Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Boyd, his smile bright with malevolence, pointed at the sign behind his desk: no cursing, no spitting, no games of chance allowed.

  “Listen, you little shit, if you don’t tell me where I can find Solomon I’m going to try every room in the hotel.”

  “You go right ahead, shorty, but there are some awful big guys in a number of them rooms, some of them entertaining company.”

  A tearful Morrie stepped between them. “Please, Mr. Boyd, we have to find Solomon.”

  “If I see him I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”

  The Gurskys sat up all through the night waiting for Solomon to come home. Fanny moaning and Aaron seated in a chair with his hands folded, his eyes turned inward. “I’m too old to start over again,” he said to nobody in particular.

  It was dawn before Bernard slipped into the bedroom he shared with his two brothers and discovered that two of Solomon’s drawers were empty and his valise was gone. Win or lose, he wasn’t coming back.

  “I’VE SEEN DEAD MEN look better than you do right now.”

  “Unfavourable winds,” Solomon said to Minnie in the adjoining room. “How much did you bring?”

  “Your fifty and the railway ticket and eight hundred of my own and my rings.”

  “What happens if I lose that too?”

  “Then you must promise to marry me.”

  “Minnie,” he said, inclined to be generous, “you must be thirty years old.”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  “It’s blackmail,” he said, scooping up the money.

  “Now that’s what I call a proposal.”

  IT WAS TIME to open the store.

  “What we should do,” Bernard said, “is hire wagons and move all our stock somewhere safe, because tonight this place may no longer belong to us.”

  “He’s a minor,” Morrie said.

  “Prick. If he signs over the deed and we don’t honour his gambling debt, we’re asking for a fire.”

  Bernard figured he wouldn’t run away without saying goodbye to Lena Green Stockings, so he took the buggy and rode out to the reservation. Kids with scabs on their faces wrestling in the dirt, one of them with rickets. A drunk slumped against a tree trunk outside George Two Axe’s store, scrawny chickens pecking at his vomit. Flies everywhere. Crows fluttering over the entrails of a dead dog, flying off with the ropey bits.

  Bernard entered the tarpaper shack and was enraged to find it stocked with goods that could only have been swiped from A. Gursky & Sons, General Merchants. Tea. Sugar. An open ten-pound bag of flour on a high shelf. He found her out in the back yard, seated on a wicker chair with a broken seat, dozing.

  “Lena!”

  No answer.

  “Lena, Solomon left in such a hurry he forgot to give me his new address.”

  When she finally raised her head, wizened as a walnut, he saw that she no longer had any teeth.

  “It’s important that I have it,” Bernard said, pulling a bottle of rum out of his jacket pocket and waving it in front of her.

  Lena smiled. “It’s the boy with the two belly buttons,” she said, remembering.

  “Jesus Christ! Son of a bitch! Fuck! Everybody looks like that coming out of the swimming hole.”

  Her head began to slump again.

  “Your shack is full of stolen goods. I could tell on you and then they’ll come to lock you up.”

  Lena swatted a fly.

  “Where’s he going?”

  “To see the world.”

  Passing through her shack again, Bernard paused to leave evidence of his passage, and then he went to see Minnie, taking the bar entrance to the hotel to avoid another encounter with Boyd. “I want you to give Solomon a message. Lena Green Stockings told me where he’s planning to run to.”

  “How did you get that flour all over your suit?”

  “Maybe my father won’t go to the police, but I will. You tell him that.”

  Solomon came home three o’clock the next morning and went right to the kitchen sink, stooping to pump cold water over his head. He turned around just in time to see Bernard making a run at him, his arms outstretched, his fingers curled, ready to scratch. Solomon slapped him away and then went to his father and dropped the deed to the general store and a bundle of money tied with an elastic band on to his lap.

  “Some of that money you stole was mine,” Bernard said.

  Emptying his pockets one by one, Solomon piled banknotes on the kitchen table, more money than the Gurskys had ever seen at one time.

  “Big shot,” Bernard said, “it’s a good thing you were lucky for once.”

  Morrie went to make coffee and Bernard sat down to count the money.

