River of the Brokenhearted (3 page)

TWO

I was never to see my grandfather. There is a picture of him next to my grandmother, taken, I think, in 1922, where he looks a little like Fitzgerald, and she, a more beautiful Zelda. Someone once told me—wisely or not I do not know, or care, for the art of such wisdom as his changes—that my granddad never succeeded at anything very much.

“Yer grandaddyoo (he said granddaddyoo) was a howling failure—just like yer dad. It must be the English side of you.”

I assumed this to be correct. Why not? A small theatre in a callow town is not the great world’s idea of success. We had all failed, and he needn’t tell me. We were failed poets, dancers, and musicians that had little enough moments of brilliance on a stage, in church basements, at weddings, or forgotten moments of sorrowful laughter long gone—say with a slight ballet movement in a stage adaptation of some composer in the lost summer of 1946.

George King, our patriarch, often failed too. Failed in youth by having both parents die, failed in the first war—the illness that he wished to end with a sudden crawl over the top prevented him from going to the front. His fiancée in England left him for someone else, assuring him, as fiancées often do, that she loved him still. So, broken-hearted, he came to Canada. His wife, my grandmother, was Irish Catholic with a broad Miramichi accent, and he Church of England. This caused a rift in the family for years, and pitted the town against us in a strange way. Like a curse not ended yet. Failed at family life for a son he did not know.

So many rifts, and so few years, my sister once commented as we drove to Burnt Church for a summer vacation that we never had.

My grandfather had come to Canada from foul London as a last respite against his sickness, and fought it here, on a playing ground unlevel at the best of times. He fought it with medicine from Dr. Giovanetti and what he called stingers—that is, gin and beer mixed; he fought it with walks and exercise, and camphor and morphine, and swimming in cold climates.

“I am Janie McLeary—from Chatham Street,” my grandmother said to him when they first met—their meeting quixotic as it was assuring my birth, through the birth of my father.

“I am George King—and I’m just about done for.” He smiled as he took her hand. “You don’t have any home remedies, do you—some syrup or elixir you’re hoarding for yourself? Give it up if you do.”

He was a collector of small prints and silver coins and out-of-date things like tin meat cans from the Boer War and took his meeting with my grandmother to be destiny, for as he said: “Once on the ship—the
Lucy Corker
out of Liverpool—I had decided on Canada. Before that moment I had decided on nothing, not even whether I might climb the rail and jump, saying, ‘so long now, my chippy mates.’ Once in Canada, I took my travelling music show northwest. It could as easily have been southwest. At this moment, why, I might be in Boston with another lady altogether! And then to need someone to accompany me—in you walk, Janie McLeary—a nineteen-year-old girl carrying her fiddle. There you go—that’s destiny. We play well together too. You don’t call that fate—it is most remarkable.”

They were married, much to the chagrin of her father, who said he had witnessed the English when he was a boy in Ireland (though he never was a boy in Ireland) and said he would hang himself if she went through with it. So he went off to do it, wearing a white shirt and tam-o’-shanter, and then because he couldn’t bring himself to tie a rope to the Morrissey Bridge, asked his friends to hang him instead.

“Hang me, for I’m not fit company with myself.”

After being drunk with him for a day, they said they would, so he backed off and went home.

The town took the marriage to be doomed, and since he was sickly, in bad taste, and her friends all decided she was insane. They would stand outside her door talking about her as she sat inside listening. One of the things against her was that she had been engaged to Bobby Boy Doyle, a man with passable fists who boxed in the golden gloves. It was just another family of enemies for my grandmother to have.

“She’s just a damn cow, that Janie McLeary—”

“I am not,” she would say. But they in their hats and skirts from Eaton’s summer catalogue would continue speaking as if she was absent, paying no mind to her protest, and then all walk off together singular in their state of agony and in their affirmation of the mortal sin she was committing. All of them would ask her for money later on.

