Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  “Sell the cottage, Daddy.”

  “I can’t, Kate. Not yet.”

  The truth is, I retreat to the cottage in the Laurentians, the scene of my alleged crime, from time to time, wandering, drink in hand, through empty rooms that once resonated with Miriam’s laughter and the happy squeals of our children. I go through photo albums, sniffling like an old fool. Miriam and I on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Or on the terrace of the Colombe d’Or, where I told her about that time with Boogie and Hymie Mintzbaum. Miriam seated on our bed, serene, nursing Saul. I play her favourite Mozart. I sit here, tears sliding down my cheeks, coddling her old garden shoes. Or sniffing that nightgown of hers I hid when she was packing. Imagining that this is how they will find me. An abandoned husband. Dead of heartbreak. Her nightie pressed to my schnozz.

  “What’s that the old Jew is clutching,” asks Professor Blair Hopper né Hauptman, “the number of his Swiss bank account, written on an old rag?”

  “Oh, my poor love, forgive me,” she pleads, sinking to her knees, holding my cold hand to her cheek. “You were right. He’s a shmuck.”

  Then I rise from the dead, like what’s-her-name, that sexpot,56 ostensibly drowned in the bathtub, in that movie with Kirk Douglas’s son, the boy as ugly as the father, only I’m not wielding a knife. Final Attraction.57 Rising, my voice quavering, I say, “I forgive you, my darling.”

  Don’t knock self-pity. There’s a lot to be said for it. Certainly I enjoy it. But, on occasion, the accusatory voice of The Second Mrs. Panofsky, who also lived with me here, intrudes on my reveries:

  “I don’t please you, do I, Barney?”

  Looking up from my book, frowning, clearly indicating that I have been interrupted, I say, “Of course you do.”

  “You despise my parents, who never did you any harm. It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “It was me what?”

  “Who sent my poor mother that letter on Buckingham Palace stationery, I don’t know how you got it, saying she was being considered for an OBE on the New Year’s Honours List, for her charitable good works.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “She waited by the window for the postman every morning and finally had to cancel the party she had planned in her honour. I hope you were pleased to humiliate her like that.”

  “It wasn’t me. I swear.”

  “Barney, I want you to give us a chance. I want you to tell me what I could do to make you happy.”

  “I’mhappyI’mhappy.”

  “Then why don’t you ever talk to me?”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong. But isn’t that what we’re doing right now? Talking.”

  “I’m talking, you’re listening, sort of. You haven’t even put down your book.”

  “There. It’s down. Now what?”

  “Oh, go to hell, why don’t you?”

  I had hoped for some solitude here, but, after I was charged, cars used to park outside, and people would get out to stare at the murderer’s house. Powerboats would cut their outboards offshore, and bastards would stand up to snap photographs. But in the early days of my second marriage, I did, in fact, manage the occasional escape from my wife.

  “Darling, I don’t think you want to come up this weekend. The black flies are at their worst. Never mind the mosquitoes after this rain. You go to the Silverman wedding. Make my apologies, and I’ll get Benoit to come to attend to the leaky roof.”

  My father, recently obliged to retire from the Montreal police force, intruded on the odd weekend. “I could get a job in security somewheres with my top-notch experience, but those chazerim took away my gun licence.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “Why? Why? Because my name is Panofsky, that’s why.”

  So Izzy phoned the high-ranking officer in the Quebec Provincial Police who had once been his driver. “Weeks went by and I couldn’t get him on the phone. But finally I swung it, eh? Finally I knew how to get him, you know. I had a girlfriend call up, you see, I made her say she’s the operator, long distance from Los Angeles, and human curiosity, you know, you’re not expecting it, well he answered. I said, listen, you goddamn horse’s ass, you know if I call the Pope, I says, I can get him quicker than you. Oh, he says, Panofsky, you know, I’m busy. I says don’t give me that horseshit, you weren’t busy when I knew you. I says I don’t want no favours. But look, every greaseball in town’s got a permit, and I’m looking for a job in security and I’d feel naked without a gun. So he comes through for me. So now it’s okay, I kept two revolvers, my favourites. I got a snub-nose, beautiful, and a Tiger. I got that and I got two automatics, and I’m leaving one here for you in the drawer of your bedside table, eh?”

