River of the Brokenhearted (5 page)

This much is certain. He had attempted a kiss.

There must have been a moment, maybe a series of moments, when his heart had been truly usurped. But she had not reciprocated. More to the point, I think, she had no idea of his feelings until they were presented with a clumsy kiss on the theatre steps, with snowflakes falling into her face. She had laughed. That laughter, though unfortunate, was not meant to injure but only to show the absurdity of his proposition.

The consequence was a shift in his metabolism: he now became more convinced that everything he had done since the death of George King was done not to buy her mean little business but to protect her and her family. He turned in mid-stride and decided there and then—if he could—to prosecute her as stridently as possible.

Elias had, he thought now, begun his relationship with Janie for her own good; this was firmly entrenched in his mind. Now he needed to do something else. And soon. For just a moment everything had been right with them, but he had played his hand too soon, and she withdrew. This was a miscalculation.

Where was the kiss attempted? On the very step of her theatre during late afternoon. Who had seen his attempted kiss? Mr. Harris, the bank manager. Elias pondered what to do. Usually he would have the good fortune of meeting Harris on the street at some time. But this did not happen, and Elias worried that the avoidance was intentional on Harris’s part. He had to regain his hand. He decided he must go to the bank and explain the kiss. And it all depended on how it was explained. He decided it was best to pretend that he did not know that Harris had seen him and Janie, and that he would ask discretion not for his sake but for Janie’s.

He walked to the bank. Though his suit was cheap, and thin, and blasts of wind chilled his legs to the bone, he waited outside until mid-afternoon, when the bank was closing and the only light on was the lamp on Harris’s desk. Then he went inside and knocked on Harris’s door and, seemingly humbled, said, “I thought since I had a moment I would tell you that something happened last Tuesday evening of a strange nature. Janie kissed me.” Here he held up his hands, palms outstretched, as if to block misconception, and shook his head. “Now don’t hold that against her—I want you to know that she is suffering, and very lonely—and it should have nothing to do with your feelings in trying to help her. She knows I tried to help her husband—and it might have been gratitude on her part.” As he spoke he manoeuvred toward the hard-backed chair. He felt its seat with his left hand before he slumped into it, feigning dejection.

“I see,” Harris whispered.

“Do you? I was discreet enough not to stop her—and now feeling ashamed, she has reacted by rejecting a certain advance I never made, and has characterized the advance as one on her business.”

Harris was silent as he nodded, his bald face flushing.

“It doesn’t bode well for us, as far as the business is concerned, to try and help her,” Elias said.

“I see,” Harris said.

“At the moment she realized she had no ground to stand on, could not keep up the pretense of being able to handle a theatre, I found myself having to avoid her sexual advances—”

He cleared his throat and waited.

“Deluded, is she!” Harris said.

“Much of the time,” Elias answered.

“Yes—well, I did see it,” Harris said.

“You saw she was deluded, you mean?”

“Not exactly.”

“Deluded—I mean—how did you see it?”

“From the street,” Harris said, pointing. “I was crossing the street. So there you go.” Then he added, “it’s strange—”

“What is strange?”

“I get the feeling that she set it up—so I would see it,” Harris said, peeling an egg and looking up at the face of his friend.

“I don’t believe that!” Elias said.

“I think she must have wanted me to think—you were taking advantage of her,” Harris answered. “My two cents—but it’ll go no further.”

“Thank you,” Elias said.

I believe that if Elias had said he made the advance on Janie, and had done it for the reason he had, which was for the affection of a woman who owned a business, Harris would have been understanding.

Joey Elias said he would take over her theatre, as a benefit to the town.

Janie sent for Walter P. McLeary, her cousin who had taken care of the theatre since George King took sick. He fixed the seats, swept the floors, cleaned the foyer, did the advertisements. At five foot four, Walter was a humpback with a lame leg. Yet he was indispensable to the survival of her business. He had learned to run the projector, took care of her coal and wood, made sure the one-sheets were up, but like Janie he himself was an outcast of the first rank.

He informed her that the Biograph was ready to expand to a new building, and Elias was thinking of more theatres. Only her theatre stood in his way.

