I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, and Other Stories

by Norman Levine

  “Good heavens!”

  My brother is an internationally famous numismatist and historian of matters medieval with vast expertise also in Anglo-Saxon and Viking coinage and trade routes. His most recent work had been three volumes on the White Bezants and Deniers of the Frankish Kingdom of Guy de Lusignan in Cyprus. Now retired, he had been for many years the Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room of the Ashmolean museum. He and Dorothy were in their seventies.

  “And now both are dead.”

  “Surely not!”

  “She was walking along the verge on that M-road with the baby in her arms when they were struck by a lorry. I washed the bodies, of course, and laid them out in Lime Street Methodist Church and sat in vigil all night. But your poor brother!”

  The story as it progressed grew more vivid. I was becoming hoarse with shouting denials into her hearing aid. Filipino staff were gawking through the open doorway. Myrna was pulling faces. A soul some doors away was wailing repeatedly: I wish to go home! Summon a taxi! Summon a taxi!

  “This afternoon,” I bellowed, “we’re going to walk in the grounds at Blenheim. You know! Capability Brown and . . . oh, fuck!”

  “John!” said Myrna.

  “A sandwich?” said my mother.

  She lifted her face in the vague direction of mine.

  “Well, I am surprised!”

  In The White Horse I sat in silence drinking a double gin and tonic and watching a man playing a slot machine. Light flickered through decorative numbers on the machine’s plastic body. On a central boss:

  CASH

  £70.00

  CASH

  Into the wooden trough the occasional PLUNK PLUNK of one-pound coins.

  Suddenly a burst of lights.

  A trumpet fanfare.

  A robotic voice.

  WIN WIN WIN

  * * *

  When he returned from his sister’s the next afternoon, he was uncharacteristically agitated.

  “She gave them to the Salvation Army,” he said coming in.

  “Pardon?”

  “My mother. Two Bernard Leach mugs I sent her. My sister says she gave them to the Salvation Army! And she drove her there!”

  “Well, perhaps,” I said, “she—they—didn’t know, you know. What they were.”

  “His early stoneware,” he said.

  “Oh, dear . . .”

  “Have you been,” he said, “to this Kanata?”

  I nodded.

  “The Salvation Army!”

  Later, when he’d calmed down a bit, he said, “But at least I’ve saved these.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Well it’s not Alfred Wallis but it’s another St. Ives—how would you say—a naïf . . .”

  He passed me the two small framed paintings from the carrier bag. They were behind dusty glass, about thirteen and a half inches by ten, thereabouts.

  “My sister had put them in the cupboard under the sink in the kitchen.”

  Ships, a harbour, a breakwater. The other a clipper under full sail.

  I looked at them and then tilted the glass. They were on paper. On pimpled paper something like wallpaper. Crude reproductions.

  “I think, Norman, I think these are possibly reproductions.”

  “What!”

  “Maybe cut from a magazine or . . .”

  He took it from my hands.

  He stared at it.

  I said, “It’s maybe—difficult to see—some sort of photogravure.”

  “But I was sure . . .”

  “Well, there’s a framer down on Elgin. He’ll take the back off for you. Tell him you’re staying with me.”

  I watched him walking across the park with the carrier bag.

  Another odd contradiction.

  Norman had spent all those years in St. Ives living among the painters there—painters in their early years largely unappreciated, in their later years honoured and shown internationally, their importance eventually given national and international imprimatur in the form of a St. Ives gallery of their work in the Tate Britain.

  Norman was in and out of the studios looking at the work of Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Bryan Wynter, and Roger Hilton and on some evenings, a beer or two and conversation in The Sloop.

  (Few people in Canada know that Levine arranged the tour in Canada in 1955-56 of the exhibition Six Painters from Cornwall and wrote the accompanying catalogue.)

  In certain ways, if we don’t push the analogy too far, Levine was the literary counterpart of the painters. His mature work is marked by its fragmentation, unorthodox grammar, and denial of cadence, Pound’s influence reverberating on and on.

