St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  AGENT S FOR SAMMY

  MOST IMMEDIATE. IGNORE PREVIOUS MESSAGE. PUT PLAN XH5 INTO OPERATION IMMEDIATELY.

  THE COMMANDER

  PS THE COMMANDER’S AGENTS LOVE THEIR FATHERS

  He inserted the sheet in Sammy’s notebook and then, enraged with himself, he suddenly, savagely, retrieved it. Leave the kid alone, don’t bug him. Jake crushed the sheet into a ball, swerved to avoid the onrushing Wilt Chamberlain, and backhanded it into the dustbin.

  Another basket.

  In the sitting room again, the bookshelves filled him with weariness. Books bought in Montreal. Books bought in Toronto. Books bought in London. Hideously expensive art books bought for Nancy while he was pursuing her and never opened since.

  “Marriage is a rotten bourgeois institution. It stinks. I keep up with the times, you know. But, Nancy, ours would be something special. A rock.”

  Books lugged from country to country, flat to flat, across the ocean, crated and uncrated, and still largely unread. There was a letter on Nancy’s desk, from Mill Hill, Sammy’s school. Next term he would require a cricket outfit. In three generations, from foxy Jews to fox-hunting ones. What next? Lord Hersh of St. Urbain?

  Turning to the bookshelves again, Jake reached for Hugo’s Spanish Self-Taught, an egg-soiled copy, and then with an ache he remembered his villa on Ibiza. That would be all of ten years ago, he realized, alarmed. Ten years ago, when time had not yet begun to count, all ambitions were to be realized, and somewhere past midnight Guillermo retrieved him from the bar at the Bristol Hotel. “Vamonos,” he said.

  They fetched the girls from Rosita’s brothel, rounded up some of the fishermen, and continued to Guillermo’s apartment, which was on the top floor of the tallest building on the waterfront. While the others waited there, Guillermo drove Jake to his clinic, they tiptoed past sleeping patients, pried open a case of champagne, and returned to the apartment, laden with bottles. Most of the others had already shed their clothes. A nude guitarist with a dampsoiled pink brassiere tied to his head like a bonnet danced on the table. A couple was screwing on the floor. Jake turned apprehensively to Guillermo, but he wasn’t at all disconcerted. He began to rip off his shirt, buttons flying.

  Next thing Jake knew everybody was on the floor. Rolling, heaving. A wriggling smelly creaming tangle of legs, arms, breasts, and tongues. Girls moaned, they shrieked ai-aii-aii and called for their mothers; the men laughed and pounded buttocks openhanded and shouted imprecations. Jake was dizzy from drink. Flushed and embarrassed. Then it struck him that this is what they called an orgy, he was taking part, and his spirits soared. This is living, Yankel. Liberated rebel-without-a-cause living. He undressed and made a sporting half-hearted grab for the body next to him when a moist stinky leg hit him on the cheek. One leg, then another, locking his neck. Arms driving his head toward a churning vagina, mossy and glistening. Suppressing nausea, Jake broke free, slid into his trousers, and sat down on a stool by the bar. He drank slowly, his head throbbing, as on the floor below they continued to thrash, roll, and writhe. Kiss, suck, gobble, penetrate. What is it with me? Jake thought. What ails me? If I saw this in an how-empty-is-the-life-of-the-rich movie or read it in a lowdown-on-suburbia novel, I’d burn with envy, but now that it’s happening to me – Jake scooped up a bottle of champagne and stepped on the terrace to watch the sun come up. The Mediterranean sun. Spain. Grubby fishing boats were beginning to chug into the harbor. Gulls swooped hungrily overhead or bobbed on the shimmering green water alongside. Remember this, Jake thought, cherish it, and he felt very ghetto-liberated, very Hemingway, as he raised a bottle to his lips, drained it, and flung it into the sea. A moment later he was sick to his stomach.

  Listen, your lordship. They’re twisting everything in this courtroom. Jacob Hersh is no sex nut. I’m a respecter of institutions. An all-around good chap. A big talker, but a chicken. Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn’t inhale.

  Mr. Justice Beal is a fart. He would say, quite, Mr. Hersh. Quite.

  5:30. Jake slumped in his chair and dipped into a stack of magazines, coming up with an old copy of Time.

