Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Ephraim, wandering into the synagogue in Minsk in time for the Friday evening service, discovered that his father was still remembered fondly. “The best cantor we ever had,” an old man told him.

  A week later Ephraim served as cantor for the sabbath services, the congregation amazed by the soaring golden voice of this Jew who didn’t wear a capot, but dressed like a Russian prince and was rumoured to frequent their taverns, demanding service. Wary of his reckless behaviour, they nevertheless offered him his father’s old post in the synagogue. Ephraim declined the honour, but lingered in Minsk long enough to impulsively marry a certain Sarah Luchinsky, who bore him a son called Aaron. Then there was an incident in a tavern and Ephraim was obliged to flee again. He settled his wife and child in reasonable style in a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement and soon, bored with both of them, left the country, but continued to send them funds from France and England and finally Canada.

  Ephraim continued to wander, running guns to New Orleans during the American Civil War, he told Solomon, and then dropping out of sight until 1881, the year a swirl of pogroms followed the assassination of Alexander II by terrorists. Ephraim, his nagging wife safely dead, his son now married, eventually sent the feckless Aaron steamship tickets and enough money to come to Canada with Fanny. But Ephraim did not care for the adult Aaron any more than he had for the simpering child, and neither did he warm to Fanny. So he dumped them on a homestead he had acquired on the prairie and disappeared again.

  “My dear father,” Mr. Morrie wrote, “had been poorly advised about the Canadian climate and brought cherry and peach tree saplings and tobacco seeds with him.”

  They arrived in April, greeted by snow and frost, obliged to retreat to a hotel in the nearest railway town until the thaw. Then Aaron built himself a sod hut, acquired a team of oxen and a cow, and planted his first wheat crop. It froze in the field. So Aaron bought pots and pans, tea, kerosene and patent medicines from a wholesaler and peddled to the farmers. Bernard was born, and then Solomon and Morrie.

  Meanwhile Ephraim scaled the Chilkoot Pass into the Klondike. “He told me,” Solomon wrote in his journal, “that he found work as a piano player in a saloon in Dawson, doubling as a cashier. The drunken prospectors paid for their booze and girls with gold dust, Ephraim usually the one to handle the scales, joshing the men, distracting them, even as he ran his fingers through his Vaselined pompadour. Then, before going to bed every night, Ephraim washed the gold dust out of his hair. Eventually he put together a stake of $25,000, most of which he lost in a poker game in the Dominion Saloon.”

  It was spring before Ephraim returned to the prairie and settled down in a tarpaper shack on the reservation with Lena Green Stockings. From time to time he looked in on Aaron and his family, mocking him, a Jew peddler; needling Fanny; and teasing the children. His visits, Solomon noted in his journal, were dreaded. But Mr. Morrie wrote, “My grandfather was a very colourful man, more interesting than many you’ve read about in my favourite Reader’s Digest feature, The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met. How we looked forward to his joining us at the sabbath table! His had been a very hard life, filled with adversity. The poor man lost his beloved wife while he was still in his prime and never found anybody to replace her in his heart. He could speak Indian and Eskimo and set bones better than any doctor. Sadly, though he lived to a very ripe old age, he didn’t last long enough to see his grandchildren succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He would have been very proud for sure.”

  On his visits Ephraim reproached his grandchildren for their ignorance, saving his worst sarcasm for Solomon, because he had Ephraim’s hair, his eyes, and his nose.

  Ephraim waited and watched and when he adjudged Solomon ready, he was there as the boy came tumbling out of school into the thickly falling snow; he was there standing on the stern of his long sled, stinking of rum, his eyes hot. Instead of turning right at the CNR tracks he took a left fork on the trail leading out to the prairie.

  “I thought we were going to Montana,” Solomon said.

  “We’re heading north.”

  “Where?”

  “Far.”

