Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  “Who is this?”

  “Barney Panofsky is who, and I want to speak to Miriam at once.”

  Laughter in the background. The clinking of glasses. Finally, she came to the phone. “My God, Barney, why are you still up at this hour?”

  “You have no idea how worried I’ve been. You told me you’d be in tonight.”

  “It’s Larry Keefer’s birthday. We all went out to dinner and I invited everybody back here for a nightcap.”

  “I must have called ten times. Why haven’t you called me?”

  “Because I assumed you’d be asleep by now.”

  “How come McIver’s there?”

  “He’s an old friend of Larry’s.”

  “You’re not to believe a word he says about me. He’s a pathological liar.”

  “Barney, I’ve got a room full of guests here, and this is getting to be very embarrassing. Go to sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “But I —”

  “Sorry,” she said, her voice hardening. “I forgot. How could I? Chicago beat Detroit three–two tonight. Bobby Hull scored twice. So the series is tied now.”

  “That’s not why I called. I don’t care about that. It’s you I —”

  “Good night,” she said, hanging up.

  I considered waiting a couple of hours and then calling back, ostensibly to apologize but actually to make sure she was alone now. Fortunately, on reflection, I dismissed this as a bad idea. But I was in a rage, all the same. How that prick McIver must have enjoyed himself! “You mean he calls you from London for the hockey scores? Amazing.”

  Flush or broke, Hymie lived like royalty. So just about every night we dined at The Caprice, The Mirabelle, or The White Elephant. Providing it was only the two of us, Hymie was the most engaging of companions, a born raconteur, charming beyond compare. But if there was a visiting Hollywood biggie at the next table, he was instantly transmogrified into a supplicant, who would tell one obviously irritated oaf how exciting it would be to work with him, and another that his last, unappreciated film was actually a production of genius. “And I’m not saying that just because you’re here.”

  A couple of days before Miriam was due to fly into London at last, I made the mistake of trying to have a serious conversation with Hymie. “She’s very sensitive, so I want you to make an effort not to be vulgar.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “And your latest ‘discovery,’ that idiot Diana, is certainly not joining us for dinner while Miriam’s here.”

  “Say we’re in a restaurant, and I have to go and make weewee, do I put up my hand to ask permission?”

  “And none of your prurient Hollywood gossip, please. It would bore the hell out of her.”

  I needn’t have been apprehensive about Miriam meeting Hymie. She adored him at first sight, dinner at The White Elephant. He made her giggle harder than I ever had, that bastard. He got her to blush. And, to my amazement, she couldn’t get enough of his salacious stories about Bette Davis, Bogie, or Orson. There I was, mooning over my loved one, my smile goofy in her presence, but definitely de trop.

  “He told me you were intelligent,” said Hymie, “but he never once mentioned that you were so beautiful.”

  “He probably hasn’t noticed yet. It’s not like I ever scored a hat trick or the winning goal in overtime.”

  “Why marry him when I’m still available?”

  “Did he say I had agreed to marry him?”

  “I didn’t. I swear. I said I hoped that you would —”

  “Why don’t the two of us meet for lunch tomorrow, while I give him some typing to do?”

  Lunch? They were gone for four hours, and when Miriam finally tottered into our hotel room, she was flushed and slurring her words, and had to lie down. I had booked us into The Caprice for dinner, but couldn’t get her out of bed. “Take Hymie,” she said, turning over and starting to snore again.

  “What did you talk about for so long?” I asked Hymie later.

  “This and that.”

  “You got her drunk.”

  “Eat up, boychick.”

  Once Miriam had flown back to Toronto, Hymie and I resumed our carousing. Hell for Hymie wasn’t other people, as Camus had it,15 but being without them. When I would quit our table at The White Elephant or The Mirabelle, pleading fatigue, he would move on to another table, uninvited but making himself welcome by dazzling the company with anecdotes about bankable names. Or he would slide over to the bar, chatting up whatever woman was seated alone there. “Do you know who I am?”

