Purportedly a lock of Barney’s pubic hair.
“In those bygone days he was very romantic and one night in the Ramada Inn we exchanged locks of pubic hair as a symbol of our enduring love ha, ha, ha. If you doubt my word I challenge you to have these hairs scientifically tested.”
The cover of New York showed Isaac flying through the air over the McTavish building on Fifth Avenue in a red and blue Captain Al Cohol uniform, a yarmulke fastened to his hair with a paperclip.
Predictably even the National Enquirer got into the act, stung with a $200-million libel suit as a consequence. The Enquirer featured a front-page photograph of Isaac emerging from the rescue helicopter at Yellowknife airport.
THE CANNIBAL WHO WOULD BE A CROWN PRINCE.
Other, more fastidious publications obviously decided to eschew the Gursky family feud. An indignant Lionel discovered that Art & Antiques had temporarily postponed a photo essay on his collection of early North American banknotes. His wife took to her bed, seething, when Town & Country cancelled its piece on “Those Glittering Gurskys”, which was to include a double-page Avedon photograph of Cheryl in her music room. “Dress: Arnold Scaasi. At Saks Fifth Avenue; Sara Fredericks, Palm Beach. Hosiery, Geoffrey Beene. Shoes, Stuart Weitzman. Makeup by Antonio Da Costa Rocha, New York. Asprey of London jewels.”
An ailing Libby summoned Lionel to the family mansion in Westmount.
“Your father once told me that on Solomon’s last night in Montreal, just before he flew off in that Gypsy Moth, he warned him that if anybody tried to diddle Henry or Lucy out of their shares he would come back from the grave if necessary and my Bernie was finished. A dead man.”
“Daddy died of cancer, remember?” Lionel asked, dismissing his mother’s foolish apprehensions.
“I remember it like yesterday. But who put that dead raven on his grave is what I’d like to know.”
Back in New York, Lionel sent for Harvey Schwartz.
“There’s a story I want to read in the columns, but it wouldn’t look good coming from me. I have it on the most reliable authority that Isaac suffers from delusions about being the Messiah. Moses plus one or some shit like that. Maybe the little prick was zonked out of his head, but that’s what he told a bunch he took to dinner at the Odeon last night. I want to scare all the little guys out there who are wondering what to do with their proxies. I want to read about this in Liz Smith tomorrow. Understand?”
“Lionel, this is difficult for me to say, but I have decided it doesn’t behoove me to take any further part in what is essentially a family quarrel.”
“How much did Morrie offer you for your piddly pile of shares, you little runt?”
“Mr. Morrie is a great human being. I say that not because he has been kind to me since I was a youngster, but from the heart. However, I will not take his side in this matter either.”
Then things began to crumble.
A spokesman for Corvus Trust declared that they had decided to cast their lot with a new management for McTavish, the next CEO, possibly an outsider, to be selected by a triad of three generations of Gurskys: Morrie, Barney, and Isaac.
Next Mr. Morrie went to the Dakota to talk to Lucy, who was irrevocably opposed to his takeover, according to most observers. That afternoon Lucy’s Broadway office released a surprising statement. Barney and Isaac Gursky would be joining her board. In the future, LG Productions, shortly to become a division of McTavish Industries, would be mounting film as well as stage productions. Lucy, who had taken to her bed, was unavailable to answer questions herself.
Mr. Bernard’s portrait was removed from the outer office of the McTavish building on Fifth Avenue and in its place went the drawing of Ephraim Gursky, all coiled muscle, obviously ready to spring out of the frame and wrestle anybody to the ground. Ephraim was drawn alongside a blow-hole, with both feet planted in the pack ice, his expression defiant, his head hooded, his body covered with layers of sealskin, not so much to keep out the cold, it seemed, as to lock in the animal heat lest it melt the surrounding ice. He held a harpoon in his fist, the shaft made of caribou antler. There was a seal lying at his feet, the three masts of the doomed Erebus and jagged icebergs rising in the background, the black Arctic sky lit by paraselanae, the mock-moons of the north.
An uncommonly serene Mr. Morrie announced his retirement from his estate in Ste.-Adèle.
“Barney and Isaac don’t need any old fogies in the office, but if they want some bad advice they always know where to find me, those two outstanding young men.”
Asking the reporters to wait, Mr. Morrie slipped into the house, opened his wall safe, and removed a set of keys that lay on a large brown envelope, addressed to MISS O., PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL. Then he invited the reporters into his wood workshop.
“This is my new office, ladies and gentlemen. Anybody needs a nicely made table, a bookcase maybe, I’m accepting orders starting right now. Free estimates on request.”
AUTUMN. The season of the sodden partridges, drunk from pecking at fallen, fermented crab apples. Moses, in need of fresh air, dropped his empty Macallan bottle into a wastepaper basket and drifted outside. Raking leaves, he wondered what Solomon would have made of all of it.
One of the journals Solomon had sent Moses some years back had come with a typically irritating note:
“I once told you that you were no more than a figment of my imagination. Therefore, if you continued to exist, so must I.”
But he’s dead, Moses thought, even as the sky above was filled with a sudden roaring, Moses ducking involuntarily, an airplane passing low enough overhead to clip the treetops. Straightening up, his balance uncertain, Moses couldn’t find the airplane anywhere. Then it was back. A black Gypsy Moth wagging its wings at him. It made another pass at the cabin, wagging its wings again. Then, as Moses watched, it began to climb. He knew where it was going.
North.
Where north?
Far.
Watching the Gypsy Moth climb, Moses believed that he saw it turn into a big menacing black bird, the likes of which hadn’t been seen over Lake Memphremagog since the record cold spell of 1851. A raven with flapping wings. A raven with an unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures. He watched the bird soar higher and higher, until he lost it in the sun.
Author’s Note
Years ago, following the publication of another novel, a television interviewer asked me, “Is this book based on fact, or did you just make it up out of your own head?”
I made the Gurskys up out of my own head, but I did not invent everything in Solomon Gursky Was Here. I dug deeply into Franklin, M’Clure, Back, Richardson and the rest on the doomed expedition to circumnavigate the globe through the Northwest Passage, putting my own spin on events. Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, struck me as the most original of recent studies. I am indebted to The Raven Steals the Light, by Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst, for the Haida myths. I found The Victorian Underworld, by Kellow Chesney, indispensable in my attempt to recreate nineteenth-century London. I have leaned heavily on James H. Gray’s Red Lights on the Prairie and Booze for western history, and on Bernard Epps’ More Tales of the Townships. I am also grateful to Christopher Dafoe, editor of The Beaver, for going through his files for me.