River of the Brokenhearted (35 page)

“Yes, I believe there is a moral here. And you and I, Doctor—well, our lives and our loves are intertwined. The most important people to me are somehow the most important to you.”

“And I’m going to write that book,” she said. “But it won’t be naughty, so you don’t have to fear.”

“You would be the one to do it,” he said, “for you’ve been where we have not been, and you have seen what we have not seen, and you know what we cannot know.”

“Thank you,” she said, with delight.

He smiled as well.

We were home, but he would not get out of the car. He was thinking of something. There was a feeling of pleasant self-destruction in him when he drank. The strange fact was, he was not to be trifled with whenever he decided not to be; and no Noel Mahoney or Ray Winch would ever bother him, once decided.

“I have not read Homer, I have not read Tolstoy,” he said to me. “You have read both.”

“I have.”

“Who am I—Ulysses? Paris?”

I told him instead about Father Sergei, Tolstoy’s hero who never was, and who wandered the last years of his life looking for peace.

“Well, that’s who I will be,” he said. “I will be a hero who never was—like Walter P. McLeary.”

And he opened the door, and we walked in the balking rain toward the house.

For the first time in his life he turned all the lights out. It was the strangest feeling I have ever had.

“You have turned out all the lights,” I said.

“Fine,” he said.

(Pause.)

“What’s wrong—”

“With what—”

“What’s wrong!!!”

“You should not be overly anxious,” he said. “You know what it is. Our poor Ginger married and convinced she is part of the solution to world overpopulation and venereal disease, an AIDS campaign in full blossom. That is what the child has taken to her heart, my prodigal girl. You see, she is a fighter for the right things—even though the reality is so dismal. That’s what idealism tends to be—and what money will they ever make? None at all.”

I did not answer.

“You realize that as well, Wendy?”

“Of course.”

“And what do you think of Noel?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I will tell you about Noel. He does not care a bit for her. In fact, his dislike of her is evident—I assume it will be over shortly. Joey Elias did not get to marry Janie to cramp the style of our business, but Noel got to marry Ginger,” he said almost peevishly as he removed a shoe and let it drop to the floor.

I rose and went into the living room. He was sitting, with his tie still measured in his defining Windsor knot, his pale hands wearing their three rings, his Rolex, keeping time in the translucent airy dark. One shoe still on. One sock impeccable. Thunder had started above his head, about our house—“and happy as the grass was green,” I thought. I sat with him for thirty minutes as he simply stared into silence, holding the bottle of gin without taking a glass.

Finally he said, “She has told me—”

“Told you—What has she told you?”

“She has told me something between her and me that happened forty—no, fifty years ago or more, when I was a boy—no one else would know. She has told me—”

“What?”

“I knew she would,” he said, being mysterious for effect. He opened his gin, picked up a glass, turned it over and poured it a quarter full, and handed it to me with an air of the professional drinker. He took another glass and poured the same amount for himself. Then he reached forward and clinked my glass. “I knew she would.”

We had not, in fifty years, gotten any closer to that night, he told me. She was very clever, yet she could not die without one-upmanship. It was her way, he said, to let the world know how bright she was, or is. It was a confession, really.

“She had to tell me, and I’ve been waiting for it since she came back.”

Detectives, police—no one knew. “Not even Kipsy Doyle,” he said. “Although perhaps Kipsy got close. Kipsy knew things from one era were tied to another.”

With research and months of investigation, he said, we had only gotten to the steps and didn’t, or couldn’t, look down to see what had happened in the old forgotten Regent Theatre. Going back along the street on that Christmas in 1930, we could see someone moving into the dark alley between the Biograph, now only a memory, and Elias’s house, long ago torn down.

“Who was moving there—and what did she have in her hand?” He sat up straight and looked at his jacket sleeves to make sure they were impeccably drawn down.

I shrugged. I knew the question was rhetorical and he would answer himself.

“Rebecca Druken, sixteen years of age,” he said, “holding the Christmas present, for she could never leave nice things alone. It was the clue she took away with her. No one would know of that present except Miles King. And she had to tell me.”

“What present?”

