Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  “And what,” asked Irv, “about the cost of fighting the fedayeen, or absorbing our brothers from Yemen?”

  Inviting Irv had been a mistake, I realized too late, as within an hour the game began to falter, the guys watching, indignant, as Irv pulled over a cut-crystal bowl filled with chips and began to stack them in piles, according to colour. The chips weren’t his, but, on his insistence, represented ten per cent off the top of each pot, proceeds to the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Irv was a governor.

  “He never rests,” said Hershey, glaring at Irv.

  “Neither,” said Irv, “do our enemies.”

  By ten o’clock the fun had leaked out of our game. And, after one more round, awfully early by our standards, the guys decided to pack it in, digging into the goodies I had set out on platters on a side table: smoked meat, salami, chopped liver, potato salad, sour pickles, bagels, and sliced kimmel bread. Counting the chips in the cut-crystal bowl once more, Irv announced, “We’ve collected three hundred and seventy-five dollars for the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. If we each chipped in another twenty bucks that would make five hundred even.”61

  Which was when Izzy, lured by the promise of food and drink, burst into the dining room, grinning as he brandished his snub-nosed revolver. “Don’t anybody move,” he hollered, assuming his gunfighter’s stance. “This is a raid.”

  “Daddy, for Christ’s sake, I’m really tired of that joke. It’s asinine.”

  Snorting, his mouth clamped on a mushy White Owl, Izzy heaved himself into the chair closest to the food platters. “I keep three guns in the house.” Avoiding my reproving look, he yanked the smoked-meat platter toward him and, reaching for a fork, began to stab at fat slices, flicking the lean cuts aside, as he began to stack meat on kimmel bread. “They’re well hidden, scattered, you know. Somebody comes in here, uninvited, boy, if he wants to I’ll air-condition him, sure as hell.” Then he started on one of his trips down memory lane. “During the Depression, you know what I earned? Twelve hundred bucks a year, that’s all, and I’ll bet some of you lost that much tonight. Could I live on it? Good question. Don’t forget I had a free car. I was in the mood for a piece of tail, it was always compliments of the house,” said Izzy. And then, carrying his wobbly sandwich with him, he drifted over to the liquor cabinet to pour himself a hefty shot of Crown Royal and ginger ale. “You’d go into places, everybody knows you’re in the detective office, they’re glad to see you, you know how it is? Butcher shops, especially the kosher ones, groceries, most of them are glad to see you. Specially they may need your help. So they load you down with free stuff. Clothing factories too, they may need you in an investigation, like you go inside to scare an employee for them who wants to start a union or shit like that. I didn’t feel the Depression at all.” And then, his immense sandwich balanced in one hand, his rye and ginger ale in another, a sour pickle clenched between his teeth, Izzy wiggled his eyebrows at me and retreated to his basement flat.

  “He’s something else,” said Nate.

  “Tell me, Marv,” said Irv, “did you stop over in Europe on your way to Israel?”

  “Paris.”

  “You shouldn’t spend your dollars in Europe. France, especially. In 194362 they rounded up more Jewish kids for the gas chambers than even the Gestapo could cope with.”

  Sensing trouble, everybody hurried into their coats and fled. Standing at the top of the stairs to my father’s flat, I shouted, “You’re a pig, a chazer, and I can see through all your childish tricks.”

  Slippers flapped on the stairs, and my father ascended, his face ashen. There were times he looked fifty, his energy boundless, and other times, like now, he seemed old and crushed. “You all right, Daddy?” I asked.

  “Heartburn.”

  “I’m not surprised, packing away a sandwich like that.”

  “Can I have an Alka-Seltzer, or has she locked that up?”

  “Please don’t start, Daddy. I’m tired,” I pleaded, fixing him an Alka-Seltzer.

  Izzy accepted the glass, gulped it down, and belched resoundingly. “Barney,” he said, a quiver in his voice, “I love you.” And suddenly, unaccountably, he was in tears.

  “What is it, Daddy? Tell me, please. Maybe I can help.”

  “Nobody can help.”

  Cancer. “Here, Daddy.”

  My father accepted a Kleenex, blew his nose, and wiped the corners of his eyes. I stroked his hand and waited. Finally he raised his tear-streaked face and said, “You don’t know what it’s like not to be able to fuck regular any more.”

