Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  “But you could have, honestly, if only you’d stayed on for another fifteen minutes.”

  “Kevin, are you lying again?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve lied so often,” she said wearily.

  “I’m not lying about this. You’ve just got to help me, Trout.”

  “And what if I can’t?”

  “But you’ve never let me down before.”

  “I’m not going to let him down. Don’t you understand?”

  “No,” he said, baffled. “I don’t.”

  “Well then, let me explain something to you. We’ve been married for eighteen years now. He has his bad days and I have mine. We don’t wake up every morning bursting into song. But we’re perverse. No matter what, he doesn’t lie to me, I don’t lie to him. And now you’ve already involved me in a lie, if only by my omission.”

  “Come on now. Stretching the truth a little on my behalf can hardly do him any harm.”

  “I can’t seem to make you understand.”

  “If I’m put away, it could kill Daddy.”

  “Oh, that’s cheap. Really unforgivable. You don’t give a shit about him.”

  “Unlike your husband. They get on famously, I understand.”

  “Why couldn’t you think about Daddy before you started your fiddling?”

  “I have not been fiddling.”

  “If you only knew how much I wished I knew if you were telling the truth.”

  “I know Joshua’s never had our advantages,” he said, “but that’s no reason for him to be so prejudiced against me.”

  “Oh, what do you know about Joshua? When you were practicing your tennis stroke, he was sitting up in some squalid room on Dorchester Boulevard, teaching himself to become a journalist.”

  “I’m told his father is an errand boy for the Mafia.”

  “Reuben?” she asked, startled.

  “Yes.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly picked up their idiom, haven’t you?”

  “You’re such a fool, Kevin.”

  “You seem to get on well enough now, but you know and I know that you married Joshua hoping to shock everybody.”

  “Did Jane tell you that?”

  “I do some of my own thinking.”

  “Well, that would be a change. Now let me tell you something. He’s not only my husband, but I love him. We have three children. A life. I’m not putting it at risk to save your skin when I don’t even know if you’re lying again.”

  “I’m not lying. I am also counting on your testimony.”

  “On my lying for you, you mean?”

  “I’m not going to prison, Trout, no matter what.”

  “I certainly hope not.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  4

  SIDNEY ALEXANDER MURDOCH, WHO WOULD HAVE BEEN forty-nine years old in May, was cremated in Golders Green in the presence of his two wives, several mistresses, and six children. There was also a surprising number of literary people at the crematorium. A few were really old friends and had come to mourn. But still more were either clients of Margaret’s or had obviously turned up because they grasped that certain important publishers and critics were bound to be there, and maybe even a Daily Express photographer. The obituary in the Times had been flattering, setting out how Murdoch, the son of a Bradford newsagent, a council school boy, had won a double first at King’s College, Cambridge, and gone on from there to a certain literary eminence.

  Following the cremation, some of them adjourned to Margarèt’s. house in NW3, where Joshua got drunk as quickly as possible. Margaret was gray-haired now, lumpy, her figure considerably thickened. Once, Joshua recalled, four-year-old Ralph had stumbled on them pawing each other in the Kentish Town kitchen. Good grief, he had thought, chilled, I’m his Ed Ryan. He told Margaret that he was bound for Spain, on a commission from his American publishers, to write an introduction for a new edition of The Volunteers, and she assured him that she could easily arrange for another British edition as well. He had caught up with Margaret in her enormous kitchen, complete with red Aga cooker, butcher’s block, and intimidating row of Sabatier knives, and he reminded her of the Mandrake Club and how he and Murdoch had used to wait for her to turn up on Friday afternoons with her weekly paycheck, less than eight pounds after taxes. This set them to listing other regulars at the Mandrake, older than they were, who had preceded Murdoch to the grave. Dylan, John Davenport, and the difficult, unappreciated Julian Maclaren-Ross.

  Overhearing them, a snowy-haired man asked, “And whatever became of Tambimutto?”

  “Or Ruthven Todd,” somebody else recalled.

  “Who was he?” a writer, much younger than they were, asked.

