River of the Brokenhearted (26 page)

But Dr. Mahoney made her see the truth. Did she help Gus? Ginger admitted that she had. Gus had owed money, which Ginger had paid twice.

“Why, then, should you be duped a third time by this fellow?” Dr. Mahoney said. “What, in fact, has this fellow ever done for you?”

Ginger said she did not know. And then she said, “What do men ever do for us?” She had wanted to add, “Except love me more than anyone else ever.”

Now Dr. Mahoney suggested to Ginger she was an enabler of weak men. “Only a few facts are missing in the jigsaw puzzle, Ginger, but we are getting somewhere.”

“Yes, thank you,” Ginger said happily. Still, she had to admit that Gus had behaved himself recently and had not asked for an extra cent.

Then a week passed and no phone calls were made. Ginger, feeling left out, telephoned the doctor to see if she was ill.

The poor doctor said she was busy with many other people, many who had been abused far worse than Ginger. She also said she didn’t think Ginger liked the calls.

“But that’s not true,” Ginger said. “I enjoy our phone calls.”

“I didn’t think any progress was being made.”

“Why not?”

“Well—perhaps you don’t take what I say seriously enough.”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, perhaps you should do something about it.”

Ginger was in an unenviable position. She realized she had no reason to blame her husband. But if Gus was blameless, Dr. Mahoney would have no reason to phone, and it was Dr. Mahoney’s interest in her she wanted to prolong.

The day after the phone call Ginger demanded soup. Gus, red afro, apron tied behind him in a bow, made it, sleeves rolled up in the oppressive afternoon, trying his best to stay sober and shaking just a little as he carried it on an old wooden tray up the three flights of ever-narrowing stairs. Yet when he reached her room she was sleeping.

“Ginger, your soup. Ginger, wake up. Soup’s on!!”

“How dare you wake me up for soup?”

“But you wanted soup—”

“That was hours ago—take it away.”

He went, and meekly waited for another order, knowing that what she suspected of him allowed her to be cruel. Yet secretly he knew she didn’t suspect him—Dr. Mahoney did, and Ginger was under pressure to suspect him as well. There was no fighting this; Ginger was obligated to think little of him in order to please someone else.

He discovered how easy it was for her to make him do things out of fear. She could not help bossing him. The more orders she gave, the more pleased she thought she was. And the more pleased she thought she was, the more pleased Dr. Mahoney would be with her, she knew.

One day, sometime after the soup, he, gathering gumption, told her that if she “continued being unreasonable” he would leave. She countered by saying perhaps he should—that her life was misery and everyone in town knew it, and that Dr. Mahoney knew it.

“What does she know?” he asked brokenheartedly.

“She knows—she knows,” Ginger said. “So just you beware.”

Gus left the house, wandered the streets. Lived in a shed downtown, and drank by himself. Everyone knew he was having a miserable time and he wanted to prove how wretched he could be, to himself as well as Ginger.

“Let her see how low I can sink, then she’ll be sorry.”

But he would always creep back to the house dejected, and go to bed alone.

Catching a whiff of this when I spoke to Ginger now and again, I got an inkling of why Mahoney should be feared, every bit as much as, if not more than, our former nemesis, Joey Elias. So things became worse, and Gus more desperate.

“You take all my friends,” Gus complained to her one day, “and you use them for yourself, and that’s not fair. I have no friends now, and you have a whole pile.”

“Then just go and live somewhere else!” Ginger Snaps said.

So her husband came home the next morning drunk, covered in dirt, and missing a boot. The night before, he had gone to Dingle’s and demanded he see Dr. Mahoney. Dingle had to restrain him, choking him until he passed out.

“The last straw,” Ginger said now. “Dr. Mahoney was right. You don’t want me to have a life or a friend!”

Gus drew back to strike her, but stopped himself and left the room.

“If you hit me I will tell the police!” she screamed after him.

Gus was terrified of the police, because Kipsy Doyle was an officer now. He begged Ginger not to say that again. She relented finally because she knew the police would ask questions if they searched him and found drugs.

