Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  Ah, Kingsmere, where Wee Willie was to create an artificial ruin, instantly time-honored, the “Abbey ruin,” which he thought was “like the Acropolis at Athens.” King diligently added to his ruins during the thirties, but he didn’t make his prize catch until 1941. On the dark day following the bombing of Westminster Hall, King sent a cable to Canada House in London. Blitzed London. The cable was SECRET AND MOST IMMEDIATE. It arrived at 10 p.m. and was promptly decoded. The prime minister wanted to know if Lester B. Pearson, then with the Canadian high commissioner’s office in London, could immediately prevail upon the British to round up a few stones from bombed Westminster for his ruins at Kingsmere. An embarrassed Pearson put through the request and, to his surprise, it was not met with indignant refusal. On the contrary. Historic stones were shipped safely via submarine to add a new élan to Wee Willie’s ruins.

  It was in 1938 that King, now a confirmed spiritualist, first met Adolf Hitler and quickly recognized something of a kindred spirit, another leader profoundly devoted to his mother’s memory and the value of Judenfrei real estate. I believe, he wrote in his diary, the world will yet come to see a great man, a mystic, in Hitler. He “will rank some day with Joan of Arc among the deliverers of his people, & if he is only careful may yet be the deliverer of Europe.”

  In 1924, friends of King gave him a dog, an Irish terrier called Pat, which he soon took to be a living symbol of his mother. Kneeling in prayer before his mother’s portrait in 1931, “little Pat came up from the bedroom and licked my feet – dear little soul, he is almost human. I sometimes think he is a comforter dear mother has sent me, he is filled with her spirit of patience, and tenderness & love.” Pat died in his arms in 1941, even as Willie sang aloud to him “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” “I kissed the little fellow as he lay there, told him of his having been faithful and true, of his having saved my soul, and being like God.” Fortunately, another Irish terrier, Pat II, soon came into his life, and before going to bed, King and his little angel dog often used to chat together about the Christ child and the animals in his crib. Of Pat II’s death, on August 11, 1947, the prime minister of Canada wrote, “I felt as if he had died for me, that my sins might be forgiven me.” His dog’s death put him in mind of Christ’s crucifixion. Pat II was buried near what King called “the Bethal Stone” at Kingsmere.

  King’s obsession with the position of the hands of the clock seems to have begun in 1918; he regarded it as auspicious if the hands were together, as in twelve o’clock, or in a straight line, as at six o’clock. By 1932 he was attending séances and consulting mediums in Canada, the United States, and England. He also went in for table-rapping, wherein it was revealed to him in 1933 that he had been predestined to become prime minister, the fate of Canada being in his hands. Leonardo da Vinci appeared at King’s little table, as did Lorenzo de’ Medici and Louis Pasteur, who was good enough to prescribe for little angel dog Pat’s heart condition. Another visitor to King’s table, the spirit of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, assured him that President Roosevelt loved him. “He will treat you like a prince.” However, when Roosevelt and Churchill came to Canada for the Quebec conference during World War II, they wouldn’t let Wee Willie anywhere near the big table, and only grudgingly allowed him to have his photograph taken with them. To be fair, however, Roosevelt proved to be a lot nicer after his death. He appeared before King, begging him not to retire, if only because, said the late president, he had the wisdom that Churchill lacked, as well as “the caution and the integral honesty that holds a country together.” From time to time Willie’s mum would appear to “my own dearest boy, my pride and joy, best of sons.” Once she went on to introduce President Roosevelt to him. “Frank, as I call him.” This time out, Frank pleaded with King to take a real rest, “knock off for at least a year.” He also said that it was vital that King should write his memoirs, including “the important chapter, your firm faith in a future life, that you have evidence of it.”

  William Lyon Mackenzie King, the longest-serving prime minister in the history of the Commonwealth, survived both his dearest loves in this world, Pat I and Pat II, and passed on to the Big Kennel in the Sky on July 22, 1950. Just as he died, thunder and lightning and torrents of rain came without any warning. The rain fell only at Kingsmere, not in Ottawa.