  Here we go again, I thought, angrily withdrawing my hand, as once more Izzy lamented the departure of Madame Langevin, our first maid. “Forty-eight years old,” he said, grieving, “and she had breasts,” he reminded me again, rapping a tiled counter top with his knuckles, “hard as this.”

  Madame Langevin, once The Second Mrs. Panofsky had found out, had been sent packing over my objections. Our new maid, a West Indian, was not allowed into the basement flat unless Izzy was out.

  “Daddy, will you go to bed now, please.”

  But he was back at the liquor cabinet, helping himself to another rye and ginger ale. “Your mother, may she rest in peace, suffered terribly from gas. What held her together during those last years? Wire and string. Stitches. All those operations. Shit. Her stomach was so criss-crossed it looked like centre ice at the end of the third period.”

  “You’re not being decent,” I protested.

  Izzy, drunker than I imagined, embraced me, kissing me on both cheeks, his eyes welling with tears again. “I want you to hang in there, Barney. Get as much as you can while the going is good.”

  “You’re a disgusting old man,” I said, disengaging myself.

  Izzy shuffled over to his stairs, paused, and turned to me once more. “Jeez. The garage doors. It’s her car. The Duchess of Outremont is back. See you around, kid.”

  Ten days later he died of a heart attack on a massage-parlour table.

  15

  On a sweet summer evening in 1973 I was out to dinner with a radiant Miriam, by then the mother of our three children, and like everybody else in those days we were caught up in a heated discussion of the televised Watergate hearings, which we had watched all afternoon. “The tapes are going to do him in,” she said. “He’s going to have to resign.”

  “The hell he will. He’s a survivor, that bastard.”

  Of course she was right, as usual. And I, as usual, brought her my office problems. “I never should have commissioned Marty Klein to write those scripts.”

  “I hate to say I told you so.”

  “But his wife’s pregnant and he left the CBC to come to me. I can’t fire him.”

  “Then promote him. Make him executive producer, or vice-president in charge of ashtrays. Anything. So long as he doesn’t write.”

  “I couldn’t do a thing like that,” I protested.

  It took me three days, as usual, to absorb Miriam’s advice, and then I did exactly as she had suggested, pretending it was my idea. Other couples used to joke about us. We would go to a party and end up in a corner, or sitting together on the stairs, gabbing away, ignoring everybody else. Then some gossip wound its way back to Miriam. She was out to lunch with one of her so-called girlfriends, then embroiled in an ugly divorce action, and she was told, “I thought Barney had eyes only for you. At least that’s what people say. Now please don’t be angry with me, but, speaking from experience, I don’t want you to be the last to know. Dorothy Weaver, you don’t know her, saw him at the Johnsons’ cocktail party last Wednesday. And there was your devoted husband coming on to a woman. Chatting her up. Whispering in her ear. Massaging her back. They left together.”

  “I know all about that.”

  “Thank God, because the last thing I want to do is upset you.”

  “Oh dear, I’m afraid that woman was me, and we went on to the Ritz from there, to drink champagne, and afterwards, now don’t you repeat this, but I agreed
to go home with him.”

  The two of us were out to dinner at La Sapinière in Ste-Adèle. As Miriam perused the menu, I brought a flush to her cheeks, sliding my hand under the table to stroke her silken thigh. Oh, happy days! Oh, nights of rapture! Leaning over to nibble her ear, I suddenly felt her stiffen. “Look out,” she said.

  Yankel Schneider, of all people, had just entered the restaurant with a couple of friends, only this time he didn’t stop at our table to insult me, his anger justifiable. Nevertheless, he put Miriam and me in mind of our last encounter with him at our make-or-break lunch at the Park Plaza in Toronto. That lunch that had started out as a disaster. Me, making such a fool of myself. With hindsight, however, we were now able to laugh at what had since become a cherished part of our personal history. A story, albeit an edited version, our children had come to love.

  “And then what happened?” Saul might ask.

  “Tell them, Miriam.”

  “Certainly not.”

  But that evening in Ste-Adèle, Yankel’s presence still filled me with guilt. Sneaking glances at him, I did not see the man in his early forties but, instead, the ten-year-old schoolboy whose life I had made such a misery. “I still don’t understand why I tormented him like that. How I could behave so abominably.”

