River of the Brokenhearted (17 page)

“If we see ya at the circus again, ya flower-pickin’ bastard, we will rub yer face in the motors,” John Druken said. Miles did not know where the motors were, but he didn’t want his face rubbed into them.

“Where are the motors?” he asked.

“Go fuck yourself, ya pansy-assed bastard. Mommy’s little flowered shit arse,” they said. And John came back and kicked him good. “You’ll find out where the fuggin’ motors are,” he said.

“And we’ll shave yer head.”

“And pour molasses over ya.”

“And have rats eat yer knob off like they did in that movie.”

“What movie?” Miles said, looking up at them from the ground.

“You’ll find out what movie, ya scab-lickin’ quiff.”

And so saying they left, complaining about the poor quality of the Saturday afternoon matinee.

Of course by ten years of age Miles knew that the problem with his life was that his mother had fought with everyone. She had fought all her life. Yet those she fought with were not above inciting kids to exact revenge on him. But he couldn’t tell her this. It would wound her too deeply.

Still, he had wanted her to explain it to him, to tell him there might be a possibility that it would be better sometime in the future. But the only thing she said after Rebecca stole her fur coat was, “Everyone leaves me—but you won’t, will you, Miles.”

He had painted Rebecca from memory after she had gone away. He wanted to catch the particular effect she had on people. He did not know this is what he wanted to address in the painting since he was only ten; however, it was the primary reason he painted it. In his watercolour she was sitting on the bed, with her hands turned toward her hips, looking up at someone at the door. It was one of the first watercolours he had ever attempted. It is somehow striking how well he caught Rebecca’s character with a dab of red to show her hair and opened lips, a dab of gold to show her hanging slip and slightly parted knees, a dab of blue to catch her eye.

He was patiently braiding Georgina’s hair when he heard the first distant chord of thunder.

“We can’t go today—it’s going to rain.”

“I don’t care if it rains. We’ll be under the roofs they have over the rides.”

“But I just put on your new dress—your prettiest one—and your new gloves.”

“So what? We will take the umbrella.”

“But don’t you think—?”

“I’m going—I’m going—and if you don’t go I will go alone—and I will tell Momma you have the mouth organ—”

“I told you I would take you—so I will take you. But if you catch a cold it isn’t my fault. And Mom can’t know I’ve taken you—because she told me not to.”

“Yes yes yes, I know I know I know.”

And they started out across the darkening field in the pulpy smell of summer toward the distant grounds where the circus was, where the trapeze artist had climbed a wire and an elephant was laughed at because of the amount of dung he had left, where the Druken boys tormented the monkey, and Billy Pebbles got sick in the crowd. Miles clutching some loose change and a one-dollar bill and wearing his top hat in case a circus manager needed him to lend a hand. “A real momma boy shit arse,” the Drukens would say. Georgina sitting up in the carriage yelling, “Hurry hurry hurry—Miles, hurry before the circus goes away.”

And they bounced over the stony field toward the big tents.

SIX

My father never so much as opened his mouth to me about it, except when he was in the throes of despair. Never spoke about anything, really. I don’t know where he lost her. I like to think of them as great birds might have watched them bumping their way across the red dirt field in the heavy air toward the circus with its animals and its games. She giving him orders—“Here, Miles, go here. Over this way. Stop. Turn right. Watch out for the dogshit, boy”—clutching the bar with her purple gloves.

What is known is that he went in under the big top. He bought a ticket to see the chimps who smoked cigars and dressed like a married couple.

That is what he had wanted to see more than anything else. She wanted to go on the unicorn, and he paid for that. He put her on one of the large seats, which meant she didn’t have to stand. He watched to see she was safe, then ran to see half the chimp show, went and found her again, paid for another ride and her chocolate whoopee, and went back in for the rest of the show. He was sure he saw her when he came out—he was sure she was near the carriage. He went to buy her a hot dog, and when he came back she was gone.

He didn’t know where she’d gone, and he was too shy to tell anyone. He kept looking. But everyone was going home, because of the thunderstorm, and the circus was littered with dead, meaningless trifles and empty rides, and squeals of people running with newspapers over their heads. He kept searching for her as rain pelted him. He had stayed too long to watch the chimps, and no one knew where he was when she got off her ride. Someone told him she was seen heading home. So he turned the empty carriage around and retraced his steps. He got to the house and no one was there. He went back to the circus. By now, it was deserted, and all the tents and trailers were closed.