  “What in the hell for?”

  “Somebody breaks in, you’re in the middle of nowheres here, you fucken air-condition him.”

  Most weekends, rather than endure my silence, The Second Mrs. Panofsky would invite her parents out, or other undesirables. So, in self-defence, I established some summer rituals. I would disappear for an hour or two with my snorkel and flippers, plunging into the lake and swimming underwater, searching for schools of perch. Protesting that I never got any exercise and was putting on too much flab, every Saturday morning, rain or shine, I filled my backpack with a couple of salami sandwiches, some fruit, a bottle of Macallan, a Thermos of coffee, a book, and set out in my spruce58 canoe, a latter-day voyageur, for the mountain on the opposite shore, belting out “Mair-zy Doats” or “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don’t Want to Leave the Congo …”

  The mountain, still listed on the map as Eagle Head in those days, has long since been renamed Mont Groulx, after the rabidly racist Abbé Lionel Groulx, who is such a hero to the separatists here. Climbing to a clearing on the top, I would settle into the shade of the little lean-to I had built, wash down my lunch with Macallans, and read until I fell asleep.

  On my return to the cottage, usually nicely sodden, I sometimes managed to avoid the dinner party, as well as the games of charades or Scrabble that followed, pleading a headache. Because joining the family at the table I would inevitably quarrel with my father-in-law, who would announce, for example, that Richard Nixon had done himself credit in his kitchen debate with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow.

  “Daddy would like to put you up for membership at Elmridge.”

  “Why, that’s awfully good of him, but the gesture would be wasted on me. I don’t golf.”

  “Frankly speaking,” said my mother-in-law, “it’s the social connections you could make there, seeing as you never enjoyed the advantages we take for granted. Mr. Bernard’s son is a member and so is Harvey Schwartz.”

  “We often make up a threesome,” said my father-in-law.

  “Look what it’s done for Maxim Gold, and he doesn’t golf either. When he came over from Hungary as a boy, he could hardly speak a word of English.”

  The odious Gold, incomparably rich now, ran a drug company, plasma its hottest seller. “Frankly speaking,” I said, “I would not want to belong to a club that has accepted the likes of Maxim Gold, who buys and sells blood for a profit. And furthermore,” I added, smiling my most gracious smile at my father-in-law, “I fail to understand grown men, otherwise mature, wasting an afternoon trying to hit a little white ball into a hole. It’s enough to make you despair of humankind, don’t you think?”

  “He’s kidding you, Daddy.”

  “Well now, I can take a jest as well as the next chap. But at least, out there in the fresh air —”

  “Unpolluted by cigar smoke,” said my mother-in-law, fanning herself.

  “— savouring what Mother Nature Bountiful has bestowed on us, we don’t indulge in fisticuffs as do the hooligans who play hockey. What say you to that, Barney?”

  I am emotionally tied to this cottage, which resonates with so many memories. Take this one, for instance.

  One summer night only two years ago, there I was, seated on my rocking-chair on the wraparound balcony. Pulling on a Montecristo, sipping cognac,
I was luxuriating in the remembrance of family good times past, when I was disturbed by the crunching of tires on the gravel approach road. It’s Miriam, I thought, my heart leaping. Miriam come home. Then a Mercedes-Benz sports car jolted to a stop immediately before me, and out stumbled a GQ fashion plate, his smile tentative. A scrawny little old man, seemingly unaware of how ridiculous he looked. It was a distraught Norman Charnofsky, long since retired from NYU, what was left of his once pewter hair no longer to be seen. Norman was sporting a toupee. “Well I’ll be goddamned” was all I could manage.

  “I came here because I want you to hear my side of the story. I feel I owe you that much.”

  Poor, innocent, sweet-natured Norman, shrunken now but still unable to control his crying jags, as it turned out. His incongruous lounge-lizard outfit was redeemed by a gravy stain on his trousers.

  “Before you start,” I said, “I want you to know that I’ve been in touch with your wife.” And then I invited him into the living room.

  “You’ve been in touch with Flora. You think I don’t worry about her?”

