Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  “He’s not staying here.”

  “I didn’t dare take a bath without stuffing the keyhole with Kleenex.”

  Uncle Harvey joined Joshua in the study again. His manner solemn, he asked, “What would you like to be when you grow up?”

  “Rich and famous and popular with girls.”

  “And do you think you can achieve such ambitions by stealing or through hard work?”

  “Hard work.”

  “I would like you to go to high school. And when you’re finished, provided you keep out of trouble, I will pay to send you to a good trade school.”

  “Geez. Would fur-trapping be considered like a trade?”

  “I was thinking of plumbing, maybe. It’s a very good business,” he said, sighing. “Meanwhile, you might just see more of Sheldon. I want him to be an example to you.”

  “I don’t want to get him into trouble, but when I stayed here that time he used to go through all his mother’s drawers when you were out, trying on things. Yeah, now I remember, and when I told him he shouldn’t do that he called me very bad names I can’t repeat, and now,” Joshua, said, summoning up tears, “he says I can’t come to his bar-mitzvah when he has it.”

  “Why, of course you can.”

  Hotch hotcha.

  “I would like you to think of me as your friend,” Uncle Harvey said.

  Joshua grinned, appreciative. “And, listen here,” he said, “you can count on me too.”

  “Life is a river we poor mortals sail on. Now you can drift with the current, ending up in the weeds of malcontent with the rest of the flotsam. Or, my dear Joshua, you can paddle your own canoe right through the storms of temptation into the ocean of plenty.”

  “Outremont,” he ventured.

  “Well, possibly,” Uncle Harvey said, far from displeased. “But that would mean hard work. It means avoiding the undertow. It means that you’ve got to start paddling right now. Stroke, stroke, stroke. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, sure. May I ask a question?”

  “Surely.”

  “When you said I would be invited to the bar-mitzvah, did you mean just for the kiddush in the synagogue or for the sit-down dinner as well?”

  “Both.”

  If there was a family quarrel, Uncle Harvey lost. Joshua was not invited to Sheldon’s bar-mitzvah. But he used to be sent his old clothes, which his mother altered for him, and when they were both teenagers he ran into Sheldon one day in the old Classic Bookshop and discovered that his cousin was not allowed to buy second-hand books. Because of germs. By that time Joshua was deep into books about the Spanish Civil War. Anything, absolutely anything, about the struggle.

  “Don’t tell me you’re reading Koestler?” Sheldon asked, sneaking a glance at his Penguin.

  “If I have any trouble with the big words, I’ll give you a buzz.”

  Joshua saw him again at a McGill dance. Then, only five years ago, Sheldon had phoned out of nowhere to say how closely he had followed his surprising career, how he had tried to phone him in London once, how proud the Leventhals were, never mind what some people said – and to ask Pauline and him out to dinner. They were, Joshua insisted to Pauline, obliged to go.

  “We are most certainly not obliged to go,” she said, “but you’re still enough of a boy to want to stick it to him.”

  “You should have heard his voice on the phone. Oozing envy. I love it.”

  “Vengeance is the Lord’s, not yours, Joshua.”

  “Dress classy. I want your breeding to show.”

  Sheldon had invited them to a restaurant in one of the new hotels, a restaurant oppressively elegant, where the waiters came dressed like eighteenth-century voyageurs. Snowshoes and muskets and stretched beaver skins were mounted on the walls. Tassels dangled from the twelve-page menu. When they turned up, maybe twenty minutes late, Sheldon and his formidable wife, Bertha, were already ensconced at a table, nursing frothy drinks. Sheldon had grown into a fleshy man with melancholy eyes, long sideburns, and a vandyke beard that obviously called for a daily trimming and was certainly combed out with a soupçon of Grecian Formula. Bertha was both mountainous and bejeweled, her black eyes fierce, and her fuzzy cheeks streaked by the application of too much pancake. Pauline, Joshua sensed, loathed her on sight. “I wonder,” she asked Bertha, before sitting down, “if you could tell me where I could find the ladies’ room?”

  “I only go at home,” Bertha shot right back, and from that moment on, Joshua could not meet Pauline’s eye without the two of them erupting in giggles.

  Matters weren’t helped any when the waiter, bewigged of course, his manner officious, asked Pauline for her order. “I’ll have a hamburger,” she sang out, “with french fries and a Coke. And don’t forget the ketchup, please.”