That morning he had taken Georgina to the photographer. They had their picture taken, he standing beside her, she with her bonnet on, smiling. It was to be a surprise for Janie. It had cost him three dollars. The photographs would be ready the next week, when they came back from the cottage. Before she had her nap he had helped her pack her bag for the cottage, putting in her doll and her colouring book. Thinking of this made him frantically tear through the circus grounds trying to find her. But it got dark and then darker, and he went home again.

He walked up the steps. The door was open but no one was there.

He waited hours. Sometimes he was in a daze, broken only by the wind over the trees. Then after midnight he heard a sound and looked through the screen window. He saw a woman coming up the street. When she turned into the walkway, he closed the door and hid behind it. He was shaking so badly he was sure she could hear his teeth chattering.

“Miles—thank God you’re okay, Miles, thank God—come—come,” she whispered. “Come.”

To Miles everything seemed so sad. All the elms had big wet leaves and if you ever saw pictures of them they were sad, and all the puddles were silent, forever and ever, and all the telephone wires were still, and the birds flew away all at once, and the woman, Putsy, took his hand and that was sad too, as sad as any woman taking a child by the hand in any movie that you saw, and no one would ever tell my father different as long as he lived.

He carried his mouth organ in his pocket, still had his tie and top hat on. He had done a good job, he had braided her hair, he had changed her stockings, he did a dance to make her laugh. He wanted Putsy to tell him where she was. But Putsy didn’t want to tell him. No one told him for a long, long time. And when they did, he looked as if an eternal sorrow could not escape his soul, in grade five or grade eleven, or any grade in between. In fact, he never spoke a word for three years to anyone at all.

PART IV

ONE

My father did poorly in school. As a boy he would be gone to school when his mother woke, and would return to the house after she was down at the Grand. “With all her actor pals,” he said. He would go upstairs, look over his homework, and then lie on his bed, staring into the dark, remembering certain frames of certain movies he had seen—for he had seen far more than most people his age, and could be considered in a certain respect, or in most respects certainly, as the son of an actress, for in her heart and soul Janie considered herself to be one, and, what is worse, had the temperament to prove it. As for Miles, he was left off centre stage, not unlike Edgar, he once admitted to me. “Edgar—Edgar who?” I asked.

“Why—Poe, son, the poet Poe—born of a thespian family—a father and mother who died in 1811—when he was two. Well, just like he, some of my very dreams were dashed at the very same age—the age of two.”

The drawing room was closed and the piano was off limits, but sometimes at night he would go down and listen, his ear pressed to the door, for someone had told him that his father was a ghost of a man at the end of his life and that the sound of the piano was the very last thing heard in the house on the day he died.

Miles had only been in the drawing room once, and not for a long time. And he, as he once admitted, had hopes that made him blush.

“Yes, Wendell,” he said, “I had hopes to make me blush, but humankind has a way of dashing hope—and in fact that is what makes you blush in the end. In fact, all men should blush at the moment of death—just because of the great foolishness of their dreams.”

After the death of his sister he never asked to play the piano.

“Though my fingers wiggled and itched,” he said, “worse than my toes. And Mom would curse at music—what she loved she learned to hate after Georgina died, so it came down to hiding the fact that I wanted to play—or taking myself into the woods to play in secret. The biggest obstacle was, I could not get a piano into the woods—well, not every day—so I had to find something else. I found a Horner harmonica when I was ten.”

My father, as he said, “did not press the piano.” It was as if a self-imposed punishment had been decided. After the death of the little girl a great weight oppressed him. I learned through rumour and supposition downtown and in the barbershop where people gathered how Georgina had died. When I heard the cruel nursery rhyme: “Miles pushed/his sister fell/down Paddy Druken’s wishing well,” I pretended I didn’t know it—to mention it to him would have been agony.

He spoke best in soliloquy, his voice though always polite was clipped halfway between a British laurel wreath and an Irish crown of thorns—not unusual for Maritimers used as they are to monologues and fist fights.

“After Georgina died, I was sure Mom would kill me, and I simply waited for the blow. Yet she did not strike. Of course she did not want to, of course she still loved me, and of course she did not listen to those nasty rumours that I had pitched and tossed my poor sister into the well. Of course she did not although once she came close to accusing me. Still, I was inconsolable at not being killed. Ten years of age is a little young to make a noose,” he said to me, “though I know better children than me made a noose at ten—some in the wars must have, but I was between wars as you know. However, I will say this. I was in charge of the little girl, and I was rich, and my mother dressed me funny, and—well—do you know what this did, Wendell?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I’m not sure either. Rebecca, while she worked for my mom, held me up to ridicule on the street, in front of her cronies from time to time, and gave me a sound knock on the head for their amusement, but what was that? I was still a player, as they say, in life. I had my pigeons and my tricks. But afterwards what did life matter? I don’t think life mattered. I lived, I ate, I watched others do things that I might have once wanted to do. But some kind of gap was now in evidence between myself and my existence.” Here I could see him trembling as he looked at me.

