Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Three

  One afternoon in 1942 L.B. told Moses that they were invited to the Bernard Gursky mansion. Moses was ordered to have his hair cut and he was dressed in a new suit and shoes. L.B. explained, “It’s a thirteenth birthday party for the eldest son, Lionel, and Mr. Bernard said that you would be welcome. You are expected to play with the two younger ones, Anita and Nathan. Say it.”

  “Anita and Nathan.”

  “When you are presented to Mrs. Gursky you will thank her for inviting you to the party. She has a honor of germs. Polio, typhoid, scarlet fever. So if you have to go to the toilet you ask me and I’ll show you where there is one for the guests.”

  “You mean even you,” Moses asked, his cheeks hot, “aren’t allowed to use their toilet?”

  “You and that temper of yours. I don’t know where you get it.”

  The three Gursky brothers had built neighbouring fieldstone mansions on the Montreal mountainside. Mr. Bernard had three children. Mr. Morrie had two, Barney and Charna. And following Solomon’s death his widow lingered on in her husband’s mansion with her two children, Henry and Lucy. All of the Gursky children, secure behind the tall stone walls of the estate, had been munificently provided for. Once through the wrought-iron gates, an awestruck Moses, totally unprepared by his father, was confronted with undreamed-of splendour.

  There was an enormous swimming pool. A heated, multi-level tree house, designed by an architect and furnished by an interior decorator. A miniature railway. A hockey rink, the boards thickly padded. A corner candy store with a real soda fountain tended by a black man who laughed at everything. There was a musical merrygo-round (this actually rented for the party) and a bicycle track running along the perimeter. The railway, the corner candy store, the rink and bicycle track had all been built shortly after the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. At the same time the chauffeurs entrusted with all the little Gurskys (except for Henry and Lucy), driving them to their private schools, had taken to carrying arms.

  Some twenty children, most of them as petrified as Moses, had been invited to Lionel’s birthday party and they stood in line to congratulate him.

  “And what’s your name?” Lionel asked.

  “Moses Berger.”

  “Oh yeah, your father works for us.”

  The party was enlivened by clowns who rode around the grounds in a little circus jalopy. The jalopy, given to backfiring explosively, had an outsize klaxon that played the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (which, in Morse code, also stood for “V for Victory” at the time). There were strolling accordion players and saucy French-Canadian fiddlers dressed like the voyageurs of old. There were jugglers. A torch singer, appearing at the Tic-Toc, dropped by to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. Four middle-aged midgets dressed like six-year-olds sang “The Lollipop Kids”. A magician was flown in from New York. An Indian from the Caughnawaga reservation, appropriately costumed, performed a war dance and then presented Lionel with a tribal headdress, pronouncing him a chief. Mrs. Gursky immediately removed the headdress and warned Lionel that he had to have a shampoo before going to bed. Then there was a birthday cake, large as a truck tire, the marzipan icing cleverly done up like a Time magazine cover, featuring Lionel Gursky, Boy of the Year.

  Moses followed the arrows to the basement GUEST FACILITIES, just in time to collide with a flustered Barney Gursky emerging from the bathroom.

  Afterward Moses wandered past the pool to the far side of the estate where he came upon two children seated on a swing. The boy seemed to be his own age. The girl, possibly a few years younger, was sucking her thumb. Popping it free, she said, “Why don’t you go back to the party where you came from?”

  Henry introduced himself and his sister, Lucy.

  “My name’s Moses Berger.”

  Lucy shrugged, as if to say so what, slid off the swing and sauntered back to the fieldstone mansion.

  “What school are you at?” Moses asked.

  “I don’t g-g-go,” Henry said. “I’m not allowed.”

  “But everybody has to go to school.”

  “I have a t-t-teacher who comes here. Miss Bradshaw. She’s f-f-from England.”

  Not to be outdone, Moses said, “My father’s L.B. Berger. You know, the poet. What does your father do?”

  “My f-f-father’s dead. Would you like to see my room?”

  “Sure.”

