River of the Brokenhearted (28 page)

I found out that she had one girlfriend, named Dolores Hughes. They went to bingo together.

My sister never forgave my father for this, and in the other world, the interior world, it allowed a crack wide enough in her soul for Dr. Mahoney to enter with her nightly sip of gin that would drown the rocks of despair, like rivers of old.

The next year was a watershed year in Ginger’s life.

Her divorce was messy, and revealed a kind of trauma ongoing between women and men. He had stolen from her, and from the business, she said, and she could not let that go.

She also accused him of battery. Nonsense, Gus said. He had to fend off her tantrums, her penchant for throwing things directly at his head. She accused him of taking the banister down so she could not get upstairs. He agreed. He did not want her up there, especially when she was insulting him, which, he added, was every night. She accused him of stealing to pay for his drugs, and in particular of stealing our grandfather’s coin collection.

Then he accused her of theft of a different kind—of ruining his relationship with his former fiancée. Why? Just to prove she could do it, and because she disliked Kipsy Doyle.

“And could she do it?” Ginger’s lawyer, Ms. Devon—well known in our area—asked.

“Of course she could—look at her,” Gus said.

The debate continued. Where had their money gone? Why had so much been spent after only a few years of marriage? When was the last time there were sexual relations? How had the Cadillac been damaged? Neither of them wanted to answer these questions.

Ginger, sitting in her plain dress that showed her soft throat and bare shoulders, said he caused in her several nervous breakdowns, and wouldn’t cut the lawn. Gus blamed her fragility of temperament, her tantrums, her flaunting her once-prominent position, on her grandmother, who had instilled in her a sense of superiority that she did not think she deserved.

Ginger countered this by saying Gus was terrified of high places, and wouldn’t rock climb with her.

Then the first day of the proceedings were over.

“Thank God,” my father said. Then my father went with the rock climbing.

“Yes, no matter how acutely psychotic we may be as a family—no mountainous terrain is going to give us nightmares—are they, Wendy?”

The next afternoon, leaning in the heat of midsummer, it came out, as indecisive as anything else in our family. It came like hash through a vent, like a dozen little boys whispering their attentions to her when she was thirteen and had breasts before any other girl.

There it was, the seemingly most modern of accusations, in the most modern of settings for our new generation, the hint of incest that Gus assailed her with, the hint of Father’s relationship with Ginger one night when she was four or five.

“She admitted to me that her father used to pick her up and carry her from her room to some secret place,” Gus said. “That’s why she is so messed up. That’s why she hit me with a rolling pin. That’s why she loves to walk around naked as a pineapple.” Why pineapple, I do not know.

Late in the day I confronted my father with this.

“Of course I carried her out of her room,” my father told me, his legs and his arms trembling, “and put her on a comforter in the closet—and closed the door.”

“Why, in Christ’s name?”

“I was hiding her. Don’t you see? I had to hide her.”

“Hide her from what?”

“I don’t know—I honestly do not know. But I had to—I had to hide her like I should have hidden Georgina. Don’t you see?”

“Not at all,” I said.

Then he told me that though he could not remember the specifics, he did think that when he was little Rebecca used to give him sleeping pills so she could rifle through his mother’s closets. He said that he used to wake up and see other people in the house, and it terrified him. That was why he put Ginger in the closet.

“Christ,” I said. “Father, are you ever fucked up.”

“But not so much as to harm a little child,” he whispered, “or anyone, for that matter—even if,” he added, taking a drink of cool Scotch, “they have injured me.”

Even I was now a suspect. The great house with its gables and its pot of Irish tea, thick and dark, was a place of haunted memories that had transfigured us all.

It was a relief to me when the divorce came in silent August. However, my father was thought to have screwed his daughter.

“I know many do,” he said one day when he was alone at the restaurant with one sandwich slice and four double gins, and ladies from the IODE were looking across the room at him, “but I assure you, my good kind imperialists, I am not one!”

But Ginger did not refute the suggestion of incest, in court or anywhere else.

“That poor young girl needs so much help, after something like this is done,” Dr. Mahoney told Ray Winch, echoing the sentiment of much of our town. “But she has me now, and I will never leave her side.”

Her statement, of course, crept back to our house.

“I must get my theatres back,” my father said, holding an umbrella one cloudless day. (“To ward off the tomatoes they will pitch at my head.”) “But I do not know how. Right now she has too much power over me. I hate to say that, but it’s true.”