My grandparents lived in a rooming house run by the Dobblesteins, who owned a little mill on the back square. Janie was seen pushing her husband in a wheelchair the day after their wedding—he thirty-three, she twenty. George King failed at his first try and then his second in business, attempting to open shops in the listless, insipid summer of the flu, which, incidentally, he assumed would dispatch him with a quick cough and sudden heart failure. That it did not sent him back to reading Conrad, but saying that he found in life “not the joyous exuberance and overwhelming optimism Mr. Conrad himself finds.” (I take this not as irony in the least, for my grandfather was little fit for irony at the time.)

And then on the back of a cold winter, Grandfather coming home from playing piano in Moncton for a penny or two, decided on the theatre. It was one thing the river did not have. He decided on a theatre when the train got stuck at a pass and he saw a white drift outside in the night, the snow wisping about, he said, like “frantic actors on the silver screen who have all suddenly forgotten their lines.” All of a sudden the idea of a theatre, or a playhouse, was there, was born in morphine-induced love.

It came, spontaneously, in another man’s mind as well: Joey Elias, who himself had escaped through England to Canada and who was strangely drawn to my grandmother’s enemies the Drukens. So in one instant, two centuries of divisions were firmly entrenched, trenches fashioned for a century more.

Elias was after the same projector, but my grandfather managed to get it first, a mere ten minutes before Elias himself came with the money—from his friend (and silent partner) Mr. Harris of the Royal Bank, newly arrived in town. Both looked upon my grandparents’ marriage with a good deal of self-righteous disdain, as did much of the populace. Elias’s failure only solidified the disdain.

“Mr. Elias—he dead,” my grandfather was fond of saying as he walked about the house, drinking his gin-and-beer concoction, browsing through Mr. Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
.

Our first theatre, the Regent, was down a gravel lane and stood with its back to the town. It had been built as a feed shed, and was bought by my grandfather for three hundred dollars. There were seven benches in front of the small square screen my grandfather had constructed, and at first most of the customers were men. My grandparents’ first movie was a Tom Mix, and when he fired his gun, fellows from the woods who had come out to watch this display in a rather taciturn fury fell over backwards, shouting, “Me Christ, he’s shootin’ at me!” and scrambling over each other to find the exit. When they came back upon the theatre the next night, one brought his own revolver, to “pay Tommy back,” and was talked out of it by my grandfather, who said he would only be “killing the air—and Tom would remain Tom.”

This was not laughed at by my grandfather, for why would he laugh at those things that were natural, in support of what to most was unnatural? But he wrote a piece in the paper about how these sights were possible, on what small frames in a band of film they sat. As the months passed along, and winter came again, and more people were informed about trains seeming to come out of the air and pretty girls showing their corsets, more people came—and into this mix were the young women who had idols like Clara Bow and lovers like Valentino.

The silver screen brought our forefathers a view of New York, London, and Boston that many had never seen, and showed the Keystone Kops running about ragtag streets far away, and Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle. The benches were replaced by seats and a carpet, and a refreshment stand was built. The price of admission was ten cents and the Regent became known as the dime.

The Dime flourished as few things did, and gave my grandparents the life they wanted. And it influenced people more than they would like to admit. The blacksmith because of his proportions became known as Pond Street Fatty, after Arbuckle, and a young girl who had a peek-a-boo hat believed she was the spitting image of Clara Bow, and to her beau, who cut hair in the square and shaved my granddad clean, she was.

But Mr. Elias bided his time, thinking that at death’s door Grandfather would find it too taxing to run an enterprise such as a theatre and sell out. Yet night after night my grandparents played their instruments wildly and brilliantly against the backdrop of silent actors cavorting on the screen. To those early goers to our theatre, my grandfather seemed possessed. And after six luckless months Mr. Elias, who had opened his own little theatre, called the Biograph, went to visit the house of his opposition.

The afternoon was sweltering and light shadows flitted on the wall as the blinds blew forward in a gust of July wind, and my grandfather swiped at motes of silent dust every now and again. My grandfather was dressed in a wide-lapel suit and a housecoat, with his pockets bulging with strange collectibles, pins, buttons, Boer War medals, that he rubbed for good luck. Mr. Elias, holding his hat, his pin-striped suit also of a variety found in the 1923 summer catalogue, watched him with some dismay, and thought, as he admitted later, the old boy was bonkers. Mr. Elias humoured this insanity as best he could, and was to comment later that “all the Kings are insane—and George was the most insane of them all.”

