St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  Bloody Rifka, on first being presented with Sammy, had instantly rummaged through his nappy. “I see you’ve had him done, Jake. That’s something.”

  Then the squealing infant Molly had been brought in for her and Herky to comparison-shop.

  “A blondie,” Rifka said, pursing her lips.

  “So was I,” Jake protested pointedly, “when I was a kid, remember?”

  “And all babies have blue eyes,” Herky added placatingly, “isn’t that a fact?”

  Many brandies later, back at their suite in Grosvenor House, Herky sat down beside Jake, his manner suddenly conspiratorial yet benevolent, and whispered, “I want to talk to you, kiddo.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  Herky rose to listen by the bedroom door, satisfying himself that Rifka was asleep. “There’s something you ought to know.”

  Rifka shoplifts. “Yes,” Jake said warily.

  “It’s all right now. Everything’s A-O.K.”

  “Good.”

  “You can come home.” Herky patted Jake’s cheek, tears welling in his eyes. “Time heals. You read me?”

  “Speak plainly, will you?”

  “You married a shiksa. The family didn’t exactly flip with joy. So you did the decent thing, not to embarrass us within the community, and you didn’t move to Montreal with her. You stayed on here.”

  “What?”

  “Well, some of us have more modern ideas now and in any case she obviously keeps a clean house for you and you’ve got kids now and, well, I’ve had a talk with your father. To make a long story short, it’s O.K.” Beaming magnanimously, he said: “You can come home, Yankel.”

  “But, Herky, I live in London out of choice.”

  “What’s pride? Pride is foolishness. What are you handing me a bill of goods? It’s Herky here, your brudder-in-law.”

  Desperately Jake grabbed the brandy bottle and poured himself another one.

  “Do you mean to say,” Herky demanded, “you’d actually prefer living here than in Montreal?”

  “Yes.”

  “But they’re such cold fish. Even the Jews you meet here speak with a la-di-da accent. Aw, you’re kidding me.”

  “I’m not kidding you. Honestly.”

  “But everything is so broken and old in Europe. At home, we’re really going places. Do you know you can drive to Ste. Agathe these days in an hour flat? It’s the new highway. Six lanes.”

  The children’s mixed heritage, and Jake’s faltering attempts to imbue them with a sense of social justice, all came together or, rather, temporarily unstuck, over the garden problem, which culminated in Jake’s humiliation two days before Christmas.

  When Nancy finally bought a house for them in Hampstead, in April 1966, Jake drove in from Pinewood, where he was shooting, to look it over; he pushed open the French doors in the rear and, lo and behold, there was this seemingly endless unfilled green space. Thick with overgrown and prickly bushes. A stagnant pond buzzing with mosquitoes in the middle, and an Anderson shelter crumbling at the far end.

  Immediately, Nancy’s goysy Ontario childhood came to the fore, aglow with the memory of granny churning her own ice cream – raspberry picking – homemade jam – old grandad pricking out beds in the greenhouse. “Lookit, Nancy, it’s such a big sky.” Ontari-ari-ario. Toronto-liberated mother enthralled to be shoveling pig shit again, singing, Hi, Neighbor, as some Mennonite freak moseys past. And, lookee yonder, it’s the Ford V-8, Dad come out for the weekend, escaping the incomprehensible city, where Jewboys own the shoe factories and try, try, try, he couldn’t sell enough to please Mr. Goldstein. Goldarn it.

  “Henry,” mother calls, “the fish sure are jumpin’ in the creek.”

  “Yippee!”

  Nancy licked Jake’s ear, she hugged him, and initiated him to the splendors of their cabala, confounding him with talk of herbaceous and mixed borders, biennials and autumn stalwarts.

  Appalled, confused, Jake gruffly reminded her that this was alien to him, he had been raised on urban backyards, wherein you dumped punctured tires and watermelon husks and cracked sinks and rotting mattresses. Within weeks, however, it was Jake who emerged as the household’s most perfervid gardener, taking it as his directorial duty to impose order on such an unseemly mess. He came out of John Barnes with a two-stroke lawn mower, pruners, shears, tubs, rakes, insidious sprays, seeds, and secateurs. The following afternoon, as soon as Nancy had gone out shopping, he set to work with Sammy and Molly, burning masses of autumn leaves and clearing his spread, his Hampstead holding as it were, just like Van Heflin in Shane. He uprooted one barren-looking bush after another, trimmed the rhododendrons and, forking over the soil, stabbed into some seemingly cancerous-type growths, all of which he unearthed and stacked in the barrow.

