River of the Brokenhearted (27 page)

“Yeah, and what did you see?” Ray Winch asked.

“I saw the statuette of Georgina, Janie King’s little girl. I remembered the story about her, and I had a feeling that it was destiny that I be back in town and that something great would happen for me!”

“Oh, yeah,” Ray Winch said, still plying the file to the metal crate.

“And,” she continued, “that Janie herself had led me toward this decision. I stared at the statuette. Janie wanted me to see this, to make my mind up. It was as if I seen the world clearly for the first time, and was given an insight others did not have. It comes down to that. I decided that Noel and Ginger have to be united. Janie would want me to take over—she’s letting me know—so if I have to do something ruthless to take over, I will have to do it—Janie herself wants me to keep the business going. It’s as if she spoke to me from the grave, saying: It is up to you, Dr. Mahoney, to see this through. Her son is a weakling and Ginger needs help from a woman. I want Noel to settle down and get away from those people—and I want him someday married to Ginger.”

“Yeah, and what’s in it for me, Doctor?” Ray said, caught by a woman he knew was far too devious and brilliant to be actually insane.

“Doncha worry your little head. You’ll end up with as much as Noel and me.”

Still he tried as best he could to warn her now, just once:

“You should leave everyone alone—go away for good.”

But she knew that wasn’t possible. It had taken her almost a lifetime to get back here at the right time. She had waited for Janie’s death. Just as she said to a priest long ago that she would never go away, she felt she could not now, and that her fate was sealed.

She left him and walked back down the hill on the street named after my grandmother. She was hunched forward, her feet moving in their new sneakers, chewing gum and huddled into herself, a sad strange little creature no one knew, in the midst of our town.

Gus Busters had left his wife and lived his days in the back sheds in town, with young boys who mocked him. He had no friends any more.

“Please let me come back, Noel,” he would ask, standing about ten yards away from his friend.

“No. You displeased Momma,” Noel said.

“But I won’t no more.”

“It’s up to Momma.”

Then it happened. Depressed since his argument with Ginger, and feeling like a bad son since his mother’s death six months before, much to his surprise he was given two grams of cocaine that Saturday night, in one of those small sheds filled with the scent of beer and urine, as the sun faded over broken shards of glass and threw glimmers of orange light on the wooden floor.

“What’s this for?” Gus said.

“For you,” Ray said.

“When will I have to pay you?” Gus asked.

“You want me to take it back?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, when I want you to pay me, I’ll let you know.” Ray patted his skinny shoulder, and rubbed his mop of red hair.

Some of the coke was cut with powdered sugar, but some was pure. And some had been cut with PCP. Noel and Cassie had cut this by themselves, for they were more daring than any of the others and liked to take it. Nothing could give you more energy than PCP if you could handle it. And if you could not, it was even money whether or not you would live.

Gus, shivering with good luck, took it home, the first time he’d been home in two days, holding it under his faded shirt. He ran past Ginger and into the upstairs bathroom, where he spread it out on the cracked hand mirror. Then, in leisure, listening to the tap dripping, he did four lines.

He was fine. He sauntered downstairs and began to laugh and talk with Ginger, making up her plate of dinner. Then, suddenly angered by the peas, he tore the stove from the wall.

Later he found himself out on the highway, in his underwear. Seven police officers wrestled a rolling pin from his hand. Kicking, screaming, frothing at the mouth, he fell to the dirt, had a seizure, bled from the nose.

Dr. Mahoney stayed by Ginger’s side in the hospital waiting room.

“He’s ruined himself,” Ginger whispered, rubbing her hands, tears in her eyes, “he’s deliberately ruined himself.”

When Miles came to the hospital in trepidation (fearing to go into buildings where they might admit him), carrying a box of chocolates, Ginger, in kind of an epiphany, yelled and screamed at him in front of Dr. Hardy and Dr. Wise, and cried on Dr. Mahoney’s shoulder.

My father trembling his mouth unable to get words out, simply called everyone—even two of the youngsters from the shed—Doctor.

When Gus came out of his coma four days later, he was 126 pounds, morbid and ashamed. It was raining, and the first thing he heard was an intercom. He felt for the first time that it was useless to live. He wrote my father proposing that he take his life, and asked Miles how he might accomplish it.

“Without giving up any secrets, you seem to be doing a good job now,” my father wrote back. “But I believe, my dear boy, without laying blame, that all of this seems to have happened because you are popular and visited Dingle. If you shoot yourself, leave a note which says, ‘I was cleaning my rifle and as you by now may have guessed I did not know the damn thing was loaded.’ That might throw the scent a little. But I will also tell you this—you would be sorely missed by me, my fine chap, if you did.”