  Seven

  It depended on whom you talked to. Some said certainly six, seven million, others swore ten, maybe more. Anyway in 1973 that was the scuttlebutt on how much Harvey Schwartz had already made for himself hoeing the hundreds of millions ripening in Jewel, the Gursky family investment trust, as well as riding shotgun over Acorn Properties, the Gursky international real-estate company, its estimated value a billion plus at the time. Mind you, a good chunk of Harvey’s fortune was tied up in vested shares. But it was the weight of the money, they said, that explained why Harvey chewed his fingernails and suffered from insomnia, dyspepsia, and agonizing bowel movements. The gossips, as is so often the case, were wrong. Even before Harvey had accumulated his millions, he had been consumed by the secret fear that one day they would come for him. He would be falsely accused of a crime. Robbery, rape, murder, take your pick. One day he would be framed and they would come for him, his protestations of innocence unavailing unless he had a foolproof alibi. So Harvey, who knew he could be arrested when he was least expecting it (any time, any place) constantly worked at clearing his name. Once, at ease by the poolside of the Tamarack Country Club, on the verge of snoozing, Harvey came quickly alert when he grasped that everybody else was discussing the Kleinfort murder case. “You know,” Harvey said, as soon as he had the group’s attention, “I wouldn’t even know how to handle a gun.”

  Harvey’s obsession crystallized when he saw The Wrong Man, an Alfred Hitchcock movie inspired by the true story of a bass-fiddle player at the Stork Club, who was mistakenly identified in a police lineup and charged with robbery, only to be saved at the last moment when the real culprit struck again. Harvey, who had seen the movie three times, suffered with Henry Fonda throughout.

  Harvey knew. Harvey understood. So naturally he took precautions. If, for instance, he went to a movie with his wife, Becky (whose testimony in his favour wouldn’t count), he not only held on to the stubs, filing them with the date, but also did his best to make his presence felt. He might thrust a hundred-dollar bill at the ticket seller, apologizing for not having a smaller banknote with him, but making himself known. Once inside, he would look for anybody he knew, greeting even the slightest acquaintance effusively.

  —Yes, on the night of the rape I definitely saw Mr. Schwartz at the Westmount Square cinema.

  Checking into a hotel in New York, Chicago, or wherever, Harvey donned surgical gloves as soon as the bellboy had set down his bags and departed the suite. He searched the closets, the shower (since Psycho), and every dresser drawer, unwilling to leave his fingerprints about until he was satisfied that no bloodied knives or incriminating guns had been left behind by a previous occupant, setting him up. Harvey also insisted that his chauffeur obey all traffic regulations, especially speed limits, lest some disadvantaged mother, crazed with greed, throw her baby under his wheels, intending to sue for millions. Then, in the days when he was still obliged to fly commercial, he never accepted a seat next to an unaccompanied lady, lest she was a plant, set in place to hit him with an indecent assault suit. Happily, nowadays, he enjoyed access to the Gursky jets, thanks to Mr. Bernard’s largesse.

  The truth was Mr. Bernard could be surprisingly caring, treating Harvey like his most favoured acolyte, thinking aloud in his presence. He told him that if he were prime minister he could settle the national deficit one-two-three. He felt strongly that there was too much screwing without rubbers in the Third World and he would put a stop to that. If the Israelis only had the sense to call on him he would also settle the Arabs’ hash.

  “You know, Mr. Bernard, we should keep a record of your table talk.”

  “For future generations?”

  “Yes.”

  So the sessions began, Mr. Bernard pontificating.

  “You know what’s the greatest invention of western man?”

  “No.”


  “Interest.”

  Mr. Bernard munching cashews, sipping Mascada Blanc, reminiscing.

  “Abraham Lincoln (I’m not knocking him, he freed the niggers) he was born in a log cabin in a warm climate, which couldn’t have been that bad. But for Bernard Gursky it was a sod hut on the freezing prairie, which was all my poor father could afford at the time, Ephraim he wouldn’t give him shit. I was Ephraim’s favourite, you know. Big deal. Ephraim always had money for whores and gambling, yesirree, but for his own son? Bupkes. How do I know your tape recorder is working?”

  Harvey shifted briefly into playback. It was working. “You think Westmount can be cold? I’ll tell you cold. When it drops to sixty below, even with the kitchen stove roaring all night, the water pails would be solid ice in the morning. Then it’s spring, and no matter how good you fill in the chinks in a sod hut when it rains it pisses on your head. Never mind. You also collect the rain-water in barrels off the sod-and-poplar roof to help with the water supply. Otherwise, kid, you are dragging water up from the spring in galvanized pails day after day.

