River of the Brokenhearted (30 page)

He had also taken a writing course to hone his skills for his masterpiece. Reading the comment of his professor, I could tell he found Father amusing and talentless, and I hated the bastard.

“I do not wish to be as great a writer as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” my father had written. “Well, who could be—you see, I am not vain. But I would like to be able to tell my life story in a way which might attract a feeble bit of attention so that my life will not have been lived totally in vain—for the memory not of me but of my little sister, who unfortunately fell down a well when she was four. I was taking care of her that day, and we started toward the circus, with such a bright bit of hope. Little did I know the little thing would not be home again. The dang problem is, you see, I have a difficult time remembering anything about it, or my life for years after. And I do suspect some people of laughing at me because of this.”

My father had struggled for six months in this course offered by one of the fresh-faced post-modernists, in a way trying to remember and atone for his life; then at the last realizing literature no longer wanted to atone for life but only to smile irreverently and mock it, he gave up, and did not receive a passing grade.

He was being destroyed, slowly, and he desperately needed not to be.

He woke up the next morning at six, saying he was on his way out to kill Noel. I found myself wrestling with him in the street, he with a service revolver in his pocket. I got him to the house, I put it back, and I realized it was unloaded.

In the late summer, Putsy was on her deathbed and asked if she might see Noel and Ginger. After she spoke to them, she reached toward the table to give them her prayer beads that had been blessed in 1935 by Father Carmichael. Noel made a cross with his fingers as if warding off a vampire, and began to giggle. For the first time Ginger saw a banality in her future husband’s gaze. For his part, he was angry that Ginger did not giggle as well.

Putsy said nothing. She handed the beads to them both, and made the sign of the cross, and kissed Noel on the forehead. When she looked at that broad forehead, the magnificent shoulders and wide grin, she shuddered slightly, and said, “God be with you, son. I believe you are who I think. Father Carmichael spoke about you years ago. But have no misgivings, he loved you too. He loved your mother as she should be loved—and loved your father, Joey, more than you could ever know.”

Noel stepped back and then stood out in the corridor, with a tired-looking nun, while Ginger lingered by the bed.

“Come on,” he kept saying, interrupting Putsy as she tried to speak. “Ginger, come on now.”

Noel thought it ridiculous hocus-pocus, for one reason—if he did not think it so, he would have to respect or believe. Since his mother spent her entire life proving this was a lie, a way to enslave, he could not respect or believe. He was angered that Ginger did not mock it too.

“Dumb, superstitious old bat,” he said. “She’ll die alone, having done nothing in her life.”

“That’s not true! She helped hundreds and hundreds of people!”

“She hasn’t helped who my mother helped. My mother helped young women get abortions. She never done that!” he said victoriously.

Dr. Mahoney went to visit Putsy that night. But the old nun, tired and broken from years of duty and prayer, had slipped into a coma. Her hands were thin and ghostly white, her mouth turned down in a little grimace. Above her head was a picture of the Madonna and Child. It was raining outside and four candles flickered in the quiet room. Beside her bed, four ancient nuns, and a group, equally aged, from the Catholic Women’s League, were saying decades of the beads.

“She wanted to know if you were her sister,” a nun whispered to the doctor.

“All women are sisters, aren’t we?” Dr. Mahoney smiled in her best and most understanding way.

Putsy died the next morning, fifty-one years to the day after Georgina. The sun was soft on the milky water.

In the grand old church, my sister looked like a little waif at the pulpit, reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, tears running down her face.

We came home from the funeral, Father and I, and sat for a listless four hours staring at nothing, except the subtle gusts of wind over the trees in the summer distance, the sound of faraway traffic going to our pulp and paper mill, and the occasional laughter of a child, who by dusk had not yet known pain.

TWO

In our own bungalow Father and I lived as disgraced members of the larger community. Ginger had made her choice. She had tried, she said, to no avail, to be kind to us. Do not think I blame her—both of us were alcoholic, and had no say in the greater world. And no one listened to what either I or my father said anyway.