“Give Ginger time. She will settle down. If she could only find just one friend who would truly care for her.”

“No, son—she is ripe for the grand mistake, the great finale,” he said softly. “She is ripe for a quart of gin and a driving lesson into the sea.”

She had no idea her life could be so disastrous—and I suppose she had no idea that disaster could follow her all the days of her life, that “surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life” could easily be “surely terror and heartbreak will too.”

She was heartbroken, over her marriage, yes, but mainly over her lack of knowledge—her part in Yeats’s poem, that of flattering beauty’s ignorant ear, her part being, I know now, the ignorant beauty—and still being in love with trying to do something right. That was her tragedy.

“Did you know,” she said to me one day, “that girls went to school and burned their bras and have marched for their rights?”

“Of course I knew this,” I said.

“What do you think of it?”

“Most of them are privileged.”

“Well, Wendy—there you go.”

But “there you go” left her at a loss, and in some despair of ever being taken seriously. All those young women whose promise once seemed less than hers had leapfrogged into a new world, leaving her behind. In a small town theatre started fifty years before by her grandmother.

FIVE

I suppose if any girl would fall for Noel, it would be Ginger. Here was someone who was more dangerous than anyone, greater than anyone, someone who did not believe as others believed, who could make his own way as few others did. Father said, “That is what he has managed to convince those easily convinced that he is.”

But there was something else—something that Dr. Mahoney in helping Ginger could never have foreseen, which played into her hand, like the age old game of the pea. Ginger knew that I feared Noel was the one person who might seduce her, and in that way capture some of Father’s business. Now Ginger—like a fly testing the strength of a spider’s web—must see for herself what I was worried about, to rebuke me as her stuffy big brother.

Looking back, I see that it was part of Noel’s greater tragedy to be beautiful and empty, and to be controlled by his mother who applauded beauty and emptiness as a virtue. He was like a shell Dad placed with artistic flourish in the garden. It was part of Ginger’s tragedy to be beautiful and to have the required money to pour into this empty shell. Noel believed he deserved this, and no one told him differently. Women gave him money; it was part of the universal plan.

In all its frantic searching, the age allowed this vacancy. It allowed for despair in finery, in doeskin coats and suede gloves. It allowed just once more what Camus understood about ancient Greece. It allowed for Noel’s tragic beauty; the harshest and most barren of all.

The month of my sister’s divorce, Dr. Mahoney brought Noel into her bedroom and closed the door and, sitting on the bed, said, “As you know, I am not going to live much longer. But I want one thing.”

“Tell me and you’ll have it.”

He saw how her hair, brushed up red over her ears, made her look manly, how her white T-shirt showed freckled and sunburned arms. He remembered hundreds of nights with her alone in empty places, always seeking a moment that was destined to come. He remembered she had taken a course in university, he did not know what, but if people were suspicious of her credentials, he defended her with viciousness. He would tell the Lord himself she was an accredited psychologist if she wanted him to. And she did.

“I want you to get married. And then I can die in peace.”

“What about Cassie?”

“No, someone special. This has to be a secret for now.”

“Who?” he persisted.

“Someone I think might be worthy of my son. That is all.”

He was good with older women, those dissatisfied that the world had left them out, and this is what he was thinking she must want. And he was not averse to this.

That week, Ginger met Dr. Mahoney at the Palace Bar. Ginger had come to see Dr. Mahoney as the touchstone to a world she wanted. The world that Dr. Mahoney understood, women like Ginger deserved. And Ginger wanted more than anything to succeed where her mother, Elizabeth Whispers, had failed. More than anything Ginger wanted this.

Mahoney ordered a gin.

“I’ll have my spoonful,” Ginger said.

Mahoney looked suddenly angry.

“What’s wrong? What did I say?”

“You are not a little girl now. You can have more than a sip a day! In fact, I think you should. Throw off the damn yoke.”

“That’s right,” Ginger said, and she too ordered a gin. She felt nervous about this, for she did not trust herself when drinking. But besides, there was the idea of gentle hypocrisy here. What had Gus or her father done that was much more than to go to a damn bar and throw away some yoke?

“You,” Mahoney said, “are a freedom fighter.”

“No,” Ginger said, blushing.

“Of course you are. You finally handled your disastrous marriage. But I don’t have much time left.”

“No—don’t say that.”

“It’s true—and I have never lied to you. But you are a real fighter. You own a business—you and your grandmother did more for women on this river than anyone—and I spent my life studying women in society.”