The week after Gus was released, Dr. Mahoney went to see Ray Winch. She said he should press for the money now.

“Now? He’s so sick he does nothing but puke.”

“Now,” she said. “He owes you thirteen hundred dollars.”

“More that that.”

“There you go.”

“What if he tells?”

“He won’t,” she said. “He’s too frightened of displeasing Ginger.”

The cards she was playing were played in the finest sequence she knew. She was doing this for Ginger and Gus’s benefit and not her own. This is what she told Cassie, who had been under Dr. Mahoney’s mentorship. Just as Joey Elias had confided in a girl called Rebecca Druken, so now Abigail Mahoney confided. Cassie said she could help if need be.

“In what way?” Dr. Mahoney said.

“I know exactly what to do to sabotage their business,” Cassie said with a forced smile. “Not that I would want to. I mean, the drive-in screen will tumble in a second.”

“Why would we want to do that?”

“Perhaps you might want Ginger, one day, to start another business.”

Mahoney sat back and looked at her young protégée with increased admiration and just a slight tinge of alarm. Cassie sat forward and grabbed one of the chocolates from the box Dad had bought for Gus. They had found their way to Dingle.

Ginger went to Dingle’s the next day and found Dr. Mahoney at the table doing a jigsaw puzzle and having a gin and tonic.

“I wish I could be that happy just once,” Ginger said.

“Here,” Mahoney said, and poured some gin into a spoon.

“I don’t drink,” Ginger said. “Because of Daddy—and Gus—as you might know.”

“I know,” Mahoney said, touching her shoulder and smiling. “And I know your grandmother did not drink because of her terrible father, going to the theatre to burn it down. However, she did take a tablespoon at night.”

“She did? How do you know?”

“She admitted it herself in the paper—I wanted to read about her when I came here. She was a pioneer.”

“Yes—I remember now,” Ginger said. As if Janie had mentioned this.

“Of course. And that helped her a lot, in making her great decisions,” Dr. Mahoney said.

Ginger nodded, not at the prospect of having gin but at the prospect of making great decisions, closed her eyes and opened her mouth like a child.

FOUR

My father’s past was always around a corner, and at times I could hear him pacing all night long.

“I find it hard to sleep,” he told me. “I find it doubly hard to have to live through the conspiracy against myself.” He took a drink, and spoke about letting the cup pass from his lips (“I cannot allow any cup to pass”) and about who was going to kiss his cheek, etc. “Not, I hope, the doctor—or, for that matter, any doctor!”

Over the winter of 1979, it emerged that my mother was dating Noel Mahoney. There were a number of different stories about this, all of them fatal to Father. She arrived alone at certain bars, or dance clubs, but late at night, after many drinks, she would leave with Noel, always out the side door, thinking she would not be seen. She gave him money, bought him clothes so he could take her out.

On February 14, having bought Mother a gigantic Valentine’s card and signing his name to it shakily (I helped him pick it out, and helped him hold the pen to the page), only to find out she was not at her apartment, Father threw one of our potted plants across the table, and smashed it to bits, cutting his thumb. Fearing he had murdered “one of God’s fellow creatures, so to speak,” he staggered away and lay down. I heard his laborious breathing, and saw only the bottoms of his shoes sticking up at the end of his bed.

Later he came out to the kitchen and said this: “I keep trying to figure it all out, Wendy. I’m unhappy about Dingle and what I started in 1930, in the damn snow.”

“What do you mean?”

“My mother said I’d regret having Dingle as our derelict, and I already do. Well, forty-five years have passed, but still, I already do. He is a great foil to us. I never particularly cared for Hank Snow—oh, except for the yodel. Having a young woman to sit on one’s lap is worth a yodel, I suppose.”

He still couldn’t bring himself to blame Elizabeth. Neither could Ginger, who now saw nothing wrong with my mother’s attitude. (She had heard nothing about Noel and Mother.)

But I had to be firm. I told Miles bluntly that he had to get help with his drinking. He nodded. But a week went by and he did nothing. I pressed the matter again.

He looked at me a long moment, and answered me with the strength of conviction. “I am not able to. Do you understand, Wendy, my good man? I am no longer able to stay sober—to see things that are there—to remember going to the store with Rebecca to pick out my granddad’s Christmas present—or to remember Georgina and how she would get so upset when the wheels of her carriage got stuck in the mud—she would yell at me, you see:

“You—you are an idiot, Miles. Everyone says you are and you are my brother!”

He laughed slightly, and then taking and pouring almost a complete tumbler of gin, and sprinkling it with just a small dash of tonic water, he whispered, “I am so—sorry.”

But he was not whispering to me.

——

Spring came and my father was hospitalized for the first time. But he stayed only a day or two, and came out, and had a nice gin, and forgot what the doctor had told him.