  * * *

  The front doorbell rang.

  Norman handed me the carrier bag.

  In the kitchen, I held up a glass.

  He nodded.

  “You were right,” he said.

  Was it on this Unveiling visit or an earlier one? Certainly while he was living in France. In my unreliable memory for dates, it was an earlier visit. His marriage to Anne Sarginson was unravelling. He talked rather haltingly about the situation; Norman never wore his heart upon his sleeve.

  He had showed me then two Peter Lanyon sketches, pencil, a few strokes in India ink, a dash of watercolour. They’d been torn from a wirebound pad. He was going to try to sell them in London on his way back to France. Lanyon had given them to him in the late fifties.

  “When you know the paintings,” I said, “these, well if you know Cross Country or Offshore, say, or Silent Coast . . .”

  “She used to be proud of being married to a Jew,” he said. “Once we were on a train and she was talking to the conductor and she said, ‘Nous sommes juifs.’”

  I nodded.

  “She thought it was romantic being a writer, being a Jew, being married to a writer,” he said, “but there was only the pension . . .”

  I nodded again.

  “Now she holds it against me. The money.”

  I sighed.

  He fell silent.

  “So now she’s denied me . . .”

  He made a sudden dismissive gesture; the confidences had ended; the silence grew uncomfortable.

  “So,” he said, sliding the sketches back into the manila envelope. “This is what I’m forced to.”

  Years later than these events Myrna and I were pottering about in London near where Clifford Street meets New Bond Street. We’d just bought a Liberian Dan-N’gere Poro Society mask from the Gordon Reece Gallery. Further down Clifford Street I saw a gallery with a Peter Lanyon painting in the window.

  Behind a black glass desk sat a young woman with haughty tits.

  “The Lanyon?” she repeated.

  She consulted a Lucite binder.

  “Fifty-four thousand pounds,” she said.

  “Good Lord!”

  “Plus,” she said, “VAT.”

  * * *

  “Just put everything in this garbage bag,” said Myrna. “I’ll sort it out later. No, not the maps. We’re bound to get lost.”

  MapArt’s Ontario Road Atlas. Rand McNally Canada Inc’s Ottawa Hull.

  Norman stood keeping the spare tire balanced upright with his right-hand fingertips.

  “Do you want the vacuum cleaner?”

  “No. Get the vacuum-gun-thing. That’ll do.”

  Myrna’s plan was to turn in the old car and pick up the newly leased one before the ceremony. She’d completed all the forms and credit-check bumph days before.

  The dealership was glass and chrome and brushed steel. On the forecourt on an inclined plinth shaped like a wing or a spearhead they’d posed a glittering car. Myrna was talking to a generic golf-player in an Italian-cut suit. I riffled through a display of fat brochures. Over at the counter, smiles, b
allpoint pens. I’d never learned to drive, never gave any thought to cars. Air freshener permeated. Myrna rummaging in her purse. I found myself wondering how much the colour separations for the brochure would have cost. Thought of telling Norman the Frankie Howerd monologue line about visiting a pneumatic travel agent I’ve come to look at your brochures—pause—yer tours, but humour often seemed to pass Norman by.

  The only funny story of Norman’s I could think of, and that not exactly a thigh-slapper, was “My Karsh Picture.” And following from this somehow, I found myself thinking about Norman’s poetry collections, Myssium, The Tight-Rope Walker, I walk by the harbour and how generally awful they were. As was the poetry of Katherine Mansfield; as was the poetry of Ernest Hemingway; as was the poetry of James Joyce—four stellar prose writers who simply couldn’t write a line that lived.

  Odd.

  “Pardon?”

  “He’s just changing over the plates,” said Myrna, leading us onto the forecourt.

  “Oh, smell the smell,” said Norman, “the new-leather smell.”

  “They spray it on,” said Myrna.

  “Does it handle differently?” I asked.

