Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  “Clever Molly.”

  “When Marty’s in town he brings his friends around, really bright kids, and Sam adores drinking beer and horsing around with them. But they don’t know who Henry Wallace was or Jack Benny or Hank Greenberg. Sam’s Yiddish music hall records don’t do a thing for them. It drives him crazy. He’s going to be fifty soon. He’s jowly. He overeats. It’s the tension, you know, all that travelling. His new producer, he’s only thirty-two—he discos—he’s on coke half the time—he wants Sam to get a facelift. He’s done viewer surveys, demographic studies, may he rot in hell. Sam told him when I was with the Times I was nominated for a Pulitzer for my Korean stuff Kiss my ass, sonny. But there are rumours that they are testing younger faces and I don’t think they’ll renew his contract.”

  “He ought to do the Watergate book.”

  “Sam still collects 78s. You wouldn’t believe what he came home with the other night.” She sang, “‘Chickery Chick cha-la-cha-la, Check-a-la romey in a bananika.’”

  “Molly, he’s a lucky man. You’re a good woman.”

  “Good bad. I love him.”

  “So do I.”

  “Hey,” she said, brightening, her old jauntiness and loopy logic shining through, “in that case maybe we should have an affair.”

  “Let’s save it for our dotage.”

  “Come to dinner,” she said, fleeing, because she knew that she was going to cry again.

  SAM, HURRYING HOME early from the office, changed quickly and made a dash for the pool. He found Philip and his boyfriend sunbathing on the back-yard terrace, sipping champagne. His champagne. “Celebrating something, boys?”

  “You really are quelque chose, Dad,” Philip said, producing a glass for him.

  Immediately regretting it, but unable to help himself, Sam said, “Gay was a perfectly good word until it was appropriated by your kind. Our hearts were young and gay. The gay hussar. Et cetera. Gay means cheerful, merry, sparkling. According to my thesaurus its opposite is joyless, glum, dreary. Whoever gave you the right to pass such a judgement on heterosexual love? Real chutzpah, that’s what I call it.”

  “Oh, Dad, about those hussars. When the Austro-Hungarian empire was still intact no officer below the rank of colonel was legally allowed to wear makeup.”

  “How does your family handle it, Steve?”

  “They don’t.”

  FOR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS Moses sat in a small stuffy screening room looking at footage of the Watergate hearings, circling sections on certain frames and having the lab blow them up, unavailingly. Then on Moses’s fifth day in the screening room there he was, seated immediately behind Maureen Dean, smiling that smile of his, a gold-tipped malacca cane clasped between his knees. Moses fled to the washroom and splashed cold water on his face. He went for a walk. He stopped for a hamburger somewhere. Then he returned to the screening room and sat staring at the frame, sliding in sweat, for the better part of an hour.

  Back in his hotel mom, Moses pulled the blinds and collapsed on his bed, chain-smoking through the rest of the afternoon. Once by air, he recalled, and once by water. He washed the blood off the palms of his hands and had already begun to pack when the phone rang. It was the front desk.

  “Will you be checking out today, Mr. Berger?”

  “Yes.”

  The assistant manager had a letter for him.

  “It was left here by a most distinguished-looking gentleman who said you would be turning up eventually.”

  “Why didn’t you give this to me before?”

  “His instructions were most explicit. We were not to let you have it until you were checking out.”

  Moses opened the letter in the bar.

  If the Catholic Church could outlast Pope Innocent IV, Auto-da-fé, and Savonarola, why can’t Marxism survive the Georgian seminary student and his acolytes. For the record, I didn’t erase the tape.

  When the waiter approached his table, Moses ordered a Macallan. A double. Neat.

  Seven

  The next morning Sam sought out the editor who had worked with Moses. “I understand that you were a great help to my friend. Now show me what he wanted.”

  So Barry screened the pertinent out-take for him, a panning shot of observers at the Watergate hearings, including many familiar faces, among them Maureen Dean and, immediately behind her, an old man with a gold-tipped malacca cane clasped between his knees. “It was either Mo Dean or the old guy seated right behind her who turned him on,” Barry said. “He shot right out of his seat to have a closer look, and then he lit out of here like he had been badly burnt.”

