River of the Brokenhearted (29 page)

“Gaslight,”
Father said spontaneously, as if he had read my thoughts, “You have told me something, sir, that I have no power to stop—” He said this with gravity and aplomb. “Besides, I ask the startling question, Is she really a doctor—does she know anything really about doctoring—is she even a Mahoney—or is she someone else? No, son, I will not be so measured by the temperature of the moment—I have a longer memory concerning the history of events.”

I went for a beer as soon as the tavern opened. When I got home later in the afternoon, I got a call from the police. Could I come and see them? What had happened? We will be here when you come, I was told.

I had a strange foreboding that my father was either dead or, worse, had run someone down.

He was sitting in a cell, in his bathing suit, holding his briefcase on his lap. He had gone for a walk wearing a bathing suit and carrying his briefcase. He appeared before the bank manager, demanding a loan.

“Of how much?”

“Eighty-seven thousand dollars, sir. Just enough to ride this tempest out.”

“What tempest?”

“Ah—what tempest. The tempest I see all around me—the tempest from Famous Players, who have my first runs. The tempest of the cable company who runs
Playboy After Hours
, the most sanitized of sex, don’t you think? The tempest”—here he whispered—“from a woman who has ensnared my daughter’s innocent heart. Besides, I need a new screen at my drive-in, and it would be handy to have a screen in order to run movies—don’t you think so, sir?”

Sweating, smelling of gin, not having eaten in a week, he looked—well, not dishevelled because he was wearing only a bathing suit—but more than a little under the rails.

When the bank manager, a well-kept, blow-dried fellow of twenty-four asked him to leave, he said he would stand his ground come what may. Then police bringing him to his cell, they discovered twenty minutes later that he was sitting with his briefcase before him, being used as a table, and a quart of gin sitting upon it, the gin cap beside the quart, and the quart half drained.

“We didn’t check his briefcase,” Kipsy Doyle told me. “We thought it held important papers. Well, he
is
a well-known businessman.”

I did not tell them they had shirked their duty, for I knew them all by name, and rather liked Kipsy Doyle.

I brought my father home, where he was most excitable and truly discouraged about being called a businessman. Nothing, he said, was further from the truth. He was a magician and a song-and-dance man, a hoofer, if it must be said, who could still do a tap for damn St. Patrick.

“Remember Cagney,” he said.
“Yankee Doodle Dandy,”
and he did a shuffle into our favourite drinking lamp.

In the hallway of our house, the picture of my grandmother Janie seemed ambivalent to it all, with the light crossing her face at an angle that hid most of her expression. Yet in her expression was a foreboding, as if she was saying, Wait—and see—and you will know. All will be revealed with time—and time is on the side of the dead, my boy.

SIX

It was Labour Day of 1982. For nine years, every Labour Day—the last big weekend of the drive-in—my father had played
Gone with the Wind
.

“Rebels as poetry,” Father said. “As far as I’m concerned, I always went for the rebels. When Clark Gable announces at the first of the film that those damn Yankees would win, I feel disheartened. Why? Not because I believe in slavery (except perhaps my own), but like my Irish ancestors, that great part of my blood has always agreed with the rebel yell. However the Irish from Boston and New York, some of my own relatives, fought for the North.”

A Miss Larson—the granddaughter of the man who had the pawnshop where my great-grandfather pawned his suit—sold tickets, wearing earmuffs, and seeing her breath. A slight north wind had come and chilled the grounds.

The drive-in was about half full. There was only one short, for the movie was long—and no trailers about upcoming movies, only a thanks to our patrons for another wonderful season and our ongoing hope that they would visit our concession stand for the creamy hot chocolate and the one-sheet showing Kathleen Turner in
Body Heat
.

It was cool and rainy, and I ran the projectors, shivering and freezing because the heater was broken. Just when the damn Yankees were advancing on Atlanta, and just when the young girl shouted, “Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies,” the screen collapsed.

There was kind of a hush as it wobbled, so I tried to adjust the lens to keep the picture in focus, and then it fell completely, utterly and forever. My father’s great and somewhat triumphant right flank of the business reduced to a black inscrutable sky. The cables had loosened and stretched over time, and the old screen fell. A screen with no insurance.

I had the unpleasant task of going home and reporting this to my father. The drive-in was like our last panzer move, and now we fell back on our heels. My father looked not only heartsick but frantic.

Over the next week or so, I conveyed to him my regret that our empire, such as it was, had dissolved.

