“Well, Gitel, if only I had been somewhat older and you just a little younger,” he said, reaching out to squeeze her knee, frail as a chicken bone.
“Oh you’re such a devil you. So why did you ever break up with Solomon Gursky’s daughter? What’s her name? Remind me.”
“Lucy.”
“Lucy. Of course. Everything she touches on Broadway turns to gold. If it’s a hit, she’s got a piece of it. And her dacha in Southampton, it was featured in People, you could die. She collects those paintings, you know the kind I mean, they look like blow-ups from comic books. Oy, what a world we live in today. Did you know that the Chinese now rent out railway crews and construction gangs to richer Asian countries? Fifty years after the Long March they’re back in the coolie business.”
“And die Roite Gitel reads People.”
“Moishe, you could have been living on easy street.”
“Like father, like son.”
“Shame on you. I never blamed L.B. for writing those speeches for Mr. Bernard. As for the others, with the exception of Shloime Bishinsky and maybe Schneiderman, it was envy pure and simple. Those days. My God, my God. Before you were even a bar mitzvah boy, the Gurskys were mobsters as far as our group was concerned. Capitalism’s ugliest face, as we used to say. Then when I led the girls out against Fancy Finery during that terrible heat wave you could die, certainly nobody could sleep, and there was bupkes left in our pathetic strike fund, guess what? Knock knock at my door. Who’s there? Not the RCMP this time. Not the provincials again. But Solomon’s man, your buddy Tim Callaghan with a satchel and in it there is twenty-five thousand dollars in hard cash and that isn’t the best of it. Buses will pick up the strikers and their kids on Friday afternoon to take them to the mountains for a week. Everybody’s invited. What are you talking about, I say? Even Solomon Gursky can’t have a big enough house in the mountains for that bunch. They’re going to Ste.-Adèle, Callaghan says, and there will be rooms for everybody. Tell them to bring bathing suits. Hey, hey there, I say, Ste.-Adèle’s restricted, no Jews or dogs on the beach. Just make sure, Callaghan says, that everybody’s gathered outside here by four o’clock.
“So when they finally put Solomon on trial I naturally had to get to see our benefactor up close. It wasn’t easy. Listen, you’d think it was John Barrymore playing His Majesty’s Theatre, or today say one of those rockers who dress like girls singing at the Forum, you had to line up for hours before the courtroom opened. Not only Jews waiting to get in, but mafiosi from the States. And big-shot goyishe lawyers there to take notes if one of their bosses’ names is taken in vain. And all those debutantes of his, mooning over him. I didn’t blame them one bit. If Solomon Gursky had curled his little finger at me, I would have quit the Party. Anything. But it wasn’t me he had eyes for. It was obviously somebody who never turned up.”
Yes, Moses thought, one eye brown, one eye blue.
“Every time the courtroom door opened he looked up from the table, but it was never whoever he was waiting for.”
“Were you in court when the customs inspector testified?” This country, Solomon had written in his journal, has no tap root. Instead there’s Bert Smith. The very essence.
“Who?”
“Bert Smith.”
“No. I was there the day of the fat Chinaman, you know the one who was supposed to have known plenty. Well let me tell you he waddled up to the witness stand and he couldn’t even button his suit jacket over his belly, but then he stopped and looked at Solomon and Solomon smiled and said something to him in Chinese, and I’ve never seen anything so amazing in my life. By the time the fat Chinaman sat down in the box his suit seemed too large for him, he was swimming in it, and he couldn’t remember a thing.”
“I’ll tell you what he said to him. ‘Tiu na xinq’, which means ‘Fuck your name’,” Moses said, and then he asked Gitel if she would like a liqueur with her coffee.
“What about you?” she asked, fishing.
“I don’t these days.”
“Thank God for that much.” She ordered a B & B. “And what are you living on now that you can afford to invite me to the Ritz for a flirt?”
“This and that.”
“And what do you do out there, buried in that cabin in the woods?”
If he told her the truth her manner would change, she would begin to humour him, an unredeemed nut-case, obsessed with delusions about Solomon Gursky. Moses lit a cigar. “I go to A.A. meetings. I read. I watch hockey games on TV.”
“Oy, Moishe, Moishe, we all had such hopes for you. What kind of life is that?”
“Enough personal questions for one day.”
Gitel refused to let him put her in a taxi, saying, “You sit here and drink your coffee. I’ve got some shopping to do.”
“Gitel, for Christ’s sake!”
Outside, maybe a half hour later, Moses found her wandering down Sherbrooke Street, looking stricken. “It’s my address,” she said, tumbling into his arms. “I know I’m staying with my daughter, but sometimes I just can’t remember …”
Moses drove Gitel home, out to the suburban barrens of Côte St. Luc, then he made right for the Eastern Townships Autoroute, peeling off at exit 106. Back in his cabin, he flicked on the TV and Sam Birenbaum’s face filled the screen. Sam, who had fallen out with the network years ago, now pontificated on PBS.
My God, Moses thought, lighting a Monte Cristo, how many years was it since Sam had taken him to that lunch at Sardi’s? Twenty-five at least. “I’ve got something absolutely ridiculous to tell you,” Sam had said. “CBS wants to hire me for more than twice what I’m earning now and send me to London. But if I leave the Times I could freelance. Molly thinks it’s time I got some real writing done.”
“Ah ha.”
“What are you ah-ha-ing me for? I hate TV and everybody associated with it. It’s out of the question.”
Moses flicked off the TV, poured himself a Perrier, and resolved once more to sort out the clutter in his cabin, starting tomorrow.
There was a shelf laden with material on Marilyn Monroe, including a photograph taken at Peter Lawford’s beach house and Dr. Noguchi’s autopsy report. The photograph, taken in July 1962, showed a group sipping cocktails at Lawford’s poolside: Marilyn Monroe, President Kennedy, and several unidentified figures, among them an old man seated in a chair, a malacca cane held between his knees, his hands clasped over the handle, his chin resting on his hands. Dr. Noguchi’s autopsy notes described Marilyn as a “36-year-old, well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian female weighing 117 pounds and measuring 65 ½ inches in height.” He ascribed the cause of death to “acute barbiturate poisoning due to ingestion of overdose.” Moses had attached a file card and a telegram to the report with a paper clip. The file card noted that the FBI had impounded the tapes of the phone numbers Marilyn had dialled on her last day. The telegram, sent to Moses from Madrid and of course unsigned, read: I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING BUT THE LAST PHONE CALL WAS NOT FROM ME. I TRUST THE WORK GOES WELL.