Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  — 5 to 2, but it could turn out to be a costly —

  “Am I boring you?”

  “No.”

  “Then put your paper down, if you don’t mind.”

  “It’s down.”

  — to be a costly win, because Phil Goyette was cross-checked by Stan Mikita —

  “You’re reading again.”

  “You started to tell me about your dream.”

  “I know exactly what I started to tell you about, and I’ll get to the point in my own good time. I didn’t know we were in such a hurry here. Boy, did you ever make a racket when you finally got in last night. That hockey game must have gone on for eighteen periods instead of the usual three, judging by the time you got in, and how did you tear your shirt I’d like to know. No. I’d rather not know. But that reminds me, your behaviour, there’s something I have to ask you. We’re going to my parents for Shabbat dinner on Friday night, you’re not getting out of it this time. Oh, I know it’s a big imposition, you have to wear a suit, but my father always has the very best single malts there just to please you. Oh, I forgot. The new maid served it with ice in your glass last time you came. Off with her head, eh? The truth is I could cut out my tongue, because I was once foolish enough to tell you my mother simply cannot stand whistling at the table. You don’t do it here or anywhere else. Never, never. But sit down at our family table on a Friday night and before we have even finished the gefilte fish, you could be auditioning for The Ed Sullivan Show or something. So this Friday at the table will you please, please, please not whistle ‘Mair-zy Doats’ or ‘Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don’t Want to Leave the Congo,’ or some idiot tune by Spike Jones. You find that funny? Something to laugh about? Well, fuck you. My father is still waiting for the results of that biopsy, and if it comes back positive I don’t know what I’ll do, I think I’ll die. Where was I?”

  “Sixteen is where you were, with a pigtail.”

  “That was the year of my Sweet Sixteen dinner dance at the temple. I wore a white taffeta dress from Bergdorf Goodman, with matching gloves and silk stockings, and high-heeled shoes. My father took one look and his eyes filled with tears. Mr. Bernard and his wife came to the dinner, and so did the Bernsteins and the Katanskys and —”

  “What did they serve?” I asked, my smile menacing.

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “I’m interested.”

  “In anything that means something to me? Yeah, sure. And you never laid a hand on one of your shiksa so-called actresses and you didn’t drink a drop last night. Right? Wrong. Well, for your information, it was catered by Monsieur Henri, no expense spared. He was a Sephardic Jew from Morocco, but not one of your greasy ones. He was extremely polite. Very sophisticated. Introduce him to a lady and he would kiss her hand, without actually touching it. Then it turned out his only son was an epileptic, and it broke his heart. He began to drink and his business went downhill. Don’t give me that look. Spare me. I know it doesn’t interfere with your work. Not yet anyway. In fact, in your case, I would say it’s your work that interferes with your drinking. No reaction? What do I have to do to get you to crack a smile? Stand on my head? Take off my panties in Eaton’s window? Something that young actress you’re so fond of, that Solange woman, could never do. I’m told she doesn’t wear any and I’m looking at the guy who I’m sure could confirm that one way or another. Yes? No? Never mind. Back in those days Monsieur Henri’s business was burgeoning and he catered a lot of affairs that weren’t even Jewish. Old families in Westmount who wouldn’t have a Jew, even one as cultured as my father, in one of their clubs booked him for their daughters’ coming-out parties and all sorts of events that make the social column in the Gazette. Oh, look at you. Impatient already. I’d better stick to the point, eh? Or you’ll soon tell me you have to go to the toilet urgently, taking your newspaper with you, but I happen to know you’ve already been this morning, and how. So next time would you remember to spray, that’s what it’s for, you know. Look at it like this. Not every bottle is to drink from. No smile as per usual. No ha ha ha. You don’t think that was witty. Only you can make jokes. Okay, okay. Tara-taratara. The menu. We started with foie de poulet, served in a cucumber canoe, and surrounded by sour-pickle slivers and flower petals. My Aunt Fanny didn’t know what they were, and ate them all, it became a family joke for years. My father would take us to dinner at the Café Martin, there would be a vase with flowers in the middle of the table, and he would wink and say, ‘It’s a good thing Aunt Fanny isn’t here.’

  “At my Sweet Sixteen boys dressed like Bedouins went from table to table with baskets of chocolate-chip and cinnamon and raspberry and lemon bagels, which nobody had ever seen before. It was Monsieur Henri’s invention. The soup was some kind of bouillon, but ooh so fragrant, with itsy-bitsy heart-shaped balls of minced veal, wrapped in paper-thin dough, floating in it. Then everybody was served a little peppermint sherbet to clear the palate, and some of the older guests began to mutter, they thought the meal was over, they weren’t going to get a main course. The main course was rack of spring lamb, sitting on a bed of couscous, and garnished with apple fritters. Afterwards there were date squares and pecan fingers and quartered fresh figs and strawberries dipped in chocolate, everything spilling out of a biscuit crust shaped like a hunter’s horn.

