Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  “Just asking.”

  Early the next afternoon I bluffed my way into the McGill library and looked it up in a reference book:

  When Alzheimer (1907) described the disease which now bears his name, he considered it an atypical form of dementia … Family histories illustrating either dominant or recessive inheritance have been reported … Alzheimer’s disease is indistinguishable histiopathologically from senile dementia, and Sjogren et al. (1952) found a higher than expected incidence of senile dementia in Alzheimer families …

  Oh, my God. Kate. Saul. Michael. What have I done, Miriam?

  Pathology

  The brain shows extreme atrophy. Coronal sectioning confirms the uniform gyral atrophy, widening sulci, reduction in white matter and ventricular dilatation …

  Yeah yeah yeah.

  Clinical features

  The first sign is mild memory loss. A housewife mislays her sewing, burns the toast, and forgets one or two items while shopping. A professional man or woman forgets appointments or disconcertingly hesitates in the middle of a lecture, unable to find the appropriate word. No more serious failure may be observed for a year or longer because of the slow progress of the disease.…

  “Morty, it’s me. Sorry to call you at home. Have you got a minute?”

  “Yeah, sure. Just let me turn down the TV.”

  “It’s Alzheimer’s, isn’t it?”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “Morty, we’ve known each other for a hundred years. Don’t fuck with me.”

  “Okay. It’s a possibility. The thing is, your mother died of —”

  “Never mind my mother. She had hardly any marbles to begin with. What about my children?”

  “The odds are long. Honestly.”

  “But shorter than for those with no family history. Shit. Shit. Shit. Saul reads about any disease in the Times and he’s sure he’s got it.”

  “We’ve scheduled the CAT scan and MRI for tomorrow morning. I’m going to come and pick you up at eight.”

  “I’ve got to arrange my affairs, Morty. How long have I got?”

  “If it’s Alzheimer’s, and that’s still a big if, the memory lapses will come and go, but I’d say you’ve got a year before …”

  “I’m totally gaga?”

  “Let’s not assume anything before we know for sure. Hey, I’m not doing anything tonight. Would you like me to come over?”

  “No. But thanks anyway.”

  14

  I’ve already mentioned “Margolis,” but there is an even more chilling story of Boogie’s that I read while I was in prison. “Seligman,” written in Paris in the early fifties, wasn’t published in The New American Review until months after Boogie’s disappearance. Like all his stories it went through endless drafts before it was distilled to less than three thousand words. It’s a story about a bunch of affluent New York lawyers, Harold Seligman among them, who have taken to relieving the tedium of their lives by playing practical jokes on one another, constantly upping the ante. But there is a rule to the game. In order for a jest to pass muster, it has to pinpoint and attack a flaw in the dupe’s character — in Seligman’s case, say his uxorious relationship with his libidinous wife. One morning, Boris Frankel, the criminal lawyer who is a member of the group, entices Seligman, just for a gag, to join a police-station line-up in a case of alleged burglary and attempted rape. To the astonishment of the bunch, watching behind a one-way mirror, the victim, a still traumatized woman, identifies Seligman as the true culprit. The lawyers instantly fear that for once a jape has gone too far, but Seligman is sanguine. He has a sure-fire alibi: the night in question he and his wife had dined with Boris in their apartment. But Boris, consulting his desk diary, denies that was the case, and Seligman’s wife confirms there had been no dinner party at their apartment that night. And then Boris and Seligman’s wife repair to a motel to tear off each other’s clothes and resume their heated affair.

  Rereading that story this morning, and recalling the Boogieman’s taste for cruel pranks, I could no longer believe, as I once did, that he had been sufficiently angry following our quarrel to betray me out of spite. And yet — and yet — turning to McIver’s Paris journal, I consulted the entry for September 22, 1951:

  … In passing, I once said to Boogie, “I see you’ve got yourself a new friend.”

  “Everybody is entitled to his own Man Friday, don’t you think?”

