Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  About what, he thought? Give me a hint.

  She twirled around, her hands fluttering round her neck, and then he saw it. A diamond-studded choker.

  “From Van Cleef & Arpels,” she said, and then she indicated a little parcel, tied with a golden bow, lying on the bed. “I also brought you something.”

  Harvey tore open the wrapping.

  “I know you could use a dozen, but I just couldn’t shlepp any more parcels.”

  Holding the socks against his chest, Harvey said, “They’re just the right size.”

  Eight

  Tim Callaghan hoped that Bert Smith would be drawn to Mr. Bernard’s funeral, ending his twenty-five-year-old hunt for him. He must be sixty-five years old now, Callaghan calculated, maybe more. Smith, the righteous rodent. In his mind’s eye, Callaghan saw him in a tiny basement kitchen that reeked of rot and cat piss and Presbyterian virtue. There would be a calendar with a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II on horseback tacked to the wall, the corners curling. The linoleum would be split and worn, the teapot chipped. He would be sitting down to a supper of macaroni or baked beans on toast at a table with a Formica top, sustained by the red-hot coals of hatred. Yes, Callaghan thought, providing that he was still alive, Smith would come to the funeral even if he had to be carried there on a stretcher.

  Callaghan, a child of the century, had survived gunshot, two heart attacks and a prostate trim, none of which distressed him so much as the loss of his teeth, an intolerable insult. He was a tall man, an old coin worn thin, his once-blond hair reduced to a fringe of wintry straw, his eyes pale blue, his shoulders stooped, his liver-spotted hands with the busted knuckles prone to trembling. But at least he wasn’t incontinent. He didn’t shuffle like some of the others who had overstayed their welcome. Once he found Bert Smith, and made the necessary arrangements, he himself would be free to die, a prospect he contemplated with a sense of relief. He would leave the rest of his money to the Old Brewery Mission and his mementoes to Moses Berger.

  “My God,” Moses had said, the first time he had seen the photographs in Callaghan’s apartment.

  Over the mantel there was a faded snapshot of the young Solomon strolling down a country lane with George Bernard Shaw, and another one, somewhat out of focus, showing him seated on a verandah with H.L. Mencken, a malacca cane held between Solomon’s knees, his hands clasped over the handle, his chin resting on his hands.

  1956 that was, and Callaghan had shown Moses one of his most cherished souvenirs of that era when he had been most vibrantly alive. It was his edition of the Holy Bible as purified by the incomparable Dr. Charles Foster Kent, professor of biblical history at Yale. The abstemious professor had revised Samuel 6:19 from, “And he dealt among all the people, even among the whole multitude of Israel, as well to the women as to the men, to every one a cake of bread and a good piece of flesh and a flagon of wine,” to read, “And he distributed to the whole assembled multitude a roll of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins.”

  Those were the days when Callaghan seldom saw his bed before four A.M., if at all, but, instead, sat enthralled at Solomon’s table, listening to him pronounce on Trotsky’s forging of the Red Army, or Edward Gordon Craig’s theory of the actor as marionette, or the art of breaking a mustang. More often than not the table was festooned with fawning society girls. A de Brisson, a McCarthy, one of the Newton girls. And you never knew what was coming next, what a driven Solomon would decree. A midnight dinner thrown for whatever tacky touring company was playing His Majesty’s Theatre, Solomon flattering the inadequate performers with caviar and champagne, dandling the middle-aged Juliet on his knee, flirting with the girlish Macbeth, and finally dazzling the company with his parody of Barrymore’s Hamlet. Or Solomon crashing a supposedly secret Communist party meeting in some professor’s apartment, playing the speaker like a kitten with a skein of wool before pouncing with his superior knowledge of dialectics, slapping him down with Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.” Or Solomon opting for a breakneck run to Albert Crawley’s hotel in the Townships, playing the piano with the Dixieland band, luxuriating in their astonishment at his skill. Or Solomon disappearing, retiring to brood on that bend in the Cherry River where Brother Ephraim had once set his traps for game and, come to think of it, men as well. The abandoned shafts of the New Camelot Mining & Smelting Co. were still there, the rotting rafters a perch for bats. Or Solomon suddenly turning on his flutter of society girls, seducing one of them into submitting to outrageous sexual acts and then sending her back to her mountainside mansion, himself avenged but also, he would complain to Callaghan, diminished.

