River of the Brokenhearted (25 page)

Putsy sent Dad a letter about her sister, believing also that she had died on some military ship as a WREN in the war.

“Ships and men, and a good fight—is how she described it to me in the last letter I ever received,” Putsy wrote.

I discovered the letter sometime later in his haversack of letters in the corner of his room.

One day I ran into Noel.

“How do you like being on the river?” I asked.

“I like it okay,” he told me.

“Noel thinks it’s a backward place and everyone’s an asshole,” Cassie said. Cassandra Avalanche was Dingle’s cousin’s granddaughter, and we had hired her one summer because of this, but it had not worked out, and she resented us all. She had been caught trying to steal a freezer full of wieners.

I looked at Noel, and the summer wind blew against his brown shoulder-length hair. Noel made the mistake many youth make, that to be rural and innocent of kinds of vice was to be ignorant. And Cassie liked this mistake, because it carried in its lie a supposed urban virtue that she could easily attain without virtue itself standing in the way. And then she could hold this virtueless virtue up to me and find me, and Father, who she once thought was sophisticated, lacking.

Noel was handsome, almost tragically so. He was empty too, in the way certain youth of my generation tended to be. That is, he was innocent because concern had so far escaped him. Or, rather, moral concern was foreign to him.

Noel’s fame was that he had friends in Dorchester Penitentiary. One was Ray Winch, who he told me was getting day parole soon. (As if I should rejoice, like him and Cassie.)

My father, never receiving the gift of day parole, sat listless and depressed in our house of shadows and empty bottles and empty dreams, and fantasized his empire crumbling with the Druken return. Though I did not think there was evidence of their return, I was plagued by how easy things seemed for others, and how bright he in his monumental failures was.

“Do you know who Mahoney was?” he asked me.

I did not.

“Mahoney was the fellow who sold Mother the monopoly on the talkies. There is something in a name, after all—or a name borrowed. Diabolical, isn’t it?”

Often Ginger and I found it difficult to rouse Dad to go to work. He kept staring into dark corners, mumbling to himself.

But then questioning him one evening about his paranoia, about Abigail, who after two years had done nothing but tell fortunes, give out home remedies, he simply smiled and said, “Ah, you have not reckoned on one particular fact, Wendy, my child. Poor Miss Whispers has not, poor Ginger flying toward her doom has not.”

“And what is that?” I said.

“Simply that I cannot pretend that I do not know what it is I know—even if it would make my life better.”

So with darkness creeping on, I would go to run the drivein projectors, my father insisting that we run old black-and-whites—musicals and singing cowboys—to draw the crowd. Even then he could not understand why our lot was only a quarter full at best. He wanted to live the last years of his life in a kind of nostalgia, where the drive-in continued memories of dances and singalongs and top hats in a parade along the white picket fences of middle America. Ginger and I would fight with him over this, of course. But he was unperturbed by our protests. Of course.

One August evening Father paced back and forth in a particularly agitated mood, drinking from a bottle of gin. I have to be fair and admit that we were both old-fashioned, and the world was rushing away from us in wondrous exhilaration at being free. We were not free, and everyone else, including my mother, now seemed to be.

Days would go by and my father and I would be alone, caught up in the horror of what we saw or, worse, expected to see. Ginger was exceedingly short with us, because of our conservative natures and our arguments with how she dressed and where she went.

“We will not stop them,” Father said, “and they will not stop themselves, for they do not know what they are doing. But her main objective is starting.”

He squinted at me, to make sure I was who I was.

Then at the den door, in the crowded heat, he said, “My God—she’s come back for Ginger.”

“Who?”

“Who? I speak of only one person. She has come back for our Ginger, and it is imperative we stop her! It will be like Georgina all over again!”

Janie had left almost everything—the great house, two cars, the major share of the Grand, and a partnership in the drive-in to her. This is what bothered us without either of us saying it.

The next day, when I went to Janie’s house to see Ginger about booking some new pictures, I had a surprise. She and Gus Busters, who had graduated with me—in fact, the only one whose marks were consistently higher—and fresh from three years of failing one university course after another and taking part in radical campus protests over library books and distribution of free hash, were sitting on lawn chairs on the sunny side of the yard.

