St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  “It was a joke. He thought it was a funny thing to do.”

  “I see. The Progressive Book Club?”

  “Um, one minute. Let me think … I’m not sure. The Progressive Book Club?”

  “Yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  Next the interrogator read out a seemingly endless list of newspapers and magazines, and asked Jake if he had ever subscribed to any of them. All of Jake’s replies were typed out in quintuplet and then he was asked to check his answers for inaccuracies and misspellings before he signed each copy.

  “It says here … religion ‘Hebrew.’ I clearly remember saying ‘Jewish.’ ”

  “So what?”

  “He’s a fresh guy,” the immigration officer said. “I warned you.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to sign a false statement.”

  “Christ Almighty, but you believe in making things tough for yourself; O.K., I’ll write in Jewish over Hebrew. You initial each copy where I’ve done that.”

  “Roger,” Jake said, winking.

  “Now listen here, kid. You cut that out.”

  Jake signed the copies. Then he was fingerprinted and brought back to the office. “This hearing is now closed,” the interrogator said, “because you are considered undesirable to the United States. Your application for admission has been refused and you are temporarily excluded under the provisions of Section 235 (c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. You will be returned to Montreal this evening at 7:30.”

  “You still haven’t given me a reason.”

  “We are not authorized to divulge information on which we pass exclusion.”

  Jake was driven back to his place of detention and found there was now a thin old man with a sunken pot belly perched on the edge of the upper bunk opposite him, spindly legs dangling in mid-air. The man was wearing a natty straw hat and a checked shirt at least two sizes too large for him and split running shoes. He had enormous pop eyes, opened, it seemed, in an attitude of perpetual amazement; and he held a walking stick over his head. “Don’t move,” he said, shaking his stick at Jake. “Not an inch closer.”

  “Jesus Christ. Who are you?”

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  Jake sat down tentatively.

  “I knew they’d send somebody. Cockroach. Vermin. That’s you.”

  “Would you mind telling me what this is all about?”

  “Admit it. Feigelbaum’s paying. Or is it Shapiro?”

  “Nobody’s paying. Nobody sent me here. I’m a prisoner. I’m being sent back to Montreal tonight.”

  “To keep tabs on me. Well, I’m on to you. Human trash. If you so much as reach into your pocket for a weapon, I’ll scream for the guards.”

  “I’ll stand up with my arms over my head and you search me.”

  “Oh, no you don’t. No sirree. That’s when I get the judo chop.”

  “Why would I want to kill you?”

  “For the money. Five million.” Jake whistled.

  “Didn’t they tell you that much?”

  “I’m not completely trusted.”

  “They’d stop at nothing to put me out of the way and you know it. My case is before the Supreme Court in Manhattan right now. Calendar number 33451/1953.”

  “I wish you luck.”

  “It’s my father’s money. It belongs to me. I know where Feigelbaum is and I’ve located Shapiro, but I still have to find Czucker and Leon Feigelbaum.”

  The man’s eyes, to Jake’s astonishment, appeared to open even wider. They might actually pop, he thought.

  “I’m willing to share the money with anyone who helps me recover it and brings the criminals to justice.”

  “Cigarette?”

  “Not one of yours, thank you. Are you crazy?”

  “Surely you don’t think my cigarettes are poisoned?”

  “Last time Feigelbaum tried to murder me it was with supersonic rays. They paralyze and destroy the bodily organs. They’re not trying to kill me themselves. No sirree. Instead they hire people to try for them. Human excrement, like you.”

  Suddenly a metal clipboard was banged against the door and a man peered in the barred window. “What did you say your mother’s maiden name was?” he asked Jake.

  “I already told you in quintuplet.”

  The old man leaped down from the bed and threw himself against the door. “You’ve got to get me out of here. I’m not like him.”

  “We want the name again.”

  “He was put in here to murder me. He’s a hired killer.”

  “The name, please.”

  “It’s on the form. You’ve got it right there.”

  “Spell it for me, will you?”

  “Belloff. B-E-L-L. Off. Like in fuck off.”

  “You’d better watch it, buddy.” But he opened the door for Jake all the same. “You can go now. Train time.”

  “Don’t put me on the same train,” the man whined, retreating.

  “Don’t worry, grandpa. Somebody’s coming for you.”

