“Don’t knock it, Cooperman. My brother-in-law works in the bar at the Prince of Wales Hotel. Think of what he’ll make in tips alone. What’s going on, Benny? Dirty work at the projected crossroads?” I didn’t want to do my guessing in public, so I dodged the question and showered some thanks in Martha’s direction. “What am I here for?” she said. “Don’t leave a ring in the tub if you love me and don’t tell any of your friends that phone after ten at night that you’re shacking up here. Now, let’s have a little drink to make it legal, Cooperman. I’ve been thinking about you lately.” Martha unscrewed the top of a bottle of Crown Royal, the last of the Christmas bonus, she said, and filled two tumblers well beyond my limit. I knew there’d be a price to pay for dropping in on Martha like this, but it seemed steep only when she’d pulled the cork of a second bottle. This time it wasn’t a brand I was familiar with. When I stopped coughing, I told her I wanted to go to bed. She looked at me to be sure of my meaning, then she got up and reappeared with a pair of pyjamas, which she poked at me. I had the tact not to ask where they came from. After all, I was a guest under her roof. Who was I to judge? She gave me some clean towels, a wash-cloth and told me to leave my shoes and pants outside the door and she’d see what she could do for them.
“Your shoes look like you’ve been running through a sewer.”
“In a way, I was. I’ve been playing games over by the old canal. You know where the Showers is?”
“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Patrick Oliver Tracy, my grandfather, ran lock eleven and the Homer bridge for nearly thirty years. Where’d you get your feet wet?”
“I found a tunnel running under the old canal.”
“That’d be the old Great Western tunnel by lock eighteen. There’s a road tunnel between sixteen and seventeen. I’m not sure whether it’s still there. I haven’t been out that way since I was a kid. But, hell, I’d wear my Wellingtons if I went anywhere near there. You’ve got to be careful. My cousin got a bad bite looking for the road that Laura Secord took trying to warn the British of some coming battle or other.”
“What bit him?”
“Her. Iona Tracy. Iona Lloyd she is now”
“Martha, what bit her?”
“Massasauga rattler. She said it was a yard long. Got her on the leg above her boot. You can’t be too careful.”
“You mean there are rattlesnakes down there?”
“One of the few places in the whole province. You get them in the Niagara gorge too and up on the Bruce peninsula.”
“Martha I’m going to bed.” And I did that.
* * *
Next morning I got up to the sound of bacon frying in a frying pan. I’d heard that sound before, in fact I’ve been hearing it all my life. The world’s chief occupation it sometimes seems to me is the baiting and setting of bacon traps. Sometimes I can walk around them, sometimes I can jump over them, and sometimes I fall into them like a tiger into a tiger trap. I wondered how I was going to meet this challenge as I moved stiff legs over the edge of the single bed to the uncovered floor. In the no-nonsense bathroom I tried to simulate a toothbrush with the washcloth. In my head I was making a list of things I would need if I was going to stay clear of my room at the City House. I owed my mother a call for missing Friday night dinner. I wanted to talk to Nathan Geller again about his miraculous telephone conversation with his missing brother.
When I was looking as fit as I could manage in shoes and trousers sponged into passable condition by my landlady, I joined Martha at the kitchen table. “I hope you aren’t one of those morning talkers,” she said, stifling a friendly “Good-morning” before I’d got my mouth open. I drank reconstituted orange juice and tried to outstare the crisp rashers on my plate. I chewed on some cold toast and watched Martha spread peanut butter on hers. In the end I ate the bacon. I always do and I always pay for it before the month is out. Like the time I nearly got drowned under a swimming pool’s nylon cleaning net, after eating bacon out Pelham Road a few years ago. I know these things are related.
When Martha disappeared into her bedroom, I phoned my Ma. It was early, too early to bother her under normal circumstances, but I knew she would be worried about my skipping out on Friday night dinner. It was one of the things I should have mentioned when Geoff, Len and Gordon extended their kind invitation to join them at the gun club.
“Hello?”
