Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  “She’s scared of you.”

  “Say I will bring her freshly caught inkfish for breakfast.”

  “Tell her yourself,” Joshua replied hotly.

  Now it was a somewhat flustered Peggy who pushed back her chair, rising. “Would it be too much to ask you to take me back to my hotel?”

  “Of course not.”

  As Joshua got up, Juanito cursed him. “Don’t come round to my bar any more. You have no friends on Ibiza.”

  Taking Peggy’s plump freckled arm, Joshua escorted her back to her hotel. He was eager to return to Juanito, to explain himself, but she suggested a nightcap. The bar was closed. However, as she still seemed distressed, he agreed to join her for a smoke on the dark and seemingly abandoned terrace. “It’s going to be as bad as Italy here,” she said, “all those perfectly frightful little men trying to pinch your bottom wherever you go.”

  There was a stirring in the darkest corner of the bar. Somebody broke wind. Peering, Joshua made out Peggy’s aunt, her mouth agape, a nearly empty bottle of Fundador on the table before her. Peggy snatched his hand impatiently. “Take me for a walk,” she said.

  Damn it, Juanito would be seething, convinced they were now romping in bed together. He led Peggy to a secluded spot on the hotel grounds and they sat together on a rock looking out to sea. Peggy rested her chin, doubling just a little, on her apple-pie knees and gathered her white cashmere sweater around her.

  “Chilly?” Joshua asked.

  “Mmmn.”

  “Maybe you ought to go to bed?”

  “Me, and my cuddly Mr. Pooh Bear,” she said all twinkly. “What fun.”

  Joshua smiled.

  “You can’t imagine how difficult it is for two respectable women to travel alone on the Continent. They all want to get their filthy hands into your knickers. On the beach at San Remo, the Italian men stroll about in the briefest of shorts. When they sit down,” she said, pressing his arm, “you can actually see their extraordinaries.”

  “You can?”

  “They have filthy, waxy ears,” she said with immense feeling. “Not like mine,” she added, tilting her face for his benefit, “all soft and nibbly.”

  There was a long pause and then Peggy bounded to her feet. “Well then,” she said.

  “Will your aunt be all right?” Joshua asked, as they passed her again.

  “Oh, let her be. I don’t share with her, you know. We have separate rooms.”

  They were now standing in the dark at the foot of the staircase inside the hotel.

  “I suppose,” Peggy said, “I had better move a chair against the door before getting ready for bed. Or, God knows, somebody might barge in and find me standing there. Starkers,” she added, giggly.

  “That will hardly be necessary,” Joshua replied in his most reassuring voice.

  “Mmmn. Quite.” Extending her hand, her manner unaccountably sharp once more, she said, “I would like to thank you for being so wonderfully gallant and rescuing me from God knows what.”

  “I will expect you and your aunt for tea tomorrow.”

  “Now that’s something to look forward to,” she said, and she started up the stairs at last, enabling him to hurry back to the bar and explain himself to Juanito.

  Drunk and belligerent, Juanito was astonished to see him. “You mean that after all that you didn’t even fuck her?”

  Joshua told him yet again that Peggy was a well-bred young lady, utterly respectable, and furthermore, he pointed out, in civilized countries it was possible to escort a frightened young lady home without taking it as license to leap into bed with her. There were other rules of social conduct, he added, than those that applied at Casa Rosita.

  “You know nothing,” Juanito said. “You’re still a kid.”

  Peggy and her aunt failed to turn up for tea the next afternoon, which baffled Joshua, but she greeted him warmly when he discovered her at work two days later in the bay of San Antonio. Seated on a canvas stool, her easel set out before her, a broad-brimmed straw hat shading her oval face, but her reddening freckled shoulders bare, she was seemingly indifferent to the onlookers she had attracted: some of the local children, the village carpenter, and two army officers. One of the officers, the tall, bronzed Jose González, was familiar to Joshua. An accomplished horseman, he was a native of Cadiz. Occasionally they drank together, González practicing his English.

  “I’m sorry about the other afternoon,” Peggy said gaily, “but my aunt wasn’t up to scratch, as you can well imagine, and I had no way of getting in touch with you.”

