River of the Brokenhearted (22 page)

When we came back, Janie ignored us for months, and our friends, as few as they were, had scattered.

I think my sister was as lonely as I was, as we spent most days on the sidewalk pavement, without our gram to come down with her jelly doughnuts (this is how she showed her love). There is a look crossing a child’s face when they wish to share their parents’ dilemma over something that was never done by them, to remain friends with whoever it is they need; you might see it in the sunlight refracted in their reflection against the bike’s handles turning at the end of the street.

SIX

Yet the question remains—did my parents have any friends? None on average—one or two at the most, and they were my mother’s friends, who liked her “in spite of Miles,” and who felt sorry for her “because of Miles.” My father remembered them from his youth—a youth he did not, because of shame, tell my mother about so she would not have to suffer with him the memories he had of pushing Georgina in her carriage, of the terror these good people (for they were in truth good people) had once offered him. He did his best (for sanity’s sake, and the memory of his sister) to ignore them or, if that was not possible, and it often wasn’t, to insult them (being, for the memory of his sister, duty bound to do so).

A few months after we got home, Elizabeth Whispers decided to have a dinner party—her first in twelve years of marriage—with the Waltlings and the Conroys.

“They all attacked me before—what should prevent them from doing so now?”

“Don’t be silly, Miles. You were a child.”

“What if it’s an ambush? If it’s an ambush, I will retreat to this hill. You, dear Elizabeth, will be left to your own devices.”

She told him he was being silly. He said to her as a last resort, knowing that she had a tender heart and if she did not care how he was treated she could not be cavalier once she knew this, “Oh, yes, when I was small they clubbed a little flock of parishioners who had come to hear a tenor sing ‘Ave Maria.’ Your friends tore at them—it’s on record. I was appalled. They look safe now, but I assure you, the clean clothes and the cherub children are an act.”

He was not lying so much as he was simply terrified to meet these people in his house, on his ground where he would have to smile and mince willy-nilly with those from that bygone time. And of course he believed that cherub children were always an act.

So the night of the party he sat by himself in the room, in the dark, with his hat in his hand, near one door as the guests arrived at the other door. I remember the light shining on his kneecaps, and now and then the top of his hat appearing as if in mime, and disappearing again.

They would call out to him, in jovial mood while he sat morose and drinking, and my sister and I on the stair steps looking through the banister railings to the dining room one moment, to the knees and feet of our father the next. A drama was being played out here. Bob Conroy the effusive car salesman, the goody-goody cheery man, and his wife, high-haired Sandra, with her tiara and her looking quick as an assassin into the corner, to turn and giggle at her husband. (Told beforehand, I am sure, that my father was a witless fool, and believing it because she herself was one, nor was there a poetry course at university she would take in later years to make a statement about women, could ever help that.) My mother mortified; they—these good middle-management people of our town—the only people my mother was brave enough to ever aspire to, the Waltlings who owned a clothes shop for the “Fresh young man and girl.”

“Why don’t you come and join us, Miles—talk about old times?” Hal Waltling said.

“(Under his breath) Good God—(aloud) no, Hal, I’m fine by myself—thank you very much—You see I’m not much company without my medication.”

“Oh, do you take medication, Miles?” Mona Waltling said.

My father poured a half glass of gin and drank it straight. Then, clearing his throat, he answered, “I have in the past, Mrs. Waltling, and I’m fairly willing to again, whenever I can procure—or is it obtain?—it.”

“Please call me Mona.”

“Call you what?”

“Mona—my name.”

Long silence.

“Momma?”

“No—Mona.”

“(Under his breath) It is I believe enough to make a man stiff—although I suppose I am.”

“What’s that?” Mrs. Waltling asked.

“Nothing—not a thing—thinking in some fashion or another to myself.”

“And what medicine do you take, Miles?” Bob yelled.

“Ah—well—as much of it as I can—when I can convince whoever dispenses it to dispense it to me.”

“And what is it, Miles—what is it?”

“It all depends on what the meaning of ‘it’ is, I suppose. So Demerol when it works, morphine if I’m truly lucky.”

