River of the Brokenhearted (34 page)

“And Dr. Mahoney—or Rebecca?” I said, taking the bottle again. He looked at it painfully.

“Rebecca is forgiven,” he said, crumpling the towel and throwing it aside.

“By whom?”

“By me,” he said.

“Does she know she has your forgiveness?”

“She doesn’t. But more to the point, she does not know yet how much she needs it. However,” he said, “I am more worried that little Ginger does not tumble and gets some return—for I am not going to mope or moralize on the position she has put us or herself in. Who am I to moralize? Why, if they came in shooting, I would say shoot!”

I thought this also. What right had I not to believe what she herself was willing to?

Two days before the wedding, Cassie was released from the Sleepy Hollow women’s institution in Prince Edward Island. Cassie asked Noel to go and see her, and he made Ray Winch drive him down. All day Dr. Mahoney was trying to ward off Ginger’s questions. But Ginger was frantic—where was he?

Noel told Cassie he was going to call off the wedding. He felt he could still get his hands on some of my sister’s money.

Cassie, more politic, told him to wait. She said “If you are doing this for me, prove it.”

“How?”

“I want a house out of it.”

“Well, of course.”

Then she brought up the reason she wanted to see him. He had brought down some PCP. She had been straight for months and did not want to remain straight.

“I can’t do it with you,” he said. “I’ll be all fucked up.”

“You have to,” she said. “What am I supposed to do? Be left out of everything?”

He was afraid that Ginger would realize something. But he was more afraid of displeasing Cassie, and if truth be told, so was his mother. So in a small hotel room carved out of nowhere, in the middle of the afternoon, both did speed.

After he left Cassie he had to go with Ray Winch, who was his best man, to pick up the suit he was to wear. Noel stood among the mannequins in the darkness of the little room and felt miserable and detached. Seeing himself in a suit, in the change room with its pressboard walls and no bigger than a toilet, he became claustrophobic and violent and went into a rage. Ray Winch had to rescue him, fighting with the lady at the front of the store, while he half dragged Noel out.

Noel was angry that his mother would put him through this—angrier still that there was a man waiting for Cassie when he left her. So he came home wanting to tell Ginger everything.

Dr. Mahoney tried to stop him from seeing her, but Ginger rushed to him, teased him, tried to hold his hand. He was about to push her away when Ray Winch grabbed his arm. Noel winced. Something unpleasant had happened with that needle he had taken, and for the first time he felt sick.

Ray whispered in his ear, “Smarten up or you’ll ruin everything.”

Noel realized that breaking off the wedding meant breaking away from his mother and her plans.

“Do you think we will have a good life?” Ginger asked sweetly.

“If you want,” he said, barely whispering, his eyes half closed, his lips dry.

“I do. It’s just—”

“If I’m not good enough for you, then just call it off,” he answered.

“You won’t mind if I break up—call it all off?” Ginger said teasingly.

“Not in the least.” It was on the tip of his tongue to say something about her mother and how much fun he had with her.

Ginger stepped back and looked at him.

“Call what off?” Dr. Mahoney said, vivacious and happy, coming into the room with a glass of wine.

Noel smiled and said, “Oh nothing.” He staggered a little, and would not speak any more.

In a second, everything became crystal clear, in his face and his eyes. And Ginger knew.

He left the room. He went to the bathroom and took off his shirt. He remembered Cassie’s smile when the needle wouldn’t go in easily, how she turned away and laughed.

For the first time he felt pain, and he stared at himself in the mirror and saw himself no longer young or pretty, or even lucky. Whatever Putsy had tried to tell him was coming true, and there was nothing he could do now but watch.

Ginger looked at Dr. Mahoney, then at Ray Winch, whom she had never liked, with his tattoos across his fingers. Her heart was pounding. She felt she didn’t know either of them at all.

The phone rang and Mahoney turned to go to it.

“Nerves,” the good doctor said, the wine spilling a little as she took a drink. “Goddamn men and their second thoughts—nerves is all.” She picked up the phone.

It was Cassandra, asking what she might wear to the wedding.

“You cannot possibly come,” Dr. Mahoney whispered.

“Why not?”

“It wouldn’t be good for Noel.”

“It might be good for me,” Cassandra said.

“You will have what I have out of this,” Mahoney whispered. Turning sideways she saw Ginger staring at her. She lifted the wine and smiled.

