by Endre Farkas
“Yeah! Sounds good,” she said with more enthusiasm.
Tommy’s parents had bought him an Expo passport as a graduation present. Though he had only completed his second year, for them each year passed was a graduation. No one in the family had ever finished high school. In their eyes, a learned man was a somebody. “It’s also something you can take with you if you have to flee,” his father often said.
His parents’ education stopped with the war. When she talked about it, his mother said, “We went to a different school and got a different kind of education.”
Tommy guessed, by his mother’s math skills,and her passion for literature, that she was the one who would have done well. But after the war, a job was more essential than an education. She got one as a bookkeeper even though she had never had any training or experience. She learned quickly and by the end of the year, after her boss was arrested for having been a Nazi sympathizer, she was made head bookkeeper.
In their business here in Canada, she was the one who kept the books, handled the payroll and paid the suppliers. Saturday nights, while Tommy and his father were watching hockey, she would be in the kitchen working on the books and keeping an eye on the simmering soup and roasting meat; the meals for the week.
She was also the handyman. Whenever she had to call a repairman to fix one of the sewing machines, she would watch how he did it. After that, she was able to do the repair herself. Better in my pocket than his, was her motto.
His father was more of a people person. He wasn’t interested in the running of the factory. He did the pickups and deliveries, negotiated prices and collected payments. “Always pick up on Mondays,” he repeatedly advised Tommy whenever they made a delivery. “Monday people are fresh, so they help you more. You can get the shippers to have the load ready, hold the elevator and help load the van. Of course, it helps that I give those goyims five dollars every week. Always deliver on Thursday with the bill in your hand. And never unload until the cheque is in your hand. This way you have Friday to deposit the money. If you deliver on Friday, they’ll tell you that they’re busy and come back Monday. By Monday they could be bankrupt. Better in my bank than theirs.” And it wasn’t only practical advice that he dispensed. “Always be on first-name basis with the bookkeeper. Have a compliment ready for her, even if she’s so ugly that she would scare off the Antichrist.”
Tommy’s father was a great wheeler-dealer. Tommy had often witnessed him haggle for a half hour for a couple of pennies over the price of a jacket. His father’s adversaries were pretty good at it too, but his father was better, and he usually got the price his mother told him to get.
His tactics included charm, wit and self-deprecation. He had even used Tommy on occasion. Arms around his son, his father would declare that if he didn’t get his price, he wouldn’t be able to send his son to college.
“You never know, my wonderful son here might be your lawyer, doctor or accountant someday.” He chose the profession just a notch below the other person’s child. “Don’t you want to feel that you contributed to your family’s well-being? You’d be doing a mitzvah for yourself.”
His opponents appreciated the struggle for the betterment of their children’s lives, so with a sigh, a smile and a shrug they usually agreed to his price.
“Haggling is like fishing.” his father always said after one of these encounters. “To catch a fish you gotta give it something. So, I give them a good spiel and make them feel superior. I learned in Mauthausen that winning was surviving. Losing could mean death.”
Tommy felt uncomfortable watching his father in action. Tommy knew that he didn’t have the same skill or the hunger or the killer instinct his father had. He didn’t see the bargaining as life or death. He didn’t like the paperwork side of the business either. On the other hand, he did like operating the buttonhole and button machines. But his parents wouldn’t allow him to be just a machine operator. They expected him to take over the business. To be the boss. He didn’t want to and had already made up his mind to transfer out of Commerce into something else, though he didn’t know what. He knew this would be another big hurt in a growing list of hurts.
Tommy spotted Marianne walking towards him. It was always her hair he noticed first, how it glistened and cascaded. It had an undulating motion that hypnotized him. She was wearing a long-sleeved, tie-dyed blouse and her poetry night full-length skirt, the one he had unhooked, unzipped and slipped over her hips. The memory brought a smile to his face.
Maid Marianne, he said to himself and embraced her. When she squeezed him back he felt relieved. When they kissed, he was elated.
She looked him up and down. “Jeans and T-shirt? What happened to the chinos-button-down-shirt-and-tie man?”
“Too uptight. Left him at home,” he said.
“Ahh. Cool.”
“So, what are you doing here?” she asked.
He picked up on her playfulness. “I’m off to the World’s Fair with my girlfriend.”
“Ah, and, where is she?” she said looking around.
“She’s coming soon.”
Marianne burst out laughing. “Oh, is she now?”
“I hope so.”
“Well, can I hang out with you till she shows up?”
“Sí, Señorita.”
“Won’t she be jealous?”
“I hope so. She’s wonderfully dangerous when aroused,” he said. He reached for her hand as they entered the station.
The escalators took them down six storeys into a massive underground maze. It was bright as day with an arched ceiling and highway-sized walkways that crossed over the gleaming rails. The echo of the crowd and whoosh of trains bouncing off the walls filled the place with endless sound. He felt like an ant among thousands of ants. Though the métro had been completed a couple of months earlier, he had never ridden it. He preferred being above ground.