“Think of it as armies—your army is blocking his advance, because you have the first runs. He needs the first-run picture. They make twice the money his does. There is nothing you can do but fight him. You might not want to fight him, but we must fight. You are a McLeary—and so am I—so remember who we are. Our people came over on a boat, settling in this town on the edge of nowhere. You, after almost a hundred years, are the first McLeary to make something of herself. And now this. So you have to fight. You have no other option.”

“Yes, I know,” she answered, her voice remote. Her features had changed since her husband’s death. She seemed closed off, more solitary than ever. In her mid-twenties and a young mother, she was beautiful, though somewhat tougher since her husband’s death. Her money held no pleasure. She was very stern with herself, yet was kind to almost everyone else and to Walter—though once in anger she accused him of having two humps.

Walter had done nothing in the last few weeks but find things out about her enemies. That he was able to obtain such information was in itself unnerving for her.

He walked back and forth, banking to the left and blowing smoke from his oversized cigar. He told her that it was a consortium of friends that showed a complete and unswerving contempt for her. How was this contempt manufactured? Easily, indeed. A widow like Janie McLeary would know nothing about what movies fine and decent people wanted. And why? Because her father was old Jimmy McLeary the drunk. She knew nothing about business, and would be better taking care of her children, the way a woman should.

That aside, he said, he was concerned about something else. The movies came in by overnight train and often sat in the open at the train station. Walter told her she must be vigilant, for Joey Elias knew where the pictures sat, and knew well how to use anything to his advantage. So what if John Barrymore’s, or Charlie Chaplin’s, or Buster Keaton’s new movie was hijacked by Joey Elias? Would the luggage department care who came to collect it?

And here was the rub. What if Joey sent her father to collect these pictures?

“Joey is your father’s pal.”

For if even her own poor father came to override her, Walter said, his right shoe scraped down, by the way he dragged his foot, who would not laugh at her expense?

“Then you must guard the station. And I will guard the hall,” Janie decided. “And if they take my movies I will take theirs.”

“You have already run theirs. You have the first runs. Georgie saw to that before—all of them—”

“I have the first runs? Who said so?”

“In a curious roundabout way, Charlie Chaplin said so. I mean, you signed—or your husband signed—a contract with the film distributors who act on behalf of the companies, and one of these companies is Chaplin’s—so it’s your move, Lady Jane.”

The movies came in by overnight train, down from the great city of Montreal, on the
Nova Scotian
plowing snow in front of it all the dark winter, and long after those pictures arrived they would sit in the soot-darkened train station the whole of the next day, near the time slips for the freight workers. Elias would switch pictures, or had a station worker whom he sold bootlegged rum to hold Janie’s movie back, telling her it hadn’t arrived, until long after his movie had started. There she would stand, awaiting the arrival of the tins of film that sat four feet from her.

Now it was decided that Walter would go to the station each day there was a change and collect the tins and the one-sheet directly off the train. Meanwhile, Janie would find out from Montreal’s distributor in Saint John what Elias was running so she would inform the public before he himself did.

At first it was a contest of who rose earlier in the morning—Walter, who was loyal to Hanna Jane, or pale, trembling Jimmy McLeary, once again showing unwavering devotion to Joey Elias and the drunks in town, whom he needed more than his daughter.

Jimmy would turn up at the station with the filching, troubled expression of a man gone to ruin, playing his last seedless gambit against his own kind so he would be liked. Always little Walter McLeary was there before him.

“I didn’t think my own nephew would act like this—against his own kind—his own flesh and blood—like that there.”

Over the next month, not a movie was missed. The Dime became known as “Janie’s theatre.” All the people in town called her Janie instead of Hanna, whether to show familiarity or respect, she wasn’t sure. But she liked the name. It made her feel independent, no longer the young Hanna that George King had spied in what felt like an eternity ago. She was waved to by patrons of her theatre when she rode along the street in the Ford car, still wearing black, with a shawl over her head, or when she walked, her hands hidden in a fur-lined muff.

