St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  “You certainly are thinking big, Herky.”

  “You’ve got to move with the times.”

  “Let me sleep on it, O.K.?”

  “O.K., but meanwhile, mum’s the word.”

  A half hour before the first evening star, the rabbis trooped into the insufferably hot apartment in shiny black frock coats. The local yeshiva’s Mafia. Ranging from tall spade-bearded men in broad-brimmed black hats to pimply, wispy-bearded boys in oversize Homburgs. Finally, there came the leader, the fragile Rabbi Polsky himself, who led the men in the evening prayer.

  Immediately behind Jake, prayerbook in hand, stood flat-footed Irwin, breathing with effort. As Jake stumbled self-consciously through the prayer for the dead, Irwin’s troubled breathing quickened – it raced – stopped – and suddenly he sneezed, and sneezed again, pelting Jake’s neck with what seemed like shrapnel. As Jake whirled around, Irwin seemed to draw his neck into his body. Bulging eyes and a sweaty red face rising over a succession of chins were all that confronted Jake. But as he resumed his prayers, he was conscious of Irwin, biting back his laughter, threatening to explode. The moment prayers were over, Irwin shot out onto the balcony, heaving, a soggy hand clamped to his nose.

  Rabbi Polsky, holy man to the Hershes, was thin and round-shouldered, his skin gray as gum, with watery blue eyes and a scraggly yellow beard. He padded on slippered feet to a place on the sofa. A cunning field mouse. Accusingly impecunious amid Hersh affluence. His shirt collar curling and soiled, his cuffs frayed, Rabbi Polsky came nightly, wiped his mouth with an enormous damp handkerchief, and preached to the Hershes, all of whom virtually glowed in his presence.

  “There came to me once a man to ask me to go to the Rebbe in New York to ask him what he should do for his father who was dying. He paid for me the air ticket, I went to Brooklyn, I spoke with the Rebbe, and I came back and said to the man the Rebbe says pray, you must pray every morning. Pray, the man asked? Every morning. So he went away and every morning before going to the office he said his prayers after years of not doing it. Then one morning he had an appointment with a goy, a financier, from out of town, at the Mount Royal Hotel. He had to see the goy to make a loan for his business. The goy said you be here nine o’clock sharp, I’ll try to fit you in, I’m very busy. All right. But the man overslept and in the morning he realized if he takes time to say his prayers he will be late. He will lose his loan. All the same he prayed, and when he got to the Mount Royal Hotel and went to the man’s room, the goy was in a rage, shouting, hollering, you keep me waiting. You need me and you keep me waiting? So the man said his father was dying and his rabbi had told him he must pray every morning, and that’s why he was late. You mean to say, the goy asked, even though if I deny you this loan your business is ruined, you were late so as not to miss one morning’s prayers for your father? Yes. In that case, the goy said, let me shake your hand, put it there, you are a fella I can trust. To lend money to such a man will be a genuine pleasure.”

  Euphoria filled the Hershes. Only Jake protested, nudging Uncle Lou. “We now know that praying is good for credit, but what happened to the man’s father?”

  “You know what your trouble is? You don’t believe in anything.”

  Rabbi Polsky, possibly with Jake in mind, continued:

  “Sometimes young people question the law. There’s no reason for this … that’s a superstition … You know the type, I’m sure. Why, for example, they ask, should we not eat seafood?”

  Uncle Lou poked Jake. “Your sister Rifka is on a seafood diet.”

  “What?”

  “Every time she sees food she wants it.”

  “Why,” the rabbi asked, “shouldn’t we eat crab or lobster? To which I would answer you with the question why is there such madness among the goyim, they run to the psychiatrist every morning? Why? It is now scientifically revealed in an article in Time magazine that eating seafood can drive you crazy. It promotes insanity.”

  “Jake, it’s for you,” Uncle Jack said, holding out the kitchen phone.

  “Who is it?”

  “The boss,” he replied with a big wink.

  “Would you mind shutting the door after you, please?” Jake asked, before taking the call.

  It was Nancy, enormously concerned for his sake. “I thought you would phone last night.”

  “Honestly, I’m all right.”

