River of the Brokenhearted (36 page)

My father would bring home these ruined draughts about Ginger, though she wouldn’t see us.

“I would want to give money back to Raymond Winch if I could,” Miles said, “even though I know that is the exact amount Noel and he took out of old Dingle’s pocket while bashing his skull with pans.”

SIX

Ginger was pregnant, and was alone in the house with Dr. Mahoney. Abigail, as far as I can tell, did not worry, for since childhood this was her life. She had never done another thing except play the game of the pea. And even in its failure this was her major victory.

But one night when Dr. Mahoney was out Ginger found courage enough to say to herself, “The money has to be upstairs—behind that door where Abigail lives. I will get it and give it to my father—it is his money. It is him we have betrayed.”

For once she longed to help her father. There was no one in the house, and shadows fell across the chesterfield and the mahogany table. Most of the doors were closed. And there was a terrible feeling that she should not go into the doctor’s room. But she found herself walking up the stairs. She did not want to go into the room because her action would prove to her a warranted suspicion.

But if she did enter she could not remain as close to her mother-in-law as she had been. This was the most difficult moment. Still, she decided she must go.

She found herself with the master key to all the upstairs doors of the house, which her grandmother had given her when she was fifteen. It was the one secret she had managed to keep.

She unlocked Dr. Mahoney’s door, and walked into the room that had belonged to my father when he held on to the tree with his pigeon coop. The tree was still there. She kept the light off, because moonlight shone on the white bedspread and reflected eerily back at her. She did not know what she was searching for, but she began to open the drawers, carefully rummaging with her hands under linen and clothes. Her hand touched a package wrapped in plastic. She did not know what it was, and she pulled her hand away. She went to the closet. On an upper shelf she saw, to her amazement, the antiques that had been lying about the house, piled in a box. Abigail had taken them for herself. Some had belonged to Ginger’s great-grandmother. She tried to reach these, but she couldn’t.

Suddenly she heard a noise. When she turned around Abigail was staring directly at her. Her heart stopped. The doctor made no movement toward her. And then Ginger realized the mirrored closet door was hiding her from view.

Ginger crouched down, as the woman came over, brushed her hair and smiled into the mirror, turned and left the room, looking once, twice, stopping, almost deciding to come back. Then she walked right by Ginger again, and went to the window. She whistled at something, looking down at the ground. And Ginger suddenly realized the woman was whistling at the distance my father fell as a boy. Yet how could that be?

“Ginger?” she called, turning her head.

She went to the dresser, opened it and looked at something, then closed it quickly.

“Ginger, where are you?” she called. “Little pea brain?”

Then she turned and went back to the door. All of this took about thirty seconds. Closing the door behind her, she went downstairs.

Strangely Ginger felt if that woman had found her there, she might have killed her. But worse, she saw herself as herself walking arm in arm with Dr. Mahoney in front of her father, and smiling back over her shoulder, at his lonely solitary figure.

I asked my father about the four-leaf clover one day shortly after his escapade at the Palace, when he took on those bouncing sons of the old school lawyers, the Rotarian boys going off to their rewards as surely as he.

“Perhaps I have been mistaken about her all my life, do you think? I cannot prove a thing, you see. That’s what bothers me. She has given me a clue, and I cannot prove it. It’s something that she might not even realize herself any longer. Who knows? We are still involved in prosthetics—”

“Prophylactics, Dad—and I don’t think they are slipping on as well as they once thought—”

But he had forgotten all about that stuff and did not know or pretended not to hear what I just said. I think “pretended” is the word, as he shuffled to the patio to have a drink and watch his hummingbirds suck the nectar from his flowers.

“I am certain, Wendy—they are trying to sell wooden legs,” he yelled back at me, “Well, it’s not a flying car, like poor Gus Busters once said he would build, but it is transportation—Ginger says she will help me out in anyway she can, as soon as she can—but the money is tied up—”

I was sure he would not live too much longer. Not the way he was now drinking. Let him go off to glory seeing wooden legs instead of French safes, I thought.

Ginger’s heartbreak in this, my father reminded me, was the fact that she now had to mistrust the very woman whom she told us we must—we were morally obligated to—trust.