  “In the winter my mother, God bless her soul, she used to melt snow in tubs for water. For heating we collected buffalo chips. The buffalo were long gone, but their skulls were still everywhere. Hey, how did Bernard Gursky, that empire-builder, make his first money? Ordinary people might like to know. I made my first money catching gophers, but now,” Mr. Bernard said, slapping the table and laughing until tears came to his eyes, “now I have my own, eh, you little runt?”

  Harvey’s freckled cheeks shone stinging red. “Hey, I was only teasing. I made a funny. No hard feelings, eh?” “No.”

  Another day.

  “Every family has a cross to bear, a skeleton in the closet, that’s life.

  Eleanor Roosevelt, she’s been to our house, you know. Couldn’t her father afford a dentist? Her teeth. Oy vey. Her people were in the opium trade in China, but you wouldn’t read that in The Ladies’ Home Journal or wherever she wrote ‘My Day’. Joe Kennedy was a whoremaster from day one and he swindled Gloria Swanson, but they never sang about that in Camelot. Take King George V even, an OBE was too good for me. One of his sons was a hopeless drunk, another was a bum-fucker and a drug addict, and that dumb-bell the Duke of Windsor he threw in the sponge for a tart. You want the Duke and Duchess for a charity ball, you rent them like a tux from Tip-Top. Royalty they call that. Me, my cross to bear was Solomon, though God knows I tried my best for him, it’s on the record. He was what they call a bad seed. You think it doesn’t grieve me? It grieves me plenty, my brother to die like that, besmirching the family name to this day. Hey, that Solomon Gursky he ordered Willy McGraw shot dead at the railway station. And those Gursky brothers were once bootleggers. Oh me oh my. Oh dearie me. We can’t have them here for tea and cucumber sandwiches on bread made from Lepage’s glue.

  “Did I ever tell you what happened just before I bought our first railroad hotel, and if anybody says that was Solomon’s doing just look it up, eh, and see whose name the deed was in. All we’ve got to our name at this point is my father’s general store and maybe four thousand dollars in the pushke. Correction. We had four thousand dollars until Solomon stole it so’s he can sit in on the biggest poker game in town. He’s going to risk the family’s hard-earned money at the table, everything, and win or lose the bastard’s going to run. Bye bye family. Bye bye family savings. My poor mother and father, and Morrie it goes without saying, are going sob sob sob in the kitchen. Nobody knows where the game is but I know where Solomon’s whores can be found. The old Indian one on the reservation and the Polack with the big knockers at the hotel. I give them a message for my darling brother. Tell him he runs as far as Timbuktu and I’ll find him and have the cops put him in prison and he can rot there. He got the message all right and he comes home but he’s so ashamed to face us he runs away the next day and joins the army. And while he’s making his paid tour of Europe, ending up an officer in the flying corps yet by forging a university degree, I’m putting together a chain of hotels, working eighteen hours a day for me was nothing, putting a third of everything in his name because that’s how Bernard Gursky is built. Family is family. He comes home, does he say, Bernard, I don’t deserve such a big share? Does he observe I’ve done real good? Forget it.

  “You know in the bad old days hijacking was a problem we had to contend with. Gangsters. Other people’s greed. Well one day he sends out Morrie, of all people, with a convoy, himself he’s too scared. Morrie’s in the last car, you know, the one that drags a fifty-foot chain behind, it makes one hell of a dust cloud in case anybody is chasing after. The men in this car also have a searchlight they can shine into somebody’s eyes through the back window and they carry submachine guns, but only for self-defence. The shooting starts before they even hit the Montana border. Morrie shits his pants. That’s no disgrace, you know, if you’ve read up on the Great War. Me they wouldn’t take because of my flat feet. I was heart-broken. This country I love it and everybody in it. Anyway I read that happened to men at Vimy Ridge the first time they went over the trenches and they came home some of them had the VC, not VD like Solomon. Big hero Solomon. Did he ever go on about Vimy Ridge. The mud. The lice. The rats in the trenches. You ask me the closest he ever got to those trenches before he transferred to the flying corps was a whorehouse in Montmartre.