“The present I bought my grandfather for Christmas in 1930. The present I put in his suit pocket at his house that day without even Janie herself knowing.”

“And what present is that?”

“The four-leaf clover Dr. Mahoney was wearing today on her bosom.”

I was more surprised at the word
bosom
than by the four-leaf clover or the idea she might have been under an assumed name and a murderer.

“To celebrate her son’s wedding to my daughter.”

(He paused.)

“Ginger helped her pin it on. I watched them, before I made the toast.”

I turned cold and a shudder went through me, because I remembered it clearly.

“How do you know?” I said. “It could be anything—couldn’t it?”

“I went to get the four-leaf clover with her before Christmas—I had saved my money and waited for her all day to take me to the store. All the way downtown she was irritated, hauling at my hand to keep up. ‘I had no money to get anyone a present when I was yer age,’ she said. I realized then how much she disliked me for that fact. In some ways I do blame her. She has always relied on the fact that those with a little don’t blame her resentment. She tried the four-leaf clover on and said, ‘Your granddad should wear it just like this.’ ”

“But maybe she kept it—stole it then?”

“No,” he said calmly. “I wrapped it. I put it into the pocket of Granddad’s suit jacket when we brought the suit to the house. I put it into his pocket just before I left. I might never have remembered buying it if she had not been so angry with my ability to. It was something that later allowed my heart to go out to Elizabeth Whispers. Does this not prove a Druken in our midst—maybe two?”

“I don’t know,” I said, though I did know.

“I put it in the jacket with his name on it. It was the same jacket he was wearing—the person who hit him over the head took it from him. It is the clue—or one of the clues I knew was out there and could not remember. You see, I did not remember it. I have spent forty years looking at pictures and trying to find out what it was. Today I remembered. Tonight I celebrate that memory.”

Then he added, “Leon Winch might have gone there and hit him, but she went back, to find out for Elias, and she hit him again, to finish him.”

He shrugged, as if to say it didn’t matter if I believed him, drank the gin off in a draught, and poured himself another. He set the glass down and lit a cigarette. He looked with a kind of sprightly amusement at the smoke drifting up into the black between us both.

I paced the floor most of the night. Twice I went to the phone to telephone Kipsy Doyle, or Ginger’s house, the bars, anywhere to let people know, while my father in the background simply said, “It isn’t in a picture after 1938.”

“What isn’t?”

“The store where I bought the clover.”

“So?”

“The family who owned it is dead and gone—everyone is dead and gone—so then they probably wouldn’t have a receipt or any such bill of sale, h’m?”

The next morning I told Dad I was going to confront her about it. It was, after all, about my great-grandfather.

“No—don’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

“She will have an answer so pristine you will probably believe her and not me.”

I went to the house anyway, and sat down with them for brunch. Noel and Ginger were leaving on Gary Fallon’s boat for P.E.I. that afternoon. They were excited, and Noel was still fussing with his hair—he liked it the way his mom did it.

Dr. Mahoney came in from the kitchen with bacon wrapped in a dishtowel. She had repinned the four leaf to her blouse, as a memento to the celebration. I could not face it when I spoke, so I turned a little to the side.

“Where did you get that four-leaf clover?” I asked. There was a momentary pause, and I turned to see her eyes saturated with a kind of analysis—going back over the years, and years, tic-tac-toe of memory dominoes shuffling in her own gymnasium and falling down one by one to come to the moment. But when the moment was found, like ringing the bells in a slot machine, her eyes widened.

“Do you like it?” she said, fingering it slightly and smiling like a little girl.

“Sure,” I said.

“Mommy always has nice things,” Noel said, taking Ginger’s hand.

“Do you want it?” she said suddenly, completely as if she was inspired by kindness toward me but in another way hurrying to get rid of it.

“No,” I said (and then regretted saying this). She looked at the four-leaf clover and then took Ginger’s hand.

“I found it here, in Miles’s room upstairs,” she said, “Who knows how long it was there? Someone told me it was a Christmas present to poor old Jim—Miles bought it or something. I could not think of not wearing it today. Did I do something wrong?”

“Of course not,” I said.

