Harvey shifted briefly into playback. It was working. “You think Westmount can be cold? I’ll tell you cold. When it drops to sixty below, even with the kitchen stove roaring all night, the water pails would be solid ice in the morning. Then it’s spring, and no matter how good you fill in the chinks in a sod hut when it rains it pisses on your head. Never mind. You also collect the rain-water in barrels off the sod-and-poplar roof to help with the water supply. Otherwise, kid, you are dragging water up from the spring in galvanized pails day after day.
“In the winter my mother, God bless her soul, she used to melt snow in tubs for water. For heating we collected buffalo chips. The buffalo were long gone, but their skulls were still everywhere. Hey, how did Bernard Gursky, that empire-builder, make his first money? Ordinary people might like to know. I made my first money catching gophers, but now,” Mr. Bernard said, slapping the table and laughing until tears came to his eyes, “now I have my own, eh, you little runt?”
Harvey’s freckled cheeks shone stinging red. “Hey, I was only teasing. I made a funny. No hard feelings, eh?”
“No.”
Another day.
“Every family has a cross to bear, a skeleton in the closet, that’s life.
Eleanor Roosevelt, she’s been to our house, you know. Couldn’t her father afford a dentist? Her teeth. Oy vey. Her people were in the opium trade in China, but you wouldn’t read that in The Ladies’ Home Journal or wherever she wrote ‘My Day’. Joe Kennedy was a whoremaster from day one and he swindled Gloria Swanson, but they never sang about that in Camelot. Take King George V even, an OBE was too good for me. One of his sons was a hopeless drunk, another was a bum-fucker and a drug addict, and that dumb-bell the Duke of Windsor he threw in the sponge for a tart. You want the Duke and Duchess for a charity ball, you rent them like a tux from Tip-Top. Royalty they call that. Me, my cross to bear was Solomon, though God knows I tried my best for him, it’s on the record. He was what they call a bad seed. You think it doesn’t grieve me? It grieves me plenty, my brother to die like that, besmirching the family name to this day. Hey, that Solomon Gursky he ordered Willy McGraw shot dead at the railway station. And those Gursky brothers were once bootleggers. Oh me oh my. Oh dearie me. We can’t have them here for tea and cucumber sandwiches on bread made from Lepage’s glue.
“Did I ever tell you what happened just before I bought our first railroad hotel, and if anybody says that was Solomon’s doing just look it up, eh, and see whose name the deed was in. All we’ve got to our name at this point is my father’s general store and maybe four thousand dollars in the pushke. Correction. We had four thousand dollars until Solomon stole it so’s he can sit in on the biggest poker game in town. He’s going to risk the family’s hard-earned money at the table, everything, and win or lose the bastard’s going to run. Bye bye family. Bye bye family savings. My poor mother and father, and Morrie it goes without saying, are going sob sob sob in the kitchen. Nobody knows where the game is but I know where Solomon’s whores can be found. The old Indian one on the reservation and the Polack with the big knockers at the hotel. I give them a message for my darling brother. Tell him he runs as far as Timbuktu and I’ll find him and have the cops put him in prison and he can rot there. He got the message all right and he comes home but he’s so ashamed to face us he runs away the next day and joins the army. And while he’s making his paid tour of Europe, ending up an officer in the flying corps yet by forging a university degree, I’m putting together a chain of hotels, working eighteen hours a day for me was nothing, putting a third of everything in his name because that’s how Bernard Gursky is built. Family is family. He comes home, does he say, Bernard, I don’t deserve such a big share? Does he observe I’ve done real good? Forget it.
“You know in the bad old days hijacking was a problem we had to contend with. Gangsters. Other people’s greed. Well one day he sends out Morrie, of all people, with a convoy, himself he’s too scared. Morrie’s in the last car, you know, the one that drags a fifty-foot chain behind, it makes one hell of a dust cloud in case anybody is chasing after. The men in this car also have a searchlight they can shine into somebody’s eyes through the back window and they carry submachine guns, but only for self-defence. The shooting starts before they even hit the Montana border. Morrie shits his pants. That’s no disgrace, you know, if you’ve read up on the Great War. Me they wouldn’t take because of my flat feet. I was heart-broken. This country I love it and everybody in it. Anyway I read that happened to men at Vimy Ridge the first time they went over the trenches and they came home some of them had the VC, not VD like Solomon. Big hero Solomon. Did he ever go on about Vimy Ridge. The mud. The lice. The rats in the trenches. You ask me the closest he ever got to those trenches before he transferred to the flying corps was a whorehouse in Montmartre.
“Where was I? Oh yeah. Solomon starts to tease Morrie something awful about what happened to him. Boy, did I ever fix him. I shoved Solomon into the next convoy out, he’s white as a sheet of paper. He’s sweating. A truck backfired he hit the floor. Everybody breaks up. They’re laughing at him, the hero of Vimy Ridge. He doesn’t bother Morrie any more, you bet your ass.”
Yet another day.
“Each generation produces a handful of great men, raised in log cabins or sod huts, who reach to the stars to grasp at impossible dreams. Einstein, Louis B. Mayer, Henry Ford, Tom Edison, Irving Berlin. Men in different fields of endeavour and what they have in common is that they never rest. But how did it all start in Bernard Gursky’s case? Well, I’ll tell you. We were living in Fort McEwen now (hoo boy, plank sidewalks) and among other things my father was dealing in cattle. My father had an understanding with this guy and one week instead of cattle he brings him forty wild mustangs. I had to break them in a corral behind the old Queen Victoria Hotel. My father auctioned them off and after each sale he invited the customer into the hotel bar to seal the deal with a drink. I watched this, sitting on a corral fence. I watched and I thought, which was always my way. Paw, I said, the bar makes more profit than we do, why don’t we buy the hotel? There, right there is where it started. I led the Gurskys across the Rubicon into the liquor business. Have I got the river right?”
“Yes.”
“There are so many lies being told about Bernard Gursky already somebody should be hired to listen to the truth from me and write my biography.”
“I was thinking the same thing, Mr. Bernard.”
“For this job I don’t want a Canadian. I want the best. The hell with the expense.”
“I could consult Becky and draw up a list of names.”
“What about Churchill, who wrote his stuff?”
“He did, Mr. Bernard.”
“Oh yeah?” Mr. Bernard drummed his plump fingers against his desk. “Maybe yes and maybe no. Now this Hemingway fella, how much can he earn?”
“He’s dead.”
“Of course he’s dead. You think I don’t know? You’re getting on my nerves, Harvey. Haven’t you any work to do?”
Yes, yes, certainly he did, but Becky, just back that morning from a two-day trip to New York, phoned to say, “I want to see you and I mean right now.”
Harvey, home within the hour, found Becky seated behind her Louis XIV bureau-plat. The contents of an asbestos-lined box that had been lifted out of Harvey’s wall safe were spread out before her. “I want to know why your precious life as Mr. Bernard’s poodle is insured for three million dollars with various companies while the value put on mine, a published writer, is a piddly one hundred thousand?”