Each morning that the postman failed to shove a big brown envelope from The New Yorker through the mail slot L.B.’s mood darkened. Everything Moses did seemed to irritate him. “You’re not on death-watch duty here,” he said. “You don’t have to hang around day and night. Go look up some of your friends.”
But if Moses didn’t return in time for dinner he would say, “Did you come here to comfort your father or to chase the kind of girls who hang around downtown bars?”
L.B. was no longer confined to his bed, but he was wasting, fragile. Told to shed twenty pounds, he had clearly dropped thirty, maybe more. His clothes hung badly on a suddenly scrawny frame. He no longer hurried about the house, a man with appointments to keep and deadlines to meet, but shuffled, his slippers flapping. He seemed to be out of breath a good deal of the day and inclined to wheeze in his sleep. A frightened Moses grasped that his father, that powerhouse of his childhood, pronouncing at the dining-room table with the crocheted tablecloth, was actually a short man with bad teeth, a bulbous nose, and weak eyes.
Moses took to drinking heavily, often staying out until the early hours of the morning and sleeping in late. His mother spoke to him in the kitchen. “You mustn’t be a disappointment to L.B. It would break his heart his only son a drunkard.”
“What about your heart?”
“If you’re flying back on Thursday you’d better give me your socks and shirts tonight.”
Bessie Berger née Finkelman came from an observant family. Her father had been a ritual slaughterer. When he died L.B. had gone grudgingly to the funeral. “Your grandfather,” he told Moses, “was a very superstitious type. An apostle, if I dare use such a word, of the Ravaruska Rebbe. Your zeyda, the torturer of cattle, was buried with a twig in his hand by those crazies so that when the Messiah comes, blowing on his shofar, he can dig his way out to follow him to Jerusalem. Isn’t that right, Bessie?”
L.B. never brought her flowers or took her to dinner or even told her that she looked nice. Now her hands were rough, angry red, the nails clipped short. Embarrassed by the tracery of protruding veins in her legs she wore surgical stockings even in the heat of summer.
“Maw,” Moses asked, “do we own the house now or is it still heavily mortgaged?”
“Don’t talk foolishness. Go read to him. He likes that.”
The next morning, while a badly hungover Moses slept late, a big brown self-addressed envelope from The New Yorker shot through the front-door slot. L.B. heard the thud, recognized it, and immediately fetched the envelope and took it into his study, shutting the door behind him. He sunk into the chair behind his desk, overlooked by his own portrait: L.B. in profile, pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight. Well, he thought, it was to be expected. If his poetry wasn’t classy enough for Mr. Harold know-nothing Ross, what chance had a first short story by a fumbling neophyte talent? L.B. addressed himself impatiently to opening his own mail first. There was a royalty statement from Ryerson Press with a cheque for $37.25 clipped to it, as well as a note from his editor. He regretted that there seemed to be no copies of The Collected Poems in stock at Ogilvy’s, Classic’s, or Burton’s, but this was not the fault of the Ryerson sales force. Demand for poetry was small. Unfortunately there would be no second edition. A CBC radio producer, another obvious ignoramus, wrote that while he considered L.B.’s notion of dramatizing stories from Tales of the Diaspora for radio an interesting one, his colleagues did not share his enthusiasm. Would he try them again next season? T.S. Eliot, of Faber and Faber, his anti-Semitism a matter of record, thanked him for submitting a copy of The Collected Poems, but.… Infuriatingly, the letter was signed by a secretary in Mr. Eliot’s absence.
Finally L.B. reached for the big brown envelope from The New Yorker and slit it with his leather-handled letter opener which was a gift, in lieu of a fee, for a reading he had given at the B’nai Jacob synagogue in Hamilton, Ontario. Then he retired to his bedroom, removing his pince-nez, rubbing his nose, the small tic of discomfort starting in the back of his neck. It was noon before he heard Moses stumbling about the kitchen and called out to him. “Bring your coffee into my bedroom and shut the door behind you.”
Moses did as he was asked and L.B. took his hand and stroked it. “Moishele,” he said, his eyes shiny with tears, “you think I don’t know how it feels right here?” Withdrawing his hand, he pressed it to his skittering damaged heart. “My work hasn’t always been in such demand. L.B. Berger wasn’t born famous. I’ve also had rejections from editors who print crap, so long as it is written by their friends, but who couldn’t tell Pushkin from Ogden Nash. I have also suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Prizes going to hacks with the right connections when it was obvious I could write circles around them. You have to have a thick skin, my boy. You want to be an artist your motto has to be nil desperandum.”
Then he handed Moses the envelope. It had already been slit open and Moses could just make out the printed rejection slip clipped to his manuscript.
“The next attack could be curtains for me,” L.B. said, squeezing his hand again, “so let me tell you that I have always expected you to follow in my footsteps, but not to be intimidated by them. I have such hopes for you. I have always loved you beyond anybody, including your mother.”
Moses swallowed hard, his stomach rising, bound to betray him he feared. Like father, like son.
“Now this is not to be interpreted as a complaint against a good woman. A loyal woman. A real baleboosteh. But, to be frank, she has never been a true soul-mate for me. What a man like me needed was refinement, intellectual companionship, like Chopin got from Georges Sand or Voltaire from the Marquise du Châtelet. Whatever gossip you hear after I’m gone, whatever letters future biographers turn up, I want you to understand. I was never unfaithful to your mother, not in my heart of hearts. But I had need of ladies from time to time who I could talk to as an equal. My soul cried out for it. Don’t look at me like that. You’re a grown man now. We should be able to talk. You think I feel guilty? The hell I do. My family always came first with me. Costing me plenty. You think I ever would have signed on with Mr. Bernard, that behayma, if it wasn’t because I wanted to do right by your mother, but you above all? Do you have any idea how many hoops I’ve jumped through there? Furnishing that gangster with a library. Feeding that hooligan literary allusions for his speeches. He couldn’t even pronounce the words. I had to coach him. A man who sits glued to the TV for the Ed Sullivan show. You have no idea what I have endured at his table so that your future welfare would not be sacrificed on the anvil of my art. He’s coarse beyond belief, Moishe. Even a sailor would blush to hear him in full flight.”