She smiled and took Ginger’s hand. She looked at this hand, with the wedding band gone and the small graduation ring still proudly displayed, and remembered what Cassandra said about sabotage.

“Did you ever think of having another business someday, something else altogether?”

“I haven’t thought of it,” Ginger said. “You know Dad—he still thinks it important to keep the business going.”

“Well then, at any rate, I am lucky to have you to talk to, Janie’s own grandchild,” Dr. Mahoney said. “Look out for Noel—just look out for him. There are too many women who want to lead him astray. If he only had someone to ground him—like you!”

“You’re my friend,” Ginger said spontaneously. “You are the kindest person I’ve ever met. Of course I’ll keep an eye on Noel.” She said this like a child, knowing she was not mature enough to do what she just promised.

But Mahoney’s faith in her brought tears to Ginger’s eyes. The doctor ordered another gin and wiped tears from her own eyes as well.

“What is it?”

“My son—he has such a crush on you. But he’s so shy. And he didn’t want me to say a thing, because you were married and are such an important person—”

“Do you mean it? Noel?” Ginger, who was more than slightly drunk, said, her eyes glowing. She found it unbelievable. But she also knew this was the reason she visited Dingle’s in the first place.

Did Dr. Mahoney believe anything she was saying? At this moment she believed every word. For in her life, from the earliest time until now, she could never remember telling a lie.

The next afternoon Mahoney waited for Noel to come back from Bathurst, and when he finally got home, she said, “Someone whose people own a business that we must take over!”

“Who’s that?”

“The marriage. She loves you, I can tell.”

He looked outside over the dark lawn, the brown fence, the trail of smoke from a barbecue and heard the shout of a child.

“Who?” he whispered.

“Ginger King.”

He leaned back against the door frame. Ginger had just been divorced. It was perfect timing. His mother simply stared at him, with her green cold eyes, her figure still remarkable for a woman her age, waiting for his decision.

He remembered his mother speaking once in fury about the Kings years before, and though he had forgotten it until now, by chance all of this was to come about, and it was as fresh in his mind as if she had just said it.

But Dr. Mahoney made him promise not to say anything and contact no one in the next week or so. Ginger, she said, was a flower already bruised.

So, following his mother’s edict, Noel made no attempt to contact Ginger—now that the “cat was out of the bag” and now that she was free. The idea of being free, Dr. Mahoney told him would allow her the choice not to be free. This was the play they were making—subtly indifferent to freedom that it was. How could it be indifferent to freedom—simply put, there could be no freedom without forgiveness. It was something our psychologist did not contemplate in her life of helping others.

After a week Ginger impatiently sought out Dr. Mahoney again.

The woman sat in Dingle’s living room. Her sign was still up in the yard, faded now and lacking the punch it once carried. For there were complaints, not spoken loudly, that her only interest was in herself and that she took money from unhappy, hopeless people.

Ginger was one of these unhappy, hopeless people. “Were you serious?” Ginger asked.

“About what, my dear?” Mahoney was wearing a bright yellow shirt. Ginger could see the tattoo on her arm beneath the fabric.

“About Noel.”

“What about Noel?”

“That he likes me.”

The woman sighed, as if she were truly pained that Ginger would doubt this.

“I told you, he’s just been through a terrible relationship. She was a liar and told him she loved him but didn’t, even though I tried to keep them together, and I don’t know if he wants to take a chance. Men are far more fragile than we are, really. Something like that they never quite get over. Besides, in my profession I’ve always cautioned young women against jumping back into a relationship. But then you strike me as being—more mature.”

“Well,” Ginger said, exuding all of her considerable charm, “you just tell Noel that I’ve been through a terrible relationship too, and I am mature—though I’m not a very good catch, I guess.”

Dr. Mahoney picked up a grape and gave a smile, as she looked around at nothing. Everything was coming about because she wanted it to, and she was doing everything for Janie’s grandchildren, just as the men on the bridge were doing everything for Janie’s children. In her travels she had discovered one fact—many people wanted to be gulled. It was what Joey Elias had discovered at the circuses when he was sixteen. And it was what he had told Ms Mahoney when she was someone else all those years ago.

Later she told Noel not to go to Ginger for a week or so.

Noel liked teasing people. He enjoyed harming people too, but he never admitted that, for he was under his mother’s thumb. He had taken money from older women who could not afford to give him any (Elizabeth Whispers being one). He smiled when they handed it over, for he disliked women, just as, he sensed, his mother disliked women.