  Sensing my distress, Miriam reached for my hand.

  O, Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire. Without her, I am not only alone but also incomplete. In our halcyon days I could share everything with her, even my most shameful moments, of which there are too many to haunt me in my dotage. Take this one, for instance. On that day that was ruined for me, because I had read in the Gazette that McIver had won the Governor General’s Award for fiction, I sent him a note. An anonymous note. Some lines from Dr. Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes:63

  “Toil on, dull crowd, in extacies,” he cries,

  “For wealth or title, perishable prize;

  While I those transitory blessings scorn.

  Secure of praise from ages yet unborn.”

  This thought once form’d, all council comes too late,

  He flies to press, and hurries on his fate;

  Swiftly he sees the imagin’d laurels spread,

  He feels the unfading wreath surround his head.

  Warn’d by another’s fate, vain youth, be wise,

  Those dreams were Settle’s once and Ogilby’s.64

  Once I was not only an unredeemed sadist, given to ridiculing a classmate with a stammer, but on occasion a coward, and also a petty thief. When I was a boy one of my chores was to deliver and collect our sheets from the Chinese laundry on Fairmount Street. One afternoon the stooped old man ahead of me, bearded, wearing a yarmulke, didn’t notice that he had dropped a five-dollar bill on the floor as he paid for his laundry. I covered it with my shoe immediately, retrieving it once he had shuffled out of the shop.

  In fifth grade, I was the one who wrote FUCK YOU, MISS HARRISON on the blackboard, but it was Avie Fried who was expelled from school for a week as a consequence. Our principal, Mr. Langston, summoned me to his office. “I am obliged to strap you, young man, because I know you were aware Fried was the culprit. However, I do admire your pluck for declining to snitch on a classmate.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, extending my hand, palm upward.

  I have many more claims to obloquy. It was not an accident that at Sheila Ornstein’s Sweet Sixteen party, up there in the higher reaches of Westmount, I knocked over a lampstand and shattered a Tiffany shade. I did it because I detested them for being rich. Sure, but I was indignant when, maybe five years ago, ruffians broke into my Laurentian cottage and not only stole my TV set, among other movables, but also shat on my sofa. I am an impenitent rotter to this day, a malevolent man, exulting in the transgressions of my betters.

  Case in point.

  I understand why our most perspicacious men of letters object to the current trend in biography, its mean practitioners revelling in the carve-up of genius. But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit. I’m a sucker for studies of those who, in the words of that friend of Auden’s (not MacNeice, not Isherwood, the other guy) “ … travelled a short while toward the sun / And left the vivid air signed with their honour.”65 But took no prisoners en route, now that the facts are known. Say, the story of T. S. Eliot having his first wife locked up in the bin, possibly because she had written some of his best lines. Or a book that delivers the dirt on Thomas Jefferson, who kept slaves and provided the prettiest one with an unacknowledged child. (“How is it,” asked Dr. Johnson, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) Or reveals that Martin Luther King was a plagiarist and a compulsive fucker of white women. Or that Admiral Byrd, one of my boyhood heroes, was actually a smooth-talking liar, a terrible navigator, an air traveller so frightened of flying that he was frequently drunk while others did the piloting, and a man who never hesitated to take unearned credit. Or tells how F.D.R. cheated on Eleanor. Or that J.F.K. didn’t really write Profiles in Courage. Or how Bobby Clarke slashed Kharlamov across the ankles, taking out the better player in that first thriller of a hockey series against the incredible Russians. Or that Dylan Thomas was a shnorrer born. Or that Sigmund Freud faked some of his case notes. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. And, in any event, my feelings are licensed by no less a moralist than Dr. Johnson, who once pronounced on the uses of biography to Edmond Malone, a Shakespeare scholar:

  If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shown, we should sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in anything. The sacred writers (he observed) related the vicious as well as the virtuous actions of men; which had this moral effect, that it kept mankind from despair.

