Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  “Right.”

  “And, whatever you do, no whistling at the table. Absolutely no whistling at the table. She can’t stand it.”

  “But I’ve never whistled at the table in my life.”

  Things started badly, Mrs. Mock WASP disapproving of our table. “I should have had my husband make the reservation,” she said.

  It was an effort to begin with, the conversation halting, Mrs. Mock WASP infuriating me by demanding answers to direct questions about my family background, my past, my health, and my prospects, before I eased us into safer territory: the death of Cecil B. DeMille, how enjoyable Cary Grant was in North by Northwest, and the coming Bolshoi Ballet tour. In fact, my behaviour was four-star exemplary until she told me how she had adored Exodus, by Leon Uris, and, all at once, I began to whistle “Dixie.”

  “He’s whistling at the table.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “You.”

  “But I never. Shit, was I?”

  “He didn’t mean to, Mother.”

  “I apologize,” I said, but when the coffee came I was so nervous I found myself suddenly whistling “Lipstick on Your Collar,” one of that year’s hit numbers, stopping abruptly. “I don’t know what’s got into me.”

  “I would like to contribute my share of the bill,” said my future mother-in-law, rising from the table.

  “Barney wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “We come here often. They know us. My husband always tips twelve and a half per-cent.”

  Next there came the dreaded day I was obliged to introduce my father to my future in-laws. My mother was already out of it by this time (not that she was ever deeply into it), wasting in a nursing home, her mind adrift. The walls of her bedroom were plastered with signed photographs of George Jessel, Ishkabibble, Walter Winchell, Jack Benny, Charlie McCarthy, Milton Berle, and the Marx Brothers: Groucho, Harpo, and, you know, the other one.41 It’s on the tip of my tongue. Never mind. The last time I had been to see my mother she had told me that a male orderly had tried to rape her. She called me Shloime, her dead brother’s name, and I fed her chocolate ice cream out of a tub, her favourite, assuring her that it wasn’t poisoned. Dr. Bernstein said she was suffering from Alzheimer’s, but I mustn’t worry, it needn’t be hereditary.

  In preparation for the visit of Mr. and Mrs. Mock WASP to my house, I drew a “W” with a ballpoint on my right hand, a reminder not to whistle. I purchased appropriate books and left them lying about: the latest Harry Golden, a biography of Herzl, the new Herman Wouk, a photo book on Israel. I bought a chocolate cake at Aux Délices. Filled the fruit bowl. Hid the liquor. Unpacked a box of hideous china cups and saucers I had acquired only that morning and set five places with linen napkins. I vacuumed. Plumped up the sofa cushions. And anticipating that her mother would find an excuse to look into my bedroom, I checked it out inch by inch for hairs that did not belong to me. Then I brushed my teeth for the third time, hoping to kill the Scotch smell. Mr. and Mrs. Mock WASP, as well as their daughter, were already seated in the living room when my father finally arrived. Izzy was impeccably dressed in the clothes I had chosen for him at Holt Renfrew, but, as a small act of rebellion, he had added a touch distinctively his own. He was wearing his snappy soft felt fedora with that ridiculous, multicoloured brush in the brim large enough to serve as a duster. He also reeked of Old Spice and was in a mood to reminisce about his old days on the beat in Chinatown. “We was young fellers, pretty smart, and we soon learned us a few words of China. We watched from the rooftops when they made their trades. Then you could tell if they was smoking, because they always hung wet blankets on the street, due to the smell. Barney, would you pour me a Scotch, please,” he said, pushing away his teacup.

  “I don’t know if I have any,” I hissed, glaring at him.

  “Yeah, and there’s no coal in Newcastle,” he said, pronouncing the “t,”

  “or snow in the Yukon.”

  So I fetched him a bottle and a glass.

  “What about you? Aren’t you drinking this afternoon?”

  “No.”

  “L’chaim,” said Izzy, belting one down, my own throat dry. “There was girls involved, you know. Oh yes, it was — Christ — now you take the average French-Canadian family, I don’t know about today but years ago they had ten or fifteen kids, so you know, they had nothing to eat, so they used to send the girls down there and one would bring another and you come in, you raid some place, you know, and you found four–five Chinamen with four–five girls, Christ, they’d even give them dope, you know. There was a lot of opium then. I’m talking 1932, when, you know, our entire detective force had only one automobile, a two-seater Ford.” Izzy paused to slap his knee. “If we catch us two crooks, you know, we’d just throw them across the hood and put the handcuffs on, and vroom-vroom, off we go. They’d be laying there like deer, you know, when you go hunting, they just lay on the hood.”