  No. Boogie never said that, I decided, setting out for one of my aimless morning strolls. It’s a malign invention, typical of the lying McIver. There had been such warmth between Boogie and me. I was not his flunky. Comrades is what we were, brothers kicking against the pricks. I couldn’t be wrong about that. I wasn’t going to allow that Boogie, even given his drugged-out state on the lake, that once soaring talent addled beyond repair, would take off forever just to get back at me. More likely we were to blame for his self-destruction, having anointed him, when we were young and foolish, as the only one of our bunch destined for greatness. And those publishers who had courted him in New York, pledging lavish advances against a novel only he knew he couldn’t deliver, could only have added to his burden. I had solved the problem at last. Boogie, in flight from unbearable expectations, had gone to ground somewhere, assuming a new identity, just like Margolis. “Rest, rest, perturbed spirit.” I forgive you.

  I must have walked for an hour, maybe more, so self-absorbed that I had wandered into unfamiliar territory. I had no idea where I was until I recognized that I was standing outside the Provincial Bus Terminal. And, oh my God, that’s where I caught that unnerving glimpse of the lady of my sometime wet dreams, Mrs. Ogilvy of the pubic hairs that used to glisten with pearly drops for me. Eighty years old now, I reckoned. Knobby hands clutching the rails of her walker to which she had defiantly fixed a Union Jack. Humped now. Shrivelled. Eyes bulging. Gathered with others, chanting:

  One, two, three, four,

  what are we for?

  Wheelchair access,

  Wheelchair access.

  There must have been thirty-five of them there, maybe more, all of them wheelchair-bound. A Hieronymus Bosch sprung to life. Or a scene out of a Fellini film. Amputees and double-amputees. Survivors of strokes or polio, with wasted legs thin as rake handles. Victims of Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis, heads jerking, spittle trickling down their chins. Fleeing the scene, I hailed a taxi.

  “Where to, mister?”

  “ … um, drive …”

  “Yeah, sure. That’s what I do. But where to?”

  “ … ahead …”

  “Do you want a hospital?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “ … downtown …”

  “Right.”

  “ … it’s the street next to, you know, I want …”

  “Gotcha.”

  “ … it comes right after where the hotel is …”

  “Which hotel?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m taking you to a hospital.”

  “No.”

  “ … you know where the bookshop is on the corner?”

  “If you feel like you’re going to be sick, for Christ’s sake, not here, let me know, and I’ll pull up to the curb.”

  “I’m not going to be sick.”

  “There’s always a silver lining, eh?”

  “ … it’s where they serve drinks I want …”

  “A bar?”

  “Of course a bar. I’m not stupid, you know.”

  “This has to be my lucky day,” he said, pulling over. “You got a wallet on you, maybe with a card with your home address, I’ll take you there.”

  “I know where I live.”

  “Tell me, then. I won’t squeal.”

  “ … it would be close enough to where I’m going if you drop me on that street with a saint in its name.”

  “Oh, that’s a big help in fucking Montreal.”

  “ … Catherine. On the corner, please.”


  “Which corner?”

  Shit shit shit. “ … on the corner right after the religious street …”

  “Religious street?”

  “Not rabbi, or mullah. Catholic.”

  “Cardinal?”

  “Bishop.”

  “Hey, this is fun. You want the corner of St. Catherine and Crescent. Right?”

  “Right. I’m going to Dink’s.”

  Hughes-McNoughton was lying in wait for me there. “Are you okay, Barney?”

  “I know my own name, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course you do. Bring him a coffee, Betty.”

  “Scotch.”

  “Sure. But a coffee first.”

  I waited until my hand had stopped trembling before I drank the coffee. Hughes-McNoughton lit my Montecristo for me. “Feel better now?”

  “I want you to do the paperwork so that I can give power of attorney to my children.”

  “You don’t need a lawyer for that, a notary will do the trick. But what’s the hurry?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Let me tell you a story, if only to validate my role as advocatus diaboli. When I was a young and inexperienced lawyer, still trusting in human nature, I had a client, a nice old Jew in the shmata trade, who decided to sign over his flourishing business to his two sons in order to avoid estate duties. I did the dirty deed. We drank champagne together — the old boy, his two sons, me. When the old boy turned up at his office in the factory the next morning, his two sons told him he wasn’t to come in any more. He was through there. So be careful as you go, Barney.”

