River of the Brokenhearted (31 page)

“I must stop drinking,” he said, “at least for a time—it’s unsavoury to have your nurse dead drunk in the middle of the day.” He wiped Dingle’s tired and pinched little mouth. “Besides, if I have to see about a new medicare number and getting pills, I can’t be slurring my words as I approach the authorities. What would they think? They would think I wanted medication for myself. They have no sense of humour—most of the bastards are my former fellow Rotarians.”

He did stop. He put the cork in the bottle. Sometimes he would clip a flower or two and put it in Dingle’s room. He cleaned spittle and changed diapers, and said not a word to me, who couldn’t do it. He dressed in immaculate fashion and curried favour to get what he needed for his “stepfather.” He took him for drives and wheeled him out among the petunias to take the sun. He read to him the stories of Sir Walter Scott in his amazing voice, pausing now and then to tuck a blanket about the man, and turning pages with a practised finger, until the old lad fell asleep.

He informed Dr. Mahoney, who had always made much of the fact of her relationship with Dingle and how much she loved him, and asked her if she wanted to come up and sit with him awhile.

She did come, and held his hand, and spoke to him, tears running down her face, her hair just as severe, her forehead seeming to thrust out.

Father told her he wanted and needed help, and smoking a cigarette, looking over at a pile of old magazines on the bookshelf, he asked for it.

“What kind of help?”

“Well, if it is possible, Dr. Mahoney—excuse me, I mean Abigail—perhaps some help changing his diapers and feeding him one meal a day. I can handle most other things. You could sit with him a few hours. Perhaps at night, if he needs to be moved or put on a pot—”

“Change diapers.” Abigail smiled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, without being indelicate, Mr. Dingle needs his diapers changed. But since you were once his best friend, in a way, and taught him to ‘groove’ in a new way, and grow his sideburns, so to speak—Abigail, his sideburns didn’t do that much for him—Abigail in a way!”

She did not come back.

Ginger helped with money and time, and came over every day for a while, wearing her light blouse, diamond earrings, and summer skirt that seemed in our house of dark furniture and old wars to embody the naïve and terrible wonder of the outside world that blew in with summer gusts from the door. But then she forgot, or had other things to concern her, so we were left alone.

We hired a day nurse who had a gruff sense of detachment and humour and carried Dingle back and forth from the bath to the bed.

The old house with the flowers and seashells, and nature trails concocted by the former artillery officer, had a visitor from our past.

Some nights Dingle would wake and scream, “The bastards are coming! Kill them all!”

And my father would rush in to him, yelling, “A fine idea! Kill them all. They who would not let you move beyond that basement room.”

Once I woke up to a scuffle in the kitchen in early morning. Dingle was trying to down all his pills before breakfast. He was hunched over with his bib on, fighting for his pills and trying to bite my father’s nose. A week later, I saw my father hobbling about the living room, rubbing his leg.

“Got me with his damn wheelchair—came at me like a tank,” he said, looking up at me, his face showing as much inquiry as mine.

I realized that at night, when the streets were dark and lovers lay abed, as Thomas might say, my father was having a horrible time. I stayed up with him, and took turns, but there was a night when I went into the kitchen and saw blood on Miles’s face, where he had been scratched almost to the bone.

“He was almost sure I was a Winch,” Father explained.

The next day, Dingle remembering nothing about this, obediently sat at the table awaiting his boiled egg.

But something else occurred. It was said that because of this day nurse (whom Ginger had helped pay for) we had “alienated” Dr. Mahoney. In fact, the day nurse, a Mrs. Lovett, hated her and had threatened to slap Mahoney if she was rude to Mr. King again.

“You are—whoever you are—a damn fraud,” she said.

We had not known that this Mrs. Lovett was a downriver Lovett and her sister’s girl was Kipsy Doyle.

“There’s something not right about Mahoney,” she told us one day. “I don’t know what it is, but I am certain it is something.”

Father, smoking a cigarette, asked, “Do you think she is a trained psychologist, as she wants us to believe?”

“She’s trained at something, and she’s exceptionally bright—and very dangerous,” Mrs. Lovett said, but would not go any further than that. Mrs. Lovett came even when Dad’s money to pay her had gone.

In the months he lived with us, some eighteen thousand dollars was spent. But poor Dingle did not know this, sitting in the corner in his Hank Snow hat.