  “But the engine was under it,” said my future bride. “Wasn’t it hot?”

  “We weren’t going very far. Just to headquarters. And anyways I didn’t feel it,” said Izzy, chuckling. “They was on there.”

  “On second thought,” I said, not daring to look at my future in-laws, “I just might have a wee drink myself.” And I reached for the bottle.

  “Are you sure, darling?”

  “I feel a cold coming on.”

  Izzy now cleared his throat, and shot a wad of snot into one of my new linen napkins. Bull’s-eye. I sneaked a glance at my future mother-in-law, attracted by her rattling teacup.

  “We’d arrest a guy, we’d take him downstairs to open him up, if you know what I mean?”

  “You weren’t gratuitously violent with suspected felons, were you, Inspector Panofsky?”

  Izzy looked pained. “Gratuitously?”

  “Unnecessarily,” I said.

  “No fucken way, mister. I condoned it. Absolutely. But, you know, it’s human nature, when a feller is young, you give him authority, he likes to push people around. But when I was young I didn’t, because I knew my name was Panofsky.”

  “But how did you get suspects to talk, Inspector?” asked my future father-in-law, looking directly at his daughter, as if to say, are you prepared to marry into such a family?

  “I got my ways and means how.”

  “How time flies,” I said, glancing pointedly at my wristwatch. “It’s almost six o’clock.”

  “You lay down the law to them. They don’t want to talk, you take them down below.”

  “Then what transpires, Inspector?”

  “Well, we get this feller in the room, we slam the bloody door and then we start to throw chairs around. You know, scare the shit out of them. Maybe I step on his toes. Come clean, I shout.”

  “What happens if, perchance, it’s a woman you take downstairs?”

  “Well I never remember — I’m sincere when I tell you about this — I never remember beating a woman, we never had occasion to, but if you get a tough guy, in many instances I could tell you …”

  “Dad, may I have the bottle back, please?”

  “Darling, should you?”

  “Let me give you another for instance. In 1951 this was, I found those bearded rabbinical students were being beaten up outside their school on Park Avenue by all those punks. Just because they were Jews. Well, those punks they see you and I, well they doubt a little bit because we may not look too much like Jews, and we don’t act it, but when they see a guy all dressed up, you know … Anyways their leader, this Hungarian roughneck, just off the boat, was caught, and I drove him to Station 17 to have a look at him. He’s got those boots on, you know those big boots, rough as hell, I shut the door. What’s your name, I says? I don’t care about anybody, he says in that accent they have. His English is terrible. So I slammed him good, mister. Down he goes. He passes out. Jesus Christ. I thought he would die. I tried to give him first aid. You know what passed through my mind? Just imagine … JEW POLICE OFFICER KILLS … if the guy died.
So I rushed up an ambulance and we get him to come to …”

  Then, even as Izzy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and was about to embark on another for instance, I was driven to take a desperate measure. I started to whistle. But this time, in deference to my future mother-in-law, something cultural, the “La donna è mobile” aria from Rigoletto. That succeeded in clearing the house of both my future in-laws and my bride. Following their hasty departure, Izzy said, “Hey, congrats. They’re very nice people. Warm. Intelligent. I enjoyed talking to them. How’d I do?”

  “I think you made an unforgettable impression.”

  “I’m glad you brought me here to look them over. I’m not a cop all these years for nothing. They’re loaded. I could tell. Demand a dowry, kid.”

  5

  Hey, nonny-nonny, here’s a hot one, plucked from this morning’s Globe and Mail:

  PROBATION FOR “DEVOTED”

  WIFE WHO KILLED HUSBAND

  Caring for sick man “intolerable burden” after 49 years’ marriage

  A devoted 75-year-old wife who killed her seriously ill husband shortly before the couple’s golden wedding anniversary walked free from the High Court in Edinburgh yesterday.