  “Very amusing, but my children aren’t like that.”

  I couldn’t handle more than one Scotch in my state. Strolling back to my apartment, still feeling somewhat unwell, wary of when my next memory failure would strike, I thought, so much unfinished business. Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire. My children, my children. Mike has no idea how much I love him. I fear Kate’s marriage won’t last. And what will become of Saul?

  When Saul was no more than eight or nine years old, I might send him upstairs to my bedroom to fetch a sweater or a script I needed. A half-hour could go by and still he wouldn’t have returned, and I knew he had passed a bookcase, pulled out a book, and was now lying on his stomach somewhere, reading. When he was absorbed in A History of the Kings of England, Saul brought conversation at our dinner table to a full stop one night, complaining, “If Daddy was the King, then after he died Mike would inherit the throne and get to rule the empire, and I would just be the duke of something or other.”

  Only ten years old at the time and my second-born son already grasped that he had been delivered into an unjust world.

  Oh my oh my, if I were an angel of the Lord, I would mark the doors of each of my children’s homes with an X, so that plague and misfortune would pass over them. Alas, I lack the qualifications. So when there was still world and time enough I fretted. I nagged. I corrected. I got everything wrong.

  Damn damn damn.

  Following the death of his wife, Sam Johnson wrote to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, “I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wilds of life, without any certain direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on a world to which I have little relation.”

  But my wife wasn’t dead, merely absent. Temporarily absent. And I had to talk to her. She’s in that city in Ontario, I thought. Not Ottawa. The city with the Prince Arthur dining room, remember? Yes. I’m not totally wacko yet. I can even remember how to strain spaghetti. It’s with that thingamajig I keep in a kitchen drawer. There are Seven Dwarfs, who cares what they’re called? Lillian Kraft didn’t write The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt. Or Suit. Whichever. It was Mary McCarthy. I picked up the phone, started to dial — stopped — and began to curse. I couldn’t remember Miriam’s number.

  70 Described as two sizes too small on this page.

  71 Counter-clockwise.

  72 I have been unable to trace this quote.

  73 Norway.

  74 Pierre Elliott Trudeau was still largely unknown in 1960. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year of Trudeaumania, and his election as prime minister.

  75 Actually Louis MacNeice in “Bagpipe Music.”

  76 It was the Financial Times, defunct since March 18, 1995.

  77 It was the Sirens.

  78 Flaubert.

  79 Eric Ambler, author of The Mask of Dimitrios (1939); U.S.A., A Coffin for Dimitrios.

  80 It was not until 1928 that women were declared “persons” by the Supreme Court of Canada.

  81 My father has confused two Italian-American filmmakers, the novelist and screenwriter Mario Puzo, and the director Martin Scorsese. Puzo wrote the Godfather films and Scorsese directed Raging Bull, among other films.

  82 Grand Old Man.

  83 Or Stanley Street, this page.

  84 The Tour Eiffel, according to my father. this page.

  85 I was born six months after my parents’ marriage.

  86 I fear that by this juncture my father’s memory was unreliable, even somewhat scrambled, and that pages of this manuscript were put together in a haphazard fashion. The referendum was on October 30, 1995, but what follows happened a year or so later.

