River of the Brokenhearted (15 page)

FOUR

Putsy went back to her mother’s house, back to her dear old folks, as she said, to get the pic, and to take it down to Chatham Street, to that place where just a month or so ago the best man she had ever met—so she thought—loved her and was ready to marry her. But no, he loved her sister. Now she would put the pic into her sister’s back. She could see herself doing it, and then she would hand it over to Elias and say, “See what you did.” And she would go to the gallows and everyone would say, in a romantic way—for Putsy was romantic—“She killed for Love.”

And it was very nearly done, except for one thing—one simple fact. Rebecca did not go to Elias’s that day Putsy went back with the pic. Putsy waited that day, for hours. The next day she waited as well. But Rebecca stayed away. And the third.

Agitated that her desire would not last, she took her pic, and decided that Rebecca was not to blame—Elias himself was. She hid this pic under her coat and waited in the corner of the foyer for him to come back from his haunts. She held the pic by the handle. How worn and warm it was. Still, her hands were weak, as happened with drink. And so were her legs. Drink had done that as well. It had swollen up her legs and her hands. So she put the pic down and waited.

Her father had kept this pic well, and drew his living from it. He had bled from it, sweated over it, and slumped upon it exhausted. Now she would kill with it.

The life of the pic was interesting too, for it had come from Dobblestein’s lumberyard, and had been used in a boom to separate that last corduroy road of wood. She did not know what Elias had done to diminish this yard, but it would be ironic, for Elias was visiting this yard when Putsy first saw him. He gave her two caramels, and she brought her sister to see him the next day, to get two caramels too.

Now she waited. She could smell the soup in the cold air coming from up and down the street, and the small Irish houses benefiting from at least a month of temporary jobs at Estabrook’s mill. Then at six o’clock she heard him coming, grating his heels upon the snow. How she hated him—how terrible her life. She crouched down in the doorway and waited, her shoulders shaking. She heard the key, the door opened. She readied the pic.

“This is for Rebecca!” she would yell. Rebecca’s name was on her lips. And then in the gloom of the March night, she saw a small dark hat, a scarf around a woman’s face, her red shoulder-length hair, and a boy being led into the foyer.

Rebecca, audacious as always, had brought Miles King into Elias’s house.

Putsy glanced at the child and smiled uncertainly. Rebecca looked at her sister, surprised, and then calmed herself.

“Oh—Puts,” she said, “I has to go—I won’t make it home to the pisser. So I’ve brought him in. Take him home for me, will you?”

Putsy took Miles by the hand and walked him home. She was silent for a long time. Then she asked about his grandfather, and if he was sad. And she asked about Mr. Dingle who walked about the yard and shook hands with people at the theatre, and Janie.

“And how is Walter?”

“Good.”

“Is he mad at me—angry with little Putsy?”

“I don’t know.”

When she made it to the house, Janie asked if she would be so kind as to take a basket of clothes to the church for the lottery, for it would be too late for Rebecca to go. And off Putsy went with the clothes.

There she met Father Carmichael, who took the basket and asked, seeing her wince, if she had had problems with lifting, and holding.

She nodded, frightened that he would know what she had been thinking.

“It’s your arms and legs, isn’t it?”

She did not answer.

“And you’ve been drinking—having trouble sleeping, and worrying about something, h’m?”

“Yes,” she said. “So what of it?”

“Nothing—only I might be able to alleviate it.”

Father Carmichael told her to come with him. Up to the great old rectory they went with a few scattered lights in the windows. There he gave her some fireweed tea and told her to drink it.

She took the tea and drank it.

Suddenly she broke down and told him she could not go back to Joey. That with Joey she would sooner or later murder someone.

“Never you mind that,” he said. “You will accomplish much in your life now.”

He told her to pack her bags and he would find a place for her to stay with some people he knew.

After she regained some strength she got a job helping the nuns in the convent with washing and cleaning. Every evening she went first to the convent basement to wash and then to her room.

