are right, of course,” he said, in front of the hallway mirror, trying a Windsor in his tie. “Still and all, she is just starting to get used to me being down at the hall. You know, she actually introduced me as her son. Not that I mind if she does or does not, but then again, working where I am, it is nice to have my employer, who is also my mother, recognize who it is I am.”

There was something my father snuck into the house and kept from my mother for well over a year, taking them out only when she was gone and looking at them in a kind of melancholy joy, like a child might look at a fishing rod or bicycle in a store window. Tuning forks for the piano he never played.

FOUR

Usually though, from mid-afternoon until supper he was at his garden, wearing a sombrero, and carrying a small spade, rooting in the earth about his flowers. In the winter he would sit in the far back room, looking out over the river, now and then sketching the trees on the far shore, and he would make his way at night to the theatre to run the projector.

But in the 1950s the world changed for us all. Television came in a kind of spite against us. My father started a campaign against television. For the first time in years he went to the church rectory and asked Bishop Hanrahan to shout down from the pulpit that TV was satanic, or at least imp-like.

“Anything that small has to come from the devil himself,” Miles said.

Hanrahan of course would not do this, for he was watching television at the time; and something in him liked the idea of the destruction of Janie’s business. My father knew he would not, but tried the gambit anyway. Then he went back to his work. The town no longer needed us, and for many months we ran to an empty house, John Wayne shooting out at empty seats, or Glenn Ford rounding up cattle to solitary lovers in the fifteenth row.

For the first time I saw my grandmother worried, for her lower take meant that many first runs were too expensive. Each night, driven by Dingle, she would come down to the house to see Father.

“We will have to ride this storm out,” Janie said to us one night. “But there’ll be no television for us, will there. You won’t buy one, will you, Elizabeth?”

“Television is a gadget that won’t work,” my father said with conviction.

Dingle, feeling superior to Father, would glare about at us. Sometimes he would point his finger at Miles, when Janie was directing him to do something.

“I want you,” Janie would say, and Dingle would point, “to go to Saint John tomorrow and see Mr. Winchester”—point, point—“and tell him for me, in person, I will not pay thirty-five percent for a goddamn Elizabeth Taylor. No matter what the take is in big cities, it is not the same as”—point, point—“here!”

Still, the first runs, our life’s blood, were slowly drying up. The old Grand began to look dowdy, and though my grandmother put down new carpet in the foyer, spruced up the marquee, and advertised more aggressively, people no longer came in the numbers they had. In those years we had no TV, as if fighting against the modern world, in a similar fashion as the Whispers people themselves had no TV because of religious scruples.

Though Ginger and I longed for and lobbied hard for TV. We were found at night, on those soft twilight June nights when our mother looked for us around the neighbourhood, staring in the windows of houses where the artificial lights of the televised world had captured our hearts. I was more guilty than she, for I knew how my father plotted against TV, how he did a song and dance at times before the main feature to draw a crowd. My heart went out to him, to his wonderous sadness and his enormous plight, and I vowed I would not leave when I grew up, but would help him any way I could.

During these days my sister saved money in her piggy bank to buy one of our arch-enemies. And in 1956 (the worst year our theatre had), when she had saved eleven dollars, I took her to find the place the televisions were.

I found myself trying to haul her sled over dirty snow, with Ginger watching me with the most beautiful brown eyes of any child I have ever seen. I turned onto a side street, with the window shades down on most of the stores, and the sound of traffic disjointed and faint. It was late afternoon, late February. I entered a small, depressing shop, with my sister by the hand. I remember a big, silent clock on my right, and a stack of shoes, some coins under glass, and an old office fan. The radio was on, and a faint light shone under the dial. There were beaded drapes behind the counter.

“You don’t get TVs in here,” Ginger said.

I told her the man in here sold them.

Four gongs came from the radio, and I looked beyond the press on my right where the piles of boots and shoes were and saw a man staring at us from behind the beaded curtain.

“Who are you?” he said.

“I am Wendell,” I said, taking off my thick glasses.

“You’re Janie King’s boy,” he said. His voice was distant and cautious. His face was cleanshaven, with some red blotches on his cheeks. His hair was short and iron grey, his eyes steely, his pants rumpled, and his slippers frayed at the toes.

I shook my head.

“If you aren’t Janie’s, who are you?”

“I am Miles King’s son.”

“I didn’t know he was married—or had children. How old is she?” He was staring at my sister.

“She’s four. She is Ginger King.”

“Ah,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll get someone to take you home. So your mom won’t miss you. Okay? You know Sister Putsy? Well then, if she can come, you will go home with her.”

He picked up the telephone and made a call. Fifteen minutes passed as we sat near the door and watched him mend a shoe, which he seemed to tear at with no enthusiasm. Now and then he looked at us over his glasses, staring at my sister and then down again at the shoe.

There was a tinkling of the bell and Sister Putsy came in. We considered her our aunt, because of her closeness to Walter, the history of which at the time we did not know. But she was one of my father’s few friends, and it was only to her he spoke those few times he went to mass. She sent us a card at Christmas, and except for the company card that Gram sent to us, it was the only card we received.

“Are they Kings?” the man asked, pointing at us with a worn black file in a kind of “I told you so” voice that made me shiver.

“They are,” Putsy said.

“Well, take them out of here.”

“Of course.”

Ginger took her hand, and I followed them with the sled, and we made our way past Radio Street in the evening dark. Not knowing anything then of the world she and our father had lived in before we came, not knowing of the hilarity this man had created at my father’s expense, the laughter and spite seeming to have dissipated among the tired old shoes. He did sell televisions; they were kept in the far room. His last gambit to destroy our empire. Hannibal still planning his revenge up to the moment poison was drunk.