“I am as fit as a fiddle,” he said, “and am willing to take on the world.”

I had made myself a room in the basement of Dad’s house. Here it was cooler in the summer, and I could come and go up the back patio stairs and not wake my father. But one morning I woke to a cacophony of senses. I walked into the living room, drapes still drawn against the terrible conspiring light of day, and saw Elizabeth Whispers, tipsy and slightly staggering, but trying to be a lady still. My father, always a gentleman, was sitting in a chair with an aperitif in his hand, listening to her with rapt attention, like an old stage play we might have seen where some hidden dagger was soon to be revealed. The rapt attention could only be given in a comedy, so early in the day. It was 7 a.m., by the dining room clock. Of course the aperitif was being drunk because the gin was gone.

“Six-thirty,” he once advised, “is far too early for an aperitif. But 7 a.m.—is high time we had one.”

My mother had come to berate him for a host of things he was doing, which as far as I was concerned were none of her business even if he was doing them. (He had in fact one date in this time—and she was angry about it.) But her main concern was his trying to take Dr. Mahoney’s friendship away from her. Dr. Mahoney had helped her move into a little apartment, was the kindest person she had ever met, understood the trouble she had suffered, and had done, she said, “everything for me.” Then she added, “I will be lost without her, and you are trying to take her away from me!”

My father, always mortally aware of the way life and rumour intermingled, said nothing for a brief moment. And then, as if finding respite in the process of raising the aperitif to his lips, said just before he drank, “I am sure you know I have no love for that woman—Mrs. Mahoney, as you know her—except the love of the virtuous test of enduring her—not unlike Walter’s test in being considered Frankenstein’s creature for almost sixty years. I was hoping you would see through her generosity in helping you establish yourself as an independent woman—at my expense—and with, of all people, her son, but I was proven wrong once again.”

My mother gasped. Clearly, she’d had no idea that people knew about Noel.

Miles lowered his crème de menthe with a gravity he reserved for his staff, and tilted his head slightly to the side to listen to her once more. She complained that Dr. Mahoney and her son had no more time for her, did not answer her frantic calls, and kept the door locked on her at Dingle’s.

“Last night Dr. Mahoney said you two were on the best of terms—and that she understood Ginger, and loves Ginger more than I do.” Here she slapped her hands together.

“This woman no more understands Ginger than she does herself, which is both her own and Ginger’s tragedy and will envelope our son Wendy, standing behind you, soon enough.” He drained his glass and poured another and sat back in the leather chair, staring gloomily at his slippers. “Do you understand they have set out to use you to get to Ginger? Don’t you see this, my Elizabeth Whispers? Unless I kill her—or her son—which I refuse to do, at least for the moment …” He paused. “Now they no longer need you—yet you could have been here still, where we loved you.”

Elizabeth turned to me, startled, and waved her hand, as if she did not know until that moment, in this terrible half-darkened little room, what her dalliances had caused. Oh, she knew of Miles’s pain. But now she was beginning to see how severely opportunistic his enemies had been, at her expense. It was a momentary reflection, for both she and I staring at each other. But also in this moment was the shame of her own conduct that sprang out of giddy hope of independence, and was dashed in local gossip and smut.

Only now was she beginning to see it all as others did. Or, what was worse, I suppose, as Father did.

My father pretended he would never suspect Miss Whispers of any more then a “dance somewhat too close with someone I don’t approve of,” as he told his fellow Rotarians at a meeting one day.

“You are conspiring against the angelic—yes, angelic—reputation of my wife, Elizabeth Corinth Whispers, of Low Bottom Road, Upper Renous.”

I tried to get Elizabeth coffee—but she said in a kind of inimical embrace of her own desperation that Father and the Grand and Janie, and Ginger, too, had betrayed her. And that her one friend, Dr. Mahoney, whom she liked talking to about books and music, no longer wanted to see her. I asked her to stay, but she said no. I asked to go with her, but she forbade me. Then she left, her body slightly tilted as she walked along the street, at eight o’clock.

Keeping the Grand open was the only thing Father wished to do. Nothing else mattered, after the death of Janie. It was to honour her, in some sad way to worship her, and he did not care how he went about it. Except to say, in a very principled way, his drinking did increase, and his unkind remarks were more exquisite, and of greater volume than before.

The movies I booked had to be of a certain “quality.” It was, I told Ginger, our only hope.
Sagebrush Trail
was replaced by
Lust for Her Bust. Truck-Stop Women
replaced
A Song to Remember
. Not that Chopin would have minded, Father said.
The Story of O
replaced
Red Dust
.

“Don’t you think, Wendy,” Father would say, lighting a cigarette and pondering this, “that’s why I’ve always run old black-and-whites? I want the crowd to breathe in a kind of unique staging, setting, and—what else?—character.”