Gus left the house, and for days no one knew where he had gone. When he came back he and Ginger lived like strangers. Worse, he had no money for anything. He kept asking for advances from our father, who would say, “I have already paid you up until the turn of the century, my good boy. Do you need money for the new millennium as well?”

The only thing Gus wanted now was the new drug around town, cocaine. Sensing this, as a shark senses blood, Dr. Mahoney went to Noel’s friend Ray Winch with a proposition. Now that Gus was back to wanting some “things,” let him have some “things” free. Ray Winch feared her deeply. He had seen her twist phrases and tell lies without batting an eye. He felt the only way to end her control over him was to kill her or to become a saint. Both were feasible but unpleasant. He could not say no to her, so he asked what her reasons were.

She said her reasoning was extremely moral and timely. She wanted Ginger to share in a freedom the young woman’s mother, Elizabeth, never had. She said that she wanted to prove that her world and her view were every bit as moral as those of a woman she knew who was a nun and whom, she often maintained, she had been in a great contest with since she was a child.

“You would not understand,” she told Ray. “It is a woman thing. But this nun and I have divided the world between us. She thinks her world is the right world, and I know mine is. She is superstition. I am logic and control.”

Ray Winch was born on the river but had grown up in the south end of Saint John, with an aunt. He had met Mahoney there some years before. He remembered her quite differently then, with her long red hair. He was even sure she went by another name at that time. But he knew her logic and control were like a bear’s vise. The secret was, she had many things on him, and he was frightened of whom she might let know.

Out of jail again, Ray Winch ran a small bottle exchange. Selling amphetamines and hash, and more recently cocaine and PCP, was far more profitable. (He was not unlike his father, who in a previous generation sold rum for Joey Elias, rum that at times tore out the throats of First Nations men and women.)

Like many people from all walks of life, he believed selling drugs was not a crime, and these things should be legal, though at the same time he did not want them legalized, for he would miss the six hundred percent profit he now enjoyed. So in this disjointed world, he was a master of contradictions—hating that the police kept him down, and yet needing them to, to sell his drugs at such a profit.

Dr. Mahoney, sitting on a pile of empty bottles, her arms folded, knew all of this, of course, and much, much more.

The idea (far from true) was that Ray understood Noel like a son. Ray secretly found Noel a bother. Dr. Mahoney understood this as well, and placated this by giving Ray Winch what he needed (but not everything he needed). Ray, who was in fact a bad man, kept Noel out of harm’s way of other bad men. But he did this because he feared Noel’s mother. None of this was ever mentioned.

Dr. Mahoney told Ray this town was hers. She could have anything she wanted in it. Years of observing people had taught her exactly who was vulnerable and who wasn’t, who needed things and who didn’t. Like Joey Elias before her, she was titillated by the fact that many people expected to be cheated. Many were vulnerable. But most of all, the Kings were vulnerable.

“How is that?”

“Trust me,” she said. “They are a family falling apart. I, as a trained psychologist, know this, my good fellow.”

Now Ray had his doubts about her. She had been under observation by police in other towns, with her sign out and a Ph.D. behind her name. But to be humoured delighted her, and he was willing to do this.

She said that as a registered psychologist she would accomplish something fine and leave something spectacular for people to remember her by. And as much as she respected Joey Elias, his name would be eclipsed by her own. She brushed her hair back and gazed at him. Even Ray Winch could not stare for long into her eyes.

“How will you do this?” he asked.

“What have I discovered since I got home? I have discovered that Miles King had a child, Ginger.”

“So what?” Ray asked. “Everyone knows that.”

“Well, I will tell you,” Mahoney said. “This was an unexpected bit of luck—with my son, Noel, coming into his own. A man who understands women and treats them with decency!” She looked around to see if anyone else was near. She began to speak in the curious self-justified way of a professional paid to pass judgment on others. “Miles is a drunkard. I knew from the time he was a child he would be. He was weak and would take to sucking on the bottle.”

“How did you know that?” Winch asked.

“I was here some time ago, and knew him as a boy.”

She smiled. Furthermore, she said, people had tried to do right by him from the time he was a boy. But they could not prevent him ruining himself and the business, even though they had tried. The theatre was a mess now, and whose fault was that? “Joey, kind heart that he was, tried—to no avail,” she said sadly. “And Janie put the poor man out of business.”

