Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  His father never went back to the scrap yard. Instead, he drifted into the insurance business again, a field where Sonny Colucci still had need of his expertise. Less than three months later, his father was obliged to leave town again, suddenly. Esther, disobeying strict instructions, followed after, and Joshua was dumped with his Aunt Fanny once more.

  Things ended badly for Reuben. There was a trial.

  The problem was Pinsky’s Jubilee Outfitting, on Jean-Talon, which had burned to the ground late on a Saturday night. An act of God, Pinsky said – mind you, a friendly one for a change, because at the time Pinsky was just one breathless step ahead of his many creditors. The fire inspector, a sour type, suspected arson, but was unable to find any hard evidence. All the same, the insurance company refused to pay Pinsky’s claim and he was forced to sue. At the trial, the insurance company’s lawyers made many a sarcastic reference to Pinsky’s books, which strongly suggested that Jubilee was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. They also tried to make a good deal out of the fact that Pinsky had withdrawn $1,500 in cash from his account only a week before the fire. The withdrawal seemed inexplicable, possibly even compromising, until Reuben Shapiro took the stand.

  Occupation, he was asked.

  “Metal merchant and like, you know, boxing instructor.”

  “Boxing instructor?”

  It was explained that Mr. Shapiro, a former lightweight boxing champion of Canada, now saw it as his civic duty to instruct under-privileged youngsters, who might otherwise turn to crime, in the manly art of self-defense at the Neighbourhood House A.C. He did this work voluntarily, without recompense.

  Reuben’s tangled tale, as it emerged piece by piece, was that he just happened to be in Pinsky’s office, shooting the breeze, a week before the fire. That very morning, he said, he had seen an absolute dream of a fur coat in Ogilvy’s window, just the number for his wife, and Pinsky had lent him the $1,500 so that he could pick it up. Members of the jury exchanged knowing glances and smirked. Reuben, grinning, blinking, playing it goofy, exactly as he had been instructed by the lawyer, explained that Pinsky was an avid boxing fan, a longtime admirer of his ring feats. And to this Pinsky added, his manner defiantly sincere, that he had felt sorry for Shapiro, who had obviously answered the bell once too often, and no matter how bad it looked in court he would never regret having lent him a helping hand. Furthermore, given the choice he would do it again, because that’s the sort of fellow he was. But Mr. Justice Boyer was not impressed. Summing up for the jury, he said, “Like me, you may find Mr. Shapiro’s tale incredible. Obviously, if Mr. Shapiro was going to buy a fur coat he would, true to his kind, not shop at Ogilvy’s. He would get it wholesale.”

  The jury found in favor of the insurance company, Pinsky’s claim being disallowed. But Pinsky’s outraged lawyers put in an immediate appeal, on the grounds that Mr. Justice Boyer had misdirected the jury with a blatant and inexcusable racial slander. The appeal was granted and, after many delays, the insurance company, rather than go to court again and risk offending its Jewish clientele, settled Pinsky’s claim.

  Pinsky, exultant, talked too much, and his boy, a classmate of Joshua’s, carried the tale to school. “If you need maybe a fire, my father says Shapiro’s the man. What a yold!”

  Joshua fell on Pinsky’s boy in the schoolyard, knocking him down, sitting on his stomach, and beating him about the face, until Seymour Kaplan and Morty Zipper managed to tie him up, Pinsky’s boy squirming free.

  Reuben, it was decided, ought to absent himself from the insurance business for a while. And so, with Colucci’s help, he went into the printing business, sort of.

  Gas ration coupons.

  4

  IT WAS ONLY 10:30 A.M., NOTHING ACCOMPLISHED, WHEN Joshua decided what the hell, he could bend his own work rules if he felt like it. He went out for a walk.

  Their street of terraced houses, in Lower Westmount, was now a thicket of A VENDRE/FOR SALE signs, slush everywhere, crumbling frozen dog shit lying on the snow. Joshua lived in a failing city, a wasting place, many of its shiny new office towers crying out for tenants, the construction hammers silenced, the stock exchange mute. Almost everybody he knew was jittery, drinking more, inclined to stumble out of bed at 3 a.m. to jot down a list of redeemable assets on the back of an envelope. Or study French verbs. Many English-speaking natives were packing their bags, making ready to run. Safety deposit boxes had been emptied, bank accounts cleaned out. Lawyers, twenty years out of school, were eschewing noonday squash to bone up on the bar requirements of the other provinces. Doctors were brooding over real estate portfolios suddenly stricken with malignancy, involved with ill health at last, if only their own.