  “Would you like to have a drink when you’re done here?”

  “I’d love to, but fools walk in. I’ve already accepted Captain González’s invitation.” Peggy crinkled her peeling nose. “Do you think I’m in for another spot of trouble?”

  “Why, Jose is a gentleman of the old school.”

  González and Peggy became inseparable. They were seen together strolling hand in hand on the beaches after dark, cuddling in Don Pedro’s Bodega, Peggy chewing on his ear, or embracing ardently on the waterfront. They were seen everywhere, in fact, except in the bar of Peggy’s hotel, a sanctuary her bilious aunt never quit, disgusted busboys heaving her onto her bed each night. More than once, González, understandably unfamiliar with English slang, sought Joshua’s advice privately. “Is not ‘to come’ a regular verb, as if you invite, I come to your house?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Then what does it mean, please, ‘Come, baby. Come now.’ If you are already there?”

  Another time it was, “Are ‘extraordinaries’ a measure of the unusual or the street word for the male organs?”

  Infuriated with himself, deeply embarrassed by his innocence, Joshua avoided Juanito for a couple of weeks rather than risk his ridicule. When they got together again, however, Juanito did not tease him. He did not taunt him with Peggy and González; instead he gratuitously told him a story about some foolishness he had committed when he had only been twenty-one years old.

  Juanito, my friend.

  If I ever have a son, Joshua vowed, I will try to be just as understanding. Then he laughed aloud, it seemed such an outrageous notion. Imagine, he thought. Me, a son.

  8

  FALSE SPRING. AFTER A BENIGN EVENING OF MELTING snows, the temperature suddenly took a dive, the streets freezing again, but Joshua wasn’t the only one out there. Pinsky and his Russian wolfhound blocked his path. “Did you catch the National?” he asked. “Your friend Lévesque was shitting on us again. He said the Jews were edgy. They’re bums, every one of them. A bunch of know-nothing pricks. A Jew in their mind is a stereotype.”

  “Why don’t you leave, Pinsky?”

  “Where would I go? Tahiti?”

  “That’s the stuff.”

  “With Gilda? What would she do without a phone?”

  “Why not Toronto?”

  The worst thing Joshua could have said, as it turned out.

  “Don’t quote me on this, you bastard, but I was in Toronto last Tuesday with a bunch of the boys.” By “the boys” Pinsky meant pillars of the community. UJA heavies, synagogue presidents, Jewish Congress apparatchiks. “We flew in for a secret meeting with our counterparts there. The Toronto chevra. We had come to spell it out. The day was dawning when we might all have to leave Quebec. In our innocence we expected our brothers, remembering the Holocaust, to greet us with open arms. A little love. Fat chance. ‘Don’t be hasty,’ they said. ‘We’d love to have you here, you’re family, but it wouldn’t look good for the Jews to run, and to tell you the truth, things aren’t so hot here.’ Sons of bitches. Forest Hill dreck. What they meant to say is, they don’t want to cut up the pie. Except for the bunch that was into real estate. They wanted us to move right now, the more the better. They practically came in their pants at the thought of the action. How’s your wife?”

  “Improving.”

  “You never should have taken Jonathan Cole off the case.”

  “Oh,
really, and would that be your considered opinion?”

  “Not mine. His.”

  “He discussed Pauline with you?”

  “We jog together.”

  The next morning, a Monday, a fine, powdery snow began to fall on streets already encrusted with a scalp of ice. It was still snowing on Thursday, the morning Alex, who had just acquired his driving license, borrowed the car to return some records to a friend in N.D.G. An hour later the phone rang. It was Alex; he had been in an accident. “Are you hurt?” Joshua asked.

  “No.”

  “Was anybody hurt?”

  “No.”

  “O.K. Relax. And tell me what happened.”

  Descending Clarke, a steep hill at the best of times but uncommonly treacherous in winter, he had geared down for a red light at Sherbrooke Street and then obviously braked too hard, only to find himself sliding helplessly past the light and into the oncoming traffic. He bounced off not one, not two, but three cars. He was now parked round the corner, being questioned by the cops, one of whom wanted to speak to him. “Don’t worry about a thing,” Joshua said. “I’ll grab a taxi and be right over, but put him on.”

