Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Nobody had seen Mr. Bernard speak to his brother for years. Ever since Mr. Morrie, prodded by his wife, had dared to go to Mr. Bernard’s office to plead Barney’s case.

  “I appreciate that eventually it’s got to be Lionel who sits in your chair,” Mr. Morrie said.

  “Don’t count Nathan out yet.”

  “Or Nathan.”

  “What are you talking, Nathan? That boy’s a washout. The things that come out of your mouth. Christ.”

  “But what harm would it do for Barney to be a vice-president?”

  “I’m not putting a rat in place to scheme against my sons once I’m gone.”

  “He won’t scheme. He means good.”

  “That boy was once bitten by a bug called ambition and now he’s infected from head to toe.”

  “Bernie, I beg you on bended knees. He’s my only son.”

  “You want more, make more. I did.”

  “I never even told him I signed those papers years ago.”

  “Listen, why don’t you go back to your office and do a crossword. I could finish it in half the time it takes you. Or go pull your petzel, you’ll only need two fingers for the job, I’ve seen it, and that should keep you busy until it’s time to go home to that yenta you married like a damn fool.”

  “Bernie, please. What do I say to him?”

  “Out of here before I lose my temper.”

  Also joining Mr. Bernard for lunch were the still-fetching Miss O’Brien, his secretary of twenty-five years, and Harvey Schwartz.

  Freckled and pink and plump Harvey was, inordinately vain about his full head of curly ginger hair, even though Becky was fond of announcing at dinner parties that baldness was a sure sign of virility. A short man, but still some two compromising inches taller than Mr. Bernard, Harvey wore shoes especially made for him with paper-thin heels. Only forty-three years old, he also affected a septuagenarian’s stoop, his knees slightly bent.

  M. Delorme, the chef, offered steamed Dover sole and boiled new potatoes for lunch. Mr. Morrie, as was the rule, was served the smallest portion last. Somewhat taller than Mr. Bernard, a full five foot five, the Chippendale chair Mr. Morrie was obliged to sit on differed from the others at the table. Two inches had been shaved off the legs.

  “Harvey,” Mr. Bernard said, his manner menacingly sweet, “I’m sorry I kicked you in the elevator. I apologize.”

  “I know you didn’t mean it, Mr. Bernard.”

  “Fetch me the Wall Street Journal,” Mr. Bernard said, nudging Miss O’Brien under the table. “I left it on my desk.”

  No sooner did Harvey limp out of the dining room than Mr. Bernard fell on the salt shaker, trailing it over Harvey’s fish again and again, shaking vigorously.

  “Naughty, naughty, Mr. B.”

  “He’s not allowed. He’s worried about his heart. Watch.”

  Harvey returned with the Journal, and Mr. Bernard, all but bouncing with glee as he pretended to be absorbed in the market pages, watched him gag on the first bite. “Anything wrong?”

  Harvey shook his head no, no, reaching for the Vichy water.

  “How’s your fish, Miss O.?”

  “Firm but tender.”

  “Eat, Harvey. Low fat. Brain food. Good for you. Eat every bite on your plate or M. Delorme will cry and you know what that does to his mascara.”

  After lunch, somewhat mollified but still restive, Mr. Bernard asked Miss O’Brien to bring him the logs for the Gursky jets. When he found the entry that he had foolishly hoped wouldn’t be there, he turned pale. He began to curse. And Solomon stood before him again, his eyes diamond-hard. “Bernie,” he had said, “you’re a snake, but not a complete fool, so I want to make something clear to you before I go. If you or any of your wretched children ever try to diddle Henry or Lucy out of their shares I’ll come back from the grave if necessary and you are finished. A dead man.”

  Shivering, sweaty, Mr. Bernard grabbed the nearest thing to hand, a Chinese jade paperweight, and pitched it against the door. Miss O’Brien came running. “Mr. B., if you want me, there is a button on your phone.”

  He snatched her hand and led her briskly into the billiards room. They shot a couple of games of snooker, Mr. Bernard sucking on a Popsicle between shots. Then, abruptly, he pulled Miss O’Brien to him, digging his head into her high firm bosom. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Do you?”

