St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  “HAPPY” MARRIAGES MAY BE JUST DULL,

  PSYCHOLOGIST SAYS

  Washington – A lot of “happy” marriages may be merely dull, says a psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health.

  Dr. Robert Ryder, who directed an institute research project involving 200 young, middle-class couples, warned about the “unexamined idea that compatibility is a good thing.”

  Jake feared that a felicitous marriage not only reflected poorly on Nancy and him, stamping them superficial, tin-like, but it was also bad for the kids. Everybody he admired, his most imaginative and resourceful friends, had emerged from afflicted homes. Dad a zero, mum a carnivore. Parents so embittered that they wrote off their own lives and toiled only for the children’s sake. Divorced parents, vying shamelessly for the kids’ affections. Quarreling, lying, but, inadvertently, shaping rebels. Hammering out artists. Whereas in their home there was only symmetry, affection, parents who took pleasure in each other’s company.

  What are we spawning here, Jake wondered? Surely from such a well-adjusted and cozy childhood only ciphers could spring. Cocooned and soft-minded dolts, who would grow up totally unprepared for life. Sammy would never shoplift. Molly wouldn’t have hysterics. In a drug culture, they were already tranquillized.

  England, England.

  London was almost Jake’s home now, but he had mixed feelings about the place. For if the city he had come to know was no longer Big Ben, Bulldog Drummond, and the anti-Zionist fox hunters of his childhood dreams, neither could it be counted the cultural fountainhead he had sought so earnestly as a young man. Slowly, inexorably, he was being forced to pay the price of the colonial come to the capital. In the provinces, he had been able to revere London and its offerings with impunity. Fulminating in Montreal, he could agree with Auden that the dominions were tiefste Provinz. Scornful of all things home-baked, he was at one with Dr. Johnson, finding his country a cold and uninviting region. As his father had blamed the goyim for his own inadequacies, mentally billing them for the sum of his misfortunes, so Jake had foolishly held Canada culpable for all his discontents. Coming to London, finding it considerably less than excellent, he was at once deprived of this security blanket. The more he achieved, feeding the tapeworm of his outer ambitions, the larger his inner hunger. He would have preferred, for instance, that the highly regarded Timothy Nash had been worthy of his reputation and that it was utterly impossible for Jacob Hersh to be as good. He would have been happiest had the capital’s standards not been so readily attainable and that it were still possible for him to have icons.

  Ruminating in his study, Jake grasped it wasn’t only London or Canada that was exasperating him, but also the books, films, and plays he had consumed. Years and years ago, he recalled, another Jake, ponderously searching for a better way than St. Urbain’s, had started out on his intellectual trek immensely heartened to discover, through the books that shaped him, that he wasn’t a freak. There were others who thought and felt as he did. Now the same liberated bunch dissatisfied, even bored, him. The novels he devoured so hopefully, conned by overexcited reviews, were sometimes diverting, but told him nothing he had not already known. On the contrary, they only served to reaffirm, albeit on occasion with style, his own feelings. In a word, they were self-regarding. As he was, as his friends were. If it had given the callow Canadian boy who had once been Jake reassurance and pleasure to see his own dilemmas endorsed, rendered real in print, now the further prospect of others torn by his own concerns, more malcontent and swollen egos, filled him with ennui.

  Literature, once his consolation, was no longer enough. To read of meanness in others, promiscuity well observed or greed understood, to discover his own inadequacies shared no longer licensed them, any more than all the deaths that had come before could begin to make his own endurable.

  Oh, Horseman, Horseman, where are you?

  Jake craved answers, a revelation, something out there, a certitude, like the Bomb before it was discovered. Meanwhile, he was choked with self-disgust. Given his curriculum vitae, orthodox Jewish background, emergent working class, urban Canadian, his life until now read to him like any Jewish intellectual journeyman’s case history. To begin with, his zeyda was a cliché. A gentle Jew. A chess player. His childhood street fights, the stuff of everybody’s protest novel, lacked only one trite detail. Nobody had ever said to him, “You killed Christ.” On the other hand, his mother actually said, “Eat, eat.” She was aggressive, a culture snob, and his father was henpecked. As they were divorced, he could also qualify as the product of a broken home. At fifteen he had been sufficiently puerile to tell his father, “The synagogue is full of hypocrites,” and two years later he had the originality to describe himself as … ghetto-liberated.

  If, rather than a code of unspoken nonconformities, there was a battery of written tests for intellectual novices, then Jake felt he would have passed top of the latter-day yeshiva class. He had done all the right wrong things, even to marrying a shiksa, voting for the better candidate to this day and, squeezed in a vise between the moral values of two generations, worrying about Arab civil rights in Israel, on the one hand, and kids having to make do with impurities in their pot, on the other.

