River of the Brokenhearted (24 page)

TEN

I did not go to university, much to my father’s pleasure. I twice tried to get into business on my own that next winter. I started a small haberdashery, next to Joey Elias, whose little shop was closed, the blinds drawn. It was as if not only his generation had passed but his entire universe had faltered and fizzled. I felt sorry for him.

He told me stories about Europe. One day, sitting in a chair in my shop, he asked me what I thought of fate.

I was uncertain fate had anything to do with me. He shook his head at this and gravely said, “The older you get, the more you think you have escaped certain things in your past. But nothing ever goes away—nothing! In fact it has started all over again, I think—don’t you?”

“What has started all over again?”

“I wish I had stayed in Poland and I wish I had helped my brother,” he said bitterly. “Do you know, I have a son?”

I didn’t.

“I’ve told no one. He is your age. His life is empty.”

I smiled uncertainly. “Empty?”

“Yes—empty.”

He went to Putsy at the convent and spoke to her while holding her hand. He spoke about the good deeds he had done, how he had hired Phil when no one else would; how he had married her to keep her virtue intact after Walter had “let her down.”

Putsy Druken was his only hope now. He was staring into a grand darkness he had never stared into before. It was a darkness he had only heard about, had laughed at, and in health believed he was too brave to fear. Now he was in deep sorrow, and in the alcove outside the side convent door, with a wrought-iron gate closed to the side lane, a wisp of smoke from a barrel in Mr. Hollingshead’s field, they sat side by side, a little old man with a felt hat and a little middle-aged nun without many teeth. Tears were often in his eyes as the sun lingered on the gravelled drive, but the windows on the second floor were blank and hidden. Sometimes the wind blew his hat away, and Putsy would run about trying to grab it.

He told her that people didn’t know right from wrong, and that children had stolen some of his baseball cards that he had collected. She was silent as he ranted against this, his face red raw, his lips wet, and his hands shaking. He sat forward so he could look at her as he railed against all the terror of his life. She was silent.

“What can I do?” he said.

She said she would pray that Joey would find peace in the end of his days, as Walter had.

“Walter—you want me to be like Walter? For God’s sake, is that what you pray for?” He felt the cold through his coat.

“At times,” Putsy said.

“I’ll never be like Walter,” he said, twisting away from her, turning his back. He hobbled away without anything more being said.

Elias was obsessed with going to Europe. He told me he had made a fundamental mistake when he was twelve, and it would be nice for him to go back and correct it. He spoke so much about it that many thought he was mad—that is, if there was a time machine, he would go back in an instant.

“And what would you do?” people would ask him.

“I would put my little brother on my back and continue my journey. I would be pressed into the Russian army and then this life would not have happened. There would have been no crimes committed.”

“What crimes are those?”

“I tell you—if I had picked up my brother and put him on my back for one more day, no crimes would have been committed!”

He went to see Putsy, to ask her for money. And holding her hand, in the foyer of the convent, he finally confessed to her what had happened.

His flight to England, his trying to manipulate Mr. Harris against Janie, his palming aces against the young man who was going to be married, his spreading fake gold dust on the children’s boots—all of this came about because of some mistake he had made when he was little.

“You spread gold on Miles’s toes?”

“Not toes Putsy, his boots. Yes—well, me and—Rebecca. That’s what we did—she more than I—she was worse than me!” he yelled in spite. “She was far worse than I was!”

“That’s very strange,” Putsy admitted, looking around at the empty foyer and hearing a door close.

“Yes, yes. But you see, I have not treated people right—I must go home and see to it now,” he said.

Putsy believed it was essential that she help, and so she went to his house, with money that Walter had left her, four thousand dollars.

“He would want you to have it,” she said.

“Walter?”

“Of course. He would beg you to take it—and find peace with your brother.”

However, the day did not come when Joey embarked for the old country. Something was stopping him, some bad feeling about the trip. Was the old country any longer the old country? Not at all. And were the Communists in charge? Of course they were. Besides, he was too old, and too sad. But worse—what might he find out about his brother? What torture might his brother have suffered? Who had fought on his brother’s behalf if he, Joey Elias, had not? What might his brother have become if he had stayed to help him?

He simply sat and stared at the wall, seeing his life as if it was projected on a movie screen, seeing Leon Winch leave with the key and come back. Seeing Rebecca go again. So he sat, with the money Putsy had given him in his threadbare pocket, and he cried.