She snapped a piece of bacon and smiled, and moved around the table, talking and laughing about the old days. She looked back at me once, with narrowed, searching eyes. Then she coolly laughed at something Noel said.

FIVE

Some months went by. My sister’s life seemed fine, for there was not a thing she had to do for herself. Dr. Mahoney was always there, still spry at seventy, carting in groceries and making up lists, and helping redo a room for a child, with a grandmotherly devotion. But Ginger discovered things in bits and pieces.

Noel was spoiled, and wanted everything right away. He thought there would be a million dollars instantly. And Ginger felt it was her fault that they did not have a million instantly for him. So by the second month he openly pouted and ignored her, going away to visit someone. And most of the time she was left alone. She took to painting landscapes, and was quite good at it, and went for walks or bicycle rides by herself. Then she began to take yoga.

One day when Ginger came home early from yoga, Ray Winch was standing at the door with the doctor. He turned and saw her, and shook his head.

“What’s wrong?” Ginger asked, looking at him, and turning back to her.

“Woman problems,” she said, biting a strawberry slowly and watching him drive off.

What was wrong was simply that Ginger herself had no idea what was happening to her money.

In the triangle of people who had the most to say about the business, there was something very deliberate happening. Each of these people feared the other would take a good deal of the money and leave when things became difficult. Cassandra was telling each of them that this would be the case. She had levelled with Winch, telling him of Dr. Mahoney’s intentions. She did this hoping Winch would cause a disturbance to prod everyone ahead. “There are probably no French safes at all, Ray,” she told him.

She was also putting pressure on Noel to get what he said he could and leave. If he did not, she would tell the world of their secret marriage.

Gary Fallon, fearing Cassie also and fearing that she would get Noel to rob for her, was the most worried, for the money was the most he had seen. He also knew Dr. Mahoney simply assumed it was hers. “It’s as much mine as it is that bitch’s,” he told Ray Winch one night.

Fallon believed Dr. Mahoney was deliberately trying to sabotage the business and leave with the funds. He tried to watch her and her son like a hawk, but it was impossible.

Only Ray Winch tried to get the business to go. He made phone calls, worked day and night. All the others just wanted to take the money for themselves, knowing by the seventh month there was no way any of them could get the business to work, not because it wouldn’t work, but because of the mistrust they had for each other. Why, each of them deliberated in a private moment, should they sink so much money into a business when the money was already available—staring them in the face?

And thinking this, each one found a legitimate reason to mistrust the other and take his share. Cassandra in her talks to Fallon, who she said was her only link to her husband, whom she loved, told him that she suspected Dr. Mahoney. “She will leave you with nothing,” she said.

Gary, who had known Cassandra from the time she was a child, had reason enough to believe her.

So in the ninth month something terrible occurred. Gary Fallon left them in the lurch, taking forty thousand dollars he was given to use for packaging and distribution of the sample product, leaving the creditors to hold Ginger accountable. He had struck first but he had not taken the largest portion. He could not get hold of that.

This is what Cassandra wanted. Now she begged Noel to take his money before it was too late. Whining and petulant his mother couldn’t stop him. He planned his own business, with halogen lights and controlled heat to grow marijuana to sell in New York State. No one knew about this except Cassandra.

Dr. Mahoney was furious. She wanted him to close down his farm for his own safety. She told him that Cassandra was using them both.

He did not believe her.

“Damn you—they will start an investigation now,” she said. “We only have a few more months before it comes crashing down—so prepare for that—and prepare to leave.”

About this time, Ginger discovered that selling their product in Canada was, because of the provinces’ different regulations, even more difficult than selling it into the States, and in the States they could not compete because they were far too small.

But Dr. Mahoney was in a position where she could not simply take this money and leave as Gary did.

Ginger paced the floor one night, waiting for the doctor to come in. When she did, Ginger started to speak, but the doctor said almost viciously, “Aren’t we too sarcastic. It’s not my fault.”

Ginger had her summer dress on, and a small gold chain I had given her as a wedding present. She was alone in the centre of the room.

“Can we get our money back?” Ginger said. “I mean, if I want out of all of this?”