  Nancy was not pleased. “Oh God,” she exclaimed.

  Autumn leaves, properly rotted, she pointed out delicately, could be of enormous value. The scraggly things he had uprooted were in fact mature rose bushes and the cancerous growths he had dug out were not only nonmalignant, they were peony tubers. Bloody shiksa, he thought, seething inwardly, Ontario hick, you don’t know the Holy One’s Secret Name, the sayings of Rabbi Akiba, or how to exorcise a dybbuk, but you would know that sort of crap, and he retreated to the living room to sulk and study his newly acquired gardening manuals. The Orangeman’s Talmud.

  It was no use. He lacked the touch. So Jake shiftily argued that what with the need to decorate and furnish a newly acquired house, as well as there being the children to attend to, they ought to hire a jobbing gardener to come in twice a week. They’re hopeless, Nancy warned. Overriding her objections, he insisted. Largely because he wanted control, and the hired hand was bound to be responsible to him in his office as guv’ner. But beery old Tom, the gardener, a Scots countryman cunning as he was leathery, with a hound’s nose for class distinctions, immediately sniffed out an urban rat in Jake, somebody who didn’t know leaf curl from mildew and, from the first, he merely tolerated him, his smile small. Nancy was something else again. Nancy, poised and knowledgeable, the beautiful countrywoman fallen into the hairy Jew’s grasp, he truly revered and constantly deferred to. Standing by the window, outraged, Jake watched them stroll together through his garden, two bores out of a Thomas Hardy novel, delighting in rustic trivia, exchanging their Gentile secrets, the text derived from the Protocols of the Elders of the Compost Heap.

  Determined to eke at least a splinter of satisfaction out of Tom’s presence, Jake tried to use him as a case in point to further Sammy’s sense of social justice. As his son, home early from prep school, raced across the garden to him, shouting they had won the cricket match for once, Jake suddenly said: “Tom’s grandchildren won’t go to a private school, but you’re not better than they are.”

  Sammy stared, startled.

  “What I mean is your grandfather is a poor Jew,” Jake continued defensively.

  Only the evening before, at the school concert, Jake had sat, the only glowering man among as many beaming parents, as Sammy sang with the others:

  “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,

  The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head:

  The stars – in the bright sky looked down where he lay,

  The little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.”

  The next afternoon, after a hard day’s editing at Pinewood, Jake poured himself a gin and tonic and thought to seek solace in his garden. There, lying in wait, shedding his sweat-stained fedora to mop his brow, was the cunning old goy. Jake felt obliged to return to the kitchen and fetch his hired man a gin as well, which made him resentful. He couldn’t fob Tom off with a beer as that went against his egalitarian ideas. It was also a bad example for Sammy. But even sharing his liquor with Tom, he was made to feel an intruder in his own garden. For Jake had only to sink into a deck chair in the shade for old Tom to begin to dig with maniacal drive, He thinks I only sit out here to demand my pound of flesh, Jake thought, and he dismissed Tom abruptly, doing the old m
an out of two afternoons’ work a week rather than continue to subject both of them to embittering class conflict.

  “Why doesn’t Tom come any more?” Sammy asked.

  “I fired him. He was lazy,” Jake blurted out, remembering too late that only the night before, tucking in Sammy, he had explained to him that it was unforgivably rotten to complain, as other parents did, about how lazy the working man was. “Men like old Tom,” he had said, “and others, who work on factory assembly lines, have to do jobs they hate in order to earn their daily bread. So, naturally, they’re resentful and do their jobs grudgingly. Really, there’s nothing worse for a grown man than to have to go to a job he hates day after day. You’re getting a good education and when you grow up you will be able to choose. You won’t be forced into soul-destroying work. So you must always be especially considerate to those who weren’t so lucky.”

