St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  KEEP THE HOME FIRES BURNING …

  With McTaggart’s Anthracite

  Hanna carried Joey’s photograph everywhere and if anybody on St. Urbain or even in Outremont had visitors from New York or Toronto, if on a Sunday night a synagogue’s lights were on for a bar mitzvah or a wedding, then Hanna would come to the door, St. Urbain’s blight, scuttling from table to table, flashing the photograph, her manner truculent, accusatory. Asked to sit down she would immediately pounce on the whisky and begin to ramble about Joey. She would tell of the time his puny four-year-old body had been rough as sandpaper with ringworm and how it was touch and go for him with the scarlet fever. She recalled how once he had all but choked on a rusty nail. “And who would have thought he’d survive in the first place,” she’d say again and again. “God who watches so well over his Chosen People? Spike Jones? The cross-eyed chief rabbi of the London zoo? Dr. Goebbels? He was born in a freezing miner’s shanty in Yellowknife, with the help, if you can call it that, of a drunken Polack midwife while his father was out boozing somewhere. Too weak to cry. Only this big and blue as ink, my Joey. Who would have thought he’d live? Me. Only me.”

  During the baseball season Hanna advertised in the Personal columns of major league cities and the week of the Kentucky Derby she always ran an ad in the Louisville Courier.

  REWARD

  Anybody with information as

  to the whereabouts of Joseph

  Hersh, also known as Jesse

  Hope, 6 ft. 1 in., black hair.

  Write Box …

  Increasingly hostile, she shoved Joey’s photograph under the noses of startled strangers in hotel lobbies or coming out of the air terminal or disembarking from boat trains. Finally she was the subject of a newspaper column, Mel West’s What’s What, in the Herald. “HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL, as the Bard sez. Missus Hanna Hersh, a longtime character on our Main Stem …” Uncle Abe summoned Hanna to his office in the Dominion Square Building, the offending newspaper column on his desk. “Feh,” he said.

  “It’s my first-born son,” she said.

  But not her only child. Less than a year after Joey disappeared Jenny had to quit Fletcher’s Field High to take a job. Jenny was given credit for contributing to the support of the family and raising Arty almost single-handed. People felt it certainly indicated quality that she continued with her studies at Wellington Night School, but they also agreed that Jenny was too sour. For now that her pimples had dried out she was really rather attractive, especially strolling home from work in a sweater on a summer evening, her handbag, groceries, and a Modern Library book in her arms, her bottom snug in its skirt as a watermelon in its skin, but there was not a boy on St. Urbain good enough for her. It was also rumored that Jenny came home disconcertingly late from night school and did not, some neighbors said, treat her mother with the respect to which Hanna was entitled.

  Even Hanna.

  “Gzet,” Hanna hollered on street corners, “Gzet” and without warning she would begin to sob or curse passersby obscenely.

  Early one spring morning, when the lilac tree was in bloom, Hanna emptied the coffee tin in the kitchen of all the week’s food money, hurried to Rachel Market, and returned with a tongue for pickling, a fat goose, marrow bones, chicken livers, pickles, Bing cherries, imported grapes, and a pineapple. Singing to herself, she lit the stove. Jenny, off to work, was not so much disconcerted by the squandered money as terrified to see Hanna so elated, seemingly untouchable.

  “Joey’s coming home today,” Hanna said.

  “You heard from him?”

  “Vas you dere, Charlie? A mother knows.”

  Jenny returned from work to find the kitchen stove laden with simmering pots. A tray of sweet-smelling, crispy raisin buns came out of the oven and in went a honey cake. The dining room table was set, the fruit basket covered with a linen, napkin. Arty had been made to put on his High Holidays suit; his shoes had been polished. Hanna sniffed at Jenny. “Her best friends wouldn’t tell her,” she said, reeling back in a mock faint. “Use Lifebuoy.”

  Finally Hanna had to go and pick up her Gazette’s. “If he comes before I get back,” she said, “you and Arty are not to ask any dumb questions, understand? Not why did you go and where have you been? You pour him a snort from the bottle of Chivas Regal and say I’ll be home soon.” Then, as they both looked frightened, she added, as she tied her change purse to her waist, “Hi-ho Silver!”, and pounding herself on the behind, bellowing, she galloped out of the house.