  “Gerald Murphy got it wrong,” he once said, “living twice, maybe three times is the best revenge.”

  Callaghan, sprung from Griffintown, hard by the Montreal waterfront, had once been a club fighter. Possibly because he displayed more spunk than talent in the ring, he developed a following in the west. Solomon, who had watched him lose a semi-final in Regina, invited him to dinner afterward. He fed him beef and banknotes and started him out driving a Hudson Super-Six, laden with booze, to just short of the North Dakota border, where the switch would be made with the waiting Americans. Callaghan proved so proficient that Solomon soon had him managing the Detroit River run, armed with what Eliot Ness once called “The Canadian Print Job”, that is to say, B-13 clearance documents that stipulated the liquor on board was bound for Havana. Because Callaghan had so much on Mr. Bernard he survived at McTavish following Solomon’s death, serving for years as vice-president in charge of nothing for Loch Edmond’s Mist.

  Cancer claimed Callaghan’s wife in 1947. He saw her through her last months at home with the help of a night nurse and Kathleen O’Brien and cases of Loch Edmond’s Mist, tolerating the comings and goings of the officious Father Moran for her sake. Kathleen O’Brien read to her every afternoon. Belloc, Chesterton. Then she sat with Callaghan, praising him for proving such a devoted husband.

  “But the truth is I wish she’d die and leave me in peace,” he said.

  “Shush.”

  “And then there’s the nurse.”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “I do.”

  Frances, Frances. Each time he looked down on her bed, her oncefine flowing mane of black hair reduced to dry scorched patches, her eyes sunken, he was consumed with rage. What he wanted back was his once-glowing Frances, the girl he had first caught a glimpse of emerging from the Cathedral of Mary Queen of the World on a perfect spring morning. Frances, utterly unaware that all the men had turned to look, but not one of them whistled or made a coarse remark. She told him that he would have to speak to her father, a sour plumber with telltale broken veins in his nose. Callaghan told him that he was in transport, which made her blush because she understood and prayed for him. When the RCMP investigators came in the weeks leading up to the trial, she proved surprisingly tough. “But what does your husband do?” one of them asked, smirking.

  “Mr. Callaghan provides. Do you take sugar and cream?”

  Only a week before she died, swimming out of a morphine undertow, she said, “You shouldn’t have lied at the trial.”

  “We owed Solomon everything.”

  “You did it to save your own skin.”

  “Why bring that up now, after all these years?”

  “Find Bert Smith. Make it up to him. Promise me that.”

  “I promise.”

  She died in his arms, and for a while Callaghan became a drinker to be avoided, seeking out fights at two A.M. in the Normandy Roof or Carol’s or Rockhead’s. Then, stumbling out of Aldo’s late one afternoon, turning into Ste.-Catherine Street, Callaghan saw him. He saw Bert Smith. His chalky pinched face filling the window of a number 43 streetcar, staring right back at him without expression. Callaghan, the back of his neck prickly, took off after the streetcar, catching up with it at the corner of Peel Street. One stop too late. Bert
Smith was no longer on board.

  Callaghan found 153 Smiths listed in the telephone book, none of them with the Christian name Bert. Probably Bert is still rooted in Regina, he thought, and he was in Montreal only to attend a wedding or an Orangemen’s convention. Something like that. Callaghan sent for the Regina phone book and, on a hunch, the one from Winnipeg as well, but he couldn’t locate any relatives. So he tried another ploy. He had his lawyer place notices in newspapers in Toronto, Montreal, and throughout the west, announcing an unclaimed legacy of fifty thousand pounds for Bert Smith, a former customs agent, residing in Regina. None of the many bothersome claimants who came forward, several of them threatening lawsuits, turned out to be the real Bert Smith. So Callaghan, remembering that he had been drunk at the time, concluded that it had not been Bert Smith’s face filling the streetcar window. It had been an apparition. That’s what he decided. But he didn’t believe it. He knew it had been Bert Smith.