“Caterers,” she mouthed.

Ginger went to her room, shaking and shivering. What could she now do? She was in love with him, wasn’t she? Perhaps she wasn’t—perhaps she was only in love with Gus. But then there was the business and all that money. She turned her face to the side and saw the ancient prayer beads Putsy had left her. In fury she opened the drawer and threw them in, those old wooden beads from 1848.

The day before the wedding Miles cooked a ham. “To quell my desire to be one when I introduce the groom’s mother,” he said.

I told him of my hope that Ginger would be happy. He nodded as he took out the ham to baste it.

“I do I do I do—but if you have people stealing, you have people who believe they are more human than you are. Don’t think for one moment that this is not what Joey Elias thought. His theft and his dislike were based on an intellectual superiority. What lamp will light our way—for it is swimming the river all over again, and will be long and dark from here to the shore.”

He put the ham back in the oven and licked his fingers bare.

FOUR

The wedding took place at the courthouse, for reason’s sake. The dinner took place at a small restaurant near the Enclosure.

My father did not eat, but had four gins, and was relaxed enough to stand and toast the groom’s mother.

“She has been with me always,” he said, “and I imagine will always be. I salute you.” Then he looked at her a long time, almost to the point of embarrassment as he held his glass to his lips. Finally he drank.

“To Abigail!” people shouted, and waved and clapped. She raised her glass of champagne and drank, spilling just a little and laughing.

Miles staggered slightly as he sat back down. He gave me a sudden stare, as if I had said something.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Pardon?”

“What?”

“Yes—what,” he said. “That’s exactly it. What have I just seen that you do not see?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ah—Gary,” he said in mirth (tragic mirth), waving to Gary Fallon. “A bright and blissful future for all.”

“What’s that?” Gary asked across the tinkling glasses. “What?”

“Bright and blessed future for all?” (Asked as a question.)

“Yes, yes—you’re right.”

“It’s good to know this,” Father said to me. “He has just quelled my fears and put a stop to my objection.” Then he stood and shouted, “Hear, hear—my fears have been quashed!” He held his gin and saluted the crowd. A picture was taken. It shows my father, cuffs a tad stretched, looking Dr. Mahoney’s way, and behind him a young boy of about six, looking awestruck at whatever it was that might be happening.

“Gary—Gary?”

“Yes, Miles?” Gary asked, not quite annoyed yet.

“You work with population control—I was wondering. You know there is this—ozone thing, and also climate control. We are either heading head down toward an ice age or a hothouse—not sure which. So after you quell the populace, then you should start on climate.”

Gary nodded, a little sternly.

“And then of course there is my play,” he said. He sat back down and said to me, “My God—I got away from myself, didn’t I.”

“What are you doing?” I said.

“There’s nothing more here than meets the eye,” he said.

“Well, isn’t that fine—”

“But it’s what meets the damn eye, son.” He smiled. “We are all drunks.”

“Who are all—drunks,” I said.

“What is left of the King family. But there, you see, my prodigal son—and oh, if only she would come home.” Then he became silent and morose.

Ginger had been drinking for more than a year now, and I could not stand it. I knew it was terrible to moralize over this with her, but still—she was my sister.

The wedding was horrible simply because it was a wedding. The jokes were raw, the conversation strained.

We drove back to the house, to the caterers, and the party, which was put on by Ginger, at her own expense, the way things are done when people reach a certain age—their independence leaves them vulnerable, and money becomes a sad part of their relationship with others, and it is not until an occasion like this that it is noticed as poignant, yearning and—the real word—solitary, like a stranger taking money out to pay a taxi driver on a sun-drenched street filled with empty sidewalk cafés.

There was a moment at the party when I knew we were the outsiders, even, or especially, Ginger. It seemed suddenly and almost fatally incongruous that this strapping man with the wild eyes would be married to this child—for I still considered her this. Had she heard what people were saying, that his loyalty to her was a joke, that he was doing it for the business, and that Ginger must have known and taken her chances anyway?

Lobsters and oysters and jumbo shrimp on ice, and sparkling wine. Her face beautiful. Still after all of that strife, beautiful.

“Keep an eye on him,” she whispered, holding my hand lightly and then letting go. There were three girlfriends of hers from the convent, but I had not seen them in years and had forgotten their names. Perhaps Ginger had also. She seemed to get them as recruits, called up at the last moment to prove she had someone at her side.