  King, who always presented himself as a man of very modest means, earned $7,000 a year when he first became a minister in 1909. On his retirement in 1948, his pay and allowances totaled $19,000 annually. And yet – and yet – miraculously, perhaps – he died leaving a fortune of over $750,000, and this did not include the Kingsmere estate, which he left to the nation.

  Their Annual Day in honor of the scheming old fraud began, quite properly, at Kingsmere, the Jews getting in to ruin the whole place at last, with a champagne breakfast on the site of the “Abbey ruins.” From there they moved on to pay their respects to Pat II, at the Bethal Stone, where they sang “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” but in Yiddish, this version being the inspiration of Mickey Stein.

  Then they adjourned to Laurier House.

  Laurier House was left to Wee Willie by Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s widow in 1922. Friends of King’s clubbed together to renovate and refurbish the house for him before he moved in a year later. As usual, the gentlemen of the Mackenzie King Memorial Society began their tour of the residence from which Canada had once been governed with a visit to the dining room, the table set exactly as King had liked it. “At this table,” the guide solemnly declared, “sat all past presidents of the United States, as well as Shirley Temple.”

  In the living room, they stood to marvel at the crystal ball that still rested on the piano, and the painting of King’s mum, where he had knelt to pray nightly.

  Next they assembled in their private dining room in the Chateau Laurier to drink more champagne. A disgruntled Seymour abruptly demanded, “How long have you known that Auden was a queer?”

  “I don’t know,” Joshua replied, surprised. “For years, I guess. Why?”

  “First Dostoevsky and then that little Eliot, whose lines I once committed to memory, turn out to be farbrinter anti-Semites, and now I find out that Auden, my Auden, has been a cocksucker all these years. ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love,’ yeah, but you know where. What can you put your trust in these days?”

  Lennie Fisher, his manner urgent, strongly recommended ITT.

  Seymour, just married the previous summer, was showing all the out-of-towners, including Joshua, photographs of his wife, apologizing each time. “I know it’s a corny thing to do, but …”

  At the time, Seymour was still running his bookshop on University Street, roosting in the apartment upstairs. If an unsuspecting matron wandered in and asked for Taylor Caldwell’s Dear and Glorious Physician, he would explode, “This is a bookshop, madame, not a shit-bin. You want shit, shop at Burton’s. Go.” But he would thrust Kafka on certain students, giving it away, saying they needed it. He was enjoying himself in the bookshop, but he couldn’t earn a living there. He was married now and in three years he would be thirty. Imagine, he said, thirty. “My father pops into the shop once a week and says, ‘So, enough of this foolishness. Who did I build the business for if not for you?’ ”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Molly’s great, you know. I’m really serious about this marriage. She says I can do whatever I want.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m weak, Josh. I really hate being without money. But knitwear? With an M.A. in English lit?”

  Lennie Fisher floated from group to group, urging everybody to get into Xerox now.

  Max Birenbaum, whose wife was expecting again within a week, started each time the phone rang. “If it’s for me, I’m right here.”

  Bobby Gross, prospering as a lawyer, was thinking of buying a house in Westmount.

  “You go right ahead,” Max said, “but I’ll never step in there. Count on it.”

  “You make that a promise,” Bobby said, “and I’ll buy.”

>   Then, arms around each other, Max and Bobby sang “Hail, Comrade Stalin,” followed by “A Company Union Is a No Good Union.”

  A squinting, tight-lipped Eli Seligson drove Joshua into a corner to tell him that he had read his article on the Aldermaston march in Esquire and, so far as he was concerned, it was sentimental, left-wing horseshit. “The others may be impressed, but not me. You know what your problem is? You think you’re too good for us.”

  “Eli, baby, I am too good for you.”

  “Boy, are you ever a putz. Is it true that you’re coming back to live here?”

  “Yes. Next year, probably.”

  “And you’re writing a book about the Spanish Civil War, of all things?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what?”

  AI Roth, who was in real estate, advised all of them, no matter where they lived, to stop burning money on rent. He enjoined them to get out of their apartments and buy houses right now. “Borrow, if you haven’t got the cash. You can’t go wrong. Especially in Montreal.”