After a month Father Carmichael told her that things would change only if she wanted them to, that nothing could change until she decided, but that change did not come by her will alone but by the will of God. He said after her Saturday afternoon confession, where she told him of awful things, but not of the key, that life did not happen according to Joey Elias, or even according to Rebecca Druken, as much as they might want it or think it. Their lives accomplished only sadness.

“How does it happen, then?” Putsy said.

“It happens according to God. Now, we might not see or know or even believe, but that does not matter at all.”

She said she believed him firmly, but he told her she did not yet, that she might in the future, but there would be times when she would be discouraged. Events would happen that would prove that the path she was on was right.

“Yes,” she said, “of course—it doesn’t matter.”

And as long as she thought that most things did not matter, she was fine. Yes, the illness was to think that everything mattered because of you—because you felt, and believed what you felt, was more important than what others felt. A concern of hers no longer, she assured herself.

One day, floundering over what had happened to her, still depressed because she had seen Rebecca with the King children downtown, as unconcerned about her as if she were dead, Putsy found herself at church.

Carmichael listened to her and then told her it was possible to change if she did not lie. If she did as he said, she would begin to change. If she lived as he said she must, if she gave everyone what she herself most desired others to give, kindness and respect—when she did this, she would find not lying easy. “Do not speak, and you will not lie,” the priest said.

As absurd as it sounded, she tried this about town during the day, and it worked, more or less. She found she could not meet old friends without lying because they expected her to lie, because they were liars themselves. So, standing mute in front of them, she would shun their questions or answer in monosyllables. Not only was this painful but people teased her, saying she lost her mind over Elias. So she would turn away when she saw any of them, and walk in another direction.

Rebecca came and berated her, telling her that she was a huge disappointment, and then, what was worse, bringing some of her things back from Joey’s.

“What has gotten into you?” Rebecca said.

“Christ, I suppose,” Putsy answered.

She worked, and lived in her room behind the convent, and ate sparingly, and touched no alcohol. When friends from her bad days would come by, thinking she had struck it lucky and would drink with them again, she would send them away. And she began to realize she would never have to take another drink. And this scared her more than anything else in the world.

The priest asked her to do charity work. He needed help taking food to those very men she had come from and drunk with and slept with. This charity was something Carmichael did, though many did not like what he was doing, for it kept men here who the community was hoping would move on to somewhere else.

“I don’t want them to think I think I am better then they just because I’ve had some luck,” Putsy said.

“Oh, well, firstly, its what
you
think that counts,” Father Carmichael said. “Secondly, there is no luck. Things are designed in such a way as to bring us forward—I believe this, and all things are unified. There is a man, Einstein, who believes all things are unified, and I, as a priest do, too. Have you heard of Einstein?”

“No.”

“Have you heard of E=mc
²
?”

“I don’t know.”

Putsy thought about this. And here is what she thought: I am smart enough to bamboozle this priest, and pretty enough to seduce him here and now, yet he thinks he can instruct me. How can he instruct me? Do I believe that if I act as if I believe, then I believe? Is that what he wants? When she told the priest this, admitting everything, he answered, “You told me your husband is a gambler—he would gamble on a fly, and if it will crawl to the right or the left, and he will make strategies and waste energy trying to figure out how flies move. Well, gambling might be that complex, but I assure you life isn’t. The fly will move exactly as it is supposed to. You just start to do and sooner or later you will become. It is better by far than gambling.”

The fact was, Putsy had had little enough charity from her own. Her broken teeth and venereal disease proved that. So she took to doing charity work. And her first impulse was her most radical. She didn’t want to listen to this impulse, for it went against the grain of everything she once believed. She answered Carmichael’s call and took food to the very men that had accosted her when Elias threw her family out of their house. They were sitting in a tin shed halfway up the cliff overlooking Ritchie’s Wharf. They were snitches, rats to the police, wife beaters, and drunks. They had fought and gambled and hurt others all their life. They were the friends of Joey Elias.

