Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Harvey waited until ten o’clock in the morning before he phoned Lionel. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said.

  Then Harvey phoned his banker in Geneva. “I want to know who’s behind something called Corvus Investment Trust.”

  “You aren’t the only one,” the banker said.

  Five

  “Here, if you are interested,” he had said, “is a list of the complete contents of the safe, properly notarized.”

  “And were you there when the safe was opened, Mr. Schwartz?”

  “There was no envelope addressed to you.”

  So Kathleen O’Brien, who had been in charge of transcribing the tapes Mr. Bernard had made with Harvey, slipped the lot into her tote bag when she left the Bernard Gursky Tower on Dorchester Boulevard for the last time.

  Tim Callaghan took her to the Café Martin for lunch and listened to her story with interest.

  “But what was supposed to be in the envelope?” he asked.

  “A certified cheque. Shares. I don’t know how many. All those years of my life. God in heaven.” She lit one cigarette off another. “You don’t understand, Tim. It isn’t the money.”

  “I never thought that.”

  “I adored the old bastard. Go ahead. Laugh.”

  “You’ve hardly eaten a thing and you’re drinking far too much.”

  “We held hands in the movies. Once every summer we sneaked off to Belmont Park together. The Hall of Mirrors. Dodge ’em cars. The House of Horrors …”

  Her voice broke. Callaghan waited.

  “There was a side of him the rest of you didn’t know.”

  “Only you.”

  “Yes. Only me. Christ.”

  “Easy now.”

  “He wouldn’t lie to me. Somebody stole the envelope. The little runt, probably. He didn’t like you.”

  “Schwartz, for God’s sake.”

  “Mr. B. Because you were Solomon’s man, he said. His brother’s death haunted him.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “I want to know what Moses Berger is up to out there in the woods.”

  “Wrestling with his Gursky demons. Hoping to justify man’s ways to God.”

  “He’s been here, there, and everywhere, digging up dirt on the family.”

  “He’d like to talk to you.”

  “No way.”

  Kathleen phoned Mr. Morrie. He invited her over to his house and sat with her in the garden, where he knew that Libby could see him from her bedroom window.

  “I want to know if you were there when the safe was opened, Mr. Morrie.”

  “It pains me right here to tell you this,” Mr. Morrie said, hand on his heart, “but there was no envelope.”

  “Couldn’t Harvey have pinched it earlier?”

  “He didn’t have the combination to the safe.”

  “Maybe Mr. B. just never got the time to put the envelope in the safe and it’s still among his papers in the house.”

  “Didn’t I look?”

  “Libby could have it.”

  “Kathleen,” Mr. Morrie said, tears welling in his eyes, “forgive me, but I can’t stand to see you suffering like this. I have to tell you something hurtful. He also promised an envelope to a young lady in the New York office.”

  “The hell he did.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Christ.”

  “I’m so ashamed.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t say. I gave my word.”

  She began to sob. Mr. Morrie took her in his arms. “Bernie, may he rest in peace, was a complicated man.”

  “Was it Nora Weaver?”

  “Why torture yourself?”

  “Shit.”

  “You know what? I’m going to go through his papers in the house again tomorrow. From top to bottom. And I bet you I find the envelope, just like he promised.”

  “Did Lionel have the combination to the safe?”

  “I’m such a fool. Why didn’t I think of that? I’ll phone him.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Let me give it a try.”

  “There never was an envelope, and even if there was, I don’t want it any more.”

  “I appreciate your feelings in this matter,” Mr. Morrie said, freshening her drink.

  “I’m fifty-three years old now.”

  “You don’t look a day over forty.”

  Kathleen burst out laughing. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes. “And what will you do now that Lionel has cut you out?”

  “Say, why don’t we open a bar together downtown? Right on Crescent Street. Kate’s and Morrie’s.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Can I let you in on a secret?”

  “Please.”

  “After all these years my Barney came to see me on his way to the Maritimes. He was going salmon fishing. A guest of the minister of trade. Isn’t that something?”

