Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  What she failed to understand was that he loathed staying in every night, reading on the sofa, a habit not answering some dearly held predilection of his but born of penury. A good part of her attraction for him was that she could take him to Les Ambassadeurs or the Mirabelle, a world he longed to experience but couldn’t afford. However, having ventured out with him two or three times she swore never again. Moses, insecure in opulent surroundings but absolutely adoring it, coped with the contradiction by indulging in snide remarks about the glittering couples at the other tables. He embarrassed her in fine restaurants where her arrival had once been treated as an occasion, the maître d’ strewing flatteries like rose petals in her path, by never settling the bill before checking each item as well as the addition.

  Bored, he laid his book aside one night and said, “Tell me about Solomon.”

  “I was only two years old when he died.”

  “Didn’t your mother ever tell you anything?”

  “He drove her mad. What more is there to say?”

  Her clothes, acquired at the Dior boutique or from the Rahvis sisters, were strewn everywhere, left for Edna to retrieve. Lying on the sofa, absorbed in the latest issue of Vogue, she was given to absently picking her nose. Even more disconcerting, her thumb might find its way into her mouth and she would suck it avidly, unaware of what she was at. Her appalling table manners were explained, he thought, but hardly pardoned by the mad mother, the absent father. For all that, she had a way of teasing him out of his bouts of depression, increasingly frequent now that he was supposed to make do without drink.

  “What are we going to do for excitement this afternoon, Moses?”

  “What would you like to do?”

  “Maybe there’s another Arctic nut with rotten teeth lecturing at the ICA?”

  “Would you settle for tea with Hymie, if he’s free?”

  Sir Hyman seemed delighted to see them, but they had no sooner settled in when the butler interrupted with a whispered message.

  “Really,” Sir Hyman replied. “I wasn’t expecting him today.”

  A tall gangly man with a tight little mouth sailed into the room. Sir Hyman introduced him as the Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute and the Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures.

  Though Sir Hyman pleaded with them to stay, Moses made his excuses and led Lucy out, but he wasn’t ready for another night incarcerated in her flat in Belgravia. “Why don’t we go to the Mirabelle for dinner?”

  No answer.

  “I shouldn’t be alienating you from all your old friends.”

  “What do you do in that room all day? I never hear your typewriter any more.”

  “I am pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight.”

  “Edna found an empty bottle of vodka hidden in the bottom of the cupboard.”

  For all their bickering, she came to depend on him. Her anchor, she thought. Somebody who could dissect a script, or explain a character that she longed to play, in a manner that allowed her to dazzle many a director with her insights. But she, too, had begun to find their evenings together in the flat unendurable. Even so, she wasn’t going to treat him to a night out until she heard the hum of his typewriter again. So she began to lie, pretending that she was working late with a girlfriend on a scene when she was actually at Annabel’s, and he, grateful for some solitude, began to sneak drinks in earnest, topping the Scotch and cognac bottles with cold tea when Edna wasn’t looking. Then one morning she returned from her agent’s office flushed with excitement. One of the proliferation of new young directors had seen her in something on TV and had invited her to audition for a small but telling part in a new play by a writer whom even Moses had said was not utterly without merit. Her audition was scheduled for the afternoon but it was midnight before she returned to the flat, kicking over an end table, sending a bowl of pot-pourri flying. “He told me I was perfection. Born to the role. Why, he wouldn’t even bother auditioning anybody else.” Then, she said, he asked if she would find it too boring to join him for a light supper. Harold drove them to Boulestin’s.

  “Oh, isn’t this fun,” the director said, rubbing his chubby little hands together. “It calls for a proper celebration. Wouldn’t you say, my dear?”

  “Yes.”

  “We could start with masses of beluga and a bottle of Dom Perignon unless you object?”

  “Certainly not.”

  He told her wicked stories about Larry and Johnny G. When admirers stopped at their table he introduced her as his latest discovery. “What would you say to lobster?” he asked.

  “Why not?”