TWO

Gus Busters’s fiancée was Kipsy Doyle. The Doyles were a large clan on our river, so breaking up a relationship like that made enemies of half of our clientele. But Ginger was irrepressible. By midsummer she was deeply in love.

“He is so independent and lovable,” she said to me. “And he doesn’t drink.”

He did drink. Most people knew that. And he did something she did not know about—drugs. He got them from Noel Mahoney. But in the dry afternoon air I was averse to telling her this. And of course I knew nothing said by me would stop her. Busters drove a Vespa scooter, with his chihuahua, Scoop, in a basket.

At the circus, when she was fifteen, Ginger had wanted to get her face tattooed. The tattoo artist refused. But there was something about this request that made us realize she was entirely and fundamentally vulnerable to making a huge mistake, the kind of mistake the McLearys had always made. The kind my father made in one unalterable moment in 1932—to see a retinue of well-heeled monkeys at the circus on a rainy day.

A mistake the caliber of which would inflict a Picket’s charge of the spirit, calculated to destroy herself and us. When she walked by me, in a cloud of mystery, I realized her childlike skip could become the scaffold kicking out from under our family’s feet.

My father realized this too, but he was unable to do anything about it.

To her he was a failure, a man who had chased his wife away, and a drunk. But most suspect of all, suddenly, and in parenthesis, he was a man. And as James mentioned, “the agitation on behalf of women,” had swelled and she was part of this, had flowered in it—used it to her own advantage.

There was a sense that the King dynasty was a matriarchy, that had to be preserved in spite of Father. His failure at life brought life to her.

Kipsy had loved this fellow Gus since she was a child. She believed that her marriage was guaranteed. Yet he made a delivery of frozen hamburger patties to the drive-in and Ginger came out to get them. He lingered by the freezer door, in the fury of a cloudless May night, and in giddy exasperation tried to swat bugs with his hat, and she said, “Oh, Gus—I remember you playing badminton. When you hit the bird it made me shiver.” He had made it to the semifinals of the provincial championship in grade eleven, on those long ago gymnasium floors and contests of the will now forgotten, with cheering teachers and seeded opponents on the sidelines watching.

There was some question to whether or not Gus was brilliant. My father came to me one night to ask me if he was.

“Perhaps,” I said, “but socially he is not very astute.”

“Are any of us astute socially?” Father asked.

“Well, no. I am twenty-three years of age and have yet to meet a girl that likes me, or have a friend. It would seem to me I have quite a bit of the old Gus Busters in me. Busters continually makes the same mistake. He trusts all the wrong people.”

“Yes—” Father said, “really the damn thing is, you see, that that person—oh, his whatchamacallit—his mother—phoned to warn me, that he drinks. Well, I thought—if he drinks and cannot afford it, he will be a burden—but if he drinks and can afford it—a blessing sent. So I thanked the mom and hung up. ‘Brilliant’ is, however, not the word I would use to describe Mr. Busters—a village idiot like ourselves perhaps—h’m, Wendy, my boy?”

His mother was ancient when he was born, and Gus grew up like a grandchild on a forlorn lane. I felt sorry for him. I knew loneliness, and the absence of a father had caused him to trust others who so easily and cavalierly had little care for him. Kipsy was his high-school sweetheart, the one who did care in spite of others, but her influence was coming unglued after he met Ginger.

And Ginger was determined to be married, as a way to be out from under and on her own. Though Father thought Ginger getting married would save her in another way, he said after supper one evening with the small grandfather clock ticking away monstrously, our time devouring earth, he had to warn her. He could not live a charade. “You see,” he said, “if I don’t speak up, am I culpable the way a father should not be? Shouldn’t I say at least something?”

“You mean, tell her he takes drugs?” I said.

“Yes—tell her of powders and sauces and stuff that he sniffs. She is a Puritan, our little rascal, isn’t she—at least where it concerns libation. I made her that way and am sorry for it. However, the problem is what do I do, for I am far more comfortable with Gus Busters’s predilections, such as they are, than with her sermonizing. However she is my daughter.”