  TIM CALLAGHAN RETIRED IN 1965 on a necessarily generous pension and moved into an apartment on Drummond Street. A creature of habit, no matter how late he turned in he wakened at six-thirty every morning, shaved and showered and ate his bacon and eggs, ploughing through the Gazette. Then he took to the streets, searching for Bert Smith in Lower Westmount and N.D.G. and Verdun, sometimes wandering as far as Griffintown, circling back to The Hunter’s Horn or stopping at Toe Blake’s Tavern to chat with the detectives from Station Number Ten, including his nephew Bill.

  After a solitary supper in his apartment Callaghan would go out again in the futile hope of running into Bert Smith or at least tiring himself out sufficiently to sleep through the night.

  Increasingly, striding those downtown streets, Callaghan mourned for the glittering city he had once known, the fine restaurants and bookshops and watering holes that had been displaced by the ubiquitous fast-food joints (Mike’s Submarines, McDonald’s, Harvey’s) and garish clothing stores, video gamelands, bars where vapid girls danced nude on your table, gay clubs, massage parlours and shops that peddled sexual devices. There were no more cubbyhole shoeshine parlours where you could also get your hat blocked and maybe bet on something good running at Belmont. The last honest barber had retired his pole years ago. Gone, gone were Slitkin’s and Slotkin’s, Carol’s, the Café Martin, the Eiffel Tower, Dinty Moore’s and Aux Délices. Tramping the streets Callaghan sometimes wondered if he were the last man in town to have heard Oscar Peterson play at the Alberta Lounge or to have ended a long night with an obligatory one for the road in Rockhead’s Paradise. Certainly he must be the last Montrealer to have seen Babe Ruth pitch for the Baltimore Orioles in Atwater Park, now a sleazy shopping centre.

  If Moses was in town Callaghan usually met him for lunch at Magnan’s or Ma Heller’s, carrying on from there into the night. Years ago an agitated Moses had told him, “I was in Winnipeg last week and dropped into the Tribune and asked the librarian if I could see the Gursky file. But all the newspaper accounts of the murder of Willy McGraw and Mr. Bernard’s arrest and trial had been stolen. I contacted other newspapers and found out that the old bastard had one of his minions go through the west and sterilize all the files.”

  “Moses,” Callaghan said, “your father wasn’t drafted, he volunteered. He didn’t have to write those speeches for Mr. Bernard.”

  Moses was young then, already a considerable drinker, but able to handle it. Callaghan found him interesting, but he was not sure that he liked him. Moses was too nimble, ever ready to rush to judgement, and there was, Callaghan suspected, too much self-display there, born of insecurity perhaps, but tiresome all the same. Callaghan was also put off by Moses’s silly determination to pass for the perfect British gent. The Savile Row suit. The Balliol College tie. The furled umbrella. Callaghan didn’t understand that Moses, having already adjudged himself ugly, unattractive to women, felt better playing the peacock, his strut defiant. As far as Callaghan was concerned, what redeemed the young Moses, so quick to anger, was that he had not yet grasped that the world was imperfect. He actually expected justice to be done.

  Callaghan tried to warn him against pursuing Solomon’s story, but had he anticipated the ruin Moses’s quest would lead him to in the years to come, he would have frogmarched him clear of the Gursky quagmire. “I know damn well why you are so enamoured of Solomon,” Callaghan said, “but you haven’t got it nearly right. Mr. Bernard is vulgar, but all of a piece. Totally consumed by his appetite for riches. But Solomon …”

  “Betrayed hopes?”

  “Yes.”

  Nine

  “Good time to invest. Bad time to invest,” Becky said. “I want it.”

  So, in 1973, when most of his friends, fearful of French-Canadian unrest, were going liquid, Harvey Schwartz bought an imposing limestone mansion on Belvedere Road in Westmount. Westmount, dug into the mountainside and towering over the city of Montreal, was a traditionally WASP enclave, the most privileged in Canada. Many of its great houses, hewn out of rock, had been built by selfmade grain and railway and beer barons and shipping and mining tycoons. Most of them were originally Scots, their mansions constructed to rival the grandest homes of Edinburgh, colonial sons triumphant, the progeny of crofters, ships’ chandlers and Hudson’s Bay factors chiselling shields of the dimly remembered clan into the stonework. Harvey bought the mansion, with its spectacular view of the city and the river below, from a stockbroker. Tall, stooping, the broker insisted on showing them through the place himself, smiling acrimoniously all the while. He led them upstairs, past a wall of Harvard Classics and a set of Dickens, Becky pausing to admire the leather bindings. “My articles have been published in The Jewish Review,” she said, “and the Canadian Author and Bookman. I’m a member of the P.E.N. Club.”

