Before Smith, dizzy with despair, could answer, Mrs. Jenkins was there.
“We moved everything into the back room for you nice and tidy. Even your precious strongbox full of marijuana and dirty postcards I’ll betcha.”
“I’ve got to get into my room.”
“But everything’s here,” she said, leading him to the back room.
“Please,” Smith said, “I’ve got to get into my room.”
“This is your roomy-doomy-do now. Besides, Mrs. Boyd is in bed with the grippe, poor kid.”
Smith shut the door and subsided on to his bed. Shivering under his blankets even though the radiator was on the sizzle, he realized that he couldn’t move out tomorrow as he had planned. He would have to wait until Mrs. Boyd got better, went out shopping with her husband, and he could break into the room to retrieve his money. Meanwhile, he calculated it was safe. They would never look under the floorboard. But it squeaked. Oh, God.
Early the next morning Smith opened his door a crack. Soon enough he was rewarded with his first glimpse of Betty Boyd, a frail creature in a faded nightgown, hurrying to the toilet, a hand cupped to her mouth. Morning sickness, Smith thought.
Betty couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old. Herb, easily ten years older, was a big man, his hockey sweater no longer stretching over his beer belly.
MONCTON WILDCATS
Eat McNab’s Frozen Peas
Herb had a job at Pascal’s Hardware and came straight home from work every night with a pizza or a couple of submarine sandwiches, a six-pack of O’Keefe, and a quart of milk. Except for hurried flights to the toilet, Betty lingered in bed all day, playing her radio loud. The Boyds had only been installed in Smith’s old room for a week when he contrived to run into Herb in the hall. “You ought to take her out one night,” he said. “Put some colour in her cheeks.”
“She don’t like you peeping from behind your door when she has to crap.”
Two nights later Smith saw them leave their room. He waited until he heard the outside door open and shut and then he reached for his hammer and screwdriver. Mr. Calder in number five was out. So was Miss Bancroft. Bingo night. Mrs. Jenkins was watching TV in her parlour, but what if she heard the door being forced? Or what if the Boyds had only gone to the corner store and would be back in five minutes? Smith decided to wait for a night he could be sure they had gone to a movie. Meanwhile, he would time how long they stayed out. But when he fell asleep at two A.M. there was still no sign of them.
It was seven A.M. before Mrs. Jenkins opened the door to the room with her master key and saw that the Boyds hadn’t taken anything with them.
A stricken Smith joined her.
“Don’t touch anything,” she said. “Fingerprints. They could be the victims of foul play.”
But Smith knew, without even looking, that the Boyds had lifted a squeaky floorboard and were now on the road to Toronto richer by two thousand three hundred and fifty-eight dollars.
Still mourning his loss, Smith arranged for his things to be picked up while Mrs. Jenkins was out having her hair done by Lady Godiva. He left a brief note and two weeks’ rent on the table, but no forwarding address, and his last best hope was that she would slip on the ice, breaking an ankle, and there would be nobody to take care of her when she got out of the hospital.
Good riddance, Mrs. Jenkins thought, crumpling the note, and then she stepped right out again, stopping for a banana split at the Alexis Nihon Plaza and then going to a movie, The Day of the Jackal. It was ruined for her by two glaring flaws. The assassin, crossing from Italy to France, never could have spray-painted his sportscar so easily. Another scene began with the sun at twelve o’clock, but ended with it at three, though the scene only lasted a minute, if that. Filmmakers must think everybody is an idiot.
Installed in his new flatlet, his colour TV and refrigerator in place, the photograph of his parents in Gloriana sitting on the mantel, Smith prepared his breakfast, gratified that he no longer had to respond to how many Newfies it took to screw in a light bulb or how do you tell the bride from the groom at a Polish wedding. It was a pleasure to have his own Gazette delivered to the door, not a crumpled copy, pages stuck together with marmalade. There were other benefits. He didn’t have to wipe the blood off his butter, because she had shoved her leaky lamb chops on the shelf above his own, instead of putting it in the meat drawer. Neither was he obliged to spread paper on the seat before sitting on the toilet. Tomorrow, he decided, he would have his phone disconnected. He didn’t want Mrs. Jenkins coming round to snoop just because he was listed in the book. Let her worry about what had become of her best friend in this vale of tears.
Lionel Gursky beamed at him from the front page of the Gazette. His newly established Gursky Foundation (yet another tax dodge, Smith thought) would offer a hundred university scholarships to needy students across Canada. This, in everlasting memory of Mr. Bernard. “My father,” Lionel said, “loved Canada and everybody in it.”
Said the call girl to the judge, Smith thought, a pain shooting up his arm.
Seven
One
Inevitably, Gitel Kugelmass’s daughter and her husband, the dentist, joined the exodus of English-speaking people from Montreal, fleeing down the 401 to Toronto. The Nathansons did not take Gitel with them. Instead they secured a place for her in the Mount Sinai, an apartment-hotel in Côte St. Luc with everything for Jewish seniors. A kosher dining room, a shul, arts and crafts classes, a health-atorium where a nice young girl led them in aerobics, a convenience store, twenty-four-hour security, and a room set aside for lectures, pinochle, funeral services, and dances on Saturday nights. Die Roite Gitel, tricked out in a big floppy hat and a flowing black cape, was anathema to those wives still lucky enough to have husbands in this world. A coquette. A menace on the dance floor. She was also known to invite men up to her apartment who were not yet incontinent or confined to walkers, serving them peach brandy. According to rumour, that choleria received the men in her black negligee trimmed with lace, slipping a Mick Jagger disc on the record player, that shaygetz howling, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”.
Gitel’s only other visitors were bouncy cemetery salesmen armed with lyrical graveyard photographs and casket price lists, urging her not to end up a burden to her family. Or round-shouldered rebbes in smelly caftans who guaranteed to light a memorial candle on each anniversary of her death for a mere twenty-five dollars. So once a week Moses drove into town to take Gitel to lunch. What began as a happy excursion, the two of them gabbing away in Yiddish, evolved into a melancholy duty. Following her second minor stroke, die Roite Gitel, who had once led the workers out against Fancy Finery, lost her compass. The first inkling Moses had that she was now somewhat addled came when she insisted he drive into Montreal a day early. “I’m calling from a pay phone,” she said. “My own line isn’t secure any more.”
Once seated with him at a table in Chez La Mère Michel, she showed him the letter. It was from her daughter in Toronto, inviting Gitel out for the High Holidays, and enclosing photographs of the grandchildren, Cynthia and Hilary.