  — by Stan Mikita early in the first period —

  “My father gave me an onyx ring and a pearl necklace with matching bracelet and earrings. I had it valued at Birk’s, don’t look at me like that, I’m not mercenary, I had to, for the insurance, and it was worth fifteen hundred altogether, and I’m talking 1947, never mind now. He also gave me a sterling silver vanity set from Mappin and Webb that still sits on my dressing-table, and would you please not put down your whisky glasses there any more, it leaves rings on the antique leather, not that you care. My grandmother gave me my first mink jacket with matching muff, who wears them now, eh? But I wouldn’t part with it for anything. You’re reading again.”

  “I am not.”

  “Then why did you move your coffee cup just now?”

  “Because I spilled some.”

  “Tell me something. You go to a hockey game on Thursday night, you see what’s going on, you know who scored the goals, but first thing the next morning you turn to the sports pages. Why? You think the score is going to be different in the Gazette?”

  “You were going to tell me about your dream.”

  “You’re not interested in my dream.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Because it was about you?”

  “I didn’t bring it up, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m interested in. Sylvia Hornstein saw you in the lingerie department of Holt Renfrew two weeks ago, and says she saw you buy a silk negligée, and had it gift-wrapped, and then — and this I found interesting — had it wrapped over again in brown paper — as if it was going to be mailed to somebody. So obviously it wasn’t for me. Who for, then?”

  “As a matter of fact —”

  “Oh boy, is this ever going to be good!”

  “— Irv Nussbaum’s anniversary is coming up, and he phoned me from Calgary and asked me to get it for his wife and mail it to her here.”

  “Liar, liar, liar.”

  “This is outrageous.”

  “Which of your so-called actresses wore it for you last night, you didn’t get in until four a.m.”

  “As it happens, I was out with John and Zack last night, and you can check that out if you like.”

  “You can go straight to hell,” she said, leaping up.

  — it was the fire-wagon Habs taking the play to the Hawks. First it was Big Jean Beliveau feeding Dickie Moore in the slot, then it was Boom-Boom beating Glenn Hall on his glove side with a forty-footer the Hawk netminder would like to have back, and then Beliveau, taking a long pass from Doug Harvey, skated in all alone on Hall. Bang bang bang, 5–1 for the good guys.

  14

  The Second Mrs.
Panofsky pounded on my shower door. “It’s the phone,” she said. “Your father.”

  Izzy said, “You were going to take me to the hockey game tonight? Big treat. The fucken Rangers. Probably you couldn’t find another customer. Well, I can’t go. Neither can you.” Then he paused to blow his nose. “It’s over.”

  “What’s over?”

  “Your poor mother’s suffering. She passed away in her sleep last night and I’m heartbroken.”

  “Don’t give me that.”

  “Hey, show some respect. You should have seen her when we got hitched. She was a number. We had our little tiffs over the years, who doesn’t, but she always kept a clean house. I had no complaints in that department.”

  But I had some complaints in mine. My father was seldom home when I was a boy. For supper I ate macaroni and cheese most nights, but on special occasions my mother boiled hot dogs served with lumpy-mashed-potato pyramids covered with corn flakes. She did do one thing for me, registering me for a tap-dance class with Mr. Jeepers Creepers, who had twice been charged with molesting boys. It was her fondest hope that I would appear on “Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour,” and be discovered, but she lost interest when I bombed in audition for a local show. The closest I ever came to her was when she was already out of it in the hospital. I would shut the door to her room, don my straw boater, twirl my cane, and tap-dance round her bed, singing “Shoofly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy” or “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,” another of her favourites. She would squeal, and clap her hands, tears sliding down her cheeks, and my mood would seesaw from joy, for having reached my mother at last, to rage at her for being so damn stupid.

  Izzy wept at the funeral, if only for the benefit of her two brothers and their wives, who had flown in from Winnipeg where my mother came from. My uncles, whom I hadn’t seen since my bar mitzvah, were respectable people. Milty was a paediatrician and Eli, a lawyer, and they both warmed to The Second Mrs. Panofsky immediately. “I understand,” said Uncle Eli, “that your father is a good friend of Mr. Bernard’s. He’s going to speak at a fund-raiser in our synagogue next week. Tell your father if I can be of any help, I’m at Mr. Bernard’s service.”

  The Second Mrs. Panofsky hastily explained that her parents were travelling in Europe, or of course they would have been at the funeral.

  “Should business ever bring your father to Winnipeg, he has a friend there now. You tell him that.”

  My uncles had always disapproved of my father and been embarrassed by my mother, whom they took to be the family idiot. All the same, Uncle Milty asked my father, “Where will you be sitting shiva?”

  “My own philosophy, speaking personally, is modern,” said Izzy. “I don’t go in for the religious hocus-pocus.”