  “There’s no need to pretend.”

  “The embarrassing thing is,” Jake said, “it’s like a family party. I’m not grieving. I’m having a wonderful time.”

  Sitting with the Hershes, day and night, a bottle of Remy Martin parked between his feet, such was Jake’s astonishment, commingled with pleasure, in their responses, that he could not properly mourn for his father. He felt cradled, not deprived. He also felt like Rip Van Winkle returned to an innocent and ordered world he had mistakenly believed long extinct. Where God watched over all, doing His sums. Where everything fit. Even the holocaust which, after all, had yielded the state of Israel. Where to say, “Gentlemen, the Queen,” was to offer the obligatory toast to Elizabeth II at an affair, not to begin a discussion on Andy Warhol. Where smack was not habit-forming, but what a disrespectful child deserved; pot was what you simmered the chicken soup in; and camp was where you sent the boys for the summer. It was astounding, Jake was incredulous, that after so many years and fevers, after Dachau, after Hiroshima, revolution, rockets in Space, DNA, bestiality in the streets, assassinations in and out of season, there were still brides with shining faces who were married in white gowns, posing for the Star social pages with their prizes, pear-shaped boys in evening clothes. There were aunts who sold raffles and uncles who swore by the Reader’s Digest. French Canadians, like overflying airplanes distorting the TV picture, were only tolerated. DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET, THE TROUBLE IS TEMPORARY. Aunts still phoned each other every morning to say what sort of cake they were baking. Who had passed this exam, who had survived that operation. A scandal was when a first cousin was invited to the bar mitzvah kiddush, but not the dinner. Eloquence was the rabbi’s sermon. They were ignorant of the arts, they were overdressed, they were overstuffed, and their taste was appallingly bad. But within their self-contained world, there was order. It worked.

  As nobody bothered to honor them, they very sensibly celebrated each other at fund-raising synagogue dinners, taking turns at being Man-of-the-Year, awarding each other ornate plaques to hang over the bar in the rumpus room. Furthermore, God was interested in the fate of the Hershes, with time and consideration for each one. To pray was to be heard. There was not even death, only an interlude below ground. For one day, as Rabbi Polsky assured them, the Messiah would blow his horn, they would rise as one and return to Zion. Buried with twigs in their coffins, as Baruch had once said, to dig their way to him before the neighbors.

  Phoning Hanna, in Toronto, Jake had to cope with Jenny first.

  “Sitting shiva with the hypocrites, are you?”

  Oh, God.

  “I suppose whenever my name’s mentioned they cross themselves, so to speak,” she said, giggling at her own joke.

  He hadn’t the heart to say her name had not been mentioned once, and next thing he knew Doug was on the line.

  “I want you to know why I didn’t send flowers.”

  “You’re not supposed to,” Jake said wearily.

  “It’s not that. You know I’m beyond such ethnic taboos. Instead of flowers, I’ve sent a check in memory of your dad to SUPPORT in Hanoi.”

  “You did?”

  “It goes toward buying artificial limbs for children maimed in the air raids.”

  “I knew you’d always come through in a crunch, Doug. Now may I please speak to Hanna?”

  “So, Yankel?”

  “Hanna, how are you?”

  “I’m sorry. You know we were never friendly in the old days, but, after all, he’s your paw, and I’m sorry.” She inquired about Nancy and the baby and demanded photographs of Sammy and Molly. “I wanted to come to Mon
treal, but you know how Jenny feels about the Hershes. She wouldn’t give me the fare. Big deal. I’ll hitchhike, I said, like the hippies …”

  “I’d send you the fare, Hanna, you know that, but …” He feared the family would treat her shabbily.

  “I know. Don’t explain. Couldn’t you come here for a day?”

  “There’s the new baby, Hanna. Really, I …”

  “It’s O.K. Next time, yes?”

  “We’ll go to a hockey game together.”

  “Hey, Red Kelly’s in parliament. He’s an M.P.”

  “Who?”

  “What do you mean, who? The Maple Leafs’ defenseman. You remember, Imlach traded with Detroit for him.”

  “And he’s in parliament now?”

  “Aquí está nada.”

  “Aquí está Hanna.”