I saw Ginger downtown one afternoon, but she did not look my way. She had become a stranger, just another stranger on the street. She was pregnant and yet thin as a rail. Her eyes looked large and scared. I know that she thought getting pregnant would stop Noel from seeing that other woman, and would bring the money back under her control. I went home to a bottle of gin and five sleeping pills.

Two weeks later, Ginger was in the baby’s room decorating. She was standing in the middle of the room with a length of wallpaper, when the doctor appeared. Ginger did not speak to her. The doctor had slapped her the night before, calling her spoiled rotten and accusing her of snooping in her room. She said she could tell something in her drawer had been touched. Ginger denied this but still felt the sting and the shock of the slap. And at that moment their relationship seemed to be over.

Today she turned and looked at her mother-in-law. Dr. Mahoney had a grave smile that Ginger had seen only in certain moments.

“I know we haven’t been on the best terms lately, so I want to make it up. I have a present for you. I have kept it awhile—it’s for your little girl.”

“I don’t know if I’m having a boy or a girl,” Ginger said.

“It will be a girl for certain,” the doctor answered, “and you will call her Georgina. Wouldn’t that be appropriate? I picked these out some years back. Aren’t they nice?”

She handed them to my sister.

“They’re very nice,” my sister said. “They are wonderful.”

“Yes, they are,” the doctor said. “As soon as I get to Montreal I will tell you what’s happening. It wasn’t your fault, but we lost some of our advantage. And I have to go and get it back.”

“When are you coming back?”

“I’m leaving next week, but I’ll be back quicker than a flash.” Then the doctor hugged Ginger and said, “Remember what I said, concerning this deal we have. You are doing what is right. Only those jealous of you are trying to stop us.”

Ginger smiled, for she had no one else.

The doctor was happy, and when she was happy, Ginger’s heart was glad. After lunch, while Abigail was doing the dishes, Ginger went upstairs.

She was sitting in the big bare room that had once been Georgina’s room—the room my father dressed her in on that day. Ginger sat on the floor with her knees tucked under her, thinking of Dad’s garden.

Then quicker than a heartbeat, something terrible came over her. Something so horrible she could not move. She was staring at the present the woman had given her. It was on the wooden table at the far end of the room. A present solitary and non-verbal. Yet suddenly because of the history of her family, they told her something horrifying. Ginger the eccentric goofball, who had believed up until that moment that her life was one way, now realized Miles was right and her life was a completely different life. Completely and totally other than what she had thought as she was eating her lunch at the mahogany island in the kitchen.

She stared at the present for more than an hour, not moving a muscle, scarcely able to breathe. The present was like the Grecian urn, an inanimate mirror into past tragedy, from the age of our sad and courageous Jane.

Little purple gloves, wrapped in plastic to keep them timeless.

She stood, heard the woman below her singing. When she reached the banister she thought she would faint. She was as white as a ghost.

Rebecca Druken was humming a song, brushing her hair back, staring at her own reflection, her two suitcases open in the living room, waiting to be packed.

Ginger walked past her and left the house.

She came to me, and my father.

“What do you do,” she said, “when you realize your entire life is a lie, and your father has told the truth?”

“You go and thank him,” I said, a little sternly. But at that moment I had no idea what she meant.

“It’s over,” she said.

“What is? The business? Thank God you’ve gotten out of that business.”

“Yes, and my entire life, it seems.” She gave a kind of hopeless smile.

She wanted to find the picture of Georgina. It took us about three hours to locate. She looked at pictures like a puzzled schoolgirl, saying nothing at all to me, picking them up and tossing them aside, just as I had done a few years previous. Then we came across it at about five in the afternoon. There Georgina was at four years of age, staring with a halo about her, looking at the camera of Mr. Maurice, wearing the purple gloves. Ginger took the present from her coat and laid those same buttoned-up gloves on the coffee table before me.

What incensed Ginger was Gram had gotten them for her child. What incensed her was that Rebecca Druken thought she could get away with it; or perhaps she no longer knew where they had come from.