  “I hope he didn’t come to borrow money.”

  “Barney is an outstanding person. Let me tell you that boy has more ideas …”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “He’s in the furniture business in North Carolina. Very big. But, now that the ice has been broken, I’m hoping that he’ll come in with me in oil and other investments I can’t speak about yet. You come to work for us you name the salary.”

  “Thank you,” Kathleen said, kissing him on the cheek, “but I think not.”

  “Hector will drive you back to your place. But you know what? This is your second home. You’re feeling blue you hop into a taxi and come to dinner.”

  Five minutes later the phone rang in Mr. Morrie’s study. “What did she want?” Libby demanded.

  “I was hoping to get rid of her before you saw her here.”

  “Money?” “A letter of reference.”

  “You give her a letter of reference it should be to the madam of a whorehouse.”

  “You think I don’t appreciate your sentiments in this matter?”

  “I don’t want to see her on the property again.”

  “Whatever you say. Now would you like to come over tonight and watch ‘Dragnet’ with us?”

  “It would hardly be the same,” she said, hanging up.

  Mr. Morrie unlocked the top desk drawer and took out his private address book. He reached Moses at The Caboose. “Poor Kathleen O’Brien is very depressed,” he said. “I think it would be nice if you took her to lunch.”

  Six

  Moses knew that he could stay with Sam and Molly Birenbaum in Georgetown, but he opted for privacy, checking into the Madison instead. An hour later he took a taxi to Georgetown.

  Sam, his caramel eyes shiny, hugged Moses. He held him tight. “Moishe. Moishe Berger. Shall I offer you a drink?”

  “I’m on Antabuse.”

  “Glad to hear it. Tea, then?”

  “Please.”

  Looking to warm the coals, Sam reminisced about the table with the crocheted tablecloth in the cold-water flat on Jeanne Mance Street. Then he got into London, their halcyon days, starting into a story about Lucy Gursky. Remembering, he stopped short.

  “Sam, relax. It’s okay to talk about Lucy. Now tell me about Philip and the others too of course.”

  There were three children. Marty, Ruth and Philip. Ruth was putting in a year at the Sorbonne. Neither of the boys, knock wood, were in Vietnam. Marty was at MIT and Philip, having dropped out for a couple of years, working as a bartender in San Francisco, was at Harvard. “He’s visiting us now.”

  “Terrific. Where is he?”

  “Out.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s gay,” Sam said, slapping down the gauntlet and waiting for Moses’s reaction, pleading with his eyes.

  “Well, he isn’t the only one.”

  “I could be appropriately liberal about it if it were another man’s son, but it’s an abomination in one of my own.”

  “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t understand. It’s not that I’m prejudiced
against faggots, it’s just that I don’t like them.” Sam poured himself a Scotch. A large one. “He wouldn’t come home for the weekend unless he could bring his Adams House sweetie-poo with him. What could I say? We hadn’t seen him in months. I was determined to behave myself. I wasn’t going to make a crack about his boyfriend’s earring or his black silk shirt open to his pupik at breakfast. We had words this morning. I don’t think it necessary for them to skinnydip in the pool. Molly looks out of the window it breaks her heart.”

  “There’s a pool?”

  “Hold tight. There’s a pool and the black maid you’ve already seen and a cook and stock options and a condo in Vail and a tax-shelter scam I don’t understand, but I’m sure will land me in the slammer one day. That’s the way it is, Moishe.”

  Suddenly Molly was there. “Moses, it’s unfair how you never answer a letter but drop in and out of our lives once in five years.”

  They ate at Sans Souci, senators and congressmen and others in search of prime-time exposure on the network stopping at their table to pay obeisance, whispering in Sam’s ear, delivering the latest Watergate scuttlebutt. He’s going to be impeached. No, he’s resigning. He’s no longer playing with all the dots on his dice. Henry told me. Len says. Kay assured me. Sam, Molly sensed, was not so much pleased as apprehensive at such a tangible display of his importance. He was waiting for Moses to pronounce. The less he said the more Sam drank. Liquor, as had always been the case, rendered him foolish. Three publishers, Sam let out, were pursuing him to do a Watergate book. Moses nodded. “So,” Sam said, deflated, “I didn’t become the Tolstoy of my generation.…”

  “Did you, Moses?”