  The Canadian dollar continued to sink. There were rumors it wouldn’t bottom out until it reached eighty cents American. A disaster for many, but not for Izzy Singer. Izzy had added to his fortune, speculating on the international exchange. But Izzy, who had considerable holdings in La Belle Province, was not in good shape. He had broken out in shingles, his skinny little body girdled in scabs. Becky rubbed him down nightly with an ointment of atropine, a cocaine-type drug which exacerbated the ailment, only because Izzy was secretly fearful that the salve might be habit-forming. Keenly aware of the Italian syndrome, he was also scared of being kidnapped and now varied the time of his daily departure from his office, cunningly driving home by a different route each night. He wouldn’t open thick envelopes or ride in an elevator with a Japanese in it. He carried a doctor’s letter with him at all times, properly notarized and addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” saying he was allergic to down pillows, must be kept on a salt-free diet, and responded poorly to physical pain; attached to it were Japanese, French, and Arabic translations. Izzy triple-locked his doors and there were double bolts on his windows. He had had his alarm systems renewed and bought a new pair of Alsatians. So now he tiptoed about his own house, not only itching everywhere, but also terrified of being torn apart. Coming home from his office, he slid out of his Cadillac already in a crouch, proffering gifts, minced steak or calf’s liver from Dionne’s, doing his utmost to ingratiate himself with his new hounds. “Here, boy. Here. Easy does it now. It’s me, only me. Izzy.”

  In this city, Joshua’s Montreal, nobody he knew was redecorating. Or planting. Everybody was thinking hard. The more cultivated were buying sterling silver, diamonds, jade, gold, and other movables; the coarser, Saturday night specials.

  There were many who feared that the city was teetering over an abyss.

  Certainly standards weren’t what they had once been. Take the Ritz-Carlton, for instance, the most opulent of their hotels.

  The Ritz, desecrated.

  The incomparable Ritz. Where once impeccably schooled brokers could conspire over malt whiskies and dishes of smoked almonds to send a dubious mining stock soaring. Where, after a morning of trying on dresses in neighboring Holt Renfrew, matrons of good family could meet for a lunch of cold Gaspé salmon and tossed salad in the garden café. Where, in halcyon days, even the doorman, an appraiser born, could make him feel Jewy. The Ritz had fallen on such hard times that it now admitted visiting hockey players to its gilt bedrooms – even the players from expansion teams. The Café de Paris, the Maritime Bar, would never be the same. This winter, the sweetly scented ladies in their mink wraps and the gentlemen in their beaver coats, drifting in after a hockey game, were obliged to actually mingle with the players. Youngsters with angry boils on their necks, only a season out of northern mining towns, whooping it up at the bar, attended by groupies reeking of cheap perfume. Tautsweatered girls who favored bikini panties, DYNAMITE embossed on the crotch. O God, Joshua thought, where once only the very best Westmount had to offer met for discreet assignations, now one groupie working a floor could service the power play, obliging the penalty-killing squad in overtime.

  Joshua had come to adore Montreal as never before.

  In this city, his Montreal, a few weeks after the Parti Québécois had bounded into office, s
urprising themselves more than anybody else, their newly elected premier, René Lévesque, was in a car accident. Sweeping down Côte-des-Neiges Road, on the flank of Mount Royal, at 4 a.m., he inadvertently hit a derelict, who was snoozing on the street, and killed him. Montreal’s intrepid police, who used to gleefully crack Separatist skulls with riot sticks in the days when they were still demonstrating in the streets, quickly adjusted to the new power structure. On the spot almost instantly, they assessed the situation and grasped where their duty lay. They tenderly escorted the distressed premier and his mistress from the scene, out of sight of obnoxious reporters, and booked the offending corpse, removing it to the hospital for a blood test, to establish whether or not it had been drunk.

