Cancer claimed Callaghan’s wife in 1947. He saw her through her last months at home with the help of a night nurse and Kathleen O’Brien and cases of Loch Edmond’s Mist, tolerating the comings and goings of the officious Father Moran for her sake. Kathleen O’Brien read to her every afternoon. Belloc, Chesterton. Then she sat with Callaghan, praising him for proving such a devoted husband.
“But the truth is I wish she’d die and leave me in peace,” he said.
“Shush.”
“And then there’s the nurse.”
“She doesn’t know.”
“I do.”
Frances, Frances. Each time he looked down on her bed, her once-fine flowing mane of black hair reduced to dry scorched patches, her eyes sunken, he was consumed with rage. What he wanted back was his once-glowing Frances, the girl he had first caught a glimpse of emerging from the Cathedral of Mary Queen of the World on a perfect spring morning. Frances, utterly unaware that all the men had turned to look, but not one of them whistled or made a coarse remark. She told him that he would have to speak to her father, a sour plumber with telltale broken veins in his nose. Callaghan told him that he was in transport, which made her blush because she understood and prayed for him. When the RCMP investigators came in the weeks leading up to the trial, she proved surprisingly tough. “But what does your husband do?” one of them asked, smirking.
“Mr. Callaghan provides. Do you take sugar and cream?”
Only a week before she died, swimming out of a morphine undertow, she said, “You shouldn’t have lied at the trial.”
“We owed Solomon everything.”
“You did it to save your own skin.”
“Why bring that up now, after all these years?”
“Find Bert Smith. Make it up to him. Promise me that.”
“I promise.”
She died in his arms, and for a while Callaghan became a drinker to be avoided, seeking out fights at two A.M. in the Normandy Roof or Carol’s or Rockhead’s. Then, stumbling out of Aldo’s late one afternoon, turning into Ste.-Catherine Street, Callaghan saw him. He saw Bert Smith. His chalky pinched face filling the window of a number 43 streetcar, staring right back at him without expression. Callaghan, the back of his neck prickly, took off after the streetcar, catching up with it at the corner of Peel Street. One stop too late. Bert Smith was no longer on board.
Callaghan found 153 Smiths listed in the telephone book, none of them with the Christian name Bert. Probably Bert is still rooted in Regina, he thought, and he was in Montreal only to attend a wedding or an Orangemen’s convention. Something like that. Callaghan sent for the Regina phone book and, on a hunch, the one from Winnipeg as well, but he couldn’t locate any relatives. So he tried another ploy. He had his lawyer place notices in newspapers in Toronto, Montreal, and throughout the west, announcing an unclaimed legacy of fifty thousand pounds for Bert Smith, a former customs agent, residing in Regina. None of the many bothersome claimants who came forward, several of them threatening lawsuits, turned out to be the real Bert Smith. So Callaghan, remembering that he had been drunk at the time, concluded that it had not been Bert Smith’s face filling the streetcar window. It had been an apparition. That’s what he decided. But he didn’t believe it. He knew it had been Bert Smith.
TIM CALLAGHAN RETIRED IN 1965 on a necessarily generous pension and moved into an apartment on Drummond Street. A creature of habit, no matter how late he turned in he wakened at six-thirty every morning, shaved and showered and ate his bacon and eggs, ploughing through the Gazette. Then he took to the streets, searching for Bert Smith in Lower Westmount and N.D.G. and Verdun, sometimes wandering as far as Griffintown, circling back to The Hunter’s Horn or stopping at Toe Blake’s Tavern to chat with the detectives from Station Number Ten, including his nephew Bill.
After a solitary supper in his apartment Callaghan would go out again in the futile hope of running into Bert Smith or at least tiring himself out sufficiently to sleep through the night.
Increasingly, striding those downtown streets, Callaghan mourned for the glittering city he had once known, the fine restaurants and bookshops and watering holes that had been displaced by the ubiquitous fast-food joints (Mike’s Submarines, McDonald’s, Harvey’s) and garish clothing stores, video gamelands, bars where vapid girls danced nude on your table, gay clubs, massage parlours and shops that peddled sexual devices. There were no more cubbyhole shoeshine parlours where you could also get your hat blocked and maybe bet on something good running at Belmont. The last honest barber had retired his pole years ago. Gone, gone were Slitkin’s and Slotkin’s, Carol’s, the Café Martin, the Eiffel Tower, Dinty Moore’s and Aux Délices. Tramping the streets Callaghan sometimes wondered if he were the last man in town to have heard Oscar Peterson play at the Alberta Lounge or to have ended a long night with an obligatory one for the road in Rockhead’s Paradise. Certainly he must be the last Montrealer to have seen Babe Ruth pitch for the Baltimore Orioles in Atwater Park, now a sleazy shopping centre.
If Moses was in town Callaghan usually met him for lunch at Magnan’s or Ma Heller’s, carrying on from there into the night. Years ago an agitated Moses had told him, “I was in Winnipeg last week and dropped into the Tribune and asked the librarian if I could see the Gursky file. But all the newspaper accounts of the murder of Willy McGraw and Mr. Bernard’s arrest and trial had been stolen. I contacted other newspapers and found out that the old bastard had one of his minions go through the west and sterilize all the files.”
“Moses,” Callaghan said, “your father wasn’t drafted, he volunteered. He didn’t have to write those speeches for Mr. Bernard.”
Moses was young then, already a considerable drinker, but able to handle it. Callaghan found him interesting, but he was not sure that he liked him. Moses was too nimble, ever ready to rush to judgement, and there was, Callaghan suspected, too much self-display there, born of insecurity perhaps, but tiresome all the same. Callaghan was also put off by Moses’s silly determination to pass for the perfect British gent. The Savile Row suit. The Balliol College tie. The furled umbrella. Callaghan didn’t understand that Moses, having already adjudged himself ugly, unattractive to women, felt better playing the peacock, his strut defiant. As far as Callaghan was concerned, what redeemed the young Moses, so quick to anger, was that he had not yet grasped that the world was imperfect. He actually expected justice to be done.
Callaghan tried to warn him against pursuing Solomon’s story, but had he anticipated the ruin Moses’s quest would lead him to in the years to come, he would have frogmarched him clear of the Gursky quagmire. “I know damn well why you are so enamoured of Solomon,” Callaghan said, “but you haven’t got it nearly right. Mr. Bernard is vulgar, but all of a piece. Totally consumed by his appetite for riches. But Solomon …”
“Betrayed hopes?”
“Yes.”
Nine
“Good time to invest. Bad time to invest,” Becky said. “I want it.”
So, in 1973, when most of his friends, fearful of French-Canadian unrest, were going liquid, Harvey Schwartz bought an imposing limestone mansion on Belvedere Road in Westmount. Westmount, dug into the mountainside and towering over the city of Montreal, was a traditionally WASP enclave, the most privileged in Canada. Many of its great houses, hewn out of rock, had been built by selfmade grain and railway and beer barons and shipping and mining tycoons. Most of them were originally Scots, their mansions constructed to rival the grandest homes of Edinburgh, colonial sons triumphant, the progeny of crofters, ships’ chandlers and Hudson’s Bay factors chiselling shields of the dimly remembered clan into the stonework. Harvey bought the mansion, with its spectacular view of the city and the river below, from a stockbroker. Tall, stooping, the broker insisted on showing them through the place himself, smiling acrimoniously all the while. He led them upstairs, past a wall of Harvard Classics and a set of Dickens, Becky pausing to admire the leather bindings. “My articles have been published in The Jewish Review,” she said, “and the Canadian Author and Bookman. I’m a member of the P.E.N. Club.”