“Oh, you did wrong, Mr. Charnofsky. Bloody wrong. But not about that, you damn fool.”
“You damn fool. Is that a way to talk to an older man, I just lost a daughter?”
“Get out of here, Mr. Charnofsky.”
“Get out of here. Did you think I was going to invite myself to dinner in such a dump?”
“Get out of here before I throw you on the floor and wash your mouth out with soap.”
I grabbed him, frog-marched him out of the door, and slammed it shut. Then he started to pound on the door. “I want my homburg,” he said.
I retrieved it, whacked open the door, and thrust it at him.
“You couldn’t have made her so happy,” said Mr. Charnofsky, “if that’s what my Clara did to herself.”
“You know, Mr. Charnofsky, I’m quite capable of literally throwing you down the stairs.”
“Pish pish.”
I took a step toward him.
“The man at the embassy told me she was dead two days32 when you found her on Thursday. But the table was set for dinner for two. There was a burnt chicken in the oven. So, I ask myself, where were you that night, Mr. Panofsky?”
I took another step toward him. He started down the stairs, stopped in mid-flight, shook his fist at me, and hollered, “Murderer. Oysvorf. Momzer. I wish makkes on you and your unborn children. Plagues. Deformities. Phew,” he said, spitting on the floor, and turning to flee once I started after him again.
15
Paris. Nov. 7, 1952. Now that she has fecundated, I cogitated that the thickening Clara would be less promiscuous, if not precisely celibate.33 But this afternoon she brought me her latest poem, accepting my corrections comingled with encouragement, and then she subjected me to those ministrations at which she is so gratifyingly proficient, with that serpent’s tongue, and then smearing my sperm on her face afterward. Good for her complexion, she said.
P —— must suspect that he is a cuckold. Friday night, ambling down the boulevard Saint-Germain, something made me turn around. My third eye, Clara would say. And there he was, loping along less than a block behind, and when he caught my reproving glance, he stopped at a bookshop window, pretending he hadn’t seen me. Et voilà, last night there he was again, trailing along behind me on the boul’ Mich. I think he has taken to following me in the hope of discovering us together. Increasingly, he turns up uninvited at my door, pretending to be concerned about me, taking me to lunch at that appalling restaurant on the rue de Dragon, expecting me to be grateful.
“I’m worried about Clara,” he says, watching me closely. But I decline the trap he is setting for me.
670 words today.
Paris, Nov. 21, 1952. Another letter from my father in which I discover three split infinitives, two dangling participles, as well as the usual lapse into pleonasms here and there. Mother has taken a turn for the worse and longs to see me before she expires, but I have no wish to endure her opprobrium. I cannot put my manuscript aside, or risk the angst that such a visit would entail. The quarrels. The migraines. And her inevitable attempt to extract a deathbed pledge from me to stay on in Montreal to look after my father, whose health is also failing. I doubt, given my father’s uxorious nature, that he will survive her for long. They were high-school sweethearts, having met, appropriately enough, at a Young Communist League picnic.
Nothing written today. Not a word.
16
My mood vile after Ms. Morgan had spurned my luncheon invitation and stormed out of my apartment, I attempted to calm my nerves by donning my straw boater, reaching for my silver-topped antique cane, and slipping into my tap-dance shoes. Accompanied by a King Oliver CD, I warmed up with some rhythm tap, managed a passable Shim Sham Shimmy and a neat Pulling the Trenches, but it failed to settle me down. I was in a state because the resoundingly silly but delectable Ms. Morgan was the recipient of a grant from The Clara Charnofsky Foundation for Wimyn, having been awarded $2,500 to help her complete her M.A. thesis, “On Wimyn as Victims in the Québécois Novel.”
Mea culpa yet again. Mea maxima culpa.
