Nialie confronted Isaac at breakfast the next morning. “How can you be so rude to your father?” she asked.
Because he’s a hypocrite, he thought. But he didn’t say it. Instead he glared at her.
Ten
Condemned to a night in Edmonton before he could catch his morning flight to Yellowknife, Moses checked into the Westin, and then settled into a stool at the bar. Sean Riley was on TV. He was in Vancouver, peddling Bush Pilot, the book about his thrilling adventures in the Land of the Midnight Sun. The pleasantries didn’t last long and then the interviewer, a former Miss B.C. Lion, took a deep breath, swelling her bosom, and asked about Riley’s celebrated crash in the winter of ’64. His passenger, a mining engineer, had died on impact. A month later Riley, who had been given up for dead, limped out of the barrens right into the Mackenzie Lounge in Inuvik.
“As you know, it was rumoured in Yellowknife at the time that you survived your terrible ordeal by resorting to, um, cannibalism. If that’s the case,” the interviewer suggested, flushing, “and, darn it, who’s to say any one of us would have done different—if that’s the case—I’m looking at a guy who has had a very unusual experience, eh?” Then, glancing hastily at one of her index cards, she added. “Now what grabs me is how such an unusual experience has affected you personally and psychologically?”
“Say, I don’t get to appear on TV that often. Do you mind if I say hello to Molly Squeeze Play in Yellowknife?”
“What?”
“Hiya there, Molly. See you in The Gold Range tomorrow. Meanwhile keep your legs crossed, ha ha ha.”
“Does it haunt your dreams?” Shirley Anne asked.
“Molly?”
“Cannibalism.”
“Well, I’ll tell ya, it kind of puts you off your prime rib. Like, you know, it’s so good and sweet. Hardly any gristle.”
The bar was rocking with chattering men and women wearing name tags, educators gathered from all ends of the continent to ponder WHITHER THE GLOBAL VILLAGE? But, as Moses started into his fourth double Scotch, most of them had dispersed, only a handful of dedicated drinkers surviving. Then a lady came flying into the room, out of breath, obviously too late for the party. She snuggled into the stool immediately beside Moses and ordered a vodka on the rocks. “Prosit,” she said.
MY NAME IS CINDY DUTKOWSKI wore a snug woollen dress and carried an enormous shoulder bag. Fierce she was, black hair unruly, petite, forty maybe. She taught Communications 101 at Maryland U. “Say, do my eyes deceive me, or didn’t I see you in Washington last week, rapping with Sam Burns at the Sans Souci?”
“You’re mistaken.”
“I’ll bet you’re also a media personality and I should know your name.”
“Sorry about that.”
“If you tell me your name, I won’t bite.”
“Moses Berger,” he said, signing his bar bill and starting to slide off his stool. She shoved him back.
“Hey, you’re really shy. It’s a form of arrogance, you know. It also protects you against rejections in highly charged social encounters. I was a psych major.” Hers, she said, was an open marriage, which allowed both partners a life-style enabling them to explore their full sexual potential.
“That must be awfully convenient for you.”
“Oh come on. Do I have to spell it out? I’m interested if you are.”
MY NAME IS CINDY DUTKOWSKI scooped up her enormous shoulder bag and they went up to his room, not hers, because she was sharing with a real square, she said, a lady from Montana who undressed in the bathroom. “I’m willing to act out your favourite fantasy, so long as it isn’t too kinky.”
“The usual,” an intimidated Moses said, “will suit me fine.”
In that case, she had a menu of her own. “I’m going to be your laid-back, but secretly horny high-school teacher and you are the nerdy little teenager. I’ve asked you to report to my office after classes, pretending that we have to go over your latest assignment, but actually because I caught you peeking up my skirt when I sat on your desk this morning and it really turned me on. Now you go wait out in the hall and don’t knock on my office door until I call out ‘ready’. You dig?”
“I’m not sure exactly how you want me to behave.”
“Well, you know. You don’t know from nothing. Like Canadian will do.”
“Gotcha,” he said, slipping out of the room, tiptoeing over to the elevator bank, and then grabbing a taxi at the front door of the hotel. “Take me to a bar where they don’t play loud music.”