  “Then Mr. Schwartz has reason to be proud.”

  “You bet,” Harvey said.

  The broker ushered them into the master bedroom, opened a cupboard and said, “Now here’s something that should interest you, Mr. Schwartz. The wall safe. Of course,” he added, “you’ll want to have the combination changed now.”

  “We wouldn’t think of it,” Becky said.

  Downstairs they met the broker’s wife. The elegant Mrs. McClure, her smile cordial but guarded. Maybe seventy years old now, Harvey figured, but still a beauty. Her ashen hair, streaked with yellow, cut short. She seemed fragile and favoured a cane. Harvey had noticed her crippled leg at once. The leg was as thin as his wrist—no, thinner—and caught in a cumbersome brace. She offered him a sherry, set out on a cherry wood table on which there was a vase of Sweet Williams. Indicating the cheese and crackers, Mrs. McClure apologized for not being able to offer them more, explaining that their maid and chauffeur had preceded them to St. Andrews-by-the-Sea. Westmount, she told them, had once been an Indian burial ground. The first skeletons, discovered in 1898, had been unearthed on the grounds of the St. George Snowshoe Club. “This street,” she said, “wasn’t laid out until 1912. When I was a little girl I could toboggan from here, through Murray Hill Park, all the way down to Sherbrooke Street.”

  A portrait of McClure, kilted, wearing the uniform of the Black Watch, hung over the mantelpiece. On the mantelpiece itself, there was a framed photograph of Mackenzie King. It was inscribed. The largest portrait hanging in the room was of the saturnine Sir Russell Morgan, Mrs. McClure’s grandfather.

  “I understand that you are retained by the Gurskys,” McClure said. “He runs Jewel,” Becky said, “and serves on the board at McTavish. He is a recipient of the Centennial Medal and a—”

  “Do you know Mr. Bernard?” Harvey asked.

  “I haven’t had that distinct pleasure.”

  “He’s a great human being.”

  “But Mrs. McClure once knew the brother who died so tragically young. Solomon, if memory serves.”

  Mrs. McClure, favouring her thin misshapen leg, limped three steps toward a chair, managing the move with astonishing grace. Immediately she sat down, her hand sought out the knee-joint of her steel brace
and clicked it into place. “I do hope,” she said to Becky, “that you care for tea roses?”

  “Are you crazy? We love flowers. Harvey buys them for me all the time.”

  “Why don’t you show Mrs. Schwartz the garden? I’m sure she’d appreciate that.”

  “Allow me, Mrs. Schwartz.”

  Mrs. McClure offered Harvey another sherry, but he declined it. “I’m driving,” he said.

  “He made this table.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Solomon Gursky made this cherry wood table.”

  Harvey smiled just a little, but he was not really surprised. Strangers were always lying, trying to impress him. It came with the territory. “He did?”

  “Indeed, but that was many years ago. Ah, there you are,” she said, smiling at McClure without dropping a stitch. “Back so soon?”

  “Mrs. Schwartz was worried about her high heels.”

  “Quite right, my dear. How foolish of me.”

  His blue eyes frosted with malice, McClure raised his sherry glass.

  “For generations this was known as the Sir Russell Morgan house, and then mine. Here’s to the Schwartz manse,” he said, with a little bow to Becky, “and its perfectly charming new chatelaine.”

  Outside, Becky said, “Now that we’ve got it, where are you taking me to celebrate?”

  He took her to Ruby Foo’s.

  “Mrs. McClure,” Harvey said. “Did you notice?”

  “That she’s a cripple. You must think I’m blind.”

  “No. Not that. Her eyes.”

  “What about them?”

  “One is blue, one is brown.”

  “Don’t look now,” Becky said, “but the Bergmans just walked in.”

  “I’ve never seen that before.”