  87 Three days.

  88 A paraphrase of W. H. Auden’s lines:

  Time and fevers burn away

  Individual beauty from

  Thoughtful children …

  89 Actually it was called Burnside until 1966.

  90 Ontario.

  Afterword

  by Michael Panofsky

  1

  AT 10:28 A.M., on September 24, 1996, a surveyor and two lumberjacks, employed by Drummondville Pulp & Paper, stumbled on scattered human remains in a clearing near the crest of Mont Groulx: a skull, a severed spinal cord, a pelvis, a femur, cracked ribs, and broken tibias. The Provincial Police were summoned, and the bones were collected and delivered to a pathologist at the Notre-Dame Hospital in Montreal. Dr. Roger Giroux declared that these were the remains of a Caucasian male, thirty-something years old, who had died of unknown causes thirty to forty years ago. He speculated that the cracked ribs, severed spine, and broken tibias could be attributed to the fact that the unknown male had been severely beaten with a blunt instrument, or had fallen from a considerable height. But a more likely possibility, he ventured, alluding to the teeth marks, was that coyotes, or other animals, had cracked the bones, trying to get at the marrow. The story, reported in the Gazette, caught the attention of a retired Sûreté du Québec detective, Sean O’Hearne. On his insistence, an old file was opened, and a New York dentist was flown in to examine the skull. Shortly thereafter, it was confirmed that these were the remains of Bernard Moscovitch, who had disappeared in the vicinity on June 7, 1960. A triumphant O’Hearne was interviewed by the Gazette and La Presse, and appeared on several local TV shows, as did my father’s second wife, always with a framed photograph of Mr. Moscovitch on her lap. “He pledged undying love to me,” she said. Accounts of my father’s trial in St-Jérôme were resurrected under the rubric DID JUSTICE TRIUMPH? or THE AVENGING BONES. My father’s defence lawyer, John Hughes-McNoughton, entrapped at Dink’s (a bar, on Crescent Street, in Montreal), dismissed one reporter, saying, “Credo quia impossibile,” and another, who confronted him with the renewed charges, saying no more than, “Argumentum ex silentio,” before waving him away. An enterprising ’Allô Police photographer managed to slip into the King David Nursing Home to snap a picture of my father being spoon-fed roast brisket by Solange. I flew in from London, Kate from Toronto, and Saul was driven in from New York by a young woman called Linda. We met at the cottage in the Laurentians where we had once been such a happy family, to cope with the revelation that Barney had lied and was a murderer after all. Kate, naturally, disputed the irrefutable evidence.

  “Boogie was drunk, and he could have wandered up there, had a bad fall, broken both his legs, and died of starvation. How dare you both be so quic
k to blame Daddy when he can’t even answer to his name any more?”

  “Kate, you’re not the only one who is upset here. Be reasonable, please.”

  “Sure, reasonable. Daddy was a homicidal maniac. Obvious, eh? He shot Boogie, dragged him to that mountaintop, and broke his legs with a shovel.”

  “I’m not saying that’s how it —”

  “There wasn’t any evidence of even a shallow grave having been dug. Do you think Daddy would have just left him there for the animals to pick over?”

  “What if there wasn’t time?”

  “In all these years.”

  “The remains were found not far from where Daddy used to have that lean-to he once told us about. They found broken glass nearby. From a bottle of Scotch.”

  “So what?”

  “Kate, we know how you feel, but —”

  “They were both drunk. He could have killed him accidentally. I’ll give you that much.”

  “He never stinted on any of us, and we owe him the benefit of the doubt. So you believe what you want, but if I live to be a hundred, I’ll still know he was innocent. Furthermore, I happen to know that he never gave up the idea that Boogie was alive somewhere, and would turn up one day.”

  “Well, he has now, hasn’t he?”

  We had gathered at the cottage to come to a decision about Barney’s incomplete manuscript, which we had all read; and also to salvage whatever mementos that appealed to us, and to close the cottage, which we had already put up for sale. The omens weren’t encouraging. The real-estate agent said, “The day after the referendum, I had calls from forty-two people out here wanting to sell their properties, and I have yet to see an offer for any one of them.”

  This wasn’t our first family conclave, or our second, since we had learned that Barney was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. At the time, Saul had reminded us that our grandmother had also been stricken, so we were all at risk.

  For starters, said Saul, we shouldn’t use underarm deodorants that have a zinc base, or cook in aluminum pots, which are also suspect. A subscriber to both The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, he went on to point out that nicotine had recently been adjudged a brain stimulant, and that smokers were less likely to be afflicted.