  And now, not surprisingly, Sammy looked at his father quizzically. All eyes.

  “He wasn’t lazy. He annoyed me.”

  Tom continued to labor for others on Jake’s road. In the evening, Jake would step up to the saloon bar in his local, ordering a large gin; and, in the public bar, rolling a cigarette with a shaky hand as he contemplated his pint, sat Tom, his smile malevolent.

  Come autumn, Tom was seen less and less often on the road. Nobody needed him. But only two days before Christmas, he surfaced again.

  Yuletide was, in any event, an uneasy season for Jake, the tree in the living room an affront no matter how rationally he explained it away to himself. As a fertility symbol. As a pagan ritual. As Nancy’s birthright, and the children’s, for after all they did spring from both traditions, and in Hersh’s half-breed house they did not festoon the tree with anything but interfaith baubles. Which is to say, there was no haloed Yoshka riding over all. And yet – and yet – hang it with chocolate Santas, spray it with silver, drape it with colored balls, even rub it down with chicken fat, if you like, and, by God, it was still a Christmas tree. His forebears hadn’t fled the shtetl, surviving the Czar, so that the windows of the second generation should glitter on Christmas Eve like those of the Black Hundreds of accursed memory. Old Hanna, for one, would have said, feh, Yankel. Yes, yes, he argued with her, but this was Nancy’s home too. Sammy’s and Molly’s maternal zeyda was merely a goy. Untroubled by Spinoza, not perplexed by the enigmas of the Zohar, he was, to be fair, nourished by the intellectual illuminations common to his breed. He perceived, for instance, that wrestling matches were fixed, and having allowed him as much, Jake was so pleased with himself that he slapped his knee and laughed out loud.

  Typically, this Christmas as last, he put the offending tree out of mind to lose himself in the pleasures of shopping with Nancy. After all, looked at objectively the holiday was no more than an excuse for gift-giving and overeating with loved ones. They plunged into Harrod’s, demanding Norfolk-bred turkey and a Yorkshire ham; and in Fortnum’s, they splurged on caviar and vintage wines. The smoked salmon, an ecumenical concession, came from Cohen’s; and once more, Jake insisted on chopped liver as well, preparing it himself, lustily singing Adon Olam in the kitchen as he wielded his chopper. His gesture to Jehovah.

  It was after just such a shopping expedition, only two days before Christmas, that Jake answered the door in his slippers to discover the long stooping cop with the correct face standing there.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you, sir. But were you robbed last night?”

  “No. Certainly not,” Jake protested, and peering over the bobby’s shoulder Jake noticed a plainclothesman sitting in the rear of the car. Beside him, his smile small under his battered and discolored fedora, was old and leathery Tom. “Hey, that’s my old gardener.”

  “Ah, well, that explains it.” He would not have bothered Jake, the bobby went on to say, had the man not been able to accurately describe the interior of his house. “This is the season for them,” he allowed, grinning, “isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean, it’s the season for them?”

  “Suddenly, it’s winter. The weather turns nasty. There’s no work. Their minds turn to the problem of bread and board for the coming months. So they come to the station in droves, claiming to have robbed somebody’s house, hoping the state will tide them over until the spring.”

  “Wait, officer. Maybe I’m mistaken. He could have stolen something, you know. Something small maybe,” Jake ventured.

  The sergeant was impassive.

  “Come in, won’t you? I’ll just run upstairs to check things out.”

  But Nancy said there was nothing Jake could do for Tom now. Unconvinced, he raced down the stairs to confront the sergeant again. “Well now, officer,” he asked, beaming, “I wonder if you could enlighten me on a point of law?”

  “Possibly, sir.”

  “How much would the old man have to take to get three months?”

  “If you are missing anything, you must swear out a complaint against him,” he replied, taking out his pad.

  “Oh,” Jake said, retreating.

  “It would be your duty.”

  “Duty? The old bastard’s got nowhere to sleep. Do you want him to die of exposure?”

  “That, sir, is hardly my affair.”

  “What is your affair, then,” Jake suddenly charged, exploding. “Breaking up demonstrations? Beating up West Indians?”

  “Steady on.”

  Nancy appeared at the top of the stairs, aghast.

