Doug Fraser was there, so was Jenny, all the girls from the cast, the crew, and, naturally, loping, straw-haired Lucas Scott, Esq., still a zero, up to his neck in rejected scripts.
“How goes it, Shakespeare?” Duddy asked, beaming.
“Don’t ever make the mistake of trying to match witticisms with me, Kravitz. You haven’t a hope.”
Retreating, Duddy joined the circle on the floor around Hanna, who was telling tales of Joey. “He was born in a freezing miner’s shanty in Yellowknife, with the help, if you can call it that, of a Polack midwife …”
Because Jake, caught up with his goysy set, Scott’s rich bunch, seemed to have no time for him, Duddy left early, hoping to buy a Globe and check the latest uranium market figures. Which were beautiful.
Go-ahead money, Duddy thought. Real and desperately needed go-ahead money.
For all the while Duddy had not rested from his labors on his Canadian Jewish Who’s Who, the work slow and increasingly frustrating, as he had urgently required a presentable office, sizable bank credit, a printer, and a sales staff, all of which would now be available to him. And so he would at last be free to concentrate on the pursuit of fat cat sponsors, whom he hoped to secure by his promise of turning over ten per cent of his profits to Jewish charities.
Working in secrecy, Duddy pored over Canadian telephone directories from coast to coast, the social pages in newspapers and Jewish weeklies, extracting the names of Jewish professionals and businessmen. On Jake’s advice, he commissioned a shnook in Winnipeg, one of those poetry-writing professors, to compose a stirring ten thousand-word history of Jewish achievement in Canada, beginning with the first settlers who came over in 1759 with General Amherst, conspicuous among them Reb Aaron Hart, the commissary officer (buying cheap, selling dear even then, Duddy mused) and many more, who took one quick look around and leaped into the fur trade. “Bringing,” Duddy wrote into the margin, “modern marketing knowhow and sales savvy to hitherto underdeveloped but colorful coureurs-de-bois.”
The history led off with a quotation from none other than the Right Honorable Vincent Massey, Canada’s first Canadian governor-general who allowed that the Jews were “a fruitful and fertilizing stream” in Canadian life (which is to say, we’re horse manure, Duddy thought) and it skimmed over any reference to prohibition whisky running, the Jewish Navy Gang of the twenties, or latter-day Montreal bookies and gaming house barons. Another professor was hired to write a eulogy on medicine, from Maimonides to Leonard Hyman Jacobson, Toronto’s outspoken child psychologist. This, and specimen pages from further essays, Duddy had reproduced, under headings in Old English print, on the most luxuriant paper he could get without paying, by writing off to England for sample rolls, ostensibly soliciting a Canadian franchise for the sheets.
Meanwhile, after riding the fall in uranium shares, as scare stories proliferated, Duddy called his baffled broker again, took his profit in shorts, and then flew to troubled Ottawa to seek out the appropriate minister, waylaying him in the snow outside the Rideau Club. “I must have a word in confidence with you, sir.”
“What’s that?”
“Kravitz’s the name. I’m a personal friend of Senator Scott’s son. You know, the budding playwright,” Duddy added, enjoying himself.
“Yes.”
“I am able to impart to you the true reason behind the miners’ illness at Elliot Lake. I wish to offer you this information as a long-standing admirer and lifelong anti-communist.”
Back in Toronto, Duddy called his broker yet again, reversing his investment gears by ordering him to buy uranium shares heavily on option, his reward coming when the self-satisfied minister rose to speak at question time in Ottawa the next afternoon.
The Globe ran the story on the front page the following morning and, reading it, Luke whistled with astonishment, and passed it to Jake.
Minister Reveals Mail Order Scandal.
INSTANT REDUCING PILLS
CONTAIN TAPEWORM
“Well, now,” Luke said, “I’m moved to pity. For they are bound to lock Duddy up and throw away the key, and I certainly never wished that on him.”
“Would you like to bet on it?”
“But he’ll never wiggle out of this one, Jake.”
“Say, twenty dollars?”
“Right.”
As Duddy expected, George and his father, quaking with anger, were waiting in the outer office when he arrived, emboldened by the presence of an over-eager young man drumming his fingers on an attaché case.
“You their legal-eagle?” Duddy asked, waving them into his office.
“I am their lawyer, if that’s what you mean to say in what I take to be show-business parlance.”
