St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  “Yeah, now let’s go.”

  “O.K., O.K.,” he said, leading Jake into the bar. “But facilities should be spotless. Above reproach. Like Napoleon’s wife. It’s the kind of investment that pays off.”

  “Goddammit, Herky, you don’t have to sell me.”

  “We did a survey. The average guy, if he’s in a restaurant or a nightclub and he has to crap, he skips the dessert and cancels the next round of drinks, so’s he can let rip at home. Sorry, what are you drinking?”

  “Scotch.”

  Herky ordered two Scotches. “Public toilets,” he continued, “have a bad image. Now tell me a toilet’s nonproductive. I mean when you add up a year’s skipped desserts and drinks, well, what’s the use of booking Lena Horne for a million dollars a week? We made the findings part of our sales kit.”

  “It’s a strong argument. Are you rich, Herky?”

  “It’s all tied up.” Herky put a hand on his heart. “I’d love to help out, kid, but –”

  “I’m not asking for money.”

  “– you see, I shovel everything right back into the business. Rifka’s very active, you know. Socializes like hell. She used to be in cancer, but she didn’t care for the kvetchy president there. So now she’s in heart ailments. In fact, as of last week she’s running her own artery. They do a lot of good work, you know.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Hey, tell you what. You want some stuff? That I can fix.”

  “Stuff?”

  “It’s free. Charna Rosen. You remember her. Well, now she puts out. She’d be glad to see you. She reads Dylan Thomas. Hand her some of the longhair stuff.”

  “Herky –”

  “Aw, don’t tell me. You’re getting it regular. A college boy; an assimilationist. Soixante-neuf. Oh la la. Well you don’t have to spit on us. Me and Rifka, we’re the nonconformist type.”

  Jake fixed his brother-in-law with an earnest, melancholy stare. “Herky,” he whispered, “I’m glad you said that.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Herky said, full of anticipation.

  “You see, I’m not interested in girls.”

  “What?”

  “Remember you once put Rifka up to asking me funny questions. Like was I scared of snakes?”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Herky said, grabbing him.

  They huddled together in Herky’s Chrysler in the parking lot.

  “You mean to sit there and tell me you’re a faigele?”

  Jake nodded.

  “We’ve been to the YMHA pool together,” Herky shouted, shaking a finger at him. “In the old days. Oh, you filthy bastard!” Herky bit his lip. “It would kill Rifka. Hell, if she found out …”

  “It’s no bowl of cherries for me either, you know.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Look at it this way, you go to a dance at the golf course and feel up Charna Rosen or somebody else’s wife and the other guys just give you a big wink, but if I turned up and wanted to neck with one of the waiters or caddies –”

  “Listen here, you little son-of-a-bitch –” Herky stopped short. He rolled down the window. “Couldn’t you see a psychiatrist?”

  Jake didn’t answer immediately.

  “Well?”

  “Rifka says your new rabbi is brilliant. Very up-to-date. Maybe I should ask him, well, for guidance?”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you. He’s not reform, you know.”

  “Herky, I think it would be best if I left town.”

  “Well,” Herky said, starting up the car, “if that’s how you feel …”

  “I’ve been thinking of New York. The problem is I’m broke. I haven’t got enough money for the fare.”

  “We all have our problems,” he said frostily.

  “Herky, you don’t understand. My passions –”

  “Shettup about it, will you! I’m driving.”

  “– get out of control. The cops are bound to pick me up one night. On the mountain … or in Outremont …”

  “You want to borrow money from me, is that what you’re getting at?”

  “I’d pay you back. Honestly, darling.”

  “I should break your neck. I should pull you out of the car right here and cut it off for your own protection.”

  “Two hundred and fifty bucks would see me through nicely.”

  “I’ve always suspected you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “You’re brainy, Herky. There’s no denying it.”

  “Oh, you snake! Sewer! You really neck with other guys?”

  Jake blew him a kiss.

  “You take that back. You take that back, you filthy thing.”