“I mean, what illness do you have?” Bob Conroy said.

“Schizophrenia, I believe. However, no one is certain at the institute.”

There was a gasp and a polite giggle from Sandra Conroy, who in her life had always hoped others would be the butt of jokes she herself could never get.

“Miles, you don’t go to any institute,” Elizabeth Whispers said happily.

“Not any more,” Miles said, and he cheered himself by pouring another glass.

“But it’s our dinner party, Miles,” my mother pleaded happily, coming to him, and beckoning with her fingers against her brand-new summer skirt, taken out of the box that day.

“Yes, it is—so go to it,” Father whispered.

“You come,” Elizabeth Whispers whispered.

“Oh, don’t worry,” the guests said happily. “He doesn’t feel well.”

“He’s fine,” Elizabeth said.

“Come here, Elizabeth, dear,” Mona Waltling said. “It’s just a little brouhaha—we have them too, don’t we, Hal?”

“Of course we do,” Hal said.

Bob looked most cheery. He smiled and clutched Sandra’s hand for fear of another small giggle on her part. Elizabeth walked back to her seat, as if, I remember, something had snapped inside her. Her little jazzy record, whatever it was, valueless to jazz, I’m sure, but making a splash with the early-to-bedders, seemed distant and forlorn. The smell of my father’s flowers came through the window, with a damp middle-hour air.

There was a long silence. The brouhaha comment seemed to have been forgotten completely until, five minutes later, my father answered thus, quietly at first and then raising his pitch until he was almost shouting: “What in God’s name—in the pleasant sight of Christ’s good blood—would you, Mona Waltling, know about anything approaching a brouhaha? Your stifling marriage, your rather too big ass, your compendium of knowledge about nothing at all, your listless gossip about me no doubt, even your troubles seem to be of the quality that would resist to the death any brouhaha. In fact, when you do have a brouhaha—you will, I assure you, never live through it. I myself have had, so far in my life, at last count three dozen brouhahas—the death of my sister and a major war.”

Silence. Gin being poured into my father’s suddenly gleeful cup. My father feeling he had gone too far, I think, stood and approached the table, weaving just a tad, but not much considering he had drunk almost a quart of gin straight in the last hour. He stood above them as my mother sliced the roast and put potatoes and gravy on the plate for him, set it at the head of the table.

Miles sat down, the budgie’s feet sticking up out of his shirt pocket. He looked at his guests, lowered his head, looked up again, and tried to smile.

He looked across at Sandra Conroy as if she would be his only friend here (he as always about friendship was mistaken) and said, “Oh, be joyful.” He lifted his glass and had a drink. Then, without glancing Elizabeth Whispers’s way, he picked up his potatoes with his fingers and tried bravely to stuff them, all at odds, into his mouth. Another saturnine girlish giggle—which was more like a giffle—from Sandra.

“The gravy is now cool,” he said, making two spots with his index finger and looking at his guests as he licked it.

“You are very tipsy tonight, Miles,” Mona Waltling said.

“Not tipsy, Mrs. Waltling—not in the least tipsy. I am very
drunk
—and you are bone ugly. I will wake up sober, and you will wake up—bone ugly,” Father said, quoting Churchill, of course.

Hal gave a smile. My father raised his glass to the joke that had gone askew.

The rest of the dinner was eaten—if eaten can be the word—in abject silence, bordering on incivility. The jazz record stuck on “a Caz Caz—Waz waz—bibbity bobbity boo.” My mother said, “Uh-oh,” went to the record player and released it for good. The budgie’s feet began to pump up and down, and Father suddenly, like a magician—and of course he was—tossed it with a flourish into the air, where it landed on Sandra Conroy’s tiara. She sat rigid, her arms flailing out in front of her, her expression a silent scream, Budgie hanging for dear life to a strand of dyed blond hair.

The guests were gone by nine. Ginger and I, waiting on the steps for our mother’s instructions to rush forward and be introduced as the showpiece to these such clever people she so wanted to impress, were left on those steps, sometimes, I think, forever.

My father put an apology in the paper. Printed in uppercase letters it read: “I called Mona Waltling bone ugly. This, I realize now, is overstated. The word ‘bone’ should never have been used. Miles King.”

