Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  “It’s a tow zone.”

  Immensely relieved but still suspicious, Joshua said, “I had too much to drink last night and decided to take a taxi home.” But the truth was, he had forgotten all about the car. “I’m sorry to have caused you any trouble.”

  The older of the two cops, the plainclothesman in charge, plunked down Joshua’s car keys on a table and introduced himself: Detective Sergeant Stuart Donald McMaster.

  McMaster was a chubby man with icy blue eyes, pudgy cheeks, a sly tiny mouth, and a chin receding into wobbly fat, the price paid for too many submarine sandwiches on the fly. “Why, it’s our pleasure, Mr. Shapiro,” he said. “I happen to be a great admirer of your column.” And sending the younger cop back to the car, he wandered into the living room and sat down, uninvited. Immediately putting the furniture under surveillance. “You’ll find your car parked across the street, incidentally.”

  McMaster, Joshua noticed for the first time, was carrying what appeared to be a bound manuscript, and now he revealed what Joshua took to be the real reason for his visit. McMaster was taking a night course at Concordia University, creative writing; he had been working on a novel for ten years. “I want you to know it’s not one of your little one-character jobs. Shit, no. It has ten major characters and I’ve written the biographies of each one of them.” He paused, watching Joshua closely. “Now I suppose you want to know why ten?”

  “Only,” Joshua said, beginning to enjoy himself, “if you have already copyrighted the idea.”

  McMaster didn’t answer at once. Savoring the moment, he lit a cigarette, his face flushed with hatred. “You don’t know what an honor it is just to be sitting with you, a man of your stature. We never miss you on TV. Wait till I tell my grandson. Wow.”

  “Please, McMaster.”

  “Stu.”

  “Stu.”

  “I used to know your father in the old days.”

  “There isn’t a cop in town who didn’t.”

  “Hey, did you know big Ed Ryan back when?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Well, I got my own theories about his accident.” McMaster ground his gleaming dentures together. “I read somewhere that you liked hockey better than any other sport.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “Affirmative. But you’ve got a season pass, maybe even a couple in the reds, and you get to booze with all the players. Me, I only get to take my grandson to a game when the legendary Washington Caps are in town. Ginsberg of Upper Belmont lays the tickets on me. And I’m supposed to faint with gratitude and maybe cruise past his house one more time while they’re in Florida. Specially these days. With all the robberies.”

  In as casual a voice as he could manage, Joshua asked, “Are we having an unusual number of robberies in Westmount these days?”

  “Not so much an unusual number as unusual robberies. Crazy.”

  “How do you mean, crazy?”

  “I was going to tell you why ten characters.” McMaster sucked in a mighty puff of his cigarette, his cunning eyes belying his quick smile. “There’s one major character from each province of Canada.”

  Joshua whistled, impressed. “No one from the Northwest Territories or the Yukon?”

  “Minor.”

  “If Quebec separates, will you have to revise?”

  McMaster’s smile lapsed. “One of the major characters,” he said, his voice filled with reproach, “is a Jew. And I’m not saying that to flatter you. I don’t give a sweet fuck about anybody. Ask around.”

  “I don’t have to. I believe you.”

  “Nobody speaks for guys like me any more. We just hacked this country out of the wilderness, that’s all. But these days, you want to inherit the earth you better be a gay-libber or a jigaboo or a Jew. You’re a faggot today, and you want it written in the bill of rights that you got the right to teach gym in elementary school and soap the boys down in the shower room. A Jew elbows ahead of you in a lineup outside a movie and you shove him back a little, just to keep him honest, and right off he’s hollering about the six million.” McMaster leaped to his surprisingly dainty little feet. “What I’m trying to say is, don’t make the mistake of taking me for a fool. I may be nothing but a goy,” he said, enormously pleased with himself, “crazy enough to be an honest cop, but I’ve still got all my marbles.”

  “I can see that you weren’t born yesterday, McMaster.”

  “Aw, come on. Stu.”

  “Stu.”

  “Don’t get pissed off with me. More power to you, I say. I wish my people had your savvy. If we did, the French Canadians wouldn’t be dumping on us today. Here, give me your hand. Put it there.”