  “Yes, sir. Alive and kicking. A living testimonial to Carling’s beer. How’s Luke?”

  “The same.”

  “You two; you give me a royal pain in the ass. When will you make it up?”

  His mother made Jake lunch in her apartment. She said how sad she was his father had died. He was not to blame if he had not been intelligent enough for her and she was certain he would have been a good husband for a simple woman. And that done, she asked, “How’s my new baby?”

  “Nancy’s baby is fine,” Jake replied.

  Again and again he was driven back to St. Urbain to linger before the dilapidated flat that had once held Hanna, Arty, Jenny, and, briefly, the Horseman. More than once he strolled around the corner and into the lane. To look up at the rear bedroom window, Jenny’s window, that had used to be lit into the small hours as she applied herself with such ardor to her studies, the books that were to liberate her from St. Urbain, the offices of Laurel Knitwear, and all the oppressive Hershes.

  “You know what she’s plugging away at in there?” Issy Hersh had said. “Latin. A dead language.”

  Through a hole in the fence, Jake contemplated the backyard where the Horseman had once set up a makeshift gym, doing his stuff for admiring girls, high-quality girls. He and Arty, Jake recalled, had used to watch from the bedroom window and once they had seen Joey, his eyes shooting hatred, strike a stranger ferociously in the stomach.

  Suddenly, a dark-eyed, olive-skinned boy appeared in the yard, ran to the fence, and confronted Jake. “Fuck off, mister.”

  Duddy, he remembered, Arty, Gas, find me.

  Everything happened so quickly. One day Arty, Duddy, Stan, Gas, and Jake were collecting salvage, practicing aircraft recognition, and the next, it seemed, the war was over. Neighbors’ sons came home.

  “What was it like over there?”

  “An education.”

  IS HITLER REALLY DEAD? was what concerned everybody. That, and an end to wartime shortages and ration books. One stingingly cold Saturday afternoon a man came to the door. Leather cap, rheumy eyes, an intricately veined nose. Battle ribbons riding his lapel. One arm was no more than a butt, the sleeve clasped by a giant safety pin, and with the other arm, the good arm, the man offered a Veteran’s calendar, the Karsh portrait of Churchill encased in a gold foil V. “They’re only fifty cents each.”

  “No, thanks,” Mr. Hersh said.

  Reproachfully, the man’s bloodshot gaze fastened on his battle ribbons. “Ever hear of Dieppe?” he growled, flapping his butt.

  Jake looked up at his father imploringly.

  “And did you ever hear of the Better Business Bureau,” Mr. Hersh demanded, “because it so happens they have broadcast a warning for law-abiding citizens not to buy combs from cripples who just claim to be war veterans.”

  “Jew bastard.”

  Mr. Hersh slammed the door. “You see what they’re like, all of them, underneath. You see, Jake.”

  “But did you see his arm? He lost it at Dieppe maybe.”

  “And did you see his schnozz? He’s a boozer. The only battle he ever fought was with Johnny Walker. You’ve got to get up early in the morning to put one over on Issy Hersh.”

  Or, Jake thought – remembering Tom the gardener with a chill of shame, Sammy watching, all eyes – or his first-born son Jacob.

  The old friends Jake sought out, were, to his dismay, churlish or resentful.

  “What’s the famous director doing here, back on the farm?” Ginsburg demanded. Arty’s enthusiasm for Jake’s film iced over with three drinks. “If you had asked me when we were kids, I never would have picked you to make it. Stan maybe.” Witty, corrosive Stan Tannenbaum, with whom Jake had sat in Room Forty-one, at Fletcher’s Field High. Stan was a professor now, his long greasy hair bound by a Cree headband, a pendant riding his barrel belly. “I’m the leading authority on Shakespeare in this country and I adore teaching it, but it humbles a man, you know. I don’t flatter myself into thinking I have anything to add. There’s so much crap being written today. Take your buddy, Luke Scott, for instance.”