  “Clickety-click, clickety-click. I told the kid not to disturb the master at work, but he insisted on calling you.”

  “He did the right thing. He told me nobody was hurt.”

  “Right. But one of the cars he barely dented belongs to a real meatball. One of your more excitable co-religionists. A Mr. Henigman. I think he’s going to claim psychological damage. I figure he’ll also claim the collision rendered him impotent, but if you’re lucky he’ll only sue for five million. This has been a bad year for men’s suits, and most of those bastards are in trouble with the tax inspectors. Or don’t you read the Gazette?”

  “He’s in men’s suits?”

  “He gave me his card already, yet. Oy vey. He says, I drop into his factory I’ll walk out dressed like a prince. So if the meatball sues, we’ll get him on attempted bribery of a police officer.”

  “I’ll be right over, Stu. Hold on.”

  Alex, his cheeks burnt red by the wind, was waiting in the snow. So was McMaster.

  “Some day,” Joshua said.

  “Cold as a witch’s tit,” McMaster said.

  Taking Alex by the arm, Joshua pulled him aside. “You O.K.?”

  “Yeah. The brakes grabbed. There’s something wrong with your brakes.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the brakes, the car just came out of the garage.”

  “Well you just better have them checked out again, Daddy.”

  Joshua shook his head impatiently.

  “O.K. What do I know?”

  “I didn’t say that. Were they rough on you?”

  “Oh, no. But whenever I tried to say anything they just said, ‘Now you shettup, kid.’ Then the usual happened,” he added hotly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They looked at my name, established I was your son, and suddenly I smelled roses.”

  The morning Alex was born, Joshua had wept in the hospital men’s room. A son, a son.

  “McMaster is crazy. Hey,” Joshua said, grinning, “don’t look so long in the face. It doesn’t matter. One day get me to tell you about my first accident.”

  “Yeah, you probably hit four cars, and this was nothing.”

  Joshua embraced him, took the car keys, said he would handle things now, and sent him off to classes. He was late, surely, but there was no determination in his gait. Probably he was headed elsewhere.

  “You shouldn’t kiss your kid in the street like that,” McMaster said. “It must be embarrassing for him.”

  “He never protested,” Joshua said, startled.

  “How could he?”

  Joshua allowed McMaster to lead him across the street to the drugstore and they sipped coffee together at the counter.

  “Have you read my manuscript yet?”

  “Yes, I have. Stu, what you really ought to do is write your autobiography. Memoirs of an honest cop.”

  “Geez. Yeah. I’ve got tons of material. If only you could give me a hand with the writing of it.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Isn’t there anything I could say,” he asked, “that might change your mind?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “I figured,” he said, his eyes hot, and he asked Joshua if he had read about the incident in Dr. Jonathan Cole’s house.

  Yes. The item in the Gazette had caught his eye at breakfast. According to the report, the author of Your Kind, My Kind, Mankind, had only discovered there was something screwy the morning after his return from Banff. Dr. Cole had been in Banff with his wife, the noted local composer, presenting a paper at an international medical conference. His mansion, a graystone, was high on Edgehill Road, its parquet floors protected by wall-to-wall carpets. The grand piano on which Bessie had composed The Golan Heights Sonata was a Steinway. Bessie’s stirring sonata had first been performed in honor of Moshe Dayan, in town for an Emergency Bond Drive dinner. It was available, Bessie pointed out to the reporter, on records or sheets from Masada Music Inc., a nonprofit division of Catmore Holdings Company, an outfit whose name was derived from those of the two Cole children, Catherine and Mortimer.