  The poor dear was placed on probation for two years after she admitted that she had suffocated her husband with a pillow in their home last June before trying to commit suicide with a drug overdose. The court heard that she and her husband had been a “devoted and loving couple” for forty-nine years. But after hubbie, that inconsiderate boor, suffered a massive heart attack and had chronic kidney failure, the burden of nursing him had become too much for his wife, and made her suffer from depression. Tch-tch. The lawyer42 said that caring for her husband had become “an increasingly intolerable burden.” The night of the killing, he said, the husband had been getting out of bed and she ordered him to return to it, but he refused. She slapped him and, after he fell, put the pillow over his face and smothered him. The Lord Justice Clerk said he was satisfied it would not be appropriate to impose a prison sentence. “This is a truly tragic case,” he said. “You find yourself facing a situation with which you could not cope. It is clear that you committed this crime at a time when you were suffering from the mental illness of depression under considerable strain.”

  This poignant tale of true love gone awry among the seniorboppers put me in mind of one of my few surviving septuagenarian buddies, and so that afternoon I bought a box of handmade Belgian chocolates in Westmount Square, and went to visit Irv Nussbaum, now seventy-nine years old, yet frisky as ever, and still active in community affairs. Irv, bless him, was angst-ridden about the fate of our people, but uppermost in his mind was the coming referendum. Only yesterday The Weasel’s most rabid pointman had warned les autres that if we voted No massively we would be punished. “That’s good news,” said Irv, “because that prick must have started at least another thousand nervy Jews packing. I’m grateful. Now if only they’d opt for Tel Aviv rather than Toronto or Vancouver.”

  “Irv, what’s to be done with you, you’re a terrible old man.”

  “Remember how when we were young the pepsis43 marched down the Main chanting ‘Death to the Jews,’ and Le Devoir read like it got its ideas from Julius Streicher? Do you recall how in those days there were all those restricted hotels in the Laurentians, and a Jew couldn’t even get a job as a cashier in one of the banks here, never mind marry out. Like damn fools we complained about it. We fought discrimination bitterly. But, with hindsight, it was a blessing, anti-Semitism, if you feel as deeply as I do about Israel and Jewish survival.”

  “Do you think we ought to bring back pogroms?”

  “Ho ho ho. I kid you not. Now we’re accepted, even welcomed just about everywhere, and the young think nothing of marrying a shiksa. Look around, will you. These days there are Jews serving on the boards of banks, and on the Supreme Court, and even in the cabinet in Ottawa. That Gursky suck-hole Harvey Schwartz sits in the Senate. The lasting problem with the Holocaust is that it made anti-Semitism unfashionable. Ah, the whole world’s gone topsy-turvy. I mean you’re a drunk today, what is it? A disease. You murder your parents, sneaking up behind them with shotguns and blasting their heads off, like those two kids in California, what do you need? Understanding. You slit your wife’s throat and you walk because you’re black. Excuse me, African-American. You’re a homosexual now and you expect to be married by a rabbi. Once that was the love that dared not speak its name, but you know what mustn’t show its face today? Anti-Semitism. Listen here, my old friend, we didn’t survive Hitler so that our children could assimilate and the Jewish people disappear. Tell me something. Do you think Duddy Kravitz will beat the charges this time?”

  “Insider trading is difficult to prove.”

  The last time I ran into Duddy, attended by a bimbo of a secretary, was at the airport in Toronto. “Hey, Panofsky, you going to London, let’s sit together.”

  “Actually, I’m flying to New York, where I’m going to pick up the Concorde,” I said, hastily adding that it was not me, but MCA, that was paying for the ticket.

  “You think I can’t afford the Concorde? Shmuck. I’ve done it and I don’t like it. You fly the Concorde everybody on it is worth millions. D.K. likes to go first class on a 747 flying out of Montreal, so that I can stroll back through club and economy and all those shits who used to look down their nose at me can see how well I’m doing and choke on it.”

  Irv went on to say, “I even hope their fucken Parti Québécois wins the referendum this time and scares the hell out of the Jews who still remain here. Only I want them going to Tel Aviv, Haifa, or Jerusalem this time. Yes. Before Israel is overwhelmed by Ethiopian blacks or those new Russian immigrants, most of whom are not even Jewish. How about that? Seven hundred and fifty thousand Russian immigrants. Israel itself could soon become just another goyishe country. But, for all that, the Israelis are now the only anti-Semites we can still count on. Let’s face it, they hate diaspora Jews. You speak a word of Yiddish there, they want to flush you down the toilet. ‘Oh, you must be one of those ghetto Jews.’ After all these years of fund-raising, and I must be personally responsible for at least fifty million squeezed out of here over the years, and I go over there and they tell me I’m a bad Jew because my children haven’t settled there and don’t serve on the front lines.”