You see, it was Clara’s cousin, the highly thought of NYU professor, who would lovingly sort out her manuscripts and drawings and feed them to publishers and art dealers as they increased incrementally in value over the years. But he first insisted on seeing me in New York, an encounter I agreed to with dread, anticipating a difficult meeting with an academic drudge, prejudging, as I am wont to do. “You do realize,” Hymie Mintzbaum once said, coming off a session with one or another of his shrinks, “that it’s a defence mechanism. You’re convinced that anybody who meets you for the first time will consider you a shit, so you take preventive action. Relax, boychick. When they get to know you better they will realize that they were right. You are a shit.”
Norman Charnofsky turned out to be a gentle if naïve man, and a stranger to avarice. A gute neshuma, as my grandmother used to say. A good soul. A clear and present danger to himself and others. Having heard from his abominable uncle Chaim that I was a boozer, Norman thoughtfully suggested we get together in the lobby of the Algonquin, where I was staying, and immediately reinforced my preconceived prejudice against him by ordering a Perrier for himself. An unprepossessing little man he was, with pewter hair, thick glasses, a bulbous nose, his tie gravy-stained, and his corduroy suit salted with dandruff round the shoulders and worn thin at the knees. The ancient schoolboy’s satchel he set down beside him was overloaded to the point of bursting. “I should begin,” he said, “by thanking you for taking the time to see me, and apologizing for my uncle Chaim, who had no idea that the child Clara miscarried wasn’t yours, while you were too considerate to point that out to him.”
“So you’ve read her diaries.”
“Indeed I have.”
“Including the last entry about the dinner I failed to attend.”
“My uncle Chaim’s surprising visit to your flat couldn’t have been easy for either of you.”
I shrugged.
“Please don’t misunderstand me. I have an enormous regard for my uncle Chaim. He is an embittered man, yes, but with cause, and many have reason to be grateful to him. Myself foremost. Chaim was the first of the Charnofskys to come to America from Poland, and from the very beginning he denied himself, pinching pennies, and sending for relatives. If not for his devotion my parents would have remained in Lodz, where I would have been born, and Auschwitz would have been the end of our story, as it was for too many Charnofskys. But the children of many of those whom Chaim brought over here, men and women who have prospered in America, now regard him as an embarrassment. An atavism. A ghetto Jew. And they don’t want him putting on his tallis and davening in their living room in the morning, which makes their children giggle, or sunning that pale body, but wearing his yarmulke, in their gardens out on Long Island, or in Florida, lest he compromise them before their neighbours. Okay. Enough. I talk too much. Ask my wife. And I’d have to agree he is a narrow man, obdurate, intolerant, but you see he is still baffled by what has become of the Jews in America. And from your point of view, I have no doubt, he was unpardonably cruel to Clara. But how could he be expected to comprehend such a precocious and wilful child in his house? She was so difficult. Such a troubled spirit. Oh poor Clara,” he said, biting his lip, “when she was only twelve years old she would lie on the floor of our parlour, surrounded by books, sketching, her skinny legs swinging away, crossed at the ankles. I loved Clara and deeply regret I didn’t do more to shelter her from … what? From the world, that’s what.”
“Was it you, then, who came to Paris looking for her?”
“It was me. Then she wrote, pleading with me to stay away, not to worry, she had met a good man — you Mr. Panofsky — and he was going to marry her.”
Norman taught a remedial-reading course one night a week in Harlem. He belonged to a group that collected clothes to be mailed to Jews in Russia, he was a blood donor, and had once stood as a Socialist Party candidate for the state legislature. His wif
e, Flora, had given up her job as a grade-school teacher to care for their only child, a boy who suffered from Down’s syndrome. “Flora would be so pleased if you came to dinner one night.”
“Another time, maybe.”
“If Flora were here, she would say stop kvetching and come to the point. I brought you here because I have found a publisher for Clara’s poetry and a gallery that is interested in her drawings. But let me assure you, even if there was somebody who wanted them, it goes without saying that Clara’s diaries could not be published in the lifetime of my uncle Chaim or aunt Gitel.”
“Or mine?” I asked, my smile tentative.
“But if you read between the lines,” he protested, “she was more than grateful for your devotion. I think she loved you.”
“In her fashion.”