  Luke still swam into focus from time to time. Back from Rome, on his way to Hollywood, between trips to New York. On his return from Malibu, they went out to dinner together, not talking to begin with, but instead replaying their friendship like an old movie. Exchanging anecdotes like bubble-gum cards.

  “You must understand I’m not exaggerating,” Luke said, “this is exactly how they go about it. Before they sit down to the poker table, they remove their trousers. All the men, six of them. There’s a girl under the table and she blows them, one by one, as the game goes on …”

  “Oh, God, Luke, what’s to become of us?”

  “Look here, baby. We’re on the Titanic. It’s going down. Everything, everybody. Me, I’ve decided to travel first class.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Before you turn around, you’re dead.” Luke fiddled with his glasses, embarrassed. “All right, then, what do you believe in?”

  “Praising those who were truly great, those who came nearest the sun. I believe in theirs and ours. Dr. Johnson, yes, Dr. Leary, no.”

  I’m a liberal, Jake thought, driving home. If only he labored for Dow Chemical, yielding napalm, and so was utterly committed to evil, or if, conversely, he practiced medicine among the Bantu, death’s enemy … As it was, he was merely another ranks contributor to the arts. Like most of what he read or saw on stage or screen, only to deprecate it fiercely afterwards, he felt his own work had no importance other than the intermittent pleasure it gave him. The time it filled, the social office it provided. After all the posturing, the assumed moral stance, he was, like his mindless uncles, no more than a provider. Worse. A provider with pretensions. Applying Norman Mailer’s stricture as a rule, he could not honestly claim that he was adding an inch to the house.

  Which is not to say on some mornings, for no ostensible reason whatsoever, Jake did not wake ineffably happy. Nancy stretching beside him. Sammy and Molly romping on the bed. Waken to descend into the kitchen, prepare a delicious breakfast, and drive them into the country. Then, cavorting in a meadow, savoring the sun and his family, he would all at once be riddled with anxiety. Why am I being allowed to enjoy myself? The Gods raise you, only the better to strike you down. So look sharp, Yankel, there’s something lousy in store.

  His glee only simulated as he chased Sammy now, Jake would scrutinize the surrounding woods for advancing Nazi troops. Search the grass for poisonous snakes. Rake the skies for falling planets. Stealthily maneuvering his giggly, frolicking brood closer to the car, he would assure himself that his jack handle was within reach in case they were suddenly set upon by Black Panthers zonked out of their minds on speed. Remember, immediately before Oswald took aim, John Kennedy seemed the most blessed of princes. Malcolm X had further speaking engagements. Even Albert
Camus must have had plans for when he reached Paris.

  Still playing, but hard put to conceal his apprehensions, Jake would try to outwit the avenging Gods by trying to conjure up the most appalling things that could befall him, forearming himself as it were.

  Nancy discovers a lump on her breast. Molly’s heart springs a leak. Sammy, a sex maniac’s meal. For him, lung cancer.

  Whenever Jake flew anywhere, he arrived untimely early to loiter by the insurance machine, just to make sure nobody was investing too heavily. Among the credit cards in his wallet, there was a card that read: “This is to declare that in the event of my death in a Street accident, I, the undersigned, wish to be buried intact. None of my organs are available for transplants under any conditions whatsoever.”

  DISSOLVE TO:

  EXT. DAY. GOLDERS GREEN. THE NONDENOMINATIONAL CREMATORIUM

  Rain. Wind in the sorrowing trees. No birds sing. As a black limousine pulls up …

  INT. DAY. GOLDERS GREEN CREMATORIUM

  Mourners include NANCY, LORD and LADY SAMUEL HERSH, MOLLY and GAYLORD x (her husband, the Black Panther), and LUKE SCOTT. The others are mostly CREDITORS.

  TRACKING IN ON CASKET

  Made of cheap plywood, just thick enough to contain its vicious smells. Some wilting, scraggly flowers here and there. But atop the casket, as a last request of the deceased, there is a PLACARD that reads:

  EENY, MEENY, MINEY, MOE,

  WHICH OF YOU IS NEXT TO GO?

  ANOTHER ANGLE

  As LUKE SCOTT mounts the podium. He’s in his sixties, wearing stitched-on shoulder-length hair, earrings, grandmaw glasses, and a medallion hanging from his wizened neck.

