Too Close to the Falls (19 page)

I wondered how ol' Jim ever managed as a father since now he was just a torso sitting in front of the post office on a rolling four-wheeled
platform an inch from the ground, yelling dirty words at people. Sometimes he sold things like painted metal frogs that jumped an inch at a time if you wound them up with a key. He usually had a grubby little demo model. If you didn't buy one of his stupid frogs he yelled obscenities at you when you walked down the street. My mother always bought whatever he had to offer and told him how much she needed a metal pet frog. Seymour Knox was not invited back to the Christmas-decoration selection committee when he awarded ol' Jim the Nativity scene display first prize in 1955.

I was amazed that Marie and ol' Jim were once married. I had no idea that leaving a husband was even a possibility, outside of Hollywood, by any method other than death. It seemed particularly ironic to me that Marie literally kicked ol' Jim out when he had no legs and she had no hands. They could have been quite useful to one another. I also wondered if Marie knew that she was going to hell after committing mortal sins, if she hadn't figured it out yet, or if she genuinely didn't care, having given up on the whole business. I had never met anyone who had given up on it all; someone who said that she didn't care if life was only a breath compared to eternity, she was at least going to have a good time breathing.

I was also amazed that someone as lowly as ol' Jim, a person who even young Jim, who cleaned the septic tanks, didn't say hello to when he walked past the post office, could be in
charge
of giving out babies. I thought about the story of the good Samaritan, how God dressed as a beggar to see who would help him. On the way home, when I shared this idea with Roy, he said that I was probably right, and there were people who passed ol' Jim every day and never saw the God within him.

Marie became quite worked up when ol' Jim was mentioned, and started to wave her atrophied hands in front of me, saying that she got the “devil's own disease” because she had to work cleaning up other people's sins. Noticing my appalled look, she picked up momentum. “That's right, I had to clean the confessionals at church and all the floors back in them days when they never heated the church, exceptin' on Sundays. Dr. Alderman says I get this scourge from havin' my hands in cold water for years. When I had my knees operated on, the surgeon said I wored ‘em away on that floor. He said that knee bone was thinner than a parchment paper by the time he got to it. He telled me the light shine right through it. I scrubbed that place from baptismal to confessional while ol' Jim threw that money down his gullet at the Riverside Inn as fast as I earned it. Dr. Alderman told him he goin' to lose hisself to the drink, but he only keep on. Finally when the drink got the better o' him and he was sittin' on his hip bones, I just slide his platform right out the door and down the Lewiston Hill toward the river. He want to go to the Riverside Inn, so I got him there by the fastest route.” Marie, Roy, and I were laughing at the image of ol' Jim speeding as he headed down the steep hill. “His hands get mighty brush-burned that day, let me tell ya,” Marie said as she took a deep drag on a much-needed Chesterfield, and daintily picked a little bit of tobacco off her lip.

I said, “Well, what goes around comes around,” a favourite line I learned from Irene, the cosmetician of Evening of Paris fame. I was thrilled to have a chance to use it. Roy laughed and slapped my hand, and Marie was laughing so hard she almost tumbled off her lawn chair.

When we calmed down a little, she asked Roy if he was the
bartender because “We ladies want our drinks freshened.” I took to a lot of Marie's phrases and used them when I could. In fact, the next day at breakfast I asked Loretta to “freshen” my orange juice.

When Marie was what Roy referred to as “feeling no pain” (I was relieved the Percodan had taken effect), she moved on to the second phase of her life, which she called her “golden era.” “He was one mean drunk, that one was, I'm here to tell ya, knocked me from one wall to another. Dr. Alderman knowed what's goin' on. He seen it on the x-ray pictures and let me stay in the hospital, sometimes for a week at a time, just to have a break from him. When I got rid o' him, I figured I mights as well make money from what I had to do with him. Let me tell you, Roy, there were men who were willing to pay for me in them days.” She asked us to flick on a switch over a picture on the wall. Most of her pictures were of little children with unblinking eyes in rangy clothes with black velvet backgrounds, but she had one large oil painting of herself with a light switch placed on the upper edge of the ornate gold frame.

