“Then Mr. Schwartz has reason to be proud.”
“You bet,” Harvey said.
The broker ushered them into the master bedroom, opened a cupboard and said, “Now here’s something that should interest you, Mr. Schwartz. The wall safe. Of course,” he added, “you’ll want to have the combination changed now.”
“We wouldn’t think of it,” Becky said.
Downstairs they met the broker’s wife. The elegant Mrs. McClure, her smile cordial but guarded. Maybe seventy years old now, Harvey figured, but still a beauty. Her ashen hair, streaked with yellow, cut short. She seemed fragile and favoured a cane. Harvey had noticed her crippled leg at once. The leg was as thin as his wrist—no, thinner—and caught in a cumbersome brace. She offered him a sherry, set out on a cherry wood table on which there was a vase of Sweet Williams. Indicating the cheese and crackers, Mrs. McClure apologized for not being able to offer them more, explaining that their maid and chauffeur had preceded them to St. Andrews-by-the-Sea. Westmount, she told them, had once been an Indian burial ground. The first skeletons, discovered in 1898, had been unearthed on the grounds of the St. George Snowshoe Club. “This street,” she said, “wasn’t laid out until 1912. When I was a little girl I could toboggan from here, through Murray Hill Park, all the way down to Sherbrooke Street.”
A portrait of McClure, kilted, wearing the uniform of the Black Watch, hung over the mantelpiece. On the mantelpiece itself, there was a framed photograph of Mackenzie King. It was inscribed. The largest portrait hanging in the room was of the saturnine Sir Russell Morgan, Mrs. McClure’s grandfather.
“I understand that you are retained by the Gurskys,” McClure said. “He runs Jewel,” Becky said, “and serves on the board at McTavish. He is a recipient of the Centennial Medal and a—”
“Do you know Mr. Bernard?” Harvey asked.
“I haven’t had that distinct pleasure.”
“He’s a great human being.”
“But Mrs. McClure once knew the brother who died so tragically young. Solomon, if memory serves.”
Mrs. McClure, favouring her thin misshapen leg, limped three steps toward a chair, managing the move with astonishing grace. Immediately she sat down, her hand sought out the knee-joint of her steel brace and clicked it into place. “I do hope,” she said to Becky, “that you care for tea roses?”
“Are you crazy? We love flowers. Harvey buys them for me all the time.”
“Why don’t you show Mrs. Schwartz the garden? I’m sure she’d appreciate that.”
“Allow me, Mrs. Schwartz.”
Mrs. McClure offered Harvey another sherry, but he declined it. “I’m driving,” he said.
“He made this table.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Solomon Gursky made this cherry wood table.”
Harvey smiled just a little, but he was not really surprised. Strangers were always lying, trying to impress him. It came with the territory. “He did?”
“Indeed, but that was many years ago. Ah, there you are,” she said, smiling at McClure without dropping a stitch. “Back so soon?”
“Mrs. Schwartz was worried about her high heels.”
“Quite right, my dear. How foolish of me.”
His blue eyes frosted with malice, McClure raised his sherry glass.
“For generations this was known as the Sir Russell Morgan house, and then mine. Here’s to the Schwartz manse,” he said, with a little bow to Becky, “and its perfectly charming new chatelaine.”
Outside, Becky said, “Now that we’ve got it, where are you taking me to celebrate?”
He took her to Ruby Foo’s.
“Mrs. McClure,” Harvey said. “Did you notice?”
“That she’s a cripple. You must think I’m blind.”
“No. Not that. Her eyes.”
“What about them?”
“One is blue, one is brown.”
“Don’t look now,” Becky said, “but the Bergmans just walked in.”
“I’ve never seen that before.”
“How can she wear such a dress, she just had a mastectomy, everybody knows. Oh, I see. They make them with nipples now.”
“What?”
“The plastic boobs. I said don’t look.”
“I’m not!”
“And don’t use chopsticks. People are staring. You look like such a fool.”
Ten
“What did you think, Olive?”
“He should go on a diet. Like yesterday. Brando used to be so sexy. Hubba hubba!” Mrs. Jenkins didn’t dare mention Last Tango in Paris, which she had slipped out to see alone. Imagine Bert Smith there when Brando reached for the butter. “But,” she added, “I really go for that Al Pacino.”
“He’s Italian.”
“Yeah, but cute. Those bedroom eyes. Remember Charles Boyer? Come wiz me to ze Casbah. Those were the days, eh, Bert? What did you think?”
“I thought it was shockingly immoral from beginning to end.”
“Said the prioress to the Fuller Brush man. But didn’t you just die when that guy woke up with the horse’s head in his bed?”
“In real life he would have wakened when they came into the bedroom with it.”
Squeezing her beady little eyes shut, puffing out her lower lip, Mrs. Jenkins said, “And what if they put it there while he was out, smarty-pants?”
“Then he would have been bound to notice the bump at the foot of his bed before getting into it.”
“Oh, Bert, it takes seventy-two muscles to frown but only twelve to smile. Try it once.”
As usual, they went to The Downtowner for a treat after the matinee. Smith ordered tea with brown toast and strawberry jam.
“And for you?” the waitress asked.
“Make me an offer I can’t refuse.”
“The lady will have a banana split.”
“One bill or two?”
“Mr. Smith and I always go Dutch.”
No sooner did the waitress leave than Mrs. Jenkins snatched all the little tin foil containers of mustard and ketchup on the table and stuffed them into her handbag. “When that waitress wiped the table with that yucky cloth she leaned over for your benefit.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Her jugs.”
“Please,” Smith said.
“And maybe, just maybe, that guy didn’t hear them put the horse’s head in his bed because he had taken some sleeping pills before retiring like they all do in Hollywood, if you read up on it.”
“Then why did he waken later?”
Mrs. Jenkins sighed deeply and rolled her eyes. “Oh, come off it, Bert. Do cheer up.”
But he couldn’t. The world was out of joint, every one of his cherished beliefs now held in contempt. Once the G-Men, say Dennis O’Keefe or Pat O’Brien, were the heroes in the movies, but today it was Bonnie and Clyde. The guardians of law and order, on the other hand, were portrayed as corrupt. Even in westerns, when they still made one, it wasn’t Randolph Scott or Jimmy Stewart who was the hero, but Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The memoirs of whores and swindlers became best-sellers. Young Americans with yellow streaks down their backs were being welcomed by a fat Jewess in hot pants at a store-front office on Prince Arthur Street, the book brazenly displayed in the window—Manual For Draft-Age Immigrants To Canada—telling them how to lie to gain entry into the country. Uppity French-Canadians wanted the sons of anglophones who had beaten them on the Plains of Abraham to speak their lingo now, a patois that made real Frenchmen cringe. The shelves of Westmount Library were laden with filth and to go for a stroll in Murray Hill Park on a balmy summer evening was to risk tripping over copulating foreigners.