His mother’s answer was lost.
“Costly too, to be frank. I mean do you think I would be singing for my supper at that parvenu’s table if I didn’t have a wife and child to support? I would be living in a garret in Montparnasse, serving nobody but my muse.”
The dreaded self-addressed envelopes continued to rebound. From Partisan Review, Horizon, The New Yorker. Again and again somebody else, a detested rival, would win the Governor General’s Award for Literature.
One morning, three years after Moses had scored so high on the intelligence tests, he discovered his picture in the newspaper: the sixteen-year-old boy who had come first in the province in the high-school matriculation exams, winning a scholarship to McGill. L.B. reacted to the news with a low whistle. He removed his pince-nez, polishing the lenses with his handkerchief. “I see that you made ninety-seven in your French exam. Okay, I’m going to read you the opening paragraph of a French classic and I want you to identify it for me,” he said, turning to a book concealed behind a magazine. “‘Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans, est une vielle femme qui, depuis quarante ans, tient à Paris une pension bourgeoise établie rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, entre le quartier Latin et le faubourg Saint-Marceau.’”
All the same L.B. dropped into Horn’s Cafeteria so that old cronies could congratulate him.
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, eh, L.B.?”
Four years after Shloime Bishinsky had denounced him in a high squeaky voice L.B. published a story in Canadian Forum about a pathetic little Jew, unattractive to women, who had bribed his way out of Siberia, across China, into Japan, and from there to Canada, only to be knocked down and killed by a streetcar on his first day in the next-door place to the promised land.
Once Moses had asked Shloime, “How did you manage to walk out of Siberia?”
“Looking over my shoulder,” he replied, and then he tweaked Moses’s nose, making a plum pop out of it. “What kind of boy is this? Sneezing fruit.”
Sometimes, while one of the men was reading a long solemn essay aloud in the dining room, Shloime would gather the children together in the kitchen to entertain them as well as Moses’s mother. He could pluck a silver dollar from behind your ear, swallow a lighted cigarette, or make Bessie Berger squeal by yanking a white mouse out of her apron pocket. He could tear a dollar bill to bits and then only had to close his fist on it to make it whole again. Shloime was also capable of dancing the kazatchka without spilling a drop from the glass of seltzer water balanced on his head. He could comb chocolatecovered raisins out of your hair or stick out his tongue, proving his mouth was empty, and then cough up enough nickels for everybody to buy an ice-cream cone.
Eventually Shloime set up in business for himself, taking a floor in a building on Mayor Street, prospering as a furrier to the carriage trade. He married one of Zelnicker’s shrewish daughters, a social worker, and she bore him two sons, Menachim and Tovia.
Years later, flying to New York, Moses was unable to concentrate on his book because two men, across the aisle, were playing with pocket-size computer games, new at the time, that kept going ping ping ping. Both men carried clutch purses, the top three buttons of their silk shirts undone, revealing sparkly gold necklaces with chai medallions. Finally Moses couldn’t take it any more. “I would be enormously grateful,” he said, “if you put those toys away.”
“Hey, aren’t you Moses Berger?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I thought. I’m Matthew Bishop and this is my yucky kid brother Tracy. Belle de Jour Furs. You want to buy your chick a wrap, I’ll give you some deal.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My father once told me he used to shmooze with you when you were just a kid.”
“Bishop?”
“Shloime Bishinsky.”
“Oh my God, how is he?”
“Hell, didn’t you know? He left for the ultimate fur auction in the sky eight years ago. The big C. Wasn’t he a card though, eh, Moe?”
1951 IT WAS, and as soon as the news was confirmed at McGill, a jubilant Moses tiptoed into the kitchen, embraced his mother from behind, twirled her around and told her.
“Sh,” she said, “L.B.’s working.”
Moses burst into L.B.’s study, daring to disturb him. “Flash. We interrupt this program to announce that dashing debonair Moses Berger has just won a Rhodes scholarship.”
L.B. carefully blotted the page he had been working on and then slowly screwed the top back on his Parker 51. “In my day,” he said, “it would have been considered presumptuous for a Jewish boy to even put himself forward for such an honour.”
