St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  “Who knows what he was, or is, he was such a liar.”

  The first phone bill to come after Joey’s return was for a staggering sum. Long-distance calls to New York, San Francisco, and Hollywood, some of them lasting twenty minutes. “He paid the phone bill with cash,” Jenny said.

  “Didn’t you ask him what he did in those six years away from home?”

  “O.K. One night – he was pissed at the time, mind you – one night he told me that he was in Spain in 1938. Madrid.”

  “Oh, my God, the scars on his back.”

  “Sure. Only they could have been made by lots of things.”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “From Spain he went to Mexico. Coyocán.”

  Where Trotsky was living. Jake’s heart hammered. He told Jenny how he had been mistaken for Joey and stopped at the American border.

  “So. Does that have to be political? You think he fought in Spain. I’m convinced he was running away from trouble with gangsters. He came home to lick his wounds, then he found he was attracted to me, and left again for my sake.”

  “Oh, come off it, Jenny.”

  “Come off it. You think I’m telling you everything?”

  There was a sudden upshot of laughter from downstairs. Shrieks of delight. “There she goes again,” Jenny said, pounding her fist against the arm of her chair, rising abruptly, Jake trailing after.

  “Gzet! Gzet!” Hanna, her old Canadiens sweater pulled over her head, loped drunkenly from group to group. “Gzet! Gzet!”

  Luke Scott, looking perturbed, bore down on Hanna, but Jenny intercepted him, seizing his arm. All at once her manner softened. “Meet Luke Scott,” she said to Jake, nuzzling his cheek, “a would-be writer in need of succor.”

  “Pardon?” Jake pleaded over the party din.

  “You heard me right the first time,” Jenny called back, “and you’re still too young for me anyway.”

  Jake watched them whirl off together, Luke obviously embarrassed, keeping an eye out for Hanna.

  Over a group of bobbing heads Jake caught Hanna accosting another bunch.

  “In Yellowknife,” she said, “you couldn’t bury people in the winter. The ground freezes hard as rock. And so every autumn, the undertaker, Formaldehyde Smith, used to size us up before he figured out how many graves to dig in advance. He looked at my Joey, my four-year-old Joey, nobody expected him to live, he was so sickly, and he dug a pint-size grave for him. With my own eyes, I saw it. His momma. Mr. Smith, I said, you fill that hole in immediately or I’ll cut your balls off and fry them for dog food …”

  8

  DUDDY KRAVITZ DESCENDED ON TORONTO WITHIN A month and, by way of establishing his name, was soon having himself paged at the cocktail hour in those bars that were most frequented by ad agency and CBC types, including those insufferable scoffers, Jake Hersh and Luke Scott.

  Reactivating an old company of his, Dudley Kane Productions, Duddy sent out letters of introduction. But the going wasn’t good. Without connections, an interloper, he had one door after another shut in his face. Only Jenny was helpful. They lunched together once a week and then retired to his apartment on Avenue Road, where he mounted her absently, eliciting an orgasm in time to shower before his next appointment. The CBC would not buy Duddy’s idea for a television quiz game and no ad agency required his services as a self-styled troubleshooter. On a frenzied trip to New York, he bid for, but failed to win, the Canadian distribution rights for the hula-hoop. Instead he returned with the rights to a reducing pill. Take one a day, eat all you want, and shed twenty pounds within two weeks. But, at the time, Duddy was dubious and also lacked sufficient funds for promotion and advertising. He was stripped down to his last thousand dollars, stacks of unpaid bills, and a bleeding stomach ulcer when he opened the Star one afternoon and read that somebody was going to publish a Canadian Social Register and, lo and behold, according to the newspaper’s most outspoken columnist, there would be no Jews in it. Which was what inspired Duddy to break into publishing, simultaneously doing something for his people and laying the cornerstone of his Toronto fortune.

  The Canadian Jewish Who’s Who (published by Mount Sinai Press, president, Dudley Kane) was, for a year, no more than an obsession, the all-consuming dream Duddy laid himself to bed with in his increasingly squalid apartment, the fervent hope he tramped the winter streets on, driving himself to concoct schemes that would yield a quick turnover. Stake money. Blessed stake money. Where? How? What, he thought, about Jake Hersh, the sentimental prick?