  Norman began by reminding me of our meeting at the Algonquin all those years ago, on the other side of the moon, when I signed over the rights to Clara’s work, which we had both considered to be without commercial value. But to Norman’s astonishment and mine, as Clara’s reputation soared, that coffee-table book of her ink drawings began to sell in the thousands year after year, and her widely translated The Virago’s Verse Book was reprinted again and again. The Clara Charnofsky Foundation, inaugurated as a loving but seemingly futile gesture, started to bank millions. To begin with, its office was that tiny den in Norman’s apartment where, seated under a bare lightbulb, he answered correspondence on his portable typewriter in the early-morning hours, maintaining scrupulous records of money spent on stationery, postage, typewriter ribbons, paper-clips, and carbon paper. Yes, carbon paper, if any of you out there are old enough to remember what that was. Why, in those days we not only used carbon paper, but when you phoned somebody you actually got an answer from a human being on the other end, not an answering machine with a ho ho ho message. In those olden times you didn’t have to be a space scientist to manage the gadget that flicked your TV on and off, that ridiculous thingamabob that now comes with twenty push buttons, God knows what for. Doctors made house calls. Rabbis were guys. Kids were raised by their moms instead of in child-care pens like piglets. Software meant haberdashery. There wasn’t a different dentist for gums, molars, fillings, and extractions — one nerd managed the lot. If a waiter spilled hot soup on your date, the manager offered to pay her cleaning bill and sent over drinks, and she didn’t sue for a kazillion dollars, claiming “loss of enjoyment of life.” If the restaurant was Italian it still served something called spaghetti, often with meatballs. It was not yet pasta with smoked salmon, or linguini in all the colours of the rainbow, or penne topped with a vegetarian steaming pile that looked like dog sick. I’m ranting again. Digressing. Sorry about that.

  The foundation’s office, once an airless den, had yielded years ago to a five-room suite on Lexington Avenue, with a staff of eight, not counting legal advisers or its portfolio manager, who had performed stock-market miracles. Millions were accumulated not only by dint of royalties and shrewd investments, but also through endowments left to the foundation. After it all became too much for Norman to handle, he had appointed two African-American feminists to the board of directors: Jessica Peters, whose poetry was published in both The New Yorker and The Nation, and Dr. Shirley Wade, who lectured on “cultural studies” at Princeton. The two formidable sisters brought in an abrasive historian, Doris Mandelbaum, author of Herstory from Boadicea to Madonna.

  It was Ms. Mandelbaum who led the initial boardroom rebellion, pointing out that it was a typical male power move, some might even say “an oxymoron, gender-wise,” that the chairperson of the board of a feminist foundation should be a man, of the nuclear-family persuasion, his only claim to that office that he was a relative of Clara’s, herself a martyr to male chauvinist insentience. An embarrassed Norman readily agreed to step down as chairperson, and was replaced by Dr. Shirley Wade. But Norman continued to keep an eye on things, sifting through the foundation’s accounts. At a 1992 board meeting, his manner characteristically timorous, he nevertheless questioned a junket the sisters had made to a literary conference in Nairobi, with a stopover in Paris, charging it to the foundation.

  “I suppose if we had gone to Tel Aviv, you wouldn’t have questioned the trip.”

  Next Norman had the audacity to query the legitimacy of lunches at The Four Seasons, Le Cirque, Lutèce, and The Russian Tea Room, also charged to the foundation.

  “But I imagine it would have been kosher, so to speak, if we had met to discuss foundation business over chitlins in some greasy spoon in Harlem.”

  “Please,” said Norman, flushing.

  “We’ve had enough of your tripping on penis-power here, Norm.”

  “The truth is we’re all weary of your patronizing manner —”

  “— and your sexual hangups —”

  “— and your racism.”

  “How can you accuse me of — Didn’t I appoint you and Shirley to the board?”

  “Oy vey, bubele, but it made you feel good inside, didn’t it? It warmed your kishkas.”

  “You could go home and tell your wifey, we’ve got schvartzes on the board now.”

  As a consequence of an emergency board meeting, held in Norman’s absence at La Côte Basque a year later, he was sent a registered letter dismissing him from the board of The Clara Charnofsky Foundation, which would now be known as The Clara Charnofsky Foundation for Wimyn.

  “Goddamn it, Norman, why didn’t you get a lawyer and throw the lot of them out?”

