Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t. Go away.”

  All at once, her father was there. Dr. Orbach. A big, swarthy man with a reddening face. His right hand was in a cast. He wore a sling. “How dare you come to this house,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Aren’t you the criminal’s son?”

  “Hey, there. You talking about my father?”

  “You come around here again and I’ll break your head open, and you can tell your father that I’m not finished with him. I’ll soon see him back behind bars where he belongs. Now beat it, you little street arab.”

  He did not run into Bessie again for a couple of years, and only then did he find out what had happened.

  Dr. Orbach, it seemed, was not only a gifted dentist but also a reckless gambler. Horses, baseball, and Sonny Colucci’s barbotte tables. He had run up a debt, a big debt, and not only had fallen behind with his monthly payments, but had taken his account elsewhere, running up markers there as well. Sonny Colucci was offended, and sent his father to see Dr. Orbach in his office after the last patient had gone. “Dr. Orbach,” Reuben said, “I’m surprised at you. You are a very respectable man.”

  “I’m not paying out another penny to you.”

  “But Doctor, you still owe us eleven thousand dollars, not counting interest.”

  “You’ve had as much money as you’re going to get from me.”

  “But you agreed to terms with Mr. Colucci. You shook hands with him.”

  “I’m broke. The well is dry.”

  “Possibly you would prefer to settle on somewhat easier terms.”

  “The matter is closed. Finished. You’ll get more joy pulling your mutt than bargaining with me.”

  “You are referring, I suppose,” Reuben said with dignity, “to the sin of Onan?”

  “Oh, a Bible reader, are you?” he asked, amused.

  “Say, seven-fifty a month. We could live with that.”

  Dr. Orbach mistook Reuben’s offer for a show of weakness. “Your activities are absolutely illegal,” he said. “You can’t take your claim to any court.”

  “What we are suggesting is that you make some effort to settle. Say, six hundred a month.”

  “You know how much money that bloodsucker has had from me over the years?”

  “Didn’t you ever win?”

  Dr. Orbach made no reply.

  “And then did Mr. Colucci say the well is dry or you have no proof, no witnesses, only a phone call, or did he send a runner round with an envelope the next morning?”

  “Colucci belongs in jail, and that’s exactly where Pax Plante is going to put him now that this town is being cleaned up at last.”

  “My instructions are not to leave this office without any money. Please be reasonable, Doctor. Even five hundred dollars a –”

  “Fuck you and your instructions,” Dr. Orbach said, emboldened. “And now you get the hell out of here, you little creep, before I call the police.”

  “Well, yeah. Right. Dr. Orbach, please understand, I really hate doing this.”

  “Doing what, you little prick?”

  “My job.”

  “I don’t blame you. A Bible-reading Jew collecting for goyishe mobsters. Shame on you, Shapiro.”

  “I have no education, but.”

  “Bernard Gursky could have said the same, and just look at him today.”

  “You think I wouldn’t have liked to make millions out of bootlegging?”

  “You haven’t got the brains.”

  “I wouldn’t even mind being a dentist.”

  “And what in the hell do you mean by that?”

  “It’s good, steady work, isn’t it?”

  Orbach had to laugh. “Look, I’d like to sit here and shoot the breeze with you, but I’m a busy man.”

  “I appreciate that, Dr. Orbach. But I can’t go just yet. First I have to break the fingers of your right hand. It’s my job.”

  “Idle threats will get you absolutely nowhere.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Orbach, finally grasping what was about to happen, turned chalky.

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m sorry. I have to.”

  “Oh, please,” Dr. Orbach said. “Please give me a chance.”

  “I’m sorry,” his father said, “really I am,” and he reached across the desk, seized the screaming Orbach’s right hand, and began to squeeze.

  His father, to be fair, was indebted to Colucci. He had been working for him on and off ever since he had been a boy, beginning as a runner. Colucci had bankrolled Reuben when he turned pro, and taken him in again when his fighting days were finished.