  “Ssssh,” she said, unbuttoning, unsnapping, stroking his head as he nuzzled there, sucking.

  Later, sinking into the chair behind his Chippendale mahogany desk with the cock-beaded drawers and carved gilt handles, a still apprehensive Mr. Bernard began to shuffle through a stack of birthday telegrams. They were from the prime minister, President Nixon, Golda, Kissinger, a brace of Rothschilds, merchant bankers of New York, London, and Paris, and other supplicants, creditors, and enemies. The shank of the afternoon, which passed uneventfully, only served to feed Mr. Bernard’s anxieties. He rang for Harvey. “I want you to tell reception that if any thick letters come for me, you know, parcel size, they’re to be opened by the goy downstairs, even if they are marked ‘private and confidential.’ Wait. Hold it. Especially if they are marked ‘private and confidential.’”

  IN THE EVENING there was a banquet in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, suitably bedecked for the occasion with Canadian, Québecois (this, in the name of prudence) and Israeli flags. Red roses, flown in from Grasse, festooned every table. There were oneounce bottles of perfume for the ladies, from a house recently acquired by Gursky, and slim gold cigarette lighters for the men, that were manufactured by yet another Gursky enterprise. Ice sculptures of Gursky-endowed university buildings and hospitals and museums and concert halls, set on side tables everywhere, testified to Mr. Bernard’s largesse.

  The centrepiece on each table was a papier-mâché doll of Mr. Bernard, wearing a glittering crown at a jaunty angle. King Bernard. The figure, mounted on a charger, held a lance, banners flowing from it. Each banner broadcast another accomplishment of Mr. Bernard: a directorship, a medal, an award, an honorary degree. Lionel Gursky announced, “If you will be kind enough to turn over your plates, you will find that one plate at each table has a crown stuck on its underside. Whoever has the crown has won the right to take home the figure of Mr. Bernard at their table.”

  Everybody, absolutely everybody, who counted in the monied, if not the larger, Jewish community was there. The ladies perfumed, their hair sculpted and lacquered, their eyes shadowed green or silvery, outsize rings riding their fingers; the ladies were breathlessly there, triumphantly there, glittering in gowns of écru silk façonné or shimmering cyclamen satin or purple chiffon, acquired and tactfully altered for them by the Holt Renfrew boutique. The men were harnessed in velvet dinner jackets, wine-coloured or midnight blue or murky green, buttoned punishingly tight; they wore ruffled shirts, edged in black, like condolence cards, ornate satin cummerbunds and twinkly buckled Gucci shoes.

  Their antidote for ungrateful children—unwanted polyps—was plaques, plaques and more plaques, which they awarded one another at testimonial dinners once, sometimes twice a month in this very ballroom. At ease in the Ritz-Carlton they took turns declaring each other governors of universities in Haifa or Jerusalem or Man of the Year for State of Israel Bonds. Their worthiness certified by hiring an after-dinner speaker to flatter them for a ten-thousand-dollar fee, the speaker coming out of New York, New York; either a former secretary of state, a TV star whose series hadn’t been renewed or a senator in need. But tonight wasn’t make-believe. This was the real thing. This, after all, was Mr. Bernard, their Mr. Bernard no matter how large his international importance, and they were there to bask in his aura. A pleasure immeasurably sweetened by the knowledge that some people whom they could mention by name if they wanted to, some cherished friends they would be sure to phone tomorrow if only to establish that they had been there, some so-called knackers had been excluded, adjudged unsuitable.

  Bliss.

  So now they applauded,
they cheered, they banged forks against wine glasses as tributes to the great man proliferated, and Mr. Bernard himself sat there inexplicably charged with unease, grinding his dentures.

  The Israeli ambassador, delivered from Ottawa in a Gursky jet, presented Mr. Bernard with a Bible, encased in a cover of hammered gold, the flyleaf signed by Golda. There was a bronze plaque testifying that even more forests paid for by Mr. Bernard had been planted in Israel. Zion, soon to be Gursky green from shore to shore. There was a medal from Bolivia, where Mr. Bernard had copper interests, but an OBE, ardently pursued for the occasion on Mr. Bernard’s instructions, had been denied him, just as he had failed in the past to procure a seat in the senate.

