River of the Brokenhearted (18 page)

“Janie’s lad,” he was called by everyone. Many had forgotten his name was Miles. Some would never know. He could have been Artie Shaw, could have been Benny Goodman, could have been anyone singing “I’m Miles Away from You.”

He and my grandmother alone in a house that never reached grandeur and never quite captured despair.

After 1940 my father became the front for our family, the shuffling dancer with the smooth moon face, who could tap dance, sing, and do a sadly brilliant imitation of W. C. Fields. “Hello, my little chickadee,” he would say, mostly to his newly trained pigeons. Once at a picnic in the honour of a middle-aged female member of our IODE he waved away her offer of ice water after the three-legged race with: “No, I don’t drink water, ma’am.”

“And why not, Miles?”

“Why not, ma’am—you ask why not? Well, it’s because fish fuck in it.” He bowed and walked away.

He was left alone, and slowly, quietly, he left the world, the church, the house he lived in, and began to drink.

After a certain day—I’m not sure what day this was—he never performed tricks with his pigeons again, though he had a budgie when my sister and I were little, and at times played with his bowler hat like Laurel and Hardy to make us laugh. Though he did not laugh when we did.

I did not know until I was sixteen and found a letter with his report card from 1939 that because of supposed psychological problems (sneaking a gin bottle into class), he never graduated, but left school in grade eleven.

“He’s about as interested in school as a bag of dung,” the principal wrote to Janie, one airy April day of that far-off year. “He must be taken to task. It is all well and fine to have money, Mrs. King”—by which of course he meant that it wasn’t—“but responsibility is more to the point here, isn’t it? He is simply not responsible—for he has money. Well, he might not always have it, might he not?

“So try him in banking (if someone will take him), as a teller, or perhaps as a clerk in a store. He may make a labourer, for he has the strength if he has the will. He cannot be much else. Do you know that he drinks?”

“I am quite aware that he drinks,” Janie wrote back. “It is our family inheritance—which is more than an inheritance—over a hundred and fifty years from Boyne to our Irish famine—than you have ever had, you pickle-cheeked, squeamishly polite, kiss-arse bastard.”

The principal, disgusted at her coarseness, did not answer back. I don’t think he expected an answer and got one anyway. There is a life always and forever beneath the life led, and one signature folly of that hidden life is a perverse and private desire to cause pain. Janie, however, was willing to trade pain, so sorrowful had her life been. And she knew who he was, this man. He was, in his imitable tall and bony fashion, what so many men are, who have felt over the years a right to belittle people. He was this man, the frightened head of his own department and a complete arsehole.

The school was glad to be rid of my father, and I assume my father of them. Miles was perceptive enough to know that his torture came because of class. The Winches and Elias and the Drukens had tortured him because of class, and so too had those from the principal families in town, the Estabrooks and Blacks. For Miles King was considered rich by the poor and callow by the rich. He could do nothing about either perception. His father had been an eccentric orphan, his mother born at the intersection of Pond and Chatham Streets. No one had taught him a thing. His mother left him to his own devices. And he floundered in much.

One day the anatomy book was found in a back field, opened to a page underlined and annotated by studious juvenile remarks, left and forgotten as well.

There is a moment that this anatomy book gives us. We can interpret him leaving it in the back field like this. All his life he had believed Janie, and then, by the time he was seventeen, he realized half of what she had told him were lies to protect her investment in his life, because she no longer had her daughter. Nor did she mind him suffering over this. And suffer he did, so he began to keep up his father’s flower gardens, and lavished the attention on them, and on the hummingbirds that flitted about them, that no one had ever managed to lavish on him.

Still, Gram spoiled him in other ways. She bought him a sports car that he never drove, and invited young people to his house that he never spoke to. One night when he was sixteen coming into the house late, he saw a most depressing sight. Young girls and boys jitterbugging in the drawing room—in his father’s sanctuary—laughing and playing the piano that he had always been kept away from.

“I have invited some little people over,” Janie said.

