River of the Brokenhearted (7 page)

I went to Toronto years later, trying to get the feel of the same kind of day. However, when I arrived at the train station it was pouring rain, and I, unlike Janie, took a cab. After speaking with the manager, a fresh-faced fellow from the Ukraine, I checked the register in the basement, but it went back no further than August of 1942.

Why did she trust no one—what had failed in her? Well, how might others have acted, considering her life? “Betrayal causes a wound, the more to be vicious by,” my father once told me. That was true enough.

I walked down Yonge Street reflecting on this, and in the heat singing Cockburn’s “The Coldest Night of the Year.” And reflecting upon those women who once had left cards to visit her, only to turn their backs when she needed them, and whose granddaughters became the indulged feminists of privilege who marvel at my grandmother in front of me, but if born in that time would not have shown her the spit off their tongues.

In the searing heat shimmering off the blue and inert lake, I followed her in my mind’s eye as the next afternoon she took a tram toward her destiny, to a place with a few flashy posters and a “girl” of forty-nine at a typewriter, a prostitute in the shade of a building, and a wino lying in a yard. She gave them money. For she knew them all as people of her blood.

“What would you do with me?” the prostitute said.

“I would give you a meal,” Janie said. “So get one now, dearie.”

“If you are to buy wine,” she said diligently to the wino, “buy Napoleon—at least you’ll be in for a fight.”

She entered the office, held her breath to stop the smell of sweat and cigar in the fiercely small room, with its couch with its dilapidated cushions and said, “I’m here to see Mr. Mahoney—of the talking pictures.”

And when she saw him, late in the day—for he had business and was attired as such, and came in late—she asked him for a monopoly in writing for a guaranteed amount of time. She would stake her future on a roll of the dice. And that dice was a picture called
The Jazz Singer
.

If done on a whim, as Walter declared, it was a brilliant whim.

In August of that year she came back to her hometown with a four-year monopoly on the talking pictures. She heard that Elias had lost at cards and was fined for brawling, but she had no time to consider that.

PART II

ONE

By December of 1930 Joey Elias could not afford to heat his building and those who still went there to watch what was now a piece of entertainment history huddled in coats and hats, seeing their breath on the air, watching silent men and women who already seemed of another age and time walking streets forlorn and distant, climbing stairs already disappearing under their feet.

That winter was cold. The buildings were hard to heat, food cost an arm and a leg and many young men poor to start with were heading away on boxcars. Joey had heard that Roy Dingle, a former Dobblestein man, had almost frozen solid, and was down to snaring rabbits, living with an old drinking pal in a cave on the riverbank. It would be hard to live like that, he thought; but it also brought him pleasure, for Dingle was worse off than he was and, to be sure, the butt of many jokes.

Joey would go home, through the quiet snowy streets, and open the heavy front door of his house. It was a long, narrow house that stretched from old Chatham Street into a back field, where now and then a deer looking for feed would appear near some bald frozen maples. Upstairs it was cold and dark as well, and fit for him, who had no friends really. He would go into the kitchen and stare at the wall. Not a decoration was up for Christmas, and there was no joy in his heart. The last time he was happy was when he had fed his brother cake and jam on Christmas morning years before.

But the more he would talk to himself, the more his dealings with people would haunt him, and the more he would plead with some unknown God (a God he did not believe in) to help him. So he would drink alone, just as he lived.

When he was twelve in Poland, fearing he would be pressed into the Russian army to fight in some reckless war, trampled to death, or marched into oblivion to die in the ranks because of his nationality, he sold a person into conscription instead of himself, betrayed him and stole his boots and headed away. He was able to do this because the officer ready to conscript him owed him twenty-six rubles by gambling on the gaming pea—a game of chance where Joey hid the pea under one of three cups. But of course the pea was not in the cups at all but in Joey’s hand. But then the officer was asked to fetch him for service, and Joey Eliseski sold his brother for the price of those rubles.

He made his way to England as a stowaway out of Norway. He went to Liverpool in a steerage filled with boards and rats, and made his way to London. There, off Soho, Neil Street or somewhere, he fell in with a group who made money gambling. He learned English and how to use a deck of cards. He was very young—the idea was to manage to live when the world was against your living. And so he learned how to palm aces. He did it well enough that he managed a card game in a travelling circus that went south of London in the summer. Here he learned another trait of human nature. Many people expected to be cheated. He liked his chances better after he discovered this. Really, he was not doing much more than what people who went to these travelling shows expected.

Before the start of the first war he tried to find his brother but could not. He heard that his brother had deserted back to Krakow and was beaten and taken to jail. Joey grew morose, and reckless. He got into fights, and somehow began to manage a boxer or two. He learned that most managers of most fighters kept most of the money if they were smart. He also learned that people longed for a white boxer—a Stanley Ketchel or Gentleman Jim Corbett, rather than Jack Johnson. This too could work to his advantage.

But when a boxer of his died in the ring, there was an investigation, and he fled to Canada.