No one ever said my father could not be cruel.

SEVEN

That summer my father’s evening primrose won a contest, and he was very happy about it. ‘Happy’ is not a word I would use to describe my father’s many moods, for to those who did not understand him they were irrelevant shifts in a landscape mute and undeterred.

“It shows me that I am doing something right,” he told the reporter from the local paper. “I am oxidizing the soil and I am planting them as close to what I call their natural state as I can, without using the variety of artificial stimulants that have become so popular nowadays. I suppose you could say I am playing God—but not in an arrogant way. I let the flowers smell themselves, if you know what I mean.”

His flowers were arranged in our back yard with a tremendous flourish, and my grandfather’s flowers were still kept up each and every day. One of his roses had come through generations of rain and sleet and some spite, from his father’s first perennial, to bloom again.

“A goodly amount of them I am pleased with, though I have not had luck making fruit pies with my pin cherries.”

It was later in the year when I learned about the makeup of my mother’s dinner party. I came upon it piece by piece, here and there—at grandmother’s house and at Charlie’s Barbershop in the talk of two elderly men. And even then in the vagary of children’s concepts it didn’t register in any real way for a while. Now, as I write this, it seems strangely monumental. Mr. Conroy and Mr. Waltling were two of the five who as children had been hired by Joey Elias to tar my father’s pants. My mother did not know this.

When I found this out I approached him one night when he was watching television. (He had disobeyed his mother and had bought one with the money he had won in the primrose contest.)

“I’m sorry about your trouble—when you were little,” I blurted too loud and fast, I thought, for I did not know what else to say or even what trouble he had had specifically.

“Ah well,” he said.

“They must have been very difficult times,” I said, trying to sound grown-up. “I mean, I heard about it in a barbershop—when you—were sent to the psychiatrist. I am sorry.”

“Ah yes. Well—’tis no matter.” He smiled briefly, went to take my hand, and couldn’t quite bring himself to.

The next evening, he was sitting alone in the dark of the den, and the sun sank lower, and shadows crossed the hardwood living-room floor. My mother was out (where, I didn’t know). My father’s meal, of turkey pie and a glass of milk and lemon pie, was sitting on the table, resplendent in its stiff mundanity. The cage door was open, the swing hung motionless.

Old Budgie bird, companion of his many trips, carried in his pocket or his briefcase, and on occasion drinking companion and a tippler of gin, had died at some point that afternoon, lying at the very back of her cage when he went to take her for a walk.

“She has soared her way to heaven on an eagle’s wing,” he said, “and we will all do that someday, I’m sure, to meet those who have left us behind—unwitting champions of our sadness and despair.”

Money flowed through and over Ginger. She could not go a day without buying something. It did not matter what it was, or how it fit into anything. A pin at a fair, a plate with a rooster on it. If she did not get the money from Mother, she got it from Gram. The great contest for her affection, which everyone but me seemed to want, was thus engaged. She was beautiful, and boyfriends aplenty courted her from the time she was twelve. She seemed to have more of it—that is, money—and do less with it than any person I knew. It walked with her, when that splendid young womanhood was formed, issued from her enchanting smile, and her long, dark hair, and her whimsical sadness, and her flourish for triumph, and her loneliness under the spring sun, and her small breasts, which she refused to cover in a brassiere, and her maniacal truths about injustice that the youth of the world have always carried, and it lay down with her in bed at night and arose again, to an ovation of tired birds.

Everything Gram gave her, Mom gave too, so she was twice invested, twice coddled, and she took it as her due, and strode off to school with it, or waltzed with it at youth dances in the Catholic church that Bishop Hanrahan chaperoned. It walked downtown with her on Saturday afternoons, and sat on cement fences smoking away the listless and bored Sunday afternoons, resplendent and insecure. Yet it was always alone. And so was she. And so was I.

In 1965, Gram and Mom finally agreed on something. After talking to Sister Putsy, they decided Ginger would be better off at the convent, under the tutelage of Sister St. Beatrice May, where she would get up at six-thirty in the dark of winter, shower with forty other children, make her bed, go to mass, have breakfast, and be in class at eight-thirty in the morning, where she would study the major courses, from Latin to theology.