“Have fun, you little people,” Father said. “I am off to bed.”

Coming to his room later, with the melodious sound of Artie Shaw trailing behind her up the stairs, she looked in at his door.

“Look, I’ve been thinking. If you want to play the piano—you know you will never be as good as your dad, however—well, would you like to?”

“Absolutely not, Mother,” he said.

She began to see then that just as she was willful, brilliant, and determined in a way that reminded one of a disaster survivor, so was he.

She tried then, to no avail. To no avail. When he was seventeen she decided to have him a birthday celebration, with papier-mâché decorations and young girls in sprightly attire invited. But he whispered in her ear: “Ten years too late, Mother. Not for the girls, of course, but for the party.”

She faced him the next day as he stood ready to enter the back hallway that led outside. Her voice seemed to echo and engage you with its power and its tragedy.

“I was alone after George died. I don’t blame you for being little, but there was nothing I could do with you. You could not help. It must have been a strange position to be in—you as a child—how you must have wanted to help, at certain times—like one of the princes brought to the tower. But if you play your cards well, you will someday inherit what I have to leave.”

“I see. Well then, of course.” Father smiled, lighting his cigarette with his engraved gold lighter. Then without finishing that thought he nodded and went out into the yard to attend to his father’s flowers, and his own rock garden.

He loved all his life flowers, ground ivy, small white violets and purple loosestrife. They commanded our back yard in the summer, sadly waving like ancient talismans, brandishing bright colours and certain of a swift demise under the autumn sky. He kept them up at his mother’s great grey house on the hill as well.

“If it wasn’t for a dumb plant, I’d never get to see him—though I only see him from the hind end anyway,” Grandmother once remarked to me when I was very little.

“What was Daddy like?” I asked, thinking she would shower me with information about his goodness.

“I’m not sure—I never got to know him that well” was her reply.

TWO

Just as abruptly, Miles quit high school, put his bright paints away, and became a cadet. In 1940, when Churchill came to power after years of being laughed at by the intelligentsia who now called upon him to save their arses, my father, telling his mother nothing of where he was going, lied about his age and went gaily off to war, hoping, like his own father, that a crawl over the top might do him in. He wrote to Janie from Halifax, jostled in among other soldiers in a crowded train station, waiting to take the
Queen Mary
across the pond.

“You might not know, but I have 1302 guppies in my room. You will have to feed them when I am gone—or feed them to each other if you can’t manage it. I will be away for some little time—perhaps in Europe.”

We do not know what happened to his guppies, but she did remove from his room his copies of D. H. Lawrence, his
Sons and Lovers
and
The Rainbow
. “Thank you, God, I now know what girls do—or what I am supposed (or allowed, or is it willing?) to do with them” was scribbled on both.

He spent most of his furloughs and nights out at theatres in London, and sent his mom postcards now and again from Piccadilly, about various theatres and theatricals he knew she would love. All of them were unsigned. A picture of him in a London pub, frayed and cracked, remains of those days. He is looking silently out at the camera. And the truth be told, no wise-ass friend or jaunty boyhood pal snapped this poignant photograph of my father when young, but the barmaid. For he, as always, was alone.

By 1944 my father had risen to a captain of artillery in the North Shore Regiment, and there is a story that outside of Caen, France, on a hot, dusty furnace of a day, he accidentally fired on his own troops, and took out a number of them, thinking them Germans. Whether or not true, it was never verified, and I did not ask him about it bluntly, though I suggested he write his war experience down. But he was only a boy of twenty then, and a captain of artillery is a fine thing for such a young, inquisitive gentleman.

In England he searched for his past, in Ireland as well.

He retraced his father’s steps on King’s Road and King Lane, into King’s Head Inn, and King’s Square, and found in a small upstairs room beyond Piccadilly an old yellowed piano that my grandfather had played his first piece on.

“The remarkable Georgie King of Blackhead’s Lane,” George King was once called. My father put the program in his pocket and brought it back to Canada, not to give to his mother (as one might think or infer), but to keep on his person.