“So you have an obligation,” I said, warming to the moment.

“Obligation. How wonderful that word, but what does it mean? It means becoming a snitch. No, that’s not being a gentleman. I must also say that these things they take—heroin or whatever it is they drink—is fine by me. I’ve tried it myself many a night.”

“You have not,” I said. “In fact, I think, and I know in saying this I sound conservative—but I think you are very different from those we are now discussing—there is a different temperature to your doom compared with theirs—a difference not in degree but in kind—part of my love for you is that your doom is very different then the doom of those we have been speaking of—their doom is a greed-filled one—not Buster’s but many he knows.”

“Thank you. However, let’s just say I might have drunk heroin if given the opportunity, so being in the moral quandary I find myself, I must let it go for now. I am a wonderful drunk—perhaps one of the finest who has ever lived. Gus and I are the same. The silly fellow thinks hash medicinal and non-addictive. I believe gin is addictive if non-medicinal. So,” he said, shuddering as he looked down at his lamb chop, “we are somewhat kindred spirits, just the kind of son-in-law I need. He will be ineffectual but a presence enough to keep the wolves from the door.”

“Gus will need a job,” I said, lighting a cigarette from his silver case.

“I suppose she will have to hire him—just as my mother felt she had to hire me. So send him to me and I will see him.”

Then I asked the question on both our minds. “Do you think he will bring her to ruin?”

“Vigilance,” Father maintained, setting his lamb chop aside with a weary grimace.

Gus came to the house the next afternoon and sat in our den, his bony knees thrust out into the middle of the floor. He had a red afro and a freckled face, and the skinniest legs I had ever seen in shorts. I kept him company while Father readied himself in the bedroom, gargling.

Then I heard my father begin his walk down the hall, banging off one wall and lurching into another.

“Where is he?” he said, waving his hands for me not to try to steady him.

“Right here, Father,” I said, smiling sheepishly.

Miles looked about.

“Where—where?”

“Here I am, Mr. King,” Gus said, giving a kind of tip off his hair, with his finger.

“So you’re the one?” Father said.

Gus nodded.

Miles looked down at him, completely baffled, turned and whispered to me, “Wasn’t it the other Busters who lived in Fenwick Court by the old pool hall?”

“Pardon?”

“I said wasn’t it the other Busters who lived in Fenwick court by the old pool hall?”

“No—it’s Gus.”

“I have to prepare another speech,” he whispered.

“Pardon?”

His face went beet red. “I don’t know him. I thought it was the other Busters.”

“Pardon?”

“Are you an idiot? I said. I don’t know him—”

He turned to Busters and nodded civilly, and left the room. Then he called me into the hallway.

“What are you going on about?” I whispered.

In the hallway Father believed he could speak as loudly as he wanted.

“I thought it was the other Busters, or VanBusters, or whoever the hell they are who lived up in Fenwick court.”

“Well, it’s not.”

“Is this the guy who does drugs?”

“I don’t know. Shut up!” I said.

The interview was effectively over.

So we prepared for the wedding as best we could. They were to live forever all at once. She was to have a long, white dress with a train and have two bridesmaids, the other two girls of the triumvirate whom she had won over, Nancy Savage and Karen Hardwick, to isolate Kipsy even more.

Gus became (since I was to manage the drive-in) our projectionist. It took him only two days to learn everything he needed to know, his little chihuahua, Scoop, sitting on his head as he made his way around the theatre checking the wiring on the speakers. My sister went about with the diamond, tapping it against glass and filling French fry cups with delight, handing over the cups of fries with her diamond showing.

THREE

My father was in anguish after the wedding. Mother would not come back, and this further alienated him from the world. He plodded about the yard as November came in a drizzle and a blanket of frost, in hat and scarf, without a coat, feeding winter birds, and not reading the paper when his neighbour yelled across the street that Elizabeth was picked up and taken to the police station.