So the very form of our house, the very notion of my father’s flowers, from pin cherries to daisy fleabane, left us lepers in the noonday sun. So the two of us drank together. Really, we had no one else. And I was slipping into melancholic drunkenness as much as he.

“It must be a sad day when the only one you have to drink with is your father.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “You are a professional drinker, just like me.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Then, remembering his past, his voice rose as, banging a fist weakly on his knee, he said, “How can you say that a man who sells used cars in the useless humble-bumble of his life and attracts your wife so she is out selling Amway to make her fortune and hanging about shuffleboard tables is a man? Still you are not allowed to say he is not. Especially if you are a King. We are not allowed to, my boy, that is the thing.”

“So for our kind it is best to be silent?” I asked, grabbling with him for the bottle.

“Yes,” he said, grabbling with me to take the bottle back while I tried to pour myself a drink.

“Why?” I said, when I finally wrestled the damn gin from him and poured myself a header.

“The world seems against us,” he said, looking at me, his fingers twitching.

On occasion he would have to go down to see Ginger and ask for money. Often Dr. Mahoney would open the door for him, and leaving the door opened, turn away:

“Ginger, it’s your father!” she would say with a wistful sadness in her voice, for she knew he hated her.

And Father would stand in the foyer of what used to be his own house, and wait, in his ochre-coloured suit and tie. From behind one might see a few slight wrinkles in the jacket. The morning sun would be up over the trees, a godawful time of day, and Ginger, sleepily coming out in her pyjamas, would say, “What is it?”

“Oh, it’s not much of anything, really. It’s just that at this very moment I am just a little light in the pocket—too light by half.”

“You want money?” Ginger would say.

“Shh,” Father would say, cringing. “It’s not like that exactly.”

He would look around, smile at nothing, his lips trembling, and feel the emptiness that one does on particular mornings when there is a slight breeze on your face after a night of imbibing. “I do not want to be a bum—but as you see, this is a certain stretch in my life when it seems that—I have been up against it—so a few dollars maybe—just to stave off elimination—I mean”—here he would chuckle—“you must realize I am in the elimination round.”

He would take the money and sneak back home, at times cutting through a neighbour’s yard, with the bottle under his jacket. This particular neighbour did not like my father and would often shout at him or throw a stone to move him along. And my father would start to run, as if a dog was chasing him.

“Here we are,” he would say to me at ten in the morning, coming over the back fence. “Now we must take it easy with this reprieve, and make it last as long as we can. Let’s not open it until supper hour.”

I would agree, and go back to my room.

“How dare you slam that door!” he would yell.

“I have not slammed it,” I would answer.

“See that you don’t!!”

Five minutes later he would be back in the kitchen, calling out to me. “Wendy, I think, however, I will open it now—and have just a touch—a tad, a reminder of old days—of those bright days of youth when I was in a London pub.”

The reminder of old days would be gone in an hour. And we would wonder at eleven-thirty in the morning where the rest of the day was going to come from, or how to get it to go away.

One day that August my father brought home a full forty of gin. He sat it on the kitchen counter. He went to the cupboard to look for some tonic water, and bringing out a terribly flat half-empty bottle, he set it beside the gin. Then he went to the far end of the kitchen and folded his arms in determined vagrancy. He looked acutely uncomfortable.

“My God,” he said. “My tie—has a stain from an egg. Look at that. I was at Ginger’s house with a stain.”

And he tore it off, and set it on a chair.

“Remind me, Wendy, never to eat another egg. That was Miss Whispers’s idea—eggs and cauliflower and all of that. I’m an independent man now, I make my own decisions.” He slapped his fist into the palm of his hand and nodded to himself.

He went into his bedroom, put on a fresh shirt, and put on a new tie. The heat had made him woozy, he said, and he was wondering if I could drive him to the beach that afternoon, for his yearly supply of seashells.

“Of course,” I said.

“You know, of course, if I drink that, I am doomed.”

“Why?”

