River of the Brokenhearted (21 page)

FIVE

We left at night, usually. It was my mother’s idea, her hope assuring my sympathy, being still a child. It was her way to save Father, although I doubt that my father ever wanted to be saved from anything. But Elizabeth tried anyway. Everything was clean, everything was pressed, everything packed into four suitcases. Travelling light like escapees running for some damn train that kept moving just out of reach.

Sometimes our escapes were short-lived. On three or four occasions, Janie did not even know we had made a break until we were back at our place going about our business in the usual way. Sometimes we stayed away a month, living out of suitcases at various places.

We went in summer, when I could smell smoke off the wind, hear in the heat the short on-again off-again call of a crow in the dead silence. I remember air shimmering off a lone spruce tree in the middle of a field, while my sister was behind the vehicle being sick.

“It’s because I’m skinny,” Ginger said. “I would rarely get car-sick if I were not skinny—and it’s just such car trips that leave me skinny—because I continually puke.” She said this not only in defiance but as a celebration of her willingness to be pulled away once again from everything she knew, from house, from school, from Gram.

“You are doomed,” I said to her.

“Yes. But no more than you, Wendy dear,” she promised. (I invoked my mother’s rule that she not call me Wendy.) Then she looked at me with her huge brown eyes and gave a smile, then immediately returned to her retching.

“I am a goner, unless—or is it until?—I have some kind of a strawberry milkshake,” she said.

We laughed, leaving little echoes somewhere in the air beyond us, and got into the car again, and drove.

Many times Father could not continue without his libation. He would pull over on the side of the road, and while wind from other vehicles whipped down upon us, he would drink. Then, being at least a little drunk, he would ask which one of us—Elizabeth (who could not drive), myself, or Ginger—was willing to take the wheel.

Once, I woke in the back seat, the last rays of sun lingering like jellyfish trails on the wide, empty fields, to see my father slumped in the passenger seat, my mother sleeping next to me in the back, and Ginger herself, sitting on three books (one being Mother’s Bible), navigating the turns of a solitary secondary road somewhere in the lost province of Nova Scotia.

Or piling into our Chevy, with Dad’s budgie upside down in his shirt pocket—sure way of putting Budgie to sleep—and a road map, and snow against the flat green windows, off we went toward our destiny, perched on the swing of despair, sure to make it out of the birdcage and into our future, somewhere where my father’s brilliance would be appreciated and my mother would not feel a complete and utter failure in the queasy company of her relatives, in a town that dispatched rumour against us at a nod.

We would wake to my parents arguing in the car when they thought we were asleep.

“A woman you proposed marriage to,” my mother would be saying.

“A scurrilous rumour—I did not propose marriage to my mother.”

“Well, someone very close to her in age.”

“There was, I assure you, not only an age difference of upwards of four to five months but a—how do you say?—a certain joie de vivre—”

“Osteoporosis—”

“That too,” Father would admit.

On these trips, it was precious to Elizabeth Whispers to try and escape, to live a life as she said, “For her family.”

We instead relived the harshness of her childhood. With a lightless, luckless, endless bunch of non-ecumenical Whisperses, sitting in the dry rooms while outside snow shuffled in a dance against them. From her moment of birth, brought to life in the bitter and blithe gales, the jaundiced afternoons in a house that went onward without end, seeing a small mud-racked dooryard and a mother alone with nine children.

So Elizabeth’s life was retold in whispers, in “Whispers’ whispers” when she thought we were asleep. Her mother alone and with nine children. Her marriage to our father, the promise once as alluring as a golden bowl filled with shiny silver shone out now in slivers of a life forgotten, mundane as bric-a-brac, and alloyed with anger and dumb courage.

We always came back to town, to try and try again, to the streets, the shaded trees, the nooks and crannies in the park, the small shops, the buildings stretched out like dominoes along the side of the river and around the sundial in the square.