Though she had money she was unhappy—just as the bishop had said she would be. “You will not find happiness in this life, Janie McLeary,” he had said after her wedding in the Protestant church.

“Then I will not search for it,” she had answered.

FIVE

Near the end of May things took another turn. When Janie came up the steps—two hours after the movie
Metropolis
—which was too inscrutable for the patrons, who wanted Rudolph Valentino or some other hero—Walter told her the mortgage was coming up for renewal and showed her the slip of paper from the Royal Bank.

“Tell me that isn’t bad,” Janie said.

“It isn’t good,” Walter said, scratching the top of his forehead with his thumb. “I think Harris will say he can close on you ‘less you can come up with seven thousand dollars.”

“That’s impossible—” she uttered.

“What is—?”

“The seven thousand—”

“I know,” Walter said.

“What should I do?”

Janie saw him in shadow, and looked at his shoes, shining in the light from the street. Kind, endearing, and loyal—all these attributes were somehow not enough.

“Have you ever noticed in the world there are different kinds of men?” Walter said in a soft voice.

“What way?” Janie said.

“Well, one is the kind that moves into a new town and within a week or two decides there is a cause to fit into, a cause greater than himself, which was waiting for him.”

“I don’t understand,” Janie said.

“Mr. Harris. He is friends with Mr. Elias.”

“I will go to meet with Mr. Harris,” she said in almost complete naivety, which Walter could not help but notice.

“Maybe you could borrow.” He handed the letter to her. She took it and tossed it aside.

“I will see to it,” she said.

She went home and sat in the dark drawing room, surrounded by her late husband’s sketches and books, his ink drawing of his son, his framed tickets to a concert he played that the Prince of Wales had attended.

She had already met with Harris once since the death of her husband. When she had gone to the bank, Harris was on his lunch hour, eating a hard-boiled egg. He cracked it with a spoon and asked to see her husband.

“He is dead,” she said.

“Well, then—who runs the business?” he said, twirling the egg about in its egg cup.

“I do.”

“What do you mean, you do?”

“I mean—you see me sitting here?”

“Yes,” he said, putting the egg in his mouth and chewing it slowly.

“Well, I’m sitting here because I run the business.”

“But the bank needs someone to take care of the mortgage. Who would that be?” He put his spoon down on the napkin on the table.

“That would be me.”

“But it is he we were dealing with.”

“But you were not dealing with him, because you were not here then. You are new here, aren’t you. Now you are here and dealing not with him, who is dead, but with me, who is sitting here.”

“But,” he said in exasperation, “that’s not the way it should be.”

“I agree,” Janie King said.

He nodded slightly and looked out at the bank clerk watching them, as he picked up his spoon again. “You agree,” he said, showing some surprise in his voice.

“Yes,” said Janie with a smile. “No idiot should ever be in your position. But since an idiot is and I am dealing with him, it is bloody unfortunate for us both.” She rose.

This is how their first face-to-face meeting (besides the brief encounter with the shotgun) ended.

Well, she thought, perhaps she should not have called him an idiot.

Mr. Harris assumed she was clever and bold, but not brilliant or courageous. He knew her kind before he ever met her and, meeting her that once at his bank, had smiled in a way which informed her that he had formulated ideas about her based on gossip supplied by those he himself wished to impress. So she called him what he was, an idiot. Now she regretted it, but found no way to take it back. Taking it back would show weakness. That showed courage on her part. Moreover, taking it back would maintain culpability where she was not guilty. She was wise enough to stand her ground. Except she had hardly known what a mortgage was when she called him an idiot. Perhaps she should have found out.

But back in 1927, though she knew everyone who was against her, though she believed she had all possibilities foreseen, she was still not prepared for this.

The day she went back to discuss the mortgage payment, Harris moved against her in a way that seemed to show he was allied with her. He was concerned very much with what kind of impression he should make. So he came to the conclusion that there would be an association of overseers for Janie McLeary’s benefit. And for her son and daughter, of course. Harris knew that if she balked at this new alliance she would be truly outcast. He knew this when she entered the bank. He felt it in the fibres of his suit coat against his chest.

