L.B. now began to wander further afield, making forays into gentile bohemia, tippy-toe at first, but soon con brio as he found himself, much to his astonishment, welcomed as an exotic, a garlicky pirate, living proof of the ethnic riches that went into weaving the Canadian cultural tapestry. Soon he was at ease at their soirées, collecting compliments from young ladies who, although educated in Switzerland, now wore Russian peasant blouses and drank beer out of bottles and talked dirty. He became a proficient punster. He found that he was adept at flirting, especially with Marion Peterson (such a trim waist, such nice firm breasts) who trailed a sweet scent of roses. Just a tasteful goyishe hint, mind you, not drenched in it like Gitel Kugelmass. Marion sculpted. “Your head,” she said, cupping it, cool fingers running through his hair.
“What’s wrong with it?” he asked, alarmed.
“You have an Old Testament head.”
Traipsing home through the snow, his scalp was still tingly.
Bessie, as usual, had left the hall light on for him. She sat in a worn robe at the kitchen table, trimming her corns with a knife. The following evening L.B. refused the stuffed derma, a favourite of his, that she had prepared for him. “Didn’t you have a movement this morning?” she asked.
“It’s too fattening.”
L.B. became a regular at evenings in the apartments of dedicated McGill professors who also wrote poetry, swore by the New Statesman, and toiled long hours to save Canada through socialism. They proved a bizarre lot, these gentiles, their intelligentsia. They had not been nourished on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, the Zohar, Balzac, Pushkin, Goncharov, the Baal Shem Tov. Among them it was G.B.S., the Webbs, H.G. Wells, board-and-brick bookcases red with Gollancz’s Left Book Club editions, New Yorker cartoons pasted on the walls of what they called the loo and, above all, the Bloomsbury bunch. Catty, clever people, L.B. thought. Writers who luxuriated on private incomes and knew the best years for claret. But when he brought back news of the goyim out there to his acolytes who still gathered round the dining-room table with the crocheted tablecloth on Friday nights, he made it sound like a world of wonders. L.B. now eschewed chopped liver on rye with lemon tea and, instead, nibbled Camembert and sipped Tio Pepe.
Then came the summons from Sinai. L.B. was invited to an audience at Mr. Bernard’s opulent redoubt cut high into the Montreal mountainside, and he descended from those heights, his head spinning, pledged to unheard-of abundance, an annual retainer of ten thousand dollars to serve as speech writer and cultural adviser to the legendary liquor baron.
“And this,” Mr. Bernard had said, leading him into a long room with empty oak shelves running from ceiling to floor, “will be my library. Furnish it with the best. I want first editions. The finest morocco bindings. You have a blank cheque, L.B.”
Then Libby was heard from. “But nothing second-hand.”
“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Gursky?”
“Germs. That’s all I need. We have three children, God bless them.”
L.B., once he had acquiesced to the deal, grasped that he had a lot of fancy footwork to perform. For, as far as his acolytes were concerned, the sly, rambunctious reformed bootlegger, worth untold millions now, was still a grobber, a hooligan who rained shame on Jews cut from a finer cloth. Saddened by the seduction of their mentor, they were as yet unable to rebuke their cherished L.B. to his face. Except for Schneiderman, who beat his fist against the table and cried out, “Ask him why he betrayed his brother.”
“What?”
“Solomon.”
Moses, clearing cups from the table, heard for the first time the name that would become both quest and curse to him.
Solomon. Solomon Gursky.
“There are many versions of that story,” L.B. protested.
“His own brother I’m telling you.”
“Didn’t Jacob slip one over on Esau and isn’t he still one of our fathers?”
“To the Jesuits you would be a real credit, L.B.”
“Artists have always had to dance a jig for their patrons. Mozart, Rousseau. Mahler, that bastard, actually converted. Me, all I have agreed to do is to write speeches for Mr. Bernard about the plight of our brethren in Europe. Coming from me, it’s noise. From Mr. Bernard they will prick up their ears. Gates will open, if only a crack. In this country big money talks.”
“To you maybe,” Schneiderman said, “but not to me.”
“So, chaverim, does anybody else want to put in his two cents?”
Nobody.
“Me, it breaks my heart to have my sweet Bessie go off to Teen Togs every morning. I have a son to educate. Am I not entitled, after all these years of serving my muse, to put some bread on the table?”
Uncertain of themselves, with so much to lose, the group seemed about to forgive, to make amends. L.B. sensed that. Then Shloime Bishinsky, who seldom said a word, surprised everybody by speaking out. “That Mr. Bernard is rich beyond anybody’s dreams, that he is powerful, is not to be denied. The bootlegging was clever—not such a sin—and many who condemn him do it out of envy. Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan or Rockefeller were worse bandits. What I’m trying to say, forgive me, is that such princes in America are entitled to their mansions, a Rolls-Royce, chinchilla coats, yachts, young cuties out of burlesque shows. But a poet they should never be able to afford. It has to do with what? Human dignity. The dead. The sanctity of the word. I’m explaining it badly. But the man I took you for, L.B., you are not. Forgive me, Bessie, but I can’t come here any more. Goodbye.”
Only a trickle of the regulars came to read stories and poems the following Friday night and a month later there was none.
“If those dreamers stop coming here to feed their fat faces and read me their dreck once a week, it’s fine with me. I require solitude for my work.”
The little tic of discomfort started in the back of his neck, the nausea came, and L.B., his pulse hectic, retired to his bed for three days.
“Sh, Moishe, L.B. isn’t well.”
Venturing out among the gentiles, anticipating disapprobation of another kind (they stick together, never mind the class struggle), he was surprised to discover they were impressed. One of the girls, a Morgan, said her aunt had once had a thingee with Solomon Gursky. “He made her a cherry wood table. She still has it.”
L.B. would stand at the back of the hall listening to Mr. Bernard, watching him rake in acclaim for a poet’s unacknowledged eloquence. Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy that’s us, L.B. thought. It stung. But there were compensations. The Bergers moved out of their cold-water flat on Jeanne Mance into a detached house with a garden and ornamental shrubs on a tree-lined street in Outremont, Mr. Bernard guaranteeing the mortgage. There was a proper study for L.B. with an oak desk and a leather armchair and a samovar and Herman Yalofsky’s portrait of him mounted on an easel. LB. in profile pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight.
Three
One afternoon in 1942 L.B. told Moses that they were invited to the Bernard Gursky mansion. Moses was ordered to have his hair cut and he was dressed in a new suit and shoes. L.B. explained, “It’s a thirteenth birthday party for the eldest son, Lionel, and Mr. Bernard said that you would be welcome. You are expected to play with the two younger ones, Anita and Nathan. Say it.”
“Anita and Nathan.”