St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  Arty, who was being put through dentistry school by Uncle Abe, had returned to Montreal years ago. “Well,” he exclaimed, “will you look who’s here!”

  Jake, Gas, and Arty settled down on the carpet with their smoked meat sandwiches and curling French fried potatoes and whisky. It was an absolutely marvelous afternoon, maybe one of the most enjoyable of Jake’s life. No longer boys they were but, mercifully, not yet full-grown men either, envy-ridden, harassed by mortgages and calorie intake and child education. Everything was still possible. Nobody had yet looked at himself maturely and settled for the workable marriage or the tolerable job. In the years to come expectations would contract, success or failure would divide them. But that glorious afternoon in Arty’s rooming house they were overcome with regard for each other. They talked about the incomparable time and place they had shared. They argued about John Foster Dulles, tartar, Jackie Robinson, sharp practices in real estate, foreign cars, Johnny Greco’s second fight with Beau Jack, the claims made in toothpaste advertisements, Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain Street, and, ultimately, Joey.

  “Was he in the rackets,” Gas asked, “or was that horseshit?”

  “I never found out for sure, but I’ll tell you one thing. Last year, you know, in New York, I was watching an old Western on TV, Randolph Scott rounding up a posse, and who in the hell jumps on one of the horses but Joey. My big brother Joey riding with Randolph Scott, for Chrissake!”

  “Where is he now?” Jake asked.

  Arty’s gaiety faltered, he put down his sandwich. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask Jenny.”

  Who had married a radio writer in Toronto, her dreams fulfilled, and was presently visiting Montreal in her office as CBC script editor.

  “How is she?”

  “The same. Difficult.”

  If Jake hadn’t seen Jenny for years, it was only because once she had put Montreal behind her she had resolutely proclaimed she wanted nothing further to do with the Hershes, even Jake, which was not exactly true. For Jenny flaunted her Gentile husband at visitors to Toronto and demanded to know what the bigoted Hershes were saying of her marriage. And as she began to circulate among the anointed, suddenly on first-name terms with Toronto’s conclave of writers, directors, and actors, she relayed messages to Montreal, aimed like poisoned arrows at the Hershes, to signal the celebrated company she kept. Alas, Uncle Abe was not impressed. Neither was Uncle Jack. All Jenny’s vengeful attempts to dazzle were unavailing. Her world was alien to the Hershes.

  “Of course I’ll see you,” she said when Jake phoned. “If you’re not scared of being contaminated?”

  “What?” Jake demanded, irritated.

  “I should have thought I was verboten to any Hersh. A fallen woman.”

  So the next afternoon, he sat in Jenny’s room at the Laurentian Hotel, where she poured him what she called a gin-and-It.

  Wearing too much eye shadow, her wet glistening lips too jarringly red, Jenny remained an immensely attractive woman, volatile as ever, her black eyes smoldering. She told Jake that she was bitterly disappointed in how Arty had turned out. Studying dentistry. “The predictable ghetto syndrome. Anyway I suppose he’s … content.”

  “And you?” Jake asked, surprised to find himself annoyed for Arty’s sake.

  “Well, at least I haven’t been sucked into the gilded ghetto. Working out my sexual frustrations by organizing bazaars. Like your precious cousin Sandra. I’m doing meaningful work. And how’s dear Doris?”

  “The same, I suppose. I hardly ever see her.”

  “She’s frigid, you know. Her husband phones me when he’s in Toronto. I suppose he’s heard about the important people who come to our parties. Or that I’m hot stuff. Anyway I told him it’s a call girl he needed. I don’t service B’nai B’rith brothers out of town. Especially, I told him, somebody who looked to me like he was no good at it. ‘I’m sorry, darling, if I came too quickly.’ You should have seen his face. I thought he’d turn gray on the spot.”

  They sat together stiffly, Jake uneasy because he could hear somebody, a man, singing in the shower.

  “Take me back to Mandalay,

  where the flying fishes play …”

  “You’re a puritan,” Jenny said. “A real Hersh. And you weren’t supposed to be here for another half hour.”

  Leaping up, Jake said, “I’ll come back later.”