  “We are the new owners of the Queen Victoria Hotel and the blacksmith’s shop on Prince Albert Street and a rooming house on Duke. The hotel comes with an eight-thousand-dollar mortgage, now our responsibility. Sell the rooming house. It’s a fire trap. The blacksmith’s shop is for André Clear Sky.”

  “I don’t see any hotel deeds here,” Bernard said.

  Solomon reached into his jacket pocket and tossed the deeds on the table.

  “You’re a good boy,” Aaron said.

  “Like hell he is. He was planning to run away. Me, I stopped him.”

  Solomon waited until his mother had left the kitchen. “I want somebody to wake me up in time for the noon train. I’m going to Winnipeg. I’m joining the army. But please don’t any of you say anything to Maw. I’ll tell her myself.”

  Bernard stood apart, fulminating, as everybody fussed over Solomon at the train station. Minnie and the other whores, Lena, some farm girls whose names he didn’t even know, a drunken McGraw, and Fanny Gursky awash in tears. Then Bernard ate lunch with his father. “I’m registering the hotel in my name, because I’m the eldest.”

  Wearing his homburg, his three-piece suit and spats, Bernard went to see the notary and then had a word with Morrie. “You know Boyd, the fat clerk at the hotel?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Go tell him he’s fired. You’re taking his place.”

  Next Bernard went to the hotel and arranged for a box of chocolates and a victrola to be sent to room twelve, and then he sailed into the bar and sat down at Minnie’s table.

  “If I invited you to sit here,” she said, “remind me.”

  “You better learn to talk nice if you want to continue here. I’m boss now.”

  “It’s Solomon’s hotel.”

  “My kid brother left me in charge. Go to room twelve at once and wait for me there.”

  Minnie was waiting when Bernard entered the bedroom. “Help yourself to a chocolate,” he said. “It’s for you. The whole box. The largest on sale.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you read the funnies?”

  “I look at the pictures,” she said, blushing.

  “My favourite is Krazy Kat, but I also like Abie Kabibble. How’s the chocolate?”

  “Very nice.”

  “It breaks my heart, but the army turned me down. Flat feet. I don’t mind if you tell that to the other girls, but if you repeat anything else that happens here you will not be allowed into the bar again. Now tell me what you like better, waltz or ragtime?”

  “Ragtime.”

  Sweaty, his hand trembling, Bernard nevertheless managed to set the record on the victrola: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”.

  “Are we going to dance first?” Minnie asked.

  “Just you. Taking things off. But not your garter belt or stockings. And you mustn’t look at me, not even a little peek,” he said, reaching for a towel. But the record was finished before he was satisfied.

  “What do I do now?” she asked.

  He put on another record. “I Love My Wife, But, Oh, You Kid.”

  “Now you can get dressed and don’t forget to take your chocolates.”

  “Would you like to do it, honey?”

  “Don’t honey me. I’m Mr. Gursky to you.”

  “Mr. Gursky.
”

  “Do what?”

  “Dress me.”

  “Shit, I know you can’t read, but surely you know how to put your clothes on at your age.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, hold on a minute. If I could do the brassiere I wouldn’t say no.”

  “Oh, Mr. Gursky, chocolate makes my skin break out, but do I ever love Frenchy perfumes and scented soaps and anything made of silk.”

  Once she had gone, Bernard immediately washed his hands with soap and water, using a different towel. Then he curled up on the bed, hot with shame. Later he picked up the incriminating towel with two fingers and took it to room fourteen, which he knew was empty, and left it there. And he decided to punish himself for his indulgence. For the rest of the week, when he popped into Susy’s Lunch to meet Morrie at four o’clock, as was his habit, he took his blueberry pie without ice cream.

