Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  “Of what?”

  “The boys you want for your party.”

  “Forget it,” he said.

  “I’m going to be a good mother from now on, Josh. No more fucking with Ryan.” And then, looking at him quizzically, she added, “Something tells me it upsets you.”

  “I don’t want a party.”

  “Why not?”

  “What would we do?”

  “Well, we won’t play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey or parcheesi. It’s going to be a surprise.”

  When he came home from school he found his mother on her knees, scrubbing the floors. The beds had been made, the dishes washed. The garbage was ready to be carted out. “You have an appointment with Mandelcorn for six o’clock. He’s going to teach you all the mumbo-jumbo you need for the synagogue. If he asks if we eat kosher here, you say yes,” and once more she demanded a list of boys.

  A week before his bar-mitzvah she decorated the hall with crepe paper and Chinese lanterns. Streamers ran from wall to wall in the living room. Balloons hung from every light fixture.

  Gifts began to arrive. Uncle Harvey sent phylacteries, a silver wine goblet, and $25 in war savings certificates. Euclid delivered Ed Ryan’s peace offering – a sharkskin windbreaker, THE CHAMP embossed on the back, the pockets stuffed with silver dollars. Colucci sent books: a biography of Marconi, an illustrated history of the Jewish people, and a collection of Winston Churchill’s speeches. There was also a case of V.O. in a box tied with a ribbon.

  Saturday morning, in the synagogue, Joshua stumbled through the blessings he was obliged to pronounce, older members of the congregation shaking their heads, amazed that anyone, even a gangster’s boy, could be so ignorant. And what about the mother? A Leventhal girl. Her eyelashes false, her cheeks rouged. Reeking of perfume.

  No sooner did they get home than his mother wiggled out of her dress, buttoned on a housecoat, and, consulting her newly acquired cookbook, set to work in the kitchen. Louis Armstrong belted out “The Saints Go Marching In” as her marble cake was mixed and then slapped into the oven. She poured what looked like a half-bottle of kirsch into her fruit salad. Onions flew in all directions as, bolstered with Dewar’s, she started in on the chopped liver. Meatballs, varying a good deal in size, were pitched into a pan and then stacked on a platter like cannonballs. Her sponge cake failed to rise, her cheese pie obstinately refused to set. Boiled chicken pieces, churning in fat, bounced back from her probing fork again and again. Burnt edges had to be scraped off her chocolate chip cookies.

  Of the twenty boys Joshua had invited to his party the following afternoon, only twelve turned up – the others, he gathered, having been forbidden to attend. Seymour Kaplan was there, of course, so were Morty Zipper, Mickey Stein, Bernie Zucker, Bobby Gross, Max Birenbaum, Yossel Kugelman, his cousin Sheldon, and, to his surprise, Eli Seligson and Izzy Singer. They were all combed and shined, wearing their High Holiday suits, but Joshua could see at once that they were ill at ease. Most of them did not know what to expect. Neither did Joshua, decidedly apprehensive, as his mother had been into the Dewar’s again since shortly after breakfast, her mood menacingly cheerful.

  The boys had been gathered in the living room for only half an hour, increasingly fidgety, when it became obvious to them that there was not going to be a movie or whatever. In fact, it seemed like there was going to be absolutely nothing to do.

  “Who would like to play Information, Please?” his mother called out cheerily.

  Groans and moans.

  “What about sardines?”

  “Hey, we’re not kids any more,” Mickey admonished her.

  “Good. That’s what I thought. All right, Josh. Draw the blinds.”

  Oh boy, a movie after all.

  But Joshua knew different, because she was already screwing in the red light bulb that throbbed on and off.

  “Maw, you can’t.”

  “That’s what they said to the Wright Brothers.”

  “They wouldn’t understand.”

  “Shettup and put on the record.”

  “Maw, please.”

  “Do as I ask. Come on, Josh.”

  So he put on “Snake Hips.”

  “Now don’t anybody move,” his mother said, running off.