  “Where was I? Oh yeah. Solomon starts to tease Morrie something awful about what happened to him. Boy, did I ever fix him. I shoved Solomon into the next convoy out, he’s white as a sheet of paper. He’s sweating. A truck backfired he hit the floor. Everybody breaks up. They’re laughing at him, the hero of Vimy Ridge. He doesn’t bother Morrie any more, you bet your ass.”

  Yet another day.

  “Each generation produces a handful of great men, raised in log cabins or sod huts, who reach to the stars to grasp at impossible dreams. Einstein, Louis B. Mayer, Henry Ford, Tom Edison, Irving Berlin. Men in different fields of endeavour and what they have in common is that they never rest. But how did it all start in Bernard Gursky’s case? Well, I’ll tell you. We were living in Fort McEwen now (hoo boy, plank sidewalks) and among other things my father was dealing in cattle. My father had an understanding with this guy and one week instead of cattle he brings him forty wild mustangs. I had to break them in a corral behind the old Queen Victoria Hotel. My father auctioned them off and after each sale he invited the customer into the hotel bar to seal the deal with a drink. I watched this, sitting on a corral fence. I watched and I thought, which was always my way. Paw, I said, the bar makes more profit than we do, why don’t we buy the hotel? There, right there is where it started. I led the Gurskys across the Rubicon into the liquor business. Have I got the river right?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are so many lies being told about Bernard Gursky already somebody should be hired to listen to the truth from me and write my biography.”

  “I was thinking the same thing, Mr. Bernard.”

  “For this job I don’t want a Canadian. I want the best. The hell with the expense.”

  “I could consult Becky and draw up a list of names.”

  “What about Churchill, who wrote his stuff?”

  “He did, Mr. Bernard.”

  “Oh yeah?” Mr. Bernard drummed his plump fingers against his desk. “Maybe yes and maybe no. Now this Hemingway fella, how much can he earn?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Of course he’s dead. You think I don’t know? You’re getting on my nerves, Harvey. Haven’t you any work to do?”

  Yes, yes, certainly he did, but Becky, just back that morning from a two-day trip to New York, phoned to say, “I want to see you and I mean right now.”

  Harvey, home within the hour, found Becky seated behind her Louis XIV bureau-plat. The contents of an asbestos-lined box that had been lifted out of Harvey’s wall safe were spread out before her. “I want to know why your precious life as Mr. Bernard’s poodle is insured for three million dollars with v
arious companies while the value put on mine, a published writer, is a piddly one hundred thousand?”

  “Actually, I made a note to myself to review the situation this weekend.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  “I mean a mental note.”

  Becky threw the deeds and policies at him and flew out of the room, charging up the stairs to their bedroom. Harvey pursued her as far as the hall, where he stumbled over a stack of boxes from Gucci, Saks, Bendel’s, and Bergdorf Goodman. He retreated into the living room, sinking on to the sofa. The truth was the day he had done his annual review of their life insurance portfolio, intent on fattening her coverage, the newspapers had been full of a Toronto murder case that had given him pause. A real-estate developer, who seemed to have led a blameless life, was on trial for the murder of his wife of twenty years. His story was that driving to Stratford after dark he had wobbled into a rest area off the 401 to attend to a flat tire. While he was bent over a rear wheel another car pulled up behind, two druggies got out, knocked him senseless and shot his wife, who had foolishly put up a struggle. They made off with his wallet, her handbag, and all of their luggage. His defence was compromised by one bit of evidence. Only a month earlier, he had insured his wife’s life for a cool million. Harvey, understandably alert, now balked at doing the same for Becky … because what if a week later, God forbid, she was run down crossing the street or lost in an airplane crash? He would be suspect number one, that’s what. Led out of his own home in handcuffs before the TV cameras. Incarcerated with salivating faggots. His body violated like Peter O’Toole by that creepy Turk in Lawrence of Arabia. Harvey, his heart thudding, started up the stairs in search of an aspirin, and there, lo and behold, was Becky standing in the bedroom door, all smiles. “What do you think, buttercup?”