Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  He knew, without asking, what the problem was. The children. She wouldn’t leave them alone. “They’re devouring you,” he said.

  “Or keeping me sane. Or both.”

  “Do you think I’m an inadequate father?”

  “I think you’re splendid with them when they’re Teddy’s age, and all that’s called for is horsing around, but once they’ve grown big and troublesome, like Alex, it’s off to The King’s Arms and let Pauline handle it.”

  “Alex doesn’t like me any more.”

  “He doesn’t want to be corrected or upstaged by you any more, is more like it. Don’t go back to Ibiza, Josh.”

  But I have to, he thought. “I’ve begun to dream about him again.”

  “Mueller?”

  “I want to settle with him. I’d also like to see if I can find the Freibergs.”

  “Stay here with us. I’ll make latkas. I’ll iron your shirt collars just so. I’ll give head.”

  He laughed.

  “Isn’t that what they call it now?”

  They docked the boat, and then Joshua, who still felt jumpy but not the least bit high any longer, fixed drinks for them on the porch. “Darling, I don’t know how many times we’ve compared childhoods over the years. I haven’t held anything back. Not even Ed Ryan. But there’s always been a bit of a gap on your end.”

  “Kevin?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want him here.”

  “Why?”

  “Trimble frightens me. So does Jane. And then there’s my father. It could kill him.”

  “Why, darling?”

  “Why,” she asked, laughing, “why?” And she began to tell him, falteringly at first, more than a little weepy, then in full flow, and they were still sitting on the porch, talking, when the sun came up.

  7

  HE REMEMBERED UNCLE OSCAR, HIS DULL BROWN EYES obscured behind steel-rimmed glasses, droning on and on about the prospects of war as Joshua continued to stare at the photograph of Franco, a paunchy man with a jaunty little moustache, strolling down an avenue of shelled buildings. In 1939 Joshua was more committed to perfecting his bolo game than to politics, and so he couldn’t pretend he was choked with anger or that he grasped the photograph’s real importance, but for reasons unfathomable to him it stuck in his memory unlike any other.

  Joshua once mentioned the photograph to Sidney Murdoch, whose uncle had actually served with the Attlee Battalion of the International Brigades. Sidney did not recall ever seeing it. Possibly, it had never appeared in Picture Post.

  In London, during the fifties, Murdoch and Joshua sometimes sought out his Uncle Willy in a pub in Cold Harbour Lane. A grizzled old man, somewhat sly, he would submit to Joshua’s breathless questions about the Spanish Civil War, obliging him with lies, but only to keep the bitter flowing and maybe touch him for a couple of quid in parting. Uncle Willy’s memories of Spain were dim; he was clearly sorry he had ever gone. And now he wasn’t interested in Nye Bevan, Eden’s Suez obloquy, their marches to Aldermaston, or all that codswallop. What agitated him were the bleeding blacks who seemed to be dropping like monkeys out of every tree in Brixton. A lazy lot, as far as he was concerned, most of them on the fiddle or national assistance or, more likely, both. All the same, Murdoch revered the old man, he was uncommonly gentle with him, and quickly reverted to his working-class accent in his presence. Joshua accompanied Murdoch to the funeral, a thinly attended affair. Murdoch, his eyes moist, read from Auden over the graveside.

  “They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch

  through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;

  They walked the passes: they had come to present their lives.”

  1939.

  “Joe DiMaggio, baseball’s most sensational big league star, starts what should be his best year so far,” Noel F. Busch wrote in Life a week after Madrid fell.

  The previous season, DiMaggio, a holdout, had been booed by the fans in Yankee Stadium. DiMaggio had held out on the advice of his brother Tom, who was vice-president of the San Francisco Fisherman’s Union. When Tom learned that his brother was being forced to sign a contract for $25,000, a picayune percentage of the money he brought into the box office, he considered it an outrage and urged Joe to take action. Joe’s strike was a failure. “Unfortunately for the DiMaggios,” Busch wrote, “the U.S. national game is run according to strictly Fascist lines. Its dictator is Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Solidarity among baseball players is impossible since, in the nature of the sport, rival teams are supposed to hate each other bitterly and any co-operation between them would remove their reason for existence.”