  Talk about money naturally led to speculation about their old classmate Izzy Singer. Izzy, wheeling and dealing before he even reached puberty, had – to everybody’s chagrin, especially Seymour’s – become a millionaire at last. He had, Joshua was told, first struck it rich six years earlier, peddling appliances. Izzy had taken to following the ice-truck down Clark, St. Urbain, and Waverly. Wherever the ice-truck stopped, Izzy bounded after, pounding on the door. “Why pay a dollar-eighty-five a week for ice, Missus, when I can let you have a fridge on installments for two dollars a week? Delivery this afternoon.”

  Seymour, warming to his pet hate, contributed a Singer anecdote of his own: “You’ll never believe this, but when he was at McGill, that grauber, he actually took a couple of courses in architecture, not that he ever wanted to be one, that paskudnyak, but so that he’d know enough that they couldn’t cheat him when he became a developer. Anyway, so help me God, he wrote a paper on the construction of Notre Dame, estimating from sources available, the cost of the cathedral per cubic foot, and its present value as a Paris tourist attraction, arguing that it had, on balance, been a sound investment.”

  Nobody believed Seymour, but what was beyond dispute was that from bartering in war savings stamps in FFHS, through appliances and real estate deals, Izzy had graduated to speculation in oil and natural gas and uranium.

  Morty Zipper, who worked three nights a week in a free clinic in Point St. Charles, shook his head, dismayed. “I treat kids there who are still suffering from rickets.”

  As they imbibed still more champagne, they turned to the serious business of the society. Joshua rose to read aloud the letter he had written to Clarence Campbell, President of the National Hockey League:

  “Dear Sir, The undersigned represent a group of respectable businessmen, civil servants, professionals, and artists who convene once a year to celebrate the memory of that great political leader and statesman, William Lyon Mackenzie King –”

  “Gentlemen,” Seymour bellowed, raising his glass, “I give you Mackenzie King.”

  Everybody at the table stood up and raised his glass.

  “– We are not a political group, but come from all parties –”

  “Except the Communist Party, it goes without saying, Comrades.”

  “Hear! Hear!”

  “– and we have only one motive: patriotism.”

  “Gut gezukt.”

  “Each year, in order better to perpetuate the late great one’s memory, we try to come up with a suitable trophy or award. One year it was a dog show prize (see enclosed advertisement from Dogs in Canada) for the hound that best personified Pat II’s godliness and bore the most striking resemblance to Mr. King’s beloved mum, Isabel Grace Mackenzie. Another year, honoring yet another deeply felt interest of the late great one, it was the Mackenzie King Memorial Hooker Award, offered to two prostitutes – one English- and one French-speaking, each award worth $500 – for bringing the most intense religious fervor to their work. This year,” Joshua continued, “we intend to dig deeper into our collective pockets. We take great pleasure in offering the National Hockey League a trophy, sweetened, as it were, by a purse of $1,000: The William Lyon Mackenzie King Memorial Trophy.”

  Everybody thumped the table, and yet another toast was proposed to the late great one.

  “This trophy, to be presented at the end of each season, would go to the player who, in his efforts on ice, most exemplified the undying spirit of Mackenzie King.

  “Obviously, the player we have in mind would not be a high scorer, a natural star, but rather a plodder who overcomes with effort and cunning a conspicuous lack of talent, intelligence, or grace. In the nature of things, he would have to be a player who has been in the league for at least ten years, unnoticed, unheralded, but persevering. The fellow we have in mind spears when the referee has his back turned, trips an opposing player if he can get away with it, but unfailingly backs down from a fight. Preferably, he would be a man who respects his mother even more than the coach, and has a firm faith in the world-to-come. If he is on the ice when a goal is scored for his side, he argues for an assist on the play. If he is on the ice when a goal is scored by the opposition, he promptly disowns responsibility. Above all, he is a vengeful winner and a sore loser. He has no close relationships with any of his teammates. Loyalty is unknown to him. Forced into a quick decision on ice, in the heat of play, he neither opts for the possibly inspired but risky choice nor stands tall and resolute on the blue line. He avoids making any decision whatsoever, heading for the safety of the bench. All the same, when many a more talented player has retired, legs gone, or has been removed from the fray in his prime through injury, our Mackenzie King Memorial Trophy winner will still be out there skating. Skating away from trouble. Persevering.