When I went to Mom’s apartment, I couldn’t bring myself to broach the subject. Her place was cluttered with knickknacks and wall plaques of winter scenes. She had not caught the whiff of intrigue, and did not associate Dr. Mahoney with Rebecca Druken. Neither, still, did I.

She spoke about how kind Dr. Mahoney was, how she had given Mom a special pair of oven mitts. It was as if she had never gotten anything before from anyone, and when I was leaving I realized that Mother probably hadn’t.

As I was going down the stairs she rushed out after me and said, “How is Miles? Tell him I’m fine, not to worry, and tell him to eat his vegetables, please.”

There were tears in my eyes.

Then in March money went missing. Ginger had sent it to Mr. Dingle to get his dentures fixed. Gus Busters had delivered the envelope and left it, he said, on the hall table. They looked for the envelope in every room and could not find it. They looked in the car and up and down the streets to and from Ginger’s house. It was nowhere. When Gus went to the house a few days later, no one spoke to him, while Dingle with his loose dentures tried to bite into an apple.

Dr. Mahoney maintained that it was very strange that the money would have disappeared. She said she did not think Gus very honourable if he would take his wife’s money—money given to an old man to fix his teeth.

But in truth Ginger also suspected Gus. She could not help doing so.

Soon after, Dr. Mahoney took Cassie Avalanche into the den and closed the door.

“You are like my child,” she said, sitting very close beside Cassie and now and again stroking her hair, “but I’ve been in a man’s world long enough to read people well. I want to help Ginger. She is the only one among them worth anything. I’ve seen too much abuse in that family—as you know yourself.”

“What do you mean?” Cassie said, smiling uneasily.

“Well, you come from a hard family life and so do I—but we prevailed.”

“That’s right—we prevailed,” Cassie said. “I remember the first time I saw them—in a new car up at Gary Fallon’s house.”

“Well, there you go,” Dr. Mahoney said, thinking the child stupid. “So I’d like to see how Gus thinks and how he handles a crisis. That will go a long way in my understanding if he is worthy of Ginger. Noel did everything for him, yet he is continually letting us down. He makes fun of your uncle Mr. Dingle too.”

“Oh, I know,” Cassie said.

“Gus is a big talker, you and I both know that, so I want to see how he acts when push comes to shove. Take the money and buy something nice for yourself.” Here she handed Cassie the envelope. “But don’t tell anyone you did. I have to know this about Gus, you see, so don’t think it is wrong—think of it as being helpful. That’s all you and I will be, dear—helpful. Remember, there is very little that is right that can’t be wrong—and anything wrong can be right, given the right conditions.”

Her breath was close to Cassie’s ear, a seduction of power only. The only kind of seduction Cassie would succumb to. The doctor pressed the envelope into Cassie’s pudgy hands.

“Oh, that would be too awful,” Cassie said.

Dr. Mahoney, whom she respected so much, nodded. “I used to think like that, but I’ve seen too many women tortured in bad relationships. Now I realize I have to fight fire with fire. This is my main object—get Ginger away from that man.”

“Gus—”

“Yes, dear. And that other awful man as well—Miles, is that his name? He must have been an awful child. There was a little girl, wasn’t there, that he pushed down a well? Now he is doing his work on poor Elizabeth and Ginger.”

Cassie knowing when it was fitting to be sentimental, became so.

“Who will ever help them?” Cassie said.

“We have to,” Dr. Mahoney said firmly. “Miles put Noel’s father, Joey Elias, out of business and never batted an eye. So what if we do a little back to him? Do you remember Joey?”

“Not very well,” Cassandra said.

“He was as close to a genius as you could get around here, so I want beyond anything else to fulfill his legacy. Do you understand?” Dr. Mahoney said. “I would have married him, but I am an independent woman.”

Cassie smiled again, knowing this wouldn’t be too awful at all, but appropriate for people like Gus and as privileged as Ginger.

Except when Ginger was present, Dr. Mahoney never spoke of Miles in a favourable light. And each thing she mentioned, each small boy she saw as spoiled, each man she knew was inept, every fellow who couldn’t handle something became to her the embodiment of Miles King, the bully who’d pushed his little sister down the well. It allowed others to see Miles in the same way, not because they had ever thought this themselves, but because someone who had so much power over them did. It was the same power Joey Elias had wielded over Leon Winch and Patricia Druken.