  The baffled boys sat on the floor, as instructed. Even as they were becoming restless, there was a rap on the door and Joshua started playing “Snake Hips” again. Then the door opened enough to allow a long black-stockinged leg ending in a spike-heeled shoe to come slithering through. It was withdrawn just as swiftly, as if bitten, making the startled boys wonder if it had been an apparition. Then it came creeping through again. The leg, seemingly disembodied, was now being caressed by a feathery pink fan. Higher, higher. The spike-heeled shoe slipped off to reveal toenails painted green. The leg rubbed longingly against the doorknob. It slid away, rose again. With maddening slowness the door opened to throbbing drums, a pulsating red light, and in glided Joshua’s mother, her eyes saying peekaboo behind feathery fans. Silver stars had been pasted to her legs. She wore a see-through scarlet blouse and a black skirt slit to her thighs.

  “I’ve got to go home,” Izzy Singer called out, petrified, diving for his coat and fleeing the house.

  “Snake Hips” started yet again and, with a wicked wink of a loosening false eyelash, Mrs. Shapiro turned her back to the boys. Hands on her knees, she gyrated her upturned ass at them. She straightened up, unzipping her skirt, wiggling out of it. Next she peeled off her blouse, letting it float to the floor. Then she whirled around to confront the boys in mock horror. Her ruby-red lips forming an enormous outraged O, arms folded saucily over her breasts, legs squeezed together. Frozen there, reduced to panties, belt, and stockings, she suddenly hissed at Joshua: “Now.”

  “What?”

  “Now, I said.”

  Remembering, Joshua slipped two fingers into his mouth to whistle, he stamped his feet, and the boys quickly followed suit.

  Now those wanton fans, with a will of their own, began to stroke her, allowing the briefest of peeks at the perkiest breasts on any mother on the street.

  Tears rolled down Eli Seligson’s cheeks. Sheldon was drenched in sweat. But the others simply squatted there, stunned, some with their mouths open, as, responding to the beat of the drums, she began to bump and grind to a finale.

  And, suddenly, the record was done. Mrs. Shapiro slipped into her housecoat, switched on the lights, lit a Pall Mall, retrieved her Dewar’s and a splash from a table, and sat down on a stool to chat with her audience. “Did you like it?” she asked.

  A flushed Seymour leaped up to applaud.

  “I’m turning pro, you know. I’m going to be playing at the Roxy here.”

  Holy shit, Joshua thought.

  “Now I want everybody who got a hard-on watching my act to be a good boy and put up his hand.”

  Seymour’s hand shot up.

  “Oh, come on, boys, I couldn’t have been that lousy.”

  Three more hands were raised, then two more.

  “Joshua doesn’t count, because I’m his mother and it wouldn’t be according to Hoyle.”

  5

  GOING TO BED WITHOUT PAULINE CURLED INTO HIM made him grieve, it was something he could not get used to. But he refused to take Valium or anything like that to encourage sleep. Instead he found that at least once a week there was nothing for it like a stiff J&B taken with his favorite CBC-TV public affairs program. Oh, what a solemn and hard-hitting bunch his rivals were out there in Toronto. Our moral guardians, unfailingly vigilant, who could be counted on for an hour of weekly outrage, fitting nicely into four fifteen-minute slots. Uncompromising they were in pursuit of garage mechanics who replaced perfectly good mufflers in your car. Or slickers who overcharged to inject plastic hairs that wouldn’t last into bald heads. Or language schools that made false promises to immigrants. If there were a deaf-mute being denied employment as a hospital nurse or a blind man, preferably Indian, being turned down for work in an airpor
t control tower, their fearless investigators ferreted out the perpetrators of such rank social injustice, no matter how powerful, and made it really hot for them. Some nights – vintage nights – they actually got to interview real Mafia hit men or dope smugglers, the backs of their heads to the camera, who claimed there were cops who took bribes.

  But tonight it was politics. American cultural domination of our tundra. Probing cameras caught out corner drugstores which displayed the latest Harold Robbins but no Canadian poets on their paperback racks; they zoomed in on schoolchildren, our kids, who knew who the Fonz was but had never heard of Mackenzie King. And, suddenly – hello, hello – there he was, Pauline’s first husband filling the screen, the wretched Colin Fraser. Colin, a fiery nationalist, had returned from London years ago to become curator of the rare Canadiana collection at Rocky Mountain University and, not being one to hold a personal grudge, he had paid Joshua $10,000 for the manuscript of The Volunteers, which was rather more than Joshua had earned in royalties during the first year of the book’s publication. And now Colin, fulminating on camera, revealed that innocent Canadian children were being taught geography from a text that included a photograph of an American rather than a home-bred dinosaur. This was more than loose talk, it could be backed up by hard fact. Colin held up the picture for everybody to see. Sneaky imperialist eyes, shrewd Yankee mouth.