The sky-blue métro cars were packed. He didn’t like crowded trains and wanted to wait for the next one, but Marianne yanked him in. The train started with a jerk, then quickly picked up speed. It sped through a long tunnel that was not only worming itself underground but also under the St. Lawrence River. The air was damp. He felt a tightening in his chest that gave him trouble breathing. Tommy gripped Marianne’s hand. He was desperate to get out.
“Ouch,” she said and squeezed back.
“Sorry.” He eased up but held her hand firmly until the subway rolled into the station.
A Montreal Welcomes the World banner greeted the visitors. It was like they had entered another world, the world of tomorrow. An inverted pyramid, a geodesic dome, spirals, cubes, octagonal shapes and a myriad of colours exploded out of the ground. And he was with Marianne.
The long lines for the popular pavilions were trips around the world. People, speaking all sorts of languages, were talking, gesturing and smiling at each other.
“What was that about?” Marianne asked.
“What?”
“The hand crushing.”
“Sorry. Nothing really. It’s a long story.”
“We got time. This lineup is forever.”
He was quiet for a moment. He didn’t want Marianne to think he was a scaredy-cat. She waited.
“When I was a young kid in Hungary, I used to have dreams about being in underground mazes. I used to love those dreams but at one point, they turned into nightmares of being chased by growling boots with spikey teeth.”
“Weird. We’ll have to get Dr. Jung to work on that,” she said, reaching for his hand. The room darkened.
The 360-degree screen in the Bell Pavilion lit up. The blue sky everywhere made him feel like he was in the air flying. It gave him vertigo and made him dizzy. His knees went weak as he soared through the snow-capped Rockies, swooped low over the wheat-blond fields of the Prairies, over the enormously loud cascading Niagara Falls, over the evergreen forests of Ontar
io, down the ice of the Montreal Forum, home of the Rocket, and out over the ocean to Newfoundland. When the lights came back on, he turned away from Marianne and took a deep breath. He wanted to make sure that she didn’t catch his tenseness. One uptight moment was enough for one date. He didn’t want to come off as a total chicken.
“Wow! What a trip. What kind of acid were those filmmakers on? I want some of that,” Marianne said once they were outside.
“Yeah,” he said halfheartedly.
“Let’s go on the monorail.”
“This is the future,” she said as they snaked above the crowd. She waved her arms like a graceful, colourful, magical bird entering the American geodesic dome while he gripped the handle of the car.
“Dy-na-mite!” she cried out.
“Look!” He pointed to a charred and scorched bell-shaped space capsule.
“Looks so small.”
“It’s still amazing that a person was in space. To go where no man has gone before.”
“Are you one of those Star Trek freaks?”
He made the V-fingered Spock salute and smiled.
“So how come you’re not crazy about heights?”
He said nothing. They rode in silence.
“Nothing about Viet Nam,” she said after they were out.
“Why should there be?”
“They’re over there fighting an illegal war.”
“This is a place about people coming together, not about wars,” he said.
“Oh, yeah. Forgot. Disneyland.”
He hooked his arms into hers. “Okay, Comradess, we go to Russia,” he said with a Russian accent. “We become Communists. Okay, Comradess?”
“Huh?”
He pointed to the giant hammer-and-sickle sculpture facing the American pavilion from across the artificial river. It fronted a solid rectangular building with a ski-jump-sloped roof. They walked across the bridge. A Fiftieth Anniversary of Glorious Russian Revolution sign greeted the visitors.
“Da!” she said.
“Everything is big. Russia is big,” he said. “See, Comradess Natasha,” Tommy continued in his Russian voice. “America have space capsule, great Russian people have space capsule too.”
“Da, Comrade Boris Badinov. Imagine what it must have been like. The first man in space.”
“I’d be scared shitless,” Tommy confessed.
“I don’t see you as a person who gets scared. Except in tunnels,” she said with a smile. “And at heights.”
How did she know that?
“Have you ever flown?” she asked.
“No.”
“So, how do you know you’d be scared shitless?”
“I just know.”
“So how are you getting to Hungary?” she asked as they strolled through the pavilion. “Gonna swim?”
“No, walk.”
“Jesus, eh?” She chuckled.
“Well, he did start out as a nice Jewish boy.”
“Are you?”
“But you have to admit there is something unnatural about being thousands of feet up in the sky, in a metal tube. It defies gravity, the natural order of things.”
She squeezed his hand hard. “Lots of things do. But imagine being higher than the birds. Flying free, like in the movie.” She waved her hands again, and again she was a graceful, colourful, magical bird.
“Now that we’ve seen the world, let’s go for a hot dog,” he said.
“Nein,” she said. “I want a bratwurst. “
“How you feeling?” he asked as they sat on the grass munching Polish sausages.
“Great,” she said.
“I don’t mean this, I mean...”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, like I told you, Speedy isn’t speaking to me and he hasn’t told our parents.”
“What’s he waiting for?”
“Maybe it’s his way of punishing me. Maybe he’s waiting till he comes back from Hungary. Speaking of which, my father says that if you guys continue playing the way you’re playing, you’re going to get creamed.”
