River of the Brokenhearted (33 page)

“I am so.”

“You are worse than the worst than the worst, as far as I’m concerned. Gary Fallon is better than you, and I am glad he took Mommie out. I am glad, do you hear—I am glad.”

No answer.

The tall grass was waving, and somewhere someone walking home, in the thick broken-hearted silence.

“I don’t mean that you’re the worst.” For a moment I could not go on. “I don’t mean you are the worst. I don’t mean that about Gary Fallon either.”

(Peevish reply.)

“Well, that’s what you said.”

“I didn’t mean it.”

“You said about Gary Fallon, you just said you were glad Mommie went out with him. You just said it.”

“Didn’t mean it.”

“And how do you know what I was like when I was a boy? You don’t know. How do you know how many times I was beaten and fought back and tried to protect Georgina? And tried to protect her and everything—and how do you know what I know—what cloth of progressiveness Mahoney has hidden her hide under? Don’t you have any understanding? You don’t know what I know—you do not know what I know, sir!”

“No, I don’t—and I’m sorry.”

“Well, let’s lose our identity and all of us become a bunch of Drukens, for they are Drukens even though you might think they are Mahoneys. So I will lose what little identity I have left—such as it is.”

“No—I don’t want that! I’m sorry—I should not have said what I did. It was said it haste.”

“Pardon?”

“I said, it was said in haste.”

“I don’t mind what you say about the people you know, and about me either, Wendy, for I have long been used to spite and false candour from the herd. But I tell you this—I am a gentleman.”

“I know.”

“And I will tell you one more thing.”

I am silent. Silence reigns in the house for almost an hour. For almost an hour I think he is long, long in alcohol-induced sleep.

“She will slip up,” came a whisper, like a tinge of horror across the carpet into my dark, soundless room.

THREE

My father said one time that among the refined, among the privileged, is a certain feeling that crassness has no place.

“So when it is seen—and it is seen—as in Kate Croy in
Wings of the Dove,”
he said, “then is an added dimension of humanity laid down.”

“What?” I asked.

“The common and universal magnet toward moral corruption that shows pettiness in the refined as a stain—yet forgiven as old-world virtue in certain settings.”

But with Dr. Mahoney, crassness was expected, he said. “And the overlay of that,” Father reminded me, “is to bully us into accepting it as a sign of vitality and a kind of moral virtue as well, that only the naïve—which is supposedly ourselves—you and I, Wendy, my dear—would not embrace—but is seen as experience in life’s terrible lessons, which are promoted as necessary to understanding the very nature of what they themselves tell us is virtuous. It makes us middle-class lackeys, doesn’t it? We are the prudes if we hesitate to embrace their world. Yet they rely upon us not to be as quick as they in embracing it—for if we do, we will know it as well as they, and they can no longer be certain of our hauling the wool over our own eyes, as Ginger and Gus have. Do you follow?”

“I do not know.”

“Of course both groups seek the same thing in the end.” He looked at me a long moment, disappointed that I did not grasp so quickly what he was saying.

“Money, son—both groups seek damn money from those whose blood they suck.”

Though my father loved Henry James, I could not get myself though
Wings of the Dove
. I left it on my bed stand to accumulate dust as I set about destroying my life in bars.

Mahoney had been forced into action—by those phone calls from Cassandra. Forced to move much quicker than she would have preferred. Right at the moment when everything she had ever planned was coming to fruition, there was this catch: she was forced to rely upon someone else’s idea. So everything for our poor doctor, in spite of a life of planning, was now up to whimsy.

Mahoney’s proposition had come when Ginger was alone on an afternoon filled with rain. She was having a cup of tea out of Gram’s old teapot when Mahoney came in to see her. The doctor was nervous, and whenever she was nervous she looked angry. She had been forced to see Fallon, for Cassandra now had something on her, just as she once had something on Joey Elias.

Gary Fallon had taken her into his confidence on condition that she come up with some money very soon. She had met him in the Palace Bar, and now his idea consumed her. For, even though she did not think of it herself, it was a good idea. It was easy; it might be perfect if it worked.

“We need the money now, before someone else jumps on the idea,” Gary said. “I can very easily carry myself, but I need someone else.”

“Noel will have money once he is married—or at least he’ll have some access to it,” Mahoney said, thinking aloud. “When would you need it—I mean exactly when?”

“You mean you’re not interested in re-establishing Janie’s theatre?”

“No, not at present. I was wanting something else. I was thinking Janie’s theatre is part of the old world—and Ginger has to be delivered from the old world.”

“I can’t risk the wait,” Fallon said, “because Miles wants to re-establish and has others on his side who will convince Ginger—”

“Ginger listens to me,” she said.

