River of the Brokenhearted (11 page)

SEVEN

Putsy had been drunk since Christmas Eve. It was her great failing, though she did not consider it one when she was fortunate enough to have enough to drink. She did not know she was drunk, and then she did not care she was. She did not know how many hours had passed or if Walter was still looking for her. She was with Mr. Elias all Christmas Day, complaining about Walter.

“He is a cripple,” Elias said matter-of-factly. “You can’t live your life with a cripple—you know that. How can you, Putsy! I try to think of a way out for you, but what am I supposed to do if you are going about living with a cripple?”

“Oh, I don’t know what to do,” she said, wiping away tears with his handkerchief.

“I know you are loyal, and want him to be happy, but marriage is ridiculous. Hippy Skippy, we call him. And he’s not honourable—don’t think he is. He’s a sneak—he sneaks about tattling on people, and he drinks too much.”

On Christmas Eve she was supposedly in love with Walter and wanting to marry him. Now, by nine o’clock on Christmas night, she knew she was in a horrible position. How could she go back to Walter? There were moments when she wanted to. How could she stay in this little room, at the back of Elias’s house, beyond everyone else? He was expecting guests, and he had made it clear she was to stay where she was. If she came out of the room he would hit her. But she thought she would rather be beaten by him than stay with Walter.

The only way she could stay was to drink more. That is the only way she could stand herself.

Where were her clothes? How stupid she was, after midnight mass, to have climbed into the sleigh with the horse with the black mane that had been hauling those university kids. They put the big bear rug over her, and she felt warm.

“We’ll hide you,” the oldest of them laughed, “and he’ll never find you.”

And suddenly she realized that hiding was a powerful anecdote to her feeling of frustration with Walter. Yes, she would hide from him, let him find her if he could. Then he would do anything for her, and she would be able to help Joey Elias.

“And if he doesn’t, I won’t go back—he isn’t fair,” she thought.

She could hear him calling her frantically. She could hear his canes in the snow. She huddled down further. The young chemistry student’s name was Ed, and he said he would hide her.

They made light of her, asked her if she would please explain E=mc
²
.

“Don’t talk over her head,” a girl said.

“I can’t explain it but I’ll be damned if I can’t drink it—give me some E=mc
²
.”

She told Ed he was the cutest boy she knew. He kissed her full on the mouth, but she pushed him away. On they went, on toward the cove. Down the lane and out toward the river ice.

The horse slipped and fell, and kicked its legs, frantic, and all they did was laugh. The young driver was the only one angered. He told them the horse wasn’t shod right and needed rest, and after rest, water and oats.

A dispute occurred and he left.

Ed took over and tried to rouse the animal. And though she felt sorry for the old animal, she laughed too. Ed kissed her again. She saw in his eyes the reflection of her hair and hat and the victorious idea that she was the young fiancée of the crippled man from the theatre, out for a lark with real men like himself. The snow fell as they watched her drink.

Then when they could coax the horse no longer, one of the boys got out and kicked it. While they watched this boy—the girl telling him to stop—Putsy put a bottle of rum under her new coat and climbed down from the sleigh. When Ed asked her where she was going, she told him to piss off.

“Hey, none of that language—there’s a lady here,” he said.

“Tell her to piss off too,” she said.

Then she ran into the dark with the bottle before they spotted it gone.

She started off to find Walter. How could she have hurt him—how?

In the snow she looked for him. Then she banged on doors of former friends and found no one home but Joey Elias. She hadn’t meant to bang so loudly upon it. She was ready to run away. But when he opened the door she cried.

“Joey, Joey—let me come in. I don’t want him to see me. I tried, I tried.”

And she had tried, and she had failed. She hugged him, and he brought her inside.

“I’m doing it all for Dad,” she said, weeping, “I’m doing it all for Dad.”

“Never mind,” he said. “We’ll figure something else out.”

It was now nine o’clock on Christmas night.

She had looked so refined just a day ago. She sat on the edge of the cot, in his back room, with its cardboard boxes, where he kept gin and rum that he ran out to the Maine border. She watched the door, hoping it would open. She heard whispers from beyond the door; the loud talk of the previous few hours had stopped. She waited, and then a door closed somewhere.