If you looked at Ginger closely you could tell that this was not her first wedding. There had been a loss of innocence somewhere among us all. Most were falling into early middle age. Most of us had done things we would never admit to. Ginger was worried about Dad, but she herself could not stay away from the gin, and at one point stumbled and was held up by Noel.

Looking at my father, I saw a desperate innocence in him, compounded by his spiritual fall from grace.

The tables spread across the lawn with paper skirts, and bugs among the lights soft as fairy dust. Ginger turned to answer a child’s question. This was Janie’s granddaughter, in her early thirties. Still vivacious, beautiful, and craning her neck beyond the one she was speaking to, to see where her father was, and if he had fallen into the dessert dish as he did at a Rotarian function.

My father did not belong. Not only here, but to life. Something had happened in his life, and he had never belonged. Now his money had been lost to prophylactics; and that seemed to complete his alienation from any part of the world he knew.

“Taking a business away was not only symbolic of killing my mother, it is in essence killing my daughter,” he said with a smile as he passed me by.

My sister’s light green dress—the same colour as Dr. Mahoney’s—left her solitary in the middle of the lawn.

I could have mentioned at that moment the sensation that something terrible would happen to Ginger, for this was the premonition I had, looking at her alone in the middle of the lawn. I thought that Noel might kill her. But I was no soothsayer, and no one in town listened to me anyway.

As night came on and loud music lingered from the patio, Miles watched with a kind of childlike gaze as people ate oysters, and then he watched Dr. Mahoney, as if trying to understand something. He walked away, then meandered through the crowd to look at her once again.

“So, you do think that these whatchamacallits that we are going to produce in droves and droves will come in handy and make us money, do you, Doctor?”

“Oh, Miles—absolutely,” she said. “But your daughter is not doing it for the money. She is doing it for something else.”

“She is not doing it for the money?”

“No, she is not doing it for the money Miles—she is doing it for the children.”

“For the children?”

“Absolutely, Miles. For the children.”

“Well—What I mean to ask is—and forgive me for asking it—but will there be children if she does it?”

“No. But that’s the point, isn’t it, Miles—all those little boys and girls suffering.”

“Ah—the point is for them not to suffer?”

“That’s absolutely right, Miles,” Fallon chipped in.

“And the way for them not to suffer—here I mean, on this earth—is never to allow them a chance at it.”

Gary and the doctor both smiled at the old disgrace that he was. Dr. Mahoney tried the diplomatic answer, knowing it was perhaps my father’s old Catholicism that bothered him, the confessional and all of that.

“That is what Ginger is about. She is a beautiful child herself and now she helps poverty, abuse, all the things she knows causes suffering. All my life I wanted to do something decent, and now we have a chance. If we meet our projected sales we will be doing very, very well,” she said.

“Just keeping dumb women from having kids—not bright women,” Fallon said, happy to clarify his point.

“Very well,” Miles answered, turning to Dr. Mahoney again. “With what you call projected sales, yes—Besides I know she is a beautiful child—I know she is not doing it for the money. I know she is only interested in helping others. But—”

“What, my dear?”

“These watchamacallits—are—well, legal? They weren’t when I was a lad, but that was long ago and in another country.”

Fallon laughed. Miles gave him a peculiar look and then looked away.

“Of course they are, Miles. It’s a brand-new age now. And you should embrace the business. It’s not like it used to be, when you were little. It has all changed. The whole world had changed,” the doctor noted.

“Ah yes—a brand-new age of whatchamacallits. Yes, of course, I see. And of course I cannot see them in my mind’s eye as anything but used product on the ground at my drivein—so you see I have no moral higher ground, just the drive-in ground—ground down, so to speak?”

Gary wandered away, and Dr. Mahoney stayed politely, purse in hand but looking over his shoulder for an avenue of escape. My father took a desperate chance.

“I want to tell you that I always felt terrible for your loss—the triplets so long ago.”

The doctor looked at him as if gauging his cleverness, but her toughness diminished.

“I don’t know what you are saying.”

“Willie, Sam, and Paddy Dan,” he said.

Father paused, for he never in his life really wanted to give anyone pain. He saw her lips tremble just slightly.

She smiled at someone else.

“Do you, Doctor, know the story of my sister?”

“Georgina? Absolutely.”

“I want you to know—I want you if no one else knows to know—all my life I have been sorry about your early life—the betrayals you yourself must have felt when a child alone.”

