Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Five

  The night before the big brown envelope from The New Yorker shot through the mail slot Moses had been a guest at Anita Gursky’s first wedding. Actually he hadn’t been invited. He had been strolling aimlessly down Sherbrooke Street, hard by McGill, past the sullen grey limestone mansions built by the Scottish robber barons who had once ruled the country. Self-absorbed, he passed the former homes of shipping and rail and mining magnates who had flourished in a time, sublime for them, when there had been no income tax or anti-trust laws or succession duties. Sir Arthur Minton’s old house, now a private club; the Clarkson home, converted into a fraternity house; Sir William Van Horne’s former residence with its delightfully loopy greenhouse. And then he ran into Rifka Schneiderman, of all people. Rifka Schneiderman, who had used to belt out “The Cloakworkers’ Union Is a No-Good Union” on the other side of the mountain, but a world away, in the dining room of the cold-water flat on Jeanne Mance Street. Rifka, to his astonishment, had grown into a fetching if rather overdressed young lady, her once-unruly hair tamed by a poodle cut. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “I thought you were studying at Oxford or Cambridge or something.”

  “My father had a heart attack.”

  Rifka was to be a bridesmaid at the wedding. However her fiancé, Sheldon Kaplan, had been struck with one of his allergy attacks. Rifka, her mood sentimental, asked Moses to escort her instead.

  “Only if you promise to sing your song,” he said.

  Anita Gursky had met her first husband on the ski slopes of Davos. A New Yorker, the wayward son of a German-Jewish banking family, he hoped to make his name as a tennis player. Life came to the wedding at the Ritz-Carlton.

  Becky Schwartz leaned closer to Harvey. “Don’t look now,” she said, “but the Cotés just walked in looking like they smelled something bad. How can she wear a backless dress with those shoulders like chicken wings? I said don’t look.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I thought I told you to cut your nose hairs before we went out. Feh!”

  Plump, double-chinned Georges Ducharme, parliamentary secretary to the minister of transport, winked at Mimi Boisvert. “I’m going to be the first to boogie-woogie with the rabbi’s wife.”

  “Tais-toi, Georges.”

  “Do not talk in the language of the peasantry here. Speak Yiddish.”

  Cynthia Hodge-Taylor was there, so was Neil Moffat, Tom Clarkson, a Cunningham, two Pitneys, and other insouciant young Westmounters. Their far more punctilious parents would not have blessed a Gursky wedding with their presence, but for the young set it was sport, and possibly, just possibly, a chance to see their photographs published in Life.

  Jim MacIntyre said, “My father, you know, was one of the government prosecutors in the trial. When Solomon was confronted by a particularly damning piece of testimony all he could say was I AM THAT I AM, and right there, my father swore, the temperature in the courtroom dropped by twenty degrees. The judge looked like he was going to have a stroke.”

  There were thousands of red roses in vases all over the ballroom. At the appropriate moment, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians swung into “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, and Mr. Bernard took to the floor for the first dance, tears streaming down his face as he foxtrotted cheek-to-cheek with Anita.

  Moses danced with Kathleen O’Brien, whom he had chatted with more than once at The Lantern. “Come on,” she said, “We’re going to get some fresh air.”

  “I’m not drunk.”

  “Your dad wrote a poem for the bride and groom. In exactly five minutes Becky Schwartz will step up to the microphone and read it aloud.”

  Outside, Moses said, “Well, he always wanted to be a poet laureate.”

  “I hope you don’t drink like this in Oxford. I believe your father is counting on you to come home with a First.”

  “Actually nothing would delight him more than my being sent down.”

  “Now now now.”

  Back in the ballroom she led him to the table where Mr. Morrie was rooted with his wife, Ida, and their enormous pimply daughter, Charna. “He’s the sweet one,” Kathleen whispered before making the introductions. “Be nice.”

  “How’s your father?” Mr. Morrie asked.

  “Getting better.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “Is his father the writer?” Charna asked.

  “And how.”

  “Big deal,” she said, glaring at Moses. “I could write a book too. I just wouldn’t know how to put it into words.”

  “Bless you,” Ida said.

  Mr. Morrie squeezed Moses’s arm. “Don’t think I don’t know all about you from your father, Mr. Rhodes Scholar.”