When Roy turned on the tiny spotlight, a young, beautiful, and truly voluptuous Marie came into focus. She was wearing a strapless black taffeta evening gown accentuating a tiny waist. Her hair was in a French twist. I told her she looked more beautiful than Stupefying Jones in
L'il Abner
, and her face resembled Lana Turner on the Toni permanent-wave box. I could tell Marie liked that image so I continued telling her that she looked like the French royalty she was descended from. “Dolores told my mother that you were a
Madam
.” Marie's eyes narrowed and she took a big swig of her drink and then a long drag on her cigarette. I quickly realized she didn't want Dolores referring to her French ancestry.

“Dolores couldn't make a dime in my line of work if she only wore her apron.” I tried to picture Dolores in only an apron. “Let the likes o' Dolores clean other people's houses. I can tell ya I saw her husband a lot more than she did and got a lot more money from him in one hour than she got in a week.” She sank back into her chair and turned her gaze back upon the portrait. “Ya see that twenty-three-inch waist. I had that waist and that thirty-eight inch bust after nine children. Tell Dolores to kiss my you-know-what. Father Flanagan ran his confessional and I ran mine. We're the only ones who know the underbelly of Lewiston and the Falls.”

Roy agreed, saying, “More people heard o' you than the Maid of the Mist.”

She leaned toward Roy and I as though she was telling us both a secret. “Ya know, when I hired my own girls, sold the drinks, and the Canadians came by the truckful, I was makin' $2,000 a week on booze alone. They came in from Fort Erie after the races. We were jumpin' on Sundays. I had a licence to print money when the Power Project was in full swing. Why, thousands of men poured into town like water over the Falls. That's without the tax man knocking on my door — for money, that is. Now my business, my body, and even a chunk of the Falls is dried up. It happens faster than ya think.”

Roy shook his head in admiration. “Umm-mm, I'm sorry I missed them days. Must a been a sight.”

Marie said, “Ya know I never could hire from you folks, Roy. Them girls want to keep them babies when they get in the family way.”

I really didn't understand why Marie couldn't have hired us and was feeling mildly offended. When I later expressed my
consternation to Roy, he said she wasn't hiring anyone, so it was one less thing we had to concern ourselves with. Yet the phrase “keep them babies” haunted me. I had no idea people didn't keep their own babies. What if
I
wasn't my parents' baby? Maybe I had been left in the bulrushes like Moses. After all, my parents were older and I was an only child like Moses. . . . Sister Agnese
had
called me a “bad seed.” Maybe Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, now a childless couple, were my real parents and they left me with my favourite beloved little cowboy suit when they gave me up to go on television.

As I was piecing together my possible lineage, Marie broke into what was not to be my last thoughts on the matter. “Ya can't do the same thing forever, ya know. Ya get older. Gotta pay the piper. I changed lines — got into fixin' girls in trouble. I was always good with my hands” — she didn't look that good to me — “and I could fix ‘em better than anyone in these parts. In fact for miles round right up through Montreal they called what I done right there on that pinochle table ‘gettin' sweenied.'”

Marie looked over at me and asked if I knew why she kept her curtains closed. When I acknowledged that I had no idea, she said it was to keep the hypocrites out. “This town is crawling with ‘em. Marie is
this
, and Marie is
that
,” she said, mimicking the tone of a gossipmonger. “Till all them country-club girls from the heights played at more ‘n golf and suddenly needed my help. Then there ain't no one like good ol' Marie. Lemme tell you that!”

As we were about to leave, my eyes had finally adjusted to the dark, and I saw on her makeshift side table, an upside-down orange crate, that she had her Santa candle from last year that Roy had given her resting on the card we'd given her. The card had red
candle drippings and Santa's head had already melted away from its last Christmas burning. I wanted Roy to know she'd saved it even though she hadn't made much of a fuss over it when we had given it to her, so I mentioned Santa's headless condition. “Don't worry,” Marie said, dragging on her cigarette, “them reindeers knows the way here by heart. Besides, I never met a man who used his head for anything more than a hat rack, anyway.”

