Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Tell me. Maybe I can help.”

  “Honestly, Miriam, I —”

  “The way you cough in bed these nights. Those cigars. Are you hiding something from me and the children that Morty Herscovitch told you?”

  “I haven’t got lung cancer yet, if that’s what you mean.” And that’s when I broke down and told her what had happened. “I’m so sorry. I’m absolutely miserable. It meant nothing to me.”

  “I see.”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “It never would have happened if you weren’t available,” she said, and then she went to pack a suitcase.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Please, Miriam. We have a life.”

  “Had. And I’m grateful for it. But before you can corrupt it any further and I end up hating you —”

  “We can work this out. Please, my darling.”

  But there was no point, because Miriam was twelve-years old again. Looking me in the eye it was her father she saw. Humping factory girls. Trolling downtown bars.

  “Why do you put up with him?” Miriam had asked.

  “What should I do?” her mother had answered, bent over her sewing machine.

  Miriam would not be so helpless. “I need some time alone,” she said to me.

  “I’ll do anything you want. I’ll sell the business and we’ll retire to a villa in Provence or Tuscany.”

  “Then what will you do all day, a man with your energy? Build model airplanes? Play bridge?”

  She reminded me of the last time I had promised to ease up with a hobby. I had hired a contractor to build a state-of-the-art workshop on our country property, and equipped it with a complete set of Black & Decker tools. I made one lopsided bookcase, cutting my hand with a power saw, requiring fourteen stitches, and had used the workshop for storage ever since.

  “We’ll travel. I’ll read. We’ll manage, Miriam.”

  “Barney, you only pretend to hate your production company. The truth is you love the deal-making and the money and the power you enjoy over the people who work for you.”

  “I could go to my bank and help them with an employees’ buyout. Miriam, you can’t leave me over a stupid one-night stand.”

  “Barney, I’m weary of pleasing everybody. You. The children. Your friends. You’ve been making all the decisions for me ever since we married. I’d like to make some decisions of my own, good or bad, before I’m too old.”

  Once Miriam had moved into a bachelor apartment in Toronto, and resumed full-time work for CBC Radio, she sent Saul round to pack and collect her things.

  “Whoever would have thought it would come to this,” I said, offering my son a drink.

  “You miserable old bastard, I’m glad she left you. You never deserved a woman of such quality. The way you treated her. How you took her for granted. Shit shit shit. Now you have to show me which of all these books and records are hers.”

  “Take whatever you want. Pack the lot. Now that I’ve raised a family of ungrateful children, and my wife has abandoned me, I’m not going to need a big house like this any more. I think I’ll sell out and move into an apartment downtown.”

  “We had a family. A real family. And you fucked it up and I’ll never forgive you for that.”

  “I’m still your father, you know.”

  “There’s nothing I can do about that.”

  Kate pleaded with Miriam, unavailingly, to forgive me my embarrassing lapse, and Mike refused to take sides. I flew to Toronto every weekend and took Miriam out to dinner, and made her laugh, and began to suspect that she was enjoying this second courtship as much as I was. “We’re having such a good time together. Why don’t you fly home with me?”

  “And ruin everything?”

  So I risked another tactic. I told Miriam that if she wanted a divorce, she would have to make the arrangements, I would have nothing to do with it, but she could have whatever she wanted. I would sign anything her lawyers presented me with. Meanwhile, I added, we still had a joint bank account, and she must continue to use it as she saw fit. Instead, humiliating me, she allowed that she had drawn ten thousand dollars on the account, which she considered a loan, but she had also written to the bank, returning her chequebooks and volunteering that her signature was no longer valid for our account.

  “What are you going to live on, for Christ’s sake?”

  “My salary.”

  “You’re no longer a young woman, you know.”

  “But you have already made that abundantly clear, haven’t you, darling?”

  Mike phoned: “I want you to know we’ve invited Mummy to come over and stay with us for a while, but that invitation holds good for you too.”

  Kate said: “She starts on a story about a trip you made together to Venice and Madrid, and then she bursts into tears. Hang in there, Daddy. Keep plugging away.”