  Gordie Rothman, another old schoolmate, who had forsaken teaching for corporation law, insisted they meet for a drink at Bourgatel’s. “The truth is the money’s rolling in …” He was happily married with two children, a house in Westmount, and what he called a shack in Vermont, just in case the French Canadian business got out of hand. “There’s only one thing.” Gordie slid a plastic-covered, leather-bound folio out of his attaché case. “I’d like to get my screenplay produced.”

  “You mean to say you’ve written a …”

  “What the fuck, don’t come on with me. Before you were well known who ever heard of you?”

  “Nobody.”

  “I’ve sent the script to agents in New York and even London, but naturally they couldn’t care less about anything set in Canada. You’ve got to have connections in this game, I realize that, and somebody like you …”

  “I’ll read it, Gordie. But I’ve got high standards, you know.”

  “Listen here, me too. But not everybody is James Joyce. I mean I’m sure you’d like to be able to direct as well as Hitchcock or … or Fellini …” Suddenly agitated, he glared at Jake. “I knew you when you were nothing. Nobody ever thought that much of you here. How in the hell did you ever get into films?”

  “Sleeping with the right people,” Jake said, winking.

  After prayers each evening, the comforters streamed into the apartment. Dimly remembered second cousins, old neighbors, business associates. They compared Miami hotels for price and rabbis for oomph, but, above all, they marveled at the miracle of the Six-Day War and followed, with apprehension, the debate over the ceasefire continuing at the U.N. One rabbi, a suburban mod, wanted the Israeli victory enshrined by a new holiday, a latter-day Passover.

  Uncle Lou accosted each visitor with the same question. “What kind of tanks were the Egyptians using in Sinai?”

  “Russian.”

  “Wrong. Not rushin’. Standin’ still.”

  Whenever guests celebrated the feats of the Israeli air force, Lou taunted them with the impending Bond drive. “Never before in the history of man,” he was fond of saying, “will so few owe so much to so many.”

  Jack assured all comers that the Egyptians had used gas in Yemen only to test it for the Jews.

  “But the Israelis were using napalm,” Jake protested.

  “By Jake here, whatever we do is rotten. Whatever they do is A-1. Do you know they had ovens ready in Cairo for our people?”

  Only Uncle Sam was not surprised by the Israeli victory. He reminded everybody that it was the Jews who had turned the tide against the Nazis in World War II. At Tobruk.

  “They stood against five Arab nations,” Uncle Abe said again and again, “all alone. It has to be the fulfillment of divine intervention, even the most skeptical man must accept it was God’s fulfillment to Abraham …”

  One evening Max Kravitz drifted in, holding his taxi cap in his gnarled hands. Max’s hair was white, his face grizzly. “Do you remember me,” he demanded, driving Jake against a wall.

  “Yes.”

  “What? You
mean to say you remember me after all these years?”

  “Yes. Of course I do.”

  “Well, I don’t remember you,” Max replied triumphantly.

  Arty, long established as a dentist, came to pay his respects. Arty had become a joker. Such a joker, they said. He told wonderful stories; then, as you laughed, Arty’s head would shoot forward to within inches of your gaping mouth, his eyes scrutinizing, his nose sniffing tentatively, appalled by what they perceived and smelled, his smile abruptly transformed into a pitying headshake. The next morning you found yourself sprawled, gagging and struggling, in his chair. Joking, cunning Arty had drilled his way through Hersh family molars, shoving in an upper plate here and striking a buck-tooth bonanza there, working his passage into a split-level in Ville St. Laurent.

  They mourned the passing of Issy Hersh for a week, the truculent rabbis surging in nightly to be followed by prayers and more guests. The sweetest time for Jake was the early afternoon, when, riding a leaden lunch, the drooping Hershes wrestled sleep by reminiscing about their shared childhood and schools, their first jobs, all on a French Canadian street.

  “They’re so dumb,” Aunt Malka said, shaking her head with wonder. “There’s one I used to tell a joke to on Friday and on Sunday in the middle of church service she would finally get it and begin to laugh.”

  What about the Separatists?

  For them, birth control would be a better policy. They breed like rabbits.

  Suddenly, the apartment darkened. Irwin’s body filled the screen door to the balcony to overflowing, the transistor held to his ear. “Arnie’s just shot a birdie on the fifteenth. That puts him only two down on Casper.”