“Then you better prove it.”

The small doctor, with a slight hobble in her gait, went back home and spoke to Noel. Would he consider this as an investment?

He shrugged, for he left everything up to her. His plan was to get what he could and go away with Cassie. But he said, “Ginger told me that Miles needs help, and she wants to spend the money on him, to go away and dry out.”

“Really.”

“The idiot thinks you’re someone he knew when he was a boy.”

“I see,” Mahoney said. “Well, I can handle Ginger, as long as you go through with our plan. And remember, it’s Ginger we love.”

Even if the plan was not entirely hers, it was a dream realized. And Ray Winch—one of the few to long suspect who she was—considered her now more brilliant than ever.

If she was who Ray suspected, she had learned on Joey Elias’s knee what must be done to exercise a perfect Trojan horse. It had taken fifty years to establish herself as Joey Elias’s principal protégée. Now she was a master—better by far, Ray acknowledged, than he himself. But what Ray Winch did not realize was this. She had no intention of starting a business at all.

At first she did not speak about the business opportunity. Taking Ginger’s hand, she spoke instead of the theatre, of its grand and wholesome days, of other theatres now disappearing into the gaunt, tabloid kind of movies that existed, a debasement that she said my father had run at the last.

“I am glad we are out of that,” she said, saying “we” circumspectly, even devotionally. Then she added, “Instead of exploitation, why don’t we do something positive—for unwed mothers?”

“Unwed mothers? Well, of course,” Ginger said. The rain pelted down outside. And Ginger was much like the rain. She had just paid for Gus Busters’s rehab treatment in Saint John, where he was now in the Veterans Hospital. He had no one in the world, and Ginger could not refuse. Dr. Mahoney knew about Gus being in the rehab clinic, and had sympathized with Ginger while reminding her that she had other obligations. These obligations were to take care of the funds her grandmother had left her, to do something that her grandmother would be proud of.

“Besides, I think Gus and your brother want to do something together.”

“What do they want?” Ginger asked.

“A disco, a place to go and drink,” Dr. Mahoney said. “You know men. But I need someone with the assets, yes, but also with the verve.”

“Verve,” Ginger said slowly, sugaring her tea and smiling.

“It requires it, it requires a sense of social duty. Of course we will make a lot of money.”

Ginger nodded again.

“Promise me you will keep this from your father.”

“Why? I mean of course, but why?”

“Because of what they intend to do with your money. I mean, it is not up to me, it’s up to you.” She paused. “There is a time when you must stand alone. It is what Janie had to do against her own father.”

“Of course, yes,” Ginger said. Yet she was trembling with a fear she had not felt before. Although Dr. Mahoney herself felt excited and exceptional, and though Ginger didn’t understand why they needed to rush ahead, or even why they needed to keep it from her father, she was sure her friend knew best. The idea of doing something clandestine made it more radical. But why was Ginger afraid—easy—this was exactly the current she feared, under every conversation they ever had—which said that Ginger would someday have to prove herself by spending money.

She had invested much in her relationship with Dr. Abigail Mahoney, and she knew she had lost her opportunity to back out.

The doctor insisted they must act soon—that very night if possible. “There is no time to waste. The first to think of this will be wealthy.”

Ginger and Dr. Mahoney went to a meeting that night. In the back office of the adult video store sat two pudgy middle-aged men she hardly knew—Gary Fallon and a Mr. Conroy. The air was full of cigarette smoke and sweat, the same smell that had greeted my grandmother upon entering the office of Mr. Mahoney of the talking pictures almost sixty years before.

Ginger looked about for Noel, but he was not there.

Learning what the plan was, Ginger was more uncertain. She felt a cold shiver on her arms. But she had promised not to tell her father—and already there was the idea that she was doing something as revolutionary as her grandmother.

Ginger managed to ask, “Aren’t there other, bigger companies?”

“Those are in the States,” Fallon said. “We are in a position to take over the market in Canada.”

“I see—of course.”

She asked if they needed her just for the money.

Dr. Mahoney stood and got Ginger a bottle of water, uncapped it for her and sat back down. “Perhaps you are right,” she said, “but say no and I will leave this building forever and nothing more will ever be said about it.”

The men made no bones about it. Money was the thing she was to bring, and Dr. Mahoney was “allowing” her to. She sensed this gave her the one chance to remove herself. But the wedding was only a few weeks away. And all of Dr. Mahoney’s plans—everything she had worked toward—had come to this. She had managed much, but the greatest of her achievements had been her ability to isolate the young woman sitting beside her.

There was silence.

“If a psychologist likes this, it can’t be bad,” Conroy said.

Ginger sipped her water. It was not water. Dr. Mahoney, sensing her nervousness, had given her gin.