  Relieved, my aunts and uncles made arrangements to fly home. I dropped off The Second Mrs. Panofsky at our house, and drove my father on to Dink’s, where we could mourn together in Panofsky fashion. Only after we were well into it did Izzy begin to sniffle, dabbing at his eyes with a filthy handkerchief. “I’m never going to marry again. Ever.”

  “Who in the hell would put up with an old fart like you?”

  “You’d be surprised, kiddo. She loved you, you know. When she was pregnant, you were an accident, you know.”

  “Oh?”

  “She was pregnant, worried about her figure, I said you want an abortion, I can arrange it. Naw, she said. She wanted to call you Skeezix, after the kid in Gasoline Alley, but I put my foot down and we settled on Barney, after Barney Google.”

  “You mean I’m named after a character in a comic strip?”

  “She hoped one day you would grow up to be a radio personality.”

  “Like Charlie McCarthy or Mortimer Snerd?”

  “Come on. Those was dummies. Hey, even a spot on Canadian radio would have pleased her. She never missed a ‘Happy Gang’ show. Remember? Bert Pearl. Kay Stokes. That bunch.”

  “Do you need any money, Daddy?”

  “I’ve got my health, you can’t buy that with millions. What I need is a job. I went to see the mayor of Côte-St Luc. How about it, I said? Izzy, he said, I’m a Jew and the alderman is a Jew. It wouldn’t look good to have a Jewish cop too. The goyim would talk. You know how they are. He had a point. When I was a youngster, I discovered that they even used to resent Al Jolson. He’s not a real nigger, they’d say. It’s make-up.”

  “Daddy, I don’t know what I’d do without you. You don’t need a job. I’m going to tear apart our basement and turn it into a self-contained apartment for you.”

  “Yeah, sure. Your missus would really go for that.”

  As Izzy anticipated, The Second Mrs. Panofsky was furious when I told her I was going to convert the basement into a flat for him. “I won’t have that animal here,” she said.

  “He’s my father. I don’t like to think of him all alone in a rented room at his age.”

  “How would you like it if mine moved in, he’s so sick, a day goes by he doesn’t see me, he’s miserable.”

  The move from a seedy rooming-house on Dorchester to a squeaky-clean, all-mod-con flat on a tree-lined street in suburban Hampstead did not intimidate my father. He made himself at home at once. Within weeks his planned kitchen reeked of stale farts and White Owl cigars and Chinese takeout food mouldering on abandoned paper plates. No sitting-room chair was without its stack of magazines and newspapers (True Detective, The National Enquirer, The Police Gazette, Playboy)60, the magazine cover corners unfailingly ripped off, having served as makeshift toothpicks while he watched Perry Mason or Have Gun, Will Travel. His bed was perpetually unmade and orange peels and sunflower seeds and chunks of sour pickle and cigar butts filled ashtrays to the overflow. Empty rye and beer bottles rode every surface.

  I adamantly refused The Second Mrs. Panofsky’s request to attach a lock to the kitchen door that opened on to an interior staircase to my father’s flat. Poor Izzy. The intrepid cop who had wrestled second-storey men to the ground, chased bank robbers down lanes, flattened drug dealers with his left hook, and cracked the skulls of muggers with his revolver butt feared The Second Mrs. P. as he had no lawbreaker. Only if he heard me moving about solo would Izzy mount the stairs tippytoe, open the kitchen door tentatively, and ask, “Is the coast clear, kid?”

  “She’s out.”

  Grabbing a glass, Izzy would make straight for the liquor cabinet in the dining room.

  “Careful, Daddy. She marks the level of each bottle with a pencil.”

  “Hey, you’re talking to a detective.”

  “So these days I pour myself a single malt,” I said, looking him in the eye, “there’s no need to add water. It’s already been done for me.”

  “It’s the new maid. Boy, is she ever a prude.”

  “Goddamn it, Daddy, you haven’t —”

  “I never laid a hand on her, I don’t care what she says.”

  Izzy especially enjoyed Wednesdays, the night The Second Mrs. Panofsky went to visit her parents in order to avoid my weekly poker game. I would usually be joined by Marv Guttman, Sid Cooper, Jerry Feigelman, Hershey Stein, and Nate Gold. I remember one Wednesday in particular, the one where Irv Nussbaum filled in for the absent Nate Gold. Shuffling the cards, Irv beamed at Marv. “Well now, did you and Sylvia enjoy yourselves in Israel?”

  “It’s unreal. We had a marvellous time. I tell you what they’re doing there …”

  “What they’re doing there,” said Irv, addressing the group as he began to deal, “is costing untold millions, and this year everyone, and I mean everyone, is going to have to get behind the bond drive as never before.”

  “It’s been a lousy year for us,” said Hershey.

  “The worst,” said Jerry.

  “And with the cost of materials today,” said Marv.