“Ma, it’s Benny. Sorry to wake you so early, but I wanted you to know that I’m okay.”
“You’re okay, Benny? That’s fine. Goodbye.”
“I knew you’d be worried when I didn’t show up last night.”
“What time is it?”
“Time? Well, it’s just after eight. Eight-thirteen.”
“Benny, you shouldn’t call so early. I was up till all hours last night with Chopin, George Sand and Paul Muni. I love that music. Chopin wasn’t Jewish was he, Benny?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That would explain the nuns at the end all right.”
“I’m sorry about last night, Ma.”
“No, I liked it. It’s one of my favourite movies.”
“I mean about missing dinner. I was held up, couldn’t get away. I know I should have called.”
“To tell the truth, your father asked where you’d got to. You usually come over. We had a nice brisket and roast potatoes. Your favourite.”
“So, you weren’t worried?”
“No more than usual. Should I have been?” I heard a yawn come over the wire with the words.
“Course not.”
“There you are then. Well, if that’s all, Benny, I’ll turn over and see if I can get back to sleep on the other side. I don’t want to hear the phone ring until the crack of noon. Goodbye, dear.”
After I put the phone down, I picked it up again and called for a taxi, then watched for it out the front curtains. Martha’s living-room was full of overstuffed furniture. A television set held pride of place on a fumed oak tea-trolley. Above the small fireplace was a huge portrait in oils of a bearded man who looked like he thought he was a somebody in the last century. He watched me watching for the taxi. I picked up a copy of Time magazine from under the trolley: “Should Germany Rearm?” I replaced it.
When the taxi came, I had him drop me at the station, where I rented a car. I folded the receipt in half and placed it carefully in my wallet. There’s nothing so impressive on a progress report as an expense with a matching receipt. I’d forgotten to get one from the cab. That dampened things. I started wondering, as I drove the small Ford up the gentle incline to St. Andrew Street West, who exactly my client was on this Saturday morning. I thought I’d better confirm that one way or another right away.
The congregation of B’nai Sholem worshipped at the corner of Church and Calvin, a fact that amused several of my Protestant friends. It was a textured red-brick building with twin garlic-shaped cupolas on top that failed to make it look like a postcard view of the Kremlin but more like a double dollop of Dairy Queen soft ice-cream. There was a wide stairway on the Church Street side leading to an open double door. I’d parked the rented car three blocks away with the cars of others in the congregation. The local reading of holy scripture didn’t prevent members of the shul from driving on the Sabbath, but simply it forbade parking within sight of the synagogue.
I felt a little bogus as I went through the doors into the back of the synagogue. I hadn’t ever been there without my father, and felt both shy and foreign. I borrowed a yarmulka from a cardboard box on a card-table near the door. Although I knew most of the men seated in the pews arranged around the bema, as I took a place in back, I felt all of twelve years old and sitting between my father and Sam (with my mother up in the balcony behind the brass rail with the women).
The place hadn’t changed much since my bar mitzvah. The long pews were stained the same walnut brown as the wood trim of the cream-painted walls. The skylight still showed symbolic beasts painted in a reedy style in faded yellow and green on the four sides of the rectangle. The ark at the front was closed and covered with a winecoloured velvet curtain. On the bema, Mr. Hecht was auctioning off the privilege of opening the curtain and carrying the Torah from the ark to the bema, a privilege for which the merchants of St. Andrew Street often paid big money. I’d seen some highly competitive scenes between several of the leaders of the Jewish community as they fought it out for the right on a hot Saturday in the autumn during the high holy days, while the rest of the congregation took side bets on who’d give up first. At the back, on the same wall as the ark, Rabbi Meltzer could be seen sitting at an old-fashioned slant-top school desk. Under the lid he kept his bound copies of the books, so that he didn’t have to pull out the Torah scroll just to establish the correctness of a citation or conduct a bar mitzvah lesson. The big moment towards the end of preparations for a bar mitzvah was the day when the student got his first chance to read from the scroll just as he would on the big day itself.