  Madrid fell in April, intruding on his enjoyment of Fibber McGee. Fat Franco and his four columns claiming an emaciated city; his fifth column, as he liked to boast, already established there. Franco, he learned from Life, was a simple man, an ordinary fellow, who read little, but enjoyed his food. He was unable to stage his victory parade immediately, the background inappropriate, Madrileños continuing to wander through the pocked streets of a ruined city, rioting for bread. Finally, on May 19, 1939, before an arch proclaiming Victoria once and Franco six times, “Spain’s victorious Generalissimo reviewed the greatest Spanish army since the conquistadores of Philip II.” At the head of the parade were ten thousand Italians. Near the end were five thousand German air-force men under Baron von Richtofen, cousin of the late great wartime ace.

  Madrid fell in April, Barcelona even earlier, on January 25. In the flight from Barcelona, some 300,000 Loyalist refugees entered France through a pass in the Pyrenees, Le Perthus – a pass through which Napoleon had once ridden, and before him Hannibal and Charlemagne.

  Squatting on the floor of his father’s tiny den, with stacks of Life, a razor, and a gluepot, Joshua cut out pictures for his scrap album.

  “A piece of tire is used by this legless veteran to protect his stump as he drags over the ground.”

  “A man dies, just short of France, attended by his daughter. The long hike and the cold killed many refugees.”

  “The children of war have lost their legs. On crutches, they hitch slowly along past the olive groves toward France.”

  At Perpignan, the men of Guadalajara, of Belchite and the Ebro, exhausted Spaniards, shivering survivors of the International Brigades, were given a traditional French welcome. Under the watchful eye of the Prefect of Perpignan, they were abruptly relieved of their rifles and haversacks, their underclothes and bits of food scattered in the ditch. The parsimonious French herded them into cold, filthy camps, and all they had to cover themselves with at night were their blanket capes. Some survived on the flesh of dead mules, others were done in by dysentery or unattended wounds.

  Six months later World War II, source material for Hogan’s Heroes, The Dirty Dozen, SS Sex Kitten, and other delights, had begun.

  Spike Jones sang:

  “Ven de fuhrer sagt,

  ve are ze master race,

  sieg heil (spit), heil (spit)

  right in ze fuhrer’s face.”

  And Uncle Oscar was right for once. Aluminum, that was the stuff. And zinc. And cast iron. And brass. The scrap yard, started by Joshua’s grandfather after Prohibition had ended, his services as a wheelman on the back roads leading into Vermont no longer needed, had finally begun to make what the Shapiros considered big money. Uncle Oscar, ever-aspiring Oscar, started in earnest to shop around for opportunities. WE INVEST IN INVENTIONS, his Star advertisement ran, a license for loonies to besiege his ramshackle office on King Street. Uncle Oscar was intrigued by, though he finally turned down, a plan to freeze clouds over Dover, clouds laden with bombs that would sail across the Channel and explode after the clouds had dissolved over Berlin. He detected the flaw at once and hollered at the inventor, “You’ve overlooked one thing, you prick.”

  “Oh, yeah. What?”

  “Wind changes.”

  “Oh no I haven’t,” he shot right back. “The clouds would be pro
peller-driven.”

  “Propeller-driven. What do you take me for? A horse’s ass? Let’s say I’m in charge of Berlin’s air defenses,” Uncle Oscar said, “and I get up on a Thursday morning to see every fucking cloud in the sky racing for the North Sea, away from me. But then I look up again and see four crazy clouds blowing right at me. Well, what do I do? I quickly realize these are enemy clouds and I send up planes with hot-water bombs to dissolve them before they reach the city. Or, still better, you little shmock, I drop grappling hooks from the planes and tow them back to England.”

