River of the Brokenhearted (23 page)

Still, he could talk about the brilliance of Hitchcock’s
Foreign Correspondent
. Or the gritty truth of the
Blackboard Jungle
, the inanity of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, the self-indulgent greatness of Brando, the wasted brilliance of Orson Welles. And he could talk of this at the drop of a hat, with no one, not even Budgie, to listen, as he sat behind a fairly sprightly bottle of wine. And unfortunately that was the problem—he spoke almost always to himself, and was almost always alone.

EIGHT

The most unpleasant allegation against Ginger during her first year at the convent, far worse and of a different kind than her unsuccessful petition to dress like a nun—“Why should they have all the glory?”—or have boys in for pizza, was the allegation about a note sent anonymously to the mother superior after the St. Mary’s Convent Skating Party was cancelled. “No one is indisponsible—no one—poonted head—think about it and be wear, you sparrow-faced twit, be it at morning mass or vesper prayers, signed Anon.”

The letter was forwarded to my mother, who took it to my father.

“Who wrote this?” she said.

He looked at it for a fraction of a second. “Squirrelly little hand. Misspelled, loopy connected words. Ginger—has to be.”

“She sent this to the mother superior.”

“Then deny it is her,” he answered, handing it back.

My sister was difficult for both Mother and Gram. And each of them blamed the other for her poor behaviour, her self-idolatry, and her miserable fortune in finding even one friend.

She failed that year—it was the first time, so that June night she was contrite. She came into the front room and called, “Yoo-hoo, Mommsie Q. Where is my fraulein, my little smootchiepookin?”

But Mother wasn’t home.

“How did you fail?” I asked. “You were locked up most nights, just to study.”

“Anyone can rebel anywhere,” she said. “Grammie said she read an article by a woman who was talking about women’s rights and she said, no one came to her with any rights.”

“And that’s why you failed?”

She looked at me askance and smiled. “Where is Athens?”

“Greece,” I said.

“And the Pyrenees?”

“Spain.”

“And is there a Y poet and a K poet?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the Y and the K guys, who are they?” She was still looking into the mirror, adjusting her blouse, opening a button in risqué fashion and then closing it.

“You mean Keats and Yeats—”

“Which one wrote something about Easter?”

“Yeats.”

“Keats tricked me into thinking it was him—” She sighed as she fussed with her hair. “So you put it all together—say you put Athens in France, a good enough place for it, and the Pyrenees in Scotland—‘Ya be in the PYRANNAS now, Laddie’—is how I thought about it. And then you say Keats wrote Easter and you fail that Latin they give you—it’s like a foreign language with all those Latin words—and you’ve pretty well done yourself in.” She winked at me. “There’ll be no learning for me,” she said with exasperating self-assurance.

She was known as a wing nut, and had made many enemies at the convent. Kipsy Doyle, Nancy Savage, and Karen Hardwick all hated her. In fact, it seemed everyone hated her. She had dyed her hair green and had placed the name tags of her saints on her convent uniform—St. John, St. Paul, St. George, St. Ringo. She had been punished by the mother superior and left alone in the hallways until lights out.

I wanted to tell her everything would be all right, but I didn’t believe it. I had taken to drink, just like Father. With drink, I could leave town in the third-floor reading room of our old library. François Villon, Victor Hugo, James Joyce, and a bottle of wine.

Curse of the Irish and at times of British Kings.

That June night my mother was at the doctor’s. She had gone for a needle. My father had watched her getting ready to leave, anxiously smiling while looking guilty, as if knowing her condition must have had something to do with his failure, though he tried brilliantly to mask it.

“What a lovely group of people the Conroys are, in fact, a lovely people—a well-groomed bunch too. Why, you take Bob—car salesman, is it? Well-adjusted, I wish I was. You know, he’s never read a book, well, why should he? He berates everything we put on the screen, well, why shouldn’t he? So well-adjusted. Lions Club, is it? As you know I’ve had my problems adjusting—forced to take a leave of absence from Rotary because of that tantrum one afternoon—in front of the premier—and lieutenant-governor—who knew they’d be there—well, who knew I’d be drinking—however—I do plan to make a change—a grand leap forward. You’ll see a different Miles from the Miles of old—”

“Please, Miles, be quiet,” my mother whispered, forcing a wispy smile as she walked slowly to the car, on my arm, and the soft wind blew at the bottom of her dress, showing in the evening sun her sunless legs. “I am in pain.”

“Of course,” Miles said.

My father came home that night after Mother visited the doctor to drive me to work (like a vampire, I came out at dusk). We crossed the bridge in silence, and felt the air on our skin.

“Wendell,” he said quietly, taking a cigarette from his silver case and lighting it with one hand on the wheel, looking over at me as he took his first drag. “What have I done?” he asked me, tears in his eyes. “What in God’s name have I done to my Elizabeth Whispers?”

I knew the question was rhetorical—no answer required.