  Somebody’s coming. The man slid to the floor, holding his head in his hands, and began to sob.

  “Can’t you do anything for him?” Jake asked, exasperated.

  “Got any ideas?”

  The door shut behind Jake and he was led downstairs and put in the care of another officer, a young plainclothesman with a clean crisp feel about him and a most disarming smile. The young man immediately stooped to relieve Jake of one of his suitcases. It was a small gesture, done without fuss, but the kindness of it all touched Jake, and it occurred to him for the first time that he was sweaty and rumpled, and that in the eyes of this pleasant young man he must seem a small-time con artist or maybe even a nut, like the man Jake had left behind. After such a long day’s squalor the young man came as a shock to Jake. He looked so wholesome, such a good credit-risk. As Jake and the young man stepped outside together into the fresh air he dared to hope that passersby would take them for friends, not a prisoner and his guard, and he was filled with a need to dissociate himself from the day’s seediness and make a good impression.

  “Pardon my asking,” the young man said, “but you’re a political, aren’t you?”

  “Well, yes, I mean that’s the charge.”

  “I don’t mind the politicals. They’re educated and are really, well, idealistic sort of. It’s the junkies and faggots that I find so degrading. Or do you think of them as … sick?”

  Jake shrugged.

  “What were you going to do in New York?”

  “Overthrow the government by force.”

  “That’s rich. That’s a good one.”

  “Me and my little supersonic ray gun.”

  “You were put in with him, then? Now isn’t he something?”

  “You with the F.B.I.?”

  “Hell, no. Nothing like that. Say, I must tell you how much I admire things Canadian. In our house, we always listen to the CBC. It doesn’t insult your intelligence, if you know what I mean? They allow for nonconformists. Like that, um, Professor McAllister who sometimes debates on foreign affairs.”

  McAllister lectured at McGill. A tiresome, literal socialist.

  “Would you know McAllister personally? Coming from Montreal?”

  “No. They said somebody was coming for the old man. Who?”

  “Oh, him. Hell, we’ve had him three times already. His son, I suppose. He’s a very distinguished dentist. Say, did the old boy show you the numbers on his arm?”

  The numbers? “No,” Jake said, nausea rising in him.

  “The Dodgers are going with Erskine tomorrow. The ole perfesser’s going to put in Whitey Ford.”

  “Mn.”

  “When the train pulls in you just get on ahead of me. No need to embarrass you, is there?”

  “What numbers? What are you talking about, you goddam fool?”

  “It was something they did to them during the war. In concentration camps. Didn’t you know that?”

  Jake suppressed an u
rge to hit him with his suitcase.

  “The irony of it is that now some of those same Germans are back in office in Western Germany. Now what do you say to that?”

  “Kiss my Royal Canadian ass.”

  “Be friendly. Come on. There’s nothing personal in this.” He offered Jake a cigarette. “Off the record, I’d even say there was something to it.”

  “To what? What are you talking about now? Concentration camps? The World Series? Is everybody crazy in this country?”

  The young man stopped, his pleasant face aching with high seriousness. “Would you say that?”

  “That? This? What are you talking about?”

  “Communism. The original idea. Brotherhood. Well, I buy it. But you can’t make it work. It rubs against human nature.”

  Jake stared at the tracks, willing the train into the station.

  “I suppose some of your buddies were going to meet you in New York.”

  “A parade was planned! A big demonstration.”

  “Can I phone anybody for you to explain why you didn’t turn up?”

  “I’m going to be sick. I’ve got to sit down.”

  Jake slumped against a pillar.

  “Here comes the train. You just get on ahead of me. We don’t need to sit together.”

  The young man settled in five seats behind Jake, and when they reached the border he got up and jumped off the train. Jake caught his eye as he stood on the platform, lighting up. The young man waved, his face broke into an infectious grin. Jake’s heart thumped crazily, his head was pounding and, to his own amazement, he spit venomously on the window just as the train lurched backwards, vibrated, and jerked forward again. The young man looked after him, shaking his head, appalled. And Jake, consumed with shame, realized that he had done it again. Shown himself one of the oily ones, an off-white. He had done the wrong and childish thing, made a fool of himself, when hitherto all the right had been on his side. So that when he remembered this day and came to talk about it at dinner parties years later, he would recall with stinging shame his stupid spit on the window, but he would always leave that out of the story, except when he told it to Nancy.