  Four

  While Solomon was overseas, during the First World War, Bernard acquired hotels in Regina, Saskatoon, Portage la Prairie, Medicine Hat, Lethbridge, and Winnipeg. Shrewdly, he followed wherever a railway extension was planned, buying hotels close to the yards. The hotels provided beer and breakfast at six, before the railroad men went to work, and solace more appropriate to bachelors when the men drifted back in the evening, their shifts done. The Gurskys’ burgeoning fortunes could be measured by the escalation of the down payments they made on hotels, conscientiously recorded by Morrie, which leapt from $10,000, through $35,000, to $150,000 paid to a certain Bruno Hauswasser for the New Berlin Hotel in Winnipeg, telephones in each of its one hundred rooms, an elevator to every floor, but unfortunately cursed with a restaurant that specialized in wiener schnitzel and sauerbraten, and a bar which had done little business since the Kaiser marched on Belgium. Bernard placed an ad in the Tribune announcing the hotel’s new name, The Victory, and that, as a patriotic gesture, the new Canadian ownership was offering one free beer an evening to nurses.

  The family sold the general store and moved to Winnipeg. Manitoba had already been declared dry, except for Temperance Beer and alcohol “for use for medicinal, scientific, mechanical, industrial or sacramental purposes.” Fortunately, there was a convenient loophole in the law. As interprovincial trade in liquor was still allowed, Bernard acquired a mail-order house in a small town in Ontario, and Morrie became a distributor of something called Rock-a-Bye Cough Cure, which enjoyed an understandably huge sale.

  The outraged drys began to apply more pressure on Ottawa. A Presbyterian minister, back from a visit to the Canadian troops in England, declared that innocent boys were being “debauched by British booze, and by the immoral filth of London.” The Reverend Sidney Lambert sniffed even more iniquity at home. “I would rather Germany wins this war,” he said, “than see these get-rich-quick liquor men rule and damn the young men of Canada.”

  In 1917 the Gurskys were struck not one, but two blows. Ottawa introduced income tax, a nuisance that Bernard chose to ignore. Then, on Christmas eve, the importation of intoxicating liquors over two-and-a-half-percent proof was banned until after the war’s end by an Order-in-Council. Only three months later, in March 1918, another Order-in-Council abolished interprovincial trafficking in liquor.

  Morrie’s memoir of the years that followed was uncommonly evasive, even for him, but, surprisingly, also a touch poetic. “This is no tale of woe,” he wrote, “but as we climbed out of the prairie of toils into the garden of plenty, enjoying our first tasty chunks out of the roast beef of life, Solomon and Bernard began to quarrel bitterly, and I had to intervene more than once. It was in that acid soil that seeds of my future nervous breakdown were planted.”

  Solomon came home in the spring of 1918, wearing a flyingofficer’s uniform, favouring his left leg, and sporting the first of his malacca canes. Bernard sat down with him and laid out all that he had accomplished during his absence. The family holdings, he said, now included nine hotels and two mail-order houses, one in a small town in Ontario and the other in Montreal, and then he looked up, hungering for praise, entitled to it, but gaining only an impatient nod. “Okay,” Bernard roared, “you want me to give it to you straight? In spite of my working sixteen hours a day, since the introduction of the new laws, the mail-order houses aren’t worth a dry fart. And you know what those fucken hotels are good for now? A fire. Insurance money.”

  Solomon sent for copies of the Orders-in-Council, studied them in bed, and the next morning summoned Bernard and Morrie. “We’re going into the wholesale drug business,” he said.

  Wearing his uniform, Solomon took the Manitoba Liberal party bagman to dinner at The Victory Hotel.

  “How I envy you,” the bagman said. “I was desperate to join my regiment, but the prime minister insisted I could do more for the war effort in Ottawa.”

  A girl was provided for the bagman, a considerable tribute was paid, and the necessary licence was forthcoming. An abandoned warehouse was acquired and The Royal Pure Drug Company of Canada was born. Within weeks it was producing Ginger Spit, Dandy Bracer, Dr. Isaac Grant’s Liver & Kidney Cure, Raven Cough Brew, and Tip-Top Fixer among other elixirs. The brew was blended by pouring sugar, molasses, tobacco juice, blue stone and raw alcohol into washtubs and letting it sit overnight. In the morning, once drowned rats had been scooped out with a fishing net, the solution was stirred with an oar, strained, tinted different colours, and bottled.

  Then Solomon discovered another loophole in the law. Given a drug licence, a wholesaler could import real whisky from Scotland without limit, providing it was stored in a bonded warehouse, imported for re-export. Another girl was washed and scented for the bagman, more money was fed into the voracious maw of the Liberal party machine, and warehouses were promptly bought in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec. Railroad carloads of whisky were imported from Scotland.