  LUKE

  (reciting)

  He disappeared in the dead of winter:

  The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

  And snow disfigured the public statues;

  The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

  O all the instruments agree

  The day of his death was a dark cold day.

  ANOTHER ANGLE

  As the CASKET begins to slide into the flames, stage curtains part to reveal … THE ANDREWS SISTERS

  ANDREWS SISTERS

  (singing)

  Bei Mir Bist Du Shayn

  DISSOLVE TO:

  INT. LORD SAMUEL HERSH’S BELGRAVIA MANSION. DRAWING ROOM. ALL of YANKEL HERSH’S PROGENY gathered together. Drinking. Eating.

  LORD HERSH

  I say, what shall we do with the old fart’s ashes?

  MOLLY

  What about mother?

  LORD HERSH

  That would never do. It would put Luigi off his love-making, don’t you think?

  MOLLY

  Well, I won’t have them. It’s morbid for the children. Besides, I haven’t told them that they’re one quarter kikes.

  (pause)

  You keep them. At least you’ve got a cat.

  LORD HERSH

  Capital idea!

  As NANCY enters, her see-through dress half-unzipped, bite marks everywhere, pursued by a slavering, hirsute ITALIAN BUS BOY

  NANCY

  Say hello, Luigi, baby.

  LUIGI

  Chow.

  INT. DAY. STUDY. LORD HERSH’S MANSION

  LORD HERSH seated behind the desk, mounds of papers before him. The others gathered around, drooling with greed. As LORD HERSH bangs the desk for silence.

  LORD HERSH

  For form’s sake, we should dispense with his last wishes first. There’s only one.

  (reading)

  He wanted his son to say …

  (difficulty reading)

  kaddish for him. Anybody know what that is?

  MOLLY

  Isn’t that the greasy stuff he used to make in the kitchen? With chopped onions and –

  LORD HERSH

  No, that’s chopped liver.

  Let’s get on with the balance sheets, what? First of all, the best bid for his heart came from St. George’s Hospital. £1,000. They said it was an especially big heart …

  (opening a folio)

  Let’s get on with the balance sheets, what? First of all, the best bid for his heart came from St. George’s Hospital. £1,000. They said it was an especially big heart …

  PAN BRIEFLY OVER FAMILY. An instant’s flicker of guilt.

  LORD HERSH

  The kidneys fetched another £100, but the lungs and liver were no good at all. A dead loss.

  NANCY

  What about his roger?

  LORD HERSH

  Was just coming to that. We finally flogged it to a children’s hospital. Wouldn’t fit anyone but a twelve-year-old, don’t you know?

  Unknown to Nancy, or so Jake assumed, he kept a baseball bat under his bed. He had joined a shooting club, which entitled him to keep a rifle. He had even planned, before retiring, to distribute plates on the stairs leading to their bedroom, so that when the vandals came he could be roused from his sleep in time to defend his family. But he could think of no satisfactory explanation for Nancy.

  Nancy, his love. Seized unawares by a joyous mood in the evening, taking Nancy to dinner on impulse, ordering succulent dishes and wines too splendid for him to appreciate, except by price, following it with brandies and protestations of love, he would suddenly, unexpectedly, clamor for the bill. Gas leak.

  “Why do we have to run?” Nancy would ask, irritated, believing him to be bored with her.

  GAS LEAK! My God, can’t she see them? Sammy and Molly. Sprawled lifeless on their beds.

  Gone, gone.

  When it wasn’t the children’s safety, death, or the Germans’ second coming that plagued him, it was the fact that he felt his generation was unjustly squeezed between two raging and carnivorous ones. The old establishment and the young hipsters. The shits and the shit-heads. Unwillingly, without justice, they had been cast in Kerensky’s role. Neither as obscene as the Czar, nor as bloodthirsty as Lenin. Even as Jews, they did not fit a mythology. Not having gone like sheep to the slaughterhouse, but also too fastidious to punish Arab villages with napalm. What Jake stood for would not fire the countryside; decency, tolerance, honor. With E. M. Forster, he wearily offered two cheers for democracy. After George Orwell, he was for a closer look at anybody’s panacea.

  Jake was a liberal.