“Joey,” she called, “I need a smoke, Joey—for Christ sake—for Christ sake, Joey.”

It echoed a dreary note through the dark house, lit here and there by electric candles, the rooms cluttered with furniture, the hallways smelling of Polish sausage and salt bacon.

Joey Elias barely heard her. He was sitting at a mahogany table, far at the back of his large dining room. And he was thinking, as he rubbed his hand through his thinning hair: Why had she come to the door on Christmas Eve? He wasn’t planning anything on Christmas Eve but to go to sleep. Then a knock on the door, which he very nearly didn’t answer. He went down the stairs and turned on the porch light and saw her face through the smoky glass, while snow fell quietly on the street. It changed their lives forever.

There she was. In her beauty. In her wonderful new coat, and her wonderful saucy eyes—eyes that could turn most men weak.

And what had he been doing? He had been preparing to go to bed. He thought she’d have been at midnight mass, go back to her folks’ house.

He wanted her again, in his maze of thinking and planning and orchestrating, but not on Christmas Eve—it had to be later on. He had no idea that she would come over so soon. And she wanted to drink with him. She held up the rum and laughed, and up the stairs they went.

But now, tonight—thinking over all of this once again, he wondered for the first time if he had done anything really. Hadn’t all things been done not
by
him, but
to
him? He still remembered the feel of his little brother on his back when he laid his head on his shoulder and fell asleep. To know peace again, he would have to go back to that time, carry his brother again—he knew it. He remembered what Father Carmichael had said a few years before at midnight mass: “We live lives that are calculated to overrule our instincts toward good. We are always making deals with our better selves in order to escape our duty. It never works in the end. In the end we have to face what and who we are. All of us live another life. That is the real life—it just goes on underneath, like a great lost sea under the ice. And all of us are equal in that sea. We must go back to our first mistakes and start again. It is not easy to do, yet it is possible. What will people say if you give up the protection of this present life for the other life, the interior life? They will mock you—torment you. That is what you have to look forward to. But it is worth this—yes—it is worth every slander against you.” He remembered that sermon. It was the last time he was in a church.

He tried to think. What had happened? Putsy Druken had knocked on the door on Christmas Eve. And it had started when he had seen her at the skating rink.

Later, after he had fed her a meat pie and put her to bed, came the fears from his youth, and again he had to walk them off. So, taking his brother’s boots, he went out along the streets covered in newly fallen snow. Most of the houses were shut up, but there were still some revellers shouting and going on.

When Joey came home from that walk in the early hours of Christmas morning, he found Putsy. Her hair was wet, her eyes puffy. She was crying and said she wanted to go home.

“You can’t go now—wait till tomorrow,” he said. “If Walter sees you in this state what will he think? You will never convince him of your innocence.”

He helped her back to the bedroom. It was there, while laying her on the bed, that he saw it. Time itself stood still. Kept in a small pouch in her silk stocking, on her white thigh near her triangle of dark, beautiful hair, was a key. He bent over and kissed her thigh and she tried to push him away. When he came away, he came away with the key in his mouth.

He knew it was the key to Janie’s theatre—the skeleton key that opened both outside doors. He stood, coughed, tucked it into his vest pocket.

He told her he was lonely and asked her to drink with him. After two drinks of rye whisky, she fell back to sleep.

He became worried about her stockings—she would know if she woke and saw the key missing. So he undid her stockings and rolled them down and hid them. He did not care if she went home without her stockings. If she did, she would think herself responsible for losing her key.

He would put the key back into the stocking after he had used it.

He still wasn’t completely sure what he was going to use it for, but he was glad he had it on him. He was filled with a sudden and desperate glee. Maybe he would go and look at the projectors, or perhaps sabotage one—just a little. Perhaps that would encourage Janie to distrust Walter, and Walter would come to work with him.

Putsy woke, and they spent the morning together. They had some drinks, and around one o’clock in the afternoon she went back to bed. She never mentioned her stockings.

He had forgotten about the key until two of his friends came to tell him that they had chased and beaten Dingle.