“Sabotage.” He looked at me.

“I’m not sure—neither are the police.”

“I did not imply a question but an assertion. It was sabotage.”

“Who?” I said.

“
Gaslight?”

“Oh, come—not our Dr. Mahoney,” I said (like a grade-school teacher).

He did not answer my extraneous outburst, knowing in a way that was all I had left.

So, like Lee, I went to see General Grant. Ginger was in her office at the house, opening her mail with an old silver-handled letter opener.

I told her that she could get my father to sign, then I would sign too, and the Grand would sell. The drive-in would sell as well, as lots, or a subdivision.

“Don’t be sad, Wendy,” she said. “The business is gone, but it had a good run, sixty years or so—that’s enough. On its ashes we will make our fortune—like Dallas.”

“You mean Phoenix.”

“Well, I knew it was a city somewhere down there.”

I nodded and went, walked slowly past the houses that my grandmother had built, toward the house where I lived. If the screen had not collapsed, we might have held out indefinitely. Now the business would be sold, my father in retirement, and who knows, I might want to someday go to university—the privilege of others I knew. There I could meet fine people with solid motives who would never in their lives think of betraying or cheating anyone. At least the brochures never mentioned it.

Miles tried to write a letter to Ginger about her life and the life of the theatre. He knew that Ginger wanted to sell, but he feared that Ginger would no longer be her own advocate in this. He also feared that she would be an advocate against him.

But he had no letter after ten days; he only had a pile of papers on the floor about his desk, some drawings, scribbles and scratches, and a poem to Mom:

“Miss Whispers, my love
a sparrow in the trees
a sweetness in her eyes
before the blast of winter storms
made her sad and wise.”

And a line to Ginger: “My dear, dear girl—love, Dad.”

It was crumpled up in the corner, and nothing else was said.

A month or two went by, and an offer was made to buy us out by the very mill that helped my grandmother all those years before.

Yet to sell we needed my father’s signature that day, and I could not find him.

His room was empty. The bed not slept in, the closets with his shirts and ties were empty.

It was cold, and I could barely afford to heat the Grand. I opened it to a few patrons twice a week, I ran second- or third-run movies, from the backlots of Hollywood, where actors and actresses of the third rate tried to look like those who had made fortunes with a certain chin or coif of hair. They reminded me in their stilting way and poor scripts and halting motion of all the florid glory days of my father’s life, the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Though Ginger and I were ready to sell everything, we could do nothing until I found Father.

I did not tell my sister that I began to get postcards.

Dear Wendy,
I’m here in Petra, where the wise men stopped for frankincense and myrrh. What is myrrh? Anyway will bring you home some—don’t worry, I have learned the tricks of the camel—every few days you just have to replenish their humps, somewhat like a good drinker.

Dad.

A week later, another:

Dear Wendy,
Have crossed over to Cairo—the place I always wanted to see—going to the pyramids tomorrow—the valley of the KINGS, ha, ha. Will bring back some sand for you.

Dad!

P.S. Have not had a drink today and feel that I might get away with not having one tomorrow.

P.P.S. Remember that terrible movie “Murder on the Nile”? Now that could make me drink.

Of course the postage gave him away.

I drove on a bleak afternoon to a small resort outside Charlottetown. He was living in a cabin, the kind that Elizabeth Whispers had rented for us the year we never went. He had locked the doors, and sat with a thousand dollars’ worth of booze, and was busy writing his memoirs. He was stuck on page three, and so was busily revising page one and two. The early years—

I helped him dress—he picked out his finest suit, and a new pair of shoes. I asked him if he had ever worn jeans. (That he didn’t had always embarrassed me.)

“Good God,” he said, tying his tie with a practised hand, and slipping on his rings and Rolex watch. “Why?”

“Not even on holidays?”

“I never took holidays,” he said, straightening his cuffs and glancing at me in a kind of silent rebuff, a look of sardonic hope that I hadn’t joined the tribe against him. He arched his eyebrows slightly to accomplish this.

“Well, you should have,” I answered.

“You’re right of course. I’ll certainly drink to that,” he said. “At any rate, I will probably have holidays from now on, won’t I?”

I helped him to the car. For the first time in his life he had trouble walking.

On his return, Father was under enormous pressure to sell, not only from me but from his creditors. His face was often contorted by indecision. He refused to take Ginger’s calls.