——

When Joey Elias saw Ginger, she looked almost identical to her aunt. Chance was cruel to send this child, this changeling, into his life. It made him feel what he hated.

So he went to visit Putsy the next night. She lived in a small room behind the convent. Her walls were decorated with posters and pictures of people he did not know—the forgotten ones, some in wheelchairs, some obviously retarded, many having to be spoon-fed. Their names were written under their pictures, and the dates when they had died. These were the people she helped Father Carmichael with. Joey could not help but feel a kind of disgust at this—she had wasted her life.

“I’m doing fine,” she said. “I cannot walk very well, but Walter has had much practice at that and helps me cope when he comes here to visit. We are like an old married couple except I’m in this room at the back of the convent and he’s in the old theatre downtown.” She laughed at this, showing her broken front teeth.

“But if you had stayed with me,” Joey Elias said angrily, “if you had—I would have taken you to Boston, to New York, or the Mayo Clinic! I would have found out why you can’t walk well—I would have taken you to the greatest specialists in the States. We’d go south, you’d get better there—to Baltimore or somewhere.”

Putsy looked at him a moment. The reason she couldn’t walk well was the after-effect of venereal disease, though there was no trace of it in her now, and it was her husband who had given it to her. Though both he and Rebecca had remained relatively unaffected, she had been in constant pain for twenty-five years.

“There was once a very rich man,” she said, trying to sound like Carmichael, “and he lived in the places you just told me about. And his son was dying. And do you know what? He took his son everywhere—for money was no object. And he went to Boston, and New York and Louisiana, and to the Mayo Clinic, but no one could save his son. And in the end, just a while ago, he brought his son here because of Father Carmichael. Because he had heard that the priest could heal people. Everyone thinks he can, and it has been documented on the radio that people say he is miraculous.”

“I know that. So what?” Joey Elias said.

“But my priest could not heal the child either. And now of course people blame the priest for not doing what he never said he could, and the bishop is angry because it has repercussions here.”

“What’s the point?”

“Well, the man had already tried that which you wish me to, and came here in hope of trying what I already have. So you see it is not up to us to decide anything about our lives.”

“That’s nonsense!” Joey shouted. “When I saw you, you were a little gutter rat—you and your sister—and I helped you, both of you, I did, and you are not even grateful, either of you. I don’t decide? I fought to make my way to Canada—I did what I had to do. Don’t say for one second it was not my decision. If I had not bribed a guard and slipped onto a boat, I wouldn’t have gotten to England, and I was little more than a child, so don’t tell me that what we do doesn’t matter. I was scared out of my wits the guard would arrest me on the spot, but I did it. So don’t tell me that it doesn’t matter. I was shaking like a leaf and I begged him—I begged him, peeing my pants—and he took me and hid me. Don’t tell me that does not matter!” His hands were trembling and his eyes were watering. A cold, dark wind came up and rattled against the window.

“I didn’t tell you that it didn’t matter,” Putsy said calmly. “I simply said you did not decide. You think it was you who decided the guard could be bribed? You just admitted you were terrified. You didn’t know a thing, Joey. In fact, you expected the opposite.”

“I did not.”

“What if the opposite had happened? It would have been ordinary—maybe even expected—for the guard to grab you and hustle you off to the police. Taken the bit of money you offered him and then run you in. Your life would have ended far differently. It would have ended like it might have ended for your brother. No—you see, someone other than you decided, as always. And someone has decided for me. I found that out the night I lost the key. It was me who got drunk, yes—and I accept responsibility for anything that I’ve done wrong—but it has taken me years to realize that it wasn’t my intent to loose the key.”

“What key?” Elias shouted. “You keep going on about a damn key!”

“I know you had a brother who died in Europe. You came to me the night Georgina was lost, and you told us how terrible you felt, for you had a small brother who died in Europe—you couldn’t get him out of Poland when you left. You told us that. Maybe that is
your
key. I’ll pray that you will find your key and have peace of mind.”

Elias stood, trembling, ready to strike her, and then abruptly left the room. All this time, unknown to Putsy, Walter had been sitting outside the other door of her room, listening. He slipped down the back stairway.

“Walter P. McLeary, late of the orphanage, I’ve sent you,” he had thought when he first saw her in 1929. Yes, perhaps it had all happened just like that.

——

What in the world had happened to Putsy? Elias wondered. Where was that young woman who used to be so wild, who carried a knife, who seduced young boys and broke their hearts? She was with Father Carmichael at his little retreat taking care of people who couldn’t live a day without help; they couldn’t feed themselves or dress themselves; they would be better off if they had been given needles and put to sleep. And she read the New Testament and a little book called
The Way
and every day she followed exactly what these books said. A real martyr and stupid to boot. Her stupidity rankled him now, for he needed her. He needed her because he was growing old and becoming scared, and he had no one to love him any more.

“We lost her,” he thought. “She’s become a religious fanatic.”

Well, how did this happen? It did not happen overnight. It took Joey Elias himself to do it. And in his heart of hearts he knew why. She could have forgiven him everything, except Rebecca. For the first time in almost thirty years he began to see what had happened. He remembered how strange Putsy had acted at the house, how he couldn’t talk to her and then he remembered how she had fallen on her knees and begged him, how powerful he’d felt—for a second.

Anyway, all of that was over years ago, and he tried not to think of it. Yet whenever he spoke to Putsy, the same thoughts always occurred. His betrayal of her became fresh and new as a bright flower once again.

“But it was Rebecca’s betrayal,” he said now. “Rebecca betrayed her own sister—that’s the kind of girl she is. She’s a Druken—they’re all the same, that lot.”

He passed the place his Biograph once stood. In 1944 Janie bought the property and had it bulldozed into the ground, and made it into a park in memory of her daughter, Georgina King. He passed the little statuette of my aunt and made his way along Chatham Street in the gloom.