September came, and the shadows swept over our floors and filled the hallways. Ginger was back at the convent when I found out, coming home from school, told by one of my “best friends,” who thought I would not throw a punch when he said it. He told me Elizabeth Whispers had gone to a dance and was seen later in the back seat of a parked car.

She had waited until Dad had drunk himself to sleep, had put on a new dress and high heels, and left by the back door, around through his flower garden with his purple loosestrife standing soldier. She had gone with Bob Conroy, the car salesman she had known at school. She had had a crush on him in grade ten, when he played right-wing second line for the A-team Beavers.

“How could she go to a dance with anyone who shoots right?” Father quipped sometime later.

I felt sorry for her, thinking of that dance. I felt sorry for Mrs. Sandy Conroy with her tiara, smiling in jest at Dad, never knowing what his terrible suffering and instability would mean for her. I felt sorry for Dad. He would not eat the lemon pie my mother made for him the next night. And as far as I know, he never did again.

NINE

From the mid-1960s on, my grandmother would wake at night without breath, and sitting up in bed, she would haul on a cord, and Roy would come to her aid with an oxygen tank. He would place the mask over her face, and she would breathe, and push him away, until the colour returned to her cheeks.

One word could delight you, another send a shiver down your spine. So Roy was subjected to these changing volleys, and did his best for her.

“Roy,” she would call, and he would be there.

“Yes, Janie?”

“I want to see Georgina,” she would say, and he would help her from bed, an old chivalrous gentleman from a school long gone and mocked by the very films they once attended. He would go in and out of her closets to help her dress and, after backing the sky-grey Cadillac out of the garage, he would wait for her on the steps and drive her to the graveyard, she staring out the window at young men keeping the night search alive at three in the morning, her hand clutching the ceiling grip and her eyes searching for the bright red flowers she had left in the graveyard the day before.

“Roy,” she would say, “you must not let on that I had any difficulty breathing tonight—especially to Miles or Putsy, for they’ll want me in the hospital for another checkup, and I have too much to do. I have been checked up to my ears, do you understand?”

“Of course, Janie.”

“Checked to my ears, you hear. So I want none of them to know, you understand. Now, where is that money?”

“What money is that, Janie?”

“The money I promised you. I had it in my purse—where is it? I had it here. Where
is
that damn money?”

“Janie, you already gave it to me,” he would tell her.

“I did? When?” She would look at him with a kind of inquiring and tranquil timidity.

“Yesterday—at supper last night.”

“Well. Don’t tell anyone about that either.”

And there she would be, on her knees by the graveside as the sun just lit the dawn, and he would help her to her feet from the grass and pebbles her arthritic knees had fallen on.

As Dingle drove her back to the house at dawn, she would close her eyes and try to straighten her right leg to rest her knee. She could remember most of the movies she had played, and she could remember her husband doing a little twirl when they had managed to obtain the projector, in 1919, and she could still lay into any radio commercial that wasn’t well delivered.

Every evening about seven o’clock, the grey Cadillac would drive out from her gate, travel the same route, and appear before the Grand. Roy would get out, in his grey suit that she had bought for him, with his dark brown leather shoes and his wide-brimmed hat that made him in the fading light look like the elderly Hank Snow. He would step around to her side of the car and open the door for her, and stand and wait like an adjutant. Janie would slowly make her way out of the vehicle, refusing his hand, and walk unaided up the steps alone, now and then glancing from the corner of her eye at the gawkers who stood nearby.

By late December of 1969, she knew she had a cancer, and she was not about to tell people of it. Besides, what would they say to her? Over the last year, she had sold off all except two of her houses, my father’s and one that she said would be allotted to Roy Dingle, her friend. She was also going to leave Roy Dingle six thousand dollars. He had a pension, and she felt he would be happy if she also gave him a Cadillac.

“I don’t want it,” he said, bawling.

“You will,” Janie replied, writing out a cheque. Most of her money was in the house, under the mattress and in other places. She gave another three thousand dollars to Mr. Harris’s widow. (She must have taken a little pleasure in this, and I refuse to begrudge her that.) Then she had Mr. Dingle go downtown and bring a boy to see her.

“Are you Danny?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You went up the ladder for me—in 1964—you were nine.”

“Yes.”

“Other boys wanted you to go swimming but you stayed and helped me, an old woman.”

He nodded.

“This is for you.” She handed him five hundred dollars folded in her fingers.

Then she telephoned Bishop Hanrahan, who had politicked against our theatre. “I have money for you,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” the bishop said with immediate world-weariness. “Did you want me to retrieve it, Miss McLeary?”

“I did not get it as a McLeary, I got it as a King. I will bring the money around,” she said and quietly hung up.

She gathered the money in a large shopping bag and carried it down the stairs. She would ask Dingle for no drive today—nor ever again. She was born without a car, after all.