  He would have been willing to vote for the legalization of pot, but he couldn’t feel that a sixteen-year-old was deprived if he lacked for a pack of Acapulco Gold. He was against puritan repression, for fucking, but not necessarily on stage. A born cop-hater, he still wouldn’t offer one a sandwich with shit spread between the bread. Though he felt the university was too intricately involved with the military-industrial complex he didn’t think it was a blow struck for universal love when students tore a professor’s work of twenty years to shreds. Admittedly, Hollywood had lied, so had the Satevepost, but he didn’t want Molly to feel a wallflower if at fourteen she didn’t submit to a gang bang. When Reb Allen Ginsberg preached to the unformed that all history was bunk, what first sprang to mind was Goering reaching for his gun when he heard the word culture. Increasingly, wherever he turned, Jake felt his generation was being crushed by two hysterical forces, the outraged work-oriented old and the spitefully playful young, each heaving half truths at one another. Not that his own bunch filled him with jubilance. For one day, Jake feared, they would be dismissed as trivial, a peripheral generation. Crazy about bad old movies, nostalgic for comic books. Their Gods and mine, he allowed, don’t fail. At worst, they grow infirm. They suffer pinched nerves, like Paul Hornung. Or arthritic arms, like Sandy Koufax.

  But, above all, it was the injustice collectors Jake feared. The concentration camp survivors. The hungry millions of India. The starvelings of Africa. Months after his first film had been released, a letter reached him from Canada.

  DEAR DIRECTOR (OF LIFE, ITS STRUGGLES)

  MY ADVISE TO YOU AS AN ARTIST IS TO SET YOUR GOAL CLOSE TO THE PEOPLE, AS G.B.S. HAS DONE IN HIS HUMBLE BEGI
NNING. WHICH NOW GIVES RAISE TO THE MASSAS. THE UNIMPLOYED. THE DEFEATED ON THE SKID ROADS OF NORTH AMERICA. INCLUDING THE SLEEPING GIANTS OF CANADA. OUR FISHERMAN AND LOGGERS. AND THE POOR FARMERS NOTWITHSTANDING.

  TO RAISE THE SPIRIT, READ, THE LOGGERS. THE CIRCUS BY THE TALENTED HOBO, JIM TULLEY. THE BEGGERS OF LIFE HE PUT ON THE SCRENE OUT OF HOLLEYWOOD.

  ALSO READ THOSE BOOKS THAT MADE UPTON SINCLAIR FAMOUS. THE BRASS CHECK, THE JUNGEL, ETC. AS WELL AS THE IRION HEAL BY LONDON.

  THE BEST ON RELIGIONS IS THE GOLDEN BOUGH BY FRAZER. ON PSYCHOLOGY RIEK, MYTH AND GUILT. AND FOR A MAGAZINE, FATE, SHOULD BE READ WITH AN OPEN MIND.

  SHOULD YOU CONSIDER A JOB TO OPEN NEW AVENUES IN MODERN THOUGHT. HERE’S A BIG TIP. GO TO A REAL ESTATE COMPANY IN YOUR CITY OR CHICAGO, N.Y.C. OR NEWARK, N.J. SHOULD BE A LARGE OUTFIT THAT CONTROLS SLUM PROPERTY. SUCH WORK WOULD BRING YOU CLOSE TO LIFE.

  LOAN OFFICES ARE ALSO GOOD WHEN SEARCHING FOR JEWELS TO MAKE YOUR DIRECTION BRILLENT.

  ALL I NEED IS A TAPE RECORDER AND YOU: FOR THAT HIT MOVIE I STRIVE FOR.

  I HAVE SHORT STORIES, VERSE, ADVENTURE, ETC. I FEAL I AM A NATURAL. I KNOW VERY LITTLE IN SUCH ART. UNIVERSITIES ARE KNOWN TO DIM DIAMONDS. S.B. BURNS. BUT I LIVE IN CHI. TWENTY FIVE YEARS, AND SLAVED IN BUILDING TRADES. WITH A THIRD GRADE SCHOOLING. IN THE YEARS OF THE GREAT PANIC I TRAVELLED THOUSANDS OF MILES BY ACCIDENT. AND LARNED IN THE STRUGGLE.

  MY YEARS ARE THOSE FROM 1893, AUGEST. I WORK IN ENGLEWOOD, B.C.

  I WISH YOU LUCK KID,

  SINCEARLY YOURS,

  STUART MCCALLUM

  He feared the Red Guards of China and the black fanatics, for he knew they would knock on his door one day and ask Jacob Hersh, husband, father, house owner, investor, sybarite, and film fantasy-spinner, for an accounting.

  The more he brooded on it, the more time he spent in his aerie, sifting through the Horseman’s papers.

  The pages from Doktor Mengele’s journal.

  More than once, in his mind’s eye, Jake saw the Horseman Entre Ríos, where Argentina meets the Paraná River. He saw him cantering on a magnificent Pleven stallion. Galloping, thundering. Planning fresh campaigns, more daring maneuvers.