At four-thirty classes would be done. She would have an hour of gym, then supper, evening prayers, study from seven till nine, when lights would be out. She would sleep in a dorm with those other convent girls, chaperoned at all times by two nuns. She would wear long, white gowns to bed and dress in a blue-and-white convent uniform, with the pin of her saint on her collar. Putsy would keep an eye on her.

I knew she was devastated, and scared. But no one had time for her. Walter McLeary was dying, his great spirit ebbing away. He had suffered a series of small strokes, and once fell down some stairs, and everyone was worried about him. My father’s drinking increased again—instead of a quart a day, he would drink a quart and a pint. He still dressed impeccably, though, and went to work, and many nights did not come home, lying in slumber across the theatre seats. And on those long afternoons when I searched him out, I would see him alone at his favourite restaurant drinking gin.

“I can have my favourite saint on my collar,” Ginger said, to Mom one cool, airy August day. “What saint would you choose?”

“Ask your brother,” she said. “I am not informed on Catholic saints.”

“St. Francis of Assisi,” I said.

“Ah—everyone will have him. As a saint, he’s the big cheese. So I must have a different saint, maybe the saint our greatgrandfather had—St. Hemseley, is it, who died of rabies—or was bitten to death by rabbits?”

“Fought the Romans,” I said.

“Oh—those guys,” she said, tears in her eyes.

As August fled in shadow and wind from the bay, another year turning over, time itself fleeing somewhere, with short squalls against Father’s flowers and rose bushes, the notice came from St. Mary’s about enrolment and orientation. We told her we would be with her and make sure she was settled. But at the same time, Walter was taken to the hospital, and there was a smell of death over our house and business. And it left young Ginger alone in the house, packing by herself.

Walter pretended bravely that he did not know his death was pending. I went to visit him every other day. How strangely small he was now; even his head seemed tiny. Sometimes he was distracted by some mystery he was trying to solve. I asked him one afternoon what he was thinking about.

“I want to know why I was born like I was born—and no one can answer me,” he said. “Not the nurses, not the doctors, not the saints, not even God. Father Carmichael said it was a great blessing, but he never had to walk a mile in these shoes, did he? See my foot?” He lifted his naked foot for me to look at and laughed. “Many a girl ran from that foot.”

He flicked his cigar ash and spoke in a hoarse whisper as I wheeled him out onto the balcony. But after a few minutes he was tired and wanted to go back inside.

Putsy would come and sit with him, and I would go home, and then Father would relieve Putsy.

One day he was furious because the nurse took his cigar from him and threw it in the sink.

“I want to go home!” he yelled.

“When you get better,” Miles managed to say.

“He won’t get better,” the nurse said, with perverse enthusiasm. “And no more cigars!”

“I’ll get better,” he said, clutching Dad’s hand. “You and Janie can’t do it all alone.” Then he whispered, “Put a cigar in my housecoat pocket, okay?”

That night, he sat up, reached for the cigar Father had hidden in his housecoat, and suffered a massive stroke. He was dead ten minutes later.

Then next day Ginger went to the convent. That afternoon, when I went into her room to see how she was doing, she had already gone. On the bed was a picture of her and Mom, and a twenty-dollar bill she had forgotten to take, her small red purse open to the air, and four new scribblers left on the dresser. Everyone so busy no one reminded her of what she did not take. No one said goodbye.

Dark clouds conjured above our house, too stingy to rain.

As the business faltered my father became more uncertain about himself, and he found running the theatre sheer agony. Janie then turned on Elizabeth and did what to her was unforgivable. She called her a poor mother.

After this particularly angry exchange, my mother wanted Dad to go away again, and had a cousin of Bob Conroy’s offer him a job in Windsor, Ontario, for more money than he was earning. It was a sound insurance job that he could just step into, be there in a fortnight in an age when insurance jobs seemed just the ticket. Elizabeth begged me to help her snare him.