  The soup simmered on the stove for two days. The goose dried out and charred. The raisin buns hardened.

  “Couldn’t we at least rent out his room?” Jenny asked.

  “Night school,” Hanna said, “you think I don’t know what goes on there? You’re peddling your ass.”

  Radio aggravated the bad feeling between Hanna and Jenny. Hanna had always been a fan, but following Joey’s departure she and the radio had become inseparable. Hanna’s favorite was Bob Hope. “That Bobby,” she’d say, “you can die from him, the things he says.” Autographed pictures of Hope, Joe Penner, the Mad Russian, Phil Harris, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and Jack Benny hung on the wall. Sunday night radio was the sore that festered. Jenny, on what was often her one free night, wanted to listen to thought-provoking Canadian Broadcasting Corporation dramas, but Hanna wouldn’t hear of it. Especially if on another station W. C. Fields might be visiting Mortimer Snerd. “If you’d only try,” Jenny pleaded, “just once.”

  So Hanna tried. That night, as it happened, there was an uplifting play on by one of Canada’s most liberal-minded writers. It was about a lovely sensitive blind girl, who was being courted by an intelligent man with a basso voice. We know the man throbs with love for the blind girl but we are also led to believe there is something fishy about him. The man raises money for an operation for the girl, but when the surgery is successful and we know she will see again, he is discovered packing in his room. Why? He wants to spare the girl. He’s a Negro.

  Hanna sighed, rolling her eyes. “Where there’s life there’s hope, and wherever there’s Hope, there’s usually Crosby,” she said, diving for the dial.

  “If you only realized,” Jenny said, “what this play has to say about the world today.”

  “Oh, you, Miss Hotzenklotz. You make me sick. Why don’t you go into your room and study up on Walt Disney’s dog?”

  “For your information, it just so happens that Plato was one of the foremost philosophers of all time.”

  If there was a thorny week between Hanna and Jenny it usually drew first blood when the intractable old lady turned up her radio very, very loud while her daughter, who had completed her high school requirements and immediately gone on to university-level courses, was studying. Jenny would retaliate by stealing a tube and Hanna’s next tactic was to crumble matzohs over her daughter’s bed sheets. Then Jenny would bring home an unplucked chicken for Friday, necessitating a loathsome job for Hanna, and Hanna would mix Russian oil into Jenny’s portion of borscht. “Tonight,” she’d say, “it’s bombs away.”

  One balmy spring afternoon in 1943, when the lilac tree was in bloom in the back yard, Joey walked right into the house, as casually as if he had only just returned from Tansky’s. Hanna melted, moaning, into his arms.

  “Well, to what do we owe this honor?” Jenny asked, terrified.

  A fire-engine red MG sportscar was parked outside.

  Windows whacked open. Neighbors came out to stand on their balconies. Arty, Duddy, Gas, and Jake gathered around the car, overcome with awe. There were stickers on the windshield. FLORIDA, the Citrus Stare. NEW ORLEANS, Mardi Gras City. GRAND CANYON. COLORADO, LAS VEGAS, TOMBSTONE, CHICAGO, GEORGIA. There was the dust of the desert on the car and the windshield was splattered with bugs and rain. The remains of a dead sparrow were impaled on the grille. The license plate was Californian. Two soft leather suitcases and a kitbag were strapped to a rack mounted on the rear of the car. So was a guitar. The name Jesse Hope was em
bossed in gold on one of the suitcases and another was plastered with still more stickers, exotic labels from hotels in Spain, France, the United Stares, and Mexico.

  Duddy Kravitz, bolder than the rest, tried to flick open the glove compartment. It was locked. “That’s where he keeps his gat,” Duddy said.

  4

  THE DAY JOEY RETURNED HIS FIRE-ENGINE RED MG looked so lithe and incongruous parked right there on St. Urbain, among the fathers’ battered Chevies and coal delivery trucks, off-duty taxis, salesmen’s Fords and grocery goods vans – the MG could have been a magnificent stallion and Cousin Joey a knight returned from a foreign crusade.