  Joshua retreated to a corner of the kitchen, wondering if a future generation of Cambridge snots, riffling David’s bookstall, would stumble on an early edition of one of Murdoch’s novels, the reviewers’ quotes on the faded jacket dazzling. “Not to be missed.” “Brilliant.” “A minor masterpiece.”

  It’s a mug’s game.

  Yes, he thought, and then, grinning foolishly, he recalled the evening he had barged in on Murdoch trying to instantly age that young writer’s manuscript, hoping to pass it off as his own and sell it to the University of Texas.

  “Wait. Hold it. I think I’ve got a better idea,” Joshua had said, beaming at Murdoch with drunken benevolence. “You and I, Sidney, might just be able to earn a tidy sum in the great state of Texas if you were willing to engage in a vile, salacious homosexual correspondence with me. Sickeningly explicit.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “We could backdate the stuff to Cambridge.”

  Murdoch had splashed more cognac into both their glasses. “Sidney Murdoch’s period of poovery, hitherto unsuspected.… Ah, Murdoch,” he sang out, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Yes. Good. Excellent. It could bring in a small fortune. Of course, you realize that I am famous while you are merely well known, and only in Staggers and Naggers circles at that. So you would have to agree to a sixty-forty split in my favor. What do you say?”

  Joshua had agreed at once and, in the weeks that followed, they had both avoided real work, exchanging letters that outdid each other in slander and depravity, not only involving themselves, a love that dared not speak its name, but also literary enemies, old friends they took for prigs, and family pets. Recalling some of the more outrageous passages in a correspondence long since – Joshua assumed – destroyed, he laughed out loud.

  My, my.

  Ralph, who was lecturing at Cambridge, had come down for the service, his long hair gathered in a pigtail, wearing a Superman T-shirt, the badge riding his breast proclaiming “TRY INCEST / The Game the Entire Family Can Play.” “I want to speak to you about his papers,” he said.

  “What about them?”

  “Didn’t you sell yours to some provincial Canadian university for a lot of bread?”

  “Yes. Rocky Mountain U. But I’m afraid they’re so provincial they’re mostly interested in Canadian papers.”

  “But he was really famous in his time.”

  “Look,” Joshua said angrily, “the man to try there is a Dr. Colin Fraser. Oh, and Ralph …”

  “Yes?”

  “I think you’re full of shit.”

  The next day Joshua wandered through Soho, visiting the pubs he and Pauline used to frequent while they were waiting for her divorce from Colin to come through. “What I can’t understand,” she had said, “is why he is being so cooperative.”

  “He thinks I’m a comrade,” Joshua had replied, his mood light, “and he’d never do one of us in.”

  “I wonder.”

  He phoned Pauline at eleven, six o’clock their time, so that he could speak to the children as well.

  “They’ve taken away Kevin’s passport,” she said. “Jack’s telling everyone he’s sure there’s been no deliberate wrongdoing, just some bad luck with certain investments that would
have righted themselves in time, and he is absolutely confident that Kevin will be able to explain everything. He believes in him, he says.”

  “It’s not necessary to like Jack,” he reminded her, “to believe that he’s telling the truth.” Like that sewer rat Nixon, he added to himself, remembering, rather than the gentlemanly Hiss.

  “He’s lying.”

  “Have you spoken to your father?”

  “He’s no more help than you are. He always said Kevin was no good.”

  No sooner did he hang up than Joshua began to feel melancholy. Lonely. And then, looking up the number of an old Fleet Street chum, he suddenly grasped that he couldn’t make out the dancing names in the telephone book unless he held the page a good distance away from his eyes. Now I’m going to need reading glasses, he thought.

  Wandering down Carlisle Street, he was reminded of those long afternoons that had used to unwind in the Partisan Coffee Bar and of the silly left-wing attitudes they had cherished at the time. Jesus, when he looked back on himself at any age, Joshua then rather than now, it seemed he had always been such a horse’s ass. O.K., he was willing to accept that, given his present unquestioned wisdom. But didn’t it mean that if he ever reached sixty, he would take himself to have been just as much of an oaf in his late forties? Yes? No? He had no answers.