And one day, after picking up the fallen leaves in the garden and bringing them over to the compost, I came about the corner near the snug green hose and saw Mr. Dingle, frightened of falling as he stepped among the spent coltsfoot, hugging my father for dear life, and Miles, somewhat unsteady on his feet himself, and whose cheek still bore the lashed scar, saying:

“Don’t worry, my man—I got you—I got you, and I won’t ever let you go.”

“You’re not that Mahoney boy who knocked me with the pan?”

“No, my good fellow. I am the little English King you knew when you were young.”

Dingle died in November. It was a bright, clear day, and children were off to school, children the age he was when he joined the Canadian forces and went overseas and fought like a son of a bitch in the trenches that they leased from France.

In his last rambling days he was still searching for something, fortune or peace or his daughter, I do not know.

He was buried alongside my grandmother with almost the exact same funeral entourage. He seemed to be the very last link to that former age, and my father was surely adrift.

PART VII

ONE

My father, having exhausted what funds the sale of the theatre had afforded him, and realizing that Ginger controlled the rest, and dispensed with them as she pleased, took a job as a crossing guard about fourteen feet from his house—which meant at times he could be a crossing guard while sitting in his house and staring out the window, through the shrubs and beyond the front-yard birdbath, assortment of homegrown flowers, down to the tired driveway shale.

He would open the door and signal the cars to stop. “There’s a crosswalk,” he would call, waving a red kerchief, and then slam the door shut again. I told him this was not the best way to endear himself to the school board.

“They are a bunch of hacks,” he told me. “School board—politics for the sake of it.”

Out he would go, dressed in bright blazer with black buttons, with rotund sign, and in practised comedy he would lead kids across the street who did not want to go.

Our house, that fall, was becoming more dilapidated than ever. A squalid yellow bungalow, haphazardly standing amid a multitude of flower lakes and gardens intertwined, a foundation that was crumbling, and numbers of small detached hothouses stretching their way to the back fence, hothouses built or reclining together over the years. One can see Mr. King’s fantastic hope of making it into a kind of fairy land. One might see my groping upon it as well. A place of conical seashells and whispering lilacs blowing all our sadness away; shrubs named for Elizabeth Whispers, flowers named for Georgina, and a potted plant in a wire hanger for Ginger.

For Ginger to have stolen away Gus Busters those long days ago was not an astonishing feat. She could have done it with one subtle movement of her hip, or arching forward to whisper in his ear, driving with her light-as-breath smile every thought of Kipsy Doyle into the dustbin of history. I thought of this the last time I saw Gus Busters, getting on a bus at midnight, on his way to Moncton to try and start his life over, to get away from the reputation he now had in our town as a hopeless former husband and a snitch to the police.

My father was worried. Dingle’s funeral took much of what was left. Often he would be seen staring at Dingle’s old wheelchair and remembering some terrible day. “Why did he wear such large shoes, when he had nowhere to go?” he said one day.

At other times he would be dressed to go out of an evening, sure to make a splash, he said, in a nice pinstriped tie and grey-flecked jacket, only to find that he was once again short of funds.

“Can you loan me a ten-spot, Wendy, my dear boy?”

“No, I cannot.”

“Is there anything we can drink here?”

“There was a pint of cooking sherry.”

“There is no more.”

“Some debilitating aftershave?”

“Gone as well—all gone.”

“When do you get paid, Father?”

“Pardon me?”

“When do you get paid?”

“I have quit my job. I have quit. How many matinees have I run in my life?”

“Thousands.”

“Thousands are right. Well, you see, I will not be cursed at by a six-year-old”

“A six-year-old.”

“Absolutely—she was six.”

“She?”

“Absolutely, she was a she.”

“What did she say?”

“I simply said, ‘How are you this morning, my darling little miss?’ and she said to me, ‘Go fuck yourself, ya prick,’ as she lugged her burdensome book bag across the street.”

“Times have changed,” I said.

“They have at that, Wendy, they have at that. Besides that, the book bags are getting more and more burdensome, and those dark school hours never ending, and the mentors less and less helpful. Perhaps if she knew who I was, that I was Miles King who once owned the theatre, who fed her mom free jelly beans—”

“Then she would recant,” I said. “Then she would recant.”

“By gum,” he said.

During the late fall he would spend days looking through the old cracked pictures he had got from Maurice the photographer, staring at them and pondering what he or his mom might have been doing at the moment the picture was snapped.

