“We wish the birthday boy continued good health and success in all his future endeavours,” Harvey continued. “And now, three cheers for Lionel Gursky!”
As everybody but Barney Gursky joined in for three rousing cheers, Harvey Schwartz’s mother descended on Mrs. Gursky. “Harvey’s the rank-one boy at the Talmud Torah. He’s already skipped a grade. I hope he can come again.”
Moses spotted L.B. pacing up and down, obviously in a rage. “Where in the hell were you?” he asked, as a smiling Mr. Bernard joined them.
“Over there. With Henry and Lucy.”
L.B., appalled, looked imploringly at Mr. Bernard. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t worry. How would he know.”
“What’s wrong with their mother?”
“Damn it,” L.B. said.
But Mr. Bernard was chuckling. He pointed a stubby finger at his forehead and twirled it like a screwdriver. “She’s as cuckoo as a fruit cake,” he said.
An agitated Mrs. Gursky joined them, propelling little Harvey Schwartz before her. “Tell him,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bernard, but somebody has written bad words about Lionel on the wall of the guests’ toilet.”
“What are you talking about?”
STROLLING DOWN FROM THE HEIGHTS Moses told L.B. that Henry had invited him back to play again.
“Absolutely out of the question. He’s Solomon’s kid.”
“So?”
“It’s very complicated. Family history. Old quarrels. We don’t want to get involved in that.”
“Why?”
“When you’re older I’ll explain.”
“How much older?”
“Will you stop now please. I’ve had enough for one day.”
They continued down the steep twisting mountainside road in silence.
“Solomon was a bulvon,” L.B. said. “A dreadful man. He came to one of my readings once and he was the first with his hand up in the question period. ‘Can the poet tell me,’ he asked, ‘whether or not he uses a rhyming dictionary?’ I should have socked him one.”
“Yeah,” Moses said, and trying to picture it he giggled and then took his father’s hand. “Let’s go to Horn’s for a coffee.”
“I can’t today. In fact I’ve got to leave you here.”
“Where are you going?”
L.B. sighed, exasperated. “If you really must know I’m late for a sitting with a sculptor.”
“Hey, that’s great! What’s his name?”
L.B. flushed. “Questions questions questions. Don’t you ever stop? Somebody I met at a party. Good enough for you?”
Four
When L.B.’s poem celebrating Mr. Bernard’s twentieth wedding anniversary in 50 was published in Jewish Outlook, it enraged Moses. A committed socialist himself now, he lashed out at his father for having betrayed his old adoring comrades to become an apologist for the Gurskys, one of Mr. Bernard’s lapdogs.
“Calm down. Lower your voice, please. It just so happens,” L.B. protested, “that Mr. Bernard did more for our refugees and the State of Israel than any of those nebbishes.”
But Moses would have none of it, going on to accuse his father of having become a nimmukwallah, somebody who had eaten the king’s salt. They quarrelled, Moses pronouncing L.B. pretentious for keeping carbon copies of all his correspondence. L.B. replied, “I want you to know that the first edition of The Burning Bush, the Spartacus Press folio, now sells for ten dollars, if you are lucky enough to find one. It’s classified as ‘Rare Canadian Judaica’. A real collector’s item.”
Seething, Moses fled the flat on the tree-lined street in Outremont and turned to Sam Birenbaum for solace. He phoned him from a downtown bar. “Meet me for a drink,” he said.
“Well …”
“Oh, come on, Molly will be glad to have you out of the apartment for once.”
SAM, WHO HAD ONCE ENCHANTED L.B.’s group by reciting Sacco’s speech to the court, had been the first of the children to disappoint them. An ironic turn of events, because no sooner did Sam become a teenager than he was the one the group came to depend on for one thing or another. Oh my God, one of the women would sob over the phone to Birenbaum’s Best Fruit, send Sam over right away, all the lights have gone out. Or the toilet’s blocked. Or the kitchen sink faucet is going drip drip drip all night. Or no heat is coming through the radiators. Or my sister-in-law’s car won’t start.
So Sam would hurry over to replace the burnt-out fuses or pump something unspeakable out of a toilet or change a washer or bleed the radiators or fill dry battery cells with distilled water or whatever. And then, though they were grateful, sometimes effusively so, he sensed each time that he was somehow diminished in their eyes for being proficient in such plebeian matters.
L.B. had not approved when Sam and Moses became inseparable in high school, always picking on Sam when he came to the house. “Could that be a book you are reading, Sam, or do my eyes deceive me?”
“It’s a magazine. Black Mask.”
“Trash.”
Then Sam and Moses were at McGill together. Sam, some three years older than Moses, was editor of the McGill Daily until he dropped out in his final year and took a job on the Gazette, because his girlfriend was pregnant. Molly, who had wanted him to continue with his studies, enabling him eventually to tackle serious writing even while he taught, had offered to have an abortion. Sam wouldn’t hear of it. Ever since he and Molly had started dating in high school, he had feared she would find somebody more intelligent and less rolypoly than he was, but now she had to marry him. Moses recalled the day an exuberant Sam had broken the news. “Molly Sirkin my wife. Imagine.”
They went to the Chicken Coop for lunch to celebrate.
“Don’t look now,” Sam said, “but there’s Harvey Schwartz, who never met a rich man he didn’t like.”
Harvey came over to introduce his fiancée, Miss Rebecca Rosen; who was wearing a gardenia corsage. “We’re just coming from Mr. Bernard’s,” Harvey said, letting it drop that he was going to join McTavish Distillers as soon as he graduated. “I consider it a great personal challenge.”
“I want to ask you a question of an intimate nature,” Moses said. “When you are visiting Mr. Bernard’s mansion and you have to piss which toilet do you get to use?”
“Let’s go, buttercup,” Becky said. “They’re just being silly.”
AND NOW SAM, not yet twenty-three, was the father of a two-year-old boy vulnerable to earache, measles, diaper rash, kidnappers, child molesters, crib death, and only Sam could guess how much more.
The two friends met at the Café André. Moses told Sam about his quarrel with L.B. and inveighed against the Gurskys, the new Jewish royalty in America, America. “From the Rambam to the rum-runner. We’ve come a long way, don’t you think?”
“I thought you were friendly with the Gurskys.”
“Only with Henry.”
They drifted over to Rockhead’s Paradise, where Sam immediately phoned home. “Don’t look at me like that. I always like her to know exactly where I am, just in case …”
“Just in case what?”
“Okay, okay. Now I’ve got something to tell you, but this is strictly between us. I submitted some of my stuff to The New York Times. They’ve invited me down for an interview, but even if they offer me a job I’m not going to take it.”
“Why not?”
“Molly wants to go back to work next year. Her mother could take care of Philip during the day and I could quit the Gazette and try my hand at some real writing.”