She had rented a cottage for us in 1960, but Father would not go, for the memory of his sister who could not come. All that summer in the smoke-fouled heat, Mother would step out of our bungalow, shading her eyes from the sun, to wait for our father who walked up Radio Street and into the house at noon, and back out at two, and home at five, and back out at six, and home at eleven, wearing his suit and carrying a briefcase as a banker might (it contained his daily allotment of gin). My poor mother making futile ultimatums and Father answering, “Yes, of course we are going, and we will go—we are sure to go. You are right about the children—they cannot swim in the birdbath, I know that. You may think I do not—yet many times as a young man I was left alone with not much more than a birdbath myself …” And his thoughts would trail off, and he would reknot his tie, clutch his briefcase, give his wife a peck on the cheek, and be off down the street, with the wisest little clink of the gin bottle against the glass. (Or two glasses, in case he could find someone to drink with, which most often he could not.)

Janie and my mother were at constant war over the prospects of my father. My father tried to keep the peace between them, but it was not easy. A fight over a raise erupted every so often. Holidays as well. But all was forfeited to Janie’s immaculate will. I would listen to them while I ate my breakfast in silence, or at night from the relative comfort of my bed, seeing the hall light shining against a small patch of carpet and hearing:

“It’s my mother, you see—so I cannot go.”

“Why?” Elizabeth would cry.

“I can’t tell you why—I mean, if I could tell you why, I would be in Boston now, drinking with the Kennedys.”

I always wanted to make it up to my mother. I would think that at a certain time, when I got a certain age I would take her on a trip to Disneyland. I prepared for it by trying to save money. I told her in my halting way one day, during an autumn rain shower, that she and I would go. She smiled at me, and then burst into tears.

When the fights got bad, Janie would distance herself from her grandchildren, and Roy Dingle would act as go-between. Or I would act as a go-between for ourselves, going up to her house on plain afternoons with the smell of varnish in the porch, to be hauled up on the carpet in my father’s place.

“I think you are a miserable, ungrateful boy.”

“Yes, Gram.”

“Do you drive a bicycle?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And do you know who bought it for you?”

I would be silent, hearing the clock sound far off somewhere, the shuffle of papers on Janie’s desk.

“
Tarzan
or Randolph Scott for the Saturday matinee?”

“I’m not sure,” I would answer. She would peer at me.

“Ginger wants
Psycho
—says the kids are up for it.” She would pause. “
Tarzan
it will be.”

She did not come to our house for two years, because of a misunderstanding over a box of jelly doughnuts, and we did not go to hers (except to be hauled up on the carpet), save for Ginger, who was “in her camp,” as Elizabeth Whispers said.

“She is not in her camp,” Father whispered.

“Completely in her camp,” Elizabeth Whispers said.

“Good God—you think so?”

“Absolutely.”

Gram, of course, had chosen Ginger as her own, a replacement for Georgina, in her middle age. It was not only easy to understand, it was also impossible to fight. Fighting against it was like so much salt to a wound my father himself had caused. And so Ginger was freer because of this than I was. Far freer.
Psycho
, indeed. Ginger was sought out and fussed over, and coddled.

So it was hard to believe that Ginger was not in Gram’s camp when she went to Gram’s wearing her white fur coat, or her navy blue London Fog with the wonderful high white boots and the peach-coloured butterfly in her black hair. She had her own room, her own bath, her own hair dryer to make her hair look like Connie Francis’s.

“Convenience,” Ginger said to me, with a worldly air, “is what I have—and you Wendy, my boy, do not.”

It was Ginger who contacted Janie to tell her where we were the time Dad made his successful pitch to leave, in 1962. Ginger could not leave Gram in the dark about where we were, even though she had promised our mother she would.

“I will reroute your mail,” Janie said, and hung up.

We had gotten as far as Hamilton then. We could look out our apartment window and see street lights below us, along the winding roadways, and smell the cadaver-like whiff from the mill against the placid lake. My father had taken a job away from his mother for the first time since the war. He began to eat better, and refused a drink—even to the point of pouring gin down the sink (though he closed his eyes and turned his head away as he did so).