Seated on yet another bar stool, Moses pondered Beatrice’s baffling note again. It was three A.M. in Montreal now, but he, phoned her all the same. “What did you mean,” he asked, “that the human question mark was Alexander Pope?”
“Are you telling me,” she replied, her voice hard, “that you don’t remember?”
He began to sweat.
“You mean I’ve been sitting here, unable to sleep, crying because the note I left must have hurt you, and you don’t even remember last night?”
Moses hung up, mortified, and when he got back to the hotel he was confronted by another problem. His open suitcase on the floor was half empty. As it turned out, however, she hadn’t stolen anything. He found his shirts, socks, and underwear in the bathroom, floating in a tub full of water.
Once out at the Industrial Airport the next morning, Moses knew, without asking, which was the right gate for the PWA flight to Yellowknife. The familiar northern flotsam was already gathered there. A knot of chunky young Eskimos with their hair slicked back, wearing heavily studded black leather jackets, stovepipe jeans, and vinyl cowboy boots. Ladies in beehive hairdos and fat coats, lugging plastic bags filled with goods from Woodward’s. There was also a group of northern workers obviously returning from leave, heading back to the oil rigs or DEW line stations, their stakes blown on whores, satisfied that women were shit, life was shit, everything was shit. Bruised and fleshy they were, one of them with his eye badly blackened.
On arrival in Yellowknife, Moses took a taxi directly to The Gold Range, where he knew he would find Sean Riley. Sean ordered two and a juice, but Moses settled for a black coffee.
“It’s like that, is it?” Riley asked.
“Yes. How’s your book doing?”
“When I was a kid, my old man caught me in a lie, it was a visit to the woodshed. Now I get paid for it.”
Moses placed a photograph on the table. “I’d like to know if you saw this old man around here last week, possibly shopping around for a charter.”
“The naturalist from California. Mr. Corbeau?”
“That’s right.”
“Cooney flew him out to King William Island last Wednesday, I think. He figured the old coot was crazy, wanting to camp out there, but there was something about him. Anyway, according to Cooney, he built himself a snow house in a jiffy. Had plenty of supplies.”
“Could you fly me out there?”
“I could find him if I had to.”
“Tomorrow morning?”
“I charge ten dollars a mile for the Otter, six for the Cessna, if you agree to help with the pedalling.”
“We’ll take the Otter and we’ll put in overnight at Tulugaqtitut to look in on Henry.”
Henry and Nialie, given only short notice that they would be blessed with guests at their Shabbat table, enabling them to celebrate the mitzvah of hospitality, Hachnasat Orechim, happily stayed up most of the night preparing delicacies. Challah. Gefilte fish. Roast chicken. Tsimmes. Lokshen pudding with raisins. Honey cake. The very best linen was set out on the table and, as a concession to Moses, a prized bottle of fifty-year-old cognac on a side table. Isaac was ordered to bathe and put on a white shirt and tie and smartly pressed trousers before he went out with his father to meet the incoming Otter, Henry’s sidecurls dancing in the breeze.
“Sholem aleichem,” Henry sang out, embracing Moses.
“Aleichem sholem.”
Riley, not wishing to impose on two old f
riends who seldom got together any more, agreed to drinks at Henry’s house, but would not stay to dinner. “Could be I’m running a fever,” he said. “I think I’ll look in on Agnes McPhee.”
“Abei gezunt,” Nialie said.
After she had blessed the candles, they sat down at the table and Henry pronounced the traditional blessing over his son. “Yesimecha Elohim keEfrayim vechiMenasheh.” May God inspire you to live in the tradition of Ephraim and Menasheh, who carried forward the life of our people.
Henry waited, expectant, but a sulking Isaac didn’t respond until prodded by Nialie.
“Harachaman hu yevarech et avi mori baal habayit hazeh veet imi morati baalat habayit hazeh.” Merciful God, bless my beloved father and mother who guide our home and family.