  The next morning he was in Madrid, back after rather more than a quarter of a century. In 1952, cars had been rare in Madrid, but the mountain air bracingly pure. Now the industrial smog didn’t burn off until 10 a.m., and the streets stank of diesel fuel at all hours. In Madrid, in 1952, children of Teddy’s age had fought each other to shine Joshua’s shoes for a nickel. They had begged for pennies or cigarettes, their facial skin broken with running sores. Sipping cognac on the Gran Via, more than twenty-five years later, he was no longer badgered by shoeshine boys, but he couldn’t help noticing the preponderance of amputees out working the street. Soldiers of the Ebro, defenders of the University City. Now aged men, leathery-skinned, hands hard as bark, missing an arm or a leg. Corner cigarette vendors, lottery ticket sellers. “Para hoy! Para hoy!”

  Seated on the terrace of a stylish café, Joshua remembered the stacks of Life his father had kept in the den. Going through them one by one, razoring out anything that had to do with the Spanish Civil War. Once Madrid had come to mean no less than la tomba del fascismo to him, ¡No Pasarán!, and the cry of La Pasionaria, “Vale más morir de pies que vivir de rodillas,” but that night he was to dine at the expensive Casa Botin, a few steps down from the Plaza Mayor, on Calle Cuchilleros. In 1924, the restaurant had been much favored by the young Ernest Hemingway; now the multinational corporation men had come. At the table next to Joshua’s a slender American in a charcoal-gray suit made notes even as he drank. His gold-plated ballpoint, a Cross; his leatherbound diary, a Gucci. “I’m a team player,” he said feelingly. “I don’t know if they appreciate that at home.”

  His companion, unattentive, frowned at his menu. “How do you say ‘without garlic’?”

  Joshua’s companion, Paco, was a member of the central committee of the no-longer-illegal Spanish Communist Party. Paco had been to prison, once for two-and-a-half years, another time for a six-month stay. He had been beaten up in a number of police stations and had the scars to prove it. “In the old days,” he said, “when you signed a statement, the important thing was to leave absolutely no room for additions between the final sentence and your signature, but now …” He shrugged.

  Now, Joshua thought, hardly anything means what it used to.

  In 1936, the Archbishop of Toledo had been able to hail Franco as a modern crusader and bless the nationalist rebels who would crush “the modern monster, Marxism, or Communism, the seven-headed hydra, symbol of all heresies.” To be fair, in those days the Reds they had celebrated on St. Urbain Street had indeed been hell-raisers, potential church-burners, dedicated to establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat by whatever means available. These enlightened days, however, there were Catholic priests petitioning for the right to marry and commissars who didn’t purge the ideologically impure on Sundays. Rabbis, who once gave you a clap on the ear if you sat down to eat without pronouncing the prescribed blessing, now wrote books telling you everything you wanted to know about cunnilingus, assuring the faithful that having consulted Rabbi Akiba, taking Maimonides into consideration, they found it no violation of the dietary laws to eat your wife even though she didn’t have cloven hooves. I’m O.K., you’re O.K. Abortion, once a disgrace, would now appear to be every embryo’s birthright. Furthermore, as Germaine Greer had ordained, any sister unwilling to drink her own menstrual blood, though not necessarily with the fish course, had yet to be truly liberated. Our consciousness, Joshua thought, continues to be raised.

  Comrade Paco took Playboy. He drove a Seat, the Spanish-assembled Fiat. He was thirty-eight, already bald, with horn-rimmed glasses, a smile calculated to please, a conservative suit. A reasonable man, Paco hankered not so much for a dictatorship of the proletariat as just a little more democracy at home. A soupçon. “Did you know,” he asked, “that two members of our central committee are priests?” Last year, he added, he had been invited to the United States to address a reunion of survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. “When I told them about the priests, they were astonished. We owe these men a good deal, but they are sadly out of touch. I met Teddy Kennedy. Do you know him?”

  “Yes. Certainly. As a matter of fact, when I told him I was coming to Spain, he asked me to give you his regards.”

  “Are you teasing me?” Paco asked, palpitating.

  “And why would I do a thing like that, Comrade?”