  Still waiting for the kettle to boil, Joshua opened the fridge in search of a lemon and noticed vegetables everywhere. Unless he did something with them immediately, they would wizen and waste. Mind you, these were ordinary vegetables. Store-bought vegetables.

  The vegetables Pauline had put in at their cottage on Lake Memphremagog had long since been consumed. He had turned the soil, she had planted the seeds, the kids had banged in the tomato stakes, and they had all plunged into the still piercingly cold lake for a swim. The old, sinking white house with the green-gabled windows and tilting wraparound porch had been in the Hornby family for generations. It was now Pauline’s. She had been raised there. She knew the overgrown mountain meadow where the wild blueberries grew and the place where edible mushrooms could be found. She could also lead the children over what had once been an Indian trail and to the shaft of the old abandoned lead mine, and him to the dark waters where the smallmouth bass ran in early June. She knew where the beaver dams were, and how to amaze the children by rooting out a beaver to make a repair. She led all of them to the brook where the smelt ran after the ice broke up. On the lake, they were dependent on Pauline for almost everything and she thrived on it. Pauline, his love.

  In the village on the lake, once a burgeoning mill town, founded by United Empire Loyalists, nobody asked Pauline if she were married to the Joshua Shapiro. They didn’t forget her first name. And they certainly didn’t tell her what she had missed, poor soul, having been deprived of a Jewish childhood. In the village, they had known and adored the senator’s daughter since she had been a spunky tomboy, and it was Joshua who was taken for an interloper. A tall, loping, bushy-haired stranger, obviously street-wise; a lean, middle-aged hawk with a hooked nose, a pockmarked face, who, practicing God knows what necromancy in depraved Europe years ago, had seduced their Trout and might yet poison the wells or abscond with one of their babes, its blood required for his Passover rituals. Beware.

  For years a wary Joshua had avoided anything more than the occasional long weekend at the cottage on the lake, her territory, and had argued instead for summers spent elsewhere. Combining magazine or TV assignments with family trips to Yellowknife, for the only golf he could tolerate, the Tournament of the Midnight Sun; Toronto, for the Queen’s Plate; the Gaspé, while he did a documentary on salmon fishing. Then, one evening in the spring of 1972, nine years after they had returned to Montreal from London, a determined Pauline had set the coffee tray down in the living room, told the kids to scoot, and announced, “You’re working too damn hard and you’re forty-one years old and you’ve never had a real vacation.”

  “But we’re going to Cape Cod in July. I’ve already arranged to do a piece on the fans in Fenway Park for the CBC.”

  It was his appearances on television, not anything he thought of as real writing, that had made him a household name in Canada. But he disliked TV. He especially disliked anybody who was good at it.

  “Oh, sure, and while we lie on the beach you’ll be dashing to and from the ball park, and when we get back you’ll be up editing at all hours, trying to meet your deadline. And all that time I’ll be renting out the cottage to people who will do even more damage to it. I want you to take the summer off. We
’ll go to the cottage, and to hell with Jane Trimble. We don’t have to see her. She’s certainly not keeping me away from the lake any more.”

  In 1963, the year they had returned to Montreal, Jane Trimble had been the first person Pauline heard from. Only a week after their arrival, the very day they had moved into their new house – a modest but sufficiently comfortable place, badly in need of a paint job, on a street of terraced houses in Lower Westmount an enormous, gift-wrapped rubber plant had arrived, addressed to both of them. “You open it,” he said.

  “Not now. We haven’t even put up the beds yet.”

  “Maybe it’s from an old boyfriend.”

  “It’s from Jane Trimble.”

  Late the following morning the doorbell rang as Joshua, unshaven, and stripped down to an old pair of shorts, was jimmying open a packing case; Alex was blissfully seated on a toilet somewhere, chanting that there was no paper; and a pregnant Pauline, in a loose blouse and ballooning skirt, was busy sorting dishes. Reconciled to yet another delivery, Joshua opened the door to find a slender, very fetching lady with raven-black hair smiling sweetly at him. She wore a silk blouse and a green skirt. “You could only be Joshua. I’m Jane,” she said, as if she were bestowing a blessing on the house.