  One night it still chills me to remember, Ben Shahn turned up at The White Elephant with a group of admirers. Hymie, who owned one of Shahn’s drawings, took that as licence to intrude upon his table. Pointing a finger at Shahn, he said, “Next time you see Cliff, I want you to tell him for me that he’s a dirty rat.”

  Cliff, of course, was Odets, who had babbled to the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming names.

  Silence settled like a shroud over the table. Shahn, unperturbed, raised his glasses to his forehead, peering quizzically at Hymie, and asked, “And who shall I say gave me the message?”

  “Never mind,” said Hymie, shrinking before my eyes. “Forget it.” And retreating, he seemed momentarily befuddled, old, unsure of his bearings.

  Finally, several months later, the day came when I sat with Hymie in a Beverly Hills screening room and watched the titles and credits of our film roll past. Startled, I read:

  FROM AN ORIGINAL STORY BY BERNARD MOSCOVITCH.

  “You bastard,” I hollered, yanking Hymie out of his seat, shaking him, “why didn’t you tell me it was from a story by Boogie?”

  “Touchy touchy,” he said, pinching my cheek.

  “Now, as if I didn’t have enough to handle, people will say I’m exploiting his work.”

  “Something bothers me. If he was such a good friend, and he’s still alive, why didn’t he show at your trial?”

  In response, I reached back and managed to crunch Hymie’s twice-broken nose for a third time, something I had longed to do ever since he had taken Miriam out for that four-hour lunch. He countered by pumping his knee into my groin. We carried on pounding each other, rolling over on the floor, and it took three men from the unit to untangle us, even as we went on cursing each other.

  4

  Poetry comes naturally to the Panofskys. Take my father, for instance. Detective-Inspector Izzy Panofsky departed this vale of tears in a state of grace. Thirty-six years ago today he died of a heart attack on the table of a massage parlour in Montreal’s North End, immediately after ejaculating. Summoned to claim my father’s remains, I was taken aside by the visibly shaken young Haitian girl. She had no last words to impart to me, but did point out that Izzy had expired without signing his credit-card slip. A dutiful son, I paid for my father’s final squirt of passion, adding a generous tip and apologizing for the inconvenience to the establishment. And this afternoon, on the anniversary of my father’s death, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Chevra Kadisha cemetery and, as I do every year, emptied a bottle of Crown Royal rye whisky over his grave and, in lieu of a pebble, left a medium-fat smoked meat on rye and a sour pickle on his gravestone.

  Were ours a just God, which he isn’t, my father would now dwell in heaven’s most opulent bordello, which would also include a deli counter, a bar with a brass rail and spittoon, a cache of White Owl coronas, and a twenty-four-hour TV sports channel. But the God we Jews are stuck with is both cruel and vengeful. To my way of looking, Jehovah was also the first Jewish stand-up comic, Abraham his straight man. “Take now thy son,” the Lord said unto Abraham, “thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” And Abe, the first of too many Jewish grovellers, saddled his ass and did as he was told. He built an altar, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. “Hey, Daddy-o,” said a
distressed Isaac, “behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” In response, Abe stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. At which point Jehovah, quaking with laughter, sent down an angel who said, “Hold it, Abe. Lay not thy hand upon thy son.” And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and beheld behind him a ram caught in a thicket by the horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. But I doubt that things were ever the same again between Abe and Izzy.

  I’m digressing. I know, I know. But this is my one and only story, and I’m going to tell it exactly how I please. And you are now into a short detour into that territory that Holden Caufield once deprecated as that Nicholas Nickleby16 sort of crap. Or was it Oliver Twist? No, Nickleby. I’m sure of it.

  Once Clara asked me, “How come your family emigrated to Canada, of all places? I thought the Jews went to New York.”

  I was born Canadian, I explained, because my grandfather, a ritual slaughterer, was short two sawbucks and a fin. It was 1902 when Moishe and Malka Panofsky, newly wed, went to be interviewed by Simcha Debrofsky of the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society in Budapest. “We want the papers for New York,” said my grandfather.

  “Siam isn’t good enough for you? India you don’t need? Sure, I understand. So here’s the phone and now I’ll ring Washington to tell the president, ‘You short of greenhorns there on Canal Street, Teddy? You need more who can’t speak a word of English? Well, good news. I’ve got a couple of shleppers here who are willing to settle in New York.’ If it’s the goldene medina you want, Panofsky, it costs fifty dollars American cash on the table.”