  Responding to a kick from Kathleen, Moses said, “Oh yes, thank you,” but he was watching Barney, who was flirting with Rifka Schneiderman on the dance floor.

  Barney, they said, still hoped to be the one to draw the sword from the stone, becoming McTavish’s next CEO. Certainly he had done everything possible to establish his claim. While Lionel fiddled, he had driven a truck for McTavish. He had spent a summer in Skye, working in the Loch Edmond’s Mist distillery, starting out by raking the barley floor, absorbing what he could in the mash house and then moving on to tend to the worm tubs in the stillhouse. On his return to Canada, he had become an expert on cooperage, and travelled out west to sit in on grain purchase negotiations.

  Rifka quit the dance floor, leaving Barney standing there in the middle of a number, laughing too loud. Then Barney joined Lionel, the two of them swooping from table to table, drawing closer.

  Lionel had bet Barney five thousand dollars that he could drink the most champagne without upchucking and that he could get laid before midnight without having to pay for it. Bottle in hand, he bounced from table to table, Barney trailing after. Lionel saying, “Hi, Jewel, want to stroke my cock?” And at another table, “Any of you girls want to fuck?”

  (Years later a best-selling hagiographer of the family wrote, in a chapter titled “Lionel as Prince Hal”, that though many took Lionel to be a vulgarian at the time, lacking the royal jelly, the truth is “he was a lonely young man, lonely as a lighthouse keeper on Valentine’s Day, overwhelmed at a tender age by the secret knowledge that one bright dawn his would be the keys to the Gursky kingdom, even though he would have preferred breeding horses in Elysian fields.” An abiding passion, a footnote pointed out, that led to the establishment of The Sweet Sue Stables in Louisville, Kentucky, the name changed to Big Cat after his first divorce.)

  Finally the Gursky scions swayed over the same table and Barney heard his cousin say, “But everything’s settled. It’s all going to be mine one day. So think carefully before you turn me down, honey.”

  Barney grabbed Lionel by the lapels and shook him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Didn’t your father tell you?”

  Barney, the colour drained from his face, descended on Mr.Morrie’s table, but he wasn’t there. Barney found him in the men’s room, washing his hands. Blind to the presence of another man in one of the cubicles, Barney began to curse his father for allowing Mr. Bernard to swindle him out of his patrimony. Soaked in sweat, his chest heaving, Barney said, “If Uncle Bernard put a saucer of milk on the floor you would get down on all fours and lick it up.”

  “Please, Barney, don’t be angry with me. I love you.”

  “Big fucken deal.”

  “When you are thirty-one years old you will inherit millions.”

  “I’ll have the money right now or I’ll sue. In fact I might fight this

  in court anyway.”

  “But, yingele, I signed the papers years ago,” Mr. Morrie said, reaching out to touch him.

  “You think it would be difficult to prove that you were mentally incompetent even then?” Barney asked, knocking his father’s hands away and fleeing the men’s room.

  Moses, in the cubicle, heard the door slam and thought both men had left. But when he came out Mr. Morrie was still there, looking daze
d.

  “Oh, my. You must have heard everything.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Barney’s a good boy, the best, he just had too much to drink tonight.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “I’m feeling, well, a little dizzy. You could help me back to my table maybe.”

  Moses took his arm.

  “Barney’s an outstanding person. I want you to know that.”

  Six

  1973. Following his humiliating altercation with Beatrice at the Ritz, the insufferable Tom Clarkson behaving impeccably, which only exacerbated matters, Moses had gone out on a bender. Ten days later he found himself being shaken awake by a black cleaning lady. He was lying in a puddle of something vile in the bathroom of a sleazy bar in Hull, his hair knotted and caked with blood, his jacket torn, his wallet open on the cracked tiles, emptied of cash and credit cards. Carleton dismissed him.

  Idiot. Blind man. Cuckold. Driving back to the Townships, Moses missed exit 106 and had to continue on the autoroute as far as Magog, backtracking to his cabin, his Toyota riding low, laden with hastily packed suitcases and all the books he had accumulated in Ottawa. A telegram was tacked to his front door. From Henry. The ravens were gathering. Well, the hell with that.