He would then, to save himself from despair, speak about the Grand, the plush seats, the carpet running along the aisles to the bottom floor, the great gold curtain that folded against itself at night. He would remember with exquisite aplomb Vincent Price. And he would remember people coming to those movies in a way no one did today. It was more than just an attraction then, it was a counterbalance to their entire lives.

And of them all Bogart was his favourite male actor, Audrey Hepburn his favourite female.

“But,” I said, “you are far more like Olivier.”

He paused, trying to get a drag from his rolled cigarette, and whispered, “Out, out—all out. Life but a walking shadow,” and left the room. It was as if the entire Grand and sixty-five years of movies were swallowed up behind him as he moved.

Now former businessmen, his fellow Rotarians looked askance when he went for his walks, shaking and trembling; trying to avoid him, for he would stop them and say, “As you know, I have been a principal shareholder of a major business, and I will be again, so if you could spot me a dollar or so, I will take it under advisement that you have been good to me. Not only will I take it under advisement, I will do more—much more, I will take out an advertisement that you have been good to me. Your name will be published beside mine, and over time our names will be synonymous with goodness, kindness, and truth.”

He sold his regimental pin, and drank the reprieve that it afforded.

This was Janie King’s boy at sixty, trembling and reduced to begging, just as his grandfather had been. I would bring him home, but he would be gone again, secure in his fatalism and his assurance that there was some mystery to solve.

Once he was tripped crossing a street. He hobbled home along the sidewalk, his coat and pants ruffled, and his hand cut.

“So,” he told me, “it has come to this. I am the almost perfect reincarnation of one Jimmy McLeary, for not only the imbecilic finery of the town smirk in my general direction when I go about asking for a dollar, but the fierce and malicious and poorly coiffed riffraff as well.”

There was something else that he had, besides his paintings (which he could not sell or even give away) and his three-page essay on his Blue Bead lilies that he had revised sixty-four times and had paid to have typed on transparent typing paper. A man came one night in March, and went away with it in its case.

The man was leaving as I walked up to the house.

I found my father with the little pile of money before him.

“How did you get the money?”

At first he would not tell me, but I became so angry that he finally confessed. He had sold his service pistol.

“Well, he has mice in his shed and he has to get rid of them somehow, Wendy—so what am I supposed to do?”

“You are not supposed to sell your service revolver,” I said. “To the very man who tripped you—to Ray Winch—Noel Druken’s bodyguard.”

That was something Miles had not known. He had forgotten all about Winch.

“That was Winch? That was
the
Winch—the last of the Winches?”

“That was he. Winch whose task it is to take care of Noel.”

“You don’t say.”

We both stared at the crumpled-up money.

“Don’t you see,” I said, “Noel wanted that pistol away from you, for you told the barber you would use it on him.”

“On the barber?”

“No, not on the barber—on Noel—and he has bided his time and sent along Mr. Winch to get the gun from you—he has taken your pistol—” I yelled. “And Noel will marry Ginger for sure.”

“Well, we cannot pick and choose our relatives, now, can we?” Miles said, defensively, drubbing his fingers on his knee, and then brushing away some imaginary lint. “If only we could—some industrialist millionaire or some such—beverage maker, perhaps.”

“Dad, this is the worst of the worst mistake,” I said, almost in tears.

“Oh, I am certain I have made worse mistakes,” he countered.
“Plan 9 from Outer Space
over
Star Wars
, with Harrison Ford, when I come to think of it.”

He looked at me, and nodded in sharp compliance with my judgment, and in self-scorn. Then he stood, straightened his jacket like a gentleman, tersely turned, and went into his bedroom with the money clasped tightly in his hand. It was awful to be so reduced, and to remember what a brandishing of promise we once had, a few short years before.

We began to drink that very money away the next morning, both of us—although I stayed in my basement room while I drank mine.

As spring came and the wedding approached, Dad was increasingly bothered by the old pictures he had acquired from Maurice’s studio. Hundreds of them, without names or dates, lay across his bed. He looked at them through a magnifying glass that he had received as a promotional gimmick from an ancient Sherlock Holmes movie staring Basil Rathbone. At least thirty shoe boxes crammed with pictures.