Harris hid behind the precept that it was a bank’s responsibility to assess a person’s risk. He could not let on even to himself that this was not the case. In truth, if he failed in this, it would be an appalling indication of his lack of moral fibre. The way to pretend he had moral fibre was to succeed in this fabrication.

In a way, as far as Harris was concerned, Fritz Lang’s masterpiece did her in, for Harris had in his possession the appalling result of this movie. He himself had not seen it, which was a little thing—but Harris was a little thinker. If he had been the sort of thinker he pretended himself to be, the smallness and pedestrian quality of his life would have appalled him. But this was not the case, for Mr. Harris believed all t’s crossed meant all i’s dotted. And Janie could do neither well. This was her secret. Her father, who could read, had not managed to get her to. However, she would learn, so by the time I was a boy, she wrote letters in the dozen—as if making up for a lack in her person that had caused so much pain.

Harris stood and warmly offered his hand. She took it and smiled in relief, until turning to a seat near the window, with a drawn green blind holding back the May sunshine, she saw the worst vision she could encounter at that moment.

Sitting in the other chair, on this warm spring day, wearing a pinstriped suit with a wide green tie, was Joey Elias, who had been asked by Harris to help him assess her “potential” as a businesswoman.

This event took place on May 25, 1927. Harris had Elias come with him to the bank. He had her last year’s mortgage statements and a statement of the theatre’s debt in front of them. When she entered she saw a trap. But Harris believed that if an illiterate woman, who was generally given to hysteria and shotguns, was so suspicious, how could she deal in a rational way with a public she depended on? And what would that say about the Royal Bank?

“Don’t let us be angry. I’ve come to help,” Elias said, touching her hand, and looking with concern at Harris.

Janie said nothing but stared straight at Harris. She did not take her eyes from him, did not motion with her hand, and though a deadly heat hung over the room, she did not sweat. Harris could not admit how treacherous his plan was, yet could not look at her, and each time he tried, her stare made him flinch.

Her silence lasted five, ten, fifteen minutes, while Harris went over the figures with Joey Elias’s help, and pointed to certain ink marks that Joey spoke about with high seriousness. Janie could not look at them, for she did not know what they were. She had not made them.

Finally Harris had a solution. Let Joey Elias countersign her mortgage. If she could not pay it, Joey Elias would take over her payments and her business—but would keep the name of the theatre in her husband’s honour and she would retain thirty-three percent of the holdings. Elias was willing to do this for her because he was a businessman and had given his word to the bank. And if she would sign it could be transacted that very day.

“I will burn in hell first,” she whispered.

Harris held the paper as she said this. He looked quickly at Elias. None had ever said this about any transaction he had ever done or ever attempted to do. No one spoke like this in a bank. He didn’t even know if they were allowed to. She was a lunatic—he saw that now. The knowledge that he was inventing a problem and fabricating a solution for the benefit of Joey Elias seemed remote after she said those words. She must sign before she left—or in a week he would confiscate her building and place it up for tender. He told her this in a voice he hoped would scare her. She made no sign it did.

Elias waved his hand to tell Harris there was no reason to be so stern, and he tried to reason with her. He spoke of how much he respected her for trying in such difficult times. Then he spoke of her father.

“You know your poor dad believes you need help with your business—is worried sick about you and your children.”

Harris looked at her eagerly, and then at Elias.

“That is why I’m here—I’ve come because of my feelings for yer dad, who has been your only support.”

“Don’t turn your back on your own father, Janie girl,” Harris said.

How horrible it must be to be Janie McLeary, thought Harris at that precise moment. She remained silent.

Finally Elias, infuriated by her silence, and seeing his chance slipping, picked up a pen, put it in Janie’s hand, and tried to force her signature.

Then Harris said, “If you cannot read, you cannot hold a mortgage. If you sign this document it will prove that you can read.” He looked sternly at her, while Elias doubled his effort. But Elias could not budge her arm. The strain on her face was visible, and his unmistakable. How strong she was, strong like the broken often are, at the very moment you think they will crumble.