  Moses got right back into his car and went to pick up his mail. Legion Hall, who fetched it for him, usually dumped it at The Caboose when he was away.

  Legion Hall was an imaginative man. According to Strawberry, Legion Hall and his two brothers, Glen and Willy, had joined the army in the spring of 1940. They were sorting out the barn for their father, shovelling cowshit, black flies feasting on them, blood streaming down their faces, when suddenly Glen threw down his pitchfork. “This guy on the radio this morning said democracy was in peril or some crap like that. He says our way of life is threatened.”

  “About time too.”

  “I’m joining up.”

  “Good thinking. Me too.”

  “Mister Man.”

  Glen’s head was shot off at Dieppe and Willy was blown apart by a land-mine in Italy. Legion Hall, however, saw real action only once, in Holland, and decided it wasn’t for him. The next morning a colonel found him on his hands and knees with a hammer and chisel outside the field mess tent. “What are you doing, soldier?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing, you prick? I’m cutting the grass.” It was the guardhouse for him. “And then,” Strawberry said, “this bunch of tests he done for a Jew doctor before Legion Hall was discharged with a twenty-five percent mental disability pension. I woulda scored him fifty percent easy.”

  Now Legion Hall, wearing his regimental beret at a jaunty angle, worked all the bars on the 243 and 105 on Remembrance Day, selling poppies, possibly even turning in some of the money.

  For the most part, Moses’s mail was made up of magazines: The New York Review of Books, the TLS, the Economist, the New Republic, and so on. He retrieved it, retreated to his cabin, flopped down on his unmade bed, and slept for eighteen hours, wakening at seven the next morning. Following his second pot of black coffee, fortified with cognac, he sat down at his desk. Sorting out papers he stumbled on a letter he had been unable to find for weeks. It was from the lady of the eyes of a different colour. “Having rambled on at such unpardonable length and to no point, let alone catharsis,” Diana McClure’s letter concluded, “I have taken the liberty of having Mr. Hobson send you a memento. Consider it compensation for my having been elusive for so long and finally proving such a bore. Are you, perhaps, a reader of detective fiction? Patricia High-smith, Ruth Rendell, P.D. James. I am addicted to their work, but I have always found the mysteries far more compelling than their resolutions, and most assuredly that is also the case with my belated ‘confessions.’ The cherry wood table I have arranged to have sent to you (delivery prepaid no matter what they tell you) is the one Solomon finished for me on the Friday that I was unable to pick up the bookcase. Central heating tends to suck the moisture out of the wood. It should be treated regularly with beeswax (available from Eddy’s Hardware, 4412 Sherbrooke St. W.).

  “To this day I still vacillate between considering my failure to appear for tea with Solomon that Friday as most unfortunate or, conversely, a blessing for both of us. Of course this is all idle conjecture, quite useless now, but seated in my wheelchair overlooking the garden I can no longer tend, I am much given to it. The roses are badly in need of deadheading, the pods swollen. A boy with a fishing pole has just passed on his way to the brook, his eyes understandably averted. Dr. McAlpine says my hair will grow in again, but I doubt that there will be time enough. I must stop this rambling right away. Goodbye, Moses Berger, and do please remember to treat the table as instructed. Perhaps you could make a note in your desk diary or wall calendar.”

  Moses continued to rummage through his desk. In a bottom drawer filled with angry letters-to-the-editor he had written but never mailed, he came across his silver cognac flask and a cheque for one hundred pounds from the TLS, payment for a book review that he had given up for lost. Then, under everything else, he found Mr. Morrie’s handwritten memoir. Getting him to compose it, Moses recalled, had required some fancy footwork. The result was pathetic, a masterpiece of evasion. But things could still be learned from it, even as Kremlinologists pried the occasional pearl of truth out of Pravda. The analogy pleased Moses. For after all was said and done what he had become, if anything, beyond a degenerate drunk and cuckold, was a Gurskyologist. The only one armed with flint among all the hagiographers in the woodpile.