  “Heavier,” she said.

  She was finicking with the rearview mirror.

  “We’re far too early,” she said. “Let’s loop round and take Norman to Cedarview.”

  “Oh, look, Norman! Canada geese! Hundreds of the buggers.”

  Picking and gleaning in the stubble.

  “The yellow corn stalks and then the black. Their necks,” he said. “The black. It’s just like those flowers, isn’t it? And their heads.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The geese are like the black bit in the middle.”

  “Ahhh . . .”

  “Do you know the ones I mean?”

  “Well, I’m not entirely . . .”

  “Anne,” he said, “now Anne knows the names of all the flowers and all the trees and even the birds in the Bassan but it’s the people. I’m more interested in the people. There was an old waitress . . .”

  “Here we are,” said Myrna. “Now cast your eye over this lot, Norman.”

  Cedarview was like a park-cum-golf course, an enclave giving the impression of “gated community” though there were no gates. It was a bloated subdivision studded with grossly vulgar travesties of architecture. Monster Homes on Mown Monster Lots. Spire, turret, widow’s walk, portico, pilaster, Corinthian capital-crowned-column, entablature and architrave, protruding air-conditioning units, lead-latticed windows, integral four-car garages beside the front doors.

  “But this is awful!” said Norman.

  “Oh, sod it!” said Myrna as the car lurched through a water-filled pothole.

  “But funny,” I said.

  “Bloody mud on my car!” said Myrna.

  “You know,” I said, “it was Betjeman who was the first . . .”

  “Do you know what Betjeman’s famous for?” said Norman. “His teeth. His teeth were green.”

  “I was going to say,” I said, “that Betjeman was the first to find bad buildings funny.”

  * * *

  The car wash was a sway-back clapboard structure listing under the Scotch pines at the end of the disintegrating concrete pad. A sandwich board on the edge of the ditch bore an arrow pointing inwards and the words OPEN and McLEODS FRIES.

  “It’ll only take a minute or two,” said Myrna.

  She read the instructions and pressed the green button.

  Advertisements on tin for Coca-Cola.

  “Collectibles.”

  I was just pointing out Millais’ rusting Bubbles on an advertisement for Pears Soap when the car checked and rending metal screamed. Her side-view mirror had somehow engaged with projecting angle iron. She turned the ignition on again and lowered the window; the mirror dangled on wires. She tried to close the window but something had buckled leaving a three-inch gap along the top.

  As the brushes spun nearer, I said, “Cover the gap! Use the Rand McNally! Now! Open it to the middle and jam it . . .”

  “There’s no need to shout.”

  “I am NOT shouting!”

  “I don’t know what’s got into you!”

  I was trying to read through the steam.

  I shoved her over towards the window, pointing to the small uncovered gap.

  “USE THE OTHER MAP AS WELL!”

  “Rude!”

  Rivulets of water, drops, chasing up and off the windscreen.

  I tried not to think of mirror on threads as eyeball on cheek.

  Ignoring her “finer-feelings-offended” face.

  Jab-jabbing with my forefinger towards the notice.

  “Hotfuckingwax!”

  * * *

  “Are you my Uncle Norman?”

  “No,” I said, “that’s Norman over there talking to that lady.”

  “I’ve got new gloves.”

  He held out both fists. Difficult to tell how old he was. What, eighteen, maybe twenty? He’d been dollied up in a suit and a floral tie and a three-quarter-length dressy overcoat.

  “And there’s a secret. Inside they’re stuffed with rabbit.”

  He turned back the wrists to show me. I stroked the fur lining with a fingertip.

  “Very nice,” I said. “That makes them very special.”

  A solemn nodding.

  A to-do amongst the ladies around Norman’s sister. We drifted over.

  “Are you his uncle?”

  Norman shook his head . . . His mouth shaped words but no sound came out. Shook his head again and spread his hands in a denial of responsibility, culpability, connection to this cemetery, these people.

  “So what’s going on?”