  One of Mr. Bernard’s most cherished charities was remembered: The Hospital of Hope, which cared for children with terminal diseases.

  An official of the Canadian Football League passed Mr. Bernard a ball, a memento of last year’s Grey Cup game, that had been autographed by all the players on the winning team, and then one of the team’s most celebrated players, a behemoth who peddled Crofter’s Best in the off-season, wheeled a paraplegic child to the head table. Mr. Bernard, visibly moved, presented the ball to the boy as well as a cheque for five hundred thousand dollars. Three hundred guests leaped to their feet and cheered. The boy, his speech rehearsed for days, began to jerk and twist, spittle flying from him. He gulped and

  began again, unavailingly. As he started in on a third attempt to speak, Mr. Bernard cut him off with an avuncular smile. “Who needs another speech,” he said. “It’s what’s in your heart that counts with me, little fellow.” And sotto voce, he told the player, “Wheel him out of here, for Christ’s sake. People are beginning to feel shitty.”

  And hungry too.

  Once dinner was done, the lights were dimmed for the ultimate surprise, the specially commissioned birthday film. Mr. Bernard, increasingly tense, his lower lip trembling, yanked out a handkerchief to hide his tears. And in his mind’s eye he saw Solomon jumping off that corral fence again, right into the flow of wild mustangs, only some of them green-broke. Follow me, Bernie, and I’ll buy you a beer.

  “Oh my sweetie-pie,” Libby said, patting his hand, “I’m so glad you’re enjoying yourself. The best is yet to come.”

  Ignoring her, Mr. Bernard turned on Lionel. “What were you doing in Yellowknife?” he demanded.

  “Somebody has to check out the oil-lease properties from time to time, don’t you think?”

  “There are no discos in Yellowknife. You went there to see Henry to try to buy his shares. Then you flew to London to try to sweet-talk Lucy out of hen.”

  “Vanessa and I took the jet to London to take in Wimbledon.”

  “It’s too late to lie. I know now. I know sure as I’m sitting here what you’ve been up to,” he said, and his cheeks bleeding red, he reached out to snatch Lionel’s hand, thrusting it into his mouth and biting down on his fingers as hard as he could. Lionel, groaning, finally wrenched his throbbing hand free, tucking it under his armpit … and the lights were extinguished and the film began.

  Jimmy Durante, one of Mr. Bernard’s favourite entertainers, stood before a concert piano, raised a glass of champagne to the old man, a Gursky brand, and then settled down to croak and play “Happy Birthday, Mr. Bernard” followed by a medley of his most famous ditties.

  The Schnozz’s impudent image yielded to that of the Chief Rabbi of Israel, who stood before the Wailing Wall and pronounced a blessing in Hebrew. His voice was soon superimposed over a montage of selected Gursky history, beginning with a shot of the sod hut on the prairie (now a museum, a Gursky shrine), the sod hut where Mr. Bernard had been born, and then dissolving to a shot of the first distillery, the St. Jerome distillery, Mr. Bernard and Mr. Morrie posing in the foreground, only the merry bright-eyed figure of the other brother, Solomon Gursky, air-brushed out of the picture, as it was out of all the others.

  Next Golda offered a tribute.

  Then Harvey Schwartz’s wife Becky was discovered in a golden kaftan seated at her Louis XIV bureau-plat of deal veneered with ebony and boulle marquetry. She turned to the audience, her smile demure, and began to read a tribute she had composed for the occasion, even as the camera tracked in on a prominently displayed copy of her book, a collection of columns about family life first published in the Canadian Jewish Review: Hugs, Pain, and Chocolate Chip Cookies.

  Jan Peerce proposed a toast to Mr. Bernard and then sang “The Bluebird of Happiness.”

  Zero Mostel raised a laugh extolling the virtues of Gursky blends, even as he staggered about a stage feigning drunkenness, singing, “If I Were a Rich Man”.

  A harpist played the theme song from Love Story as Mr. Bernard and Libby were seen strolling hand-in-hand through the streets of Old Jerusalem. The famous star of many a biblical blockbuster sat in the garden of his Coldwater Canyon home and recited Mr. Bernard’s favourite stanzas from Longfellow.