“To sell insurance—good God,” he said. “To be the thousandth-thousandth man in the last blush of innocent conniving and hail good-fellow-well-met cannibalism, against dour overworked and uneducated Canadians all reaching for the ever disappearing brass ring—disappearing so fast that the speed of light makes a kind of momentary curtsy on the screen?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Elizabeth said.

“You know something? Either do I. But I have bigger fish to fry, Miss Whispers, exquisite fish. Not like my age-old and long-gone guppies, I tell you that.”

“What?”

“You will see presently.”

My father decided to come to Janie’s aid and to open a small drive-in to offset the Imperial’s second runs. If the drive-in could book these pictures before the Imperial, it might stave off the inevitable, or so he said. He wouldn’t be completely successful by this, but it was a flanking motion, which he being an officer in the artillery knew something about. And with that he took out a loan from the bank—the first King loan in forty years, a large amount of money as far as our mother was concerned, never having seen a cheque for that amount ever drawn—and bought a tumble-down drive-in on the outskirts of town, a woebegone place deserted as a village and tormented by crows, with a sad canteen and a dilapidated projection booth, with a multitude of Stingers surrounding it.

“I will strike a blow for Janie and end our estrangement. I look at this as a challenge in the same way Monty looked at El Alamein—though not as big a theatre. Ha! Get it, Wendy?” he said as we walked together one afternoon, one of the few of our walks, and he picked up stones to toss haphazardly at the bent and scraped speaker-poles.

Seeing he was happy, I gathered my nerve and asked him about our past, about Elias, whom I had been hearing about at school. Nothing so much to inform me, but enough to whet my curiosity.

“Oh—Mr. Elias. What about him?”

“I heard that he knows what really happened to my great-grandfather.”

“You have heard that?”

“Yes, lots of people say so, but no one can prove it. They say he had something to do with it—and even Sister Putsy—lots of people.”

“Lots of people say so. Lots of people say much about us, don’t they?”

He sounded satirical at that moment, ironic and cruel, and I did not like this side of him—the side I had seen at mother’s dinner. The night before, in some roaring torment, he had demanded I stay with him and work for him. I felt as trapped now as he must have once.

Sensing all of this, he said, “Never you mind, son. You go on and become a scientist or something—see, for instance, if ball bearings hit at a peculiar angle with a certain peculiar force will ricochet forever throughout our spinning universe. It would be interesting for me to know what you discover—and at the end of all of that discovery, that sense of wonder, that acute knowledge that finally things are not random in our life but stretched with purpose known only to God, you come back and tell me then what I do not know. On the other hand, I will now tell you what you have not fathomed, why it is I stay. It is my life’s work to find out what happened to Jimmy and to Georgina, although I suppose nothing much can be done about it even if I do. There is something—was something—that happened, and for the life of me I don’t know what it is. Maybe it was a bet, or done on a dare—or just a card game, the sprinkling of gold powder on my boots, the killing of Harry Feathers. Maybe it was something said in an alleyway my mother didn’t hear. Maybe it was something done in anger over something said. But however it was, I am now past half my life and have not found it.”

“Is that why you drink?” I whispered.

“No, son—I drink because I am an alcoholic.” He picked up another stone, and tossed it into the grey-blue sky.

My father now booked for both theatres, and his booking practices were not completely successful, or should I say sane. Mother had much more sense, and she railed at him that he should not have given up
Butterfield 8
with Laurence Harvey and Elizabeth Taylor for
Revenge of the Zombies
.

He explained, trying all our patience, that it was not the entire picture he was ever after but the pure moment, brilliantly poetical or farcical, that he could embrace. That’s why, he said, Lou Costello was as great an actor as Laurence Olivier—though Olivier, he maintained, had his moments.

During the summer, and in fact ever after, he continued in this way, with
The Creature
and
The Return of the Blob
. In an argument he gave up
Spartacus
for
Horror Hotel
, which he claimed was a better picture. Then, to offset the Imperial’s
Carpetbaggers
, which the bishop had asked Gram not to run, he booked in
Plan 9 from Outer Space
. The last night of this movie, just seven people were in the audience—even though free popcorn was offered.