“There is no need for this any more—I am absolutely cured of it all. In fact, I could be crushed by gin bottles without taking a sip,” he said. “I could take a gin bath, right now, scrub my ears and my toes and my lips, and never indulge in so much as a sip.”

He gave talks against gin to us. “Never drink gin,” he would say to me, with an inquiry in his look, “and if you do, my boy, make sure it is nothing much more than a quart a day.”

He had become a projectionist at a theatre in downtown Hamilton, a dreary place the colour of rainwater, where I was not allowed even on Saturdays, and Mother stayed inside in our eighth-floor apartment, sending me out to the corner store for bread. Though in essence we were in hiding, she and Dad were happy.

“It seems as if my past life is nothing more than a dream—unfortunate to have dreamed it, but nonetheless over,” he said one night to all of us sitting about our little table, he at one end and Mother at the other, and since there was a wall on one side Ginger and I sitting side by side.

“Now I will produce,” he said. “I will have my own studio and paint. I will be not of the fashion, though, for as you know, my Elizabeth Whispers, I never was.” He cut into his beef. “I will paint grandly, and well. I am elated that I feel no compulsion to ever go back to our river—for I ask you, what has our river done for us?”

We had been away a month, and Janie was rerouting mail to our apartment. I remember, as one does, a seemingly insignificant event that made a profound change. An envelope came in April. It had been mailed to my father by Maurice the photographer, who, in cleaning out the leftover photos from his father’s career before moving the studio to its new location, had found two photos my father had paid for long ago.

I had entered a school called the Gift of the Blessed Sacrament with kids professing worldliness and being intolerant of the country boy. I was lonely, and overprotective of Ginger. We would stand together in the playground as the sun glanced off the orange jungle gyms and swings that swung on rusted chains high overhead. We walked together to and from that school, with our clothes so well ironed they never wrinkled no matter how we tried.

And then one day I came home to see my father in the dark near the curtains, with his hat on his knee, and those photos from Maurice in his hand. He sat with the photos for three solid days, as Ginger and I left for and came home from school with about as much interest in life as he was showing. He did not eat, though plates piled up about him on TV trays, or speak. The budgie flew against his head, or against the curtains, a bird in the house. But nothing could prod him forward—not even a phone call from the dreary Hamilton theatre telling him he must go to work or be fired.

“Tell them,” he said, “to fire me, please—or fire upon me, whatever they will.”

Then he put the pictures on the small table and left the apartment for places unknown. For some den where he could drink. There he would drink our savings down to nothing—there he would drink away our rent.

“I can fight almost anything—except a ghost,” my mother said.

I studied the pictures, faded with time, cracked and dazed by a kind of glow that made a halo around the child’s head. There she was, my little aunt Georgina, shy after a fashion, just the way he had dressed her that day, in her dress and her hat and what must have been her purple gloves, staring up at the camera trying to look—what, into the future or her mother’s gaze? There was a delight of life on her face; he, Miles, in his summer short pants and suit jacket with wide lapels, his top hat tilted just a spot back to reveal his dandyish toff of blond hair, a smile on his face and with a protective arm around her, keeping her forever safe in the quiet vagary of that bygone day.

The quick unknowing note that accompanied these photos said:

“These may be of interest to you, Mr. King—I do not know who they are of, actually—but your name was fastened by paperclip. They must have been taken when you were a child—by my father who you may have heard has passed away—they were found among paid for photos in the bottom of the 2nd drawer, and get this—just like one of your mother’s movie plots—they come to us directly from 1932. Yours truly, John Maurice.”

I was looking at my aunt, that child who had never grown to womanhood, and saw Ginger staring back.

My mother always blamed Janie for having those photos sent, calculating my father’s response, to go back home in a rush. Like a man turning back toward an avalanche to save someone he had no hope of finding, or my mother as Lot’s wife desperately trying not to be turned into stone.

We left the apartment in the dark and travelled east toward Toronto, onward to Montreal, and into the heart of Quebec, going ever east, past the lonely mountains toward our New Brunswick home, our great sad river of the brokenhearted, for no other reason than that my father was not free, and we had nowhere else to go but with him. And of course Budgie came back too.