  Moses moved to the cherry wood table, his most prized possession, shook the pages free of mouse droppings and began to skim through them. Mr. Morrie, in his opening paragraph, ventured that it was his intention to hit the high spots in his history of the development of the Gursky empire, begging indulgence in advance for any omissions, which could be blamed on an old man’s faulty memory. So in 122 closely written pages there was not a single mention of Bert Smith. Mr. Morrie started out by saying that his father, Aaron Gursky, had decided to emigrate to Canada in 1897 (with his wife, Fanny, who was five months pregnant with Bernard) “so that he could raise his family under the British flag, which was famous for fair play.” But in fact that wasn’t exactly how it happened.

  Raw, illicit whisky was not only the well-head of the Gursky billions, it was also what indirectly floated Ephraim’s legal descendants to Canada in the first place. Moses was able to establish as much through a close study of the Royal Commission Report on the Liquor Trade, circa 1860–70, and by chasing down every available history of the formative years of the North West Mounted Police. This led him to RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, where he sweettalked his way into the archives by flaunting his Rhodes scholarship, his First in History at Balliol, and pretending that he was researching an essay on Fort Whoop-Up for History Today.

  Sorting through old diaries, journals, and charge sheets until his eyes ached, Moses had been rewarded by the discovery that, in 1861, Ephraim was ensconced in a log cabin in the foothills of the Rockies with a Peigan squaw and three children. He turned his hand to making Whoop-Up Bug Juice from a recipe that called for a handful or two of red pepper, a half-gallon of Jamaica ginger, a quart of molasses, say a pound of chewing tobacco, and a quart of whisky. This lethal brew was then diluted with creek water, heated to the boiling point, and carted off to a tent outside Fort Whoop-Up, hard by the Montana border. Ephraim peddled it by the cupful to Blackfoot Indians in exchange for fur and horses. It was the unhappy combination of unquenchable Blackfoot thirst and an endless need for horses to satisfy it that led to a problem. The Indians were driven to stealing horses from settlers and Hudson’s Bay forts. Crazy drunk they also burned down a trading post or two for sport. They robbed and they raped, and Ephraim, according to one report, had to shoot a couple of them as an example when they had the effrontery to demand undiluted whisky, that is to say firewater that could be ignited by a match.

  There were other skirmishes, more shootings and
burnings, and eventually news of the unrest reached Canada’s first prime minister in faraway Ottawa. Sir John A. Macdonald, a prodigious drinker himself, created something called the Mounted Rifles to cope with the trouble. However, Washington took umbrage at the aggressive Canadians imposing an armed force of three hundred men so close to the border. The resourceful Sir John A. reached for his pen and renamed the force the Mounted Police. The fabled riders of the plain were born:

  We muster but three hundred

  In all this Great Lone Land

  Which stretches from Superior’s shore

  To where the Rockies stand;

  But not one heart doth falter,

  No coward voice complains,

  Tho’ all too few in numbers are

  The Riders of the Plains.

  Our mission is to raise the Flag

  Of Britain’s Empire here,

  Restrain the lawless savage,

  And protect the Pioneer;

  And ’tis a proud and daring trust,

  To hold these vast Domains,

  With but three hundred Mounted Men,

  The Riders of the Plains.

  Before the North West Mounted Police ever finished their punishing eight-hundred-mile-long march to Fort Whoop-Up, rampaging American whisky-runners slaughtered a band of Assiniboines at Battle Creek. Ephraim, at this point, was being supplied with rotgut whisky out of Fort Benton. Rather than wait to explain himself to the newly formed police corps, possibly being required to answer for the death of two Blackfoot, he obviously thought it more politic to skedaddle. And then, for a long while, Moses lost him, unaware of where he went next.

  An enigma that was resolved when Moses came by the journal wherein Solomon recounted the tales he had been told by his grandfather on their journey to the Polar Sea. Tales filtered through an old man’s faulty memory and written down by Solomon many years later. Tales that Moses suspected had been burnished in the service of not one, but two outsized egos.

  In any event, according to Solomon, his grandfather next ventured as far as Russia, disposing of a cargo of beaver pelts in St. Petersburg, and then carrying on to Minsk, where his parents had escaped from. Walking out, early in the reign of Nicholas I, when among other decrees it was ruled that Jewish children should be forcibly taken from their parents at the age of twelve and be compelled to serve in the czar’s army for as long as twenty-five years.