  Just as Henry jumped off the swing a lady with tangled hair, black streaked with grey, shuffled out of the French doors of the fieldstone mansion. She was barefoot, wearing no more than a baby-blue nightgown, supported on one side by a stout lady in a starchy white uniform and, on the other, by a young man in a white jacket.

  “Who’s that?” Moses asked.

  “My m-m-mother isn’t well.”

  Then to Moses’s surprise, Henry took his hand and held it tightly, leading him into the house.

  The living room, the largest Moses had ever seen, was crammed with paintings lit from above, many of them in heavy gold frames. Moses recognized one of them as a Matisse and another as a Braque. He knew as much because his Folkshule teacher, Miss Levy, used the Book-of-the-Month Club News as a teaching aid and in those days the covers featured work by famous artists. But what caught his eye was a clearly outlined blank space on the wallpaper. Obviously a big picture had once hung there. Dangling wires from a lighting fixture were still in place.

  Months later Henry told him that the blank space had once been filled by a portrait of a beautiful young lady. When you looked at it closely you saw that one of her eyes was blue and the other brown. Either the painter had been drunk when he was working on the picture or he was crazy to begin with. Lucy had a theory of her own. “I think the lady wouldn’t pay him for the picture, so he got even by painting her eyes in different colours.” Anyway, shortly after their father’s death the picture had been stolen. Everybody had a good laugh at what real dummies the crooks were. They left behind a Matisse, a Braque, and a Léger, among others, and made off with nothing more than a worthless picture by a local artist.

  Enormous teddy bears filled every corner of Henry’s huge bedroom. The bed was unmade and Moses could just make out the outlines of a rubber sheet under the linen one. Then he saw the antique lead soldiers arrayed in ranks on the floor. British grenadiers on one side, French dragoons on the other.

  “How old are you?” Moses asked.

  “Th-th-thirteen.”

  “And you still play with toy soldiers?”

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  Actually Moses wanted to, and the two of them settled on the floor, Moses behind the French dragoons.

  “They lost,” Henry said, offering him the grenadiers instead.

  “What?”

  “W-W-Waterloo.”

  As the battle developed, incredibly detailed field pieces being brought into play, Moses really began to enjoy himself. Then, suddenly, he leaped to his feet. “Jeez. I’d better get back. My father will be worried.”

  “You’re my prisoner now,” Henry said, racing to the bedroom door, blocking it with his outstretched arms.

  “Aw, come on. Don’t be such a jerk.”

  Henry, biting back tears, let his arms collapse. “Will you come and p-p-p-play with me again?”

  “Offer to pay him,” Lucy said, standing in the doorway. She smiled. Her fist curling over her mouth, her cheeks hollow from the strain of sucking.

  “I’ll come again.”

  Moses ran all the way back to the party, arriving in time to stumble on its closing ceremony. All the kids were gathered in a circle close to the gates, their beaming parents waiting to drive them home. One of their number, a plump redhead called Harvey Schwartz, wearing a ruffled blouse and magenta velvet trousers, skipped forward and presented a bouquet of red roses to Mrs. Gursky. “This is for our gracious hostess,” he said, kissing a stooping Mrs. Gursky on the cheek, “who was kind enough to invite us here for a day we will remember forever and ever.”


  “You’re an angel,” Mrs. Gursky said, wiping her cheek with a Kleenex.

  “We wish the birthday boy continued good health and success in all his future endeavours,” Harvey continued. “And now, three cheers for Lionel Gursky!”

  As everybody but Barney Gursky joined in for three rousing cheers, Harvey Schwartz’s mother descended on Mrs. Gursky. “Harvey’s the rank-one boy at the Talmud Torah. He’s already skipped a grade. I hope he can come again.”

  Moses spotted L.B. pacing up and down, obviously in a rage. “Where in the hell were you?” he asked, as a smiling Mr. Bernard joined them.

  “Over there. With Henry and Lucy.”

  L.B., appalled, looked imploringly at Mr. Bernard. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t worry. How would he know.”

  “What’s wrong with their mother?”

  “Damn it,” L.B. said.