Then one afternoon at the office, as he was looking through the files that covered decades of moving pictures, he suddenly blurted in naïve astonishment: “We have not run one Canadian film. Do they even make them?”

“Oh, I’m sure they do,” I said.

“I’m not sure—is it a bad thing to have adopted the heroes of another country?”

“We are good at adopting,” I concluded, telling him that many of the actors we showed on our silver screen were Canadian—who themselves had been adopted by the States, or for that matter by Britain.

“This won’t do,” he said, lighting the last cigarette in his silver case. He then told me that he might have been fooled by this movie business. “I feel I have missed my calling. A great philanthropist wouldn’t have sat at home taking orders. Do you think Gandhi was bossed about by his mother?”

“I can’t see it,” I agreed.

He motioned sadly at nothing. “It is time now to close the book and snuff the candle, what!”

“Yes,” I said quietly. “It is.”

So, after sixty years in the business, my father suddenly and conclusively (if I can use that word) decided to sign and get it over with.

He stood, straightened his tie in the mirror, fastened his cuffs on his white shirt, and buttoned his immaculate heavy winter overcoat. He picked up his leather briefcase, gave me a wink, walked by the cans of old, used reels, and turned out the marquee lights.

PART VI

ONE

For a while I went during the day downtown to the library archives, searching in the papers, back to that distant time when my father was a child, to try to help him solve some mystery I still didn’t believe existed.

I saw a picture of the Regent on the day of Jimmy McLeary’s death. Two officers stood there, not looking at the camera. The doorway was open, but looking with a magnifying glass I could not see the key in the door.

I filed on through them, one picture or piece of paper after another, until, “Little Girl’s Tragic Mishap” came before me in letters a mile high. It was the local paper.

“Janie King’s girl—you might have seen her and her brother, Miles, around our town—curly hair, sharp grin, and a feisty manner were her trademarks.”

“Janie works outside the home. Left in the care of older brother, Miles (there was a picture of Miles in his top hat)—Miles was told not to leave the house or yard.”

“Miles last summer sang ‘Paddy’s Boy’ at our Dominion Day celebration—a bit of the dandy.”

“A bit of the dandy.”

“Janie works outside the home.”

What a conscious bit of terror heaped upon her and her son at that time of grief.

——

The next week I went over the investigation into Jimmy McLeary’s death.

“Fatal Mishap Saves Regent. Angered by unmarried daughter’s profession, scandalous pictures, and nightly ways … Gas and other combustibles found in basement of Dime …”

“You see, I don’t remember,” my father said when I began to hurl questions at him. “Please, please,” he said to me, “I have my poker and my service pistol but I don’t know if I can protect myself. Can’t you see I am growing tired?”

He did not want to talk. So we drank in silence. That night, his head drooped forward and his wedding ring slipped off his finger and fell to the carpet with the tiniest of hushes.

I roamed the past in those archives while my father spoke about the great plays we would one day either write—no, I think they were already written—or produce, for the large theatre. We would go off to New York. And one day he came in with a map of the city, for our great journey south.

“Stay at the best places—go to the Brown Derby.”

“That’s not in New York,” I told him.

“Well, I’m sure there’s a watering hole or two we might find in Manhattan.”

“I am sure there will be,” I answered.

We could talk this way when we were drinking. That was the characteristic way for us to be men.

“We will make a scene—better than the movies—”

“Yes, but we are very bad actors,” I said.

“Then we stick to doing Shakespeare and no one will know.”

I found, in looking in the past, little slivers of grass and fields he had passed when he was a boy. I found streams he had taken Georgina to fish in, now dammed up solid—buildings he had roamed alone, long-gone ghosts. The river had changed so much since those days, subdivisions with grey roofs blocked the sun or held snow in the winter; pavement and concrete stretched down in redundancy from Beaverbrook Court to the square, and apartment complexes uttered nothing from their blank windows, their listless suburban sashes, and their mute satellite dishes, eclipsing any triumph my poor grandmother ever had, making all her lonely effort somehow vanish away. The great dark Grand that I wandered in alone—the seats removed, the faces of Comedy and Tragedy torn out to make us faceless once again, the old gold cords and curtains toppled.

I questioned Dad about that Christmas. Where was Jimmy McLeary when they went to the house the second time? Could it be that he was already on his way to meet someone, or to go to the theatre?

“More likely, son, he was out trying to find a draught.”

“And why do you say so?”

“Because of Minister Whispers, who came calling after we had left the second time.”