“Thank you, but I don’t know what you mean,” she said almost fiercely.

The talk seemed to drift away over our great immortal river. My father paused, knowing he did not want to cause a sorrow that had been so freely given by others to him.

“I know. But about Georgina. Can I tell you something about that little casualty?”

“Of course. But there is nothing in the world I don’t know about Georgina, for Ginger has told me everything.”

“There are some things you might not know.”

“No—I am certain I know everything,” she said, insisting on her portion, her right to know more about us then we did about ourselves.

“Of course you do—Doctor—but I am asking a rather rhetorical question here. Do you think she would have traded a second of her life for anything?”

“Absolutely not.”

“And she did suffer.”

“I hope not too, too much.”

“But it follows that she did.”

“Well, perhaps—”

“Therefore, you see, Georgina is a perfect example—almost a required one. She would never have traded a moment of life even in her suffering. And I have had to live with that for many a year. So I am not at all against the whatchamacallits. In fact, at this point in life I am against nothing, carefree, glib abortion at the doctor’s or dancing nude as beasts in moonlight. How can I disapprove, I who am the worst of all—the one true failure on the river? But still and all, suffering is the price of life, the price that all those sad children are willing to pay if we allow them. The price you have paid as much as anyone—Rebecca.”

She gave a start, almost a fatal one. He bowed to her and walked up the gravel drive past many of the cars where small groups of men drank.

“Hello, Mr. King,” Ray Winch said. He had been included in the partnership, given every cent he had, and now, exuberant about the possibility of new friendships and money, was vulnerable to any answer my father might give. Knowing this, my father refused to be unkind.

“How are you, son?” my father asked.

“Mr. King—we used to sneak into the theatre—did you know?” He nudged Gary Fallon, standing beside him. “I knew, son, I knew.”

“We used to wait by the exit door—did you know?”

Miles smiled. “Your father once waited by the door as well. I often left the door open for you, Ray,” he said. “I often did that for you, boy, for I knew your circumstances better than you cared about mine.”

There was a slight guffaw and then complete silence.

He circled back from the pathway through his hedges and came out beside Dr. Mahoney again. She caught him staring at her, and smiled, and then, with perfect resolution, stood for a picture, and then moved away with someone I didn’t know. Miles grinned at me. He looked like Malcolm Lowry at this moment—indistinguishable from the bottle of Bols gin he was holding.

In the dark he was gone from me again.

I tried to keep an eye on him. There he was by a tree. There he was talking to Ginger’s maid of honour about string beans and the best soil for them. There he was alone at the side of the house tapping his foot to some Hank Jr. music. “A Country Boy Can Survive.” There he was watching from the back bushes, a glass of fulsome gin in his hand, like a spy, nodding to whoever would nod at him.

I could just catch his pale suit; I could just catch his head as his body weaved slightly in among the hundred guests, the street with a ribbon, and a heart with Noel’s and Ginger’s names. There was a shouting match between the two wives of the two lesser investors, who staggered off in opposite directions. Ginger came to me in a hushed excitement and explained that Miles was bothering Dr. Mahoney.

“I knew this would happen. You have to take him home. He’ll make a scene with her, and she has done everything for my day.” Tears sparkled at the corners of her eyes, but she too was almost drunk. I went and told Miles I wanted to go home. He told me he was ready enough to go, for he had snuck a bottle of gin in his coat, and the bartender was staring ruthlessly at him. We walked up the path toward the street.

I asked him if he had eaten today.

Not in four days, he said, except for licking his fingers when he cooked the ham. He checked the bottle to see how much was in it. It was three-quarters full. He smiled at his luck. The luck of the McLearys. The forgotten wedding of 1791.

I asked him if he wanted to have something to eat, and he said no. Or lie down?

“Of course not,” he said.

He walked over with straightened dignity and offered the bride a kiss.

“Thank you for coming,” Noel said. “She completely changed my life.” It didn’t matter to him if he was lying; lying was somehow part of his appeal, the cynical mirth in his face always assessing or accusing those he spoke to.

Dr. Mahoney caught up with us at the drive.

“Here,” she said, and gave me a hug, with unfelt affection. Then she kissed Miles on his cheek. “We’ll always be together—we’re one family,” she said. “And don’t worry about what some people might say about our business. Not only is it legitimate but there is a moral here. That’s why Ginger is so involved.”