  But Mr. Bernard was chuckling. He pointed a stubby finger at his forehead and twirled it like a screwdriver. “She’s as cuckoo as a fruit cake,” he said.

  An agitated Mrs. Gursky joined them, propelling little Harvey Schwartz before her. “Tell him,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Bernard, but somebody has written bad words about Lionel on the wall of the guests’ toilet.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  STROLLING DOWN FROM THE HEIGHTS Moses told L.B. that Henry had invited him back to play again.

  “Absolutely out of the question. He’s Solomon’s kid.”

  “So?”

  “It’s very complicated. Family history. Old quarrels. We don’t want to get involved in that.”

  “Why?”

  “When you’re older I’ll explain.”

  “How much older?”

  “Will you stop now please. I’ve had enough for one day.”

  They continued down the steep twisting mountainside road in silence.

  “Solomon was a bulvon,” L.B. said. “A dreadful man. He came to one of my readings once and he was the first with his hand up in the question period. ‘Can the poet tell me,’ he asked, ‘whether or not he uses a rhyming dictionary?’ I should have socked him one.”

  “Yeah,” Moses said, and trying to picture it he giggled and then took his father’s hand. “Let’s go to Horn’s for a coffee.”

  “I can’t today. In fact I’ve got to leave you here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  L.B. sighed, exasperated. “If you really must know I’m late for a sitting with a sculptor.”

  “Hey, that’s great! What’s his name?”

  L.B. flushed. “Questions questions questions. Don’t you ever stop? Somebody I met at a party. Good enough for you?”

  Four

  When L.B.’s poem celebrating Mr. Bernard’s twentieth wedding anniversary in 50 was published in Jewish Outlook, it enraged Moses. A committed socialist himself now, he lashed out at his father for having betrayed his old adoring comrades to become an apologist for the Gurskys, one of Mr. Bernard’s lapdogs.

  “Calm down. Lower your voice, please. It just so happens,” L.B. protested, “that Mr. Bernard did more for our refugees and the State of Israel than any of those nebbishes.”

  But Moses would have none of it, going on to accuse his father of having become a nimmukwallah, somebody who had eaten the king’s salt. They quarrelled, Moses pronouncing L.B. pretentious for keeping carbon copies of all his correspondence. L.B. replied, “I want you to know that the first edition of The Burning Bush, the Spartacus Press folio, now sells for ten dollars, if you are lucky enough to find one. It’s classified as ‘Rare Canadian Judaica’. A real collector’s item.”

  Seething, Moses fled the flat on the tree-lined street in Outremont and turned to Sam Birenbaum for solace. He phoned him from a downtown bar. “Meet me for a drink,” he said.

  “Well …”

  “Oh, come on, Molly will be glad to have you out of the apartment for once.”

  SAM, WHO HAD ONCE ENCHANTED L.B.’s group by reciting Sacco’s speech to the court, had been the first of the children to disappoint them. An ironic turn of events, because no sooner did Sam become a teenager than he was the one the group came to depend on for one thing or another. Oh my God, one of the women would sob over the phone to Birenbaum’s Best Fruit, send Sam over right away, all the lights have gone out. Or the toilet’s blocked. Or the kitchen sink faucet is going drip drip drip all night. Or no heat is coming through the radiators. Or my sister-in-law’s car won’t start.

  So Sam would hurry over to replace the burnt-out fuses or pump something unspeakable out of a toilet or change a washer or bleed the radiators or fill dry battery cells with distilled water or whatever. And then, though they were grateful, sometimes effusively so, he sensed each time that he was somehow diminished in their eyes for being proficient in such plebeian matters.

  L.B. had not approved when Sam and Moses became inseparable in high school, always picking on Sam when he came to the house. “Could that be a book you are reading, Sam, or do my eyes deceive me?”

  “It’s a magazine. Black Mask.”

  “Trash.”