  “Good girl.”

  “Oh, and we’ll have to give Vincent a warning right now if we want the baked Alaska.”

  “Wonderful idea.”

  He called for a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet. Finally, when he was into his second snifter of armagnac, she said, “Forgive me if I’m being pushy, but when do we begin rehearsals?”

  “Glad you asked me that because there is a wee problem.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s nothing, really,” he said, deftly shifting the saucer with the bill on it closer to her place, “but we do have to raise another fifteen thousand quid before we plunge ahead.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I knew you’d understand.”

  She asked him if he’d like another bottle of bubbly.

  “Well, do you think your driver would be able to take me home, or is that too much to ask?”

  “Of course he will.”

  “It’s in Surrey, actually.”

  “So?”

  “Damned good of you too.”

  Then Lucy told Moses, “Once Mario had popped the cork, I yanked the bottle out of his hands, pressed my thumb against the lip, pumped it three or four times, and let him have it right in his fat face. Then I fled the restaurant, shouting at Vincent to mail me the bill. And now if you don’t mind you can pour me a cognac and you might as well have one yourself. I know what’s going on here. Let’s not pretend any more.”

  They drank through the night and well into the next afternoon. Between crying jags Lucy told him tales of Mr. Bernard, Henry, and her mad mother. Mr. Bernard, she said, had turned against Nathan when he discovered that his son, then only seven years old, had run away from a fight at Selwyn House. “I’m going to phone the Jewish General Hospital right now,” he had said, “to see if they’ll exchange you for a girl.”

  But the call had been unsuccessful. “I’m stuck with you. They don’t take cowards.”

  And then, Lucy said, when they had still been allowed to play with the other Gursky children, Mr. Bernard had told them that when he was a boy jumping into a corral churning with wild mustangs was nothing for him.

  “And look at the Gursky children now,” Lucy said, “every one of us a basket-case. Except for Lionel. A worse son of a bitch than his father. Henry’s God-crazy. Anita buys a new husband once a year. Nathan’s afraid to cross a street. Barney has broken my Uncle Morrie’s heart, he won’t even talk to him, and will probably end up behind bars one of these days. I don’t understand Morrie. The more my Uncle Bernard rubs his face in the dirt, the more devoted he is to the old pirate.”

  After Solomon had been killed, Lucy said, when his airplane had exploded, a weepy Mr. Bernard had come to the house to assure her mother that he would be their father now. “I swear on the grave of my saintly mother that I will treat Solomon’s children like my very own.”

  “Murderer,” she had cried. “Get out and don’t you dare come here again.”

  “Murderer?”

  “To the day of her death she believed the explosion was no accident. But the truth is my father didn’t deserve her loyalty. He married my mother because she was pregnant and when she miscarried he took that as licence to come home only when it suited him.”

  “Why didn’t she divorce him?”

  “Well they didn’t in those days. Or she might have if Henry hadn’t come alon
g. Or me. Oh, my father was such a bastard. She once told me that he would leave his journal on his desk where she could read about his other women.”

  “Solomon kept a journal?”

  “Yes. No. So what?”

  “What happened to it?”

  “It’s none of your business. Morrie, that creep, has it maybe.”

  “Would you like to get your hands on it?”

  “You and Dr. Hersheimer. Some pair. No, I wouldn’t. I know more than enough about him as it is.”

  “But he was your father.”

  “And you’re so fond of yours, right? Remember the first time we met?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there was that blank space for a picture on the wall—the portrait of that lady with the eyes of a different colour—the one that was stolen.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a mistress of his, obviously, and he had it hung where my mother could see it every day.”

  Finally Lucy and Moses fell asleep, wakening to a breakfast of Bloody Marys and smoked salmon. Lucy was violently ill and consumed by remorse. “I lied to you,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “The champagne in his fat face. I wanted to do it, but I didn’t have the guts. But I did leave him stranded in the restaurant.”