  Friends tried to cheer me up. Women Miriam’s age, they assured me, often did squirrelly things before they settled down. Be patient, she would soon come home. The Nussbaums were foolish enough to invite me to dinners, providing a sparkly widow or divorcée whom I insulted gratuitously. “My wife never found it necessary to dye her hair, and she is still beautiful. Mind you, I suppose the loss of beauty is not something that ever troubled you.”

  O’Hearne reported at Dink’s: “Your Second Mrs. Panofsky took the news well. She hopes the divorce costs you a fortune. And that it brings on a stroke or a heart attack.”

  “God bless her. Oh, incidentally, I’m thinking of committing another murder.”

  Blair was the candidate. I had phoned Miriam to say I would be arriving in Toronto late Friday night. “I can’t see you this Saturday, Barney,” she said. “I promised to go to North Carolina with Blair for the weekend. He’s presenting a paper at Duke.”

  I had Chantal phone Duke’s Department of Canadian Studies, pretending to be Blair’s secretary, saying he had mislaid the paper with his hotel reservations. Where was he staying? The Washington Duke Hotel. Next I insisted Chantal phone the Washington Duke to ask for a confirmation of Professor Hopper’s reservations. “We have a single room booked for Dr. Hopper and another for Mrs. Panofsky,” said the clerk.

  “Feel better?” asked Chantal.

  I invited Solange out to dinner. “What can she see in that prick?” I asked.

  “I’ll bet he doesn’t correct or contradict her at dinner parties. Possibly he is considerate rather than ill-tempered. Maybe he makes her feel cherished.”

  “But I love Miriam. I need her.”

  “What if she doesn’t need you any more? It happens, you know.”

  Six months passed before she moved in with Blair Hopper né Hauptman, and I thought I would go out of my mind. Imagining them in bed together, that bastard daring to fondle her breasts. One drunken night in our empty Westmount house, I swept crockery off the kitchen shelves, tore pictures off the walls, overturned tables, smashed chairs against the floor until the legs broke off, and took out our TV with one swing of a floor lamp. I knew how much of Miriam’s love and thoughtfulness had gone into the acquisition of even the tiniest item in our home, and I hoped the racket I was making, destroying what she had put together, could be heard even in that sin-bin she was sharing with Blair in Toronto. The next morning with rue my heart was laden. I collected some of her favourite pieces, hoping they had not been splintered beyond repair, and hired a furniture restorer to mend them. “Do you mind if I inquire as to what transpired here?” he asked.

  “Break-in. Vandals.”

  I moved into this downtown apartment, but couldn’t bring myself to sell the house at once, just in case. I could not abide the idea of strangers in what had once been our bedroom. Or some mod-con yuppie bitch installing a microwave oven in the kitchen where Miriam had baked croissants to perfection, or cooked osso buco even as she helped Saul with his homework and kept an eye on Kate banging pots together in her playpen.
I certainly wasn’t going to tolerate a dentist, or a stockbroker, tramping on the living-room carpet on which we had made love more than once. Nobody was going to taint our bookshelves with the collected works of Tom Clancy or Sidney Sheldon. I didn’t want some oaf playing Nirvana at ten thousand decibels in the room where Miriam had retired to the chaise longue at three a.m. to nurse Kate, while she listened to Glenn Gould, the sound turned down low so as not to waken me. I had no idea what to do with a basement closet full of skates and hockey sticks and crosscountry skis and boots. Or the white wicker bassinet that had seen Miriam through three pregnancies. Or Mike’s abandoned attempt at making his own electric guitar.

  Striding up and down in my apartment in the early morning hours, drinking alone, pulling on my umpteenth Montecristo of the day, I shut my eyes and summoned up Miriam as she appeared at my wedding to The Second Mrs. Panofsky. The most enchanting woman I had ever seen. Long hair black as a raven’s wing. Striking blue eyes to die for. Wearing a blue chiffon cocktail dress, and moving about with the most astonishing grace. Oh that dimple in her cheek. Those bare shoulders.

  — I’ve got two tickets for tomorrow’s flight to Paris in my jacket pocket. Come with me.

  — You can’t be serious.

  — ‘Come live with me and be my love.’ Please, Miriam.