  Jake, risen from stagehand to studio floor manager, had little time for him. He had little time for anybody in fact except well-born Luke Scott, who had yet to have a script accepted anywhere. They shared an apartment, competing for girls, their appetite prodigious, but otherwise intensely loyal to each other, inseparable, professional abominators, dragging nutty old Hanna everywhere with them, bursting in on parties only to insult people. Equally disliked, Duddy discovered, by older established directors and writers whom they denigrated without mercy. The small talents for whom, they said, endearing themselves to no one, Canada was a necessary shelter.

  Who would never sell out, Luke taunted, because no invitation was likely to be proffered.

  For whom integrity was not a virtue, Jake pitched in, but a habit born of necessity. Like his Aunt Sophie not being a courtesan.

  Arriving at their apartment, Duddy was relieved to find Jake alone. “You guys live in style here,” Duddy said. “I envy you.”

  Tricked out in his shabbiest suit, spitting into a ketchup-stained handkerchief, owning up to an ulcer he couldn’t afford to treat, hinting the bailiffs were breathing on his back, Duddy skewered his old schoolmate by reminding him that they had been kids together, St. Urbain’s shining morning faces, and even as Jake struggled, anticipating a touch, Duddy nailed him with a sweetener, promising not to service Jenny any more, and he managed to wring a check for five hundred dollars out of Jake as well as the promise of his signature on a twenty-five hundred dollar bank loan.

  None too soon, as it happened, for a moment later Luke whacked open the door, ushering in Hanna ahead of him. “Well,” he exclaimed with appetite, “look who’s here.”

  Hanna, sensing trouble, disappeared into the kitchen to unload her shopping bag and prepare supper.

  “I was just going, Mr. Scott, sir,” Duddy said, fleeing.

  Jake was infuriated. “Look here, Luke, there are many of your friends whom I cannot abide, but I don’t behave like that.”

  “You behave worse.”

  Hanna stepped between them. “You know what you sound like, the two of you? A couple of fairies. Jarvis Street rough trade.”

  After supper, Hanna, in rare high spirits, her black eyes sparkling, suddenly fell on a deck of cards and shuffled them as Luke had never seen them handled before. Jake shook with laughter as she dealt a hole card to Luke, another to him, and one to herself. Then she turned over hers, revealing an ace. “You know who taught me that?”

  “Joey,” Jake said, beaming.

  Hanna nodded, reaching for her bottle of Carlings. Then she began to tell them about her husband. “He was a born bummer, my Baruch, an animal. He used to go for the beer, he could guzzle it all day, and at night it was a whore for him or the wrestling matches. He stole from your grandfather, Yankel. As a youngster, he was in and out of prison for disturbing the peace. Years before I met him, ask your father if you don’t believe me, your family didn’t see Baruch for three, maybe four months, and then my man would turn up at two in the morning, banging on the door with his fists, drunk, his head bloody and stinking of vomit, shouting curses at your grandfather. Jews, he would holler, I’m here! Jews, it’s Baruch, your brother is home!”

  She continued to reminisce about her husband in the car.

  “Once he gave Yosele Altman such a beating he had to go into the hospital for stitches. He didn’t care for your paw, you know that, don’t you, Yankel? Once he said to him, hey, you know what you
are, Issy? No, what? Your father’s mistake. Or he would shove a finger under his nose and say, that’s the one that went through the paper, Issy. Oh, he was a walking garbage can, my Baruch, a brawler. A crook. And a nut case! I should drop dead if he didn’t once travel as a strongman for six months with a French Canadian carnival bunch, chewing razor blades and bending bars in Chicoutimi and Trois Pistoles and Tadoussac. In the old days in Montreal, when there were no sidewalks on St. Urbain, just mud everywhere, and whorehouses, he used to hang out in the taverns on the docks with sailors and naturally one day he signed up for a ship himself. Either he was drunk or kidnapped. Who knows?”

  Hanna insisted they come into the house with her, and led them by the hand into the basement, through the playroom, into her own bedroom, where she stood on a chair, stretched her dry twig of a body, and brought a hat box out of her cupboard.