“It’s horrible about your illness,” he said after a time.

“My illness—what’s so horrible about it? In illness you’ll sometimes find—as in war—a horrible beauty is born.” My grandfather gazed at Elias with a peculiar expression. Then he shoved a teapot forward for Elias to have tea.

“You’ll probably find, Joey,” he said after a moment, glancing through the drawn venetian blinds as he spoke, “it will not be any more horrible than yours will be—when it comes, which it will. Would you like a cupcake?”

Elias went home very distressed at the situation but willing to make some kind of an offer to amalgamate the two theatres under his control.

“Ah, that I were in England now that spring is here,” my grandfather was overheard to have said that afternoon. Elias took this as a sign that the old man wanted to get the hell back to a place where he could be buried.

So while King was still alive, invalid though he was, Mr. Elias visited him on three more occasions. It was during that long, awful summer, when noise and light and heat bothered my grandfather excessively, that Elias was at the door. He was willing to buy the theatre for a fair price so King would be able to go back home to merry old England if he wanted. Elias brought over a nice reclining chair, for the “old boy” and some slippers for the “old boy” to scuff about the house in.

But Elias did not offer a fair price, for he had never before been an agent of fairness, and it was impossible for him to be one now. If he had, my grandfather surely would have sold—although returning to England was not an option.

Joey Elias waited for Mr. King to sell the theatre to him. He waited for three weeks. He delivered news on departing ships and waited word on the price of sale.

“The
Lucy Corker
is going back. Why don’t you try to be on her, h’m?”

But it did not happen.

The last time he went to King’s house to reason with him, King was gone. Where? Janie would not say. Well, when would he be back? Janie did not know. Well—shouldn’t a dying man stay put? Well, said Janie, a dying man who does not know his options should.

Well, if he had gone without settling, he had gone off his stick, Elias said to his friends Phil Druken and Leon Winch later that evening. Both of these men loved his company because he supplied the town with rum—and on late nights, if you were in good with Elias you could get a drink. Phil Druken’s young girl Rebecca sat on his knee and listened, with rapt attention, to the names of people, which is what she seemed to know more than any other child.

She looked at Mr. Elias in a peculiar way this night. For only a child still, she remembered him. It was Mr. Elias who had sold her mother medicine during the flu—sulphur mixed with milk, and rotted herring to ward off the germs—for her little brothers, the Druken triplets. The first triplets ever born in our town, they are known as the Druken triplets by the middle-aged grandchildren of those who once knew them. They were two years of age when the flu hit, and Putsy their oldest sister was seven, and Rebecca, who loved them most, was four. She put her faith in Mr. Elias and went outside to play.

Elias sold their mother, Patricia, these cures, posturing concern. They drank the tea, and walked about with rotted herring hanging by twine from their necks, and were found in an upstairs bedroom dead in a heap.

Elias, walking back and forth in front of Rebecca now, was saying that he did not want anything for himself—far be it from him to ever want something for himself—but there must be a limit to all of this. Janie had a son—“that little squirrel-faced fellow”—so how could she take care of a business as well as a son?

“Yes, yes,” he said, disheartened, “it’s impossible for her to operate the theatre
and
be a mother.” Then he looked up under his eyebrows and shook his head sadly. He saw Rebecca staring at him, fixedly, and smiled. “Come here, Rebecca, and give Uncle Joey a hug,” he said.

THREE

No one remembers the town being disrespectful to Mr. King—people liked him, and went to the theatre regularly. If anything, the respect the town had for him transferred to Janie, and she was held in esteem as well.

Still, once Mr. King’s impending death became apparent—that is, by Christmas other things came into play for those few who might gain by his demise. That he was dying was a shame. However, the other life, the life that tells people someone else’s death is not a shame if it opens a door for themselves, was now opened. On Monday the tenth of January, Elias made inquiries into the state of the theatre, and met with the manager of the bank, certain that he would make the bank an offer on the Regent—for the Regent must fall into the bank’s hands once King succumbed. Janie would give it up, wouldn’t she, and go back to living a normal life? Besides, she was expecting again, so it was said.