  Joshua, heaving with laughter, was genuinely put off when the front doorbell rang, interrupting his enjoyment of Colin.

  “I just happened to be passing by,” McMaster said, “I saw your lights …”

  “I haven’t been able to read your manuscript yet. I’m sorry, Stu.”

  But he was already inside the door and Joshua found himself pouring drinks in the living room, wondering why McMaster was staring at his dressing gown. “Oh,” he groaned, remembering. “Don’t worry, honey. I’m wearing men’s underwear tonight. After all, it’s Wednesday, isn’t it?”

  McMaster coughed dryly. “Hey, this sofa is what I call a real antique. It must have set you back thousands. Where’d you find it?”

  “You’d have to ask Pauline.”

  McMaster was now admiring an end table. “Did she find this as well?”

  “At an auction.”

  “Good for her. Great investment. Hey, Seymour Kaplan, ah, you did say he was a buddy of yours. Right?”

  Right right.

  “Tell him if at his age he’s still got to neck with teenage shiksas, not to pick The Lookout. There’s lots of chemicals changing hands among the children of The Chosen there, and we’re watching it.”

  “Stu, has it ever occurred to you that you might be an anti-Semite?”

  “Sweet Jesus, no. Hell, you’re looking at the friendly neighborhood police officer who has been put in charge of finding the demon housebreaker of Westmount, which makes me a protector of your people, kind of.”

  “Oh, really. Why?”

  “Because so far he has only hit kosher houses.”

  “Obviously,” Joshua said, nudging him, “he knows in which houses gold bars are most likely to be buried between the floorboards.”

  “You said it, not me. But this kook marches to a different drummer. He never takes anything.”

  “Maybe he’s some kind of psycho.”

  “Maybe,” McMaster said, deftly changing the subject, only to start in on Quebec again. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd,” he said, “that when you hear all the solutions being offered, the most obvious one has yet to be mentioned?”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Civil war.”

  St. Denis Street was the city’s dividing line.

  East of St. Denis, where most of the French Canadians were rooted, euphoria had reigned ever since the Parti Québécois had come to power on November 15, 1976. As far as that party’s young activists were concerned, the reconquest had begun and now it would be the turn of the English-speaking to make bricks out of straw. But in the West End, where the English-speaking had ruled with impunity for years, each day’s news was more disheartening than the last. Joshua salvaged some joy out of imagining the terrified burghers of Upper Westmount waking each morning to read in the Gazette that yet another company’s head office had done a midnight flit, its spokesman saying, “The move of our head office to Toronto has been on the drawing board for years and has nothing to do with the present political atmosphere in Quebec.”

  Aglow with ill will, Joshua sought out Pinsky on Summit Circle. “Well, Irving, just in case you didn’t know, the value of your house has dropped twenty percent. So far.”

  Pinsky’s Russian wolfhound lifted a leg, but daintily, in deference to his master, to pee against a fire hydrant.

  “And what about yours?” he asked heavily.

  “Down there? Below the hill? What’s a house worth in the best of times? Bupkas. Besides, it’s mortgaged to the hilt and, if you ask me, René Lévesque’s not such a bad fellow.”

  “Ha. I’ll remind you of that a month from now when you’re still scraping the shit off your face. Take it from me, French Canadians are all alike. Lazy, stupid, corrupt, self-pitying, and, oh yes, bigoted, each one an anti-Semite,” and he went on to enumerate a list of old schoolmates who were packing or had already departed.

  Joshua had been away, out in California, the night the PQ had swept into office. On his return to town, Max Birenbaum explained, “After the election results came in, you could see Lévesque’s followers on TV, in the Paul Sauvé Arena, out of their skulls with joy, and I swear there were old Jews so scared they moved their furniture against the door. The next morning you had to wait in line to get into your safety deposit box. People were removing the goodies and driving to Cornwall or Plattsburgh with them.”