“Of course,” I would answer. “But
Shane
will bring in thirty cars.
Sorority Girls Meet the Boys from Hell
will bring in a hundred and thirty.” I had to book them, over his protests. I had no choice.

Miles never watched these movies. He was by now too sick at heart. Usually he was gone wherever and returned after the movies were over. In the long afternoons when it was a vacant lot, the drive-in looked vanquished, as if we had fought a tank battle here and lost. Weeds grew up inside the projection booth, the speakers were broken, the lanes unpaved, and dust clouded our view on a good night. The screen was my family’s only refuge. The screen was where we lived. It came at a price, but it gave us our sadness and our laughter.

“I did not know monopolies would have such immense power,” he told me, “but it seems to me that if you own three hundred theatres you have more pull than the chap who has one. Why would that be?”

Still, he would fight the Imperial for the Grand’s first runs. But how did he expect to make his case, if when thwarted on
Star Wars
with Harrison Ford, he turned to the representative of MGM, and said, listing slightly to the right as he did when he drank, “Well, fine. The only thing I will say to you, since you have cost me a picture I had already advertised and you had already promised, something your father, who I’d worked with for years would never do, since you give your word to me over the phone, only to retract it in front of a Famous Players’ representative now, and send it off to the damn Imperial, is that at this moment, sir, I fart in your general direction.”

“He is dying,” I told Ginger over the telephone. “We must do something.”

As a last resort Ginger phoned Mother and asked if she might try some kind of reconciliation. So Mom and Dad went to counselling. I don’t know how successful counselling can be in the Catholic Church. But the priest was, as my father called him later, “the new breed of priest.” He played guitar at mass, invoked the names of psychologists and popular singers. Ideas came and went, but the predominent one was that my mother had suffered at the hands of the Kings, and that my father was unwilling or unable to accept this.

“Don’t you think that was true?” the priest said. “The Kings the Kings, it was always the Kings.”

My father blushed crimson that this gay twenty-six-year-old priest would say this to him a man twice his age, with such moral ferocity.

My father said politely that he disagreed, if he was allowed to disagree with a representative of the church or with the woman sitting beside him now. And if it came down to the insurance job, he could not in all conscience have taken it when his mother was ill. Nor did he have a right to abandon his uncle Walter at that time. Now that they were dead, insurance was out of the question, for he had a business to run. “If we cannot see this,” Father said, “then something about our own humanity has gone, hasn’t it?”

“Who said it was the insurance job?” Elizabeth asked.

“Well, considering that was perhaps the last true conversation you and I had, I simply assumed we were picking up from there.”

Elizabeth started crying, saying that not one of her dreams had ever come true.

“Then I am sorry about that,” Father answered, “but I thought I was dreaming when you got into my automobile that first day.”

Then the priest said to my father, “Oh, yes—you’re a man of the eighties all right—the eighteen-eighties.”

My father sat still, with his hat in his hand, feeling the rake of humiliation across his face. Worse, he had stayed sober to come here. What nonsense—what utter nonsense not to be fortified with a simple libation, like a quart and a half of gin. I think it was, or I believe it had to be, facing that priest that caused the absolute dissolution of their marriage.

“But you are a man of the eighties, I suppose,” Father said, “and you will almost certainly pay for it with your spirit.”

When they left the rectory, Elizabeth stood with him on the walkway and tried to take his hand. Their fingers touched a moment but that was all, and Father said he would not go back to her apartment for supper.

“But I have lamb chops for you, and we planned,” Mother said, getting flustered. “I planned it—and I got a new record for you. You like Orville—Packerton.”

My father touched her raw cheek. “Peterson. Oscar. Yes. But I can’t possibly—though I do love you—or is it I did—I am not so sure any more. But there was a moment, without casting any stone, that you turned your back on me, and I was left entirely alone.”

He turned and walked toward our house in the gloom. She called his name once, twice, to come back for supper, before turning away.

It was the last time they were to see each other. The wind blew in from the north, the streets turned to sheets of ice, and the trees grated and called out in their pain. Deer were shot and driven on the back of trucks around the square, and winter came.

She was leaving the Legion in December, after the party, or during the party. Mother was a bit of a hanger-on, during the shuffleboard tournaments and, at the end, was often seen with Gary Fallon, who owned the new video store, and sold cassettes.

At four o’clock, someone saw her in her old red coat, just as the door closed after her. The place smelled of smoke and was lit by neon beer signs. Her coat belt snagged in the door. She pulled to free it in the gale, and slipped on the top step, falling head first to the cement; strangely, dead, a second later. She was tiny, really, not much more than five-three and revellers passed her inert body by for two hours or more.