  Entry in Panofsky’s Ledger of Ironies:

  My first wife, Clara, had no time for other women and is enjoying an afterlife as a feminist icon, but it is The Second Mrs. Panofsky, that yenta still bent on my imprisonment for murder, who is now the militant feminist. I keep tabs on her, and I have learned that every Passover she joins six other rejected wives, latter-day Boadiceas, for a women’s Seder. They begin by toasting the Shekhinah, which is the female aspect of God, according to the Cabbala. Lifting the plate with the matzohs, they chant:

  This is the Seder plate.

  The plate is flat. Woman is flat, like a plate,

  flat in the relief of history …

  They go on to chant:

  Why have our mothers on this night

  been bitter?

  Because they did the preparation but

  not the ritual. They did the serving but

  not the conducting. They read of their

  fathers but not of their mothers.

  According to the women warriors who composed this travesty of the Haggadah, Miriam, the sister of Moses, never got a fair shake. Where in Exodus, for instance, was the story of Miriam’s well? On the cutting-room floor, that’s where. But, according to rabbinical legend, it was in Miriam’s honour that a well of sweet water followed the children of Israel through the desert. And when Miriam died, the well dried up and disappeared.

  The daughter of Rabbi Gamaliel said: “There is anger in our heritage. In the desert Miriam and Aaron asked, ‘Is Moses the only one with whom the Lord has spoken? Has he not spoken with us as well?’ The Lord passed among them and left Miriam white with leprosy but Aaron unharme
d. Miriam was treated like the wicked daughter whose father spat in her face and sent her from the tent for seven days until she was forgiven.”

  Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire. I spit in Blair’s face, never yours.

  Miriam’s birthday today. Her sixtieth. Were she still with me, she would have been served breakfast in bed. Roederer Crystal champagne, Beluga caviar, not to mention sixty long-stemmed roses, and gifts of silk lingerie, elegant but naughty. Maybe that overpriced pearl choker I saw at Birk’s. Instead, I imagine Herr Doktor Professor Hopper would splurge on an air-pollution testing kit. Or perhaps a pair of sensible shoes with no animal leather content. No, I’ve got it. He’s giving her a record of whale music. Har, har, har.

  I was supposed to be meeting somebody for lunch, but I couldn’t remember where or with whom, and I didn’t dare phone Chantal to check it out as she was already sufficiently suspicious of my occasional memory lapses, which are nothing to worry about. It’s common to people of my age. So I phoned Le Mas des Oliviers to find out if I had a reservation there. No. Neither had I booked L’Express or the Ritz. Then Chantal phoned. “I’m calling to remind you that you have a date for lunch today. Do you remember where?”

  “Of course I do. Don’t be impertinent.”

  “Or with whom?”

  “Chantal, I could fire you just like that.”

  “It’s with Norman Freedman and you’re supposed to meet him at Moishe’s at one. Or I could be lying, and it’s with my mother at Chez Gauthier. But since you remember anyway, no problem. Bye-bye now.”

  Norman Freedman had been among the more than two hundred guests who came to my wedding at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Black tie, evening gowns. Boogie stoned and me blasted, my mood vile, as I longed to be in my seat in the reds in the Forum. Damn damn damn. The Canadiens could clinch their fourth Stanley Cup in a row in my absence. But there was nothing to be done, because by the time I had discovered that I was double-booked it was too late to postpone the wedding. And, remember, the 1959 Club de hockey canadien was one of the greatest teams of all time. Consider the line-up: Jacques Plante in the nets, Doug Harvey, Tom Johnson, and Jean-Guy Talbot minding the blue line, and, up front, Maurice and Henri Richard, Bernie Geoffrion, Dickie Moore, Phil Goyette, Ab McDonald, and Ralph Backstrom. But, alas, the Canadiens were without their best playmaker for the cup finals. Big Jean Beliveau had taken a bad fall in the third game against Chicago in the semifinals, and was out for the rest of the season.