  The photograph of Joey that Hanna had flashed in railway stations would not have helped to identify him. Joey had left a skinny boy, sickly, with a rasping cough, and come back a big broad-shouldered man. He had style, Jake recalled, such style. Striding down St. Urbain bronzed as a lifeguard, eyes concealed behind sunglasses, trousers buckled tight against a flat hard stomach, he did not seem to be of St. Urbain any more. There was no suggestion in his gait that a creditor might be lurking around the corner or that a bailiff was waiting to pounce. Joey wasn’t going to be tapped on the shoulder by a goy bigger than he was. People on the street took pleasure in him, but they feared him, too. When he drifted past Best Grade Fruit on the day after his return, for instance, Lou waved tentatively, beckoning him inside, but he was grateful when Joey merely acknowledged the invitation and strode on. Tansky’s regulars, equally wary, immediately recognized that Joey was a drinker. He didn’t reel, he was never actually violent, but occasionally there was an underwater slowness to all his gestures and a distinct menace in his manner. Joey wasn’t a happy, mischievous drinker, like Jake saw at bar mitzvahs. His state wasn’t born of a quick burning little schnapps with honey cake, head tossed back and eyes instantly tearing. Joey drunk was a threatening man.

  The afternoon of his return he summoned Jenny and Arty into the parlor. “Our father is alive in Toronto,” he said. “He’s living with an Irish woman. A widow. She owns a candy store.”

  That was all; but another day Arty overheard Joey and Jenny quarreling.

  “Where did you go when you left here?” she demanded.

  “Europe.”

  “Did you get to Paris?”

  “Yes. I was in Hollywood, you know. I made a bad marriage. With a starlet.”

  “And I’m the Queen of Siam. Now tell me why you came home. Were you in prison?”

  He laughed.

  “You son-of-a-bitch. I can’t even afford Toronto. If you only knew how I hate it here.”

  “Go then.”

  “What about Arty?”

  “Hanna’s his mother. Not you.”

  The next morning Joey went shopping and then the parcels began to come. Exquisite white shirts and black silk socks from the Saville Row Shoppe on Sherbrooke Street. A sterling silver cigarette case from Birks. A suit not from Morrie Gold & Son, with padded shoulders, a two-button roll, and slightly zoot trousers, but from a tailor with an authentic British accent. Joey’s taste was alien to St. Urbain. He did not favor gaily colored ties or two-tone shoes; neither did he go in for a camel hair coat. Joey dressed as cold and correct as a Westmount lawyer.

  He soon discovered that Arty and Jake, prodded by Duddy Kravitz, were shoplifting at Eaton’s on Saturday mornings, and he bawled them out for it, which baffled Duddy, who assumed that Joey was a mobster.

  Duddy, Arty, and Jake were even further confused after the blackjack game the next rainy afternoon. Joey, his manner solemn, intimidating, didn’t take long to clean the boys out. Afterwards the boys were flattering, they hung around expectantly, but Joey did not offer to return their winnings. “Come on,” Duddy pleaded, “it’s only peanuts to you. I thought we were playing for fun.”

  “Gambling is gambling,” Joey said sternly.

  Duddy, the heaviest loser ($2.85), burst into rears. “You big dumb prick, robbing innocent kids. My father says you were in on the Lindbergh kidnapping.”

  Before Joey could even reply, Duddy had scuttered out of the door. Outside, he executed a spiteful little dance. “Hey, syph-head,” he shouted up at Joey, “make you a deal. You burp up my ass and I’ll fart in your mouth.”

  Only Goody Perlman was sufficiently intrepid to ask, “Where’d you get all the money, Joey?”

  “Well, Goody. Well, well,” Joey replied. “Look at it this way, hombre, it isn’t black market money.”