“That’s terrible.”

“At any rate, it did irreparable damage to the relationship between me and your grandmother. Or is it ‘your grandmother and I’? The yard grew up about the house, and the trees grew to shade us, and the nights were soft and melancholy, and the rooms smelled of face powder and cosmetics and strong tea, and the wind blew along the hallways where I would sometimes stand for hours staring in abject desolation at emptiness. Georgina’s room was locked, for my mother could not look at it in calmness. Nor, though she tried to hide it, could she look at me in calmness. So over time I became a kind of oddity—a Mr. Oddity, if you must know. I did not speak for several years, for my own thoughts about that day did not seem to matter. I could not remember what happened, yet people believed I only said this because of my own culpable, damnable heart. Rebecca was gone, and that was a good thing. She begged money or stole money and went away. Where had she gone? I wondered often enough. Some said she joined the circus to do a bawdy dance—I had no idea what that was, and could not conjecture. However in the summertime at night, when the wind blew, I sometimes felt she was coming back to see me, and I would dream of her in the midst of a bawdy dance, swaying to some doomed music at the other end of the house. It was known that she had had a falling-out with many people, and I always thought, ludicrous I know, that she would be back to seek revenge on us all, even against the man who taught her everything she knew—Joey Elias himself.

“No” he said, looking at me with a peculiar gaze, “none believed me. I was too witless. There is a conscious effort at times to see only the worst side of people, and I was the one they had singled out. I realized that by twelve years of age, but had no voting power to correct it. I thought that if I donated something to the town they might like me, so I began to save my money for a fire engine, knowing our town needed one. There would be no need to name the fire engine after me—we would name it after Georgina. But I could not save enough. That became the story of my life.”

As a boy he lived a solitary life. If it was a mild night he would walk to the theatre and go upstairs and sit near Walter, looking through the projector’s gaze at the movie, at Cary Grant or Irene Dunne. Then he would take out his sketch pad and doodle the actors, Fred Astaire in motion, or Clark Gable in full smile, until he heard Janie leave, and when the theatre, the great Grand she had built as her own monument to her own brilliance and talent, was locked solid as a vault, he would return home alone. He would walk back and forth on the street outside until he saw her lights go out.

His supper would be made for him by the maid and sitting out on the kitchen counter, cold. There was a new maid every few weeks. They could not keep one long enough to know her name.

“Mom, I was going to ask the new maid—my new ‘pal’ as you call them—to come outside with me, but I cannot for the life of me find her.”

“She’s gone, son.”

“Gone. Where?”

“I did not like the look of her—”

“You did not like the look of her, I liked the look of her quite a bit.”

“She had the ‘French look.’ ”

“She did, she did. I admire that.”

“Well, I am not fond of the French.”

“Well, mother, who is? Yet is that any reason to let the poor girl go?”

He would go days without seeing his mother or caring if he did. For there must have been some idea, some grain of understanding, that a death he had forged had caused a shift in their destinies and in their loyalties to one another. That was the rub. The loyalty Janie demanded of him was not, evidently, strong enough in her to keep her from accusation, although direct accusation was never thought of. She could not stand any display of affection from him—no hug, and no kiss, and no gentle reminder they were mother and son. It was too painful for her, and became after a while too painful for him, until something inside him no longer cared.

Still, she was desperate not to lose him. So though he bought himself a Swiss Army knife, he never got to go camping, and a snorkel and fins were enough to cause frenzy in her gaze. The great damn river you see, terrified her, and although she had swum it herself, he must not—for losing him meant losing all that was left. She did not know, for he did not say, that there were certain moments when certain boys (never just one boy) held his head under water at Vye’s beach to see if he would gurgle. He did not—learned to hold his breath for almost three minutes when he was fourteen.

Every fortnight, in a kind of desperate attempt to win her approval, he bought Janie a present with money she left on the table for him, and he left these presents on her bed table. Years later my sister, the sleuth, discovered these presents unopened in her cedar closet, all of them having notes attached.

“A little something for you, Mom, to prove what you already know, that if the town does not love you, I do.”