“I’m going to apply to Balliol.”
“D.H. Lawrence,” L.B. said, “who managed to get by with no more distinguished a formal education than I had, once wrote that the King’s College chapel reminded him of an overturned sow.”
“King’s is in Cambridge. Besides, I won’t be attending chapel.”
“This country has always been big enough for me. Mind you, I have published over there. The New Statesman. A letter about Ernest Bevin’s anti-Semitic foreign policy that led to a dispute that went on for weeks. You could take my greetings to Kingsley Martin. He’s the editor.”
EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER Moses flew home. L.B. had suffered his first heart attack. Once more he had failed to win the Governor General’s award, his Collected Poems not making the grade.
“It would break their heart to give it to a Jew,” Bessie said.
L.B. was in bed, propped up by pillows, writing on a pad. Pulpy, pale, his eyes wobbly with fear. “How long can you stay?” he asked.
“Ten days. Maybe two weeks.”
“I like the short story you sent me. I think it showed promise.”
“I’ve submitted it to The New Yorker.”
L.B. laughed out loud. He wiped tears from the corners of his eyes with his knuckles. “What chutzpah. Such hubris. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk.”
“If they don’t want it, they’ll send it back. No harm done.”
“You should have rewritten the story with my help and tried it on one of the little magazines here. Had you the sense to consult me, an old hand in such matters, I also would have advised you to use a pseudonym. You don’t want to be compared to L.B.”
“Would you like me to read to you now?”
“I’d better sleep. Wait. I see your friend Sam Birenbaum interviews writers for The New York Times these days. I don’t know how many times I fed that fatty here, but now that he’s a bigshot reporter he can’t even remember my phone number.”
“Paw, I’m sure he’s assigned to do those interviews. He doesn’t pick and choose.”
“And why would he want to interview me anyway? I don’t come from the south and I’m not a pederast.”
“Do you want me to speak to him?”
“Begging is beneath me. Besides, he’s your friend. Do what you think best.”
Things got worse once L.B. found out that Moses had given The New Yorker the house in Outremont as his return address.
“When they turn down your story I don’t want you to be drunk for three days. I don’t need it.”
Moses hid his bottle of Scotch behind books in the library. He sucked peppermint Life Savers.
“Bring me the mail,” his father demanded each morning. “All of it.” One night, after they had both gone to sleep, Moses sat up drinking in the library, going through The Collected Poems of L.B. Berger. So much anger, such feeling. He pitched red hot all right, but he didn’t always find the plate. Many of the poems were clearly vitiated by sentimentality or self-pity. W.B. Yeats he was not. Gerard Manley Hopkins he was not. Yes, but did the poems have any merit? Moses, sliding in sweat, poured himself another three fingers of Scotch. He shirked from deciding, unable to accept such a responsibility. After all, he held a life in his hands. His father’s life. All those years of dedication and frustrated ambition. The sacrifices, the humiliations. The neglect. Moses
thrust the book aside. He preferred to remember his father and himself as they once were. Man and boy trudging through snow to synagogue halls, holding hands when they chanced on slippery patches.
Each morning that the postman failed to shove a big brown envelope from The New Yorker through the mail slot L.B.’s mood darkened. Everything Moses did seemed to irritate him. “You’re not on death-watch duty here,” he said. “You don’t have to hang around day and night. Go look up some of your friends.”
But if Moses didn’t return in time for dinner he would say, “Did you come here to comfort your father or to chase the kind of girls who hang around downtown bars?”
L.B. was no longer confined to his bed, but he was wasting, fragile. Told to shed twenty pounds, he had clearly dropped thirty, maybe more. His clothes hung badly on a suddenly scrawny frame. He no longer hurried about the house, a man with appointments to keep and deadlines to meet, but shuffled, his slippers flapping. He seemed to be out of breath a good deal of the day and inclined to wheeze in his sleep. A frightened Moses grasped that his father, that powerhouse of his childhood, pronouncing at the dining-room table with the crocheted tablecloth, was actually a short man with bad teeth, a bulbous nose, and weak eyes.