  Lucy phoned her agent and was told he was in a meeting. She called again at noon. Her agent was out to lunch. She and Moses moved on to Scotch and Lucy called her agent again at five. He was unavailable.

  “There are other agents,” Moses said.

  She fled the flat and didn’t return until noon the next day. “I got in touch with the director,” she said, “but I’m too late. He found the money elsewhere.”

  Only then did she notice Moses’s packed suitcases.

  “You can’t walk out on me now. I’m going crazy. Look, you can drink as much as you want. I won’t say a thing. Stay. Please, Moses.”

  In the morning she hurried to a gallery on New Bond Street to buy Moses a Hogarth etching he had once admired and, in another shop, a first edition of Sir John Franklin’s Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea. She fired Edna the same afternoon.

  “But I thought you adored her,” Moses said.

  “I did. I do. But haven’t you read about the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, you shmuck? Everybody’s talking about that Martin Luther King now. I found out people are saying it’s just typical of Miss Moneybags to have a black maid. I had to let her go.”

  “I hope you told her why.”

  “She’s so thick, that one, she’d never understand.”

  A couple of days later Lucy rented an office on Park Lane, hired a secretary and a script reader and began to option novels and plays and to commission hacks to turn them into film scripts in which she could play the lead. Soon avaricious agents and inept writers began to beat a path to her door, shaking the legendary Gursky money tree. She was consulted. She was listened to. All she had to do in return was scribble cheques. Fifteen hundred pounds here, twenty-five hundred there, two thousand somewhere else. It was amazing how little it took to satisfy them. Baffled, she asked Moses, “How much does a writer earn?”

  “One of your screenplay spivs or a real one?”

  “Okay, a real one.”

  He told her.

  “Boy, am I ever dealing with a bunch of jerks.”

  But one of them, a former juvenile lead in more than one West End farce, caught her eye. Jeremy Bushmill, in his forties now, was trying to carve out a place for himself as a writer and director. The first draft of a screenplay that she had optioned from him actually attracted the attention of Sydney Box’s story department. Lucy, armed with the notes that Moses had fed her, invited Jeremy to dinner. To her delight, he insisted on paying the bill. They carried on from Wheeler’s to the Gargoyle Club, which wasn’t the same, he said, now that poor Dylan was gone. But a sodden Brian Howard was there and Jeremy told her that he had been the model for Ambrose Silk. Lucy didn’t get home until two in the morning. Moses, pretending to be asleep, didn’t stir. But when he heard her pouring herself a bath he understood. He switched on the bed lamp and went to find himself a drink and a cigar and then waited for her to emerge from the bathroom. “Have fun?” he asked.

  “He’s a bore.” She fetched herself a drink and sat down on the floor. “What if we got married and had children together?”

  “I’m an unredeemed drunk. I also think you ought to complete your own childhood before thinking of taking on kids of your own.”

  “Who was Ambrose Silk?”

  “A character in one of E.M. Forster’s novels.”

  “Which one?”

  “Captain Hornblower.”

  In the week that followed, Moses found himself a satisfactory flat in Fulham, but it wouldn’t be available until the first of the month. Lucy was absent a good deal, usually coming home late and slipping into her tub. Later she clung to her side of the bed, careful that their bodies didn’t touch anywhere, her thumb rooted in her mouth. Then one evening, even as she was applying her makeup in the bedroom, the bell rang. It was Jeremy, tall and handsome in his deerstalker hat and Harris tweed coat; Jeremy bearing roses.

  “I’m afraid she’s still getting ready. Shall I put these in a vase, do you think?”

  “Bloody awkward, isn’t it?”

  “How goes the scriptee?”

  “She’s a marvel. Her notes are always bang on.”

  Lucy came home earlier than usual. “I have something to say to you,” she said.

  “You needn’t bother. I’m moving out tomorrow morning.”

  She wanted him to join her production company as script editor for an annual retainer of ten thousand pounds. “We would have lunch together every day.”

  “Lucy, you continue to amaze me.”