“Azoi.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“George, we could have talked this over together. I’m surprised at you. You’ve got a lawyer, so now I get a lawyer. And what happens, the letters fly, threats, we get nowhere, and they coin it in hand over foot.”
“It is perhaps the oldest and most pernicious trick in the books,” the young man said, springing out of his chair, “to try to separate a client from his attorney.”
“You’d better read this, Perry Mason,” and Duddy heaved a file at him.
There was a letter to George imploring him not to buy Dr. McCoy’s Real Wate-Loss, at best a risky venture, and another letter, to the New York manufacturer, saying Duddy no longer wished to lend his name to a product, whatever its sensational initial benefits, which he feared might ultimately not be in the best interest of users health-wise.
“Why, you sharp Jewish bastard, you haven’t heard the end of us.”
Duddy flicked on his intercom. “Miss Greenberg,” he said, glaring at the lawyer’s card, “would you please get me Seligman, at the Anti-Defamation League, and ask him who we’ve got on the bar council? Thank you.” Then, turning on his visitors, he said, “My secretary will give you my lawyer’s name on your way out.”
Duddy stayed home that evening to watch Jake’s production of Luke’s first television play, having decided that he would settle for nothing less than a brilliant production of the shittiest play ever written. But, before the first act was over, he realized that Lucas Scott, Esq., could write rings around anybody in Toronto. It seemed unjust, even perverse, that having been born into everything, he should also be abundantly talented. Well, maybe he’ll die young. There’s always hope. But Duddy, his mood sour, did not attend the party that was to follow the production.
After the party, Jake and Luke drank in the dawn together, embarrassed to be waiting for the reviews. For if they were bad, it would be humiliating, and if they were good, it wouldn’t be satisfying either, because this was merely Toronto. So when the reporters started to phone, Luke was withering and Jake did his utmost to give offense.
There were more plays, larger triumphs, and other postproduction mornings, unwinding with girlfriends until dawn, then deprecating the reviews no matter what they said, for both men continued to take Toronto’s approval as a stigma. England was what filled their thoughts more and more. England, England, as soon as the time was ripe.
Duddy, envious of their shared celebrity, sulking as he felt Jake had thrown him over, retreated from both of them, increasingly absorbed in his own dreams.
The Canadian Jewish Who’s Who.
After all, it was time for Duddy to bait the hook.
A test mailing of one thousand forms was dispatched across the country to doctors, dentists, lawyers, and businessmen, who were asked to return photographs and biographies, under no obligation to themselves. Their names, they were informed, had been selected as community leaders by an exacting and distinguished committee, for it was not possible to buy your way into an epoch-making compendium that was destined to become part and parcel of our incomparable Jewish heritage. An order form was enclosed in each envelope, in case the recipient wished to reserve a numbered, gold-embossed copy of the limited first printing (bound to double in value as a collector
’s item) of the Canadian Jewish Who’s Who. Or the Jew’s Who, as it came to be known in the inner sanctum of the Mount Sinai Press.
One hundred and twenty-two people enclosed checks for twenty-five dollars, of which only eighteen bounced, and Duddy hurried over to his bank, threatening to switch elsewhere unless more credit was instantly forthcoming.
Duddy Kravitz cleared fifty thousand dollars in legitimate profit on the Jew’s Who, entering Jake free of charge, for old time’s sake, as the noted up-and-coming television director, who would soon move on to bigger and better things, directing on the other side of the pond.
Luke had already left for the Eastern Townships, to spend his last week in Canada on the lake with his family. Jake was taking Hanna to dinner on his final night in Toronto, but Duddy, he said, was welcome to join them.
Join them he did, enormously depressed to see Jake go, and leaving them early to sit in his own apartment and ruminate.
Certainly on the high road to his first million, Duddy nevertheless felt something lacking in his life. His handsomely-appointed apartment with a built-in bar backed by a mural of can-can dancers lit from behind, equipped with hi-fi and a bath-side telephone, was forever in a mess. Smelly socks and soiled shirts strewn everywhere. Pots and pans riding the sink. Salami butts shriveling in corners. And, most distressing of all, he still had to make do with restaurant food or something sent up from the delicatessen. He longed for home-cooked food (chicken soup, flanken, knishes) and something nifty yet haimeshe in a wife. What good was a million, he reflected, if you had to eat dreck alone every night and then either pulled yourself off to sleep or sent out for a hundred-dollar call girl, still damp from the last customer. Syph-bringers. The girls he relieved himself with were just the thing for a weekend in Buffalo, but not the sort he could take to the Pine Valley Country Club.