  “Your Canadianism undoubted, your patriotism proven in two world wars, we hope, Mr. Campbell, that you will give this award every serious consideration. Should more information be required, or a meeting be considered advisable, we are, sir, at your service. Respectfully, Joshua Shapiro, Secretary, The Mackenzie King Memorial Society.”

  The letter was resoundingly applauded and approved, and Seymour Kaplan moved that it be mailed to Mr. Campbell at once.

  Then a candidate was proposed for a Mackenzie King Memorial Award, one of the many statuettes of the late great one and Pat II which had been made for them by Henry Birks: Lester B. Pearson, the head of External Affairs.

  Max Birenbaum made the case for Mr. Pearson. “In a recent interview,” he said, “Mr. Pearson was asked if after all his years as a diplomat, and head of external affairs, he had anything to be ashamed of. His reply was at once filled with candor and quintessentially Canadian. Yes, he said, I have certainly done some things I later regretted. I cheated in geography class when I was in grade six or seven, I think, and I’ve never forgotten it.”

  The award was approved without a dissenting vote.

  Following dinner, chaos. Against a background of records by Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and the rest, they began to reminisce about the old days at FFHS. Strappings were reenacted, basketball games played again. Petting sessions with Bessie Orbach were savored once more. Mickey Stein won the yo-yo contest yet again, walking the dog, going round the world, and eating spaghetti without faltering, scooping up a well-deserved pot of $200. Then they split into two sides and, taking an empty bottle of Mumm’s for a puck, started to replay the Stanley Cup Final of 1947, which led to an expression of displeasure by the management of the Chateau. The house detective paid them a visit. “Now, come on,” he said, “you’re all grown-up men here.”

  “Don’t judge us too harshly,” Joshua replied.

  Saner voices mollified the house detective. They promised to be good and adjourn within the hour. And then somebody, fortunately, remembered the birthday cake, thirty candles for AI Roth, the third of their number to reach such a debilitating age.

  Al blew out the candles. And then, tea
rs welling in his eyes, proclaimed, “You’re the best fucking bunch of guys anybody could have ever been to school with, and if any of you come to Toronto on a visit, you’re staying at my place. No hotels. I won’t hear of it.”

  Eli Seligson cornered Joshua again. “There’s something I want to tell you,” he said, swaying.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I never liked you.”

  Finally, inevitably, Joshua called for silence and went to the record player and put on his cherished album of songs by the men of the International Brigades, ending with “Los Quatro Generales.” They raised their glasses one more time, drinking a solemn toast to the men who had died in Spain. Those who had clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurched through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel. They who had walked the passes, come to present their lives.

  4

  AFTER WEEKS OF CAROUSING ON IBIZA, TAKING IN THE cockfights with Juanito and his cronies, staggering out of Rosita’s at dawn, Joshua certainly couldn’t claim to be paddling his own canoe through the storms of temptation. There was simply no stroke, stroke, stroke. The truth was, he had to admit, he was not so much interested in writing as in being a writer. Somebody well known. But his twenty-first birthday had come and gone and he was not yet famous. He not only embraced unclean women, but gorged himself on forbidden foods: gambas, calamares, spider crab. Only eight years after his bar-mitzvah, whorehouse orgies.

  Gehenna beckoned.

  But to be fair to himself, his bar-mitzvah, he recalled, had not exactly got him off to an auspicious start if he was meant to mature into an observant Jew.

  “Don’t worry, kiddo,” his mother had said. “You’re going to have a party. Oh boy, are you ever going to have a party!”

  In the morning, she had actually roused herself to make him breakfast and, charged with enthusiasm, she said, “Make me a list.”