He remained friendless, was the last one in and the first one out of the amphibian landing craft on June 6, 1944, walking with his gun over his head, far less worried about German assaults on his flesh than drowning, and in the process making a complete ass of himself, which everyone from the town of Newcastle simply assumed he would do.

“And what happened to that terrible Miles King?”

“Drowned within a second of leaving the transport.”

“Ah yes, well—h’m—of course.”

In 1946, he was released as a commissioned officer, with a long lanky body, and a white sad face. He came home with a plan to marry—his schoolteacher.

He went nights to sit with Miss McGrath in her parlour, drinking tea, talking about and apologizing for history lessons uncompleted in grade eight. She, who was thirty years his senior, tried not to leave a light on, yet would see him standing in her little living room as she sank back into a chair in the dark. Miss McGrath finally told him she was a friend only and could not make him happy. Nor, she said, did she have the inclination to do so. He went and got good and hammered.

“I’ve lost the love of my life,” he told an old school acquaintance.

“Who? Diane? Susan? Who, who?”

“Miss McGrath,” he said.

“But she’s damn near sixty!”

“And worthy of every year God has decided to spend on her,” my father mused.

The fellow told me that he decided my father was mad.

“In what way?” I asked.

“In a way that was charming and interesting,” he replied, “and quite sharp—but nonetheless a little self-destructive, I think. No,” he continued, picking up his beer, “completely self-destructive—frighteningly so!”

My father did perform at a St. Patrick’s Day concert that March, which enabled him to do a bit of soft-shoe to a scratchy recording of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” which he had to reset halfway through by shuffling over to the skipping record with a cane and, after resetting the needle, tapping back, twirling about. He was introduced as “our boy Miles” by Monsignor Hanrahan, and he seemed to like that, “our boy Miles” was the finest tribute he had ever received on the river. But St. Patrick’s Day aside, he did not enter the church.

“Why don’t you come to church?” Hanrahan asked him that afternoon.

“Because I wish to be a saint.”

Miles was back home, pondering his life, his hope for a career in the later part of the 1940s. Certain he could not stay with his mother, certain he had to make it on his own, thinking again of medicine, he packed to leave one sweet soft night in July, with the crickets chirping under the window, and the smell of his father’s flowers gentle in the garden below, leaves rustling soft like on the trees.

“Where are you going?” his mother said.

“I am going away.”

“Don’t be so full of nonsense—there is nothing out in the world for you. You have to stay here. Who will protect me?”

“You have Roy Dingle,” he said. Roy, whom they had saved that long-ago Christmas day, was her male companion or, as she called him, “her pal.” They were suited for each other, looking something like Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main from Ma and Pa Kettle. Roy called her Mrs. King. Sometimes she would let him back the car out of her garage. He would shine it, wax it, and dust off the seat for her as he awaited her on Sundays to take her to church. They were partners at Auction 45, and went to bingo once a month. As for Miles’s relationship with Roy Dingle, they were strained at the best of times. Many times Mr. Dingle would be known to turn away just at the moment Miles was to offer friendship.

“How can you leave? I need you to take over the business—you have to. Who will own the business when I die?” She burst into tears, looking at him through her fingers as she cried.

“Ah, another ruse,” he thought, “in this sweet July evening, with the fireflies across in the darkening field where I have hidden my bottles since I was fifteen.”

He left and neighbours actually heard her wailing at the gate.

He sat with his suitcase, his hair well coiffed, and his cigarette pinched between his manicured fingers, waiting to board the train, even an hour after it had left.

The next day he received a job offer, from her, in writing, to be Walter’s apprentice—the apprentice Walter had been asking for for twenty years.

He was offered thirty a week and room and board. When he married, if he married, and depending whom he married (a qualification) he would receive one of her houses she had scattered about the town, where she put her money instead of putting it in the bank.

So Father entered the theatre as an employee on August 6, 1947, with five dollars in the pocket of his brand-new itchy suit.