  Moses shook his head, no.

  “Do you still write short stories?” she asked.

  “Canada has no need of another second-rate artist.”

  “Gerald Murphy,” Molly said, pouncing.

  “Clever Molly.”

  “Hey, we’ve been through the fire together,” Sam pleaded. “We’re all friends here. What brings you to Washington? You still haven’t told us.”

  Moses explained that he wanted to see raw tapes, everything available at the network, shot at the Watergate hearings or during Nixon’s press conferences. He wasn’t interested in the footage that had actually been shown, but the out-takes, especially panning shots of onlookers. “I’m looking for somebody who might have been there.”

  “Who?”

  “You wouldn’t know even if I told you.”

  Sam asked Moses to return to the house with him as they had hardly begun to talk. He would play his Yiddish music hall records for him: Molly Picon, Aaron Lebedeff, Menasha Skulnik, Mickey Katz. But Moses, complaining of fatigue, asked to be dropped off at his hotel.

  Once back at his place, Sam poured himself a Remy Martin.

  “God knows you’re not a braggart,” Molly said, “but there was no stopping you tonight. Why do you feel you have to justify yourself to him?”

  “You know when Moses was only twenty-one, he found an error in the OED. A first usage. We wrote them and they sent back a letter thanking him and promising to correct it in the next edition.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “I have, only you don’t know it. Okay, okay. The emes. I envy him.”

  “You envy him? He’s an alcoholic, poor man, and who knows how many tranquilizers he takes he slurs his words now. Let’s face it, Sam, he didn’t amount to much.”

  “And me? Hoo haw. Sam Burns né Birenbaum can call Cosell Howard to his face. Mike Wallace sees me he waves.”

  “The truth is he’s a failure.”

  “Oh, yeah, a failure absolutely. But he’s an enormous failure, a tragic waste, and I’m a little trendy horseshit TV mavin, the trustworthy face that comes between the Preparation-H and Light Days commercials.”

  Sam wandered into the bathroom, knocking into things, opening the medicine cabinet, pulling out her jar of Vaseline and holding it up to the light, squinting.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I marked the level it was at with a pencil before we went to dinner.”

  “Sam, you’re disgusting.”

  “I’m disgusting? When they leave burn the sheets.” He shook his fist at the ceiling. “It’s an averah what they’re doing up there. Makkes they should have! A choleria on them! Faygelehs! Mamzarim!”

  “Please Sam. Philip is not responsible for tonight. Lower your voice.”

  “He plucks his eyebrows. I caught him at it. Maybe you should never have taken baths with him.”

  “He was three years old at the time.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “What did you and Moses talk about when I went to the ladies’?”

  “This and that.”

  “He’s your oldest friend. You’ve known each other since you were nine years old. What in the hell did you talk about?”

  “The Mets. Moses thinks they can take Cincinnati in the playoffs. Pete Rose. Johnny Bench. Tony Perez. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  “Raw tapes. What’s he after?”

  “All I know is that he has that crazy look and I’ve seen it before.” And then Sam, breaking an old vow, told her the story, making her swear never to say anything to Moses. “In the spring of ’62 I think it was, I was drinking in the Algonquin with Mike, shortly after he started with The New Yorker, and we were soon joined by a couple of other editors.

  They were sharing a private joke about something they called the Berger Syndrome. What’s that, I asked? Well, it seems that in the early fifties some kid called Berger, a Canadian, sent them a short story that everybody liked and wanted to publish. They wrote him, asking for a few minor revisions, and he wrote back a nutty letter saying The New Yorker regularly prints crap, so long as it is written by their friends, they couldn’t tell Pushkin from Ogden Nash, and he was withdrawing his story. When I met Moses the next afternoon for drinks at Costello’s, I got up sufficient nerve to ask him about it and he said, no, it was certainly not him. But he was lying. I could tell just looking at him. I thought he was going to pass out on the spot.”