  Feeling foolish, Joshua shook hands with him. McMaster’s palm was moist.

  “I get home tonight, I’m going to tell Irma I shook hands with Joshua Shapiro and that he has agreed to read my novel and give his frank opinion of it.” Instead of letting go, he squeezed. “Sorry about your wife.”

  “What, exactly, do you mean about my wife?”

  “Hey, hello there. Geez. Better ask me what I don’t know about Westmount, this has been my turf for better than thirty years now. You must know the Trimbles. You know, Belvedere Road. The corner house.”

  “Yes,” Joshua said wearily, “I know the Trimbles.”

  “Have you ever wondered why such a la-de-da Englishman served in the Canadian army?”

  “His mother came from the west. Edmonton, I think.”

  “Calgary,” McMaster said, his smile small. “Remember his Guy Fawkes parties? Everybody used to come. Too bad, isn’t it?”

  “Jack Trimble can walk in here any time he feels like it.”

  “Spoken like a born gentleman.”

  Joshua smiled.

  “But if it’s not presuming too much, Mr. Shapiro, how would your good wife feel about that?”

  “The short answer is that you are presuming too much. And now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.”

  “Right.” McMaster wiped his brow with his sleeve. Thin gray hair was brushed back to reveal a deep running scar. “Hey, look, I still carry a steel plate in there. A souvenir of the battle of Falaise. I call it my goy’s yarmulka.”

  Joshua didn’t react.

  “Doesn’t that deserve a little hee-haw?”

  “You’re a live one, Stu.”

  “The things I know about Westmount, holy shit, I’ll never sell the serial rights to the Digest. This classy cesspool makes Peyton Place look like the Waltons. Ah well, you know what pleases me? To cruise by here and hear you typing away. Clickety-click, clickety-click. I really am grateful that you’re going to read my novel.”

  Leaping up to see him to the door, Joshua didn’t realize that his loosely belted dressing gown had fallen open briefly, but one look at McMaster’s startled face was sufficient to remind him that having tumbled into bed drunk last night, he was still wearing that ridiculous pair of black satin panties with the delicate lace trim.

  “Well, I do declare,” McMaster said, genuinely surprised.

  “They’re not mine,” Joshua protested in a rush, his cheeks hot. “They’re Seymour’s,” he added, as if that explained it.

  “Seymour’s,” McMaster said. “Well, see you around.”

  Having disposed of McMaster with a rash promise to read his stuff, Joshua was unaccountably apprehensive. A conditioned reflex, possibly; after all, he was still Reuben Shapiro’s boy, and a cop in the house was no way to start his day. But now he was more than apprehensive, he was frightened. He had begun to sweat. Today was Teddy’s hockey day at school. A stray skate could catch him in the throat, slicing it open. When he had finally got round to sorting out the laundry for Mrs. Zwibock yesterday, he had found a bookmatch in Alex’s jeans. He didn’t smoke, it had to be pot. Or possibly he needs the matches to heat the substance in the spoon. He never should have had children, they scared him. Joshua felt inadequate. Lonely. If Pauline had been there, a coffee shared with her would have calmed him down
and propelled him into his study to write his bloody column. But she was no longer there and she might never be back. Face it, Joshua. No, I won’t face it. She’s going to recover. O Pauline, Pauline, my love.

  Stepping out of those black satin panties, Joshua dressed quickly, gulped down a coffee, and retreated to his study to confront his Underwood 450. Immediately he saw that the ribbon was faint, and was relieved to think he could now (without cheating, without really avoiding work) go out to buy a new one. Playing by the rules, however, he had to try the top drawer of his desk first and there, as luck would have it, lay an unused ribbon. Grudgingly he changed ribbons, consuming only ten minutes, and then he scrubbed the keys with an old toothbrush. Then he went to the window and watched until a car passed with a license plate ending in a seven, always a good omen. Then he moved to the wall where his father’s old boxing gloves hung, and he laid his cheek against them for luck.