Ginger did not want to go back there any more. It was so horrible to her.

“You go back,” she said. “You go back and put her out of my house—or I will get the police—I will get Kipsy. Call Kipsy for me, or Constable Delano. That’s what we have to do—we have to get protection!”

She was shaking, her nose running, and she was crying for a tiny child she had never in her life seen. She sobbed with abandon for hours on end.

Then she phoned Kipsy Doyle and, still bawling, related as much as she could.

“There,” Kipsy said, “we’ll see to it now. It’s over. Tell your dad it’s all over now.”

Fifty-five years after it had started.

Kipsy Doyle came to our house that night. My father did not want to listen and went to his room. Here in the living room—Kipsy explained how the police felt the deal was set up—how incidental it all seemed. How they all believed in it at first, and how they all turned on each other when things started to go wrong, suspicious each would get the bigger share.

“Rebecca Druken—is it her?” I asked.

Kipsy said she and the RCMP Officer John Delano now believed that it was. If it was she was already wanted on five or six charges, both here and in the States, under two or three names.

“She did not know Miles had a daughter when she came back—she had no idea. But when she found out she kept pushing Noel on you, hoping something would go wrong in your first marriage,” Kipsy said. “When it did—they helped it along, let me tell you. In a way, she was the consummate matchmaker.”

Kipsy laughed at this for a second but, seeing tears running down Ginger’s face, said, “It’s all over, Ginger. Don’t think about it any more. They had to get rid of the screen. If they could topple one business, they could make your dad sell the other, and then they could use the funds. Besides, your marriage is non-binding—for in spite of his mother’s wishes, Noel married Cassie in secret before he married you.”

Ginger looked up at Kipsy, startled, and then put her head down again.

“Anyway, I don’t think you’ll see any of them again. You can thank your lucky stars. But,” she added, “the money, your grandmother’s money, is gone. All except for a few thousand, I think.”

“I see,” Ginger kept saying in a whisper, staring at the floor, mortified to appear so weak in front of her old adversary, “I see. Well, that’s it, then. Thank you, Kipsy—thank you very much.”

Kipsy nodded, closed her notebook, stood abruptly, and walked assertively to the door, her duty completed.

Then, turning and seeing Ginger with her head down, her fingers fumbling with one another, rushed over and hugged her for two solid minutes.

My father had been telling her all of this for years. That is why he couldn’t stand to hear it now.

SEVEN

Within a week the business was over. The police issued a warrant for Rebecca Druken, a.k.a. Dr. Abigail Mahoney. They would have a hard time proving anything, Rebecca knew. She said she had picked the gloves up in an antique sale years before and was saving them for her granddaughter. And she said every business she was ever involved with was legitimate. Then she disappeared.

Ginger had a miscarriage.

Ginger tried to bring a lawsuit against Noel Druken. But no one knew where he was. Then a year later I heard that he was living on the street in Montreal, had hepatitis from a dirty needle, and he needed a new liver.

I kept this from Ginger, but told Father.

“He could have mine, for what it’s worth. A tad overused, mine is, I suspect,” my father said, without the least gloating, and a terrible sadness.

We sold what we could to pay what we must. Ginger was very astute in that regard. She was determined not to let the other investors down.

Roy Dingle’s house was sold, Janie’s house was empty, and we had to sell every piece of furniture. I saw my grandmother’s violin during a Mendelssohn concert in Halifax, and my grandfather’s piano sits today in a bar in Fredericton.

We lost Janie’s house in the end. It was boarded up. My father was sitting on the steps one November day, and was told by a policeman to move along, that it was a historical property and he wasn’t wanted there.

My father did not say, “I am Miles King, who was born here.” The fresh-faced policeman wouldn’t have known who he was.

I wanted things solved for my father’s sake. And Kipsy took an interest in me, and I in her. So she listened to both my father and me for weeks, trying to distinguish fact from fiction—our lives, of course, were filled with both. Kipsy believed, from going over the old, faded files, that my great-grandfather was hit twice, first by a man, and then probably by a woman.

“There is one piece of the puzzle that might help—if we could find it,” she said.

