His mother’s answer was lost.
“Costly too, to be frank. I mean do you think I would be singing for my supper at that parvenu’s table if I didn’t have a wife and child to support? I would be living in a garret in Montparnasse, serving nobody but my muse.”
The dreaded self-addressed envelopes continued to rebound. From Partisan Review, Horizon, The New Yorker. Again and again somebody else, a detested rival, would win the Governor General’s Award for Literature.
One morning, three years after Moses had scored so high on the intelligence tests, he discovered his picture in the newspaper: the sixteen-year-old boy who had come first in the province in the high-school matriculation exams, winning a scholarship to McGill. L.B. reacted to the news with a low whistle. He removed his pince-nez, polishing the lenses with his handkerchief. “I see that you made ninety-seven in your French exam. Okay, I’m going to read you the opening paragraph of a French classic and I want you to identify it for me,” he said, turning to a book concealed behind a magazine. “‘Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans, est une vielle femme qui, depuis quarante ans, tient à Paris une pension bourgeoise établie rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, entre le quartier Latin et le faubourg Saint-Marceau.’”
All the same L.B. dropped into Horn’s Cafeteria so that old cronies could congratulate him.
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, eh, L.B.?”
Four years after Shloime Bishinsky had denounced him in a high squeaky voice L.B. published a story in Canadian Forum about a pathetic little Jew, unattractive to women, who had bribed his way out of Siberia, across China, into Japan, and from there to Canada, only to be knocked down and killed by a streetcar on his first day in the next-door place to the promised land.
Once Moses had asked Shloime, “How did you manage to walk out of Siberia?”
“Looking over my shoulder,” he replied, and then he tweaked Moses’s nose, making a plum pop out of it. “What kind of boy is this? Sneezing fruit.”
Sometimes, while one of the men was reading a long solemn essay aloud in the dining room, Shloime would gather the children together in the kitchen to entertain them as well as Moses’s mother. He could pluck a silver dollar from behind your ear, swallow a lighted cigarette, or make Bessie Berger squeal by yanking a white mouse out of her apron pocket. He could tear a dollar bill to bits and then only had to close his fist on it to make it whole again. Shloime was also capable of dancing the kazatchka without spilling a drop from the glass of seltzer water balanced on his head. He could comb chocolate-covered raisins out of your hair or stick out his tongue, proving his mouth was empty, and then cough up enough nickels for everybody to buy an ice-cream cone.
Eventually Shloime set up in business for himself, taking a floor in a building on Mayor Street, prospering as a furrier to the carriage trade. He married one of Zelnicker’s shrewish daughters, a social worker, and she bore him two sons, Menachim and Tovia.
Years later, flying to New York, Moses was unable to concentrate on his book because two men, across the aisle, were playing with pocket-size computer games, new at the time, that kept going ping ping ping. Both men carried clutch purses, the top three buttons of their silk shirts undone, revealing sparkly gold necklaces with chai medallions. Finally Moses couldn’t take it any more. “I would be enormously grateful,” he said, “if you put those toys away.”
“Hey, aren’t you Moses Berger?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I thought. I’m Matthew Bishop and this is my yucky kid brother Tracy. Belle de Jour Furs. You want to buy your chick a wrap, I’ll give you some deal.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My father once told me he used to shmooze with you when you were just a kid.”
“Bishop?”
“Shloime Bishinsky.”
“Oh my God, how is he?”
“Hell, didn’t you know? He left for the ultimate fur auction in the sky eight years ago. The big C. Wasn’t he a card though, eh, Moe?”
1951 IT WAS, and as soon as the news was confirmed at McGill, a jubilant Moses tiptoed into the kitchen, embraced his mother from behind, twirled her around and told her.
“Sh,” she said, “L.B.’s working.”
Moses burst into L.B.’s study, daring to disturb him. “Flash. We interrupt this program to announce that dashing debonair Moses Berger has just won a Rhodes scholarship.”
L.B. carefully blotted the page he had been working on and then slowly screwed the top back on his Parker 51. “In my day,” he said, “it would have been considered presumptuous for a Jewish boy to even put himself forward for such an honour.”
“I’m going to apply to Balliol.”
“D.H. Lawrence,” L.B. said, “who managed to get by with no more distinguished a formal education than I had, once wrote that the King’s College chapel reminded him of an overturned sow.”
“King’s is in Cambridge. Besides, I won’t be attending chapel.”
“This country has always been big enough for me. Mind you, I have published over there. The New Statesman. A letter about Ernest Bevin’s anti-Semitic foreign policy that led to a dispute that went on for weeks. You could take my greetings to Kingsley Martin. He’s the editor.”
EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER Moses flew home. L.B. had suffered his first heart attack. Once more he had failed to win the Governor General’s award, his Collected Poems not making the grade.
“It would break their heart to give it to a Jew,” Bessie said.
L.B. was in bed, propped up by pillows, writing on a pad. Pulpy, pale, his eyes wobbly with fear. “How long can you stay?” he asked.
“Ten days. Maybe two weeks.”
“I like the short story you sent me. I think it showed promise.”
“I’ve submitted it to The New Yorker.”
L.B. laughed out loud. He wiped tears from the corners of his eyes with his knuckles. “What chutzpah. Such hubris. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk.”
“If they don’t want it, they’ll send it back. No harm done.”
“You should have rewritten the story with my help and tried it on one of the little magazines here. Had you the sense to consult me, an old hand in such matters, I also would have advised you to use a pseudonym. You don’t want to be compared to L.B.”
“Would you like me to read to you now?”
“I’d better sleep. Wait. I see your friend Sam Birenbaum interviews writers for The New York Times these days. I don’t know how many times I fed that fatty here, but now that he’s a bigshot reporter he can’t even remember my phone number.”
“Paw, I’m sure he’s assigned to do those interviews. He doesn’t pick and choose.”
“And why would he want to interview me anyway? I don’t come from the south and I’m not a pederast.”
“Do you want me to speak to him?”
“Begging is beneath me. Besides, he’s your friend. Do what you think best.”
Things got worse once L.B. found out that Moses had given The New Yorker the house in Outremont as his return address.
“When they turn down your story I don’t want you to be drunk for three days. I don’t need it.”
Moses hid his bottle of Scotch behind books in the library. He sucked peppermint Life Savers.
“Bring me the mail,” his father demanded each morning. “All of it.” One night, after they had both gone to sleep, Moses sat up drinking in the library, going through The Collected Poems of L.B. Berger. So much anger, such feeling. He pitched red hot all right, but he didn’t always find the plate. Many of the poems were clearly vitiated by sentimentality or self-pity. W.B. Yeats he was not. Gerard Manley Hopkins he was not. Yes, but did the poems have any merit? Moses, sliding in sweat, poured himself another three fingers of Scotch. He shirked from deciding, unable to accept such a responsibility. After all, he held a life in his hands. His father’s life. All those years of dedication and frustrated ambition. The sacrifices, the humiliations. The neglect. Moses thrust the book aside. He preferred to remember his father and himself as they once were. Man and boy trudging through snow to synagogue halls, holding hands when they chanced on slippery patches.