  And then Solomon had another idea. “Why are we selling other people’s booze when we could make our own?”

  Morrie was sent out to buy mixing vats and bottling equipment, and Solomon set to designing labels and commissioning a printer to produce them. Highland Cream, Crofter’s Delight, Bonnie Brew, Pride of the Highlands, Balmoral Malt, Vat Inverness, Ivanhoe Special Brand. Bernard, armed with a book he had stolen from the library, insisted that he be put in charge of the blending that was to be done in one-thousand-gallon redwood vats and Solomon, amused, agreed to it. But the initial carload of 65 overproof ethyl alcohol shipped to the Winnipeg warehouse presented them with a conundrum, and it was only the first of many carloads expected. If the overproof were to be used in the making of beverage alcohol it would be subject to a tax of $2.40 a gallon, but if, on the other hand, it was to be used to make vinegar the excise tax would be only 27¢ a gallon. Lloyd Corbett, the obese, affable Winnipeg customs agent, explained the problem.

  “What time is it, my good friend?” Bernard asked.

  “Eleven twenty-three.”

  “Come,” Bernard said, and taking him by the arm he led him to the window and pointed at the big, endlessly blue prairie sky. “I tell you what, I’m such a crazy fool, I’m willing to bet you a thousand dollars it rains before noon.”

  Lloyd Corbett sat down again, sorting out his genitals, and then lit his pipe. “Jeez, Bernie, I’m crazier than you are. I’ll bet you two thousand dollars and give you until one o’clock before the first drop falls.”

  While they waited, Bernard fished a bottle of Scotch out of his desk drawer and poured Corbett a large shot. Among them, it was never too early.

  “I’m retiring next month. Going to settle in Victoria. Had enough of these damn winters.”

  “Will Frobisher be taking your place?” Bernard asked, suddenly alert.

  “Nope. He’s going to Ottawa. They’ve already sent in a new fella. Just a kid. His name’s Smith. Bertram Smith.”

  “Well, let me have his address and I’ll send him a case of Johnny Walker Red to welcome him into town.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Bernie, if I was you.”

>   “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Smith’s a teetotaller.”

  “Married?”

  “Nope.”

  “I bet I’ve got just the girl for him.”

  “He’s a regular church-goer, Bernie. A troop leader with the Boy Scouts.”

  Three weeks passed before Bert Smith made his first appearance at the warehouse. At first glance, Bernard took him for another unemployed farm boy looking for a day’s work, he walked so softly and seemed so unsure of himself. Smith was scrawny, dry brown hair parted in the middle, pale as a plucked chicken, grey eyes with pupils like nailheads, blade of a nose blackhead peppery, hardly any lips, just a line there clamped shut, and a receding chin. His suit, too large for him, was neatly pressed and his black leather shoes shone. Once he introduced himself, Bernard grasped why he kept his mouth shut so tight. His crowded teeth were not so much irregular as running off in every which direction, the puffy gums an angry red. And his breath came hot and smelly. “I’m the new customs agent,” Smith said.

  “It’s very thoughtful of you to come by to say hello. What do you say we grab a coffee and a blueberry pie at The Regent?”

  They sat together in a booth.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Saskatoon.”

  “Isn’t that my favourite town?”

  “I came to inquire about the four carloads of bonded whisky you’ve got lying on a railroad siding.”

  “You got a hero, Bert? Jesus aside.”

  “Jesus was not a hero, Mr. Gursky. He is our Saviour.”

  “Goddamn right he is. I meant no disrespect.”

  “Those who do not accept him can never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  Or the Manitoba Club, you little rat, Bernard thought, but never mind. “Risky risky,” he said, “that’s life. And death too, if I take your point correctly.”

  “Yes.”

  “Me, my hero is Baden-Powell. You know, the best years of my life were in the Boy Scouts and it really pains me that the troops here haven’t got a proper meeting hall. We’d like to contribute to that, the Gurskys, and we’d be honoured if you served as treasurer, taking charge of the funds at the committee’s disposal.”