  Still working on his research, Joshua went to lunch the next day with the elegant Antonio, a former Foreign Office official in the government of cautious old men that had ruled through Franco’s last illness and the immediate post-Franco period. They ate in the opulent Club 31, hard by the Alcala Arch and surrounded by haute couture salons. The sweetly perfumed, bejeweled lady at the table next to theirs wore a silver lamé dress. A Piaget wristwatch. Her handbag was made of baby crocodile.

  “Is it correct to say,” Joshua asked, “that there are now all of two hundred and forty political parties in Spain?”

  “That,” he said, his smile rueful, “is only counting coalitions.”

  He wouldn’t be able to write the new introduction, he no longer gave a damn. Not only Spain had changed in twenty-five years, but so have I.

  Ah, but possibly not Ibiza, he thought, ensconced in his rented car, starting south.

  Tooling down the Nationale IV, heading uneasily toward Ibiza, Ibiza at last, Joshua imagined Juanito and himself taking off on a drunk of heroic proportions. Unless, he thought, his mood darkening, Juanito did not remember him. Or, still worse, remembering, might not cherish the relationship as he had come to over the years. No, that was impossible. There would be a memorable reunion. Yes, yes, Shapiro, gather ye epiphanies while ye may. He would find the Freibergs, who would absolve him of all wrongdoing. He would confront Mueller. Mueller, who must be sixty-five years old now, maybe a couple of years more, and me – O Jesus – older than he was then.

  Joshua made his first overnight stop at a parador in Arruzafa, a hilltop commanding the heights over Cordoba and a sweeping view of the Guadalquivir Valley. A Spanish paradox: although his balcony overlooked an orange grove, the trees laden with plump ripe fruit, Joshua was served tinned orange juice for breakfast, freshly squeezed being unavailable. On second thought, however, it did not seem so utterly Spanish to him, or even a paradox, but just a conceit of the poor who had belatedly come into funds.

  Like Uncle Oscar.

  Poor Oscar, who had once intruded on his contemplation of Franco’s picture in Life, had now lived long enough to see all his dreams of riches collapse. He was reduced to driving a taxi these days, and Joshua never hailed one on the streets of Montreal without fearing that he might have unwittingly hired his uncle as chauffeur. And yet Oscar, sa
gacious Oscar, had been the first Shapiro to quit St. Urbain for the pleasures of tree-lined Outremont. From cold-water flat to apartment – a real apartment, with a shower! A shower Joshua was invited to gawk at, if not allowed to use. Furthermore, such had been Uncle Oscar’s brief postwar affluence that he could actually afford to serve his children tinned fruit in summer. But it took more than that to impress Esty Blossom. “He’s only showing off,” she said.

  Joshua had last heard from Uncle Oscar only a couple of days before he had flown to London. He had phoned, typically, at 1 a.m.

  “Motorized suitcases!”

  “What’s that?”

  “Look here, Dimwit, you’ve seen the toy cars kids run by remote control. Teddy must have one. Well, why not suitcases? It would eliminate schlepping at airports and train stations.”

  “And what if there’s a power failure?”

  “Prick. You carry your own battery pack.”

  “Or what if you run down another suitcase or maybe even a cripple in the terminal?”

  “You’d carry motorized suitcase insurance.”

  “I don’t know, Uncle Oscar, I just don’t know.”

  “If I had phoned you a year ago and said ‘Pet rocks,’ you would’ve called me crazy. You know what that guy is worth now? MILLIONS!”

  From Cordoba, Joshua continued on to Seville. From there to Granada. His sense of unease growing, a palpable presence, the closer he got to Ibiza. What in the hell’s wrong with you, he thought. Once you enjoyed travel beyond almost anything. Shapiro on the road alone, out there adventuring. Or Shapiro and Peabody bouncing through the Alpes-Maritimes in the old deux-chevaux. But now – and how it infuriated him – the road filled him with fear and apprehension. He could have a heart attack in his hotel room. Or his car might crash. And what – oh my God, no – if he were never to see Pauline or the children or his father again, so many things left unsaid? Two a.m. in his hotel room, 9 p.m. at home. He put through a call to Montreal, but he was told there would be a two-hour delay. O.K., calm down. But in the morning the first thing he did was check out his tires and then his brakes before hitting the road again, his hands clammy.