“I hit him for you, sir, just like you wanted,” Leon Winch said.

“Good, good,” he said, though he had already forgotten why he had been angry with Roy Dingle.

“Then Janie came along and took him in her car,” the other said. “Then Leon ran.”

“I did not—”

“Sure you did,” the other man laughed. “Ran from Janie King—”

Leon, furious at this banged his fist on the table.

“Dingle is with Janie King?” Elias said, astonished.

He could not believe this, so he sent the men around to find out what was going on at the house.

“They are sitting about eating supper,” Leon reported when they returned. “Dingle is wearing King’s clothes—though he swims in them.”

“And I overheard them speaking about you,” the second man said. “Janie said you had a fatal flaw!”

“Me, a fatal flaw!”

“Yes—envy.”

“Envy? Envy! Me! Who am I envious of?”

“Her.”

Elias threw his cigarette holder across the room, and spat.

“I think they’ve always been in cahoots,” Leon said, “or we woulda got her on the bridge!”

Now this seemed completely true to Elias. And if it was, then he had been played for a fool.

When the first man left (for he was not a man of Joey’s inner circle) Joey sat down in despair that he was being treated so badly.

“Well, let’s you and I get even with them,” Leon Winch said. “That’s what we have to do.” He was terrified of Janie King and wanted to prove that he wasn’t.

Now Elias put everything that was happening down to Janie’s trickery.

“Do you want to get even?” Elias said, the intonation of his voice suggesting that only good men got even.

Elias slipped his hand into his pocket and fingered the key. It was cold and silent throughout the town. The lights were out and the buildings dark.

“What do you intend?” Winch said.

“I want you to go inside the Regent—and burn the theatre to the ground. Then we’ll see how the Biograph does.”

“If it’s a break-in they’ll know it’s arson,” Leon said circumspectly.

“Then you’ll need this,” Elias said. He opened his hand on the key and smiled as if his answer had been preordained an eternity ago.

My great-grandfather had missed Janie by five minutes on that Christmas Day. He had gone out to a house on Pond Street to find a bit of cooking sherry he had hidden under a plank a month before. To his amazement it was still there, and he went back to his house, and while drinking his sherry—the dregs of the dregs—he had a visitor, Minister Whispers. He was frightened because Whispers was dressed completely in black and had a hawkish face, and small cupped white hands. This visitor was a lay minister from the Church of the Gospel of the Lower White Rapids. He visited Jimmy three days a month to try to convert him “to a sensible religion.”

“And why in Christ would one want a sensible religion?” Jimmy said. “A sensible religion is like a frigid wife—polite, but a lousy piece of wisdom in bed.”

The lay preacher’s report was that they got into an argument about saints and hell and fairies.

“I will never go trooping off to a religion where fairies are mistreated—never, never,” Jimmy said.

The preacher Whispers imparted his wisdom about saints. Catholic saints were not really saints, he said. Jimmy, angered by this, told the preacher, perhaps a little rashly, that he had a saint in a box in his bedroom.

“What saint is that?” the lay minister asked.

“St.—Hemseley” my great-grandfather was reported to have said, coughing at that moment so the preacher could not be sure of the name.

The preacher said he wanted to see the saint. Jimmy said it was a feast day for the saint—Christmas—and he didn’t want to be disturbed. Then Jimmy, his voice filling with emotion, spoke in his still half-Irish brogue about his daughter, Janie—how he had always loved her. He began to cry, and said he hoped she forgave him for all the terrible things he said. That he had worked for Joey Elias against her, pretending she had done him wrong as a way to enable his habit of drink. But that she continually looked out for him, even after he had done this.

“Of course she’s a saint,” he said, his eyes bright with tears. “She brought me back my suit today even though I had pawned it—just to have Christmas supper with her and her boy and little Georgina.”

The minister’s face was intense and snail shaped, with the upper lip falling over the bottom, so the line from his nose extended almost to his chin. Now his lips curled upwards in a sly smile. My great-grandfather had the reputation that D. H. Lawrence’s father must have had—that is, when Lawrence and his wife were forced to leave their house, who was at the gate scorning them but his own father.