“Look here, this could all come to nothing. But it is my duty to tell you that it could also turn out that her work has substantial financial value, and if that were the case it is you who are entitled to benefit from the income.”
“Oh come on, Norman, you’re talking nonsense.”
“I have a proposal to make, which I want you to think over carefully. I’m crazy. Ask anybody. But just in case money should come in, I wish to establish a foundation in her name to help women of artistic or academic bent, because it continues to be exceedingly difficult for them,” and he went on to run numbers at me of how few women at NYU or Columbia achieved tenure, or were appointed professors, and how they had to manage on smaller salaries and deal with male condescension. “I have brought some papers for you to look at,” he said, reaching into his bulging satchel. “Waivers. Releases. Take them with you. Consult a lawyer. Consider the matter carefully.”
Instead, eager for Norman’s approval, I signed the papers in triplicate right there. Better my right hand should have been cut off. Go know I was setting in motion events that would lead to the ruin of one of the few truly good men I ever met.
1The correct spelling is Coreo.
2 Actually, Richard finished fourth in the scoring race. Ted Lindsay, of the Detroit Red Wings, won the title with twenty-three goals and fifty-five assists. Sid Abel came second, Gordie Howe third, and then Richard.
3 It was the Queen Mary, which made its last voyage in 1967, encountering the Queen Elizabeth at sea at 12:10 a.m., on September 25, 1967.
4 Waterloo, where the Duke of Wellington, and the Prussian field marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, defeated Napoleon on June 18, 1815.
5 Actually, the 2CV was a Citroën. It was introduced at the Paris motor show in 1948, and taken out of production in 1990.
6 Not Odets, but Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman, p. 138. Viking Press Inc., New York, 1949.
7 Actually, according to my diary, Blair and my mother stopped over on October 7th, and the conference was in Edinburgh.
8 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was written by Sloan Wilson (1955); and it was The Hucksters, by Frederic Wakeman, that was made into a movie starring Clark Gable, Deborah Kerr, and Sydney Greenstreet: MGM, 1947. Now also shown in a computer-coloured version.
9 Las Meninas.
10Actually, it was L. P. Hartley in The Go-Between, p. 1. Hamish Hamilton, London, 1953.
11 It had to be some other book, as Bonjour tristesse wasn’t published until 1954.
12 Described as a Citroën on this page.
13 Voltaire.
14Santa Fe in New Mexico.
15 Actually, it was Jean-Paul Sartre.
16Actually, it was David Copperfield. See Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger, p. 1. Little, Brown, Boston, 1951.
17 Actually, Quemoy and Matsu are in the Taiwan Straits, and the mainland Communists didn’t begin the shelling until August 1958. Threatened by the American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, they suddenly confined the bombardments to only odd days of the month. Then, in March 1959, the bombardments ceased altogether, without explanation.
18 Pat Boone (b. Charles Eugene Boone, June 1, 1934) did not have his first hit single until 1955: “Two Hearts, Two Kisses.” Dot Label.
19 Actually, it was Auden. See Selected Poems, Faber & Faber, London, 1979.
20 Actually, James E. Chaney, twenty-one, was black.
21 Jackson Pollock (1912–1956).
22 The entry for Clara, in McIver’s handwritten journals, lodged in the University of Calgary, reads: “I would rather slit my wrists, as C —– did (unsuccessfully, faute de mieux, like everything else she has undertaken).” Notebook 31, Sept.–Nov. 1951, page 83.
23 The entry in McIver’s handwritten Notebook 31, Sept.–Nov. 1951, p. 89, does not include the last sentence. “Capable of murder one day, I fear” has been added later, after the fact.
24 “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety …” Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2, Scene 2.
25 The Scream.
26 Charles de Gaulle airport never existed under any other name. The airport referred to is doubtless Le Bourget.
27 The Ford Escort didn’t go into production in England until January 1968.
28 In 1970–71, his last season with the Canadiens, Beliveau was actually paid $100,000
29 Three strikes.
30 Patrick Bowles was the translator of Molloy. Wainhouse translated de Sade and was the author of Hedyphagetica. A Romantic Argument After Certain Old Models, Scenes of Anthropophagy, and Assortment of Heroes.