  “Blow up the old guy for me. Big and bigger.”

  Sam ate lunch at his desk, pondering the photographs Barry had brought him. I know that face, he thought. But where and how eluded him.

  Later Sam took the photographs home with him and retreated to the library, but once more how and where he knew that face remained tantalizingly out of reach. So he began to pull down scrapbooks that Molly had put together in spite of his objections, poring over old newspaper stories that he had churned out on four continents, hoping something would evoke that face for him. It didn’t work. In fact all his efforts only muddled him, rendering the face even more elusive, and he went to bed wondering if he was mistaken after all.

  Unable to sleep, he tried to play a game that had worked for him before. Think of something else, anything else, and the right brain circuits would connect without effort, putting a name to the face. He replayed Ralph Branca’s home-run pitch to Bobby Thomson, striking him out in his mind’s eye. Once again he savoured Ron Swoboda’s ninth-inning catch in the fourth game of the ’69 Series. Then, sinking into sleep, other images drifted into his mind. Moses saying, “Oh come on. Let’s take a peek.”

  “I don’t think we ought to.”

  “It’s probably the new Bonnard he bought.”

  Lifting a cloth revealing what, at first glance, appears to be the most conventional of portraits, the sort that would be welcomed by the Royal Academy. A lovely young bourgeois lady seated in a wicker chair. Long blonde tresses, flushed cheeks. She wears a broad-brimmed straw hat with a pink bow, a multi-layered chiffon dress, also with a pink bow, and holds a bouquet of sweet williams in her hands. But there is something quirky about the portrait. The young lady’s eyes are of a different colour. One eye brown, one eye blue.

  Eight

  North, Moses knew, is where he would find him.

  Where north?

  Far.

  On his return from Washington, Moses picked up his Toyota at Dorval, and set out for his cabin in the Townships to pack his northern gear. Then he collected his mail at The Caboose, drank for a couple of hours with Strawberry, and drove back to Montreal, where he had recently rented a pied-à-terre on Jeanne Mance Street. Every bottle in his flat was empty. So Moses took a taxi to Winnie’s, and carried on from there to Big Syl’s and when all the bars shut down for the night, he moved on to the Montreal Press Club, floating between tables to a dim corner and falling asleep almost immediately.

  “Moses?”

  Drifting awake, he was claimed by a fuzzy raven-haired figure, sweetly perfumed, throbbing in and out of focus. Her smile, tainted with benevolence, irritated him.

  “Beatrice?”

  “Yes. Are you pleased?”

  The raven-haired figure, possibly Beatrice, subsided softly into a chair, silk rustling.

  “Don’t let me fall asleep again.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Say your name.”

  “Beatrice.”

  “Imagine. Beatrice.”

  He squinted, concentrating, grudgingly reducing the multiple breasts, each one exquisite, to two; the comically trebled mouth to a more satisfying sensual one.

  Unable to cope with his idiotic gaze, she asked, “How do I look?”

  “Harder.”

  “Count on Moses.”

  “You asked.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think I can make it b
ack to the bar again,” he said, pointing at his empty glass with a certain cunning. “You go, please.”

  Enabling him to watch Beatrice, his heart’s desire, stride to the bar, obviously nourished by the stir her presence was creating among the men in shiny suits gathered there. She took too long. Head slumping, he drifted off to sleep again.

  “Moses.”

  “Go away.” Then he recognized Beatrice, the proffered drink, and he smiled again. “I want to ask you a question of the most intimate nature.”

  “Please don’t start on me, Moses.”

  “Do you wear pantyhose now?”

  She shook her head, no, flushed but amused.

  “Garters still. I knew it. Ah, Beatrice.” Satiated, he slid into sleep again, his smile serene.

  “Moses?”

  “What?”

  “You said you didn’t want to snooze.”