  SURGERY

  How Not To Die Of Cancer

  A whole generation has grown up since William Powell was a matinee idol noted for his sophisticated suavity in The Thin Man, The Great Ziegfeld, and My Man Godfrey. Many of today’s moviegoers scarcely know him. But less surprising than his fading reputation is the actor’s actual survival. Last week in Palm Springs, Calif., Powell observed the 25th anniversary of his operation for cancer of the rectum. And with the same smooth ease that made him a hit on the screen, Powell spoke frankly of his illness and a treatment that most patients and their relatives find embarrassing to discuss.

  “I began bleeding from the rectum in March 1938,” he said. “The doctor found a cancer, smaller than the nail of your little finger, between three and four inches up my rectum. They recommended removal of the rectum. Then I’d have to have a colostomy and evacuate into a pouch through an artificial opening for the rest of my life. I didn’t feel I could go for this. But the doctor said that for my particular case they could offer an alternative – a temporary colostomy and radiation treatment. I took it.”

  Surgeons made an incision in Powell’s abdomen, brought out part of the colon, and cut it half though. “From then on,” said Powell, “fecal matter emptied into a pouch round my middle.”

  Jake skipped breathlessly to the bottom of the page.

  Few cases of rectal cancer are detected early enough to be treated as Powell’s case was. Says Powell simply: “I was one of the lucky ones.”

  Son-of-a-bitch. When Jake had been to Dr. O’Brien about his own rectal bleeding he had been told not to worry, old boy, it was hemorrhoids. Sure, old boy, only probably while Jake was hoisting his trousers up again inside that freezer of a surgery, O’Brien was saying to his nurse, “You know that nice Mr. Hersh?”

  “You mean the chap with the undescended testicle?”

  “Exactly. Well, I jolly well hope he’s carrying lots of insurance. No sense opening him up. He’s swimming in it.”

  Now Jake stood nude, legs spread wide apart and back to the hall mirror, bent over with his head bobbing between his knees, probing his ass hole for cancer nails. Nothing, no early-warning sprouts yet, as far as he could see. Then Jake remembered how Gas Berger of blessed memory had raised his arm to shave one morning and there was this unnecessary little lump above the elbow. Goodbye Gas. Jake searched all his body’s hiding places, rubbing, pinching, squeezing, and slapping, testing for tell-tale lumps and bumps, but he could find nothing anywhere. Nothing visible anywhere. More suspicious than relieved he went into the kitchen for another drink, decided against it, squeezed himself an orange juice, and jogged around the table three times.

  Once more the hall mirror trapped Jake, and this time he stickhandled into the sitting room, feinting Johnny Bower out of position by winding up for a slapshot, dekeing him, and then gently shifting the puck back in front of the net for the kid to pick up. Naturally the kid missed and Jake had to cut around the net and flip in the rebound. He knew without looking over at the bench that Toe would be smiling, smiling inwardly, as he said to the others, “The old son-of-a-b—— can still make the big move.”

  If it isn’t lung cancer it will be an airplane crash.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  CLOSE ON: DOLL’S SEVERED HEAD LYING AMIDST TWISTED METAL AND STILL STEAMING RUBBLE

  TRACK BACK

  EXT. DAY. A MOUNTAIN. LABRADOR

  Sun, sky, clouds. Peaks … A HUMMING BIRD … PANNING TO … twisted wings. Torn engine and tail work. Bodies under blankets. Small fires being hosed down here and there. POLICE wandering in the wreckage.

  CLOSE ON: JAKE’S EYES

  TRACKING IN

  They have seen and known so much. Now they are dead, unseeing.

  HOLD ONE EYE

  MUSIC: Orgiastic.

  CLOSE ON: NANCY wiggling out of a half slip wit
h an air of moist expectancy.

  TRACK BACK

  INT. DAY HERSH BEDROOM

  NANCY cavorting in bed with JAKE’S BEST FRIEND. Both nude.

  JAKE’S BEST FRIEND (LUKE)

  (raising his champagne glass)

  Well, here’s to him. Hope the shmock is having a good time in Canada.

  CU PHONE

  Ringing ominously.

  MUSIC: JAKE theme. Very pure, lofty.

  NANCY frees her breasts from JAKE’S BEST FRIEND’S hands.

  CLOSE ON: Greedy clutching fingers. Dirty anti-Semitic fingernails.

  CLOSE ON: NANCY

  Answering phone.

  Grief. Dumb agony. As she realizes, too late, she will never look on his (JAKE’S) like again.