  One punishingly hot summer afternoon when Joshua was a snotty eleven-year-old, still too incredibly stupid to comprehend how his father really earned his living, Reuben summoned him into the kitchen. In those days it was his mother’s affection he yearned for. God forgive him, but in those days he found his father’s very presence an embarrassment. Snoring away with his mouth open while his mother listened to “Big Town” on the radio, Edward G. Robinson hollering, “Stop the presses, Lorelei!” His father clipping his toenails at the kitchen table. Or beginning his breakfast with a bottle of Labatt’s. And now, typically, calling him into the kitchen, where he stood clad only in his initialed shorts and diamond socks, slipping into trousers with a faultless crease even as he talked to him, pausing now and then to sip V.O. out of a shot glass. Which was not the way fathers behaved in G. A. Henty novels. Or in Boy’s Own Annual. Or even in neighboring Outremont, beautiful Outremont, where his respectable relatives lived. The Leventhals. Who would have nothing to do with them.

  Because of him.

  Reuben Shapiro, hitching up his trousers and then fishing into his initialed cotton shorts to sort out his genitals. Whistling through that misshapen nose, broken more times than Joshua could count, as he knotted his hand-painted tie: sunset comes to Waikiki Beach. His father, his black curly hair heavy with Vitalis, his eyebrows disappearing into scarred bumpy tissue, smiled down tenderly at him. “Hey, Josh, how’s school?”

  His mother was in the bedroom, sobbing, the door closed behind her.

  “You doing good there?”

  “I’m doing well,” he countered in his prissiest manner.

  His father smiled and moved to the window that looked out on the back lane. There was nothing there. “What’s your favorite subject,” he asked, “grammar?”

  “Literature,” Joshua said, too dim to grasp that he was being teased. “What have you done to Mother?”

  He no longer said “Maw,” which he had come to consider crude.

  “Now listen here, Josh. You ever heard of a town called Cornwall?”

  “It’s just across the border in Ontario. Why is she crying like that?”

  “Now in this town of Cornwall on the main street there is, like, a bank.” His father glanced out of the window, cracking his knuckles. “It’s called the Royal Bank of Canada. Repeat that, please.”

  “The Royal Bank of Canada.”

  “In the Royal Bank of Canada which is on the main street of Cornwall just across the Ontario border they have, well, kinda boxes there. You know what I mean?”

  “Safety deposit boxes.”

  “Hey, yeah. Right. Well, well.” His father dug a long thin key out of his pocket. “This key fits one of those boxes in the Royal Bank of Canada which is on the main street of Cornwall just across the Ontario border. The number of the box is on the key.”

  “So?”

  “Take it. Hide it for me.”

  “Why?”

  A car slid to a stop in the lane. A man got out, put two fingers to his mouth and whistled. His father held up five fingers. “Well, yeah. Why? I’ve got to take a trip. Unexpected.”

  “Again?”

  His packed kitbag stood in the corner. Years before, he had used to lug that bag with him to Brockton, Three Rivers, Quebec City, Portland, and a couple of times even to Madison Square Garden.

  “I won’t be able to write. If I’m gone long and you run short here you are to go to Cornwall and open that box, but you mustn’t take, um, Mother with you.”

  “Why not?”

  Outside, the man whistled again.

  “People are nosey. They might be following her.”

  The man in the lane blew sharply on his horn. His father went to the window and held up one finger. And then, his eyes wet, anguished, he grabbed Joshua without warning and pressed his son to him. Joshua went rigid, resisting his embrace, flinching from a kiss that reeked of V.O. and Aqua Velva. “Yeah, right. Well, well. Goodbye, yingele,” and reaching for his kitbag, he retreated into the coal shed and down the winding stairs into the lane.

  The car his father rode off in had Michigan license plates. He didn’t sit beside the driver, but instead folded his jacket neatly and then climbed into the trunk.

  When the detectives arrived, only five minutes later, his mother wailed and pulled her hair. She denounced his father to them, saying he had deserted her, the drunken bastard, running off to Baltimore with another woman, leaving her without a penny. “I only hope you catch him,” she said cursing him again, “and teach him a good lesson this time.”

  Joshua watched. Bug-eyed. Amazed. He had never heard her say a bad word about his father before. But the detectives were unmoved by his mother’s plight. Perreault even shook his head, laughing. “You ought to go on the stage, Esther.”