  Joshua had never seen his father fight – he had been only three years old when Reuben had had to quit; but there were photographs of him in his ring days that he had come to cherish. In one of them, taken for one of the few advertising endorsements that Reuben ever got, he was portrayed in his ring stance, a Star of David sewn into his Everlast trunks. Superimposed, in a corner of the photograph, there was a head shot of Reuben wearing a fedora, with the tag line “ ‘For every round of the day, I wear an ADAM HAT.’ Ruby Shapiro, Lightweight Champion of Canada.” Another photograph, taken in Stillman’s gym, showed his father grinning shyly in the company of Lou Ambers, Henry Armstrong, and Whitey Bimstein. And Joshua owned a snapshot of him, taken at the Tic Toe, where the group at the table included Al Weill, Frankie Carbo, the young Johnny Greco, and a couple of showgirls.

  Joshua also kept an album of newspaper clippings that dated back to his father’s so-called amateur days. “So-called” because when he was still only seventeen, his father was already fighting professionally, under assumed names, in northern Ontario mining towns, as well as Peoria and Albany, for $20 a bout. His first important amateur fight, a title fight, was at the Griffintown A.C. “For once, the Emerald Isle barracking brigade will have to choose between the lesser of ‘two evils,’ when Ruby Shapiro and Solly ‘The Ghetto Kid’ Bergman, a pair of Hebes, slug it out for Canada’s Amateur Featherweight Title at the …” He went on to fight Mick Sullivan for the Canadian Amateur Lightweight Title in Toronto. “A grudge fight between a Son of Moses and a Son of Erin is a promoter’s dream of heaven! And Pete ‘Side-Door’ O’Hara put on a real corker of a grudge fight at the Arena Gardens last night between Mick Sullivan and Ruby Shapiro, both of whom are being groomed for the pro ranks. One glance at Shapiro’s schnozz and you didn’t have to ask which one was the Hebe! Anyway, there were 4,952 delirious fans at the fight, 4,620 of whom talked turkey at the box office.… It was a fiercely fought contest from the first bell. Right off Shapiro sent over a haymaker with the Celt’s name on it and nearly had Sullivan crying for his momma. But when he raced in to finish him, the Celt countered with a left-hander that had the aggressive little Jewboy dreaming of chicken soup.…”

  His father, pulling another marker free of his Bible, told him about Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his only son, Isaac, to God, which apparently pleased Jehovah enormously. “Quote, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore, blah blah blah, unquote. Now we’ve got this covenant with God, time-honored, and going on forever and ever. Those are the terms and they’re very stiff, I don’t mind telling you. But – and not a word to your Uncle Harvey about this, you understand – but if I had to sign on the dotted line today, I don’t know that I would. God’s always needling, testing, his wrath waxing hot. He’s a real blowhard. Back in Egypt, for instance, when we were in bondage, he could’ve got the Hebes paroled with only one plague, but no, after each one he hardened Pharaoh’s heart so he could display his whole bag of tricks. And afterwards, once we were sprung, he never once talks to Moses that he doesn’t remind him” – and here his father sought out another marker – “quote, I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the la
nd of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, unquote. Now in your life if hard times come and you have to borrow money, never take it from anybody like that, they drive you crazy reminding you every day what they did for you. I don’t care for such types.”

  His father also preferred Esau to Jacob.

  “Esau was one fine fella, a hunter, and he used to bring his dad venison to eat. But his brother Jacob was a cunning little bastard, a momma’s boy, a jealous type. Anyway, one day Esau comes in from the hunt, fainting with hunger, and asks his brother for something to eat. And Jacob, a real Outremont kid, always looking for angles, a way to get ahead, he says you want to nosh, sell me your birthright. And poor Esau, on the point of dying, sells him his birthright for some bread and soup. And later Jacob does even worse, the tricky bastard, with the help of his bitch of a mother. The old man is dying, he still prefers Esau, a hairy man, to Mr. Peaches-and-Cream. And Jacob comes to him, the old man is blind, and lies, pretending to be Esau, in order to steal his blessing. But, what the hell, Jacob’s one of our holy fathers and not Esau, and he’s tricked in turn by this guy Laban, a real con, when he comes sniffing around, looking for a wife. In those days, incidently, a Hebe could have more than one wife, and concubines, those are whores, and if one of the wives couldn’t give him kids, they would offer him the maid to screw, just like that.”

  “And did they have to wash up before and after?” Joshua asked.

  “Now you cut that out. We’re into serious stuff here. Like, these are the Days of Awe.” He cracked open another quart of Labatt’s. “I guess we could leave the windows until tomorrow.”