  Or my shriveling liver giving out. Or robbery with violence. Or DDT poisoning, already begun. Or my back, Jake thought, because his disc felt tender again. Or my heart. Groping for his pulse, he discovered that it was fast, hammering again, indicating acute tachycardia or, God help him, SOLDIER’S HEART (or Disordered Action of the Heart or Effort Syndrome), a set of symptoms arising under conditions of great stress, and consisting of palpitation, shortness of breath, speedy exhaustion, depression, and irritability. Damn. It seemed reasonable to Jake, that is to say, he was reconciled to the deaths (sad, inevitable) of others, but he couldn’t understand why they wanted him.

  6:10. Jake went into the living room, opened the French doors, and stepped onto the terrace and into the garden. Through the wire fence that ran along the southern border of his garden he could see Old Lady Dry Cunt’s newly planted rhododendron bed. Old Lady Dry Cunt’s bedroom curtains were drawn. Good, good. Jake filled a bucket with water, took it to the greenhouse, poured lime into the water, stirred, and emptied the solution into the tank attached to his spray gun. Then, pretending to water the dahlia bed on his side of the fence, he directed a spray of murdering lime solution through the fence at Old Lady Dry Cunt’s rhododendrons. Even if she was watching from behind the bedroom curtains it would appear – he hoped – that he was treating his own bed with liquid fertilizer. British bitch. He’d teach her to write snotty notes about the noise his brash American children make in the garden.

  Inside again, Jake made himself a cup of instant coffee. 6:30. Stock-taking time.

  It began well, ritualistically well. You have a gorgeous wife. Three kids. You’re loved. All the same you’ve managed to remain an alienated Jew. Modishly ugly. But at thirty-seven you are a disappointment to yourself, a wash-out, and – and – and – he tried desperately to control the wheel, sensing a catastrophic turn, but he was too late. And he had to admit, looking at things objectively, there were other men in the world who were more talented – no, no, who were rumored to be more talented or taller or richer or better in bed than he was, not that he would be so doltish as to let one of them into the house. Still, you couldn’t blinker your wife completely. There were always those adoring profiles of the latest golden boy that she could read in the Observer, her legs crossed, the skirt riding above the knees. Or the winners who prevailed like Luke at parties they went to. She sitting glowingly still and scented in one of those breast-popping Mary Quant creations and Big Eyes looming over her, Jake hissing, “He’s queer. I can tell.” Or this season’s Mr. Thingee being cooed over on the telly. How he abominated them, the scintillating people who blazed with confidence on TV panels. Or who could churn out a funny column once a week. Or who had articulate, controversial opinions about everything. She, watching in her kaftan, refulgent Mr. Thingee making eyes at the world and his wife, Jake jumping up and down in front of the telly. “He’s talking crap.”

  Worse (but inevitable) news. Luke luxuriating on the Frost show. Mr. Fat Cat meets Bugs Bunny.

  “Is Canada boring? Well, let me put it to you this way, David. Other people find it boring. My friend Jacob Hersh … you know,” he offered in parenthesis, “the television and film director …”

  Frost, who obviously, didn’t know, nodded, anticipating.

  “… likes to tell the story of the New York publisher who amused himself by drawing up a list of ten books for a new firm that was bound to fail. Leading the list of unreadables was a book titled Canada, Our Good Neighbor to the North.”

  Then Luke convulsed the studio audience by reading them a scene from The Good Britons.

  Fuck you, old pal. Remembering, Jake poured himself a drink. It’s too complicated, life’s too spiky for me, he thought. There have been too many betrayals. In the study again, disc aching, Jake lowered himself gently to the floor. Your lordship, listen to me. Let’s clear this courtroom of these expensive lawyers, Regina’s and mine. Tell the jury to go home. We’ll talk this over, man to man.

  Quite, Mr. Hersh. Quite.

  The judge didn’t understand. Nobody did. Even Nancy. Of course Jake suffered his agonies, his guilt, his attacks of fear, but there were also times when it was getting off that alarmed him more than going to prison for two years – say one. In Jake’s absence his friends would support his family and feel all the better for it. Slowly, shiftily, his unit trusts would accumulate capital growth and income, just like those tantalizing sales promotion charts had promised. When he finally got out, decent people would feel touched by him (slender again, his temples flecked with gray) because he had suffered an injustice. The Sacco of the sexual revolution. Juicy girls would cream for him at parties. To no avail.