Mr. Harris must have realized that the widow Janie King would not be a reliable sort to take over after the death of her husband, with one small child and another to be born. Elias added that her husband knew this himself. The bank must take it over, and he, Elias, might, if the price was right, buy it.

Yet Janie might have the ludicrous idea that she could run the place after King died. So, Elias added, now was the time to put a lock on the theatre door—seal it up before she got that chance.

“I see,” Harris said, as men say who don’t see at all. “You think so—board it up.”

“It has been done before,” Elias said. “Besides, the Biograph really is the legit place for the big Hollywood pictures. I can combine the two theatres to make one—it will save your bosses a headache—and you know the town can’t support two places.”

Elias liked to assume that Janie had done something deceitful to her husband at the moment he was dying. What that something was, Harris himself didn’t know. But Harris nodded, stood up, and closed the door. Perhaps, Elias suggested, she was hiding him so he could not sell the place.

“Is that what is going on?” Harris demanded,

“I am not going to say anything,” Elias said.

“Then there is the mortgage,” Harris said. “I have never lost a mortgage in my life—but you see, I didn’t give this mortgage to her—nor did I give it to him. Old McGrathon did.”

Elias threw up his hands.

“Well, that’s just it. I feel helpless fighting a woman—because I don’t want to, but you see, if I don’t, her theatre’ll put us both out of business. I spoke many times about it with King—three times he was ready to sell and three times she says no. Now her husband is too weak to make any decision and decides to go back home or wherever. What we need is to do something for her so she can have some little money. I’ve known George King—he’s an entertainer just like me—I understand him—I understand the practicality of the English. She doesn’t!”

He said this though there were no mortgage arrears, and Harris agreed because he was terrified that there might be if she took over.

“I would have to get head office in Montreal to sign on that—to board her up,” Harris said.

“I know it’s a bother to you,” Elias said.

“Oh, no—I can have it wired by Tuesday.”

Elias glanced bitterly out the window, at snow falling against the paved street, and the flame from his lighter flickering on in the dusk. Then he sat back, legs spread, and puffed on his smoke, full of expectation and life. The intention was for both of them to show each other their solicitude for the woman.

But on Tuesday morning a storm covered the river. All businesses were locked, schools shut, and the telegraph office was blocked with snow. By now it was announced that King was dying.

Hearing from Usoff Assoff, the man who had come with his blind horse up the street to deliver coal, that they were thinking of shutting her theatre, Janie knew she had to act. She was twenty-five years of age and walking past the couch where her husband was dying, she took the shotgun and said to my father, “I’m going to the hall. Take care to stay here—I will try to get to the maid.”

Janie, however, was not dispirited and walked through the snow toward the theatre with a shotgun under her arm.

She meant to guard the Regent against anyone from the Biograph or the bank, armed with a double-barrelled 12-gauge my grandfather had bought for bird hunting. And she had something else—she had the deed and the will that stated the business was now hers alone.

Harris, who did not get the go-ahead from the head office until Wednesday morning, found her there, pointing the shotgun at him. Shaken, he hurried back to the bank.

“She pointed the gun at me—a lunatic—it might have gone off, and then where would I be? Well, there you have it—I wouldn’t be, would I?”

The mortgage payment was made that afternoon. It was brought to the bank by Walter McLeary, her projectionist and cousin. Harris informed Mr. Elias that his hands were tied for the moment.

“How hysterical she is,” Elias said sympathetically. “But something has to be done! This is not the time to be weak—understand me, Harris—not the time. I have heard her shotgun is not a British but a Russian make. I’m not sure of her politics. Are you, Harris? She might be one of those Irish troublemakers we hear about from time to time.”

At Elias’s insistence Harris telephoned the sheriff.

This Russian-made shotgun was by the next day the topic of the town. What did she have a Russian gun for—what possessed her?

This talk was something that informed Mr. Harris, who was a moral man, in the sense that bankers are moral in their circumspection about whom they entrust money to. A hidden anger about his position at this lowly bank enveloped him. In his thwarted inner life, she was the key.

