“Solomon’s jokes were always at somebody else’s expense,” Callaghan said, “but he was indifferent to the damage. Take that prank of buying the Chalet Antoine in Ste.-Adèle, for instance. Far from being overjoyed, the bunch from Fancy Finery were intimidated the minute they came spilling out of those chartered buses and saw what kind of hotel they were being put up at. Tennis courts. Lawn bowling. Croquet. Canoes. Instead of a bottle of seltzer at each table, a snobby waiter presenting them with a wine list and a menu they couldn’t understand. Pâté de fois gras. Ris de veau. Tournedos. A couple of the more enterprising husbands piled into a pickup truck, drove out to Prévost, and came back with a sack of kosher chickens and briskets, gallon jars of sour pickles, stacks of rye bread and so forth, and their wives took over the kitchen. But then there were those bastards who gathered in boats offshore, come to gawk at the fat ladies taking the sun in their bras and bloomers and the men playing pinochle in their underwear. So the beneficiaries of Solomon’s largesse, confined to the hotel for the most part, longed for nothing so much as the corner cigar & soda or the familiar front-door stoop. Moses, there are some eggs in the fridge if you’re hungry. Mrs. Hawkins marks the hardboiled ones with an X for me.”
Moses groaned.
“Okay, next time you flatter me with an unannounced visit I’ll see to it that the larder is properly stocked. Pass the bottle.”
“Here you go.”
“If I had to mark the map I’d say it wasn’t the trial, but Ste.-Adèle. Everything changed between the brothers after Ste.-Adèle. This is conjecture on my part but I think it was only then that Bernard grasped he would have to shaft Solomon if he was to survive himself. As for poor Morrie, castrating him would have been more merciful than humiliating him before his wife with that perfectly made cherry wood table. And Solomon, the insatiable Solomon, got his comeuppance at last. ‘I know who you are and what you are, Mr. Gursky.’”
“I was out to see her in Ste.-Adèle this afternoon.”
“Diana McClure?”
“And what did you find out?”
“That I’m in love.”
“Seriously.”
“It was incredible. She interviewed me, not me her. She was awfully polite, but she wouldn’t say anything. There was her son to consider. Her husband.”
“The son is worthless and Harry McClure’s a boor. He’s a regular at those appalling Beaver Club dinners. All got up in whiskers, goatee, frock coat and beaver hat. Excuse me,” Callaghan said, rising, “but my bladder isn’t what it used to be.”
When Callaghan returned, he settled into his chair, reached for the bottle, and said, “Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish the famine; and Jews the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from the Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are still huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared by the Americans on one side and the bush on the other. And now that we are here, prospering, we do our damn best to exclude more ill-bred newcomers, because they remind us of our own mean origins in the draper’s shop in Inverness or the shtetl or the bog. What was I talking about?”
“Solomon.”
“Okay. Solomon. There are some things even a man of genius can never overcome and that’s his origins. He was not her sort. Sure, her grandfather was a swindler, but he was knighted for his efforts. Like Sir Hugh Allan. Had the Jesuits or the rabbis got their hands on Diana she would have been the better for it, left with mysteries to conjure with, real baggage to check. But her school was Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s and what she learned there was never to cross her legs, and not to laugh out loud in the theatre or eat in public. She was brought up to believe that a lady only had her name in the newspaper three times: when she was born, when she married, and when she died. And hello, hello, along comes this notorious thundering Jew, who will not be denied, and she was both fascinated and terrified. She didn’t turn up at the trial and he never forgave her for that. And she’s just one chunk of the wreckage Solomon left in his wake. Damn him.”
“I thought he was your friend.”
“You don’t understand anything. I count myself blessed that I knew a man of such roaring. I loved him.”
Moses cooked the fresh asparagus for the two of them, supporting the crowns with crumpled foil to lift them out of the water, and then he asked Callaghan if he had an empty jar he could borrow.
“Whatever for?”
“The water will make a nourishing broth.”
Ten
Diana McClure’s second letter, the one delivered posthumously, began:
Having rambled on at length once, and bid you a somewhat self-pitying adieu, here I am again, pen in hand.
Forgive me.
There was no boy with a fishing pole passing on his way to the brook, averting his eyes from my peeled egg of a head. But I thought it a permissible indulgence, a nice literary touch. Look at it this way. As an old lady sits in her wheelchair, grieving over what might have been, waiting for death, Huck Finn passes with his fishing pole. Life goes on. On reflection, most assuredly an image more maudlin than original. A lie, in any event.
You inquired about my first meeting with Solomon at the Chalet Antoine, when I was young and silly but passably pretty and he charged with such audacity and appetite and, above all, rage.
At the time, I would have sworn that I quit the bar for the terrace because I knew that Solomon’s intrusion would culminate in violence and wished to avoid it.
Another fib. I was flirting, sending a signal. I wanted him to join me on the terrace. But first I wanted him to follow me with those hot eyes, watching me stride on limbs that had not yet betrayed me and I still took for an entitlement. Look, Solomon Gursky. Look look. Diana Morgan is different. Not only intriguing to look at, one eye brown, one eye blue, but also reasonably intelligent. The things you recall in your senescence. The curse of memory. I had two magazines with me at the time, Vogue and Vanity Fair. I hid them, lest he consider me flighty, and wished that I had brought my copy of Ulysses with me, because that would have impressed him. So why, once he joined me on the terrace, did I turn down his invitation to dinner? I was scared of what the others would say if they found out, especially Stu MacIntyre. But, above all, I was frightened of the turbulence Solomon evoked in me.
No sooner did I return to our cottage than I looked up the entry on Prester John in our Encyclopedia Britannica. Then I went for another swim in that lake that would be my undoing.
I learned from a shopkeeper in the village that Solomon had not left Ste.-Adèle, but was staying with his brother. When the invitation to tea came from Morrie I understood and began to count the hours, deliberating on what I should wear and imagining our conversation, polishing phrases that would do me credit. I also got into a horrid row at the dinner table with my father and Stu MacIntyre. My father, I should explain, was in a justifiably vile temper. The day before the invitation to tea came he had had to drive into Montreal, because our house had been burgled in his absence. He did not yet know that the police would recover everything within a week. Everything, but a portrait that had been painted of me that I, for one, considered no great loss.