Putsy would drop in with some fresh fish and feed him, for if not, he might have starved. She would pray for a miracle and say that one would come.

“No—God does not love me.”

“Of course he does.” She would reassure him by reading parables and Scriptures. “Let not your heart be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me.”

He yelled against this—and who could blame him? For what had God done for him? He grew up where there were palaces, he said, yet he couldn’t keep his brother fed. God had a lot of explaining to do.

But that night she left the book
The Way
, and he opened it at random and read the exact same phrase—“Let not your heart be troubled”—as if it was not Putsy telling him this but someone else.

Yet he had gone so far on a road, how could he change now? It was not respectable to change. God perhaps did not want him to change—had she thought of that?

“Remember, you have been preparing for this moment all of your life,” Putsy said.

“What moment? What moment have I be preparing for?”

“The same moment we have all been preparing for,” she said.

“Damn it, what moment is that?”

“Death,” she said.

For the first time in his life he was staring out at it and it was close enough to touch him, its great uncompromising gulf soon to sweep over him. And it struck him—this is what my grandfather was feeling while Joey had tried to take his theatre. For the first time he realized what a terrible thing it was to do to a dying man.

And then one day he admitted something else. “I have a son by Rebecca,” he said, staring across the lawn at nothing.

Putsy did not know how to answer.

“How?” she said.

And so he told her. Rebecca had come back in 1948—she was running from a charge of fraud against her in Edmonton. It was then she became pregnant. She was frightened and wanted to get rid of it.

“Do you know what I mean?” he asked.

“I think so,” Putsy said, hardly whispering and staring straight ahead. Wind blew against them and neither of them spoke for a moment. It was as if her womb, so silent for so long in such a bitter life, started to bleed again.

“She had gotten rid of a child before, she told me, frightened she was to have a boy. She aborted a girl child. Fate had been cruel—because she wanted only a girl.”

“I know,” Putsy said. “She would want a girl.”

“Yes,” Joey Elias continued, “she was frightened to have a boy—and I was afraid she would destroy it—so I kept her with me. And a boy was born here in 1949. You didn’t know?”

Putsy shook her head slowly.

“But when she had it, no one loved a child more. She went away with him—I gave her eight thousand dollars, all that I had. I have not seen her since.”

He stayed out in the cold far too long that day. But it was as if he was paying penance and had to tell her everything. And the very next afternoon, feeling that death was imminent—he felt the cold of death on his neck and shoulders, and remembered poor Leon Winch, whose funeral he did not attend—he broke down and admitted to Putsy the boots.

“The boots,” he said. “I stole them.”

Putsy said nothing.

“I gave my brother over to the Russians.”

They were desperately silent for a long time. For the first time in his life he could picture his brother’s smile.

Putsy told Elias he had suffered enough for this.

“How have I suffered?” he said.

“Your love for your brother,” Putsy said, “caused you more suffering than your brother would ever want you to. I now forgive you on your brother’s behalf.”

“But you can’t.” He was sobbing.

“That’s not true,” Putsy said, looking up into the sun, “for I loved you as your brother did, and you abandoned me too, and that is all that is required.”

Elias could not look at her. Putsy took his hand and squeezed it.

“You carried him three hundred miles, Joey. You were only a child yourself. What else could you have done? God did not give you any breaks in the matter.”

“More,” Elias blubbered, “I should have done more.”

“You are forgiven,” Putsy said. “I know it as I know my heart.”

They spoke no more about it.

“You think I am going to die?” he asked.

“Very soon,” Putsy said.

“What will happen then?”

“Pray that you will meet your brother, for he is waiting.”

On Putsy’s insistence he telephoned Miles and chatted about the good days. It was as close to an apology as my family ever got. Nor had Father ever solicited one.

“I wish your mother and I had gotten on,” Elias said.

At any rate it was all Joey Elias could do.

The next morning Putsy went to his house, and found him dead, wearing the old threadbare shirt he had worn when he had carried the child so long ago, with the black trousers, faded to nothing, and the torn boots on his feet. His hands were folded, and Putsy took his hand and held it for an hour. Joey Elias had died holding a picture of his brother as a child in Poland all those years before.

I had been a haberdasher, and wore a tam-o’-shanter like my great-grandfather. But my little haberdashery failed.