  “Sure, and then they would write a letter to the Times condemning me as a racist.”

  “So what?”

  “So they would have been right, don’t you see? I’ve discovered that I am a racist, and so are you, only I acknowledge it now, they did that much for me. I’m also sexually prejudiced. A hypocrite. I used to wear an AIDS ribbon on my jacket lapel to classes in NYU, but you know what? I stopped going to that Italian restaurant on 9th Street, Flora and I were regulars for years; some of the waiters are gay, suddenly very gaunt, and what if one of them cut his finger peeling potatoes in the kitchen, and thought nothing of it?

  “Those women forced me to take a good look at myself. I had to admit it did make me feel good inside, noble even, to appoint two African-Americans to the board, and deep down what I expected from them was gratitude. You know I once told them Shamir was an abomination to me, and I was for a Palestinian state, and it’s true, but was that the real reason, or was I intent on ingratiating myself with them? Hey, Charnofsky is a nice Jew. He doesn’t break the arms of Arab kids on the West Bank. Jessica once taunted me at a board meeting, come clean, she said, if I saw her three sons walking toward me on, say, 46th Street, wouldn’t I cross to the other side of the street for fear of being mugged? They’ve all got those flat-top haircuts, but one of them has a scholarship to Juilliard, and the other two are at Harvard. It’s raining, they hail a taxi, it shoots right past them. And if I were driving a taxi maybe I’d do the same. You too. Jesse Jackson cracks a joke about Hymietown and everybody has a fit, but I’ve heard you call them shvartzes, and I’ll bet had your daughter married one you wouldn’t have cracked open a bottle of champagne. I also have to say that both Jessica Peters and Shirley Wade are far more intelligent than I am. But instead of being pleased — There I go again. Being pleased,” he said, banging his fists against his forehead. “What right have I to react like that to an African-American’s superior intelligence? None whatsoever. But at the time I was secretly resentful. After all these years I was still only an associate professor at NYU, I said to myself, but Shirley’s a full professor at Princeton only because of ‘affirmative action.’ Yeah, sure. But Shirley and Jessica are both witty and fast. I hardly dared open my mo
uth at board meetings, I was so intimidated, they could cut you down with a quip just like that.

  “Listen to this. When they voted themselves an annual retainer of thirty thousand dollars for attending board meetings and other duties, I fought it like crazy, but boy oh boy was I ever thrilled. I could taste it. The money. But Jessica, with that smile of hers, she says, why, Norman, if you’re so offended, you could always waive your retainer. No, I couldn’t do that, I said, terrified, because it would appear I was being critical of my respected colleagues. It might be interpreted as a moral judgment.

  “You want to hear something even more shameful about me? Jessica is not only brilliant, but she is also a beauty, and has a reputation for sleeping around. Now I have never made love to a black woman. What am I talking about? I’m sixty-three years old and I’d never done it with anybody but Flora. I could die and I wouldn’t know if I was missing out because it was a lot better with somebody else. Anyway, at board meetings I would catch myself sneaking glances at Jessica’s breasts, or her crossed legs, and she knew, you bet your life she knew. She would be sitting there in that short skirt, if it ended any higher, never mind, expounding brilliantly about Henry James or Twain, doing riffs, throwing out ideas I hadn’t been able to come up with in thirty years of teaching, and I would have an erection. I used to order lunch for those board meetings from the restaurant downstairs, and one day it’s chicken pieces and potato salad, and Shirley is about to serve me a quarter of breast when Jessica stays her hand, and says, I think it’s the dark meat that Norman fancies, and the two of them are into those belly laughs, and I’m red in the face. Oh, I’m so ashamed. I’m such a pig. And Doris, yes Doris, I couldn’t stand her teasing, but she was right about me. I wouldn’t want my daughter moving in with another woman. The truth is I don’t really feel comfortable even sitting in a room with a lesbian or homosexual. Why? I’ll tell you. Like Doris said, I’m insecure about my masculinity. If I were lying in bed with my eyes closed, and it was a man who was sucking me off — pardon me for talking like this — but would I know the difference? Wouldn’t I come just the same? I think something like that and I’m just about sick to my stomach with fear. But I’ll bet it would be the same for you, if it were a man doing it, and that’s why you make jokes about fags, but not me any more.