“And what is that, dear Kipsy of mine?” my father asked.

“The key, Mr. King—the long-lost key.”

My father stayed at home and worked in his greenhouse. After a while he could not afford to pay the bills, even though Ginger took a job at the restaurant to help him. We sold our old bungalow.

Ginger and I moved into an apartment, where we began to look like the middle-aged people we have become. She started dating Gus Busters again, and I started dating Kipsy Doyle. We went out together often enough, and Kipsy helped me quell my happy habits, at least a little.

Miles lived in a room downtown, with a potted ivy and a geranium. Still, he took what he had and did what he could. He manicured his own nails, and drank a cheap gin, which he said was godawful. He still had his suits dry cleaned and tied his tie every morning into a Windsor, with thin practised hands. He had a budgie that sat on his shoulder when he went for walks, at times his jacket soiled by bird droppings that seemed compatible to his gait.

He read much of Matthew Arnold and some of Emerson, bought the complete works of Shakespeare, which he sometimes carried under his arm.

“Someday we will recoup our losses,” he said, looking into the mirror and brushing his clothes off. “Someday I will see Miss Whispers again.” And he added, “The modern agitation on behalf of women, Wendy, would not allow for our Janie, could not allow for such true independence, but did allow for Ms. Druken.” He smiled and put the cloth brush aside. “But it is not sad Ms. Druken’s fault alone.”

It was the last he mentioned it.

But when they tore down the Regent to build the pizza parlour something good did happen in our lives. A strange thing, no doubt, cast in the winds almost three-quarters of a century before. Hidden in the wall, behind the sink of Walter P. McLeary’s room was the one-sheet for
Frankenstein
starring Boris Karloff, which poor tormented Walter thought he looked like and hid so no one would make fun of him.

Gus Busters found it there and brought it home. We were about to store it away in a room when Kipsy said we should check to see if it was worth anything.

It took four months before we found out it was one of only three one-sheets from that movie left in the world.

“And how much will that gain us?” Kipsy said laughing.

“Two hundred thousand dollars,” I said, pretending a yawn.

In fact, it got what Dad was hoping for his paintings.

It allowed him to buy Janie’s house back, and we moved in as well.

We get along now, you see, for there is no sense not to. No sense in the world.

Rebecca Druken died in a rooming-house fire in Toronto in 1991. She had rented the room that week (mostly she was living on the street then) and became disorientated in the smoke and did not find the door. She was utterly alone. Small mementoes from her life in our town were found in her purse—odd little things, a spoon, a picture of Mr. Dingle’s back yard in winter taken from the kitchen window, a postcard of the Morrissey Bridge, a matchbook from the Palace Bar. And my father’s stamp collection that he had when he was ten.

That was all she had left of her life.

“Elderly transient dies in fire” was the caption in the
Sun
.

Hearing of it, my father burst into sobs and cried for hours. I suppose such terrible closeness can only bring love.

Ray Winch was left with Noel, whom he had promised to take care of. Noel, now forty, had liver disease, and came back here to die. No one he knew would give up any time to take care of him. His wife, Cassie Avalanche, said to him the afternoon he turned up at her door:

“You got caught.”

Her cream complexion as wonderful as before and her smile callow and empty, she turned away and left him alone.

Noel was vulnerable without his mom. People who had been terrified of her were not one bit frightened of him, and left him bruised and bullied on many occasions.

My father, hopeless as he was, tried to protect him.

“You’d not do this if Rebecca Druken was here,” he said. “You’d piss yourselves like kennelled dogs—get away from him.”

Noel complained about his life, and his mother’s betrayal.

Ray Winch carried him here and there, took him to the hospital, tried to keep him on his diet and medication.

Noel managed to write Ginger a short note after his mother’s funeral telling her that someday their life would be repaired. The letter came in the winter snow. “We got mixed up over those damn French safes,” he wrote.

She did not press charges, did not hear from him again.

Eight months later a car was travelling toward the Miramichi from Saint John, and Ray Winch and Noel Druken were in this car. Noel was driving and Winch was on the passenger side. They were planning to rob the Palace Bar, on Tuesday night, pay night, from the backroom’s safe. They were both armed. They would, they believed, get enough money to live for a year. Winch did not think Noel would live much longer than that, though Noel was filled with plans.