  On Joshua’s daily stroll to a favored downtown bar, where he met informally for late-afternoon drinks with cronies, sometimes including visiting members of The William Lyon Mackenzie King Memorial Society, he had taken to counting the moving vans, which seemed to be here, there, and everywhere. The bar he frequented was ensconced in a veritable Victorian pile, a hotel that had once been grand but was now dilapidated. It was still known to its habitués as The King’s Arms, but in deference to unfavorable vibrations, it now boasted a garish new sign, “Armes du Roi.” One of the regulars, sour Robbie MacIntyre, a hefty man in his early sixties, his blue eyes truculent, churned out a monthly newsletter for an insurance company. A sedentary type, Robbie was filled with such scorn for all physical-fitness freaks that he kept a scrapbook on them, a doomsday book, entering the obituaries of those who had died an untimely death. When Lloyd Percival, the head of Canada’s Physical Fitness College, was struck down by a heart attack while out jogging one morning, the usually parsimonious MacIntyre bought drinks all around, literally hopping about with glee.

  Another regular, the gentle Roger Goyer, a cherished chum, was back with them after an absence of more than a week, his hands trembling, having outlasted an Antabuse course, even as he had once triumphed over two weeks in a clinic, sent there to dry out. Roger, a desk man in the Star’s city room, confronted the world that confounded him on a diet of ale, the first one consumed at a late breakfast in Toe Blake’s Tavern. Once, invited out to lunch by him, Joshua noticed a mutual acquaintance bent into the sleet on the other side of St. James Street. “Hey, there’s Finley,” he said. “Should we ask him to join us?”

  Roger regarded Joshua with a look of utter distaste. “He eats,” he said.

  Among the regular clientele at The King’s Arms, there were also many upwardly mobile corporation lawyers, advertising men, and brokers, many of whom had sported digital wristwatches long before they were generally available in Canada. Their chatter, largely about stereo equipment or commodity futures, baffled Joshua. “Dylan” meant Bob, not Thomas, to them. They were too young to remember Maurice Richard cutting in over the blue line or to have heard Oscar Peterson play at the Alberta Lounge. But it was their bustling presence that flushed out liberated young secretaries from the surrounding office towers, especially during The Happy Hour. A number of these nifty girls, The Flopper assured Joshua, provided nookie free, though never for the likes of MacIntyre, Goyer, or the rest of their bunch, who they appreciated were going nowhere. It was the beer-bellied Flopper, of course, who drew the sporting crowd to The King’s Arms.

  The legendary Flopper, so-called because of the inimitable manner in which he had once minded the nets for the Boston Bruins, was a child of prairie penury. Pug-nosed, his gray eyes hard as pebbles, his impudent moon-face scored with more than a hundred stitches, he still wore his steely gray hair brush-cut, a memento of the day when he had been sent down to Springfield to play for the great Eddie Shore. The Flopper, born in a sod hut, the fifth of seven children, had worn a flour sack, holes scissored out for his arms, until he was nine years old. He was pulling carrots for ten cents an hour before he learned how to read, and even now his English was enriched by felicities all his own. Once, flipping through a book about the Holocaust that Joshua had just bought, The Flopper was startled to come across photographs of Dachau’s survivors. “They sure as shit didn’t get much to eat,” he said. “I mean, lookit how emancipated they look.”

  A hard-nosed conservative, The Flopper was vehemently opposed to abortion-on-demand, spearing on ice, or an independent Quebec. “I condone it,” he had said again and again. “I absolutely condone that kinda shit.”

  The bartender, an otherwise amiable Griffintown boy, was also a firm advocate of Canadian unity. He had taken to keeping a baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger, in full view of the clientele. It lay on his rear counter, intimidating, underneath a framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth. George, who called his bat “my Pepsi-tamer,” had also developed a line of jokes about French Canadians. “Hey, did you hear that the Berkowitz boy, you know, Son of Sam, has got himself a Pepsi lawyer?”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah, he’s going to plead guilty to the six murders, but fight the parking ticket.”

  But when Joshua was standing at the bar, George restrained himself for his sake. Pauline, on her mother’s side, was a de Gaspé Benoit. The blood of seigneurs coursed through her exquisite veins. George, like all the regulars in The King’s Arms, was fond of Pauline, and inquired after her daily, now that she was resting in the psychiatric ward of the Royal Victoria Hospital.

  Wasting.