  “Darling,” he called, hastily wiping the dripping sweat from his face, “it’s for you.”

  The two old friends embraced, they shed tears, and Jane offered her cheek to be kissed. “Welcome home,” she sang out, proffering a bottle of Dom Perignon tied with a red ribbon. “You look absolutely wonderful!”

  The Trimbles, Joshua was to discover, lived in an enormous stone mansion in Upper Westmount, on one of those streets of the very rich that loomed above them, hewn out of the mountainside. The champagne that Jane had descended the mountain with was chilled, but Pauline – rather rudely, Joshua thought at the time – didn’t offer to open it immediately. Instead, she set it down on the floor.

  “What do I wipe my bottom with?” Alex hollered.

  Pauline groped for a cigarette.

  “Now look here,” Jane said, “I’ve been through this kind of chaos. I know exactly what it’s like.”

  “Do you?” Pauline asked, impassive.

  “I absolutely insist you drop everything at six o’clock, and then Jack and I will pick you up and take you out for a proper dinner.”

  “That would be impossible,” Pauline protested.

  “But I’ve already booked a table at the Ritz.”

  “Alex isn’t used to the house yet. We can’t leave him.”

  “Nonsense, dear, of course you can.”

  Alex was heard from again.

  “Haven’t you got any toilet paper in the house?” Jane demanded.

  “Yes,” Pauline snapped back, her eyes welling with tears, “we do have toilet paper.”

  “If you need any shopping done,” Jane said, “just make me a list.”

  “We’re doing just fine,” Joshua said, sensing danger. “Honestly.”

  “See you at six, then.”

  “But we haven’t even got a sitter,” Joshua pointed out.

  “I’ve arranged for our maid to sit for you. She adores children.”

  “No,” Pauline called out sharply. “No, no,” she said, leading Jane abruptly to the door. “Another night, perhaps.”

  Pauline did go out to lunch with Jane the following week, returning home in a vile mood, but she adroitly sidestepped further dinner invitations not only from the Trimbles, but from any of her old crowd, until they gradually dropped off altogether. When Joshua protested, she said, “We came back here so that you could finish the research for your book, not so that I could get involved with that lot again.”

  But now, some nine years later, there had been an understandable and, he thought, healthy sea-change in Pauline. Approaching forty herself, she longed once more for the scenes and even the foolish faces of her childhood, and they were actually going to spend a summer on the lake.

  Pauline’s lake. Jane’s lake.

  In 1972, their first summer on the lake, a defiant Pauline sometimes dragged him out to nights at the golf and country club, where he was not so much introduced to as flaunted at the crowd she had once sailed with, the boys matured into problem-solvers, hard-drinking brokers, lawyers, and advertising men, the girls graduated from A. A. Milne through Dr. Spock to Julia Child (gourmet cooks, the lot), as well as tending organic gardens and raising money for the Knowlton Pony Club. The girls seemed delighted to have their prodigal sister, however spiky her mood, among them again. They took Joshua for an exotic: a Jew, a sportswriter, a TV presence. They appeared to be stirred by his snarling hirsute presence, the incessant clatter of his typewriter as they passed the Hornby cottage, and the rumor, fed by a calculating Pauline, of a constant flow of important phone calls from editors in New York. The Jewy network. The men, testing him, plied him with drinks, and were chastened to discover that he could outlast any of them at the bar, although, sufficiently fueled, he could become something of a menace. And then, inevitably, they were invited to the Trimbles for a dinner party. The guest of honor was a visiting German industrialist looking for investment opportunities.

  “Tattoo credit cards,” Joshua said, grinning.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The big problem with credit cards, as I understand it, is that people lose them or they are stolen. Think of what you could do to cut down overhead if you were to tattoo the serial number on a client’s arm.”

  Pauline was about to laugh when she noticed Jane positively glowing with understanding.

  “Of course,” Joshua continued, encouraged, “it would be necessary to test such an idea in the field. Germany, I think, would be ideal. You already have so many of the required technicians.”

  Riding home in the old outboard, an annoyed Pauline said, “You obviously set out to impress Jane tonight.”

  “Did I now?” he shot back sharply, but far from innocent.

  “Yes, my darling.”