  2

  EVERY AUTUMN, SINCE CHILDHOOD, HE HAD WATCHED the birds, the cunning birds, fly south, and this October, at last, Jake was following after. Across the border, to the sources of light. For his uncles, Miami, the Catskills; for his aunts, the wonder doctors of the Mayo Clinic. New York. It had always been their true capital. Ottawa? Quebec City? Those were bush league towns where you went to pay off a government goy for a contract or a building permit. They were the places the regulations came from, not life’s joys. New York, New York. There wasn’t a cigar store between Park Avenue and the Main that did not carry the obligatory New York dailies: the News, the Mirror, and the Daily Racing Form. Ed Sullivan, Bugs Bear, Dan Parker. The Gumps and Smilin’ Jack. Dorothy Dix, Hedda Hopper. But, above all, Walter Winchell.

  Jake had only been a boy during the war. He could remember signs in Tansky’s Cigar & Soda that warned THE WALLS HAVE EARS and THE ENEMY IS EVERYWHERE. He could recall his father and mother, his uncles and aunts cracking peanuts on a Friday night and waiting for the United States, for those two unequaled champions of their people, Roosevelt and Walter Winchell, to come off it and get into the war. They admired the British, they were gutsy, but they had more confidence in the U.S. Marines. They could see the likes of John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Robert Taylor making mincemeat of the Panzers, while Noel Coward, Laurence Olivier, and the others seen in a spate of British war films had all looked too humanly vulnerable. Like you, they could suffer heart failure, rectal polyps, and disrespectful children. But Winchell, marvelous Walter, was proof against plain people’s ailments. Out there in Manhattan, night after night, he was always ready to award orchids for the best, regardless of race, color, or creed. Ever-watchful under a broad-brimmed fedora, Walter Winchell cruised in a radio police car, uncovering America-Firsters, giving FDR-baiters what for, and smashing Hate-mongers in their lairs. Who was there, if not WW, to tell Mr. & Mrs. America and all the ships at sea about the Jewish war effort? About Barney Ross. About Irving Berlin and Eddie Cantor, giving so unselfishly of their time and talent. Or that the bombardier in the first airplane to sink a Nip ship was a Jewish boy, good enough to die for his country, not good enough for some country clubs WW could name.

  New York was quality, top quality. It sent Montreal Jenny Goldstein and Aaron Lebedoff. When Abie’s Irish Rose finally reached His Majesty’s Theater and uncles and aunts went not once, but twice, the signs outside, a veritable guarantee, read … DIRECT FROM NEW YORK. From blessed New York, where Bernard Baruch sat on a park bench telling presidents and prime ministers when to buy cheap, when to sell dear. Where Mayor La Guardia could speak a Yiddish word. Where there were second cousins on Delancey Street or in Brownsville. Where the side-splitting Mickey Katz records were made. Where Pierre van Paassen flew in from, exacting sobs, demanding donations, as he told an SRO audience about the Hagana fighting off Rommel in the desert, sometimes isolated for days and being driven to drinking their own urine.

  – Piss. Is that what he means to say?

  – Sh.

  – Imagine, Jake’s mother said, imagine. What a piece of work is man.

  It was where Jake’s father went for his best material. For only fifty cents a While-U-Wait newspaper headline that read RITA HAY-WORTH LEAVES ALY KHAN FOR ISSY HERSH. It was where Jake’s father bought his itching powder, metal ink spots, and the
business cards which he handed out at Rifka’s wedding.

  KELLY’S TOOL WORKS

  Does Yours?

  America, the real America, was a chance for Jake to see the cream of the Montreal Royals (Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Jackie Robinson, and Roy Campanella) at Ebbets Field. It was Partisan Review, PM, and the New Republic. It was the liberating knowledge which struck him one day at the university that he was not necessarily a freak. There were others, many more, who read and thought and felt as he did, and these others were mostly in New York. On the streets of Manhattan, where you could see them, real as relations, and maybe even get to touch some, talk to others.

  As he packed his suitcases, and promised his mother, yes, to write once a week, as he assured his father that he really meant to find a job, he already saw himself chatting up a cashmere-sweater girl on Kafka in the bar at the Algonquin when the man with the gleaming bald head seated next to him said, “Couldn’t help overhearing. Wow! Have you ever opened these tired old eyes! I wonder if you’d be willing to put that down on paper for us?”