Isaac, just short of hostile at the table to begin with, soon found himself giggling in response to Moses’s teasing of Henry, amazed that anyone could get away with cracking irreverent jokes about the Rebbe, astonished to see his father drinking more than one cognac. To Henry’s delight, he even joined in when the two men began to sing Shabbat songs, slapping the table with their hands to keep time.
“You know,” Moses said, “the first time I met your father he was just about your age, and we sat on his bedroom floor and refought the Battle of Waterloo with toy soldiers.”
Then, forgetting himself, Moses lit a Monte Cristo. Nialie was about to protest this desecration of the sabbath when Henry silenced her with a wave of his hand. It was, however, too much for Isaac. “How come,” he demanded, “Uncle Moses is allowed to smoke on Shabbat here and I’m not allowed to play hockey with the guys or even watch TV without being scolded for being such a bad Jew.”
“Moishe is not so much a bad Jew,” Henry said, “as a delinquent one.”
“I’ll put it out,” Moses said.
“No,” Henry said, and turning back to Isaac, he added, “And, furthermore, he is not my son. Remember, it is a mitzvah to teach one’s child Talmud Torah, as it is written: ‘Set these words, which I command you this day, upon your heart. Teach them faithfully to your children; speak of them in your home and on your way …’”
“Everything is written,” Isaac said, fighting tears, “even that I’m supposed to have a lousy time, because if it isn’t Shabbes it’s Tishah Be-Av or Shavuot or the Fast of Gedaliah or the Seventeenth of Tamuz or some other shit out of the stone ages. I know. Leave the table. I’m going. Good-night everybody.”
“Oy vey,” Henry said, dismissing Isaac’s outburst with a nervous giggle. “What a difficult age for a boy. Forgive him, Moishe, he didn’t mean to be rude. Excuse me for just a minute.”
Nialie waited until Henry had gone to Isaac’s bedroom, shutting the door behind him, before she spoke up. “He steals,” she said.
“Does Henry know?”
“You mustn’t say a word to him.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t.”
And then Henry was back, laden with weather charts, other documents, and a recently published book, many passages underlined. “According to Dr. Morton Feinberg, a really outstanding climatologist, we are in for it. The new ice age, which is almost upon us, will bring an end to civilization in the northern hemisphere as we know it.”
“Thank God for that,” Moses said, reaching for the cognac bottle.
“Fifty years from now, maybe less, the equatorial countries will dominate the planet.”
“Henry,” Moses said, irritated, “as there was once a School of Hillel and a School of Shamai, so there are now other experts who believe we are in for a different kind of judgement day. They say all the evidence points to the earth’s gradually warming because of the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which tends to trap a good deal of the earth’s heat. But the hell with all of them. Maybe you should worry less about the world coming to an end and more about Isaac.”
“I want you to look at these ch-ch-charts,” Henry said.
“There are better places to bring up a boy who will soon be an adolescent.”
Henry waited until Nialie had retreated to the kitchen. “I hope that he will attend the yeshiva in Crown Heights.”
“And what if he isn’t cut out to be a yeshiva bucher?”
“Look at these charts, please,” a tearful Henry pleaded, “and then tell me the earth is warming.”
Before flying out with Riley in the morning, Moses took Isaac to the Sir Igloo Inn Café for breakfast.
“Can I have bacon with my eggs?” Isaac asked.
“Don’t be a pain in the ass, please.”
“You mean it’s okay for you, but not for me.”
And then Riley was there, his eyes bloodshot. “If we don’t take off within ten minutes we could be weathered in here for days.”
“Isaac, why don’t we write to each other? Maybe you might even come to visit me during your summer holiday,” Moses said, immediately regretting the invitation, and then, turning to Riley, he added, “I’m coming, but I’ve got to say goodbye to Henry and Nialie first.”
Isaac went to join a group of boys at another table. They immediately closed ranks, making no room for him.
“See that old fart who just left here?” Isaac asked.
“So what?”
“He got my father pissed last night.”
“Like shit he did.”
The boys began to get up one by one.
“He used to fuck my aunt in London,” Isaac said.
“Big deal.”
Blocking their exit, Isaac flashed a hundred-dollar bill. “And he gave me this,” he said.
“Bullshit. You swiped it.”