  “Fifty dollars we haven’t got, Mr. Debrofsky.”

  “No kidding? Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m running a special here today. For twenty-five dollars I can get you both into Canada.”

  Mine was not the legendary Jewish mother, a striver, fawning on her only son, no sacrifice too great if it meant he would enjoy a better life. Back from school, whacking open the front door, I’d holler, “Maw, I’m home.”

  “Sh,” she’d say, a finger held to her lips, as she sat by the radio listening to “Pepper Young,” “Ma Perkins,” or “One Man’s Family.” Only when there was a commercial break would she allow, “There’s peanut butter in the icebox. Help yourself.”

  The other kids on the street envied me, because my mother didn’t care how I did at school, or what time I came home at night. She read Photoplay, Silver Screen, and other fanzines, worrying about what would become of Shirley Temple now that she was a teenager; whether Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart would come home safely from the war; and if Tyrone Power would ever find an enduring love. Other mothers on Jeanne Mance Street force-fed their sons Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters, hoping it would inspire them to study medicine. Or cheated on the grocery money, saving up to buy The Books of Knowledge, ideal for a head start in life. Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Pearl Harbor, the siege of Stalingrad passed like distant clouds, but not Jack Benny’s feud with Fred Allen, which deeply troubled her. What we used to call the funnies were more real to her than I ever was. She wrote to Chester Gould, demanding that Dick Tracy marry Tess Trueheart. When Raven Sherman died in the arms of her sweetheart, Dude Hennick, in Terry and the Pirates, she was one of the thousands who sent a telegram of condolence. She longed for Daisy Mae to catch up with Li’l Abner on Sadie Hawkins Day, before he was seduced by Wolf Gal or Moonbeam McSwine.

  My five-foot-ten father, who had been to see Naughty Marietta starring Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald maybe five times, and whose favourite tune was “Indian Love Call,” wished to join the RCMP, but he was pronounced too short. And so, having decided to settle for the Montreal police force, he went to see The Boy Wonder on Schnorrers’ Day.

  Jerry Dingleman, a.k.a. The Boy Wonder, usually conducted business from the penthouse suite of his plush gambling establishment on the far shore of the St. Lawrence River, but on Wednesdays he was available to local losers in a poky little office off the dance floor of the Tico-Tico, one of several nightclubs he owned. Wednesdays were known to The Boy Wonder’s inner circle as Schnorrers’ Day, and from ten to four the supplicants came and went.

  “Why do you want to become a cop, of all things?” Dingleman asked my father, amused.

  “I would be grateful to you for life, Mr. Dingleman, if, you know, like you would help me with my chosen endeavour.”

  The Boy Wonder put in a phone call to Tony Frank, and then told my father he had to report to Dr. Eustache St. Clair for a medical. “And what do you remember to do first, Izzy?”

  “Take a bath?”

  “Why, a man with your acumen will make detective in no time.”

  But a month later The Boy Wonder, stopping for two medium-fat on rye at Levitt’s on the Main, was surprised to see my father still cutting meat behind the counter. “Why aren’t you in uniform?” he asked.

  “Dr. St. Clair said I wasn’t acceptable because of the holes I got left in my face from acne.”

  Dingleman sighed. He shook his head. “Didn’t he tell you that it could be cured?”

  So Izzy Panofsky made another appointment with Dr. St. Clair, and this time, as instructed, he clipped a hundred-dollar bill to his application form, and passed the medical. “In them days,” my father once told me, chewing on a mushy White Owl, “if you was a goy and had flat feet and a big belly, well, they used to bring them in from the Gaspé, all over the place, big fat guys, and you had to pay to get on the force.” From the beginning, he said, pinching one nostril and shooting a payload out of the other, there was trouble. “The judge who swored me in, a lush with popping eyes, looked startled sort of. ‘Aren’t you a Jew?’ he asked. And at the police school, where I was taught jujitsu and wrassling, the goys were always testing me. Irish shikers and French-Canadian chazerim. Dummies. Ignorantuses. I mean like I had at least finished seventh grade and was never held back, not once.”