  — If I don’t leave now, I could miss my train. Miriam has been gone for three years now, but I still sleep on my side of the bed and grope for her when I waken. Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire.

  9

  Okay, here goes. The trial. Me and the great Franz K., both falsely accused.

  Were I a real writer, I would have shuffled the deck of my memoirs so that this would be a real nail-biter. Worthy of Eric you-know, he wrote The Something of Dimitrios. Eric like I was going for a walk. Eric Stroller? No. Eric like that publication Sam Johnson used to write for. Idler. Eric Idler?79 No. Never mind. Forget it. I’ve got a better example. More recent. Worthy of John le Carré. But you already know I was adjudged innocent by the jury, if only for lack of a corpse, but not by the gossips of this city, most of whom still believe I got away with murder.

  O’Hearne grinned as Lemieux put the cuffs on me, and I was taken to the police station in St-Jérôme, where I was fingerprinted and sat still for a mug shot. If I ended up entrusted to the hangman, I resolved to feign cowardice — just like James Cagney of blessed memory — as a favour to my priest, Pat O’Brien, so that the Dead End Kids would no longer regard me as a hero (or role model, as they say now), but instead would join the local Rotary Club. I was locked into a cell not up to the Ritz standards but an improvement on the dungeon that the Count of Monte Cristo had to endure. I was also blessed with a turnkey eager to supplement his meagre salary. Well now, it’s easy to joke about it today, but at the time I was terrified, given to crying jags and shivering fits. Charged with murder, I was denied bail. “It won’t go any further than a preliminary hearing,” said Hughes-McNoughton. “I’m going to plead a total lack of evidence.”

  Later I learned that the Crown, their case weak, was not gung-ho to prosecute, even though O’Hearne had assured them it was only a matter of time before he dug up the body. But a rampaging Second Mrs. Panofsky had hired a fire-eater of a criminal lawyer, a man with political influence, who insisted I be charged; and naturally that yenta waived spousal privilege. Nothing would stop that chatterbox from enjoying her day in court. The hell with her. What worried me was Miriam, who flew in from Toronto and was allowed to visit me on my second day in the slammer. “Whatever happens,” I said, “I want you to know that I didn’t murder Boogie.”

  “I believe you,” she said.

  “I’ll be out of here in a week,” I said, hoping that saying it aloud would render it true. “Meanwhile, I’m making some useful connections. If I want my house or business burned down, I’ve got a guy here who will do it on reasonable terms. Something else. I’m not the only innocent man here. We’ve all been falsely accused. Even the guy who took out his wife with an axe because the eggs were supposed to be sunny-side up, not turned over. Actually what happened is she suffered a dizzy spell, tumbled down the steps to the cellar, and landed head first on the upturned axe. He got blood on his shirt when he tried to help her. Please don’t cry. They won’t keep me here long. Honestly.”

  I had to wait eight days for my preliminary inquiry before a magistrate, who denied Hughes-McNoughton’s plea and ruled there was “sufficient evidence to justify a trial, namely evidence on which a reasonable jury, properly instructed, might convict.” The clincher, according to Hughes-McNoughton, were my initial lies to O’Hearne about the gun, which made me suspect. “Now Barney, old pal,” he said, “I don’t want any surprises in the courtroom. Is O’Hearne going to find a body?”

  “Where?”

  “How in the hell would I know?”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  Five long weeks would pass before my case was scheduled to be heard at the autumn assizes in St-Jérôme. Miriam flew in every weekend, putting up at a local motel, and brought me books, magazines, Montecristos, and smoked-meat sandwiches from Schwartz’s.

  “Miriam, if by some fluke I am sentenced to rot in prison, I don’t expect you to wait for me. You’re free.”

  “Barney, would you please wipe your eyes. Nobility doesn’t suit you.”

  “But I mean it.”

  “No, you don’t, my darling.”

  My good companions in the hoosegow included the idiot who held up the local grocery, making off with eighty-five dollars and change, and ten cartons of cigarettes, and was nabbed trying to unload his booty in a bar the same afternoon. There were a couple of car thieves, a guy who dealt in stolen TV and hi-fi sets, a small-time drug dealer, a flasher, and so on.