The girl that I marry will have to be
as soft and as pink as a nursery.
The girl I call my own will wear satins
and laces and smell of cologne.
Hanna, in a melancholy mood, was tearful throughout dinner, even though Jake assured her he would send her the fare to come to London on a visit, maybe for the opening night of his first film, he joked.
“Everybody leaves this cold country. Joey; now you,” and she told him a story that Baruch had brought back from his travels, a tale told to him by a Spanish sailor. “You know how this country got its name? It was written on a map by the Conquistadors in Peru. On their map of the Americas, one of them wrote on the uncharted space over the Great Lakes, ‘Aquí está nada. ’ It was shortened to aquí nada. Or Canada.”
Baruch, Baruch.
“When he was in agony,” she said, “after they cut off his leg, what kept him going was his hatred for his brothers. They’ll bury themselves with twigs, he said, so that when the Messiah comes they can dig their way to him. Fat chance. I’ll see them rotting six feet under, he swore, those crazy sons of bitches, and if any of you ever take anything from them, it’s good riddance and an old man’s curse on you.”
After his leg had been amputated, Baruch returned to Yellowknife, the mining town where Joey had been born, bought a diner, lost it and everything else speculating on claims.
“He might not come home to sleep for maybe a week and I wouldn’t stop sobbing or cursing. And when he’d come home, finally, with bottles and his goyische ruffians, he would smack me on the ass, push a bloody parcel into my hands, and send me still crying into the kitchen to cook him traifes, sweetbreads, and pork chops … and he’d pull Joey out of bed, and Jenny too, kissing and pinching them, passing them from hand to hand. He’d pull down Joey’s pajama bottoms, grab him, and shout, There’s a cock for you, a Jewish cock, when he grows up, watch out for your daughters. He would give Jenny beer to drink and laugh when she spit it out and he would put a cigar in Joey’s mouth and light it … and we would have to stay there, drinking and eating with his cronies, until he started a fight with one of them. There isn’t one of you here, he’d boast, who can pin this one-legged Jew to the floor. Or maybe he’d pass out cold and the other men, ashamed for me, would file out of the house, saying polite things, telling me that Baruch had forced them to come to the house and that he was one hell of a fellow.”
Baruch moved the family to Toronto, where Arty was born, and squeezed out a fitful living hustling worthless claims and penny mining stocks. He acquired a mistress and began to drink heavily again. Joey was taken over by the Baron de Hirsch Institute and placed in an orphanage. He fled, ending up on the Boys’ Farm. Hanna ran to Montreal, where she literally threw herself at the feet of Jake’s grandmother and Uncle Abe.
So Hanna and her three children, Jake recalled, as he brooded on the train to Montreal, were whisked into a cold-water flat on St. Urbain and put on an allowance.
Jake said goodbye to his mother, promising to write regularly from London. He went to see his father and his uncles, informing them, not that they had asked, that Hanna was well, and bringing the conversation around to Baruch, who, once abandoned by his mistress, had settled into a rooming house in Toronto’s Cabbagetown.
“Whatever money he needed for beer and beans, that one,” Jake’s father said, laughing, shaking his head, “he made selling newspapers outside office buildings and washing up in restaurants. He kicked the bucket in 1946, you know.”
“Yes,” Jake said sharply, “I am very well aware of that.”
Uncle Abe, recently made a Q.C., with larger triumphs hinted at in the future, smiled, amused. “You’ve got a lot to learn, Jake.” He patted Irwin’s ten-year-old head and added, “You should get to know my boy here. His teachers are amazed. They’ve never seen anything like him. Irwin can recite the names of all the forty-eight states of America.”
Which set Jake off. He scolded his uncles for being smug, he accused them of abandoning a broken old man to a lonely death in a squalid rooming house and of treating Cousin Joey, the only Hersh to have actually fought in the Spanish Civil War, even more shabbily. His uncles guffawed; they retorted heatedly, but justifiably, that any (or almost any) Hersh could get work with one or another of them, which only fired Jake’s anger more. He warned them that he was bound to come across Joey somewhere, in England, where he was last heard from, or Israel, possibly. He would never abandon him, as his uncles had Baruch. On the contrary, he would do everything he could to help him.
Without realizing it, Jake had become Cousin Joey’s advocate.