  Slowly, deliberately, he relit his dead cigar, enormously pleased with his accomplishment.

  “Strawberry says you’re heading North of Sixty.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon. Could I see a garter?”

  “Oh, Moses, please.”

  “Just one little peekee.”

  “Where are you staying in town?”

  “Why, Mrs. Clarkson, whatever are you thinking?”

  “Stop playing the fool.”

  “I rent an apartment here now.”

  “I’ll drive you there and we can talk. It’s too depressing here.”

  “It’s my club.”

  “You belonged to better clubs once.”

  “And a better woman.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Only if I can have a peekee first.”

  “Not here. There. Let’s go.”

  He gave her his address before staggering out with her, toppling into her Porsche, and falling asleep again. But they had only gone a few blocks when he started to tremble. “Stop the car!”

  Alarmed, she braked. Moses, fumbling with the door handle, tumbled out, lurching blindly into the middle of Sherbrooke Street.

  “Moses!”

  Circling, he scrambled to the curb, sinking to his knees beside a fire hydrant, his stomach heaving. Beatrice pulled up alongside and waited in the car for him to finish. She was wearing a new dress. A Givenchy. “Do you feel better now?”

  “Worser.”

  While Moses showered, she made coffee and then wandered restlessly about the apartment. Bay windows. Old-fashioned bulky radiators. The Persian carpet, worn threadbare in the middle, reminded her so vividly of home that she found herself searching for the walnut RCA radio cabinet and the sticky Peer’s Cream Soda bottle supporting the window with the broken sash. Then, clearing the dining-room table of old newspapers, she caught her first glimpse of the crocheted tablecloth. She slipped on her hornrimmed glasses to have a better look just as Moses emerged from the bathroom in a towel dressing gown.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked, stroking the tablecloth.

  “My mother made it years ago.”

  “How come you never brought it out when we were together?”

  “I was saving it for your vintage years,” he said, accepting a black coffee and adding a couple of fingers of cognac to it. Then he bit off the tip of a Monte Cristo and lit it. “To think that I had once been so foolish to believe that you would be the one, as the old human question mark put it, who could ‘help me through this long disease, my life.’”

  It was, she knew, his way of putting her down. She was supposed to recognize the quote. “You think I’m stupid,” she said.

  “Of course you’re stupid, but it hardly matters in the circles you frequent now that you are so insufferably rich.”

  “I didn’t marry him only for that.”

  “I want my peekee now.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Just the quickest of peeks, a mere flash, what would it cost you?”

  “Why are you determined to make me feel cheap?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I loved you, Moses, but I couldn’t stand it any more. You have no idea of how insufferable you are when you’re drunk. I want my peekee. Just one little peekee. Fuck you.”

  “At least I haven’t changed.”

  “I’ll give you that much.”

  “Actually, I would have left me a lot earlier than you did. I am impossible.”

  “Are you going north to visit Henry?”

  “I have a hunch the ravens are gathering. Damn it, Beatrice, why did you flush me out? What do you want with me now?”

  “I needed somebody to talk to. Somebody I could trust.”

  “Well that somebody isn’t me. Not any more.”

  “Tom goes both ways. He has a boy. I’m not supposed to know but they’re in Antibes together now.”

  “Then you’ll get an even richer divorce settlement than you were counting on when you decide it’s time to trade up again.”

  “Take me north with you.

  “Certainly not.”

  “Can I stay the night?”

  “Yes. No. Let me think.”

  “Bastard.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because fool that I am,” he said, sinking into an armchair, “I sometimes rush to the door of my cabin, thinking I’ve heard a car and that it will be you.” He knocked over his coffee cup, half full of cognac. “Get out, Beatrice. Leave me alone,” he pleaded, before his head slumped forward and he began to snore.

  Beatrice went into the kitchen and washed the dishes and then it came to her. She dug a pen and paper out of her purse and wrote, “The human question mark was Alexander Pope. You are as smug and pompous and hateful as ever.” She left the note on the dining-room table. Then she stood before him, hiked her dress, revealing her garters, and fled the apartment, weeping. Outside, she stopped, cursed, and retraced her steps, determined to retrieve the note. But his apartment door was locked.