“There is a certain sacred rule that will be broken. You see, I went to the house this morning—my mother’s house, now in Ginger’s name—and I was ready to confront Rebecca, a.k.a. Dr. Mahoney, ask her how she had managed to skewer so many of my sayings in the bloody paper when she recently told her life story, which in a way was my mother’s life story. ‘I swam the river’ is a godawful exaggeration. I was going to get to the bottom of all this—are people intentionally hauling the wool over their own eyes, or is she a master criminal? That was my intent in seeing her.”

“And did you?”

He looked at me a brief moment with a quizzical expression. “However, she talked me out of any confrontation with—this.” He pointed a shaky finger toward the bottle of gin. “She had it waiting for me, as if she knew I would be there to see her. She smiled and handed it to me, and patted me on the shoulder like a nanny who had told me to go to my room—or polish some damn silverware, which I still insist was more than her job—her duty to Mom, in a certain way—and—well, you see—I’m in a luckless position now. ‘You must must call me Abigail if you take this,’ she said, eyeing me, holding the bottle up to my nose. So”—here he cleared his throat—“for the fucking bottle of booze I did. Besides, I am not overly overjoyed by the colour scheme she is using on the front foyer.” We both stared at the bottle.

“So you have given in and called her Abigail? You can give no argument now, can you?” I laughed.

“You see,” he said, pointing to the gin again. “This is what Joey Elias used to do with old Jimmy McLeary, although Jimmy was a real Maritimer and drank rum. I prefer a more toxic libation. However, that woman is doing it to me—it’s the same old world, just another go-around. Abigail I must call her—if I drink it.”

“That’s terrible,” I said with compassion.

“What she is really doing is taking advantage of me.”

“In a way she is,” I said.

“Well then, I won’t give her the satisfaction by drinking it.”

“Of course not. Pour it down the sink.”

“I should,” he said, shaking his head bitterly. “That’s what I will do.”

“If you do pour it down the sink, you still have the moral right to suspect her. But one drink—you lose that right. I think that’s what she’s saying.”

There was a long pause. Old hedges, old flowers, old child’s cry, another hopeless summer day, without the requisite tallies and cans of film for our drive-in, our innocence in the kind of debauchery we were forced to run at the end, my father looking at these movies with the fantastic and fatalistic gape of a child. “Well yes, you are right there. However, I am more sensible than that, Wendy. I know this is a one-time thing and I will drink it—and it will be the last drink I have. And once I am sober I will be able to call her whatever in hell I want!”

I would not take a drink of it, and watched him agonize over every glass he consumed. I was very jealous that he consumed it all.

“I have just discovered something.”

“What is that?”

“Her gin,” he said, pouring out the last glass, “whatever her name is, is as good as any other.”

In those intervening evenings, the slow drooping evenings of summer, when we had nothing to do except watch the pitch and toss of a baseball game on TV, a bottle would now and then find itself on our doorstep, put there by an elderly woman driving a Cadillac.

One night I told him that this settled it. He could not go about calling her Rebecca Druken any more. I would not listen to him if he did.

He looked at the bottle of gin, and like his grandfather before him, he gave up.

“I will not mention it again,” he said.

One day when I woke I saw him pacing in the kitchen, with a kind of determined startled agony on his face.

He looked at me, detached, and sober, and said that he had to go out. I helped him get ready. He shined his shoes with the deliberation of a man being hanged in the morning, and brushed his jacket with the slow care of a shopkeeper you want to get away from.

“What’s going on?” I asked him.

“All in due time,” he said, looking in his top drawer for his regimental pin, and making a quip as he put it on, that the pin was just about the only thing left that was “top drawer” about him.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, picking a piece of lint from his collar.
“You
are top drawer, sir.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You are welcome. But what is going on?”

He turned toward the bedroom door, a bedroom smothered in wretched closed-off summer heat, passed a picture of his mother, and one of Elizabeth Whispers, and said as he walked away, “Mr. Dingle is coming here.”

“Your stepfather.”