  Then there was a slow dissolve to the wine-dark sea. The custombuilt one-hundred-and-ten-foot-long Gursky yacht was seen cruising the Greek isles as a voice that sounded like Ben Cartwright’s began to recite:

  The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,

  Burn’d on the water. The poop was beaten gold;

  Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

  The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,

  Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

  The water which they beat to follow faster,

  As amorous of their strokes.

  The camera eye tracked past a snoozing Mr. Bernard to reveal a sixty-five-year-old Libby, lounging on deck in a flower-print halter and pedal pushers, attended by black stewards in white linen jackets.

  … For her own person,

  It beggar’d all description. She did lie

  In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold tissues,

  O’erpicturing that Venus where we see

  The fancy outwork nature.

  Laughing, her belly rocking with delight, Libby fed caviar with chopped onion and Coca-Cola to one grandchild, chopped liver on crackers to another.

  … On each side her

  Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,

  With diven-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem

  To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,

  And what they undid did.

  The image of Libby cavorting with her grandchildren yielded to a longer shot of the yacht at sunset as another voice declaimed, “From William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon.”

  Finally the children of a kibbutz in the Negev, photographed from a helicopter, stood in a pattern in the Bernard Gursky Park and spelled l’chaim, the apostrophe raising a bottle of Masada Blanc, a Gursky brand, to Mr. Bernard.

  The film done, a spotlight illuminated Mr. Bernard, seemingly crushed by such acclaim, swimming in tears, a sodden handkerchief clenched between his dentures. Everybody was enormously moved, especially Libby, who now rose into the light to sing their song to him:

  Bei mir bist du schön,

  Please let me explain,

  Bei mir bist du schön

  Means that you’re grand.…

  I could sing Bernie, Bernie,

  Even say “voonderbar.”

  Each language only helps me tell you

  How grand you are.…

  There wasn’t, Libby would remember, a dry eye in the house, the rest of her song lost in applause, soaring applause as Mr. Bernard leaped to his feet, knocking back his chair, and fled the ballroom.

  “He’s just an old softie at heart, you know.”

  “Don’t you just want to hug him?”

  The truth was Mr. Bernard had to piss again, he had to piss something terrible, there was such a burning inside him, and when it came out it was, to his astonishment, red as Big Sur burgundy, another Gursky brand. A week later they began to cut and a tearful Kathleen O’Brien lighted the first of many candles at the Cathedral of Mary, Queen of the World. Mr. Mor
rie, responding to a summons, visited his brother at home for the first time in twenty years.

  “So,” Mr. Bernard said.

  “So.”

  “Look at Barney now. I was right about him all along. I want you to admit it.”

  “I admit it.”

  “No resentments?”

  “No.”

  “How’s Ida?”

  “She’d like to come to pay her respects.”

  “Tell her to bring Charna with her. I don’t mind.”

  “Charna’s dead.”

  “Oh shit, I forgot. Did I go to the funeral?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Bernie, I’ve got something to say, but please don’t shout at me.”

  “Try me, you little prick.”

  “You must make provision for Miss O.”

  “A big brown envelope. It’s in the office safe.”

  They cut and pared Mr. Bernard a week later, pronouncing him fit, but Mr. Bernard knew better. He sent for Harvey Schwartz. “I want my lawyers here at nine sharp tomorrow morning. All of them.”

  Later the same afternoon Mr. Bernard saw Miss O’Brien.

  “I’m going to die, Miss O.”

  “Would you like me to do your weenie now?”

  “I wouldn’t say no.”

  Four

  Passing his parents’ bedroom door, a few years after they had moved into Outremont, Moses stopped, arrested by their voices. His mother was telling L.B. about the intelligence tests at school. A new-fangled notion. Moses had scored so high that the school inspector had asked to meet the bright Jewish lad who was bound to discover the cure for cancer. L.B. sighed. “You don’t know how devoutly I hope he will go into medicine. Or law maybe. Because if Moses is really determined to become a writer he is certain to be compared to me and suffer for it. Possibly I never should have had a child. It was indulgent of me.”