  On his first beat, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, my overeager father made too many arrests, so he was shifted downtown. Strolling on St. Catherine Street, watchful, he promptly apprehended a pickpocket outside the Capitol Theatre, where Helen Kane, the one and only Boop-Boop-a-Doop Girl, was starring. My upright dad anticipated a citation for his diligence, but, instead, he was pulled into a back room in the station and threatened by two detectives. “ ‘If you want to stay here,’ they said, ‘Christ, don’t you ever bring in one of these guys again.’ They was licensed, if you get my meaning.”

  Other cops fattened on vigorish from crooks and their lawyers, but my pappy couldn’t be bought. “Like I had to be straight, Barney,” he said. “I mean my name was Panofsky and I couldn’t afford to have them say ‘the goddamn Jew.’ That’s all I needed, Christ, they used to say if I slipped on a hair, you know what I mean, they would have me hung.”

  Over the years my straight-shooting father soured as he witnessed Irish shikers and French-Canadian chazerim, guys he’d broken into the force himself, being promoted over him. Izzy remained a detective-sergeant for nine years. “When I was finally promoted to inspector, you know what they done, it made me sick, they went to the union and made up a story that I hadn’t passed my exams in shooting. I used to check out my men, you know. I was sincere. They hated me like hell. So they went to the union and complained about me.”

  Izzy Panofsky’s problems on the force were endless.

  “Hey, when I went to pass an exam on promotions, Gilbert was on the board then, he says to me, how come the Jews are smarter? I got two answers, I says. You’re wrong. There’s no such thing as a superhuman. But the only thing I got to tell you, if you take a dog and kick him around he’s got to be alert, he’s got to be more sharper than you. Well, we’ve been kicked around for two thousand years. We’re not more smarter, we’re more alert. My other answer is the story about the Irishman and the Jew. How come you’re smarter? the Irishman asks the Jew. Well, we eat a certain kind of fish, the Jew says. In fact, I’ve
got one right here, and he shows it to the Irishman. Christ, the Irishman says, I’d like to have that fish. Sure, the Jew says, give me ten bucks. So he gives it to him. Then the Irishman looks at it good and says, hey, that’s no fish, that’s a herring. So the Jew says, you see, you’re getting smarter already.”

  5

  Last night I dreamt that Terry McIver had been nicked on the ankle by a deer tick, and had stupidly dismissed it as a mosquito bite. Lying in his bed on the twentieth floor of The Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto a month later, the dreaded Lyme’s disease pulsing through his bloodstream, flooding it, McIver was wakened by a horn honking in his room and then a panicky voice coming over the PA system: “We have a serious fire here. The elevators aren’t working. Black smoke has made the stairways temporarily impassable. Guests should remain in their rooms and spread wet towels under the door. Good luck and thank you for choosing The Four Seasons Hotel.” Choking smoke began to seep into McIver’s room, but, overcome by paralysis, he couldn’t even raise his arms, never mind move his legs. Flames consumed his door and began to dance round him, licking at a stack of Of Time and Fevers on the floor, every copy as yet unsigned, therefore still qualifying as collectors’ items … and that’s when I leaped out of my own bed with a song in my heart. I retrieved my morning papers from outside my apartment door, made coffee, and soft-shoed into my kitchen, singing: “Take your coat and grab your hat …”

  Turned to the Montreal Gazette sport pages first, a lifelong habit. No joy. The fumblebum Canadiens, no longer nos glorieux, had disgraced themselves again, losing 5–1 to — wait for it — The Mighty Ducks of California. Toe Blake must be spinning in his grave. In his day only one of his inept bunch of millionaires could have played in the NHL, never mind suiting up for the once-legendary Club de hockey canadien. They don’t have one guy willing to stand in front of the net, lest he take a hit. Oh for the days when Larry Robinson would feed a long lead pass to Guy Lafleur, lifting us out of our seats chanting, “Guy! Guy! Guy!” as he went flying in all alone on the nets. He shoots, he scores.