  Then Sam and Moses were at McGill together. Sam, some three years older than Moses, was editor of the McGill Daily until he dropped out in his final year and took a job on the Gazette, because his girlfriend was pregnant. Molly, who had wanted him to continue with his studies, enabling him eventually to tackle serious writing even while he taught, had offered to have an abortion. Sam wouldn’t hear of it. Ever since he and Molly had started dating in high school, he had feared she would find somebody more intelligent and less rolypoly than he was, but now she had to marry him. Moses recalled the day an exuberant Sam had broken the news. “Molly Sirkin my wife. Imagine.”

  They went to the Chicken Coop for lunch to celebrate.

  “Don’t look now,” Sam said, “but there’s Harvey Schwartz, who never met a rich man he didn’t like.”

  Harvey came over to introduce his fiancée, Miss Rebecca Rosen; who was wearing a gardenia corsage. “We’re just coming from Mr. Bernard’s,” Harvey said, letting it drop that he was going to join McTavish Distillers as soon as he graduated. “I consider it a great personal challenge.”

  “I want to ask you a question of an intimate nature,” Moses said. “When you are visiting Mr. Bernard’s mansion and you have to piss which toilet do you get to use?”

  “Let’s go, buttercup,” Becky said. “They’re just being silly.”

  AND NOW SAM, not yet twenty-three, was the father of a two-year-old boy vulnerable to earache, measles, diaper rash, kidnappers, child molesters, crib death, and only Sam could guess how much more.

  The two friends met at the Café André. Moses told Sam about his quarrel with L.B. and inveighed against the Gurskys, the new Jewish royalty in America, America. “From the Rambam to the rum-runner. We’ve come a long way, don’t you think?”

  “I thought you were friendly with the Gurskys.”

  “Only with Henry.”

  They drifted over to Rockhead’s Paradise, where Sam immediately phoned home. “Don’t look at me like that. I always like her to know exactly where I am, just in case …”

  “Just in case what?”

  “Okay, okay. Now I’ve got something to tell you, but this is strictly between us. I submitted some of my stuff to The New York Times. They’ve invited me down for an interview, but even if they offer me a job I’m not going to take it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Molly wants to go back to work next year. Her mother could take care of Philip during the day and I could quit the Gazette and try my hand at some real writing.”

  Hours later Sam, driving his father’s car, managed it back to the Berger house in Outremont without incident. Moses had considerable difficulty with the front-door key. Sinking to his knees, the better to concentrate on threading the key through the slot, he began to giggle foolishly. “Sh,” he cautioned himself, “L.B.’s sleeping.”

  “Dreamin
g of unstinting praise,” Sam said.

  “… Pulitzers …”

  “… Nobels …”

  “Statues raised in his honour.”

  “His hair, for Christ’s sake. Beethoven.”

  “Knock it off.”

  They sat down together on the porch steps and Moses started in on the Gurskys again. “I’m told the real bastard was Solomon, who died in the thirties.”

  “Molly will be waiting up for me.”

  “Can you arrange for me to go through the Solomon Gursky file at the Gazette?”

  “Why are you so interested?”

  “Remember Shloime Bishinsky?”

  “Of course I do. What about him?”

  No answer.

  “You want to shove it to L.B., right, comrade?”

  “Can you arrange for me to go through the Solomon Gursky file or not?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  But the file had been stolen. The large manilla envelope in the library was empty. And when Moses dragged out the old newspapers that dealt with the trial, he discovered that somebody had cut out the relevant stories with a razor blade.

  He was hooked.

  Five

  Late one winter afternoon in 1908 Solomon Gursky tumbled out of school into the thickly falling snow in Fort McEwen, Saskatchewan, to find his grandfather waiting on the stern of his long sled. Solomon was a mere nine-year-old at the time. Ephraim, whom the Indians called Mender-of-Bones, was ninety-one and running short of time. He was rooted in a tarpaper shack out on the reservation, living with a young woman called Lena. A team of ten yapping dogs was harnessed to the sled. Ephraim, his eyes hot, stank of rum. His cheek was bruised and his lower lip was swollen.

  “What happened?” Solomon asked.

  “Not to worry. I slipped and fell on the ice.”