She called to them and said she was coming in. The shed was cold and smoky; the men had colds and were shivering. She did not know that Elias had talked about her to these men, and that Rebecca had as well.

So they laughed and teased her, and tried to grab her crotch, but they took the food. She found out that Leon Winch had died, and after all his vainglory and work for Elias, Elias did not even go to the funeral. Leon’s child, Ray, was left as an orphan on the street.

Strangely, it was listening to Joey Elias that changed her destination, when most would not or could not be changed by it.

And so, she lived at the convent as a lay member of the community, went to church, and began to help Father Carmichael with his charity cases. She had to numb herself from her former life, endure the hatred of some of the nuns she had for years made fun of, decided to have her marriage annulled, and had to admit privately that she had allowed the key to escape her possession.

Father Carmichael, who was known as an oddball not only within the church, which disliked him, but within the community, which was baffled by him, insisted she eat his assorted herbs and weeds. Swamp milkweed he was fond of cooking for her, and other wildflowers as well.

In secret (perhaps Carmichael knew) it was her venereal disease which prevented her from going back to Walter. However, Walter did pursue her, and one night he asked her to come and see him. It was a cold, hard night, and the streets were wet and empty. She asked Carmichael if she should.

“It will be painful for you, but it might help him. I believe you owe him that, but only if you feel strong enough.”

“He will curse me and belittle me.”

“If he does, remember you have been cursed by Elias for much less, and you stayed with him.”

Walter had been running the picture
Of Human Bondage
. He felt Putsy was exactly like Bette Davis, using his kindness and his crippled body for her own ticket. He saw himself in Philip Carey and could not help being bitter. How could she have gone with Joey Elias again—how how how! He had a speech prepared to make her feel utterly worthless, and he had practised it over the last few days. Then she would beg his forgiveness and he would laugh.

When she got there, Walter was drunk. She tried to talk like Carmichael might have talked, but to no avail. She tried to leave, but he wouldn’t let her go. She sat in the corner and watched him. He asked her to drink with him, and she said that she wouldn’t.

He said, “If you don’t drink with me, I will kill myself this instant.”

And he took the old shotgun that had been at the theatre and pointed it at his heart.

Fearing he would, she desperately searched about for a glass and, hands shaking, poured herself a rum. All that Carmichael had told her had gone out the window. Then, hands still shaking, she nodded and said, “If I do this, you promise you will put the gun away.”

She lifted the glass to her mouth. With a quickness that surprised her, he jumped up and knocked the glass from her lips, and begged her forgiveness. She reached out and gently stroked the top of his head, and he bawled like a child.

“Please, Putsy—I don’t care what you do, just don’t drink any more,” he sobbed.

“I am not going to,” she said softly, smiling, tears in her eyes.

Rebecca worried about one thing—the key. What would Putsy say to Father Carmichael about the key? She went to search Putsy out. She did not find her, and was on her way back toward town, cutting through the rectory garden, when she saw Father Carmichael himself. She asked him when Putsy could come home.

“That is up to Putsy,” he said.

“Oh, Father, I thought it was up to you.” She smiled.

“No, it is up to her,” he answered, suddenly handing her a few of his parsnips to take home to her mother. “You could stay here too,” he said. “It does not matter what has gone on before. You may think it does, but I am not concerned about that. You might have a better chance to help yourself if you did what Putsy wants to do.”

“ ‘What has gone on before?’ ” Rebecca asked. “What is it that you know?”

“There is very little that I know,” Carmichael said. “I am only saying that you could stay here also, and realize that all things hidden will be revealed.”

“Ah, well,” she said, “I’ll take my chances in the big old world.”

“We all take our chances there—even if we are here,” he said.

Rebecca did not answer this. She looked around the garden and then said, “People say you have herbs and cure people and know the future. What is my future? Tell me what it is and I’ll pay you.”