  “British justice,” Jake scoffed.

  “You an American, then?” the sergeant inquired, bemused.

  “No. I’m a Canadian. What’s your name?” Jake demanded hotly.

  He told him.

  “Oh ho,” Jake chortled. “Ah ha,” he said, rubbing his hands and looking up at a horrified Nancy. “Well then, that fits, doesn’t it, mate?”

  “Why?” he asked, baffled.

  “How do you spell it?”

  “H-O-A-R-E.”

  Hours passed before a rueful Jake emerged from his aerie.

  “We’re all becoming our fathers, you know,” he said to Nancy. “Luke’s joined the Garrick Club and I’m turning out a fool. How could I behave like that?”

  14

  GATHERING HIS PHOTOGRAPHIC EQUIPMENT TOGETHER, Harry decided, what the hell, he would treat himself to a taxi tonight, and hailing one, he gave the driver the address of the Graphic Arts Society in Fulham.

  Bloody ridiculous, he thought, descending into the basement, more than usually standoffish with the others waiting about. Bowler hat bunch tonight, mostly. Commuters. Laden down with cameras, light meters, tripods, and, in some cases, props for the girls.

  Eventually, the professor’s assistant, a massive but good-natured capon, made his appearance. “Hello, hello, hello. The model we’ve selected for you tonight, at no regard for expense, is Miss Angela, star of more than one Harrison Marks flick. 39-23-38. Yes, my darlings, 39. So stand back. Make room. We’ll be expecting more than one bright idea from you tonight. Angela will submit to active type poses, but – but – with this proviso. Nothing on the kinky side, duckies, that’s what her boy friend says, and you wouldn’t want to mess with him. Would you now, you naughty things?”

  Miss Angela, adorned in a diaphanous blue negligée, a frilly suspender belt, and black stockings, drifted into the studio, sat herself on a stool, and contemplated the men with indifference. Refusing cigarettes, scorning chitchat. Allowing only Harry a small wave of recognition.

  “Enjoy the flick?” Harry asked.

  “Smashing. Ta.”

  The professor, wearing a blue beret, a foulard knotted around his neck, black velvet shirt, levis, and sandals, skipped onstage to initiate the proceedings with a lecture illustrated with slides from his classical studies. As his assistant doused the lights and projected the first slide, he began. “You will note here that it is the forward surge of the human figure that tautens the model’s locomotor muscles and gives such a sense of irresistible movement. Next, please … Ah, Stella. Here again yo
u will observe that it is the extension of the figure, giving suspension to full breasts, that so enhances the suggestion of pride and dignity. But in this case you can also plainly see that it is the confluence of the most effective lines into a central void, a visual balance carefully maintained between centrifugal and centripetal forces, supplemented by the dispersion of irregular and interlocking triangular shapes, that renders such opportunity for an appreciation of the angular qualities of the figure.”

  Finally, the professor did his bit for those who were, perhaps, visiting the academy for the first time, relating his troubles past and present, with the censors, and warning them that the price of artistic freedom was eternal vigilance. He speculated on what a foolish and hypocritical world they lived in, a world wherein anybody might walk into a British post office, purchase a money order, and send off to liberated Denmark for absolutely anything, whereas prize-winning British photographers, such as himself, were unable to compete by supplying a domestic market, not to mention contributing to export trade that would, incidentally, bolster the Back Britain campaign. Allowing that signed copies of his own book were available for five guineas, he concluded, “Just as graphic artists, from time immemorial, have found the unadorned nude an ideal subject for stereographic, that is to say, solid, drawing, so does today’s photographic artist discover in the nude his only possible medium for the proper understanding of the play of light on irregular morphic masses.”

  Then the men surged forward, lugging their cameras and tripods and props, jostling for position in the queue, and Miss Angela descended from her high stool to stand under the lights.

  “Would you be a dear and hold this cane? Ta. Now threaten me with it.”

  Click.

  “And again.”

  Click.

  “And once more. Bless you.”

  Then the next man edged forward, crouching behind his camera. “Stick your tongue out. Jiggling it.”

  Click.

  “Yes. Bless you.”

  Click.

  “And could you drop your nightie now? Leaning forward a bit more. Super.”