As they were approaching the Enclosure, an argument arose over the money Winch had put into the business that went under and the money Noel had been foolish enough to give to Cassie. Ray was angry about this, and he was not a man you wanted to anger.

“Your mom lied about that, Noel,” Ray said. Noel’s face was the colour of a yellow flag, and pills that Ray continually reminded him to take were scattered all over the dash.

“We did what we could,” Noel said. “If the scheme Cassie and I had had worked, I’d be rich.”

“Yeah—and I wouldn’t be—now I’m back to doing what I did when I was twenty—and it’s your mother’s fault!”

The car drove on around a turn. The argument continued, and Noel pulled the car to the side of the road and reached under his seat. A red maple shadowed the car roof, and a little stream trickled off to the right, where some sparrows flitted in among some pin cherries. Noel smiled, and reached for what Winch thought would be the skinning knife Druken was going to carry during the robbery.

Ray Winch fired my father’s pistol, just once, into Noel Druken’s head.

Noel’s head fell against the dash, his eyes open, his hand under the seat clutching my grandfather’s box of coins, compensation from his mother for losing it all.

It was brought back to our house and sits on the drawing-room table again.

——

I married the police officer, Kipsy Doyle, and my sister remarried Gus Busters, and the four of us live together, for the house is certainly big enough and we want to bring life back into it, as Janie would have wished.

Time passed, and Rebecca Druken was forgotten by us. The badness just all went away. The old part of our town, like Ripper’s East London of my grandfather’s boyhood, is no more.

Yet I was speaking to Kipsy one spring evening about my father’s pigeons, and how they were buried by Rebecca and him in the yard. She looked at me as if I had stuck her with a pin.

“You stupid idiots,” she said. “All you Kings are idiots!”

“Well, I know—but why?”

“You mean you can’t see it?”

“See what?”

She grabbed Ginger by the arm and told Gus to get a shovel, and we followed her along the back path where my great-grandfather Jimmy used to drink. From there we entered my grandmother’s lower yard.

It was at the corner near the rock fence, under the old purple ivy stems. A terrible wind whistled off the water, and Ginger said she was cold, so Kipsy, always laying down the law, gave Ginger her coat.

Upstairs I could see a shadow in the window—only a shadow but who knows, perhaps a ghost, perhaps Georgina herself, the little girl I’ve loved my whole life, looking at us one more time before she said goodbye.

Kipsy ordered Gus to dig, and my poor happy halting brother-in-law—who himself believes he will invent a flying car, and is working on it now—did so. He dug in three places and then a fourth, and finally he scooped up some remnants from the ground.

Harry Feathers was gone, and the box was nothing but splinters, and the only thing left wrapped in rotted cloth, that shone in the moon and in the wind, was the old Regent Theatre key.

“Eureka,” Ginger said, and hugged Kipsy so hard she lifted her off the ground. For it was the weight of the world lifted from my father’s shoulders after so long a time.

But it was a strangely unpleasant victory, wasn’t it? And caused, I’m afraid, me to drink once more.

“We all walk the wibbily wobbily walk,” Malcolm Lowry wrote. My father did that. Not a thing to prevent him from going to the liquor store on the last day of his life.

He poured himself a drink, he took out his mouth organ, and he played three songs: “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” for his father, George King, late of Blackheads Lane, and then, for his sister, Georgina, “Danny Boy,” and for his mother, Janie McLeary, “The Risin’ of the Moon.”

There was fire and beauty and all good things in his sound.

He had an audience too. Little children across the street came to listen, crowding about him. His first audience since 1930. They didn’t know he was Miles King the song-and-dance man, the soft-shoe shuffler, the bit of a dandy who strutted out at St. Paddy’s Day and could pull Harry Feathers from his hat.

They listened in rapt attention nonetheless, with their hands folded together, tapping their shoes in our dooryard mud.

It was reported to me that as he played tears filled his eyes.

And then his sun went down.