Miles came and went alone from school, went to socials by himself and stood at the far end of the gymnasium in his bow tie and white jacket. He spied a girl at one of these functions as alone as he, and one evening at supper hour, when he was sixteen, he looked up at Janie and said: “Could you get Elizabeth Whispers a coat? It is cold out.”

“Elizabeth Whispers. Who is Elizabeth Whispers?”

“She is Sammy Whispers’s daughter.”

“Who is Sammy Whispers?”

“He was the preacher who met his end at the hands of his congregation.”

“Oh yes—that Whispers.”

“Yes.”

“Why can’t she buy her own coat?”

“Because she cannot buy anything, let alone a coat. Her family has no money. And if you ask me I doubt if in a hundred years they will earn as much as you do in five.”

“Tell her to come see me at the theatre tomorrow afternoon, and she will have her coat.”

“Thank you.”

The next evening Janie said, “I gave Elizabeth Whispers her coat—but I did not let on I bought it. I pretended there was a draw at the theatre and that she had won.”

“Since she has never been to a movie it must have seemed slightly incongruous,” my father said.

“Yes—whatever that means, I’m sure,” Janie answered, cutting into her liver, which she insisted on eating every Wednesday, just as she insisted on fish for Friday.

Miles picked up his glass of milk, drank, and said nothing more for a week or two.

Then one night, unable to look her way, he said, “You lied to me, Mother.”

She stared at him. “I am positive I have—but when?”

She discovered that Miles was talking about things she had completely forgotten. That she had told him many lies about many things to keep him near her bosom, to keep him safe, and to secure her legacy. She had told him that the river had great fish that would swallow him in “one godawful suck” so he would not go there and drown. She had told him when he was little that the forest held man-eating plants so he would not go into the woods, and lose his way, and she had told him that all the universities had closed down because everyone was poor, and he should not make any plans to go, that she had not gone to university and it did not bother her. In fact, she was twice as smart because she hadn’t. She was at least as smart and twice as rich as any university professor.

So if he wanted to be a doctor as he said, what would happen when he was operating on a patient and she needed him at the theatre? How many patients would he lose if he had to have two jobs? He would have to leave an appendix to change a reel.

“But perhaps I wouldn’t want to work at the theatre.”

Nothing struck her as more ludicrous. He should work for her—that is where he was needed. And the theatre would be the only place he was ever wanted. Besides, the whole world was against her, and he should not be as well. She told him that she had hoped Georgina would be here with her, but as he knew, Georgina was not.

“I’m not needed,” he said.

“Was St. Patrick needed in Ireland?”

“Only until the snakes were gone. And it seems our snake—by which I mean Rebecca—has fled,” he whispered.

He walked with a military air about him, and because his hope was to be a doctor, he carried a book of Boyle’s
Anatomy
back and forth from the Grand Theatre to the house. Most people thought he was the personification of a “creepy” egotist. Nor did he mind them thinking this, for it set him apart in a different way than the death of the child had. And in a certain way it complemented it—perversely, to be sure, but what else did he have to fall back upon if not the perversity of this kind of precedent?

Still, he believed in a kind of doomsday scenario for himself.

“Why do you have all the doors locked and every light on in the house—even in the basement?” Janie asked him one night in 1938.

“Because Rebecca is back in town with the circus, a hawker at the dart game, and seeking a way to do me in.”

“That is nonsense,” his mother said.

“Well, Mom, I realize that the carnie is the best place for any of us—there is a kind of emblematic understanding between those people, which in fact is rather sweet, and if not for her I could join. Yet my concern isn’t nonsense. She wants your home and your business and is willing to kill me for it—I knew it since I was seven years old!”

“Absolute rubbish,” my grandmother said.

The 1940s film noir seemed right for Miles—those films with Bogey and Mitchum, those with palm trees in the dark, those with stairways leading to forlorn patios, those with large cars and indifferent dreams, that ocean waves seemed to wash away. He in his cadet uniform smoking cigarettes alone in the dark theatre, looking like Fitzgerald himself, while the howls of moviegoers echoed around him and sometimes, for no apparent reason, at him. Or for the reason that he carried Boyle’s book of anatomy while asking a girl for a date to the spring dance.

He was in essence forgotten by the town. The girls in their finery, the boys in their youthful swagger waltzed by him, in jaunty indifference onward toward a war, and Hitler in Europe.

He wasn’t even worth bullying any more. Joey Elias told people: let him go, he is too harmless to harm.