31 Dirty Book.
32 Less than twenty-four hours. this page.
33 The original handwritten entry in McIver’s journal, lodged in the Special Collections Library, University of Calgary, reads: “ … if not precisely celibate, which would go against her otiose nature. But this afternoon, interrupting me at work again, she was back to subject me …” See Notebook 112, p. 42.
2
The Second Mrs. Panofsky
1958–1960
1
IMISS THE OLD DAYS at Totally Unnecessary Productions when I could be yanked out of a boring production meeting in our boardroom because Miriam, her visit unexpected, was waiting for me in reception. Balancing Saul on her hip, holding Mike by her other hand. Her shoulder bag weighed down with a baby’s bottle, diapers, a colouring book and crayons, at least three matchbox cars, a paperback Yeats or Berryman and the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. An apologetic Miriam shepherding a stray she had discovered panhandling on Greene Avenue or shivering in a doorway on Atwater. One morning it was a cadaverous teenager, shoulders hunched against anticipated blows, his smile at once ingratiating and sly. “This is Timothy Hobbs,” she said. “He’s from Edmonton.”
“Hi, Tim.”
“’lo.”
“I promised Tim that you had a job for him.”
“Doing what?”
“Tim’s been sleeping rough in Central Station, so I’m afraid he’s going to need a week’s salary in advance.”
I put Tim to work running messages and managing our Xerox machine, even as he wiped his nose with a quick swipe of his sleeve. He was gone by the end of the week, along with our receptionist’s handbag, a calculating machine, an IBM typewriter, a bottle of Macallan, and my recently filled humidor.
Another morning Miriam brought in a runaway young girl, who was being wasted as a waitress in a greasy spoon, suffering a boss who, she said, could never pass her in the kitchen without fondling her breasts. “Marylou,” she said, “is willing to take a computer course.”
Next thing I knew, quitting my office at noon, I would run into a flotilla of courier-service motorcycles and bicycles parked outside. Marylou, it turned out, was servicing guys in what had become our office building’s celebrated freight elevator. There were complaints and I had to let her go.
Nowadays I understand Miriam holds open house for Blair’s students in their apartment on Friday evenings, comforting the troubled or those who are far from home. She has seen young women through their abortions and testified on behalf of young men appearing in court on drug-possession charges.
&nbs
p; I avoided the offices of Totally Unnecessary Productions this morning and, instead, lingered late in bed. Tuned into “By Special Request,” eyes shut, adrift, and pretended Miriam was tucked under the duvet with me, warming my old bones. I know that voice’s every nuance. There’s something wrong. Playing that tape back at night, I was sure of it. Miriam is troubled. She’s quarrelled on the phone with Kate again. Or, still better, with Blair. Possibly the time has come for the adorable old Panofsky to make his move. “Of course you can come home, my darling. If I start out right now I can be at your front door in Toronto first thing in the morning. No, you mustn’t worry about me on the road. I’ve given up drinking. You’re right. It makes for unfortunate changes in my personality. Yes, I love you too.”
Emboldened by another stiff drink, I actually dialled her number in Toronto, but no sooner did she say hello in that distinctive voice of hers than I thought my heart would break. So I slammed down the receiver. Now you’ve gone and done it, I thought. Blair could be out somewhere hugging trees or pasting Animal Rights stickers on fur-shop windows. Miriam could be home alone, in her negligée, and think that a burglar was checking out her place. Or a heavy breather. I had frightened her. But I didn’t dare call her back to reassure her. Instead, I freshened my drink and sensed that I was now in for one of those old fart’s nights, rewinding the spool of my wasted life, wondering how I got from there to here. From the sweet teenager reading The Waste Land aloud in bed to the misanthropic, ageing purveyor of TV dreck, with only a lost love and pride in his children to sustain him.
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