“But he died with his suit on.”

“Then he put it on after the minister left.”

“This only gets us to the outside of the Regent.”

“I suspect we can get no farther this evening, so let us have a drink.”

Then one night I broached the real subject, that August day of 1932. How did that day start for him? What had he done? Did he remember dressing Georgina?

Then I discovered something very painful, though he tried to tell me how compellingly comic it was. Rebecca had taught Georgina to tease him with certain words. When I asked him what these words were, he put his hands over his ears and told me quite plainly, “Wendy, will you please be a dear and go fuck yourself.”

——

At this time my father was trying his own homeopathic concoctions to reduce the painful swelling in his legs and his difficulty with urination. He used pulsatilla and aconite, made, he told me, from blue monkshood. Very sure these two homeopathic treatments would cure all his ills. If not he would go to the more radical belladonna, poisonous but highly effective. He also told me that silica—flint—would help if he was restive and depressed, or had genital warts or a splinter—neither of which he had at the moment. But it was seeking a cure for, or at least some relief from depression, and the spite of others, which forced him to try these things. The spite of others, he bluntly told me, had lasted far too long—he had become an icon among town pariahs, which only added to the powers of his enemies.

For a while he drank only dispirited beer (and now and again a brandy). Then we heard what I had been dreading to hear. Ginger was getting married again.

Father wrote Ginger a letter.

Please realize that there will come a time when you will look upon this letter, this seemingly irrelevant page, as the last link to our former life, when we were if not happy, then at least not so dispirited as to go off with bad company. I am not a philosopher or a very good writer—though I have a few poems I’d like you to see—but I can predict with a steady gaze that your marriage to Noel (if not an entire fabrication) is convenient to him and not to you (and most convenient to his mother, our psychologist). And as soon as it is no longer a convenience to them he will let you go—so it will destroy you—sooner or later. Now that I have said this, I am certain you will go through with it—to spite me and the truth of what I have just written. However, I will offer you a carrot with the stick. If you put your marriage to Noel off—for, say, thirteen or fourteen years—I will quit drinking. Yes, you have heard me—I will quit—at the end of those fourteen years as your wedding date approaches. All I have to offer you is my bad liver—but I am doing it with grace and courage.

Love,
Daddy

It went unanswered. This was the enormous mistake, the Pickets charge that Ginger’s undaunted spirit had to make. It was what I noticed at fifteen when she wanted her face tattooed at a circus.

The town, the quiet unassuming town, however, looked upon this as incredible fun, behind her back. And they had great fun, enormous fun, with the trauma of my sister’s life, just as they had had with my mother before her.

My father found this out late one grey afternoon when he managed to walk downtown to get shaved. (He found it horribly tricky to shave himself, since his hands trembled so.) The barber began to hot towel him. He was lying back with a hot towel on his face, and he heard from one of the more galling people on the river, a useless good for nothing, that he had heard that Miles King, who was such an oddball, had long had relations with Ginger.

“Ginger would fuck a mule now,” the man said.

“I do not believe that is true, sir,” Father said. “Ginger King with a fine education and enormous self-discipline, would never—as you put it—fuck a mule.”

Still with the towel pressed to his face, and slightly, ever so slightly, altering his accent, he continued. “And as for the father—well, the father. You see, I know the father—we’ve had our difficulty, but I’m friends with the father. A better man you could not meet. No, he would no more commit an act against his daughter than he would rape a goat itself, or your wife, for that matter—even your wife—who is, as you know, somewhat goat-like in appearance, my fellow. And the scurrilous whispers against Miss Whispers were entirely unfounded.”

Then he added to the barber, “Feeling a little queasy that I might slip with the straight razor, I, with great comportment, have walked down here. Do I need to listen to the licentious talk of fleeting and galling tavern bullies, men who on their own could never find the urinal by themselves?”

The barber told the man to shut up, and the man suddenly realizing who my father was by his impeccable suit, hurried from the shop.

“She will not marry that fellow Noel,” my father whispered. “I will take a gun—I will take my service pistol—and do him in. As you can see, I’m a desperate man. Look into my eyes—a desperate man.”

The barber began to shave.

That summer, my father went golfing. He was going to become the relaxed and tanned enthusiast of the coffee-table golfbook set, or so he said. He even bought a set of secondhand clubs, and some Titleist balls. He told me it was high time he became social. For man was a social animal, and the termination of his work might enable him to have, if not friends—for who would ever be his friend?—perhaps acquaintances. He said this as he sat in a chair in an empty room. I told him he might even find a lady friend again.