  “Come tomorrow. We’ll have breakfast together.”

  Jake sat seething in a leather armchair in the lobby until Duddy emerged from the elevator. “You son-of-a-bitch,” he said.

  “Jealous?” Duddy asked, smirking.

  “Duddy, do me a favor. Lay off her.”

  Duddy smiled spitefully, reaching up to remove an imaginary hair from between his teeth, wiggled his eyebrows, released the hair delicately and watched it drift to the carpet. “Her husband,” he said pityingly, “can only go seven innings.”

  Jake discovered what Duddy was after when he joined Jenny for breakfast the following morning and she declared that she was willing to rescue him from the Hershes. She would buy him an air ticket and help him get into television in Toronto. They traveled on the same flight.

  “Duddy feels he’s stagnating,” Jenny said, “and so he’s thinking of making a fresh start in Toronto.”

  “Don’t get entangled with him. He only wants to use you.”

  “And you?” Jenny asked.

  7

  JENNY’S HUSBAND WAS WAITING FOR THEM IN THE living room.

  “And here he is,” was how Jenny thrust Jake on him, “my little Jake, who used to feel me up in the movies. Would you believe it?”

  “She’s quite a gal,” Doug said, contemplating his suede shoes with a pinched smile.

  Doug Fraser, one of Canada’s most uncompromising and prolific problem playwrights, wrote for stage and radio, adaptations and originals, as many as thirty plays a year. He had a streak of irony in him. In one of his plays, for instance, a self-made businessman sets himself single-mindedly to making … THE FIRST MILLION. He has only just acquired it, consummating the biggest deal of his life, and is now preparing to get to know his family, as it were, when the doctor tells him it isn’t an ulcer – it’s stomach cancer!!! Which made for a somewhat downbeat ending. This didn’t put off Canada’s highbrow CBC, but it was clearly not the sort of stuff American TV networks would tackle, especially, as Doug said, in the Aspirin Age. Jenny and Doug had no children. Their way, they said, of facing up to the Fact of the Bomb. Doug maintained an office with filing cabinets labeled IDEAS, CHARACTERS, and CONTRACTS. “I’m just not the longhair, live-in-a-garret type,” he said.

  Jake asked eagerly after Hanna.

  “Luke was here earlier. He took her to the movies. The new Tarzan,” Doug said, shaking his head.

  “Oh, great,” Jenny said tightly, “just great. They’re bound to be late getting back. And drunk.”

  No sooner had drinks been poured than Jake inquired about Joey.

  “After all these years,” Jenny admitted, laughing at herself, “I’ve inherited Hanna’s disease. You know I sometimes think I’ve seen him on the street. I’ll jump off a bus, rush up to a stranger with a familiar back and shout, Joey! Only it’s never him.”

  Joey, she said, drank prodigiously during his five-week stay on St. Urbain. He was able to sit in the gloom of the living room for hours, a bottle of Chivas Regal beside him, engrossed in dark reveries of his own. She had often asked him why he had come home after six years, but he only deigned to answer once. “I’m waiting for a long-distance call. It could come at any time.” He went out most afternoons and, unfailingly, his first question on coming home was, “Any phone calls for me?” Joey was also the first one up in the house to scan the morning mail. If one morning there was a letter for Jenny – a notice for a new concert series, perhaps, or something from her night school – he would open the bedroom door, waking her. “Of course,” Jenny said, “he was well aware that I didn’t wear pajamas.” Then she inveighed again
st Joey’s drinking again. “A bottle a day was nothing for him.” So, Jenny said, if she wakened in the early morning hours to hear a chair being knocked over, cursing, or somebody breathing heavily immediately outside her bedroom door, she knew that Joey, like his father before him, was drunk again. Next she would hear him retching in the toilet or he would start to make phone calls, dropping the receiver, shouting at the operator. In the morning Hanna was the one who would strip his bed, wash the sheets, mop the toilet, and take his suit to the cleaners. “Hanna,” Jenny said, “who would never so much as dust my room.”

  “But why do you think he came home after so many years?”

  “You mean you don’t know? Joey wanted to fuck me.”