  Although they attended the occasional Sunday barbecue at the Trimbles, a ritual on the lake, they avoided further dinner invitations, Joshua cultivating a reputation for being not only difficult but also something of a recluse. For more often than not he preferred horsing around with the kids at home to generously offered invitations to dinner at the country club or to the other cottages to bend an elbow, try a hair of the hound that bit him, or hoist a few after the sun had gone down over the yardarm (and it’s always below the yardarm somewhere, isn’t it, Joshua? Har har har). Drinks at the other cottages, he discovered, were unfailingly followed by a cookout and the remembrance of summers past. Hey, what about the night Dickie Abbott tied Jane’s bra to the top of the flagpole? Or that afternoon Tim Hickey got smashed and took out old Jack Trimble’s new Tanzer and ran it into Gibraltar Point? Or, Jane would add compulsively, watching Pauline, remember the night Kevin Hornby actually drove his MG up the clubhouse stairs, through the French doors, and right into the bar? It wasn’t an MG, it was an Austin-Healey. It was an MG, I was there.

  At the mention of Kevin’s name, Joshua noticed that the women would peer into their drinks and the men grin sheepishly at him, as if he knew, he understood. What he did know was that Pauline, bristling, changed the subject whenever Kevin’s name came up. Her name and Kevin’s were entwined on a tennis trophy that was kept in a glass case in the clubhouse: Mixed Doubles Champions, Eastern Quebec Region, 1952. Kevin, whom Joshua had yet to meet, was her younger brother, the family black sheep. He had dropped out of McGill law school right in the middle of his final exams. For some years now he had been rooted in Bermuda, where he ran a fishing boat.

  Late one evening the following March, the kids looking pasty, Pauline also in need of some sun, Joshua suggested a holiday. “What about Bermuda?”

  No, she said, looking directly at him. “My father used to take us there every winter. I’m not going back.”

  On a blowy afternoon only two weeks later, drinking in the Maritime Bar at
the Ritz-Carlton, he looked up to see a portly man in a beaver coat standing at his table, smiling tentatively down at him, as if he expected to be dismissed. The face was not one of those slack, disappointed, boozy faces he immediately associated with the golf and country club. It was jowly, the small eyes hard, the mouth surprisingly sensual. A cupid’s mouth. Jack Trimble.

  By this time Joshua knew that Trimble, a good ten years older than the others in the country club set, had served in World War II – not in the RCN or the RCAF, as the others would have, but in the army ordnance corps, a captain when he was demobilized in England. He went on from there to become something in the City, first with Warburg’s and then with Lloyd’s, before he appeared in Montreal in the early fifties, fond of saying, “I’ve seen the future, and it doesn’t work.” He didn’t fancy Attlee’s welfare state and he particularly disliked Sir Stafford Cripps, whom he pronounced absolutely bonkers. On the other hand, Trimble made no attempt to conceal what he described as his own humble but genteel origins, striking just the right note. “We weren’t exactly tinkers over there, you know. Or on the dole. My father was with the L.C.C. A building inspector.”

  To begin with, Trimble settled into a modest basement flat on Tupper Street, joining the brokerage firm of McKay, Pitman & Routledge, where he complained loudly about the unhealthiness of central heating and turned up at the office in shirts with detachable collars and, of course, with a furled umbrella. He was not liked. He was considered calculating. A striver. He had bad breath. He suffered from dandruff. Nobody invited him to lunch at the Café Martin or took him to a hockey game. But he was soon taken very seriously indeed. Trimble turned out to be most astute, his rise to a junior partnership breathtakingly swift. He had only been in Montreal for seven years when he acquired his own seat on the stock exchange, as well as a reputation for having the Midas touch. He was also, in principle, a most desirable bachelor, with what he called a “flat” in the Château, then the most exclusive apartment building in town. But his appeal was largely confined to Westmount’s matrons, never their most glittering progeny. He was not an amusing man, jowly even then, his brown hair thin, his flesh pink and flaky. Then he met the dashing Jane Mitchell at a cocktail party at the British Trade Commissioner’s residence and, to everyone’s amazement, they were married six months later. Trimble’s associates were surprised because Jane Mitchell had no money, not any more, and Pauline, when she heard about the marriage, was taken aback because the Trimble she dimly remembered had seemed such a stodgy man, middle-aged before his time, certainly too dull for a girl as sassy as Jane.