“Yes—well, sort of—they were not married, and he did dress like Hank Snow—however, I just got a call.”

“He is no longer able to be at his house, I take it.”

“Quite.”

“And his friends are gone.”

“It does seem that way.”

I drove him across to Dingle’s in a car that sank on its tires and wobbled about the bumpy turns on the side lanes of town.

He lit a cigarette from his silver case, and now and again shoved the thinning hair from his eyes. He looked remarkably calm, except now and again his fingers trembled slightly.

Mr. Dingle was now a tiny man of almost eighty years old, with a blue suit and tie, and heavy, almost bombastic-looking shoes. His hair was gone, except at the very back, like hair that sometimes remains on the head long after the body is in a coffin. He had been left by people, by Dr. Mahoney, who could no longer care for him, and then after her, Noel, who had listened to his stories about theatres that he owned and had waited for his pension money, until he had exhausted that.

It was obvious Dingle did not know where he was any longer. There was a mark over his forehead where someone had hit him with a frying pan. The house was a shambles, holes in the living-room wall covered by velvet paintings of Elvis and show horses.

We took him home and put him in the guest room. He was the only person to ever use it. Over the next few days medical statements arrived, as did his medicare number (he needed a new one because someone had used the original in a scam for amphetamines), and a referral to a Dr. Hardy, three bottles of pills, morning, noon, and night ones, and a few letters stating his condition and the advancement of Alzheimer’s—perhaps he would go in the next few months, perhaps not—as well as a picture of him in Saskatoon with a woman in 1956, with a pencilled line on the back: “Your daughter.”

“Somewhere along the way he must have forgotten her,” my father said. “How fortunate for him.”

One of Dingle’s arms had been pulled from his socket in a dispute over a bottle of ketchup.

“It seems he lived in a room in the basement of his house for a number of years,” my father yelled. “That, I suppose, is like living somewhere south of hell.”

My father laboriously went over all the notes, the instructions for diet and pills, and he would shout out to me from the other room, as if we had a brand-new reason for living:

“He is not to have any chocolate. Hide the chocolate.”

“I don’t have any chocolate—when have you last seen two practising alcoholics eating a chocolate?”

“Ah yes,” my father said, pausing a moment. “And it says here he is not allowed to smoke in his room—grab his smokes.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t have any on him. That’s just a reference point for you, Father—”

“Oh—he is not to have any alcohol.” There was silence. Then Father muttered again. “He is not to have any alcohol. Those bastards.”

“We’ll give him a drink,” I said, “if he wants one.”

“Of course we will—for Janie’s memory. That is, if we have some to spare,” Father answered. “He needs a bib to eat—a bib to eat, Wendell! Do we have a bib?”

“We can use a dishtowel. I’ve seen it done with regular babies.”

“Oh, yes. Okay, fine. He still has his three meals a day, and he likes singsongs—”

Here my father stopped, and his throat caught as if he was ready to weep. I looked into the room, and saw him with the letter in his left hand, while his right was patting Mr. Dingle on the shoulder.

“It’s okay, Miles—it’s okay,” Dingle mumbled.

After we put Mr. Dingle in his room, I watched my father nervously fidget and move papers about. “You don’t mind keeping him?” I asked.

“Of course not.”

“Are you up for it?”

“Absolutely!”

“You mind that he never liked you and always took Janie’s side in disputes over the management of the theatre?”

“Of course not, you—you PROSECUTOR—PERSECUTOR,” my father said. “NOR do I want you to say anything about this in front of Dingle. Bygones are bygones!”

Then he took his fingernail clippers out and began to trim his nails, not looking in my direction, but breaking out in a whistle.

It was strange to get up the next morning and see this little man at the head of our table, almost bald, yet his skull looking ancient instead of young and new, with his huge bombastic shoes on our front mat, and being spoon fed a mashed boiled egg. I went to the fridge and had a beer, the place smelling of sweat, and the lingering scent of the mill over our bushes outside. My father watched me drink the beer, and then told me he was worried about his own drinking.