Moses took to drinking heavily, often staying out until the early hours of the morning and sleeping in late. His mother spoke to him in the kitchen. “You mustn’t be a disappointment to L.B. It would break his heart his only son a drunkard.”
“What about your heart?”
“If you’re flying back on Thursday you’d better give me your socks and shirts tonight.”
Bessie Berger née Finkelman came from an observant family. Her father had been a ritual slaughterer. When he died L.B. had gone grudgingly to the funeral. “Your grandfather,” he told Moses, “was a very superstitious type. An apostle, if I dare use such a word, of the Ravaruska Rebbe. Your zeyda, the torturer of cattle, was buried with a twig in his hand by those crazies so that when the Messiah comes, blowing on his shofar, he can dig his way out to follow him to Jerusalem. Isn’t that right, Bessie?”
L.B. never brought her flowers or took her to dinner or even told her that she looked nice. Now her hands were rough, angry red, the nails clipped short. Embarrassed by the tracery of protruding veins in her legs she wore surgical stockings even in the heat of summer.
“Maw,” Moses asked, “do we own the house now or is it still heavily mortgaged?”
“Don’t talk foolishness. Go read to him. He likes that.”
The next morning, while a badly hungover Moses slept late, a big brown self-addressed envelope from The New Yorker shot through the front-door slot. L.B. heard the thud, recognized it, and immediately fetched the envelope and took it into his study, shutting the door behind him. He sunk into the chair behind his desk, overlooked by his own portrait: L.B. in profile, pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight. Well, he thought, it was to be expected. If his poetry wasn’t classy enough for Mr. Harold know-nothing Ross, what chance had a first short story by a fumbling neophyte talent? L.B. addressed himself impatiently to opening his own mail first. There was a royalty statement from Ryerson Press with a cheque for $37.25 clipped to it, as well as a note from his editor. He regretted that there seemed to be no copies of The Collected Poems in stock at Ogilvy’s, Classic’s, or Burton’s, but this was not the fault of the Ryerson sales force. Demand for poetry was small. Unfortunately there would be no second edition. A CBC radio producer, another obvious ignoramus, wrote that while he considered L.B.’s notion of dramatizing stories from Tales of the Diaspora for radio an interesting one, his colleagues did not share his enthusiasm. Would he try them again next season? T.S. Eliot, of Faber and Faber, his anti-Semitism a matter of record, thanked him for submitting a copy of The Collected Poems, but.… Infuriatingly, the letter was signed by a secretary in Mr. Eliot’s absence.
Finally L.B. reached for the big brown envelope from The New Yorker and slit it with his leather-handled letter opener which was a gift, in lieu of a fee, for a reading he had given at the B’nai Jacob synagogue in Hamilton, Ontario. Then he retired to his bedroom, removing his pince-nez, rubbing his nose, the small tic of discomfort starting in the back of his neck. It was noon before he heard Moses stumbling about the kitchen and called out to him. “Bring your coffee into my bedroom and shut the door behind you.”
Moses did as he was asked and L.B. took his hand and stroked it. “Moishele,” he said, his eyes shiny with tears, “you think I don’t know how it feels right here?” Withdrawing his hand, he pressed it to his skittering damaged heart. “My work hasn’t always been in such demand. L.B. Berger wasn’t born famous. I’ve also had rejections from editors who print crap, so long as it is written by their friends, but who couldn’t tell Pushkin from Ogden Nash. I have also suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Prizes going to hacks with the right connections when it was obvious I could write circles around them. You have to have a thick skin, my boy. You want to be an artist your motto has to be nil desperandum.”
Then he handed Moses the envelope. It had already been slit open and Moses could just make out the printed rejection slip clipped to his manuscript.
“The next attack could be curtains for me,” L.B. said, squeezing his hand again, “so let me tell you that I have always expected you to follow in my footsteps, but not to be intimidated by them. I have such hopes for you. I have always loved you beyond anybody, including your mother.”