  “I hope that means yes.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Oh Moses, Moses, I’ll always sort of love you. But I need him. It’s the physical thing.”

  “I understand.”

  “I have something else to tell you.” As no director, she said, would give her a chance, she had decided to mount a showcase production of her own and invite a selected group of directors and producers and agents to see her. She had acquired the rights to revive The Diary of Anne Frank for three performances only and had rented the Arts Theatre for that purpose. Jeremy was going to direct, play Mr. Frank himself, and put together the rest of the cast. “What do you think?”

  “I think you should hire an audience as well and pay them to applaud.”

  “I want you to come to rehearsals and make notes and tell me what I’m doing wrong.”

  “The answer is no.”

  “Will you at least come to the opening performance?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “We’re always going to be friends.” She snuggled into his lap, cuddling. But he could tell that something was still troubling her.

  “Moses, who wrote Mr. Norris Changes Trains?”

  “P.G. Wodehouse.”

  “Should I read it?”

  “Why not?”

  SIR HYMAN KAPLANSKY came to the opening night. So did some producers, directors, and a surprising number of performers at liberty. Some had come out of curiosity, others because they were pursuing Lucy’s production company for outlandish deals; there was also a Bushmill claque, but still more were there in a perverse spirit of fun, anticipating the worst. Bushmill played the mushy Dutch condiments dealer, Otto Frank, as if he had wandered into the doomed attic out of a Tory garden fête. The other performers were competent at best. But Lucy was intolerable. A natural mimic, but clearly no actress, she played her scenes like an overwrought Shirley Temple with a disconcertingly gay Peter Van Daan. When that didn’t work, she switched to the Elizabeth Taylor of National Velvet.

  Moses wandered into the theatre dangerously drunk, but determined to behave himself. Unfortunately the excruciatingly banal play outlasted his resolution. Nodding off brief
ly in the first act he was confronted by Shloime Bishinsky in his mind’s eye. “What I’m trying to say, forgive me, is that such princes in America are entitled to their mansions, a Rolls-Royce, chinchilla coats, yachts, young cuties out of burlesque shows. But a poet they should never be able to afford.” Or a theatre. Or an audience. “It has to do with what? Human dignity. The dead. The sanctity of the word.”

  They were being noisy up there on stage, which wakened him to the troubling sight of an attic and its denizens trebling themselves. Poor Bushmill, emoting about something or other, now had six weak chins stacked one on top of another and maybe twenty-two eyes. Moses shook his head, he pinched himself, and the stage swam into focus again. Damn. It was that maudlin Hanukkah scene, overripe with obvious irony, wherein the pathetic Mr. Frank Bushmill seated with the others at the attic table—all of them hiding from the Gestapo—praises the Lord, Ruler of the Universe, who has wrought wonderful deliverances for our fathers in days of old. There were no latkes, but insufferably adorable Anne (the bottom of her bra stuffed with Kleenex) came to the table armed with touchingly conceived pressies. A crossword-puzzle book for her sister. “It isn’t new. It’s one that you’ve done. But I rubbed it all out and if you wait a little and forget, you can do it all over again.” There was some hair shampoo for the horny Mrs. Van Daan. “I took all the odds and ends of soap and mixed them with the last of my toilet water.” Two fags for Van Daan’s oafish husband. “Pim found some old pipe tobacco in the pocket lining of his coat … and we made them … or rather Pim did.”

  Once more the images on stage throbbed, trebling themselves. Moses squinted. He made fists, driving his fingernails into the palms of his hands. And there were four Anne/Lucys, each one of them out of tune, rising to sing:

  Oh, Hanukkah, Oh, Hanukkah.

  The sweet celebration.

  Suddenly there was a crash from below the attic. The Green Police? The Gestapo? Everybody on stage froze. Straining to hear. For a few seconds there was a total silence and then something in Moses short-circuited. Not rising, but propelled out of his seat, he hollered, “Look in the attic! She’s hiding in the attic!”