THREE
1
NEIGHING, THE STALLION REARS, OBLIGING THE Horseman to dig his stirrups in. Eventually he slows. Still in the highlands, emerging from the dense forest to scan the scrub below, he strains to find the unmarked road that winds into the jungle, between Puerto San Vincente and the border fortress of Carlos Antonio López.
In Frankfurt, the Horseman sits in the court presided over by Judge Hofmeyer.
A witness remembers Mengele.
“Exactly the way he stood there with his thumbs in his pistol belt. I also remember Dr. König, and to his credit I must say that he always got very drunk beforehand, as did Dr. Rohde. Mengele didn’t; he didn’t have to, he did it sober.”
Dr. Mengele was concerned about the women’s block.
“… The women often lapped up their food like dogs; the only source of water was right next to the latrine, and this thin stream also served to wash away the excrement. There the women stood and drank or tried to take a little water with them in some container while next to them their fellow sufferers sat on the latrines. And throughout it all the female guards hit them with clubs. And while this was going on the S.S. walked up and down and watched.”
Bodies were gnawed by rats, as were unconscious women. The women were plagued by lice.
“Then Mengele came. He was the first one to rid the entire women’s camp of lice. He simply had an entire block gassed. Then he disinfected the block.”
Mengele’s pitch, his most cherished place, was on the ramp with the Canada detail. T
he Canada men unloaded prison transports and collected the baggage of new arrivals. Watches, pocketbooks, blankets, jars of jam, sausages, bread, coats. These valuables were lugged to storehouses with the collective name Canada, so called because of the country’s reputation as a land of immense riches.
“Mengele cannot have been there all the time.”
“In my opinion, always. Night and day.”
2
SURFACING FROM A DREAM OF THE HORSEMAN, ONLY A week after Ingrid had formally filed charges against him and Harry, he thought – no fear, Jake – soon Ormsby-Fletcher will arrive. Ormsby-Fletcher, his consolation. To remark on the weather and clap his bowler down on the monk’s bench in the outer hall. Then the two of them would retire to the study to mull over the day’s defeats and plan tomorrow’s campaign.
Ormsby-Fletcher.
When it became obvious, even to Jake, that there would be no stopping Ingrid’s complaint and that the case would actually go to court, his first embarrassed thought was he did not want a Jewish lawyer, no twisting, eloquent point scorer who would outwit judge and prosecutor, eat witnesses, alienate the jury, shine so foxily in court in fact as to ultimately lose him the case. No. Say what you like about the goyim, they had their uses. For his defense Jake required an upright plodding WASP; and, in his mind’s eye, swishing cognac around in his glass night after night, Jake methodically fabricated his identi-kit champion. He would be unaggressively handsome, after the fashion of the British upper classes, that is to say, somewhat wanting, like an underdeveloped photograph. Without salt. He would commute, Jake imagined, from a detached in an unspoiled village in Surrey (nr. Guildford, 40 min. Waterloo), where on weekends he tended to the rose bushes and fought off encroaching crabgrass with his toothy wife. (If it isn’t too much to hope for, Jake thought, fighting down the tears, we’ll swap cuttings, my goy and I.) England worries him. Raised on the King James version, lemon squash, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, hamsters from Harrod’s pet shop, Daddy’s Ceylon tea shares, Kaffirs, debentures, chocolate digestives, and duty, he would find today’s swingers perplexing. He would approve of the court’s decision on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but would argue – Jake hoped – that issuing the novel in paperback, thereby making it available to untutored minds, was going too far, rather, like MBE’S for the Beatles. He would have been to a good but minor public school, doing his national service with a decent regiment, going on from there to Pembroke, Cambridge (his father’s college) before being articled to a solicitor. He would not have crammed at university because his nagging parents had never had the chance oy and were doing without oy oy: he would have muddled through to a degree. He was a Tory, but no Blimp. While he felt, for instance, that black Africans were not quite ready for self-government, he could jolly well understand their point of view. His wife – “The vicar’s daughter,” Jake decided aloud – ordered a joint (tenderized) for Sunday and cleverly made do (color supplement shepherd’s pie, not-too-hot curry) until Tuesday. Waste not, want not. Instead of dinner on Wednesday they got by with high tea, cucumber and fishpaste sandwiches, bread and jam, while he helped his son with his Latin prep and she read Mary Poppins aloud to their little girl. Mnnn … I know, Jake added, clapping his hands, there is no central heating because they both agreed it was unhealthy. When she was having her menstrual period he was not so boorishly selfish as to hint at alternative forms of gratification: instead he came home bearing boxes of chocolates.
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