  “Why would Moses do such a thing?”

  “Because he’s crazy.” Settling on the edge of the bed, depleted, Sam asked, “Was I really bragging tonight?”

  “A little,” she said, bending to help him out of his trousers.

  The bodice of her dress came away from her. Sam peeked. It was still nice, very nice. “Was Moses ever your lover?” he demanded, jerking upright.

  “Philip’s his son. Now you know. The cat’s out of the bag.”

  Sam forlorn, his eyes wet, said, “I want the truth.”

  “Remember when you were working for the Gazette and there wasn’t enough money and I said I could give French lessons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Some French lessons. Moses and I were making pornographic movies together. Now can we get some sleep?”

  But he couldn’t sleep. He was thirsty. He was dizzy. His heart was hammering. His stomach was rumbling. “They can take everything. The works. I would have settled for writing ‘The Dead’. Never mind War and Peace or Karamazov. Am I greedy? Certainly not. Just ‘The Dead’ by Samuel Burns né Birenbaum.”

  “‘The best of a bad job is all any of us can make of it,’” she recited, hoping she had got the lines right. “‘Except of course, the saints …’”

  “I wasn’t kidding about the sheets, you know. I want them burnt. I want the room fumigated.”

  “Sam, he’s our son. We’ve got to play with the cards that we were dealt.”

  “Molly, Molly,” he asked, lying on her breasts, weeping, “where has all the fun gone?”

  Uninvited, her manner truculent, Molly turned up early at the Madison. She steered Moses into the dining room, slamming her PBS tote bag on the table. “Ever since he got your call saying you were coming he’s been on a high. Boy, were the two of you ever going to light up the town. He went through all of our books to make sure
there were no compromising best-sellers on the shelves. The signed pictures of him with Kennedy were hidden in a drawer. His framed honorary degrees went into a cupboard. He must have made up and crossed out eight dinner-party lists, saying no, Moses wouldn’t approve of them. He laid in a case of Macallan. Our fridge is stocked with smoked salmon. Then you show up and stick him with the fact that he has a swimming pool. Count on Moses. You don’t tell him once—it would really cost you—how damn good and honest he is on TV. Or that he should write that Watergate book, he’s dying to, but it scares the bejesus out of him. Philip with that boy in his room is breaking his heart. I find him sobbing in the toilet, but you have nothing reassuring to say to him. I could wring your miserable bloody neck, you self-centred son of a bitch. Then last night he gets drunk, also to please Moses, and he actually asks me if we ever had an affair. He’s so pure of heart he doesn’t even know that he’s a much better man than you are. What are those cuts in the palms of your hands?”

  “Some people grind their teeth in their sleep. I clench my fists. It’s a bad habit.”

  “Read your paper and don’t look at me. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  Moses ordered more coffee for both of them, stirring five spoonfuls of sugar into his own cup.

  “What are you doing to yourself?”

  “I crave sweets now. I can never get enough. Please don’t start crying.”

  “I won’t. I won’t.”

  “The last time I was in the clinic there was a beautiful girl there I still can’t get out of my mind. I mean genuinely beautiful. A fawn. Maybe only nineteen years old. She would drift into my room, shrug out of that awful starchy gown, and do an arabesque, a pirouette, a tour en l’air. She never leaped, she soared. Then she would smile like a naughty girl, squat, and shit on my floor. It’s all right, I’d say. I don’t mind. She danced and shat on my floor every day for a week and then she was gone. We weren’t allowed cutlery, but somehow or other she got her hands on a fork and it was enough to do the job. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. If I had a reason I forgot.”

  “Have you tried A.A.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Antabuse won’t do it. Can’t you cut it out whenever you feel like it?”