  One glance at the trial judge and I sensed that I was for the long drop into nowhere. I saw my feet dangling and prayed that my bowels wouldn’t betray me during my last moments on earth. Mr. Justice Euclid Lazure, a slender, severe-looking man with dyed black hair, fierce bushy eyebrows, a hooked nose, and a slit of a mouth, had an interesting history. Like most thoughtful québécois de vieille souche who had come of age in the Second World War, he had flirted with fascism as a sensitive young Outremont fop. He had cut his intellectual teeth on the then-racist daily Le Devoir, as well as the Abbé Lionel-Adolphe Groulx’s rabidly anti-Semitic L’Action Nationale. He had been a member of the Ligue pour la Défense du Canada, a pride of French-Canadian patriots who pledged to fight like mad dogs were Canada attacked but declined to risk their arses in what they adjudged to be yet another British imperialist war. He had been among that merry throng that had marched down the Main in 1942, smashing plate-glass windows in Jewish shops and chanting, “Kill them! Kill them!” But he had since publicly regretted his youthful indiscretions. He told a journalist, “We had no idea of what was going on in 1942. We had not yet learned about the extermination camps.” But, as Hughes-McNoughton pointed out, there was an up side to that bastard’s sitting in judgment of me. Euclid’s missus had run off with a concert pianist. He enjoyed a well-earned reputation as a misogynist. In an earlier case, before sentencing a woman who had buried a kitchen knife in her husband’s heart, he said: “Women have climbed higher in the scale of virtue, higher than men, and I have always believed that. But people say, and I believe it, that when they fall, women reach a level of baseness that the most vile men could not reach.”

  So I could hardly wait for my garrulous, shockingly unfaithful wife to testify.

  “Poor Mr. Moscovitch,” she said, “was trembling and I only got into bed with him to keep him warm, because I have empathy for anybody in distress, regardless of race, colour, creed, or sexual proclivity. I am a tolerant person. People have commented on that quality in me. But, m’lord, we do have to draw the line somewhere. No offence to anybody in this courtroom, for I have the greatest respect for French Canadians. I adored our maid. But, speaking frankly, I think your people should give up the tradition of having all of a brid
e’s teeth extracted before her wedding. If you ask me, there are better gifts you could give a groom.

  “Now only the dirty-minded could read anything sexual into my getting into bed with Mr. Moscovitch, although speaking as an attractive woman in her prime I do have my needs, and my husband hadn’t enjoyed his conjugal rights in months. Why, he even failed to consummate our union on our wedding night, the date of which he wanted to have changed because it conflicted with the Stanley Cup playoffs. Never mind the deposit my father had put down at the Temple, or that the invitations had gone out and more than one Gursky was coming. We’re friends of the family. Long-standing. There was no expense spared at our wedding. For my princess, my father used to say, only the best will do, which was why he bitterly opposed my marriage to Mr. Panofsky. He comes from another monde, my father said, and he was right, boy was he ever right, but I thought I could uplift Barney, you know, like a feminine Professor Higgins from Pygmalion, that play by the great Bernard Shaw. Maybe you saw the movie version with Leslie Howard, which must have earned him that part in Gone With the Wind. I absolutely adored the musical version, My Fair Lady, with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, and I’m not surprised it was such a big hit. I can remember when I left the theatre with my mother, the tunes still playing in my head, I said —”

  The judge, suppressing a yawn, intervened: “You got into bed with Mr. Moscovitch …”

  “To keep him warm. So help me God. I was wearing my pink satin nightgown with the lace fringe that I bought at Saks on my last trip to New York with my mother. We go shopping together the saleswomen take us for sisters. For a woman her age she has some figure …”

  In 1960,80 women were still considered too dim for jury duty in Quebec, so my fate was in the hands of twelve men, good and true citizens. Local yokels. Pig farmers, and a hardware clerk, a bank teller, a mortician, a carpenter, a florist, a snow-plough operator, and so on, all of whom obviously resented their wasted time in court. Educated, as they were, by backwoods priests, I figured they were waiting to see if I had a tail. I even considered turning up barefoot one day, if only to prove I did not have cloven hoofs.