Harvey shook his head no, no, reaching for the Vichy water.
“How’s your fish, Miss O.?”
“Firm but tender.”
“Eat, Harvey. Low fat. Brain food. Good for you. Eat every bite on your plate or M. Delorme will cry and you know what that does to his mascara.”
After lunch, somewhat mollified but still restive, Mr. Bernard asked Miss O’Brien to bring him the logs for the Gursky jets. When he found the entry that he had foolishly hoped wouldn’t be there, he turned pale. He began to curse. And Solomon stood before him again, his eyes diamond-hard. “Bernie,” he had said, “you’re a snake, but not a complete fool, so I want to make something clear to you before I go. If you or any of your wretched children ever try to diddle Henry or Lucy out of their shares I’ll come back from the grave if necessary and you are finished. A dead man.”
Shivering, sweaty, Mr. Bernard grabbed the nearest thing to hand, a Chinese jade paperweight, and pitched it against the door. Miss O’Brien came running. “Mr. B., if you want me, there is a button on your phone.”
He snatched her hand and led her briskly into the billiards room. They shot a couple of games of snooker, Mr. Bernard sucking on a Popsicle between shots. Then, abruptly, he pulled Miss O’Brien to him, digging his head into her high firm bosom. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Do you?”
“Ssssh,” she said, unbuttoning, unsnapping, stroking his head as he nuzzled there, sucking.
Later, sinking into the chair behind his Chippendale mahogany desk with the cock-beaded drawers and carved gilt handles, a still apprehensive Mr. Bernard began to shuffle through a stack of birthday telegrams. They were from the prime minister, President Nixon, Golda, Kissinger, a brace of Rothschilds, merchant bankers of New York, London, and Paris, and other supplicants, creditors, and enemies. The shank of the afternoon, which passed uneventfully, only served to feed Mr. Bernard’s anxieties. He rang for Harvey. “I want you to tell reception that if any thick letters come for me, you know, parcel size, they’re to be opened by the goy downstairs, even if they are marked ‘private and confidential.’ Wait. Hold it. Especially if they are marked ‘private and confidential.’”
IN THE EVENING there was a banquet in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, suitably bedecked for the occasion with Canadian, Québecois (this, in the name of prudence) and Israeli flags. Red roses, flown in from Grasse, festooned every table. There were one-ounce bottles of perfume for the ladies, from a house recently acquired by Gursky, and slim gold cigarette lighters for the men, that were manufactured by yet another Gursky enterprise. Ice sculptures of Gursky-endowed university buildings and hospitals and museums and concert halls, set on side tables everywhere, testified to Mr. Bernard’s largesse.
The centrepiece on each table was a papier-mâché doll of Mr. Bernard, wearing a glittering crown at a jaunty angle. King Bernard. The figure, mounted on a charger, held a lance, banners flowing from it. Each banner broadcast another accomplishment of Mr. Bernard: a directorship, a medal, an award, an honorary degree. Lionel Gursky announced, “If you will be kind enough to turn over your plates, you will find that one plate at each table has a crown stuck on its underside. Whoever has the crown has won the right to take home the figure of Mr. Bernard at their table.”
Everybody, absolutely everybody, who counted in the monied, if not the larger, Jewish community was there. The ladies perfumed, their hair sculpted and lacquered, their eyes shadowed green or silvery, outsize rings riding their fingers; the ladies were breathlessly there, triumphantly there, glittering in gowns of écru silk façonné or shimmering cyclamen satin or purple chiffon, acquired and tactfully altered for them by the Holt Renfrew boutique. The men were harnessed in velvet dinner jackets, wine-coloured or midnight blue or murky green, buttoned punishingly tight; they wore ruffled shirts, edged in black, like condolence cards, ornate satin cummerbunds and twinkly buckled Gucci shoes.
Their antidote for ungrateful children—unwanted polyps—was plaques, plaques and more plaques, which they awarded one another at testimonial dinners once, sometimes twice a month in this very ballroom. At ease in the Ritz-Carlton they took turns declaring each other governors of universities in Haifa or Jerusalem or Man of the Year for State of Israel Bonds. Their worthiness certified by hiring an after-dinner speaker to flatter them for a ten-thousand-dollar fee, the speaker coming out of New York, New York; either a former secretary of state, a TV star whose series hadn’t been renewed or a senator in need. But tonight wasn’t make-believe. This was the real thing. This, after all, was Mr. Bernard, their Mr. Bernard no matter how large his international importance, and they were there to bask in his aura. A pleasure immeasurably sweetened by the knowledge that some people whom they could mention by name if they wanted to, some cherished friends they would be sure to phone tomorrow if only to establish that they had been there, some so-called knackers had been excluded, adjudged unsuitable.
Bliss.
So now they applauded, they cheered, they banged forks against wine glasses as tributes to the great man proliferated, and Mr. Bernard himself sat there inexplicably charged with unease, grinding his dentures.
The Israeli ambassador, delivered from Ottawa in a Gursky jet, presented Mr. Bernard with a Bible, encased in a cover of hammered gold, the flyleaf signed by Golda. There was a bronze plaque testifying that even more forests paid for by Mr. Bernard had been planted in Israel. Zion, soon to be Gursky green from shore to shore. There was a medal from Bolivia, where Mr. Bernard had copper interests, but an OBE, ardently pursued for the occasion on Mr. Bernard’s instructions, had been denied him, just as he had failed in the past to procure a seat in the senate.
One of Mr. Bernard’s most cherished charities was remembered: The Hospital of Hope, which cared for children with terminal diseases.
An official of the Canadian Football League passed Mr. Bernard a ball, a memento of last year’s Grey Cup game, that had been autographed by all the players on the winning team, and then one of the team’s most celebrated players, a behemoth who peddled Crofter’s Best in the off-season, wheeled a paraplegic child to the head table. Mr. Bernard, visibly moved, presented the ball to the boy as well as a cheque for five hundred thousand dollars. Three hundred guests leaped to their feet and cheered. The boy, his speech rehearsed for days, began to jerk and twist, spittle flying from him. He gulped and
began again, unavailingly. As he started in on a third attempt to speak, Mr. Bernard cut him off with an avuncular smile. “Who needs another speech,” he said. “It’s what’s in your heart that counts with me, little fellow.” And sotto voce, he told the player, “Wheel him out of here, for Christ’s sake. People are beginning to feel shitty.”
And hungry too.
Once dinner was done, the lights were dimmed for the ultimate surprise, the specially commissioned birthday film. Mr. Bernard, increasingly tense, his lower lip trembling, yanked out a handkerchief to hide his tears. And in his mind’s eye he saw Solomon jumping off that corral fence again, right into the flow of wild mustangs, only some of them green-broke. Follow me, Bernie, and I’ll buy you a beer.
“Oh my sweetie-pie,” Libby said, patting his hand, “I’m so glad you’re enjoying yourself. The best is yet to come.”
Ignoring her, Mr. Bernard turned on Lionel. “What were you doing in Yellowknife?” he demanded.