“Lena!”
No answer.
“Lena, Solomon left in such a hurry he forgot to give me his new address.”
When she finally raised her head, wizened as a walnut, he saw that she no longer had any teeth.
“It’s important that I have it,” Bernard said, pulling a bottle of rum out of his jacket pocket and waving it in front of her.
Lena smiled. “It’s the boy with the two belly buttons,” she said, remembering.
“Jesus Christ! Son of a bitch! Fuck! Everybody looks like that coming out of the swimming hole.”
Her head began to slump again.
“Your shack is full of stolen goods. I could tell on you and then they’ll come to lock you up.”
Lena swatted a fly.
“Where’s he going?”
“To see the world.”
Passing through her shack again, Bernard paused to leave evidence of his passage, and then he went to see Minnie, taking the bar entrance to the hotel to avoid another encounter with Boyd. “I want you to give Solomon a message. Lena Green Stockings told me where he’s planning to run to.”
“How did you get that flour all over your suit?”
“Maybe my father won’t go to the police, but I will. You tell him that.”
Solomon came home three o’clock the next morning and went right to the kitchen sink, stooping to pump cold water over his head. He turned around just in time to see Bernard making a run at him, his arms outstretched, his fingers curled, ready to scratch. Solomon slapped him away and then went to his father and dropped the deed to the general store and a bundle of money tied with an elastic band on to his lap.
“Some of that money you stole was mine,” Bernard said.
Emptying his pockets one by one, Solomon piled banknotes on the kitchen table, more money than the Gurskys had ever seen at one time.
“Big shot,” Bernard said, “it’s a good thing you were lucky for once.”
Morrie went to make coffee and Bernard sat down to count the money.
“We are the new owners of the Queen Victoria Hotel and the blacksmith’s shop on Prince Albert Street and a rooming house on Duke. The hotel comes with an eight-thousand-dollar mortgage, now our responsibility. Sell the rooming house. It’s a fire trap. The blacksmith’s shop is for André Clear Sky.”
“I don’t see any hotel deeds here,” Bernard said.
Solomon reached into his jacket pocket and tossed the deeds on the table.
“You’re a good boy,” Aaron said.
“Like hell he is. He was planning to run away. Me, I stopped him.”
Solomon waited until his mother had left the kitchen. “I want somebody to wake me up in time for the noon train. I’m going to Winnipeg. I’m joining the army. But please don’t any of you say anything to Maw. I’ll tell her myself.”
Bernard stood apart, fulminating, as everybody fussed over Solomon at the train station. Minnie and the other whores, Lena, some farm girls whose names he didn’t even know, a drunken McGraw, and Fanny Gursky awash in tears. Then Bernard ate lunch with his father. “I’m registering the hotel in my name, because I’m the eldest.”
Wearing his homburg, his three-piece suit and spats, Bernard went to see the notary and then had a word with Morrie. “You know Boyd, the fat clerk at the hotel?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Go tell him he’s fired. You’re taking his place.”
Next Bernard went to the hotel and arranged for a box of chocolates and a victrola to be sent to room twelve, and then he sailed into the bar and sat down at Minnie’s table.
“If I invited you to sit here,” she said, “remind me.”
“You better learn to talk nice if you want to continue here. I’m boss now.”
“It’s Solomon’s hotel.”
“My kid brother left me in charge. Go to room twelve at once and wait for me there.”
Minnie was waiting when Bernard entered the bedroom. “Help yourself to a chocolate,” he said. “It’s for you. The whole box. The largest on sale.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you read the funnies?”
“I look at the pictures,” she said, blushing.
“My favourite is Krazy Kat, but I also like Abie Kabibble. How’s the chocolate?”
“Very nice.”
“It breaks my heart, but the army turned me down. Flat feet. I don’t mind if you tell that to the other girls, but if you repeat anything else that happens here you will not be allowed into the bar again. Now tell me what you like better, waltz or ragtime?”
“Ragtime.”
Sweaty, his hand trembling, Bernard nevertheless managed to set the record on the victrola: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”.
“Are we going to dance first?” Minnie asked.
“Just you. Taking things off. But not your garter belt or stockings. And you mustn’t look at me, not even a little peek,” he said, reaching for a towel. But the record was finished before he was satisfied.
“What do I do now?” she asked.
He put on another record. “I Love My Wife, But, Oh, You Kid.”
“Now you can get dressed and don’t forget to take your chocolates.”
“Would you like to do it, honey?”
“Don’t honey me. I’m Mr. Gursky to you.”
“Mr. Gursky.”
“Do what?”
“Dress me.”
“Shit, I know you can’t read, but surely you know how to put your clothes on at your age.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, hold on a minute. If I could do the brassiere I wouldn’t say no.”
“Oh, Mr. Gursky, chocolate makes my skin break out, but do I ever love Frenchy perfumes and scented soaps and anything made of silk.”
Once she had gone, Bernard immediately washed his hands with soap and water, using a different towel. Then he curled up on the bed, hot with shame. Later he picked up the incriminating towel with two fingers and took it to room fourteen, which he knew was empty, and left it there. And he decided to punish himself for his indulgence. For the rest of the week, when he popped into Susy’s Lunch to meet Morrie at four o’clock, as was his habit, he took his blueberry pie without ice cream.
Four
While Solomon was overseas, during the First World War, Bernard acquired hotels in Regina, Saskatoon, Portage la Prairie, Medicine Hat, Lethbridge, and Winnipeg. Shrewdly, he followed wherever a railway extension was planned, buying hotels close to the yards. The hotels provided beer and breakfast at six, before the railroad men went to work, and solace more appropriate to bachelors when the men drifted back in the evening, their shifts done. The Gurskys’ burgeoning fortunes could be measured by the escalation of the down payments they made on hotels, conscientiously recorded by Morrie, which leapt from $10,000, through $35,000, to $150,000 paid to a certain Bruno Hauswasser for the New Berlin Hotel in Winnipeg, telephones in each of its one hundred rooms, an elevator to every floor, but unfortunately cursed with a restaurant that specialized in wiener schnitzel and sauerbraten, and a bar which had done little business since the Kaiser marched on Belgium. Bernard placed an ad in the Tribune announcing the hotel’s new name, The Victory, and that, as a patriotic gesture, the new Canadian ownership was offering one free beer an evening to nurses.
The family sold the general store and moved to Winnipeg. Manitoba had already been declared dry, except for Temperance Beer and alcohol “for use for medicinal, scientific, mechanical, industrial or sacramental purposes.” Fortunately, there was a convenient loophole in the law. As interprovincial trade in liquor was still allowed, Bernard acquired a mail-order house in a small town in Ontario, and Morrie became a distributor of something called Rock-a-Bye Cough Cure, which enjoyed an understandably huge sale.