  “Aren’t we going to the synagogue tomorrow?”

  “Oh, yeah. Right. Well, the day after, then.”

  “Sure.”

  “This edition, you know, it also includes the New Testament, the guy on the stick, and I must say he had a sweeter nature than most of the old prophets. But not a word about this to your Uncle Harvey, for Christsake.”

  In the morning, Reuben wakened Joshua early; they both got into their best suits and shined their shoes until they gleamed. Then they started out for the B’nai Jacob synagogue on Fairmount Street. The closer they got, the slower his father walked, his manner increasingly agitated.

  “Hold it. We get in there, and they’ll give you this sort of scarf to wear, a tallis. You watch me closely. I’ll show you how to put it on.”

  “I remember, but. From my bar-mitzvah.”

  At the mention of his bar-mitzvah, more legend than scandal now, his father paled. “If anybody in there asks you about it, you deny it ever happened. Your mother never did it. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Oh, and listen, you stand up for certain prayers, you sit down for others. I give you the elbow once, you stand up, twice, you sit down. Got that?”

  “Yeah.”

  Outside the synagogue, many of the faithful were gathered together in the sun. Smoking, gossiping.

  “You think there’s no more room inside?” Joshua asked hopefully.

  His father fiddled with the brim of his Adam hat. “I’ll tell you what, we’ll cross to the other side of the street and walk up and down a couple of times, just to get the feel of things.”

  They crossed the street.

  “There’s Dr. Orbach,” Joshua said.

  “Where?”

  Joshua pointed to a group of men, all of them wearing prayer shawls, standing on the synagogue steps. Dr. Orbach’s right arm was held in a cast, his fingers encased. He wore a sling. “Right there,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you what,” his father said, quickening his pace, “I’m going to let you off today.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “But, shit, your mother isn’t expecting us home until one.”

  It was now only ten o’clock.

  “Have you seen Union Pacific yet?” his father asked.

  “No.”

  “It’s playing at the Palace. I’ll take you.”

  “During the Days of Awe?”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  6

  THE SEAPLANE TOOK OFF THE NEXT AFTERNOON, wheeling over the lake again and again, fading into the sun, seemingly gone. Then, catching Joshua by surprise, it came roaring up from behind to swoop low over the Hornby cottage, wings wiggling, before it settled on the lake, making for the Trimble dock rather than the country club. Joshua watched from his study window, his mind elsewhere.

  With Murdoch.

  Murdoch’s seventh novel, its contents sour, its jacket elegant, sat before him on his desk. It was a mechanical book, shallow, written with a fine writer’s remembered skills. Joshua longed to go for a swim. He could see the kids and Pauline horsing around in the water below. Instead, he slipped paper into his typewriter, plucked a can of Bras d’Or out of his small fridge (a Christmas gift from Pauline), and sat down to write Murdoch, determined to lie.

  Even before he started his letter, long overdue, Joshua imagined him tottering down the stairs to the door of his Lonsdale Road flat. He would be snorting, coughing up phlegm, a Gauloise drooping from his purply lips, his big hairy belly bouncing, breaking wind as he stooped to retrieve Joshua’s letter with the rest of his morning bumpf. Murdoch huffing as he climbed the stairs once more, settling down to his long dining room table, sweeping last night’s dishes aside, lifting the kettle from the gas stove, its bottom badly charred, to make himself a cup of instant, stirring Courvoisier rather than sugar into it, and washing it down with a couple of After Eights or a chocolate digestive, whichever was handy. Trying to remember the name of the bird who was surely resting in his bed, and wondering if he would have to make it clear yet again that a shared breakfast was not part of the Murdoch deal. Skat, ducks.

  “One of them,” he once told Joshua, outraged, “actually gave me the clap. A Rodean girl at that. I tell you, there are no bloody standards any more. My daughter, Jessica, she’s seventeen now, brought round one of those frightful Fulbrights the other morning. A New York Jew. Depressingly earnest. He said he was like, you know, man, a writer, and so I offered him drinkees and he said no thanks, the little twit, but coffee and chocolate cake would do nicely. He was wearing denims. Bell-bottom trousers. Platform shoes. Joshua, what sort of people do you come from?”