  “You know what this is,” she said, gently easing a black-felt, broad-brimmed fedora out of its tissue paper, “it’s a genuine Borsalino, my friends. One of the very first to be seen in western Canada. My Baruch used to wear it in Winnipeg,” Hanna said, wiping tears from her eyes, “strutting down Portage Street, and the hunky women would come in their pants, they’d never seen the likes. The Métis, who were afraid of nobody when they had the liquor in them, would step down into the gutter to let a man pass.”

  Jake and Luke drove back to their apartment in silence, each unwilling to speak, but neither of them could sleep, so they broke open a bottle of brandy and opened the window to the summery breeze.

  There was such a spill of Hershes, Jake explained, second cousins by the bushel and a clamor of aunts, short, red-haired cousins by Shmul Leib’s spiteful second marriage and fiercely corseted great-aunts from Motke’s side, such a world of Hershes, Jake said, that as a simple-minded boy he had simply accepted the fact that Hanna, yet another Hersh by marriage, had materialized out of the heat haze one day with three children and no husband. But of course there was a husband.

  Baruch.

  In 1901 Jake’s paternal grandfather and great-uncle abandoned Lód to come to Montreal, where they both begat enormous families (Jake’s grandfather, fourteen children; his great-uncle, twelve) and this, Jake went on to say, he had assumed as a boy, made for the sum total of their Hershes. He had been mistaken. There was a third brother. Baruch. Jake’s grandfather and his brother sent money to Poland so that Baruch, the youngest of the three, could join them. Only a week off the boat in Montreal, Baruch cut loose, he was transmogrified. He proclaimed himself a shoimar-shabus no more. Defiantly, he ate non-kosher food and was prepared to work on the sabbath. His elder brothers disowned him.

  Eventually, Baruch either signed on a ship or, as Hanna suggested, was kidnapped. In any event, he sailed as a stoker to Argentina. He swung around the Cape on an oiler and served for a season as a longshoreman in Australia. He ventured to Japan and peddled slot machines in China. He lived in Tahiti and prospected for gold in the Yukon before he finally settled in Winnipeg, where he married Hanna, had a daughter, and knew brief but gaudy affluence as a whisky runner during prohibition. Baruch was shot up in a gun battle on the Montana border and following that, as far as Jake knew, his luck soured. A leg wound never healed properly, he developed gangrene, and the leg had to be amputated above the knee.

  Luke rose shakily, staggered into the kitchen, and boiled some water for instant coffee. “Hey, it’s getting brighter,” he said, “or they’ve just polished off Etobicoke with the Bomb.”

  In the distance, the sky was on fire. Bleeding red.

  “Let’s call some girls,” Luke suggested. “Gorgeous girls, eh, with long legs and filigreed undies.” But it was 5:30 a.m. “It must be spiffy,” Luke mused, “to have your own breasts. To get up in the morning, you know, and not have to send out.” Then he sat in the window sill, glaring into the gathering traffic below, and began to excoriate all things peculiar to Toronto. “I hate this city. It’s ugly. It’s provincial.”

  “It’s the farm club, Luke. We are permitted its minor league facilities so long as we don’t linger.”

  England, England, Jake thought, and, though he had yet to direct his first TV play, he declared he would settle for nothing less than becoming a film director of international importance. “If I’m thirty and still in TV, I quit.”

  Luke swore his first stage play would have to be good enough to open in London or New York. Or not at all.

  They had only just fallen asleep, it seemed, when the door bell rang, Luke taking it.

  “It’s not you I want, Mr. Scott, sir.”

  Duddy went to Jake’s room, shaking him awake, and, resentfully, Jake struggled into his clothes and accompanied him to the bank to sign for the twenty-five hundred dollar loan.

  With which, after shaking salt over his left shoulder, slipping into a synagogue to kiss a sefer torah, touching the first cripple he encountered on Jarvis Street, Duddy registered Dr. McCoy’s Real Wate-Loss as a limited company, cajoling an acquaintance he had already softened up, the corner druggist’s son, a dense but greedy Bavarian, to serve as vice-president and mail drop for a cut of the gross. It was more than a dumb hunch. Two weeks earlier, brooding over a midnight coffee at Fran’s, kidding the obese waitress, Duddy had doled out one of his pills, promising it would help. To his amazement, when he popped in again ten days later, the fat Polack bitch had actually lost eighteen pounds. Even though, as she swore, she was still eating prodigiously. More than ever, with insatiable appetite.