  “No, dear. It’s not that. You are beautiful. Young. Firm. A mechaieh, I daresay. But I’m not the sort to risk my hard-won happiness, my wife, my children, my home, for an afternoon’s abandon. I’ll just stand here and drip.”

  He could count on being asked to direct a documentary on prison life. Hand-held cameras, jump cutting. Old lags, their heads held discreetly in the shadows, calling a spade a spade. “What’s obscene? You can collect stamps with impunity. With me, it’s jock straps. I’m a pouch-taster. It happens to be my kind of loving and as a result I’ve been rotting in this cell for twenty years. You know what’s obscene? General Westmoreland. The CIA. Factory farming.” Probing, thought-provoking stuff it would be. Très ballsy, very cinéma vérité.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  END TITLE, “INSIDE,” SUPERIMPOSED OVER WASTE WATER RUNNING INTO A PRISON SEWER.

  TRACK IN ON SOCIALLY SYMBOLIC SEWER GRATING

  HERSH (Voice over)

  I wrote, produced, directed, edited and cut this film. I also composed and played the protest ballads and did the narration. My name is …

  (a pause; then, self-effacingly)

  … Jacob Hersh.

  People who had dropped him would possibly start inviting him around again. “You should have known Hersh in the old days. He used to be so talkative, such a bouncy guy, but now … he opens his mouth and out comes an aphorism.” But if he was found not guilty they’d say, “Wouldn’t you know he’d get off, the prick? They made Harry Stein the fall guy.”

  No.

  3

  WITH HIS BLEEDING COLONIAL HEART, CHARGED AS HE was with war guilt, Jake, when he had first come to London twelve years ago, had asked everywhere about the blitz. “How you must have suffered …” But everyone spoke longingly about the blitz. “People were so friendly then.”

  Only Harry, his co-defendant, spoke with rancor about the blitz.

  Say “evacuee” and Jake, in his Canadian mind’s eye, instantly conjured up an image of huggable Margaret O’Brien, shrinking in the corner of a foreign station platform that was forever England, a tattered golliwog in her hand, only to be redeemed by Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire, parents enviable because, unlike Jake’s, one didn’t belch at the table and the other didn’t nag.

  Oh to be blitzed, Jake used to dream, orphaned and adopted by M-G-M; but it was something else for prickly Harry Stein. Even before the Luftwaffe struck, ten-year-old Harry, scruffy and sty-ridden, was uprooted from his Stepney council school, tagged, issued a gas mask, and shoveled into a train crammed with squealing mums and babes, other slum kids
(some covered with septic sores, still more lice-infested), and frantic teachers; a train without food and insufficient toilets, each one at flood-tide, the floor slithery; to be finally disgorged on a station platform in the outer wilds of Buckinghamshire, where the ill-tempered gentry, aghast to discover such urban pestilence in their midst, had nevertheless foregathered to take their pick.

  “It was a bloody selection ramp,” Harry was fond of saying, “but, in lieu of old Eichmann, there were market farmers and shopkeepers to poke and prod us, choosing the healthiest lads, the most promising-looking workhands. And unspeakable old biddies to snatch the girls who would make the best unpaid maids.”

  Insolent and disheveled Harry, naturally, was among those urchins rejected, still left shivering in the cold after the second pick, ultimately forced on a late-to-arrive family by an irate billeting officer.

  “The way they looked at me, you’d think I was going to steal their silver or shit on their carpets.”

  Harry was immediately lowered into a bath and then deposited in an unheated attic room, though decidedly more agreeable quarters lay empty. But he exacted retribution by slipping into the library and tearing pages out of the reactionary old bastard’s collection of first editions. And wetting his bed triumphantly.

  “You think the war was all fun and games, don’t you? After the raid, cockneys crawling out of the rubble with a wisecrack. Churchill traipsing through the bomb damage and asking, ‘Are we downcast?’ the forelock-touching workers shouting back, ‘No!’ ”

  Unwisely, Jake once tried to tease Harry out of his denigrating mood.

  “Why, Hershel,” he said, calling him by his Yiddish name. “Bai Jove, Hershel, how you disillusion me. I cherish the notion of you surviving the war at Greyfriars, admittedly not so much a swell as the Bolshy of the Remove. Thick with Harry Wharton and Billy Bunter, but standing up for the proles and nignogs all the same. Out there on the pitch, Hershel, proving your mettle to Fisher T. Fish and other cads, secretly proud of the old gray stones …”