  “Really?” she said, enthused, and she shot Joshua a dreamy look as if to say, “Didn’t I tell you?”

  And he knew, once the detectives had gone, what was coming. She would draw the living room blinds, switch off all the lights, and screw the red bulb into the lamp that had been adjusted to throb on and off, like a Christmas tree light. Then, while he rolled up the rug and cleared the center of the room of furniture, she would disappear into her bedroom to dig out her props. When she signaled with a rap on the door that she was ready, he would put on the record – Fats Waller playing “Snake Hips” – and he would whistle and stamp his feet.

  Joshua mounted his exercise bike, sprinting for five minutes. Then he got up to piss so he wouldn’t have to break off later in the middle of a thought, should he receive one. He cut his fingernails. He trimmed his nasal hairs. Then he descended into the kitchen to make himself a pot of tea. He wandered into the living room, where he scanned the TV Guide to see what the afternoon movie was, not that he was going to watch, no matter what was playing, but just in case he developed a headache and couldn’t work. Fair is fair. While he waited for the water to boil, he willed the phone to ring, summoning him somewhere. Picking up the phone himself, initiating an interruption, was strictly against the house rules.

  Maybe Sheldon would call again this morning, his cousin Sheldon Leventhal.

  When they had been kids he had seldom seen Sheldon, especially after the time he had been stashed with his unwilling family for a two-week stay. Sheldon’s family was both rich and respectable; Joshua had been determined to ingratiate himself, but events had conspired against him. Aunt Fanny, appalled to be lumbered with Joshua, had fixed a cot for him in the attic. Next to the maid’s room. “Hey,” he demanded, “what are you putting down a rubber sheet for?”

  Averting her eyes, Aunt Fanny said, “Little boys have been known to weewee in bed by mistake.”

  “I’m no baby, but. I’m eight years old. I wanna piss, I go to the can.”

  Aunt Fanny grabbed him, frog-marching him into the second-floor bathroom. An astonishing place. Shaggy white rugs everywhere, even on the toilet-seat cover. Do they walk on toilets in Outremont? And then Aunt Fanny washed his mouth out with soap. Lifebuoy. “And now you say, ‘I’m sorry for using such bad language, Aunt Fanny.’ ”r />
  He found plump, rosy-cheeked Sheldon curled over his electric train set on the floor of the furnished basement. “Can I play?” he asked.

  “There’s only one switch.”

  “We could take turns, fuck-face.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Joshua reared back and gave the approaching Lionel train engine a swift kick, sending it crashing against the wall. Sheldon leaped up. Joshua feinted with his left and caught him coming in with a right cross, bloodying his nose, before Aunt Fanny could intervene.

  He was sent to bed without his supper, but the following evening he ate with the family. What a bunch. With all their money, the fruit in the bowl on the dining room table was made out of glass. Nibble it and you’d shit splinters. And the maid, for all her airs, didn’t even know how to set a table properly. He was given two of everything: knives, forks, large spoons.…

  Joshua had rarely seen Sheldon since he was a child, but he did remember that when he was twelve and got caught shoplifting at Eaton’s it was Sheldon’s father, not his, who came round to smooth his way out of there. Uncle Harvey had amazed Joshua, saying he hadn’t had a fortunate upbringing, but that things would change now, the Leventhals would take a hand. Sheldon was waiting in the back of the car, smirking, his flute case on his lap, and they were left alone together while his father went to speak to the plumbing contractor on one of his building sites, a sheaf of bills in his hand. “Hey, guess what,” Joshua said, giving him an elbow, “I just got nabbed stealing.”

  Sheldon looked resolutely out the window.

  “And now your old man is taking me back to your joint for a lecture, like, and after he’s finished straightening me out I’m going upstairs to screw the ass off your maid.”

  “You’re not invited to my bar-mitzvah when I have it. My mother said.”

  “I’ll bet you can’t even shoot jism yet.”

  Back in the house, Uncle Harvey led him into his study. He was about to speak when a flushed Aunt Fanny summoned him out into the hall. Joshua could hear them through the closed door.

  “Last time he stayed here, he went through every drawer in the house when we were out.”