  Back in Montreal Jake made straight for the bar in Central Station, ordered a double whisky, and paid for it with American money.

  “Montreal is the Paris of North America,” the waiter said. “I trust you will enjoy your stay, sir.”

  Jake stared at his change. “What’s this,” he asked, “monopoly money?”

  “It’s Canadian.”

  Jake laughed, pleased.

  “Canada’s no joke. We’re the world’s leading producer of uranium. Walter Pidgeon was born in this country.”

  3

  ON HIS RETURN TO MONTREAL, JAKE, TRYING TO salvage at least a splinter of satisfaction out of the New York fiasco, assumed – gleefully assumed – that he would be the root of more Hersh border trouble. Gleefully, because it gratified him to think that his inchoate political past might deprive his uncles and aunts of Miami. Like him, this winter even the most affluent Hershes might have to suffer sub-zero Montreal. Sniffles, blizzards, frostbitten toes. Then, only a week after his return, Cousin Jerry was held at the border, questioned, and allowed to continue on to New York. It wasn’t Jerry or Jake the immigration officers were worried about. It was another J. Hersh, Cousin Joey, and Jake’s uncles had known this all along. Uncle Jack, the most unswervingly orthodox of the Hershes, a myopic furrier whose revolutionary activities had been confined to a failed uprising against the too permissive apparat of the Shaar Zion synagogue, told Jake how he too had once been stopped at the border and questioned for two hours before being cleared. “I’ll bet,” he said, “you got smart with them. You make more trouble for yourself than anybody can ever make for you.”

  “What have they got against Joey? A criminal charge?”

  “He’s a communist, a roite.”

  Jake, immersed in his own unpromising stare, shrugged the idea off with a deprecating laugh. That Cousin Joey had been a gambler, an actor, probably a gangster, once, all this Jake could dimly recall, but a communist?

  Nonsense.

  1937, Jake recalled, was the first time he had ever encountered his cousin Joey.

  Joey had been eighteen, Jake only seven years old.

  Hanna had delivered her progeny, Joey, Jenny, and Arty, to Uncle Abe’s cottage on the lake on a sweltering Sunday in summer that was, to begin with, a Sunday like any other. Jake and his cousins leaping shrieking off the raft, querulous aunts playing Mah Jong as they washed down liver knishes with Cokes, hefty uncles at the poker table under the shade of a maple tree, the women squealing, the men quaking with laughter, teenage cousins stomping to a boogie-woogie record, babies howling … when all at once there was an uncharacteristic stillness on the shore and Jake, curious, turned to look and saw Hanna and her three children Hanna, compared to his aunts, appeared shockingly thin. A black winter twig. Her two youngest children, amazingly pale for June, wore ill-fitting dark city clothes, but not Joey, who was the eldest.

  Cousin Joey, standing apart from them, smiled scornfully. His black hair had been ruthlessly brushcut and he wore a discolored blue work shirt and faded dungarees, the uniform of the Boys’ Farm, the detention home for delinquents in Shawbridge. Jenny, her forehead encrusted with angry pimples, pointedly ignored the other teenagers. Arty, considerably younger, only three years older than Jake in fact, clung to Hanna, squinting against the sun. Uncle Abe led the sullen newcomers magnanimously from group to group and Jake noticed that his aunts and uncles recoiled stiffly, suspiciously and took to whispering among themselves as soon as Abe had passed. Hanna and her brood did not eat lunch with the others; they were fed in the kitchen.

  “Who are they?” Jake asked his father on the drive back to the city.

  “Your second cousins. Baruch’s bunch.”

  “And who’s Baruch?”

  Ignoring Jake’s question, he turned to Mrs. Hersh and said, “Abe’s Parker 51 is missing already. It’s a crazy idea, a mistake.”

  But Jake’s mother cut him off and the two began to quarrel heatedly in Yiddish.

  “Why is the boy’s head shaven?” Jake asked.

  “You’ve heard of a de-icing? Well, he’s just had a de-licing.”