Moses swallowed hard, his stomach rising, bound to betray him he feared. Like father, like son.
“Now this is not to be interpreted as a complaint against a good woman. A loyal woman. A real baleboosteh. But, to be frank, she has never been a true soul-mate for me. What a man like me needed was refinement, intellectual companionship, like Chopin got from Georges Sand or Voltaire from the Marquise du Châtelet. Whatever gossip you hear after I’m gone, whatever letters future biographers turn up, I want you to understand. I was never unfaithful to your mother, not in my heart of hearts. But I had need of ladies from time to time who I could talk to as an equal. My soul cried out for it. Don’t look at me like that. You’re a grown man now. We should be able to talk. You think I feel guilty? The hell I do. My family always came first with me. Costing me plenty. You think I ever would have signed on with Mr. Bernard, that behayma, if it wasn’t because I wanted to do right by your mother, but you above all? Do you have any idea how many hoops I’ve jumped through there? Furnishing that gangster with a library. Feeding that hooligan literary allusions for his speeches. He couldn’t even pronounce the words. I had to coach him. A man who sits glued to the TV for the Ed Sullivan show. You have no idea what I have endured at his table so that your future welfare would not be sacrificed on the anvil of my art. He’s coarse beyond belief, Moishe. Even a sailor would blush to hear him in full flight.”
Moses, about to protest, was dismissed with an impatient wave of the hand.
“Don’t start. I know what your big-shot reporter friend Birenbaum thinks. I heard him say it to you behind my back. ‘Who does he think he is the way he dresses? His hair. Beethoven.’ You buy a poet in this poor excuse for a country, it doesn’t honour its literary giants, you want value for money. Long hair, a cape.”
Moses fiddled absently with the flap of the large brown envelope on his lap.
“Hey, wipe your eyes please. Shed no tears for me. At least your father didn’t have to feign a hunchback or carry a jester’s stick with a bell attached to it. Moishe, I smell talent in you and I have a nose for it.”
“You had absolutely no right to open my mail.”
“And maybe you had a right to give The New Yorker this as your return address? Or are you so self-centred, Mr. Rhodes Scholar, that you didn’t realize it was meant as a provocation?”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Don’t you dare look at me like that. I’m your father and it goes without saying I forgive you this childish business with The New York
er. It mustn’t upset you either because it was only natural. You know your Oedipus and so do I. I never published there—not that I ever wanted to—so you would, administering a slap in the face to old L.B. Okay, that narishkeit is over with and you know what? You’re goddamn lucky. Had they accepted your story you would have gone on to write more formula fiction tailored to their commercial expectations. Moishe, you have escaped a trap. Now I want you to continue to attempt to write and when the time comes I will try your stories on editors who can be trusted. But let’s get right down to work, eh? Because the next time you come home I could have shuffled off this mortal coil. You know something? I’m really glad we’re having this talk. Letting our hearts speak out before it’s too late. I haven’t felt as close to you since you were a little boy. My page, I used to say. So say something.”
Moses fled the room, his stomach heaving, sinking to his knees before the toilet bowl just in time. Then he dug out his bottle of Scotch from its hiding place. When he finally entered the kitchen he found that L.B., celebrating his escape from a migraine, was already into his favourite meal: scrambled eggs with lox, potatoes fried in onions, bagels lathered with cream cheese. “Sit down, my boy. Maw has made enough for both of us.”
“Some baleboosteh, isn’t she?”
“I thought the conversation we had in there was strictly entre nous.”
Bessie, sniffing trouble, looked closely at her son. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Our neophyte artist here has had his first rejection slip and he’s taking it hard instead of appreciating how lucky he is.”
“I would like to say something,” Moses said. L.B. shot out of his chair, snapping to attention.
“Not all neglected writers are unjustifiably neglected.”
“How dare you speak to your father like that?”
“Here is a boy,” L.B. said, “once my pride and joy, bright with promise, who cannot accept responsibility for his own failures, but would lay them on his father’s white head. Well, I’ve got news for you. I didn’t make you a drunk. I deserved better.”
Solomon Gursky Was Here Page 14