  In 1943, Uncle Oscar, prospering in the yard, took a wife, Lou Springer’s daughter Hetty, and became the first Shapiro to move into a house in Outremont. The move saddened Joshua, because as much as he disliked Uncle Oscar, he had loved wandering through his St. Dominique Street flat, which was filled with junk retrieved from the yard. A spiked German army helmet from World War I. Shoeboxes overflowing with medals and pocket watches. A malfunctioning but nevertheless real Colt Peacemaker, its butt decorated with gold inlay. The confessional from an old church in the Gaspé. Stacks and stacks of paintings, which Uncle Oscar held onto for the elaborate gold frames. Inlaid Chinese screens. Lampshades of multicolored tinted glass, which he swore came from a really classy whorehouse. A player piano. A box crammed with old canes and sabres. Stained-glass windows he could never find a market for, potential customers complaining they not only kept out the light but would be a real headache to clean. A sturdy old captain’s sea trunk filled with intricately uniformed grenadiers, toy soldiers, which he eventually had melted down for the lead. A shelf lined with irons that weren’t even electrical, but had to be filled with boiling water before they could be used. A wind-up gramophone that played music on metal rolls. Two wooden rocking horses and a pine baby crib made by French Canadians who couldn’t afford the real stuff. Grandfather clocks he never found the time to repair. A cupboard full of old telephones and typewriters. An ancient cash register. Pissy old crazy-quilts made by yentas in the Maritimes to get them through the long winters. Crocheted tablecloths from the old country which were no damn good because you could see the table through the holes.

  Hetty, far from impractical and blessed with a real flair for decoration, rummaged through the crap, salvaging what she could. She had the Colt Peacemaker soldered onto a silver plate, which made for an interesting ashtray. Colored glass squares were worked out of the leaded lampshades to make a “really cute” coffee tabletop that could also be used as a checkerboard. An inlaid Chinese screen was chopped into squares and framed with bamboo to make a set of coasters. The confessional was gutted, painted white, and converted into a neat little garden shed. The sturdy old captain’s trunk became a planter. Even the stained-glass windows were put to good use: broken up, they were cemented upright into the top of the backyard brick fence to discourage burglars as well as neighborhood kids. The rest, she insisted, was certainly not moving with her into Outremont. Which was when Uncle Oscar, chortling, told her that he had actually found a goy, a fairy, who had given him fifteen hundred smackers for all the remaining dreck and, furthermore, had agreed to cart it away at his own expense. With the money, Hetty bought some really lovely things at Eaton’s, including a fireplace log that glowed and gave off heat when you turned a switch. No ashes to clean.

  Only a month before the wedding, Joshua surprised Oscar at the dining-room table, biting into a peach, his manner fervent, even as he made notes on a book he was reading. The moment Joshua barged into the room, Uncle Oscar slapped the book shut, swept it off the table, and sat on it, glaring. He remembered to take the book with him when Joshua’s mother called him to the phone, but, surprisingly, he left his notes behind. Alas, he hadn’t gotten very far. All Joshua could make out in a quick glance at his notebook was:

  Foreplay

  a.

  b.

  c.

  d.

  Recommended time allowed each step

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  “Who,” his mother asked, “was the toughest opponent ever to trade blows with the Alabama Assassin?”

  “Billy The Kid Conn. Polo Grounds, June eighteenth, nineteen forty-one. A thirteenth-round K.O. for the Brown Bomber. Attendance, fifty-four thousand, four hundred eighty-seven. Referee, Eddie Joseph.”

  Mort Cooper pitched a one-hitter over the Dodgers, and the same day Charlie Keller drove in seven Yankee runs with two homers. In the National League race, Brooklyn led the Cards by three-and-a-half games and the boys were betting they would meet the Yankees in the World Series.

  The boys, the boys. Bless them, please.

  Seymour Kaplan, Max Birenbaum, Morty Zipper, Grepsy Segal, Yossel Kugelman, Eli Seligson, Al Roth, Lennie Fisher, Bobby Gross, Benny Zucker, Larry Cohen, and the rest.

  Out of Fairmount and Bancroft schools or the Talmud Torah, into FFHS. Room 42. Class song, “Men of Harlech.” Becoming the boys of the Fletcher’s Field High Cadet Corps.

  Here come the Fletcher’s Cadets,

  smoking cigarettes,

  the cigarettes are lousy

  and so are the Fletcher’s Cadets.

  The boys, the boys. He remembered them loping down their Boulevard on a Friday afternoon in spring, exploring, puffing Turrets, itchy in their Grover Knit-to-Fit sweaters, brash voices hushed for once, their manner subdued, because they were in Westmount. Where, according to Morty, everybody had a maid, some even a butler as well, and there was a buzzer under the dining-room table to bring them coming on the trot. Where, Izzy swore, property values couldn’t be beat. And what about the snatchola, Seymour wanted to know.