She glared at Harris the whole time Elias was pressing her arm down. Then without a sound, she broke the pen in one hand, and left the bank.

The air was full of pollen, and children played on the sidewalk near the building. She believed that all was lost and carried her purse in both hands in front of her as she walked rapidly away.

“I will have to borrow the money,” she decided, “from every Catholic in the town.”

“Yes,” the terrified French maid said, handing her mistress two dollars.

It was later that night, far past supper hour, and the sun was retreating. From the oval window halfway up the darkening stairway, Janie saw two men watching the house. Across the street in the cold, damp evening, two more men stood guard. They knew she had to make an attempt to seek money from the Catholic houses.

She changed out of her dress. After daylight had completely gone, she went to the upstairs French window that overlooked the back lane.

“Why aren’t you going out the front door?” my father whispered.

“They are all after me,” she said, without emotion or even worry.

“Who is all after you?”

“Everyone in the world,” Janie said, “so I am acting on that theory. Yet”—here she turned to her son—“where will I go?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know where you’re going,” my father said.

She was now standing out on the ledge, wearing a pair of slacks and an old shirt, her hair up under her hat. She asked him to hold on to her leg as she stretched toward the tree. She could barely touch the nearest branch with her fingers. She would have to jump straight into the air—three storeys above the ground—and grab the tree. She had no other plan except to ask anyone she might for money. But she knew that Pond and Chatham Streets would be watched as well as her house.

“You will fall!” my father remembered crying, and my grandmother turning to him and saying:

“Shh. You have to let go of my leg now and let me jump—it’s the risin’ of the moon,” she said with a kind of frozen spite.

As he tightly held on to her, tears running down his cheeks, she added, “And take Georgina to Walter if I fail.”

Then, knowing he was unable to let go, she pried his fingers away, one at a time.

“Let go of me now. And don’t clutch me again, or I will fall.”

He drew back, and then leaned out the window again. He felt she was doing this dangerous thing out of spite for others and their dislike of her. In the night air the wind had picked up and rain began to fall out of the sky.

“Things are better when we are brave,” she said, and dropped out of sight.

There was a silence, and then the noise of branches moving.

“I am on the tree,” she said. “Take heed to keep the doors locked. And take care of Georgina tonight—we have no one else, you and I! Damn, I think I broke a rib!” She disappeared into the shadows.

Janie made her way down the cliff path and out along the street near Castle Lodge. Two men were standing on the lodge steps: she could see their cigarettes and hear their soft, whimsical banter about nothing, and in one of those banterings, a word fell into the open—“Janie.” She had wanted to go to Castle Lodge for help—she knew the woman there. But now she changed her mind. She stopped not a second too soon and stepped into the alleyway leading to the wharf. Here were other men, most of the spring lumber having been moved. They were sitting up against some pilings, drinking. Far across in the night air, on the Morrissey Bridge, she saw a flashlight. A fire was burning on the shore a hundred yards from where she was. There were men there also. One was her father, hoping to collect the fifteen dollars Joey had promised to whoever could stop her.

She began again, as she had over many days, to doubt her sanity. For when dozens in town say you are wrong, you will begin to think you are. Maybe they were all trying to help, she thought, and perhaps, just perhaps, she
was
insane, as Harris suggested. Perhaps their smiles and their curious looks were out of sympathy only. She cursed that thought—she was not so insane that she did not know a light on the bridge and a fire on the shore. She waited a minute and then two. The rain started hard again. Her right rib cage felt bruised and tender and pained when she breathed.

There was something else about this idea of insanity—all her life she had been forced to act in a way uncommon with others (her father’s presence with the rabble was proof of this). Yet were
they
sane? Was sanity doing what they did? And if it was, was it moral or justified to be sane? In great part her reasoning was the reasoning of saints as well as sinners. How could sanity be anything but a ruse—and a feeble one at that? For if Joey Elias went to those men and told them they had to find Janie McLeary to really help her—they would nod, and agree. That is in a second they could be persuaded utterly by fear or self-interest into doing something else, and turning away from what at this very moment they took to be completely honourable.