  McMaster filled in the juicy details that had not appeared in the Gazette story. The Coles, he said, had not discovered that anything was out of joint in their house until the morning after their return from the west. Jonathan and Bessie had come home late and gone upstairs to bed immediately. Bessie without flushing herself out with herbal tea, Jonathan eschewing his Water-Pic toothbrush for once. Standing on her medically balanced bathroom scale the next morning, Bessie was startled to discover that she had ostensibly gained five pounds, although she had certainly not overeaten in Banff. A considerably revived Jonathan emerged from the shower and then absently started to slip into the suit he usually wore to the office. The trousers didn’t fit. They were incredibly tight; he couldn’t button them. Baffled, Jonathan studied the suit carefully. Yes, it certainly was his office suit. He tried the jacket. It wouldn’t button properly. Jonathan stripped down again and then stepped on the bathroom scale. Amazingly, he seemed to have gained five pounds. Yet he had jogged every morning in Banff and his stomach was rock-hard as usual. Distressed, uneasy, he slipped into his dressing gown and wandered downstairs for breakfast. Bessie wasn’t in the kitchen. He found her sitting on the living room sofa, weeping.

  “What’s ailing you?”

  “Can’t you see, lummox?”

  He couldn’t.

  “The furniture.”

  “Holy shit!”

  Somebody had cunningly rearranged the living room furniture. Nothing was in its accustomed place. And yet – and yet – as they flew from place to place, they could find nothing missing. That the sterling silver, however valuable, had not been taken was readily understandable: each piece of cutlery was boldly initialed “JC,” and therefore its ownership could have been easily established. But the interloper had not made off with Bessie’s furs, neither had he attempted to crack the wall safe. The hi-fi, the color-TV sets, the Nikons, the Bell-Howell film camera, the Cuisinart, anything else easily pawnable, were all in place. Not one piece of Eskimo whalebone sculpture had been disturbed. But, on closer inspection, the real act of vandalism, mindless vandalism, committed by the housebreaker became apparent. The A. Y. Jackson landscape, the pride of Dr. Cole’s collection, a picture he was fond of describing as serene, enjoyable beyond all his other possessions, had been defaced. Somebody had carefully removed the artist’s signature, probably with turpentine, and signed it with his own hand, “this copy by Hershl Sugarman.” Jonathan let out a terrifying cry. “Look at that,” he howled at his wife, “will you fucking look at that,” and he reminded her that he had been absolutely against Brenda visiting her family in Barbados while they were away.

  “Fortunately,” Bessie said, trying to comfort him, “whoever it was didn’t actually damage the picture.”
/>
  The insurance claim adjuster who had been summoned to the house, McMaster continued, was sympathetic but in a quandary. Yes, he had to agree, there was possibly, just possibly, a decrease in value, but the case was so odd he would have to take it under advisement. After all, the Jackson had been authenticated and the painting itself had not been damaged.

  “I suppose,” Joshua said, “this qualifies as one of your unusual break-ins.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Do you think it was the same bunch that got into Pinsky’s wine cellar?”

  “I figure they’re a bunch of kids, stoned out of their skulls, and when we catch ’em, they’ll turn out to come from good families, connected people, and they’ll get off with suspended sentences. So what else is new?”

  Shrugging, Joshua lighted a cigarette.

  “Once, I don’t know how many years ago, maybe twenty, a couple of meatballs broke into old Judge Gilbert’s place on Argyle. You remember Gilbert – Mr. Community Pillar. Reform Club, Mount Royal, etc. etc. Only he had a weakness. A sweet tooth. He liked being blown by under-age hookers in his chambers, him sporting his wig and robes all the while. His missus, on the other hand, liked nothing but CC, a secret drinker – she could go through a bottle a day, maybe more. Never saw her she wasn’t pissola. Anyhoo, these meatballs broke in, made off with the family silver and hey, hey, lots of unexplained cash from the wall safe. We took them in the lane behind Wood Avenue. A couple of Pepsis, real mon-sewers out of St. Henri, shit-scared. One of them has a gun and gets me in the thigh – just this much higher and to the right, and you’re now looking at the first soprano in the choir at Saint James’ United. Anyhoo, there was better than twenty thousand, unexplained, in those long brown envelopes, which is to say every time we risk our necks, bringing in a couple of meatballs, the judge does a little business with Brother Colucci or whoever, and they are back on the street even before we are out of the hospital. So he comes to see me in the hospital, your Judge Gilbert, says he’s recommending me for a St. George’s Medal, and slips me two hundred bucks. Wow. Hot damn. Two months later I had me a little NB. My nervous breakdown. You had yours yet?”