“Have you tried A.A.?”
“Yes.”
“Antabuse won’t do it. Can’t you cut it out whenever you feel like it?”
“Clever Molly.”
“When Marty’s in town he brings his friends around, really bright kids, and Sam adores drinking beer and horsing around with them. But they don’t know who Henry Wallace was or Jack Benny or Hank Greenberg. Sam’s Yiddish music hall records don’t do a thing for them. It drives him crazy. He’s going to be fifty soon. He’s jowly. He overeats. It’s the tension, you know, all that travelling. His new producer, he’s only thirty-two—he discos—he’s on coke half the time—he wants Sam to get a facelift. He’s done viewer surveys, demographic studies, may he rot in hell. Sam told him when I was with the Times I was nominated for a Pulitzer for my Korean stuff Kiss my ass, sonny. But there are rumours that they are testing younger faces and I don’t think they’ll renew his contract.”
“He ought to do the Watergate book.”
“Sam still collects 78s. You wouldn’t believe what he came home with the other night.” She sang, “‘Chickery Chick cha-la-cha-la, Check-a-la romey in a bananika.’”
“Molly, he’s a lucky man. You’re a good woman.”
“Good bad. I love him.”
“So do I.”
“Hey,” she said, brightening, her old jauntiness and loopy logic shining through, “in that case maybe we should have an affair.”
“Let’s save it for our dotage.”
“Come to dinner,” she said, fleeing, because she knew that she was going to cry again.
SAM, HURRYING HOME early from the office, changed quickly and made a dash for the pool. He found Philip and his boyfriend sunbathing on the back-yard terrace, sipping champagne. His champagne. “Celebrating something, boys?”
“You really are quelque chose, Dad,” Philip said, producing a glass for him.
Immediately regretting it, but unable to help himself, Sam said, “Gay was a perfectly good word until it was appropriated by your kind. Our hearts were young and gay. The gay hussar. Et cetera. Gay means cheerful, merry, sparkling. According to my thesaurus its opposite is joyless, glum, dreary. Whoever gave you the right to pass such a judgement on heterosexual love? Real chutzpah, that’s what I call it.”
“Oh, Dad, about those hussars. When the Austro-Hungarian empire was still intact no officer below the rank of colonel was legally allowed to wear makeup.”
“How does your family handle it, Steve?”
“They don’t.”
FOR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS Moses sat in a small stuffy screening room looking at footage of the Watergate hearings, circling sections on certain frames and having the lab blow them up, unavailingly. Then on Moses’s fifth day in the screening room there he was, seated immediately behind Maureen Dean, smiling that smile of his, a gold-tipped malacca cane clasped between his knees. Moses fled to the washroom and splashed cold water on his face. He went for a walk. He stopped for a hamburger somewhere. Then he returned to the screening room and sat staring at the frame, sliding in sweat, for the better part of an hour.
Back in his hotel room, Moses pulled the blinds and collapsed on his bed, chain-smoking through the rest of the afternoon. Once by air, he recalled, and once by water. He washed the blood off the palms of his hands and had already begun to pack when the phone rang. It was the front desk.
“Will you be checking out today, Mr. Berger?”
“Yes.”
The assistant manager had a letter for him.
“It was left here by a most distinguished-looking gentleman who said you would be turning up eventually.”
“Why didn’t you give this to me before?”
“His instructions were most explicit. We were not to let you have it until you were checking out.”
Moses opened the letter in the bar.
If the Catholic Church could outlast Pope Innocent IV, Auto-da-fé, and Savonarola, why can’t Marxism survive the Georgian seminary student and his acolytes. For the record, I didn’t erase the tape.
When the waiter approached his table, Moses ordered a Macallan. A double. Neat.
Seven
The next morning Sam sought out the editor who had worked with Moses. “I understand that you were a great help to my friend. Now show me what he wanted.”
So Barry screened the pertinent out-take for him, a panning shot of observers at the Watergate hearings, including many familiar faces, among them Maureen Dean and, immediately behind her, an old man with a gold-tipped malacca cane clasped between his knees. “It was either Mo Dean or the old guy seated right behind her who turned him on,” Barry said. “He shot right out of his seat to have a closer look, and then he lit out of here like he had been badly burnt.”
“Blow up the old guy for me. Big and bigger.”
Sam ate lunch at his desk, pondering the photographs Barry had brought him. I know that face, he thought. But where and how eluded him.
Later Sam took the photographs home with him and retreated to the library, but once more how and where he knew that face remained tantalizingly out of reach. So he began to pull down scrapbooks that Molly had put together in spite of his objections, poring over old newspaper stories that he had churned out on four continents, hoping something would evoke that face for him. It didn’t work. In fact all his efforts only muddled him, rendering the face even more elusive, and he went to bed wondering if he was mistaken after all.
Unable to sleep, he tried to play a game that had worked for him before. Think of something else, anything else, and the right brain circuits would connect without effort, putting a name to the face. He replayed Ralph Branca’s home-run pitch to Bobby Thomson, striking him out in his mind’s eye. Once again he savoured Ron Swoboda’s ninth-inning catch in the fourth game of the ’69 Series. Then, sinking into sleep, other images drifted into his mind. Moses saying, “Oh come on. Let’s take a peek.”
“I don’t think we ought to.”
“It’s probably the new Bonnard he bought.”
Lifting a cloth revealing what, at first glance, appears to be the most conventional of portraits, the sort that would be welcomed by the Royal Academy. A lovely young bourgeois lady seated in a wicker chair. Long blonde tresses, flushed cheeks. She wears a broad-brimmed straw hat with a pink bow, a multi-layered chiffon dress, also with a pink bow, and holds a bouquet of sweet williams in her hands. But there is something quirky about the portrait. The young lady’s eyes are of a different colour. One eye brown, one eye blue.
Eight
North, Moses knew, is where he would find him.
Where north?
Far.
On his return from Washington, Moses picked up his Toyota at Dorval, and set out for his cabin in the Townships to pack his northern gear. Then he collected his mail at The Caboose, drank for a couple of hours with Strawberry, and drove back to Montreal, where he had recently rented a pied-à-terre on Jeanne Mance Street. Every bottle in his flat was empty. So Moses took a taxi to Winnie’s, and carried on from there to Big Syl’s and when all the bars shut down for the night, he moved on to the Montreal Press Club, floating between tables to a dim corner and falling asleep almost immediately.