Mahoney patted Cassie’s hand and cautioned her, while folding the envelope into it. She said this had nothing to do with hurting Ginger and everything to do with young girls getting married to men who would abuse them.

“That’s what I thought,” Cassie said sadly.

She could be sad or happy at any given time, and Dr. Mahoney knew this, because Dr. Mahoney could too. She had learned it as a child, sitting on someone’s knee.

To Cassie this was the kind of intrigue she had always sought. It was a positioning of events in certain people’s lives in order to act out a certain scenario, for their ultimate benefit. What did it matter if it was also for your own benefit? She always practiced this, but had learned this better from Mahoney herself; this tough little no-nonsense woman who had prevailed who had gone back to university in her forties and became a doctor, a Ph.D. behind her name. What a happy age, Cassie thought (or actually felt a sensation with), that these things being done are to be now considered considerate and moral. What a happy age that I am gifted enough to be a part of them. But as sophisticated as this seemed for Cassie, it was only child’s play, the beginning of an intrigue.

Cassie was inspired by Mahoney; and beyond anything else there was the idea that some sin in the past was to be rectified here.

“Was there a sin?” Cassie asked.

“Oh, yes—a deep sin,” Dr, Mahoney said. “There was a little tyke called Georgina—I believe she loved the nanny more than she loved the Kings, and I think they destroyed her and the nanny. She clung to the nanny but they fired the poor woman. I do not want to see this happen to Ginger.”

“Why didn’t I ever hear of that when I worked for them?”

Dr. Mahoney lifted her eyebrows, just as Joey Elias was known to do, to show naive astonishment at the subterfuge of those they were discussing.

Mahoney, who had done wonders with my mother, now tried to improve Ginger’s life. The greater the risk, the more inspired she became. She believed that something wrong was in fact right when it helped others. Therefore, the money could be taken, since in this case it would help Ginger.

She told Cassie this had been her primary belief since she was sixteen. Back then there was something disastrous she had to prevent and she had taken it upon herself to do it. At first no one else seemed to understand this belief of hers, but now it was considered only the “besting of an adversary.”

The money was taken, Gus was blamed, and for a long time things seemed to deteriorate between Ginger and him, and him and everyone else in town, who now took him to be a shadow of his father-in-law, Miles King. He found himself unable to eat or sleep and he began to lose weight. And it was not at all violent—only vigilant. This was an accepted thesis.

My father, hearing of this in bits and pieces, saw it as the first volley in a war to capture the heart of Gus’s beautiful wife. He wanted to catch Mahoney. “We will lasso her, and hide her in my house for sixteen years.”

It was at this point, on a day when he drank two quarts of gin and got in a fight with his shoes, that I knew he needed psychiatric help.

In May, just as the drive-in was re-opening, Dr. Mahoney decided it was time to speak to Ginger, and picked up the phone.

Ginger hesitated when she discovered who it was. It was a telling hesitation, for she had promised Gus she would not speak to this woman again, but from the moment the doctor had taken an interest in her she had felt special, and she wanted this feeling to continue, because no one had ever agreed with her so much, so much so that her thoughts seemed to be read.

“It is uncanny, and she is uncanny,” she would tell me on those rare occasions when she told me anything.

I heard this from other people as well. Mahoney had an uncanny ability to read them. Gus himself admitted this. That is why her accusation that he took the money was in one way so difficult to discredit.

Dr. Mahoney always told the truth initially and let the other things she said ride upon it comfortably. She said she had been thinking lately that Ginger had found herself in some untenable position. She also understood that Ginger’s grandmother had many similar difficulties. Since both these things were true (Gus and Ginger were on the outs, and he had broken a vase), everything Dr. Mahoney said must therefore be true.

Ginger knew one thing: nothing had been done to her. And she had actually been getting along with Gus until the doctor’s accusation over money. Still, as long as he didn’t suspect her of talking to Mahoney, times were pleasant enough between them. More pleasant, however, was for Ginger to hear Dr. Mahoney agree with her. There was something else—her willingness to be duped by Dr. Mahoney because others less intelligent than she had been duped as well, and she wanted to be included.

