“Getting better.”
“Thank God for that.”
“Is his father the writer?” Charna asked.
“And how.”
“Big deal,” she said, glaring at Moses. “I could write a book too. I just wouldn’t know how to put it into words.”
“Bless you,” Ida said.
Mr. Morrie squeezed Moses’s arm. “Don’t think I don’t know all about you from your father, Mr. Rhodes Scholar.”
Responding to a kick from Kathleen, Moses said, “Oh yes, thank you,” but he was watching Barney, who was flirting with Rifka Schneiderman on the dance floor.
Barney, they said, still hoped to be the one to draw the sword from the stone, becoming McTavish’s next CEO. Certainly he had done everything possible to establish his claim. While Lionel fiddled, he had driven a truck for McTavish. He had spent a summer in Skye, working in the Loch Edmond’s Mist distillery, starting out by raking the barley floor, absorbing what he could in the mash house and then moving on to tend to the worm tubs in the stillhouse. On his return to Canada, he had become an expert on cooperage, and travelled out west to sit in on grain purchase negotiations.
Rifka quit the dance floor, leaving Barney standing there in the middle of a number, laughing too loud. Then Barney joined Lionel, the two of them swooping from table to table, drawing closer.
Lionel had bet Barney five thousand dollars that he could drink the most champagne without upchucking and that he could get laid before midnight without having to pay for it. Bottle in hand, he bounced from table to table, Barney trailing after. Lionel saying, “Hi, Jewel, want to stroke my cock?” And at another table, “Any of you girls want to fuck?”
(Years later a best-selling hagiographer of the family wrote, in a chapter titled “Lionel as Prince Hal”, that though many took Lionel to be a vulgarian at the time, lacking the royal jelly, the truth is “he was a lonely young man, lonely as a lighthouse keeper on Valentine’s Day, overwhelmed at a tender age by the secret knowledge that one bright dawn his would be the keys to the Gursky kingdom, even though he would have preferred breeding horses in Elysian fields.” An abiding passion, a footnote pointed out, that led to the establishment of The Sweet Sue Stables in Louisville, Kentucky, the name changed to Big Cat after his first divorce.)
Finally the Gursky scions swayed over the same table and Barney heard his cousin say, “But everything’s settled. It’s all going to be mine one day. So think carefully before you turn me down, honey.”
Barney grabbed Lionel by the lapels and shook him. “What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t your father tell you?”
Barney, the colour drained from his face, descended on Mr.Morrie’s table, but he wasn’t there. Barney found him in the men’s room, washing his hands. Blind to the presence of another man in one of the cubicles, Barney began to curse his father for allowing Mr. Bernard to swindle him out of his patrimony. Soaked in sweat, his chest heaving, Barney said, “If Uncle Bernard put a saucer of milk on the floor you would get down on all fours and lick it up.”
“Please, Barney, don’t be angry with me. I love you.”
“Big fucken deal.”
“When you are thirty-one years old you will inherit millions.”
“I’ll have the money right now or I’ll sue. In fact I might fight this
in court anyway.”
“But, yingele, I signed the papers years ago,” Mr. Morrie said, reaching out to touch him.
“You think it would be difficult to prove that you were mentally incompetent even then?” Barney asked, knocking his father’s hands away and fleeing the men’s room.
Moses, in the cubicle, heard the door slam and thought both men had left. But when he came out Mr. Morrie was still there, looking dazed.
“Oh, my. You must have heard everything.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Barney’s a good boy, the best, he just had too much to drink tonight.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“I’m feeling, well, a little dizzy. You could help me back to my table maybe.”
Moses took his arm.
“Barney’s an outstanding person. I want you to know that.”
Six
1973. Following his humiliating altercation with Beatrice at the Ritz, the insufferable Tom Clarkson behaving impeccably, which only exacerbated matters, Moses had gone out on a bender. Ten days later he found himself being shaken awake by a black cleaning lady. He was lying in a puddle of something vile in the bathroom of a sleazy bar in Hull, his hair knotted and caked with blood, his jacket torn, his wallet open on the cracked tiles, emptied of cash and credit cards. Carleton dismissed him.
Idiot. Blind man. Cuckold. Driving back to the Townships, Moses missed exit 106 and had to continue on the autoroute as far as Magog, backtracking to his cabin, his Toyota riding low, laden with hastily packed suitcases and all the books he had accumulated in Ottawa. A telegram was tacked to his front door. From Henry. The ravens were gathering. Well, the hell with that.
Moses got right back into his car and went to pick up his mail. Legion Hall, who fetched it for him, usually dumped it at The Caboose when he was away.
Legion Hall was an imaginative man. According to Strawberry, Legion Hall and his two brothers, Glen and Willy, had joined the army in the spring of 1940. They were sorting out the barn for their father, shovelling cowshit, black flies feasting on them, blood streaming down their faces, when suddenly Glen threw down his pitchfork. “This guy on the radio this morning said democracy was in peril or some crap like that. He says our way of life is threatened.”
“About time too.”
“I’m joining up.”
“Good thinking. Me too.”
“Mister Man.”
Glen’s head was shot off at Dieppe and Willy was blown apart by a land-mine in Italy. Legion Hall, however, saw real action only once, in Holland, and decided it wasn’t for him. The next morning a colonel found him on his hands and knees with a hammer and chisel outside the field mess tent. “What are you doing, soldier?”
“What does it look like I’m doing, you prick? I’m cutting the grass.” It was the guardhouse for him. “And then,” Strawberry said, “this bunch of tests he done for a Jew doctor before Legion Hall was discharged with a twenty-five percent mental disability pension. I woulda scored him fifty percent easy.”
Now Legion Hall, wearing his regimental beret at a jaunty angle, worked all the bars on the 243 and 105 on Remembrance Day, selling poppies, possibly even turning in some of the money.
For the most part, Moses’s mail was made up of magazines: The New York Review of Books, the TLS, the Economist, the New Republic, and so on. He retrieved it, retreated to his cabin, flopped down on his unmade bed, and slept for eighteen hours, wakening at seven the next morning. Following his second pot of black coffee, fortified with cognac, he sat down at his desk. Sorting out papers he stumbled on a letter he had been unable to find for weeks. It was from the lady of the eyes of a different colour. “Having rambled on at such unpardonable length and to no point, let alone catharsis,” Diana McClure’s letter concluded, “I have taken the liberty of having Mr. Hobson send you a memento. Consider it compensation for my having been elusive for so long and finally proving such a bore. Are you, perhaps, a reader of detective fiction? Patricia High-smith, Ruth Rendell, P.D. James. I am addicted to their work, but I have always found the mysteries far more compelling than their resolutions, and most assuredly that is also the case with my belated ‘confessions.’ The cherry wood table I have arranged to have sent to you (delivery prepaid no matter what they tell you) is the one Solomon finished for me on the Friday that I was unable to pick up the bookcase. Central heating tends to suck the moisture out of the wood. It should be treated regularly with beeswax (available from Eddy’s Hardware, 4412 Sherbrooke St. W.).