  Nine

  Isaac, who had once tagged everywhere after his father, clutching the hem of his parka, now avoided him. Shirking his Talmud studies, pleading a headache. Declining to join him in saying grace after meals. Giving up on his Hebrew lessons. “Who speaks it here? Only you.”

  Nialie anticipated that he could hurt Henry badly, but Henry claimed not to be distressed. “It’s a stage they all go through,” he said. “You are not to worry.”

  Only twelve years old, Isaac’s face was already encrusted with angry red pimples. He bit his nails. His voice was cracking. Once inseparable from his schoolmates, always up to mischief, he now eschewed their company as well.

  “What happened to all your friends?” Nialie asked him.

  A shrug.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “So?”

  “Answer me.”

  “They’re always asking me for money.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s what you’ve got, they say, isn’t it?”

  Cleaning his room, Nialie didn’t quite know what to make of the changes. The pinups of hockey players pasted to the wall (Guy Lafleur, Yvan Cournoyer, Ken Dryden) had been displaced by a row of McTavish labels peeled carefully off bottles that had been soaked in the sink, and a photograph of the McTavish building on Fifth Avenue, scissored out of the last quarterly report.

  “What does an ‘adjusted dividend’ mean?” he asked at the sabbath table.

  “Search me,” Henry replied.

  “‘Amortization of goodwill and other intangible assets’?”

  “I’m afraid your father is a prize klotz in these matters.”

  “‘A covenant’?”

  “Ah. Now we’re talking turkey. We are Am Berit, ‘The People of the Covenant.’ A covenant is what Riboyne Shel O’lem made with us at Mount Sinai, choosing Jews over all the other peoples in the world, liberating us from slavery in Egypt. Now how would you say Egypt in Hebrew?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Come on.”

  “Eretz Mitzraim.”<
br />
  “Yes. Excellent. Now in every generation, each person should feel as though he himself had gone forth from Eretz Mitzraim, as it is written: ‘And you shall explain to your child on that day, it is because of what the Lord did for me when I, myself, went forth from Egypt.’”

  Hypocrite, Isaac thought, his only response a smirk. Hypocrite, hypocrite.

  “Don’t make such a face to your father.”

  “I can’t help how I look.”

  “Leave the table.”

  Henry waited an hour, tugging absently at his sidecurls, before he went to Isaac’s room. “Is there anything wrong, yingele?”

  “No.”

  “If there’s a problem, I’m here to help.”

  “There’s nothing wrong, I said.”

  But when Henry leaned over to kiss him good-night, Isaac slid away from him.

  “Do you think I should buy us a TV set?” Henry asked.

  “Only if we can afford it.”

  Nialie found Henry in the living room. She brought him a cup of lemon tea. “Was he bad to you again?”

  “No.”

  “You look terrible.”

  “I’m fine. H-h-h-honestly.”

  A few days later Nialie startled Isaac going through the papers on Henry’s rolltop desk. “What are you looking for?” she demanded.

  “A pencil,” he replied, leaping back.

  “There’s plenty in your room.”

  “Do you know how much he gives to the yeshivas in Jerusalem, never mind the Rebbe?”

  “It’s his money.”

  “Millions and millions.”

  “Shame on you.”

  “Yeah, sure. Go to your room. Don’t worry. I’m going.”

  Then, his ear to the door, Isaac heard her say, “You ought to lock your desk every night.”

  “What have I got to hide?” he asked.

  Plenty, Isaac thought. If only she knew. But he wouldn’t tell her. He didn’t dare. Henry, whom everybody took for a holy man, a saint even, hid filthy photographs in his desk. Photographs more revealing than anything Isaac had ever seen in Playboy. They had come in a plain brown envelope from somebody in England and showed a naked woman, a really skinny one, doing amazing things with one man and sometimes two of them.