  Bolstered on Scotch – usually two quick ones, sometimes more – Joshua visited Pauline every afternoon. He read to her. Treading carefully, he talked to her about the children. Their love, their happiness. The seemingly impregnable fortress they had made for themselves, before her brother’s intrusion. But Pauline, once so fastidious, better than beautiful, an excitement, no longer even combed her soft honey-colored hair. It was tangled, dirty. He combed it out for her. Then he noticed that her once faultless fingernails were broken here, bitten there. There were foodstains on her negligée. Joshua protested to the nurses, but he knew there was nothing they could do. She didn’t care. His wife languished in bed, selfishly adrift on Valium, her blue eyes listless, her face a sickly white. Staring at him. Once, he had angrily tried to shock her out of her comatose state. “She insists on coming to see you. She won’t let go.”

  Pauline didn’t even stir.

  “I’ll bring her tomorrow.”

  Nothing.

  “She wants to explain everything to you.”

  Still, she didn’t ask who.

  “Jane Trimble.”

  Pauline began to weep without sound, her lips quivering, and he leaped up to take her surprisingly cold hand and say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, my darling.”

  Only a week after Pauline had been admitted to the Royal Victoria, Joshua was summoned to the psychiatrist’s office.

  The esteemed Dr. Jonathan Cole, author of My Kind, Your Kind, Mankind, a rotund man, brown eyes mournful, turned out to be Yossel Kugelman, of all people. When they had been kids together on St. Urbain Street, Yossel had already catalogued his library of Big Little Books. If you borrowed one, you signed for it. To be fair, they had all collected salvage door-to-door for the war effort, but only Yossel hadn’t carted his junk to Debrofsky’s yard on St. Dominique, selling it there. No sir, that fink was no war-profiteer, he actually turned in his take at school. And now, Joshua could see, Yossel was still a collector. From salvage he had graduated to art. Canadiana. A Pellan hung on one wall, a William Ronald on another.

  Cole (or Kugelman) acknowledged Joshua’s sly grin of recognition with an awkward offering of pleasantries. But Joshua wasn’t listening. He was trying to remember if Yossel had been the one to turn up at Bea Rosen’s sweet-sixteen wearing a fedora, when he was suddenly startled by a direct question. “Has she any reason to resent you?” Yossel inquired in a soothing voice.

  Affronted, Joshua snapped back. “I leave a rim round the bathtub. No matter how hard I wipe, there are stains on my underwear.”

  Yossel, obviously unshockable, continued, “Now tell me, what was your sex life like before
–”

  “None of your fucking business, Kugelman.”

  Yossel flung his pen on the desk. “You’re not taking this seriously. I’m trying to help.”

  “You’re full of shit, you always were. You turned up at Bea Rosen’s sweet-sixteen wearing a fedora. Ha, ha. Prick.”

  Yossel sighed wearily, slicked back his hair with a plump hand, and asked Joshua what his feelings were about electric shock treatment.

  Lunging, Joshua grabbed him by his tie, yanking hard. “You just come near her with those electrodes, you even think of it, and I’ll kill you.”

  Breaking free, his face stinging red, Yossel demanded, “Are you crazy?”

  “What’s crazy these days? You tell me, Dr. Cole.”

  “It wasn’t me who changed the name. It was my mother. My son has reverted to Kugelman.”

  “He has?”

  “He’s studying piano. He’s at Juilliard. And while we’re at it, it wasn’t me with the fedora at Bea’s sweet-sixteen. It was Izzy.”

  Izzy Singer, who was then already into the stock market, using his war savings certificates as collateral.

  “And please,” Yossel continued, “if we are going to get anywhere here, you must stop being so hostile.”

  Joshua thought he could explain. “I saw you once at the airport,” he said. “Waiting by the carousel. When your suitcase came, it had little wheels underneath and a handle. You pulled it like a wagon.”

  “So what?” Yossel asked, baffled.

  “So you’re a twit.”

  “I’ve got a bad back,” he protested. “I mustn’t carry.”

  “Look here, Yossel, I want my wife back. I want her well. I don’t want any electrodes or primal scream therapy or any other shit you fakers are into. And you can take her off those drugs starting right now.”

  “I tell you what. We’ll put her on yogurt every morning. You think that will do the trick?”

  “You sure it was Izzy with the fedora?”