It was also a fact that Elizabeth had suffered terribly because of Miles’s behaviour.

“That’s true,” Winch said, who actually liked Elizabeth Whispers, and was therefore easier to convince now.

“It is certain that Ginger suffered because of Miles’s drunkenness. Any psychologist will tell you as much. She in fact is an enabler, and wants men to be drunk and weak. And it is also certain that because of this suffering, Ginger is attracted to men who will use her for what they can get. Because she lacks self-esteem, and does not believe that she deserves her money. This is certainly true in Gus Busters’s case. He is a phony. I knew that right away.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Winch said, proud to discover the same powers of observation that she was exhibiting.

It was also true that no one cared that this was true, except Mahoney herself, and maybe Ray Winch and Noel.

“Of course I care,” Winch said.

So it followed that Mahoney could not let this man, this terrible Gus Busters, destroy this wonderful young woman, whom she was just getting to know. So give him what he wants, and let him destroy himself. It was for Ginger’s own good. And in the end for Gus himself, who might get clean and sober and start his life over in another town. All of this would work to their general favour. In a way she would be doing a medical service, just as she had done in other towns across Canada and the States.

“How will it work in our general favour?” Winch said, using a file on a metal crate, his huge arms moist with sweat and his eyes half covered with hair, and chewing gum in boredom.

“Oh, I have something very big planned for us.” She shrugged a moment and lit a smoke. She knew Ray Winch was a strange man. He was amoral, but there was a certain code by which he lived and worked which others could admire. This woman who was just “feeling her way into town” knew she had to handle him with kid gloves. But she knew this also, our doctor of psychology; she knew she could make Ray Winch believe what she wanted him to, because of his greed. In all her life, she had never lost at that game. Besides, he was already indebted to her. She had hired him to work at Dingle’s, and he had come with some plaster and drywall and had charged three thousand dollars. Ginger had paid for this. So he had cheated the young woman and now must continue.

“When will Gus pay us?” Ray Winch said. “I’m just getting by, by the skin of my teeth, as it is.”

“Are you so poor you can’t bide your time?” the old woman asked, almost ferociously, so Winch immediately cowered. “You leave that go for just a little, and we’ll see what happens.”

“For how long?” Ray said.

“For as long as we have to,” she said matter-of-factly, her gaze cold and her hair brushed back severely from her forehead. She thought a moment and threw down her smoke. “I have studied these cases all my life. I have helped families from one end of the country to the other. I came here and saw Elizabeth Whispers—what a horrible life that woman must have had.”

“Yeah, too bad,” Ray said sadly.

“Well,” Mahoney answered, “if Gus starts to mess up, he has a young wife who is not going to stay with him. Oh, he loves her, but she is already getting tired of him. Why shouldn’t she? She is the most precious woman I’ve ever seen. Besides, this is a new age. The last thing a wealthy, independent woman has to put up with is someone like Gus Busters, taking her for everything—isn’t that right?”

“Of course not in this day and age,” Winch said without the least emotion, but suggesting, in his tone, that Dr. Mahoney had no more real concern for Ginger than he had. He paused, and said, “I have some fairly good coke, and I have some that I cut a bit. So what do I feed him?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said sadly.

“Then there is this,” he said. And he brought out something that only a few on the river had tried: angel dust.

“That could make him sick,” she said.

“Yeah, very,” he said. “If he doesn’t ask what it is …”

“Well—that’s up to him isn’t it?”

It was said so matter-of-factly, so ruthlessly, that he shuddered. He looked at her and, putting the small bag away, said, “What is this
really
about?”

Mahoney looked behind her, and then went and closed the warehouse door. She came back and sat on the same crate of bottles. “I am only helping Ginger King. I got my new idea one day while walking downtown. I was wondering what in heck am I doing back in this small, out-of-the-way place. Where did I, Dr. Mahoney who knows most things, go wrong? Why did I bring Noel here? What would happen to Noel in this place? I knew he was in trouble and I know he is a handful, but so much of that is other people’s fault. Then I happened to look up, and I saw it.”