  Jake’s cheeks burned stinging red.

  “Come, come now. How parochial can we get? Surely you don’t think incest is peculiar to goyische people?”

  “Certainly not,” Jake said, feeling foolish.

  “Sorry to cut in,” Doug said, looking intense, “but that is a form of prejudice Jews are prone to.”

  “You’re very perceptive,” Jake said. Then he turned to Jenny. “Was Joey a communist?”

  “That line of questioning,” Doug interrupted, his boyish face throbbing with concern, “leaves a bad taste in the mouth.”

  “I’m not here for the Un-American Activities Committee. I’m merely asking a question about my cousin.”

  Jenny rose uncertainly. “I’m going to have a bath. We’re having one of our parties tonight, Jake. Everybody will be here.”

  “And we’re glad to have you too,” Doug said. “You see, it isn’t often I get a chance to kick the conversational ball around with someone of your generation.” He tugged his hassock closer to Jake. “Do you guys care, I mean really care?”

  Jenny’s party was characterized by a free flow of liquor and food. Not fortifying, over-rich Jewish food, as Jake had longed for, but instead ghetto-emancipated canapés and hors d’oeuvres. Transparent slivers of Italian salami on crackers. Assimilated anchovies curled like worms on white bread. Little liberated pork sausages. Jenny’s Toronto people were very, very sophisticated, everybody a nonconformist, seeing right through Time and the frame-up of Alger Hiss, and against warmongering in Korea. They spoke admiringly of Rod Serling, Horton Foote, and other Philco Theater playwrights. Paddy Chayevsky was compared to O’Casey.

  “Yes, yes,” a television writer agreed, “but exciting things are beginning to happen right here in Toronto, you know.”

  “Like what?” a tall, bespectacled young man demanded belligerently.

  “If Toronto isn’t good enough for you, Luke, why don’t you leave?”

  “Look at it this way. Until the very day of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese kept an ambassador in Washington.”

  Jake laughed appreciatively.

  “And who in the hell are you?” the writer asked, turning on Jake.

  “Call me Ishmael. And should I know your name?”

  “Damn right you should,” he replied stoutly, “if you’re the least bit interested in Canadian culture.”

  “Don’t tell me. You’re Mazo de la Roche.”

  Luke grinned.

  “I don’t have to put up with this sort of crap from a couple of kids.”

  “Don’t, then.”

  As Doug bore down on them, smiling, Luke slid away. Jake did not catch up with him again until he retreated to the garden, where he was delighted to discover Hanna drinking beer and laughing with him.

  “Yankel,” she exclaimed, and they embraced.

  The years had turned Hanna to mahogany; her hair was white.

  “Meet my boyfriend, Luke Scott. He takes me to all the hockey games. And the wrestling matches.”

  Jake and Luke shook hands.

  “Jenny tells me you may be staying in town,” Luke said. “I’ve got an apartment. I’d be glad to put you up, while you look around. We could share expenses.”

  “Are you sure?” Jake asked.

  “He’s sure,” Hanna said, and she made a place for Jake beside them on the bench. “Do you know what it is a week tomorrow?”

  “No.”

  “Yom Kippur. Do you fast?”

  “Sorry, Hanna. No.”

  “Last year she wouldn’t let me.”

  “At her age, Hanna’s not taking any chances.”

  “Shettup, Luke. She stood over me, shouting, you eat non-kosher food all year and today you want to fast? Not in this house. O.K., so next week I’m pretending to visit a sick friend. Well, what do you think of him, Yankel?”

  “Who?”

  “Her little shmock of a husband.”

  “Our Ibsen,” Luke pitched in.

  “Come on, Hanna. Jenny’s looked after you all these years, hasn’t she?”

  “Well, at least we don’t fight any more. We’ve made a truce. I pretend to Mr. Nothing and Nobody she’s out with me when she’s really banging somebody else, she was born with round heels, that one, and she gives me movie money. My reward.”

  Jenny’s little shmock was holding forth in the living room, explaining his play-in-progress, Accident. “I’ve been doing research on the subject with a doctor, we checked the records of bus and truck companies and two hundred ordinary motorists, and you’d be amazed at the things we uncovered. There is a small minority of drivers who are extremely susceptible to accidents, and these accident repeaters seem to suffer from the same problem. An inability to adjust to the codes of society.”