  The last time Joshua had been in London and seen the remodeled flat, bespeaking Murdoch’s all-too-temporary affluence, it was filled with black leather furniture from Heal’s, long on nickel tubing. A Hockney drawing, a gift from Angela, hung over the fireplace that now served as a catch-all for empty Smartie boxes, champagne corks, dial-a-chicken bones, and wads of Kleenex he had masturbated into. Built-in bookshelves, rather than old boards and bricks, were everywhere. A long, glass-topped coffee table, all jutting angles, good for nothing but painful knee-banging, came from Casa Pupo. There was a Sansui hi-fi, any knob beyond volume an enigma to him. And central heating, which he also hated. Clippings from Durrant’s, copies of Beano and Dandy, book proofs and mugs, rode every available surface. Moldy coffee in one mug, soggy Gauloise butts adrift in another. For there was not a char in NW1 who would service Murdoch’s flat any longer.

  In his mind’s eye, Joshua saw Murdoch, scratching absently at his groin, opening his morning newspapers (the Times, the Guardian, the Daily Mail), hungrily searching the gossip columns for a passing salute. Digging into his mail, he shakes out check-size envelopes and then hunts for intimidating invitations to mount on his mantelpiece. Shoving the bills and fan mail and income tax demands aside, he finally comes to Joshua’s thick envelope. Filled with glee, Joshua hoped.

  Once profiled in the Guardian, Murdoch was asked, “Are you married?”

  “Sometimes,” he replied.

  There was a spare bedroom in the flat, available for the issue of his several marriages, should any of them dare to visit.

  “Ralph came to see me last week. The little snot’s at St. Paul’s now. Do you know what that costs? Never mind. He actually wanted advice. A father-and-son chat. Good Lord, I’m still a child
myself. I like nothing better than to suck a girl’s titties and have her read Winnie the Pooh aloud to me before I go tuckybyes. Do you give your children advice? I expect you do. The years have made you pompous, my dear. Ah well, I suppose nothing compensates for the loss of talent. Both our brains have been addled by alcohol and the young have no mercy.”

  Yes, yes indeed, Joshua thought, giving up on the letter and racing down the hill barefoot to join his family in the lake.

  “Hey, look,” Susy squealed, “it’s Daddy!”

  Everybody smiled or waved. Even Alex. They were happy to see him. Me, Joshua Shapiro. My family. Who would have guessed, he thought, his heart thumping with pleasure as he allowed himself to be splashed, pulled, and ducked.

  But that night Joshua turned over in bed to find Pauline standing by the bedroom window, watching the seaplane by moonlight. “Why doesn’t he leave here?” she implored. “Why doesn’t he just fly off?”

  “Maybe you underestimate Jane’s charms?”

  “It’s not Jane that’s keeping him here. I can assure you of that.”

  “What, then?”

  “Money.”

  The seaplane did not take off the next morning, or the morning after, and neither did Kevin appear at their place. Then, late in the afternoon, the phone rang. “That will be Lady Jane,” Pauline said.

  Joshua scooped up the phone, nodded at Pauline to indicate that she was absolutely right, and then, covering the mouthpiece, said, “Dinner tonight.”

  “Damn,” Pauline said.

  Yes, Joshua thought, damn damn, recalling an encounter he had never told Pauline about, something that had happened some five years earlier, during the winter that had followed their first summer on the lake. It was three weeks before Christmas, Pauline and the children were in Ottawa visiting the senator, and he was on his own, drinking late most nights at The King’s Arms, only staying in if there was a hockey game to watch on TV.

  Then one stingingly cold, windblown morning, his column completed, Joshua was obliged to hurry down to St. James Street to cable it to Toronto. His battered old Toyota wouldn’t start, the battery dead again, and he was going to need a taxi. But Montreal’s taxi drivers preferred retreating to the nearest tavern when a fine, powdery snow was blowing over icy roads. Westmount Taxi brought a busy signal, their phone obviously off the hook. Diamond answered, but the snotty girl on the line couldn’t promise anything for half an hour; Joshua offered a flyer over the meter reading to the first taxi to show within ten minutes. Only five minutes later a taxi came slithering down the street, braking softly against a snowbank in front of his door. “Hey,” the driver said, “aren’t you Joshua Shapiro?”