  “It’s the grave,” said Norman. “No one can remember where it was.”

  “. . . definitely this row.”

  “. . . in line with that tree . . .”

  “. . . more with that gate. That’s what I remember.”

  “I know!” said Norman. “Perhaps she’s buried under Gurwitz. Annie Gurwitz!”

  “All these years, said one of the ladies, “I thought it was spelled ‘Gur-evich.’ Shows you what I know!”“You’d know it was Levine,” said Norman’s niece, “If you’d made the effort to attend.”

  “It wasn’t a question of effort,” said Norman. “I was in France and . . .”

  “Or contributed,” she added, “to the cost of the stone.”

  “I was in France,” said Norman, “and I hadn’t the wherewithal to come to Canada.”

  “‘Wherewithal’,” sneered his niece.

  I touched Myrna’s arm and we moved away.

  Norman’s sister was holding at her thigh a loosely-gathered blue and white homemade banner-thing emblazoned with the Star of David. Satiny-looking. It hung by big wooden curtain rings along a gold-painted rod. For the unveiling, I assumed. She was holding it by the rod. That, and the angle against her thigh, I thought for a second of a muleta.

  A crow raucous on a dead branch. I stood looking at the top edges of tombstones. Many were crowded with pebbles. This, too, was an Ashkenazi folk-custom. It was a sight that always moved me, a custom simple and heartfelt and un-undertakerly.

  Myrna started humming the tune.

  “Please, Myrna.”

  It was Shir Ha-Palmach, one of the Palmach marching songs.

  From Mettulah to the Negev

  From the sea to the desert

  All young men to arms . . .

  Once she’d started, the tune, half-sensed, would be there all day like the linger of spearmint on the air or Juicy Fruit; intermittently the words would erupt.

  “Please.”

  People visiting graves—wives, husbands, children, friends—left the pebbles, pebbles picked up from the walkways. />
  The pebbles say

  I hold you in my mind always

  Do you remember . . .

  I love you

  I looked up at the commotion as the mourners fanned out along the gravel paths in search of the grave.

  WeimanMichaelsFederman

  KaellWeissCharney

  FishmanPerelWise

  MillerKatzmanKaplan

  SteinZichermannLipshitz

  “Do you want to help, Robert?” said one of the ladies. “Help find Annie’s headstone?”

  He nodded and trailed behind them.

  We trailed behind the three of them.

  People began hurrying from headstone to headstone. Mild hysteria seemed to be setting in. Robert started scurrying along the paths, stooped at random headstones, pumped his arm in the air in the manner of athletes on TV.

  “Go, Annie!” he shouted. “Annie, go!”

  Each of his discoveries proved a disappointment.

  “Robert!” called one of the ladies. “This is a cemetery. You have to show some respect!”

  His face turned bright red.

  He stopped and deliberately hung back, then with his coat sleeve swept the pebbles from the top of the headstone.

  “Fuckin’ A,” shouted Robert sweeping off other pebbles.

  HochbergRosenfeld

  JacobsonPassman

  “Bernice! Bernice!”

  Stopped sweeping with his filthy sleeve.

  Stood weighing a pebble.

  “Bernice! He’s swearing and throwing stones at us!”

  Bernice—his mother? Surely too old?—hurried over. Robert retreated behind a headstone.

  “Here!” said Bernice, pointing at the path at her feet.

  The smack across his face sounded vicious.

  He sat on the path moaning and weeping.

  “Annie,” he sobbed, “Annie.”

  He pulled at the knot of his tie.

  “Over here,” waved an old man with a walker. “Right the way down here!”

  An immediate drift began.

  “There’s rabbi,” someone said.

  The cantor, I assumed, and the rabbi, tzitzis, a sweat-stained fedora.

  Robert sat on the path and cried more or less silently and continued burying his floral tie with gravel.

  * * *

  The rabbi flanked by Norman on one side and the cantor on the other faced the semi-circle of mourners.