Who would Ginger be betraying if she walked out? A woman who had come back to the river, every bit as noble as Janie King; her future mother-in-law, and a woman who had saved her from a bad marriage. For it was Dr. Mahoney who had saved both her and her mother, and Ginger was loyal if for no other reason. She thought of Gus down in the Veterans Hospital two hundred miles away, and how much she cared for him.

Yet what would happen if she walked out? She doubted they would love her as much as they did now. In fact, it was masterful timing by our psychologist. She knew of the investigation, and she feared Cassandra—now was the moment.

She bravely looked at her future daughter-in-law with concern.

“Perhaps we’d better go,” Mahoney said. “Perhaps you aren’t ready.”

Ginger squeezed the doctor’s hand. “Of course I’m ready.”

“Okay then,” Gary Fallon said. “We’re ready too.”

Fallon stated his case. If they acted quickly they could make a fortune with prophylactics. He was interested in the fortune. Abigail, he assured her, was interested in helping women.

Ginger paused, and then whispered, “Is Gary a nice guy?”

“I wouldn’t introduce you to him if he wasn’t,” Mahoney said.

These three people were salesmen, and they might have been selling her a car.

So it did not matter if Ginger did believe. She wanted to believe. And she thrust the money into her friend’s arms so she could prove she did. For she was compelled to, and this had begun not today or yesterday—but years ago, when the tough little woman had first laid eyes upon her. Ginger remembered their first meeting, and how Dr. Mahoney’s eyes penetrated her soul.

And there was something else Fallon stated to Ginger—in a soothing manner: this, my dear, he said, was morally appropriate—in fact, if making money from this was immoral, then the world had no case, and there was no right or wrong. But if the world said there was right and wrong, good and bad, then this was certainly above all things good! She could go to the reserves and help the First Nations, or to poor people and help, and isn’t that worth devoting time to! How could Ginger not want that?

She blushed and nodded, and looked at Dr. Mahoney, who was staring at her intensely, just as she had the first time they met.

When they went back to the house that night, the first person they saw was Noel, waiting in the den. He looked first at his mother, searching her face, and then at Ginger with a warm, inviting smile. For the first time she saw a conniving look in him, a cringing after his mom’s approval, that was so unlike her father.

Ginger had to believe in her new occupation as radical activity. The doctor, who was her only friend, told her it was.

But my father whispered, in a state of hoarseness after a night of drinking, and lying with a towel to his eyes to stop them from watering, which they did now on a daily basis:

“Wendy, my dear, our Ginger has always been radical. Now she is just the same as the rest. She is just like them. She is playing at being, when before she
was
. Now she is only as a reflection, like Harris was.” He waved the towel. “We have to get her back!”

“We all become like the rest sooner or later,” I said.

“Well,” Miles answered, still shaking the towel in front of his body, “if I can evoke a certain kind of temperament for a certain moment—is not Putsy more radical than the most radical of our new power dressers, the least self-serving of which would still demonstrate selfishness in a grand pox—so is that radical—is the search for power radical—supposedly it is. Supposedly it is supposedly, it is. But my mother never wanted it—and Putsy in some moment of despair chose sacrifice to power and was laughed at, hooted at, and condemned. Only to be seen as a charlatan and condemned—when the charlatans are very rarely condemned. My God, they are given parties and honours and awards, and are rarely condemned—and mankind walking in the rarefied air of the unprincipled who have changed our world and the very nature of truth.”

“Condemned,” I said, willing to listen to him as long as I was able to uncap the bottle and take a drink. (He made a short grapple for it and then let it go.)

“Very much condemned, Putsy was,” he said, watching me pour a glass, “by her parents and by Joey. Envied by Rebecca, thought of as a charlatan by the bishop. And yet, though she healed no one, in a way she healed Uncle Walter of his hump, in a way she healed poor old Phil Druken of his shame, healed Joey Elias—for who prayed for him day and night? At the end he was saved by some intervention of Putsy. The intervention of Putsy—a good name for a play, that is—but you see what had Elias wanted—he wanted peace, like my father had in the end. He did not know how to achieve it. Putsy, who had no power in this world, had given the power away—the power to obstruct and oppress and hurt and destroy. Gave it up, Putsy had—found peace for him in the end.” He looked at me in brilliant sheepishness.

“You mean that?” I said.

“I mean exactly what I say,” he said, sitting up and pointing the sodden towel at me. “Out of the house in Dobblestein’s mill yard came a saint who would never know she was, who had her teeth kicked out of her mouth as a child defending Rebecca, and was fucked by thirteen, and is now gone to her reward—a reward any of us would wish for ourselves, and few if any would work toward—God, would we want her reward unable though to work toward—!!!”