  Sssh. Not for you, bubbele. This is Westmount. Mothers didn’t bargain here, or fathers cheat at pinochle. The daughters were blonde and leggy, they were taught horseback-riding early, if only to break their cherries with impunity, and the sons didn’t collect butcher bills on Sunday mornings to earn enough to buy their own two-wheel bikes, but instead were given sports cars. British. The best.

  The boys stood in front of Selwyn House amazed, as cars, some of them chauffeured, came to collect the students. “If they actually had to walk home,” Joshua ventured, “they’d only get dusty, like.”

  Rosy-cheeked they were, wearing navy-blue blazers and gray flannel trousers, and they didn’t give St. Urbain’s interlopers so much as a glance.

  “Have you ever seen such pricks?” Joshua asked. “I mean, would you get into that sissy suit every morning?”

  “It’s not your problem,” Max replied. “They don’t want Jews here.”

  Not in Westmount, with a cricket pitch, and its own police force. Where the snow was cleared instantly, and if even a crack, never mind a real pothole, opened on the streets a French Canadian came running with a shovel of hot tar – “Yes, sir. Right away, boss.” But where, on the other hand, nobody had a bar-mitzvah.

  Eli’s father, a hot Zionist, showed a documentary on life on the kibbutz for the boys’ party at his bar-mitzvah. They showed Charlie Chaplin two-reelers at Max’s party. For Seymour’s, his father shoveled them all into his fruit-and-vegetable truck that stank of rotting cabbages and drove them to a doubleheader at Delorimier Downs. They laid on a Bud Abbott and Lou Costello movie for Izzy’s bar-mitzvah, and a day later he was peddling the gifts he didn’t want. Everybody was treated to a party at Levitt’s Delicatessen for Morty Zipper’s celebration. Yet, surprisingly, the bar-mitzvah that none of them would ever forget was Joshua Shapiro’s.

  Yessir.

  Nineteen forty-four it was.

  R.A.F. HITS HARD AT COLOGNE AND HAMBURG

  2,000 Tons of Bombs

  Rained on Rhine City

  And, on St. Urbain, corner of Ontario, Vic “The Torch” Rizutto was gunned down.

  “Hey, wasn’t he a friend of yours, Daddy?”

  “Well, yeah. Right. But there was a family quarrel.”

  In a frenzy, the cops padlocked bookies and barbotte and whorehouses everywhere. Colucci was charged
with dealing in black market sugar, of all things, and Joshua’s father, whose testimony was being sought, couldn’t be found anywhere.

  “I have no idea where he is,” his mother told Perreault.

  “Aw, Esther, you’re a peach.”

  With his father in hiding again, his mother quickly sank into her customary stupor. Chewing 217’s, consuming novels and movie magazines and sipping Dewar’s and a splash as she listened to “Ma Perkins” and “Pepper Young’s Family” on their walnut-finished RCA radio. She seldom bothered to dress any more, stalking through the flat in a shimmering black slip, a Pall Mall dangling from her lips. Beds were left unmade, sheets unchanged. If she bestirred herself at all, it was to practice her act. One afternoon Joshua came home to find the living room carpet rolled up, the blinds drawn, and the winking red bulb screwed into the lamp, and another afternoon he opened the front door to a surprise.

  “Well,” she said. “Rinky-dinky-doo.”

  “Wow!”

  “What do you think?”

  His mother was wearing a top hat, glittering tights, tails, and long black mesh stockings. Twirling a cane, wiggling her ass, she danced away from him into the living room as Jack Teagarden croaked “Anybody Seen My Baby?” on the gramophone.

  Dishes and pans accumulated in the kitchen. Empty milk bottles collected in the hall. The basin under the icebox overflowed again and again, and the box itself yielded no delights. A heel of hard salami. Some moldy cottage cheese. A slushy lettuce. To begin with, Joshua was given fifty cents each evening and sent out to eat his supper; she didn’t seem to mind, she was probably grateful, if he didn’t return for hours. Then a routine of sorts was established. She left the money out for him on the kitchen table in the morning and he took to leaving the house at eight and not returning until eleven at night.