  “Us?” Jake says coldly.

  “Oh. Sorry. My name’s Ed. Ed Wilson.” (Or would he say “Bunny”?) “I’d like you to say hello to Dorothy here … S. J., he’s the one with the Groucho mustache … E. B. and Harold.”

  Or he’s having a quick drink at Jack Dempsey’s bar and a young Italianate man gives him a shove (“Move over, Hymie.”) and Jake flattens him with a punch (the feared Hammer of Hersh, the very whisper of which is enough to turn champions to jelly), upsetting the Italian’s middle-aged companion no end. “Rocky, speak to me. My God, you’ve broken his jaw. He was going against Zale in the Garden tomorrow night. Now what am I going to do?”

  Rising with the birds, the migrating birds, Jake caught the early morning train, thinking, I’m not going away, I’m heading for my spiritual home.

  He’s eating latkas or cheese cake or whatever it is Lindy’s is famous for, reading that WW has wished him orchids again, Leonard Lyons ditto, when Lauren Bacall drifts over to his table, crossing her legs showily, trying to lure him to her hotel suite, anything to get Jacob Hersh to direct a film for her.

  “Sorry,” Jake says, “but I couldn’t do it to Bogie.”

  Or even though he went twelve innings in the series opener the day before yesterday, allowing only two cheap hits, Leo looks at the loaded bases, Mantle coming up, their one-run lead, and he asks Jake to step in again.

  Jake says, “On one condition only.”

  “Name it.”

  “You’ve got to tell Branch I want him to give the Negroes a chance in the big leagues.”

  Ar ten o’clock, as they were approaching the border, the latest Italian star, even sexier than Lollobrigida, began to shed her clothes in Jake’s penthouse. They’ve got to stop doing this, he thought. Zip, zip. Then the fall of silk. No, a cascade. Ping goes the garter belt. Snap goes the bra clip … And Jake, looking down at the sudden upspringing of a pup tent between his legs, hastily covered his embarrassment with Norman Vincent Peale’s column in Look, coughed, and lit a cigarette, as he was startled by a tapping on his shoulder.

  “Yes?”

  An American immigration officer with a sour purple-veined face, tufts of hair curling high on his cheeks, loomed over him. Sucking at a stubborn sliver of meat caught between his yellowing teeth, he asked to see his birth certificate. He looked at it, grunted, scribbled Jake’s name down on a pad, and waddled away, rocking with the train. Fifteen minutes later, just as the Italian star was pleading for help with a troublesome zipper, Jake was tapped on the shoulder yet again with a chewed-out pencil.

  “You get off at the next stop, fella?

  “What?”

  “The desirability of your presence in the United States is suspect. The next stop will be St. Albans, Vermont. You get off there so that immigration officers can make a more thorough appraisal of your desirability,” the officer said, waddling off again.

  Jake sat for a minute, petrified, remembering that he had signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal and a petition asking for clemency for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Oh, you fool, you goddam fool, hadn’t you ever heard of Senator McCarthy? Jake, having decided to go forward in search of more information, jumped up, Look spilling to the train floor, the tent between his legs remembered and prominent. Oh, my God! Mindful of the other passengers, Jake’s hands went swiftly, instinctively, to cover his groin and just as swiftly retreated again, as he grasped that he was only drawing attention to his hard-on. Jake collapsed, cheeks burning red, into his seat.

  Goddammit. Closing his eyes, concentrating, he lifted Look onto his lap again and willed the star back into his penthouse.

  – Get your filthy hands off that zipper, she said.

  – You’ve been leading me on. Why did you come here, then?

  – I didn’t realize you were so short and funny-faced –

  – (The throbbing abated.)

  – so jewy –

  (Good, good.)

  – and besides I’m a lesbian –

  (aaaaahhh)

  Relieved, clearing his throat, and lighting up again, Jake went forward. He found the immigration officer sitting in an empty coach, working on his teeth with the edge of a bookmatch as he scanned a book full of names the size of a telephone directory. “Why am I being taken off this train?”