“No one could replace Elizabeth Whispers,” he said.

But I tried to wax enthusiastic so he would do it, and even mentioned Dolores Hughes. “A wonderful new world,” I said.

Yes, he said, he would get in shape playing and be the specimen he knew he could be.

I smiled. “The young artillery captain again.”

He smacked his lips over a Chardonnay at noonhour. Then he said, putting the glass abruptly down,

“Well, perhaps not—but the once-again president and only surviving male member of the Harkins High Glee Club of 1937.”

“Where you fell in love with Miss McGrath,” I said.

“Never mock June–September love.” And then he added, “Especially when a boy has no one else, and his pigeons’ necks were wrung like chickens’.”

He was, however, worried about social intercourse—that brand of talking and bunting with a society that was underneath, for him, crass in its supposition and knifelike in its responses. But I left him to it, and he went in July—and I deceitfully followed him about, in the woods near the old drive-in, where I, knowing the area, could find him on any fairway. Each day that I went, he stood off by himself, in solitude, came politely to the tee on his own, whacked to the right and left in a skitter of balls, his hair pinched in a clubhouse golf cap that didn’t fit, his mouth in grim determination to not make an utter fool of himself, his golf clubs’ vinyl bag with the ticket attached to signal his beginner’s fees were paid. Sometimes there were squalls that blocked the sun.

“How are you doing, then?” I asked him on July 9.

“Absolutely peachy-keen. Warren and Don and I make a great threesome.”

“That’s great,” I said.

“Well, it is great,” he said defensively, “and they are great. But they do not drink—and so I am as a man obligated to go to the nineteenth hole alone. That’s why you saw me alone when you came by today.”

“Well, a beer is a beer,” I said.

“A beer is a beer is a beer,” he added.

“We should have one now,” I said.

I stayed at the old drive-in lot, now full of backhoes and graders making it into something else, wandered about it, remembering nights of lost and lonely movies, and the twang of Duane Eddy coming from the speakers, while those girls and boys in heat swam in my fading memories to the tune.

Over time his enthusiasm for golf faded, the golf clubs abandoned in the back corner of our empty garage.

One afternoon my father went out for a walk. He stopped at the side of the street, and looked in both directions. Then he came back.

“I have nowhere to go,” he said, “so now, what do I do? Do I go to a bar and sit? With whom? I am much more comfortable imbibing alone. I have always imbibed alone. Those children who drank years ago—started at the old age of seventeen—I already had eight years of professional drinking on them.”

Then he turned on me and said, savagely, “What a waste—what an incalculable intellectual waste—for you and Ginger never to have gone to university. You have become nothing more than smalltown peons—unread and, as far as Ginger goes, sometimes unwashed. How wretched that must be. What an insipid time of life. So Ginger senses she must make a grand statement now or be forgotten. I know this. It is what happened to poor Elizabeth too.”

I told him a little angrily that it was as much his influence as my grandmother’s. And I unkindly added that he himself wasn’t the song-and-dance man he had started out to be.

He nodded abstractly, and sat at the table with his rolling machine. “Reduced to rolling my own smokes. Christ bless me, what’s next.”

Bills were outstanding and he had to pay them. He had not eaten at home since our mother’s death, but dined daily at a restaurant downtown, even though he ate almost nothing. Those bills put on one of his four credit cards were sapping him. He bought food for the poor, and gave tickets to dances to couples he hardly knew. Looking over the bills, I saw he had purchased three winter coats. They were not for him but for people who lived on the street.

I took him for a drive that night. But as soon as I got to the highway he wanted to go home. I mentioned the bills.

“Yes,” he said, “I think I will have to pay these bills sooner or later. Why don’t I have the courage to change?”

I was silent. He had more courage than most men I have ever met. He just did not know it.

I walked around and opened the door for him. He got out slowly, held his coat together, and looked up at the stars—at all those magnificent ragamuffins over our heads.

“What is wrong with me?” he said. “Why have I gotten old?”

He went to sleep on the couch.

I went into his office, where the bills were piled up in neat bunches, to look over them, and see which ones should be paid. Most of them were for heat and lighting, and his secret daily supply of booze. There was a cheque written for a bird sanctuary on Miscou Island. His note, in his shaky hand: “For the seagulls and the terns.”