The doctor stopped on the stairs and said, “How should I know, Ginger?”

Ginger felt her throat catch and she started to weep.

But the good doctor went upstairs and closed her door—where my father used to sleep.

Ginger sat on the loveseat, shaking.

Noel hadn’t been home for more than a moment in a month. Around the living room she could see mementoes of her wedding. And the next day was her first anniversary.

Outside she could see through the trees the Morrissey Bridge opening, and she remembered how Miles had construed an elaborate and complicated equation to prove the span should swing in the other direction. That compelled her to do something, anything. There was no sound in the house. It was as if there was no soul at the top of the stairs.

It took her three-quarters of an hour to climb those stairs built more than half a century before, when her grandmother and grandfather might have contemplated a happy, useful life in among the foxgloves doing the foxtrot. On each step she would stop and look up, wistfully taking the damp hair from her eyes, and brushing her tears away.

Finally at the top she knocked lightly.

“Abigail?” she said. “Are you sleeping or are you angry? Please don’t be angry with me. Please. I’m sorry.”

The door opened, and Dr. Mahoney, taking up the entire width of the door frame, arms spread to both sides and smiling, wearing the T-shirt, with the “I’m a Tough Nut” logo, and her hair covered in a gypsy bandana, said, “I need a good drink—don’t you? I need to get blasted and forget my problems!”

“Yes,” Ginger said automatically. “That’s true—that’s what I need. But we don’t have any.”

“Ha!” Dr. Mahoney said. “I’ll never let you down, girl.”

And she produced a forty-ounce bottle of gin. Though I should hold my tongue, for I have no moral claim on the betterment-by-abstinence crew.

“I love you, Abigail. Don’t you know I find you a cross between Gram and Mom?”

“Of course I do. Can’t you understand? Everyone is so jealous of us, it would be a miracle to keep their minds off saying things about you. So don’t worry about it. Everything will turn out and we will go to bed next year at this time with a million dollars in our hands. Then Ray Winch will crawl back asking where his money is—and we will give him the cheque.”

“I wish it was right now—just so I could say, ‘See, I told you so.’ ”

“Oh, so do I.”

“But I should tell Dad.”

“Tell your dad? But he is the one who wanted to destroy you.”

Within this conversation was another—a ploy not overt but subtly attached. And it said almost as an afterthought: that if they lost all, had everything taken away, and nothing left to show for it, they had done the right thing for society by investing in Ginger’s idealism.

The doctor was sure Ginger would demand to see the one important piece of information: the accounts. It was through these bank accounts that Noel was siphoning off money and so was Dr. Mahoney. She didn’t mean to. It was simply that she had to, because Gary had taken his share. So she must take hers. What might have worked as a profitable business if they had just listened to Ginger from the first was now completely doomed. And the one who did not know this was Ginger.

Dr. Mahoney was also selling some of Ginger’s antiques.

But instead of asking any more questions, Ginger said she wanted to see Noel, and she began to cry.

Dr. Mahoney kissed her forehead. “We all want to see Noel, honey. I cry too.”

The next day, her first wedding anniversary, Ginger went downtown and bought Noel a $698 watch, carrying it in her pocket for the moment he came home.

——

Two days later, Noel came home. He was in the bedroom taking something from the drawer when she handed him the watch.

“Do you like it? It’s for our anniversary.”

“Oh yeah—well—sure—it’s great,” he said. He had been expecting her to roar and scream at him, but she gave him a watch.

“Ray wants to speak to you,” she said, squeezing him about the waist.

“Yeah, I heard.”

He moved away from her. She saw at that moment each callow quality she had overlooked so long.

He put his watch on. “It fits.”

But the news he revealed at supper was glum. And it seemed to Ginger, who knew how to read people when she had to, that this glum news was not at all unexpected by his mother. She could see this in how they cautiously looked at each other as they spoke. They had no distributor for their product, and because it was sitting in a damp warehouse, much of it had been damaged. The design and name they had come up with infringed on another product. That’s why, Noel said, the prophylactics weren’t wrapped. The real truth was, there were no prophylactics. Not one. Even the one in Noel’s pocket hadn’t been made by them. His money was lost too: the halogen lights had failed because of his power source, and the marijuana beds discovered by the RCMP. The rest he had spent on a house for Cassandra. Now he needed to take the little he had left to go away. He had come home to his mother for a loan.