Ginger Snaps wrote telling me I wasn’t cut to the fashion of selling suits, and must go back to the business God created me for. She had been made to crawl along the floor of the convent as a punishment for some infraction done to Kipsy Doyle.

“Dear dear Wendy,” she wrote, “of the luckless bunch of Kings, please think of your sister alone in this convent where the girls smell of body odour and everyone fights like weasels in a hole. Love, Ginger Snaps.”

I went back to running the projectors, and I became a semiconductor of our old established business, with my grandmother’s portrait in the foyer.

Sometimes I thought that the drive-in, staring out at the world from projection vents over the tangled bush and weeds to the giant screen showing kick-boxing and tiger lilies, would support us forever and a day.

Poor thinking is all. Poor choice of hat.

PART V

THE NEW AGE

ONE

My mother, Elizabeth Whispers, left when Ginger was in grade twelve. There was a fight, and my father sat near the mantel looking at the floor, a new hat from Zellers she had bought him about two feet away on the arm of the couch.

She reappeared a week later, and then two, and a month after that. We would see her at the door fumbling with her keys. Sometimes Father thought she had come back to stay and would run to greet her, only to discover someone was waiting for her in a car. Usually someone my father did not approve of but would not say.

She had come back for something, and what was assumed, by the friend that drove her, was that my father would understand, being a mature man. In my colder, or more lucid moments I would think she had done this purposefully to add a salt lick to the horrible wound she was causing.

She was never drunk like Father, but perhaps a little tipsy. People said she had gone to dances with various people who had at times various complaints about our business.

My sister, who could be unforgiving, wrote her a letter. “How dare you go dancing with your fancy feet. Your place is at home.”

I do not know what Elizabeth and Father talked about in the last four or five years. I almost never heard them. She would come and go. My Elizabeth Whispers, with her long, blond, stringy hair and her scared, kind eyes. Twenty-five years she had put up with the great glowering business that had consumed her husband. And now, perhaps when he needed her most, she was gone. People rejoiced at her freedom from him, and this rejoicing left my father even more alone. His drinking increased threefold.

Some said she was having an affair with the car salesman who was at our dinner party, and that this was why my father would not eat his lemon pie. Others say (and I do not know what others—it might have come from the Whispers faction of the family—all skinny half-mad little poachers from Renous) that she had given father an ultimatum, another chance in the bevy of chances she had supplied. But though she loved him she could not stand it any more. She had to remove herself from the ghosts and go away.

My mother lived in a little apartment on Hanover Street, a place with small wall plaques and a tap that dripped time to some forlorn and inconsequential tune. My father, always a gentleman, never spoke ill of her, even though our business was faltering, and seemed to go into a spin after she left, and he became erratic and once threw French fries at a customer.

“You want fries—well, I will give you fries,” Father was reported to have said. “I will shove them one at a time down your throat—sir.”

We drove to the beach one evening after Ginger’s graduation to look for shells he wanted to paint and place in his garden. We walked in silence for almost an hour. The beach stretched off into the corners where red tails of sunlight still rose and ebbed on the waves, and our shadows seemed somewhat blunted before us.

“I will tell you this, Wendy”—he broke the silence suddenly—“I have never had much stock in car salesmen.” His lips trembled.

We were walking through some foaming wave. His pants were rolled up and he wore a white jacket, and little pinfish flapped around his bare feet. He reminded me at that moment a little of Stahr, from the
Last Tycoon
, out on the beach meeting the old Negro man, who was picking up little fish in his pails. Their conversation was philosophical as well. And about movies in the end. My mother’s untimely decision to leave was the stone cast that in a sense had forced me to stay with him, and not go away and train to be, of all things, a police officer (something I never mentioned to anyone, but which came from wanting to solve the mystery that kept my father where he was).

“How long do you think we can hold out, Dad? They are stealing our first runs.”

“I know they are, son, I know they are, but we can hold out like they did at the Alamo—for as long as our powder is dry—what?” He looked at me with a grimace that told me more than his words where he found himself now.

Stealing our first runs was not a euphemism. Our competition was brave enough after Janie’s death to start doing it, knowing my father was something of an invalid. And now that Mother had left—driven away by father’s irascibility, some said—he was more erratic. So it was time for the vultures to come. Little by little our first runs would end up on a bus going to another town, or would be delivered to Father three days late. He would drive like a madman in his rollicking old car, trying, with a gin toddy, to track our poor presentations down.