“Why can’t I be gulled as well to love her?” Which is to say at some point on the moral compass, somewhere along the thin line, the truth was known, and dismissed as unpleasant, because what was pleasant was untrue. This, in fact, had been what Ginger had done most of her life. Ginger knew the truth instinctively but simply dismissed it if it did not suit her. All of her life, Ginger had dismissed a message she did not want to hear. Throughout the last month, Gus had sworn that he hadn’t taken the money, and Ginger realized that he had not been high or drunk for two months. He was frightened of Dr. Mahoney, he told her. “She is trying to do something awful.” The moment he said this Ginger knew it was true, but she laughed and mocked him—because she needed to have power over his seriousness. It was not enough that Gus told the truth—it was how he said it. The way he said it was a flag to the bull—common sense to her precocious whimsy and will.

“I know you’re not my best friend,” Mahoney now said to Ginger over the phone. “Cassie is your best,” she said quickly. “But promise me one thing.”

“Of course,” Ginger said.

“Don’t remain in a bad relationship. As a psychologist, I can guide you a little. Whatever you do, remember Miles and your mother, and how much better off your mom is now.”

“Yes,” Ginger said. Although the fact of the matter was she did not visit her mother—almost no one did any more—so she did not know how her mother was at all.

Women were in tough places and in bad relationships. That was well known. And to Mahoney, just like Joey Elias before her, it did not matter precisely if Ginger was in a bad relationship. It only mattered that Ginger could be made to think she was. And if she did think this, Mahoney the psychologist would be there to support her. This was up to Ginger and up to no one else. And Dr. Mahoney was there to safeguard her choice. But Ginger, in talking to Mahoney, knew in the end what Mahoney thought her choice must be. And she also knew that she did not want to disappoint her by making the wrong choice. Still and all, this could not happen if a relationship was not fragile. Nor could it happen if Dr. Mahoney’s real motives were honourable. This is not to suggest, however, that they were completely unknown. In fact, the truth here played a little like the votes in Comrade Stalin’s axiom:

“It does not matter who votes—what matters is who counts the votes.”

Whatever it was Ginger came to count on these phone calls now.

One afternoon in the tavern a tall hard-living farm boy stood up, grabbed Gus by his skinny shoulders, and kicked his behind. “That’s fer stealin’ yer wife’s money, ya priceless prick,” he said, to the roaring approval of the crowd.

Gus hobbled to the door. He knew well enough that Mahoney was up to something. But he could not tell his wife about the bruise on his backside, and she wondered if he was keeping something from her. Some people suggested to her that he was taking needles.

Each thing Mahoney discovered about Ginger caused her to suggest another. Her love of Janie. Her dislike of Miles’s ineptness. So Dr. Mahoney one day asked her why she felt so betrayed. Ginger said she did not know she had been.

“But certainly you were,” Dr. Mahoney said, “certainly they’ve kept it from you.”

It took a week for Ginger to realize that she had never forgiven her family for sending her to the convent. They had not said goodbye to her the day she went, and she had forgotten her twenty dollars on the bed. She had made no friends there, and in that curious place of piety and cant, she had tried to take her life. No one knew this, she admitted, but Dr. Mahoney.

Dr. Mahoney told Ginger she hated the convent as well, and spoke about it, ripening once again all of Ginger’s wounds: the smell of suppers, the dark corridors, the mass each morning, and the nauseating feeling of snow and claustrophobia.

The next morning a letter arrived at the door, in a pink envelope with a happy face. It contained a twenty-dollar bill, with a note that said only, “Love, A. Mahoney.”

Ginger sat on the couch, hugging the letter, tears flowing down her cheeks.

Ginger was now aware, as everyone else was, of Gus Busters’s serious problems with drugs. She had found blotter acid in his pocket, mescaline in his drawer. At first she did not want to admit it because of her father’s history, a history she believed she had overcome. And at first she believed it was only an occasional use.