“What do you think we should do, Noel?” Ginger asked. She sat in the same chair where there was so much laughter the morning after her wedding.

“We can sell off what we have to a larger producer. But they’d take it on risk and we’ll lose much of our investment.”

“Well, let’s do that, then,” she said, looking uncertainly from one to the other.

“Okay,” Noel said, “if that’s what you want.”

“I want what everyone wants,” Ginger said.

Noel nodded and lit a cigarette. He had that easy and clever way of sounding detached, and he was pleased with the way he sounded. But Ginger saw in his eyes a different look—it was a look she now remembered he had had when criticizing Gus Busters in front of her. She quickly looked at Dr. Mahoney. Of course! It had always been there, that look. The look that changed from delighted to predatory, always as quickly as one frame shifting to another in the millions of miles of movies our father had run.

Seeing this, Ginger tried to be firm. “Why don’t we have a distributor—can’t we afford that?” Ginger asked, banging her fist against the palm of her hand, just as my father used to do.

“Because Gary took the money for the distribution,” Dr. Mahoney explained. “And Noel’s been working hard doing what has to be done to get everything back in order.”

“Ginger,” Noel said, shaking his head, “that’s what we have been trying to tell you, sweetheart. That’s where I’ve been!”

“I know—but tell me again,” she said, shaking, her nose running.

She was hoping for him to comfort her. He had not remembered their anniversary.

Noel, as sudden as a predator sensing weakness in prey, looked at Ginger as if it was her problem and her fault. This happened in his gaze in a second. It had happened the same way with certain middle-aged women he had left as well, after they had given him their money and their love.

Later Ginger waited for him in bed. But he was sick and shivering and wanted to spend the night on the couch. He had had these attacks before. His left arm was numb, and the only way he could feel well was to take more speed. Ginger went to him, but he pushed her back and demanded to see his mother. All that night he was weak and fevered, and Dr. Mahoney ran to him with hot towels.

My father learned most of this within walls of rumour and gossip, overhearing it on street corners as cars passed by in the night, and in bars where he drank alone in the middle of the day. The hilarity over Ginger was like before, only this time people were absolutely shameless in their rejoicing. He heard that Noel was using needles and, loyal to the end, tried to protect them both.

“How dare you,” Miles would say, standing with drink in one hand and cigarette in his fingers, “how dare you speak of Ginger King to me in that vein. How dare you, sir.”

“Who the fuck are you—her father?”

“I am—I am at that,” he would say, slightly bemused, and ready with his fists up to defend her honour to the death, and being ignored because of his age and his condition, and because secretly there were enough people to react against the shamelessness of the tormentor’s conduct.

“I am—I am the father of Ginger King, the husband of Elizabeth Whispers, and the son—do you understand, I am the son—of Janie McLeary. And you, sir, will not talk to me in this vein. If Noel Mahoney uses needles as is so blatantly rumoured, he has a right to use them, as much as you do to mock it, sir.”

He would walk home alone, and lie unconscious on the couch, wheezing into the wee hours where he would wake, bolt to the washroom and stand under the shower in his clothes. With water spilling over and across his peaked face (hat still on his head) he would shout out to me:

“Made a bit of a stir tonight at the Palace Bar—where they have that nice carpet, with the nightly duo singing the tolerable leftovers from the seventies—lounge lizards invaded it today—the godawful useless set who know politics a tad, and whose daddies were lawyers, smirking in that way they do, said something about your sister—I defended her—I defended Elizabeth—defended them both—they have me to deal with from now on, no more backsliding in my duties to protect my daughter. In fact am thinking, considering buying myself a nice well-adjusted shotgun, for defence of my home.”

I would get him out of the shower and into bed, and sit beside him, in those nights with flecks of memory of Mom and Dad when they were young and we were wee ones, in the hobbled absence of sound.