Sometimes, closing his eyes he saw his brother. And when he first began to visit Janie he’d see Miles, who reminded him of his brother. How could he do this to her? he thought. Hadn’t he done enough? But the very fact that he had taken his brother’s boots made him a veteran of acrimonious campaigns—so, in order to survive, he felt he must continue to do what it was he was doing. If he did what he set out to do, he was sure to win. How would he lose?

He realized that in order to lose he would have to go and hand his brother back his boots. Then be pressed into Russian service and die. What a silly thought.

Walter McLeary had “adopted” Phil Druken’s family, for, as he knew, he had no other family to adopt. By now he had spent a lot of his money on them.

Since the family had fallen on hard times and moved to Tar Street, Walter visited them every spare moment. He could not think of Putsy without kindness and love, and a hope that went beyond hope that she might someday love him.

He always brought the Drukens something—a picnic ham, or a turkey, cigarettes or brandy for the old lad. He had taken Putsy and Rebecca to their first movie, a Clara Bow picture two years before. And both (Rebecca especially) had fallen in love with movies—with the idea of romantic heroes, or the idea of a young heroine given to melancholy because she knows how cold the world is. Sometimes these women would die in their men’s arms, or sometimes the men would save them at the very last moment from a cold-hearted devil.

This December came the moment Putsy knew would come. Walter proposed. She had been waiting—expecting nothing less—for if he did not propose, she was hopeless as a catch, and, for obvious reasons, dreading the moment he would. She had expected a warning of some kind, or maybe a visit from Janie, whom she was secretly terrified of. Yet he entered the snowy yard one clear night, walked to her back door, and, standing on his canes, smoking his ridiculous cigar, asked her father for her hand, with his pale breath lingering under the old porch light. She was hiding behind the wood stove, but when her father called her out, she did not know how to say no. Without friends, or much of a future, a man who earned a good salary, no matter if he walked with canes, was a catch. And she told herself she should be grateful for it, and that it proved her more discerning than people would imagine, to marry a good provider and a decent fellow like Walter McLeary.

Besides, for her, Walter had asked Janie a favour. Flushed by his love, he asked Janie to help Putsy’s young sister, who was known to have been in a certain amount of trouble.

The idea of Rebecca Druken having her own ideas was noticeable from the time she was seven or eight. At first things were done to please Joey Elias—just as children pray to please their parents, so did Rebecca act to please the adults she looked up to. She liked to win the approval of Elias, and studied how to do so. She studied the incremental desires of people. And she was equipped, with her open face and ready smile, to captivate others. She never clung to anything, that was her trick, yet from an early age she discovered that many people found her indispensable.

Now that she was fifteen she was sure of herself, and during the interview with Janie, she said that nothing in the world would be as fine as working for her.

“As long as you are good with kids you can work for me—if you are not going to school?”

Rebecca smiled. “What’s a school that isn’t life, ma’am?”

Rebecca Druken came to the house, to take care of Miles and Georgina King, in the spring of 1930. For a while she ignored Joey, but slowly (especially after Putsy ordered her not to) she began to slip back to the only life that truly excited her, that made her feel more important than anyone else in the world—the hidden life of the pea.

TWO

Joey Elias woke at three in the afternoon of December 20, 1930, and went to the skating rink. He sometimes went to watch the skaters. It took his mind off things.

Afternoon skating was just ending. Men and women holding hands glided before him. And who did he see in a long skirt skating in the centre of the ice by herself? The one person he knew who might work in his favour. It seemed inevitable that he meet Putsy Druken at this moment.

She skated toward him. She was tiny, had a peaked face but bold eyes, and an energetic smile, though her teeth were bad. Three were missing because her father had slammed her once when she tried to protect Rebecca. She had been at work in the shoe factory in Fredericton, but now she had come home. She had been with Elias for a while, but he always treated her meanly. And he teased her that Rebecca was prettier. This would send her into a fury.

Now she was engaged to Walter McLeary, and wore a pair of earrings, just visible under her dark hair. The engagement, for obvious reasons, wasn’t widely announced.

Her father had worked for Dobblestein’s. When the mill went out of business, Elias had put them out of the house he had rented them; he used to laugh that he had to fumigate it. Now that didn’t seem the best way to have handled a bad situation. For he was thinking of Putsy and Rebecca again and of what use both of them could be to him.

They had nowhere to go when he threw them out, and Walter McLeary had helped them. That in itself bothered Joey.

But now Putsy looked up and saw Mr. Elias again. She still called him Mr. Elias, even though he had slept with her dozens of times. And she remembered all of the times she’d believed that Mr. Elias could help her family. Mr. Elias could get her father work if she was nice, if she did his ironing or his shopping. Always if she just did this or that, Mr. Elias would give them something in return. And she knew, though she could not admit to it yet, that she still loved him, and she was being cheated out of real love by being with Walter.

She smiled at Elias and undid her cap. The music played as skaters came off the ice and the lights dimmed.