“Do you know?” my father said one evening in late June, the summer after our mother left, sitting in the pleasant small back veranda that overlooked his flower garden, the lady’s slippers and the blue oxes. He swished a slender stick at a fly and looked at me, in a kind of tired and forward perplexity, as if he wished me to answer definitively the question, “do you know?” and then realizing I could not, continued.

“Dingle is unfaithful to my mother’s memory.”

“In what way?”

He paused a moment, shoving the slender stick into the dirt, to make half a dozen little nubs, and then said, “In the most common way, Wendy, the most common way, indeed. The man has a girlfriend, and is quite unabashed about it. Some person he knew when he was young. She has come back to town. I believe there is an arrangement of sorts. I don’t wish to speculate any more than that, but he has grown his sideburns. She says she is a doctor—I believe, if I believe in anything, that she would be much more like an apothecary, whoever she is—a performer more than a surgeon. Did you know that I wanted to be a surgeon? She has Doctor in front of her name, which is more than I have ever attained, and the respect of Dingle, which is something more as well.”

“She’s probably taking him for his money,” I said, thinking she must be in bad straits indeed to have to take Dingle for his money.

“Oh, of course—but we must not tell him this. She is a woman who has come back with her son to the town of her birth and lassoed poor Dingle, I suspect. There is even the idea—well, more than that, even—I heard it at the barbershop, so you can put as much faith in it as you will—that the boy is Joey Elias’s son, and she came back to see what money he had for her. Finding him dead did wonders for her relationship with our man Dingle.”

I thought nothing more of this for a week or so. Then one afternoon I saw Dingle with a younger woman. He was trying to look like a younger man, with his hair grown over his ears. No longer did he need us to bring him over Sunday dinner, or bring him to our place for Easter duty.

I realized I had seen this woman about town for almost a year. I had seen her son also.

The woman’s gaze was remarkable, her stance, the way she hooked one leg slightly out, memorable—and reminded me of nights at the drive-in, or perhaps just of loneliness. Her hair was orange and brushed back on each side—in a severe way, not to say butch, and she looked tough, with cold, fearless eyes—undaunted by my staring, at any rate. She wore a T-shirt that said “I’m a tough nut” on the front, and on the back, “To crack.”

Her name was Abigail Mahoney, and she had lived here as a child. She came to me as a kind of mirror into the river’s past, for she knew about things like Dobblestein’s mill. I wondered briefly if she could tell me something about my father’s past. She had a degree from a place in Chicago as a psychologist and matrimonial counsellor, with just enough hint that it was bogus. Anything associated with harmonizing matrimony seemed bogus in these days, what with my mother and father.

There was also about her the impression that her purpose in life had just begun, which to me is an unremarkable trait in middle-aged women.

Now she was with Dingle as his caregiver, and worked as well as a counsellor to some women in the subdivision above us. She had her sign up at Dingle’s house. She told fortunes on the side. She had also made inquiries into Elias’s estate—a man she knew—and was distressed to learn that Elias had died with nothing.

Dingle had begun to live the high life, spending money for taxis and Chinese food in buckets.

“He has a way with the ladies I can’t manage,” Father said, “and now the poor fellow is wearing bell-bottoms and smoking grass, with a pipe. I am no prohibitionist, but I do feel you need time to develop a rapport with these things. You just can’t start at seventy-four with a hash pipe, can you?”

It is a truth that the people I often thought could not flourish in the town did so much better than Father and I. And soon enough this woman and her son did also.

She insisted on being called Doctor. She was interviewed in the paper and said she had had a very harsh life, and people my age were suddenly drawn to her, and she was being celebrated as a survivor, and a liberal, by simply saying, “Kids today are just having fun—no one has any reason to worry about them.” But she never looked in my direction, and as in most cases I seemed to have missed my opportunity to impress either her or her boy.

One night, an hour or two after I went to bed, I woke with someone in my room. The window at the foot of my bed was open, and the curtains billowed softly, and as if in a feverish dream I saw my father watching me. He was trembling and pale.

I sat upright. “What’s wrong?” I whispered.

For a long time he just stared at me. Finally he spoke in a hoarse whisper.

“I went over to see for myself how Dingle was doing, and saw his woman, this Dr. Mahoney, as you call her.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I’m afraid something peculiar has happened.” He looked first one way and then the other. “She has metamorphosed into a Rebecca Druken.”