  In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony. I realize that I — who took The Second Mrs. Panofsky’s rambling conversation to be an abomination — have consumed hundreds of pages, piling digression upon digression, to avoid getting to that seminal weekend in the Laurentians that all but destroyed my life, rendering unto me my reputation as a murderer, which is believed by some to this day. So coming up at last, the lowdown. Exit Boogie. Enter Sergeant-Detective Sean O’Hearne. And I’m willing to swear that what follows is the truth. I am innocent. Honestly. So help me God, as they say.

  16

  Wait. Not quite yet. I’ll get to the cottage (Boogie, O’Hearne, Second Mrs. P., et cetera et cetera) in a jiffy. I promise. But right now it’s time for “By Special Request.” Miriam’s hour. Damn. There seems to be something wrong with my radio. Weak what-do-you-call-thems maybe. You know, the thingamajigs that provide the juice. I can only hear her when I turn the volume way up. Everything’s going on the blink here. Last night it was my TV. The volume fading in and out again. When I finally got it adjusted, I was interrupted by a pounding on the door. It was the downstairs neighbour’s son. “Are you not answering your phone, Mr. Panofsky?”

  “Of course I’m answering my phone. What’s your problem, Harold?”

  “My mother was wondering if you’d mind turning your TV down.”

  “Your mother must have very sensitive hearing, but, okay, I’ll turn it down.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, Harold. One minute.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Trick question. If your radio was going dead, what would you suspect was the problem? It’s not a plug-in, but one of those you carry from room to room …”

  “A portable.”

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

  “I guess you ought to check out your batteries.”

  Harold gone, I poured myself a couple of fingers of Cardhu, and looked into what late movies were available on TV. Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate. The Silver Chalice with Paul Newman and Virginia Mayo. FBI Girl with Cesar Romero, George Brent, and Audrey Totter. No, thanks, but sleep wouldn’t come. So I dredged up my trus
ty Mrs. Ogilvy out of the mists, recalling the Sunday she had borrowed somebody’s Austin sedan and invited me to go on a picnic in the Laurentians. To my amazement, my mother had actually prepared food for us. Unspeakable concoctions of her own invention. Combination banana and oozy boiled-egg sandwiches and other two-deckers, these filled with sardines and peanut butter. “Remember, be a nice, polite boy,” she said.

  “Sure thing,” I said, dumping the sandwiches in the back lane.

  Mrs. Ogilvy, an iffy driver, managed to jump the sidewalk in her attempt to park. She was wearing that two-sizes-too-small, sleeveless summer dress that buttoned down the front. Tires squealing as she hit the brakes for red lights, stalling more than once, jolting to starts, we did eventually make it safely into the countryside. “Did you bring your bathing costume?” she asked.

  “I forgot.”

  “My goodness, so did I.”

  She reached out to fondle me, the Austin swerving into the wrong lane.

  “It’s Mr. Smithers’s car, don’t you know? He lent it to me in the hope that I might acquiesce, and go for a drive with him some moonlit night, but nothing would entice me into the back seat for that one. He suffers from pyorrhoea.”

  We settled on a blanket in a clearing in the woods and she opened up her picnic hamper. Gentleman’s relish. Fish paste. Oxford marmalade. Scones. Two pork pies. “Now we’re going to play a game. I want you to lean against that tree, with your derrière to me, and count to vingt-cinq en français. Then I’m going to hide some sweeties on me, bonne-bouche chockies with ambrosial centres, and then you can root for them, and lap them up. On your mark, get set, go. But no peeking.”

  As I anticipated, I turned around to find her spread nude on the blanket, the chocolates positioned exactly where I suspected. “Hurry. They’re beginning to melt and it’s getting très tickly.”

  Bracing myself as she began to buck and moan, gradually subsiding, I was finally able to pull back and wipe my mouth with my wrist. To my astonishment, she raised her legs, delivering a sharp blow to my chin with her knee. “You know, and I know, that none of this ever happened. Prevaricator. You made this up, you little wanker, sullying the good name of a perfectly respectable schoolteacher … born and bred in London, a survivor of the Blitz, our finest hour, only to be shipped to this callow dominion, this tiefste Provinz, where they use tea bags. … You invented this because you are suffering the dégringolade of old age, and hoped to rouse yourself sufficiently to trickle a drop or two of spunk on your sheets. Crikey, it’s become so rare you ought to have it bottled. You fabricated this picnic —”