“Oh,” he said cavalierly, “Putsy. I hear you have something important to tell me.” His smile revealed that he was amused by it. Then he frowned as if he knew it was an important matter for a young woman and so refused to be amused at her expense. Both looks she caught immediately.

She sat on a bench and began to undo her skates—newly bought for her by Walter, who could not skate himself.

“Well, as long as
you’re
happy,” Elias said, with an emphasis on the “you’re.”

Putsy nodded and pursed her lips as if she was about to say something.

He asked, “Is there anything about those talkies that are different—from mine?”

“Just the sound,” she said. “It seems that in your place we’ve gone deaf.”

She saw he gave a slight jolt at this, but then composed himself.

“But your place is just as nice,” she whispered, standing now, her breath close to his face.

“And how do they heat their place? Do they heat it like I heat mine?”

“Oh, you must know now. They heat it with wood—just like you do.”

“Ah yes. She’s a fortunate girl, that Janie McLeary, to have all that dropped in her lap without fighting for it—like you and I have to. Her father tried so hard to do right by her and soon as she gets ahead she ignores him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing—just a bit of talk. I think being married to an Englishman has gotten her where she is, that’s all.”

“Some are lucky to marry, some are not.” She said this without thinking of Walter, but blushed after she had said it.

“He’s good to you—that’s something anyway,” Elias said quickly, touching her face.

“Both he and Janie,” she said. Of course Janie McLeary was Janie McLeary. Putsy could not look at the woman without feeling intimidated.

“You hang on to yer luck,” Elias said, and he touched her shoulder with his hand to comfort her about this kind of luck.

Then he hurried away, having spied Walter.

Putsy Druken shrugged and waited as Walter hobbled forward. She walked toward him, trying to ignore his halting gait, and once looked back over her shoulder.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Walter said.

“Everything has a reason—as you yourself said.” She smiled.

She walked ahead of him and he followed, puffing dramatically on his cigar, now and again looking behind into the crush of skaters, for he could sense something was wrong.

“Did anyone say anything to you?” he asked.

“Of course not.”

He followed her out into the dark. Dark and Christmas, and lights twinkling on and off in small windows. Over at Beaker’s store, a golden angel sat above the door, and a sleigh and horse waited for a group of revellers. Young men and women, all covered in bear rugs and sipping whisky, had stopped for chocolates and Player’s cigarettes.

Two men saw Putsy and yelled, “Come on, we’re going to the cove. Come on!”

She asked Walter to go with her.

“No, no,” he said, blankly staring into the dark, the smell of diesel from the train yard beyond them. The bells of the horse were tinkling softly, and it snorted. It was a black Belgian with a fat belly and big hooves. Its harness was dressed with silver twine, and its tail was bobbed by red ribbon. All brought an excitement to Putsy—the smell of whisky, the idea of the bear rugs—all snuggled together. What would be wrong with it?

“I can’t go,” he said, looking back and forth, his cigar smouldering. “I have a movie in an hour.”

“Ah yes. Every night you work.”

“I told you I was talking to Janie about training someone.”

“That doesn’t help now.”

Putsy kissed him on the cheek and started toward the sleigh.

“Damn it, Putsy, I can’t go,” he said under his breath, and as he tried to grab her his canes slipped out from under him and he fell, twisting his ankle.

She rushed back and tried to help him, but he waved her away. Other skaters ran to his aid as well, but Walter shouted to them that he was fine.

As he tried to find his canes in the soft snow, a man came up behind him and helped him to his feet.

“There you go, Walter,” Joey Elias said, smiling and brushing him off. He handed Walter his canes.

Walter was too big a man not to thank him. The horse and sleigh had to go around them now, while Elias took the halter and motioned to the young driver to turn the horse back, with far more gravity than need be. There was some whispering from the women.

“Who is that?”

“That’s who runs the movies.”

“Oh, he has a humpback.”

Though there was a commotion, and these things were whispered, he could not help but hear. Putsy pretended she didn’t. The horse was whipped forward into the dark and went down the back lane, the sleigh slewing and all yelling and laughing. There was sudden silence, a whisper of smoke from the houses, and everyone began to laugh again.

Rebecca, who had come to find her older sister, stood in the dark near the side of the building and gave a flash of a smile to Mr. Elias, who just caught her out of the corner of his eye as he passed.

Elias waited until Putsy and Water were gone, then went over to her.

“Rebecca,” he said, “are you ever pretty tonight” (just as he used to tell her sister when she was fifteen).

“As pretty as Putsy?”

“Oh, far prettier,” he whispered, looking behind him.

“As smart as Putsy?”

“Oh, far smarter.” He stared into her face. There was a sudden cruelness to it.

“Well, I’m not like Putsy,” she said, biting her bottom lip.

“In what way?”

“I will do whatever you want me to,” she said to him, “as long as you like me, too.”

He stared at her and she looked up at him boldly, with a strange sullen curiosity.

“Then I’m going to give you a challenge,” he said, “just a little challenge. I want you to tell me every word that is said in Janie’s house tomorrow—doesn’t matter how unimportant it seems. If you do that, I will give you another task.”