Holding the money in the shopping bag she started up the hill, past all those signposts of her life—Oh, here is where Daddy carried me on his back when we went to fight the Drukens two at a time, the bastards, but they wouldn’t come at us one on one, and he could throw a punch, Mr. Man, could he ever—and Dad taught me the fiddle and said, “Danny Boy” and “The Risin’ of the Moon” is where we come from—and here is the schoolyard where I stood turning to see a young man looking at me, and it was Mr. King, fresh off the boat, like a child lost, and he came over, and said, “Are you to play for me tonight?” “For a price,” I said, “for I’m no one’s fool.” That was long before the theatre, in the long-ago days of my youth. Oh, the storms then—Christmas we went sliding and the boys always got fresh, You sit up here close to me, put your legs here, and of course we would pretend we didn’t know or didn’t want to—and this is where Georgina—Georgina … Georgina is gone, Janie girl—Georgina has gone away.

The bishop was having midday tea and a hot cross bun. He was arranging a trip in the new year to the Holy Land and to Rome for an audience with the pope, and Father Carmichael, the priest who had given his life helping people like Putsy and Walter, was not. Still, there were many who thought Carmichael could heal people—a great comedian had come here, for his son, and others as well. The bishop was wise enough to know that this was false hope. Just as some dull men believe that all the wise men lived in the past, so did Bishop Hanrahan believe that all true goodness, and miracles if there were any, were in the past.

Besides, Carmichael had caused problems in the diocese. He often held mass in an open field, near where he had built his own home. There, much to the distress of the diocese, he and Sister Putsy took care of seven homeless retarded children, dressed them every Sunday and brought them to church.

“They don’t understand what church is about,” Hanrahan told him.

“Christ, however, understands what they are about,” Carmichael said.

Hanrahan hated this pious lie, and hated Carmichael. So he forbade him to have mass in the open.

Janie liked Carmichael, for she, having had no education, and having had to learn to read at twenty-three so she could sign a contract, was especially humble around these people that he and Sister Putsy cared for.

She now sat in the vestibule in her heavy fur coat, and the bishop, who knew she was there, and waiting, let her wait.

“Oh, Janie—I am so busy today—I am on my way to the Holy Land—”

“I have not come to see you,” Janie said.

“Pardon me?”

“I wish to see Father Carmichael.”

“Oh,” he said.

She was in terrible pain but she could not allow herself the luxury of succumbing to it. As for the bishop, to appeal to the whim of a rich woman—which he pretended he was doing—was better than admitting he lived in moral fear of Father Carmichael. So Father Carmichael was summoned.

“I want you to hear my confession,” Janie said to him.

Hanrahan looked upon her with the most judicious political look he could afford—afford because of Carmichael, who could see through this look, being there.

Janie went to have her confession heard by Carmichael, the priest that comforted her when Georgina died.

She confessed to three sins. She would not consider confessing any more.

One was keeping her son away from the piano. He had begged her to study it when he was a child. “Perhaps I should not have done that,” she said.

The second was not giving him more freedom to do what he wished, especially as a young man. “Perhaps that was wrong,” she said.

The third sin was the most grave. She had never forgiven him for Georgina. “Please don’t think I didn’t love him—or did not try to forgive him that day in 1932,” she said.

“Your boy would have given his life for that child.”

“I know, I know,” Janie said, patting the priest’s hand as if she was comforting him.

Then Carmichael helped Janie, who insisted she kneel for this confession, stand.

“Here,” he said, “take this for the pain,” and he gave her a small bottle of liquid.

She smiled. “Is this your newest concoction?”

“It’s gin,” he said. “Drink it tonight. It might help you a little.”

Then, as if it was an afterthought, she told him there was something in the porch and could he go and get it. Carmichael did, and Hanrahan waited. The air was now stale, and winter light came through the side window with the lace curtain. There was snow left by Janie’s boots on the mat, unmelted yet, in the coming grey of a storm and New Brunswick’s night.

Carmichael came in with the bag of money, and the door was left open.

Janie said, “Old moneybags I was called every time I went to church and the debt was brought up. Who was going to pay for the renovations on the church? Not old moneybags, it was said.”

“Who ever said that, Janie?” Hanrahan asked with a smile on his face.

“At any rate,” Janie said, “this money is for you, Father.” She turned to Father Carmichael and suddenly clutched his arm. “It is for your little group—the ones you and Putsy help.”

“I can’t take this,” Carmichael said.

“I am too ill to take it back now,” she said. “You make sure you say my funeral mass—make sure I’m buried beside Georgina, and God will figure out what do with the rest of me.”

Then she went home, went into the drawing room and closed the door. She took the gin (which had morphine in it) and lay back on the very couch my grandfather had died on, at the very same time of year.

Roy came in with the oxygen tank an hour or so later.

“I will not need that now,” she said.

Roy Dingle asked why he couldn’t be buried by her. Janie told him he would live another forty years and have many girlfriends afterwards.

“I will not—I will never have another girlfriend,” Roy said, bursting into tears. “You are the only one ever to be kind to me—ever in my whole wide life.”

“I know,” Janie said, patting his hand, “I know. Well then, good for me.”

These were her last words. She slipped into unconsciousness, and died in the midst of the storm of December 29, 1969.