“Yeah, my father says the same thing. He says they’re going to make goulash out of us.”
“Maybe you guys should talk.”
“Speedy doesn’t want to talk. He wants to kill me.”
“Maybe we should break up,” she said.
He looked at her in disbelief. “Are you ending it?”
“Until you come back from Hungary, I mean.”
“No!”
“Okay, then I won’t. Don’t be scared.” She leaned over and gave him a soft kiss.
29
Tommy wanted to skip practice. He was even thinking of quitting. He didn’t like confrontations. He didn’t mind the physical kind, the shove and push in a game, or the goading, but even there, he would rather avoid them. Though he had to admit that getting Horvath in the nuts and getting the goalie to lose his cool had felt pretty good. Revenge gave him a rush.
Confrontations with family and friends were new to him. The vibes of hate he got from Speedy and his own anger towards him made Tommy anxious. It was more than personal. He both wanted and didn’t want to hate him, so he withdrew.
Speedy wasn’t in the dressing room when Tommy got to practice. He was both relieved and worried. Speedy was usually one of the first ones in. Everything about Speedy was speedy.
“Where’s Speedy?” Schmutz asked, half-dressed.
“How should I know?” Tommy snapped. Why did this boy-girl business have to be so hard? He liked Marianne and she liked him. He had even said he loved her though he had to admit he wasn’t completely sure what that was. Everyone was tossing the word around these days, including himself. Peace and love, free love and “Love Is All You Need.” He knew he felt great around her even if he couldn’t always figure out why. Sometimes it was her scent, sometimes it was what she did, sometimes the way she pushed him. Maybe you weren’t supposed to understand. He had read poets who had great difficulty with it and rhapsodized about it. He knew that Marianne made him horny, but she also made him think.
“What’s going on between you and Speedy?” Schmutz said.
“Nothing,” Tommy said, and finished lacing his cleats. The first practice after their fight was not pretty. Not only did they not talk to each other, but they almost came to blows.
Speedy came in and gave Tommy a hard look, sat on the bench opposite him and began to change. Tommy got up to leave.
“Hey, wait for Speedy!” Schmutz said. It was their ritual to leave the locker room together. Schmutz stared at both of them as Tommy headed for the door. “What’s going on?”
Coach Hus was usually first on the field. He’d run a few laps and do his stretches before the boys showed up. Today he was sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed. He looked like Buddha, without the belly. Tommy had never seen him do that before. The boys approached him in silence, not knowing what to make of the scene.
Coach Hus opened his eyes, and told them to sit. “Something is wrong.” He said it very quietly. “We haven’t been playing well. We’re lacking what got us the championship. We have to get it back. Our passes, our coverage, our support for each other and communication is non-existent. We aren’t in sync; we aren’t playing as one.”
Everybody had picked up on the strain between Tommy and Speedy. As a result, everybody was tense. They were making basic mistakes and yelling at each other. When practice finished the coach called out to Schmutz. “I want to talk to you.”
“What did I do, Coach?”
“Let’s go for a beer,” Schmutz said to the two after they dressed and were outside.
“No!” they said almost simultaneously.
“Well, at least you two agree on that. No choice. Coach Hus’s orders. I’m not joking. Let’s go to Toe’s.”
/> Toe’s Tavern was famous for cheap beer and for not asking for IDs. It was owned by the legendary coach of the Montreal Canadiens, who sometimes showed up and served the beer. Even a couple of the Habs were known to drop in from time to time. It was where jocks, the unemployed and veterans hung out.
Schmutz wasted no time. As soon as they sat down, he said, “So, what the fuck is up with you two?”
Speedy and Tommy just glared at each other.
“You two had a lovers’ quarrel?”
“None of your business,” Speedy said.
“Yes it is, ’cause it’s affecting the team.”
“He doesn’t want me to date his sister,” Tommy blurted out.
“You got the hots for Marianne?”
Speedy gave Schmutz a dirty look. “Shut your face, Schmutz. Don’t talk about my sister like that.”
“Yeah, I like her and she likes me.”
“So, what’s the problem?”
“I’m Jewish and she’s not.”
“So?”
“So, ask him.”
“So?”
“We’re Catholics and he’s Jewish.”
“My mother’s Protestant and my father’s Catholic. Big fucking deal,” Schmutz said and signalled the waiter for three more beers.
“It’s not the same.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“It’s also about honour and reputation.”
“Whose?”
“The girl’s and her family’s.”
“I respect her,” Tommy said. “And I really like her. I wouldn’t take advantage of her. Besides, she’s old enough to make up her own mind. One thing I know about your sister is that she’s got a mind of her own.”
“But that’s not what’s on your mind. Is it, Wolfie?”
“Fuck you,” Tommy said, balling his hand into fists.
“You don’t want to do that,” Schmutz said as he meticulously peeled the label off his bottle.
“What?” Tommy asked.
“You don’t want to fuck Speedy.”
Tommy almost burst out laughing.
“Fuck you,” Speedy shouted at Schmutz.