  The new Hershes were shoveled into a cold-water flat on St. Urbain, one of Uncle Abe’s properties on the same block as Jake’s, and Cousin Joey, who was said to be sickly, did not go out to look for work. Instead he slept in late, obliged, as Dr. Katz put it, to stoke energy into the furnace of his body, enabling him to best resist the wintry blasts ahead. Joey usually slept in until noon and then he went out and no matter how late he ultimately came home, Hanna, it was reported, still waited at the kitchen table, her callused knobby feet soaking in a steaming basin, making a crochet tablecloth or knitting diamond socks for her most cherished radio comedian, ready to quiz Joey about aches and pains, the time and texture of his last bowel movement.

  Four months after they had settled on St. Urbain, the snows came, the earth froze, bedsheets hung stiff as glass on the backyard clothesline, and Joey left home. He said to Hanna, “Going to Tansky’s for a Coke. Back for supper,” and he was gone.

  Max Kravitz saw Joey at Tansky’s. “He tried to borrow a sawski from me and I said no.” Saying no to Joey was St. Urbain Street policy since Uncle Abe had ordained that he was no better, potentially worse, than Baruch, Joey’s father. So it was no when Joey wanted to buy a guitar and no again, when Hanna sought money so that Joey could have a motorcycle. Uncle Abe wrote off the rent for the flat on St. Urbain, he saw to the doctor’s bills, which were considerable, but he would not sanction frivolities.

  Joey left home in December 1937 and though the police, the Baron de Hirsch Institute, and finally the seediest of private detectives, one of the Boy Wonder’s contacts, tried to find him, he was not heard from again until the autumn of 1938, when he sent Hanna a postcard from Toulouse, France. Europe! Where did he get the money? There were tho
se on St. Urbain who were scathingly quick to point out that a neighborhood garage had been held up a day before Joey disappeared. Others (remembering Baruch, perhaps) felt that he had most likely signed on a ship. There was another postcard in the summer of 1939 and this one had a Mexico City postmark on it.

  “He’s not so dumb,” Sugarman said. “He wasn’t going to be called up.”

  “Fair is fair. Who would take such a sickly boy in the army?” Jake’s father said.

  From the day of Joey’s departure Hanna never doubted that he would come back. In the spring, she assured the neighbors, glaring venomously at them, when the lilac tree in the back yard would be in bloom, but spring came and came again without Joey. Instead in January 1940 there was a tall man with empty gray eyes standing on Hanna’s doorstep. “I’m looking,” he said, his smile made to chill, “for Joseph Hersh also known as Jesse Hope.” The man explained he was an R.C.M.P. inspector.

  “What’s he done?” Hanna demanded.

  “There’s no charge against him. Just want to have a little chat.”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  Hanna squatted on her balcony or stood by the front parlor window every afternoon, rising involuntarily if an unfamiliar car slowed down. When she had to leave the flat empty, Hanna jammed a note in the door, saying which neighbor had the key. Frosty nights she raked the streets for Joey, hawking Gazettes downtown, in front of the Loew’s, outside Dinty Moore’s, at the Forum after a hockey game. “Gzet! Gzet!” Hanna was a knotted bony woman, all jutting angles, her face as creased as old brown wrapping paper, the same color, too, with heated black eyes and a wart turned like a screw in her hooked nose. On blue-cold winter nights she wore a man’s leather cap with ear flaps, a woolen scarf wound around and around her skinny chicken’s neck, and over all the sweaters she pulled a red Canadiens hockey sweater. A leather purse was strapped to Hanna’s waist, the fingers of her woolen gloves scissored out the easier to give change. She wore sheep-lined air force boors. “GZET! GZET!”

  Hanna sought out the crazy, discredited Lubiner Rabbi, whose study was crammed with palmistry charts and phrenology tables, and kissed the fringes of his talith, offering money, a bundle, beseeching him to contrive prayers for Joey’s return. But his Jewish necromancy failed her. So Hanna climbed the concrete steps to St. Joseph’s Oratory, raking each one on her knees, imploring Jesus for help, Jesus Christ, but he failed her too, which hardly surprised her. Then Hanna began going to the railroad stations to watch the troop trains come and go, searching among the soldiers for Joey, with the upshot that one Christmas morning a picture that showed Hanna, thrusting through a group of soldiers, seemingly toward a loved one, appeared in a full-page advertisement in the Star. There was a luminous cross on top of the page, the picture itself was framed in mistletoe, and below there was a line drawing of a battle-weary soldier reading a letter. The caption read,