“What is a Rebecca Druken?” I said, knowing who Druken was.

“She who is living with Dingle. It is she. She and her son. Oh, she is much different—at first I didn’t know her at all. She has not lost her looks, but she has changed them radically.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said.

“Quite serious, oh yes, quite, quite serious. Besides, I have checked in recent weeks. Noel, you see, is Joey Elias’s son.”

“It could be any number of people.”

“And of course she wouldn’t admit it to me. ‘Rebecca’ I said, pondering how incapable drink sometimes makes me, thinking I had gone somewhat senile. She didn’t answer, ‘Rebecca,’ I said.” He paused. “But of course she glanced at me in a kind of recognition that kicks you in the teeth—I was introduced by Dingle himself: He said, ‘This, Dr. Mahoney, is my stepson.’ And she said, ‘Oh, how are you?’ like that, all warm and fuzzywuzzy. She gave me a kind of searching look, as if trying to recognize who I was through the age, trying to fathom what my life had been like, so she could capture my soul in a bottle. Dingle is very pleased to have a doctor sitting about his house. She had made up a list of things that she felt Joey Elias might have left her, and was upset to realize he was not the grand man he had been.”

“Does anyone else think she’s Rebecca?”

“I went to see Sister Putsy. But Putsy is now almost totally blind. She doesn’t know. Perhaps, but part of her still believes her sister died as a nurse on a military ship in the war even though another part believes she had a son by Joey.”

“Well, if she doesn’t know,” I said offhandedly.

“Rebecca has snuck back and it will happen!” he said harshly.

“What—?” I said.

“Her plans to destroy me, bit by bit—don’t you see? She brought her son home to accomplish this. It has been written, it has been prophesied, by Carmichael. But he is no longer here. He is somewhere up in heaven, I suppose. After being gone three-quarters of her life, she is back in the fold. She has made more friends and acquaintances in four weeks than I have managed to in forty years. She has tacked up a diploma on the wall. I refuse to honour her by calling it bogus. I am already in terror of her son. I wonder why. I am thinking maybe you should kill him. No, that’s not the best idea. Prison food and all that. I am sure she is here to help your mother.”

“Mother?”

“She is Miss Whispers’s new friend—counselling her. She was the person who advised your mother to go. She helped her get the apartment up on Hanover.”

All his life the one woman he worried about (rightly or wrongly) was now friendly with his ex-wife. If I had ever thought of leaving him, I could not now.

“Are you
sure
she is Rebecca Druken?”

He didn’t hesitate. “I am.”

I was silent. He was silent.

“Well,” I said, “perhaps she
is
Dr. Mahoney.”

“Well let me relieve you of the burden of lucidity,” he said. “Consider that if she did not want to be known as who she is, there is one of two explanations possible. First, she has a grand largesse and wants to give it to the town—some fire truck or new building or peanuts for everyone—and remain anonymous—or she has hidden her true identity as long as possible to infiltrate, surmise and decide what she will do clandestinely. To me. For it has to be me she has come back for. Like an assassin—Mata Hari perhaps—or better yet Tokyo Rose.”

“But maybe she
is
Dr. Mahoney?” I said, exasperated.

“And maybe Tokyo Rose was not Tokyo Rose—but Osaka Rose?”

He gave me a telltale smirk.

She had not looked at all like the Rebecca he described to me, or as he painted from memory. She was just a small, wrinkled, tough-looking woman, and she chain-smoked, wore jeans, and a T-shirt. No earrings, no makeup. Of course she was past these things, not for any reason, but she deserved to be. Coming by Dingle’s at dusk I saw her sign out on the porch, “Dr. Mahoney—certified psychologist,” creaking a little in the rain, and waving trees.

I asked about her downtown over the next few days. Few remembered Rebecca Druken. Those who did had not the slightest belief that she was in town.

I began to watch her coming and going along our street. She wore an old rain jacket and jeans, seemed more imperturbable to changes in weather than most people. She always kept to the far side of the street, close to the buildings, hunched over when she walked.

Her name, Dr. Abigail Mahoney, Health and Happiness Consultant, appeared in the telephone book. Over the next year she and her son became part of our town. But Dr. Mahoney hardly spoke to us. It was as if she did not think we were important enough to talk to. Perhaps she knew we were conservative—like a sixth sense you have about people in a waiting room.