I had never heard anyone say anything bad about men, although the comment did resonate with something within me. I thought men were the top of the heap. They made the money, were in charge, forgave us our sins, and were the altar boys. I glanced at Roy to catch his reaction. He bellowed out his infectious laughter and said, “Now that's the truth!” I also began laughing and felt thoroughly relaxed and realized that although Marie was sort of worn-out, she had guts. Maybe having guts wears you out.

I told Marie that before we left we should light the candle and sing a Christmas song since, after all, it
was
Christmas Eve. She said, “Sure, whatever. This'll pretty much wrap up my Christmas cheer.” She didn't say this in a sad tone, but more as a throwaway line. Roy lit the headless Santa, and I asked Marie to pick a carol. I figured she would pick “I'm Getting Nothin' for Christmas ‘Cause I Ain't Been Nothin' but Bad.” (For some reason that song scared me.) But she didn't. She picked “Silent Night.” Marie, Roy, and I sang all the verses. Roy sang in a rich baritone and Marie's voice was so sweetly different from her speaking voice I was amazed. They harmonized beautifully together. Roy kept his hand on Marie's shoulder for the last verse because she was looking kind of misty.

We drove along in silence as night fell and I tried to put together the things Marie had said into one cohesive picture. Why, if she was royalty, did she live in a dump? Why, since she had nine children, did she not see them on Christmas? Why had she seen Dolores's husband more than Dolores had? I guess when she fixed people they told her their secrets just like they told Father Flanagan in confession. I also wondered how girls could get in trouble when it was usually boys, as far as I could see. Why was no one helping her when she had “fixed” so many others? When I expressed these sentiments to Roy on the way home, he said, “People think that some favours are best forgotten,” but he agreed with me that Lewiston had been ungrateful to Marie.

After both of my parents had died and I'd moved away, an article appeared in the press about several famous women, including Gloria Steinem and Catherine Deneuve, who agreed to go public after having had illegal abortions in the fifties and sixties. A few of these well-known women named Marie Sweeney as their abortionist. Marie, if she had still been with us, could have flung open her black velvet curtains and become, however briefly, the toast of the Lewiston avant-garde.

Marie opened the creaky door to the world a bit for me. She didn't seem to care about the town's hierarchy that my mother so rigidly adhered to and I had come to believe was inviolable. When she laughed at the priest, missed mass on Sunday, wore white shoes in the winter, lipstick over her natural lip line, and called her husband a “no-good layabout” (no one I had ever met called their husband anything but their Christian names), I found it all inexplicably liberating. When I asked Roy what a “hypocrite” was, he said it was a person who did one thing by day but another
when the sun went down. I pictured the people of Lewiston scurrying around like nocturnal rodents doing inexplicably awful things in the shadows of moonlight.

A few weeks later my mother was having her bridge club, with several tables of four set up in the living room, dining room, and front parlour. It was my job to supply the coasters to each guest so their highball glasses wouldn't leave a ring on my mother's unblemished cherry bridge tables. Dolores was darting back and forth placing bridge mix, hors d'oeuvres, and tiny white Wonder Bread sandwiches with no crust arranged on a platter like the floral clock in Canada. As we were all bustling around, my ears pricked up when I heard Mrs. Aungier say that her teenage daughter Cindy, a ballerina (she travelled to Niagara Falls for dance lessons), needed to have her feet fixed; however, there was no one in Lewiston or the Falls to do it. Since I had a never-ending desire to be part of the conversation while handing out gratuitous advice, I suggested to Mrs. Aungier that Marie Sweeney could fix Cindy. After all, I pointed out, she had fixed many girls from Lewiston. Mrs. Aungier paled when I mentioned her daughter's name in the same breath as Marie Sweeney's. After she'd recovered sufficiently she said that Cindy was not in
that
kind of trouble. Not having any idea what she meant, I attempted to give Marie some legitimacy in Mrs. Aungier's eyes so I forged ahead. “Marie could fix anything — why, she's seen more of Dolores's husband than Dolores ever has.”