  Max, now that he had married again, was in no position to remove most of his goodies. His newly acquired goodies. The ineffable Tanya, his embarrassing bride, had bought them a new house and turned it into a showplace, featured in Shaar Hashomayim’s annual “Open House” tour. Pauline, feigning interest, had sweet-talked a copy of the listing out of Tanya, passing it to Joshua: “On turning the corner of Upper Belmont, on to Sunnyside, you see and practically fall upon the stunning stone home with the breath-taking Tudor style façade, a reminder of a past age, and you may imagine as you enter, that beyond the large entrance, you will see the Knights of the Round Table, a large dining table near a great hearth and unique antique pieces.”

  At an anniversary dinner party in Max Birenbaum’s mansion, a year to the night after the PQ’s astonishing electoral victory, everybody was still in a turmoil. The rats, who had made contingency plans long ago, had been fully expected to desert the sinking ship; but, come 1977, even the mice had begun to scrabble after, making for Ontari-ari-ario or Florida. So there were uneasy jokes at the table about the coming referendum and the utter looniness of an independent Quebec. Tranquil Canada dismembered. Yes, yes, Barbara said, plump cheeks glowing, maybe so, certainly we have been made to feel insecure, but how exciting it must be to be young and French Canadian right now.

  Thirty years earlier, on their third date, Joshua had managed to unsnap Barbara’s brassiere on a bench in Outremont Park. He was the first, she had assured him. Now, after her mastectomy, she counseled others in the hospital, a volunteer worker.

  O Barbara Barbara.

  Seymour wakened from a cognac-inspired reverie all his own to startle the company by saying with immense feeling, “I wish I had been old enough to fight in the Spanish Civil War.”

  Portly, moon-faced Seymour was in knitwear, his father’s business. Countering the bewildered looks around the table, he said slowly, “Like my friend the so-called writer here, I wanted to fight on the Ebro.”

  Even as the rest of them continued to argue heatedly about Quebec, inconsolable Seymour, sodden Seymour, well into another snifter of cognac, interrupted again. “I wanted to fight on the Ebro. Come back with a wound, maybe. Nothing serious. I mean, not like Jake Barnes. But enough so that people would point me out even
now. Sure he’s in knitwear, but you know that limp, he got it in Spain. Do you understand?”

  Joshua not only understood, he also grasped why Seymour was drinking so heavily.

  Poor Seymour, who had never got to fight in Spain, was in deep trouble. Not over a KLM stewardess this time, but because of his indiscretion with Engel’s wife, while Engel lay in a hospital bed, trying to pass a kidney stone.

  “Engel’s wife,” Joshua had protested when he first heard, “I mean, how could you even be tempted by that –”

  “You don’t understand. You’re not into sex like me. I climbed her because she was there. Like Everest.”

  Seymour, a compulsive philanderer, was totally unselective. His mouth full, squirting pickle juice, he ran his hand up the legs of mountainous waitresses in delicatessens, making them quake with laughter and feel good. Disembarking from the morning train to Ottawa, joining the breathless dash to the taxi stand, he had already picked out, en route, the good bet he would invite to share his ride to the Chateau Laurier. Seymour subscribed to a phone call club in Chicago. For fifty dollars a year, he was able to call a toll-free station and was given the numbers of ladies eager to receive obscene phone calls. He no sooner unfastened his seat belt on the Eastern flight to New York than he was at the rear of the airplane, whispering indecencies into the stewardess’s ear, making her flush with pleasure. He bantered with long-distance operators and kept a poste restante box in a downtown Post Office. On steamy nights, he parked at the Westmount Lookout and necked with buyers’ secretaries from Eaton’s, the Bay, and even Miracle Mart. Motel desk clerks in the Laurentians, the Adirondacks, and Cape Cod, accustomed to having Seymour register with any number of “Mrs. Kaplans,” shook their heads in admiration as he moseyed up to the desk with yet another moistening wife in tow. His mother’s widowed friends suffered palpitations, they melted in his arms, when he deigned to visit. If his fifteen-year-old daughter brought home classmates after school to listen to acid rock records in the furnished basement, Seymour flung his copy of Hustler aside, scooted downstairs, and taught them how to do the boogie-woogie. He had membership cards for all the most modish discos.