  “You will have to make a formal application for admission to the United States in St. Albans. If you pass the examination there, you will be allowed to go to New York tonight. If not, you will be sent back to Montreal.”

  “What’s all this about?”

  “We have reason to believe you might be an undesirable person.”

  “What reason?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “How long will the trial take?”

  “It’s not a trial.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “As long as it does.”

  “The only reason why I ask, sir, is today is Friday. I’m, well, Jewish … Our sabbath begins at sundown and then it would be against the articles of my faith to travel.”

  The immigration officer peered at him with fresh and, Jake dared to hope, benevolent interest.

  “If there’s anything political in this, sir, I think it would be less than honest of me, if I didn’t admit that at the university I was secretary of the Young Conservative Club.”

  “We arrive in St. Albans in ten minutes. I’ll meet you at the exitway to your coach.”

  A dense downpour started just as the train was rounding into St. Albans. The immigration officer pointed at a three-story building at the crest of a hill and started to climb toward it. Jake followed behind, his two suitcases bouncing off each other and his legs. He finally made it to the stone building, panting and drenched. Over the main entrance he recognized the insignia of the U.S. Department of Justice, which he remembered from T-Men with Dennis O’Keefe. The immigration officer led Jake to the second-floor landing and left him there, dripping on the brown lino, while he conferred briefly with another man. Then they continued to the third floor, where all the corridors, as far as Jake could see, were choked with filing cabinets of the small-card variety. The officer asked Jake to step inside for a minute, politely holding the door open for him. It looked like a hospital ward. Three neatly made up double bunks and, off to the left, a bathroom. Suddenly Jake heard the clang of metal behind him and whirled around to discover he was imprisoned. The officer went away without a word.

  Rain, rain, rain. A window, the bars greasy, looked out on a grubby inner courtyard. Jake lay down, deflated, on a lower bunk. “H.W. was here” and other initials had been cut into the brown metal bedpost, and on the underside of the upper bunk an earlier prisoner had scratched “baise mon cul, oncle sam.” The radio transmitter in the room next to his crackled and squawked as the operator rasped our messages to border agents. “Watch out for Anafukobroplis, Anafuko – A as in Able, N as in – Yeah, he’s a Greek. He’s expected to try to enter from Mont
real in a party of forty roller skaters.”

  Outside Jake’s room, male and female clerks passed again and again, forever opening and kneeing shut metal files. Whirr, pause, clang. Whirr, pause, clang.

  “Hear this,” the radio operator said. “We expect those baby smugglers to make another crossing in two days. So this time let’s get with it, eh, fellas?”

  At noon the immigration officer returned, unlocked the door, and pointed his chewed-out pencil at Jake’s head. “No chapeau,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I know about orthodox Jews. Read up on them in Life magazine once. No hat. So you’d travel after sundown too, wouldn’t you, fella?”

  “You’re very observant. I’m sure one day Edgar Hoover will take notice.”

  The immigration officer led Jake out of the building and across town to a rambling, boxcar brown, clapboard unit that had been set up alongside the tracks. Jake followed the officer’s shiny trouser seat up the wooden stairs to an office with four desks and a pot-bellied stove, where the interrogator sat. Hair parted straight down the middle, dead eyes, almost no lips, and a slightly soiled shirt collar curling at the edges. One heart-sinking glance and Jake knew he was done for.

  Full name, the round-shouldered interrogator asked. Age?

  “Twenty.”

  Father’s full name? Place of birth? Religion?

  “Jewish.”

  “Employer?”

  “None.”

  “Uh-huh. Have you ever belonged to any of the following organizations? I’ll read them over slowly. The Young Communist League?”

  “I should say not.”

  Friends of the Spanish Civil War Refugees? The League of Canadian Consumers? Students For Peace?

  “I’d like to make a statement.”

  The interrogator leaned back in his swivel chair and waited.

  “One of my enemies at the university used to sign my name to left-wing petitions.”

  “What’s his name?”