  Descending on the group, Jake slapped his cheek, he whistled.

  “But it’s all based on fact, Jake. We made a study of forty taxi drivers, twenty of them with long-standing safety records and the other half of the sampling clearly accident prone. The safe drivers tended to be quiet, reserved men, almost a bit dull. They came from stable family backgrounds, were faithful to their wives, didn’t gamble much, and were courteous to passengers. But the accident repeaters tended to be social misfits. Thirteen had drinking fathers or domineering mothers. Twelve were school dropouts with frequent appearances at juvenile court. Eight owned up to sexual promiscuity. Thirteen drifted in and out of jobs. Fourteen bootlegged liquor. We classify these accident repeaters as ‘mild psychopathic’ personalities.”

  “I see,” Jake said, rubbing his chin. “I see.”

  “Interestingly enough they share certain characteristics. They tend to be intelligent, but impulsive, they hate discipline, abhor routine, and want to be their own boss. They are good conversationalists, but bad listeners. They don’t relate. They always want to be the center of the stage. Furthermore, we have noted that the rash drivers have one trait in common. An underlying aggressiveness directed against authority. While the safe driver deals with frustration in a socially acceptable form, the accident repeater uses his car as a means of acting out hostility. Our studies have satisfied us that accident repeaters are directing animosity against authority figures – the police or their employers. Then they blame other drivers, particularly women. You can narrow down the focus of their anger to their wives and ultimately the mothers who have dominated them. In extreme cases it would be fair to say they were using their cars … to prove their manhood. Trying to assert their masculinity, they climb into souped-up cars and wreak vengeance on the whole female sex.”

  “But the child they knock down,” Jake said, “could be yours.”

  “Right you are, Jake. You see, in our culture, it is a major problem that a man is too often measured by his risk-taking.”

  Which was when Jake finally managed to corner Doug alone.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard this often before, but I did want to tell you how very much I’ve always admired your work.”

  “Well thanks, Jake. Glad to have you in the fan club.”

  Prick. “There’s always real red meat in your stuff. It’s challenging.”

  “Now you tell me where you’re going. What are your dreams?”

  “I’m glad you asked me that. You see, I’m dying to get into TV, now that it’s finally
starting in Canada. I’d like to direct, but, you know, I lack your connections. I’m sure nobody at the CBC would even have time to see me.”

  “When you say ‘direct,’ do you see it as a job or a vocation?”

  “A vocation, naturally. No riding the American money mill for this boy. I want to stay in Canada and make my statement here. One day, maybe, I could direct plays as good as yours.”

  “With content?”

  “Yessiree. It’s getting started that’s got me stymied.”

  “Mnn. I’m dead set against nepotism, you know.”

  “Me too, Doug.”

  “Take Yugoslavia, for instance. It can even corrupt a socialist-structured society.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. But I’m a working-class boy, you know. I’m not seeking favors. I’d be willing to start as a stage hand, if only somebody could get the door opened for me – just a crack.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Don’t put yourself out, Doug. The important thing for you is to write. Your time is valuable, but – well, I certainly would appreciate your expert help.”

  Jenny caught up with Jake in the hall.

  “Do you hate me?”

  “Oh, Jenny, please.”

  “You love me, then?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  “I tried so hard. I applied myself to learning and literature with a kind of hatred for it, so that if I ever fell in with what I think of as the blessed, talented people, I could fit in. I would understand the references … And so what happens? You know how I can tell the people of real quality who come to this house? The few who aren’t phonies? They spend all their time talking to Hanna. Hanna, that bitch, what did she ever do to deserve such attention? They avoid me. And they poke fun at Doug. Unless they’re on the make.”

  “Is that so?” Jake said stiffly.

  “Your fly buttons are done up, kid, but your ambition is showing. You never used to be calculating.”

  “I’m growing up,” Jake said, and he led Jenny upstairs to her bedroom. “Now tell me about Joey. Was he a communist or not?”