He liked harming Mr. Dingle as well, stealing his pension cheque and hiding his medication, but he did not admit it. His mother, who saw these traits in him, refused to acknowledge them, not because she did not want to admit it but because he reminded her of herself when young. But it was also the one thing she worried about, for Dingle’s pills and cheques were missing, and only Cassandra and Noel would have had access to them. That could be the undoing of her plan.

Contrary to his mother’s instructions he kept his girlfriend informed. Cassie remembering how vaguely charming Dr. Mahoney was, felt duped. She told Noel that she would not stand for this. He could not marry that rich quiff, she said.

Noel assured her everything he did would be done for her. That they would get a lot of money and be together, perhaps go to Mexico.

“Well then, you must marry me first.”

“How could I do that?” Noel asked.

“Who would have to know?”

Cassie was under investigation for stealing funds that were meant to buy team jackets for the high-school volleyball team. She would do some time over this, she said curiously without emotion, so she wanted his loyalty.

He said once she got out he would make sure he had done what he must, and they would be free of everyone, and have lots of money. He understood, our Mr. Noel, that she would not be there if his money was not.

“Mexico is fine,” she said, and she smiled.

At week’s end, just after work, Ginger was walking along the street above ours and saw Noel approaching, head down, deep in thought.

“What are you afraid of?” she said timidly. “I won’t bite.”

He stared down at her.

“Now,” she said, taking a deep breath, “here we are—” And she reached up and hugged him.

He grabbed her and took her to a corner of an old warehouse where my father once drank as a boy. It smelled of silt and soot and old creosote logs. He wanted to tell her what was going on, just to torment her. He wanted to tell her about Elizabeth, just for fun, just to see how she would react.

“I’m broke,” he said.

She put her fingers to his lips and kissed him. “I know,” she said. “But if we care for each other, so what?”

My father began to react to all of this by staying almost drunk, almost always. I would hear the phone ring for hours, it seemed, while he sat beside it in the kitchen staring at the wall, or quoting from some obscure journal neither I nor anyone else remembered. Then he would leave, only to be brought home by a neighbour or two who were still concerned enough about him, or about our neighbourhood, to act in a conscientious manner.

His new escapades catapulted us into the paper again that fall, after all this time. He ran for mayor. “I believe that all enemies of the Kings should be drowned in their own urine,” he would declare.

So Father’s health became my primary concern. On a bright special day, he woke early—for he had slept badly, and was bleeding from the mouth. The night before, drinking with him in the den, with only one turtle-shell lamp illuminating our faces, he said to me, when I ventured that he should quit drinking, “It is impossible to drink with you—you are not a drinker, I find, and you have a limited conversational ability—and the reason is simply this, Wendy—after three or four days of drinking you sneak away for some food.”

The next morning he woke early, dismissed the bit of blood on his pillow as some kind of lubricant for his tonsils, and turned on the ancient recording he had made as a child, listening to the old warped scratching of it. “Good morning, Miles. How are you today? Nice to see you. Have you made any new friends?” It played over and over and over, for upwards of forty minutes. Then finally, and thank God, he replaced it with Chet Baker, and as the melancholic West Coast jazz came slowly drifting to me, I heard him say, “Ah, no, I have not—not one friend in fifty years. Not even my son. It may be my fault, for a man to fire on his own troops should have the decency to expect to live alone. But there was that moment, once, when poor Elizabeth Whispers held a party. I did not realize that it was not they but I who was the main guest. I was the invitee, she the inviter, into a new life I would not step—and so then you see, it follows—her coat got caught in the door.”

They were powerful lines for me, for they peeled more of the harsh onion away.

He was shaking and blue, and seemed to have a slight problem catching his breath. He opened up some cooking sherry and had a small draught.

“I must go back to England and find my father’s relatives,” he said to me. “There lies my hope. I will become a landowner somewhere in the midlands, and tend sheep by the flocks. I am not made for Canada, or at least not exclusively so—for the first part, a political correctness is rampant here—and for the second part, I am not sure how much longer I have above ground, so I must pick my final resting place with acumen. Perhaps, then, my cherished home in Ireland, wherever it may be!”

I did tell him that Ginger was in some strange way captivated by the doctor. She seemed to be in her company day and night now. I was reminded, in a flicker, of
Gaslight
, with Charles Boyer and the incomparable Ingrid Bergman. Ginger looked like Ingrid Bergman, at least to me.