“He gave it to me,” Isaac said, flushing.
“Then we’ll meet you here after school and everything’s on you.”
“I was just going to say that.”
FINDING MR. CORBEAU’S CAMP on King William Island did not turn out to be difficult. A runway of sorts had been cleared at Victory Point, some sixty-five miles from where the Erebus had last been seen. As the Otter lowered into it, Moses made out a snow house hard by the shore. No sooner did Riley slide to a stop than Moses flung open the cabin door, jumped on to the ice, and ran to the snow house. Dropping to his knees to crawl through the entry tunnel he got one of his feet tangled in a trip wire, flipping on a cassette.
There came a clap of thunder. The sound of a crackling fire and another thunder clap. Then a baritone voice, oozing self-importance:
“Moses, Moses, draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”
Bastard. Son of a bitch.
“But here I am not any more.”
Moses, who had made out the tracks of four dogsleds leading away from the snow house, should have known as much. However, he couldn’t have been that late. The snow house, heated by a Coleman camp stove, was still reasonably warm. A caribou skin was laid like a carpet on the floor and on it rested a bottle of Dom Perignon, a tin of beluga caviar, a loaf of black bread, two volumes of Solomon’s journals, and a note: “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
Five
One
Shortly after his arrival in London, Ephraim was accosted on Regent Street by a girl with sable skin. She was young and saucy, wearing a pork-pie hat with a jaunty red plume and a brown mantle and a heavily flounced crinoline skirt. On any other afternoon Ephraim would readily have accompanied the girl to her lodging house, risking the bully bound to be hidden there, but on his first day in London the ferment of the streets was sufficient for him. The din, the din. Rattling omnibuses, broughams and chaises, hackneys and saddlehorses. He saw ragged boys turn cartwheels, sweeping pedestrian crossings free of dung for elegant ladies, all rustling satins and silks. Grim men in bobbing black top hats seemed to be everywhere. As one of them emerged from a pub, his face flushed, he was confronted by an emaciated old beggar offering boxes of lucifer matches and small sticks of sealing wax in trembling hands.
Ephraim sought out a remote c
orner of Hyde Park, and satisfied that he was concealed by shrubbery, dug a deep hole with his trowel and buried the leather purse with his gold watch, his prayer shawl and phylacteries, and all of his money, save ten shillings. But he kept his candlesticks secure under his shirt, intending to dispose of them at a pawnbroker’s in Whitechapel or Spitalfields.
Ephraim lost his way briefly in the maze that made up the rookery behind the Strand, emerging hard by St. Paul’s, an unfamiliar stench leading him to the street-level maw of an open underground abattoir, its thickly caked walls sweating fat and blood. As he stopped to gaze, he was thrust aside by workers who were hurling protesting sheep into the pit so that they would break their legs before being set upon with knives by the slaughterers below, already ankle deep in slippery entrails and excrement. Close by other men, heedless of buzzing flies and scuttling sewer rats, were busy boiling fat, rendering glue and scraping tripe.
Mindful of dippers and ganefs, moving on smartly whenever he saw a peeler, Ephraim finally reached Whitechapel. Two sodden sailors lay in a pool of their own piss outside a gin mill. One of them had a purply eye swollen shut, the other a broken bloodied nose. And suddenly there were stalls, stalls everywhere.
The stalls of Petticoat Lane offered apples and oysters, cheap jewellery, boots, toys, whelks, herring and cutlery and firewood. Ephraim pressed on as far as the Earl of Effingham Theatre, joining the rambunctious mob inside. Jenny O’Hara, wrapped in gauze twinkly with sequins, her enormous rouged bubbies all but plopping free of her corset, settled on a swing and sang:
Bet Mild she was a servant maid,
And she a place had got,
To wait upon two ladies fair
These ladies’ names was Scott.
Now Bet a certain talent had,
For she anything could handle,
And for these ladies, every night,
She used a large thick candle.
Hopping off her swing, approaching the front of the stage with mincing little steps, Jenny continued:
Now Betty had a sweetheart got,
It was their footman Ned,
Solomon Gursky Was Here Page 33