“It will be the first Druken–McLeary wedding since 1791,” he told me. “That was a mistake, and this one will be as well. Our paths have crossed before, my good man—yes—and not so many years ago. Well, two hundred. I doubt this time if we will be hanged, yet I am sure some of us should be—and you see this is the fodder for intellectual play—our families hanged when innocent, and a short two hundred years later applauded when guilty. That’s progress for you!”

Then early one Saturday morning he came out of his bedroom, and laid an old black-and-white on the kitchen table.

“It’s the tent—where I went to see the monkey show.”

“That very day?”

“I don’t know.”

“That means you might be inside the tent right at that moment,” I said, smiling, thinking it all wonderful for a second.

“Just over on the right—you can see two of the children’s legs.”

I looked at the small stockinged leg of a child being whirled about, up and down in a circle of joy a half-century before.

He went back to his bedroom and closed the door. Thirty minutes later he came out again.

“But if it was raining, it might have been the last shot he took that day—everyone running for their cars.” He paused, looking at the picture again. “I’m not looking for Georgina,” he said, “if you think I am.”

“Who, then?”

“Rebecca.”

“What do you mean?”

“One second of frame for fifty years—from anywhere I could find it—”

“Why?”

“She took my sister that day.”

I stared at him.

“No, I’m perfectly sane—I think. She loved Georgina, not me, and coveted everything my mother had. Georgina wasn’t looking for gold or anything people imagined or put in the paper. Nor did I abandon her, as people have long told me I had. She was taken from me, to get back at Janie. She slipped and fell, and that was that.”

“How can you know?”

“I can’t.”

“Then don’t talk about it.”

“Right,” he said, laying the photo aside.

He cut himself a half a grapefruit and, putting a tiny bit of sugar on it, began to eat.

“Only one small incident tells me that I am right,” he said, laying a seed aside with his spoon and looking up at me. “I did not remember anything about this until one night Dr. Mahoney came into the Grand with Ginger by the arm. Then I started to remember it, slowly, little by little. Perhaps I drank to forget it.”

I did not answer him.

“Only one small incident in my entire life—are you listening, Wendy?”

“I am listening.”

“Well then—do you want me to continue?”

“Sure.”

“Good. It’s been slowly coming back to me since that evening. I was jolted into a clarity about something—I’m not sure it is everything, but something. Rebecca had me by the hand one day, and took me to Joey Elias’s. I believe that if it wasn’t for Putsy at the door she wouldn’t have let me go home—she would have taken her chances trying to get money from Janie. But the way Dr. Mahoney held Ginger and the way Rebecca held me was exactly the same. I don’t mean somewhat the same, I mean exactly—the way she turned in her leg and crooked her elbow—which means that they are the same person.” Here he paused to spit another seed on his spoon.

“Well, if that’s true, how the hell is she going to slip up,” I said, “after fifty years?”

He kept eating his grapefruit, and then he shook his head slightly and said, “Because she wants to—in a way she has to. That’s one of the main reasons she has come back—to prove in the end she is Rebecca, right when we least expect it.”

“To tell you?”

“Yes, she has to tell me in some way what she did, to show how much more clever she is than my mom.”

“Like Moriarty,” I said, staring at the magnifying glass.

“No, no. Just like Rebecca, poor distant cousin of Janie.”

“Cousin Bette,” I said.

“Who?”

“Balzac.”

“Ah well—Balzac,” he said. “But you see, there is still in her that spark of decency, the very human longing to be caught.”

“Raskolnikov.”

“Who knows if we can find the literary equivalent?”

He seemed dissociated from what he was saying, as if he was looking down upon himself from the ceiling and he was pushing the child’s carriage across the fields. The early-morning wine coupled with grapefruit, perhaps.

Still, I had to tell Ginger, in private, and she decided for once to keep it in private. We met across the river, at a restaurant close to the golf course where my father once thwacked his rounds.

“Perhaps we can get Dad psychiatric help,” I advised.

“We asked this before when Mommie was alive and he didn’t go,” Ginger said. “I don’t know what happened to him as a child, but many men grow up with domineering mothers. You cannot blame this on Dr. Mahoney, who has no idea what in heck he is talking about—except to say it is a way to dominate me even more.”

“I believe so,” I said.

I saw the light reflected in her eyes, and realized how fragmented our lives had been.

Ginger was willing to pay so Dad could get help. But the help he needed at a private clinic would cost thousands. I told her the first thing I must do was persuade Dad to take the help.