  Dr. McCoy’s Real Wate-Loss pills, its mail order advertising limited, sales ultimately dependent on word of mouth, caught on surprisingly well from the beginning, especially in rural areas and mining towns, like Sudbury and Elliot Lake. Duddy, his projected profits huge, luxuriated in Jake’s apartment, foolishly impervious to Luke’s withering presence, saying he would soon cut out his New York supplier and manufacture the pill himself, going Canada-wide with a splash, and maybe even dropping the Bavarian punk.

  “Probably, he’s a Nazi anyway,” Luke said.

  “Well, you’d know, wouldn’t you? That’s your line.”

  Luke cursed, he lashed out impatiently. Again and again they went at each other with knives, with a penchant for evoking the worst in each other.

  Luke, burdened by his acquired liberal baggage, and possibly a shade too proud of it, castigated Duddy because he felt that it was just this manner of unprincipled operator who undermined his impassioned defense of Jews to his father and his bemused cronies at the Granite Club.

  Duddy feared Luke. He didn’t trust him.

  “You know, Jake, when I want something, I grab it. I fight, no holds barred. That bastard, he’s a cool one, he sits back and waits for it to drop in his lap. Because it’s coming to him, like everything else in this country. What’s the world? It’s the inheritance of Lucas Robin Scott, Esq. But underneath that self-mocking tone, and that cool, there’s a heart of stone. He takes care of number one just like you and me, Yankel, but he was raised to coat it with sugar.”

  Instinct, albeit based on a distressing incident, saved Duddy from going Canada-wide, as he had bragged. Ensconced in Fran’s one night, sipping coffee as he scrutinized the market pages in the Globe, he inquired solicitously after his once corpulent waitress. Maria was in the hospital, wasting away, they said. God knows, he thought, it could be an abortion. Or the clap. But all the same, on his next trip to Montreal, Duddy sought out a French Canadian druggist, somebody unlikely to ask questions, and had the pill analyzed, saying it was something his overweight wife had been given on their Mexican holiday. When he discovered the pill’s crucial component, he drove all through the night back to Toronto, where the enraptured Bavarian boy, his proud father burbling blessings over both of them, greeted him with more orders.

  “George,” Duddy said, “this has to be a small gold mine, right? I mean, projecting conservatively, there has to be ten thousand dollars a year net in this with hardly any work or capital outlay, and that’s only the beginning?”<
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  George beamed, his father clucked gleefully.

  “But I’m in bad trouble.”

  Gravely, the old man brought out a bottle, pouring Scotch into beakers.

  “I’ve got a real estate problem in the Laurentians. A tax headache. I need ten thousand dollars. Like yesterday. I hate doing this to you, fella, because we’re buddies, but I’ve found a buyer –”

  “We’re partners,” George brayed.

  “– and the shrewd bastard, he wants it all.”

  “You are partners, Mr. Kane. My son and you –”

  “I don’t want to be unpleasant, but if you study our letter of agreement, you will see I have the right to buy you out at any time.”

  Father and son consulted heatedly in German.

  “Ten thousand lousy dollars. It’s a steal. But what am I to do? I’m cornered.”

  “What if my father was to raise the money?”

  “Naturally, I’d rather sell to you, but, fellas, let’s be realistic. Where can you raise ten thousand dollars” – Duddy paused – “within ten days” – and paused again – “in cash?”

  Which simultaneously provided Duddy with a stake and washed him clean of Dr. McCoy’s Real Wate-Loss. None too soon, either. For a week later the first ambiguous news story trickled out of Elliot Lake. Two uranium miners had been admitted to the hospital in an emaciated condition. Duddy, joyously laying the Star aside, called his broker, overriding his objections to put in a hefty order for uranium stock shorts, and then wrote letters to three of the most radical socialist M.P.’s in Ottawa, enclosing the Star clipping. Only three days passed before one of them rose indignantly in the House to ask a leading question about the inherent dangers of radiation to miners and, just as Duddy had anticipated, the stocks began to tumble.

  Hoo haw, Duddy thought, singing in the shower, dancing into his suit, as he prepared to attend the party in honor of the first television play to be directed by Jacob Hersh. His schoolmate, little Jake, with his name up there on the trans-Canada network screen. “General Motors Theater presents …”