For the next two days, Hanna Jane—or Janie, as she was now becoming known—stayed at the theatre. She sat in the chair with the shotgun across her lap, under a lurid one-sheet showing Valentino. He was gone too, Valentino, his art dead at the age of thirty-one, with a gaze and a cigarette, and champagne on ice.

The phone rang. It was the police.

“How did you find me?” she asked.

She was joking. They weren’t.

The police demanded that she give the shotgun over and stop the nonsense. They called her father, Jimmy, and he, plied with drink, came forward, his face pale, and pointed a finger at the theatre.

“Come on out—be sensible—come out, girl, and talk about this. Yer livin’ life the way of perdition—perdition is all around you now—and it was what I was telling ya at yer marriage ya’d fiddle and fart until ya found perdition—”

She said only when she felt safe would she.

“I am yer father—can’t you be safe with me?”

“Never!”

“Ah, yer an ungrateful girl—an ungrateful girl, Hanna Jane—”

He would look behind him to other men, shake his head, grin, turn back and ask her if she might be so kind as to loan him some money for a nice Canadian horse.

“Not on yer life.”

“Ah, yer an ungrateful girl, Hanna Jane,” he would say, scratching at his woollen pants while Harris and Elias kept telling him to keep at her and wear her down.

She hollered that she would fire at anyone who came to take the theatre from her, and die with gun in hand, as her husband, she was sure, had wanted to do years before in the mud of France.

“Honest ta fug, she’s as mad as a defrocked nun,” Jimmy said, looking back at them. By now the whole town had gathered to listen. There was Phil Druken, drinking and shaking his head. There was Putsy Druken and her sister, Rebecca, who had run to see them hang Janie. That she was not to be hanged disappointed them all, the children especially.

There was only one small detail. She had forgotten all about my father, her son. At midnight of the second day she locked the theatre doors (there were two, outside and inside) and went to her house.

When Janie came home from the theatre, she could see George King’s arm hanging down from the couch, his white pyjama sleeve embroidered with gold trim. He was just forty years of age and had been on Canadian soil eight of those.

My grandmother never shed a tear, for he was, she said, at peace, and gone to heaven if there was one. The maid, however, had fled as soon as the man had died, and had left my father alone, to sit in a room for six hours with his dead father. Janie went quickly to her son, kissed him and made a cup of tea.

That night Janie sat in the room with her dead husband’s belongings, clutching an old cane of his. Sleet fell on the roof above, which made all his collected trivials noticeable as she stared about the room. The house too was a monument against her and George. Bought by two upstarts who thought they were something, it was a house unfinished, the upstairs dark and undone, and two rooms downstairs left with studs bare. My father had faithfully awaited her return.

He often remembered her from his vantage point at the far end of the room. She was haughty and beautiful. She wore a black dress, done up with purple buttons, a dress she could never have hoped to afford three years before. She sat staring into the dark, unblinking, and every now and again she would look at him for a solid minute. He would smile timidly, and she would look away.

In the morning the minister from the Anglican church called her with some information about the service. It was a grey day, just right for such an event. Earlier, a casket had been delivered and the body had been taken away. Her one friend, Walter P. McLeary—her cousin, who was twenty-three at that time—did the legwork and got done what had to be done.

I was told that she worried about the last rites. So she sent the maid, who had returned that morning, to find a priest. The priest, called O’Hanrahan, came as a service to her. He asked for some clothes of the deceased so he could give them to the needy.

He said that he was uncertain about an Anglican going quickly to God. She answered with good dignity that no one knew God’s arrangements with Mr. King but himself.

The drawing room was small, and very British. It had the British flair for clutter in leisure. It seemed that anyone in it should talk with an accent. It contained Mr. King’s leather-bound books, which Janie never read. It contained his piano, which he had brought from England on tour, a picture of his schoolmates, all dead in the war. It contained his coin collection, started long before he crossed the Atlantic. She closed his drawing room and locked it, and put the key in her pocket.

When Janie left the house, the sky was bright and the windy air was filled with smoke. The day was warm for late January, and the snow was thick and pure white. There was no funeral procession. But Joey Elias went with about two hundred others to pay their last respects. A small stone carving to Mr. King’s memory was erected later in the year, and overlooked a part of the Miramichi that stretched toward the sea.