  Joey had passed Goody Perlman’s clothing factory on the Main and dropped in, for old time’s sake. Goody drove a Buick in a year when you could only buy them second-hand for much more than the list price, with ten or fifteen miles on the speedometer; and when Joey got home that evening Goody was waiting for him in his car parked outside the door. He beckoned Joey inside and showed him snapshots of his wife and children and the medical report turning him down for the army. His eyes charged with apprehension, he talked of the good old days. He told jokes. Sweat sliding down his cheeks, he thrust an envelope with two hundred and fifty dollars at Joey. “Please don’t make any trouble. We’re both Jewish boys. I wish you luck, all the luck in the world, you’re such a prince of a fella.” And Joey, it was reported, reached for his cigarette lighter, lit the envelope, actually lit the envelope, and did not drop it until the money was engulfed in flames. Then he eased himself out of the car without a word and Goody drove off, grinding the gears, and went right home to bed and asked Molly to send for Dr. Katz.

  Joey set up a makeshift gym for himself in the backyard. Punching bag, medicine ball, mats. Occasionally strangers came to spar with him, bringing girls, high-quality girls, who sipped martinis, their legs delicately crossed. Arty and Jake would watch, concealed behind Arty’s bedroom curtains, which was how Jake first came to see the fantastic play of scars on Joey’s back. A splattering of uneven cuts and holes. One of the girls, lanky and blonde, usually wearing dark glasses and riding clothes, came more often than the rest and stayed longer, rubbing Joey down with a towel after his workout and then waiting in his MG while he changed into riding clothes too, and they drove off together, to the Bagg Street stables, to rent horses. Other times the girl came late at night, just to fetch Joey, or turned up alone in the afternoon. Once, as she was sipping martinis in the backyard with Joey, a tall, elegantly dressed man with gray hair rang the front doorbell. The girl hid in the shed. And Hanna, answering the door, said Joey was out. The man sat in his car waiting for almost two hours before he drove off.

  Another woman who came alone usually arrived by taxi. She was dark and extremely attractive, though clearly older than Joey. He seldom seemed pleased to see her and never allowed her to rub him down after one of his workouts. Once, as she began to sob in the backyard, pleading with him, he flicked her with his towel, making her cry out. Other times, though, he drove off with her, not returning until the next morning, laden down with parcels from the Saville Row Shoppe.

  The elegantly dressed man with gray hair returned to the house on St. Urbain again and again, and once he sat in the backyard to watch Joey at his morning workout. Jake and Arty couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it was evident that it inflamed Joey; he hit the bag harder and harder, his eyes shooting hatred. When Joey finally quit, the man offered him a long brown envelope, his smile ingratiating. Instead of taking it, Joey made as if to punch him playfully. The man laughed, flashing a big smile, and all at once Joey struck him so ferociously in the stomach that the man remained doubled over and gasping, unable to catch his breath, for a worrying time. When the man left, Jake and Arty raced around to the front balcony to watch him walk stiffly to his car. Hanna was sitting on the balcony. She watched with the boys as another man, younger but equally tall, opened the front door for the man. The two tall men began to talk earnestly even before the car had driven off. Hanna spit over her left shoulder and retired to the house, leaving Jake and Arty behind to speculate.

  One day Joey piled all the boys into Max Kravitz’s taxi, took them to Delormier
Downs, and led them to the box seats on the first base line. The first baseman waved. “Hi, Joey.”

  Joey nodded and waved back lazily.

  “You know him?”

  “We were in the Dodger chain together for a season.”

  “You mean you played professional baseball?”

  “For a spell.”

  On the ride home, Joey said: “How come Jenny gets back from night school so late on certain nights?”

  Arty didn’t know, neither did Jake.

  “Chev-or-let?” Duddy asked. “Snatcherly,” he answered. And for one frightening instant it seemed like Joey was going to hit him. Instead he said, “Tell Jenny what a good time you had with me today. Tell her you like me.”

  But Jenny had spent the day typing invoices in the sticky, sweltering offices of Laurel Knitwear.

  “There’s something wrong with taking them for a treat?” Hanna asked.

  “The polio’s going around. They shouldn’t be in public places.”

  Hanna groaned, crossing her eyes.

  “Why can’t he go out and work in this heat?” Jenny protested.

  Yet when Joey offered to contribute two crisp one hundred dollar bills toward household expenses, Jenny scorned the money, saying, “Where did you steal it?”

  “You shouldn’t leave your bra and panties hanging over the tub in the bathroom,” Joey said softly. “Arty’s a growing boy.”