Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  “Only because they die of lung cancer first,” said Kate, “so you can put that cigar out right now.”

  “Period?”

  “Period,” said Kate, falling into Saul’s arms, sobbing brokenly.

  The Alzheimer diagnosis had been confirmed four months earlier, at a meeting in the offices of Totally Unnecessary Productions, on April 18, 1996, with Dr. Mortimer Herscovitch, and two specialists in attendance, as well as Solange and Chantal Renault, and of course Kate, Saul, and me. Saul went on to Toronto by train to tell Miriam. Reduced to weeping by the news, she phoned Barney as soon as she could trust her voice, and asked if she could come to see him.

  “I don’t think I could handle it.”

  “Please, Barney.”

  “No.”

  But he started to shave again every morning, cut back on his alcohol and cigar intake, and jumped whenever the phone or the doorbell rang. Solange phoned Miriam. “Come as soon as you can,” she said.

  “But he said no.”

  “He won’t even go out for a short walk in case you should turn up and find him out.”

  Miriam arrived the next morning, and the two of them went to lunch at the Ritz, where the maître d’ didn’t help matters, saying, “Why, I haven’t seen you two together here for years. Just like old times, isn’t it?”

  Later Miriam told Saul: “I could see that the menu baffled him, and he asked me to order for both of us. But, to begin with, he was lighthearted. Even playful. I’m looking forward to games of hide-and-go-seek, and spin-the-bottle, with the other loonybins in whatever hospital I end up in. Maybe they’ll have tricycles for us. Bubble gum. Triple-scoop ice creams. Stop it, I said. He ordered champagne, but what he actually said to the waiter was bring us a bottle of, you know, with the bubbles, what we used to have here, and the waiter laughed, thinking he was trying to be witty, and I was so insulted for him. When my husband, I wanted to say, intends to be witty, he is witty.

  “Wouldn’t it have been grand, Barney said, if I had agreed to fly to Paris with him on his wedding night. We recalled the good times, our salad days, and he promised not to be sick as he had been at our first lunch together. Although come to think of it, he said, it would make for a certain symmetry, wouldn’t it? But this needn’t be our last lunch together, I said. We can be friends now. No, we can’t, he said. It has to be everything or nothing. I had to get up twice to go to the ladies’ room for fear of breaking down at the table. I watched him pop I don’t know how many different-coloured pills, but he drank his champagne. He reached for my hand under the table, and told me I was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and that he had once dared to hope that we would die simultaneously, in our nineties, like Philemon and Baucis, and that beneficent Zeus would turn us into two trees, whose branches would fondle each other in winter, our leaves intermingling in the spring.

  “Then, I don’t know, maybe he shouldn’t have had the champagne. He began to mispronounce words. He had trouble dealing with his cutlery. Selecting a spoon when it was a fork he needed. Picking up a knife by the blade rather than the handle. An embarrassing change came over him, possibly prompted by frustration. His face darkened. Lowering his voice, he motioned me closer, and said Solange was forging cheques. She was swindling him. He was fearful she might force him to sign a will she had fabricated. She was a nymphomaniac who once yanked his apartment doorman into the elevator with her and raised her dress to show him she wasn’t wearing panties. The bill came and I could see that he was unable to add it up. Just sign it, I said, which made him laugh. Okay, he said, but I doubt if they’ll recognize my new signature. Hey, I still remember some things, he said. I once brought her here with her mother, and that old bitch said, ‘My husband always tips twelve and a half per cent.’

  “Then his manner altered yet again. He was tender. Loving. Barney at his most adorable. And I realized that he had forgotten that I had ever left him, and obviously assumed we would now go home together, and maybe take in a movie tonight. Or read in bed, our legs tangled together. Or catch a late flight to New York, the way he used to pull surprises out of a hat. Oh, in those days he was so much fun, so unpredictable, so loving, and I thought what if I didn’t return to Toronto, and did go home with him? That’s when I went to the phone and called Solange and asked her to come at once. I got back to the table and he wasn’t there. Oh my God, where is he, I asked the waiter. Men’s room, he said. I waited outside the men’s room, and when he came out, shuffling, his smile goofy, I saw that his fly was still unzipped and his trousers were wet.”

  While he was still enjoying some relatively good days, our father called in John Hughes-McNoughton and insisted on signing papers that granted power of attorney to his children. Totally Unnecessary Productions Ltd. was sold to The Amigos Three, in Toronto, for five million dollars in cash and another five million in shares of Amigos Three. According to his will, the proceeds from the sale, as well as all his other holdings, including a considerable stock portfolio, were to be split three ways: fifty per cent to his children, and twenty-five per cent each to Miriam and Solange. First, however, the estate would be responsible for a number of bequests:

  Twenty-five thousand dollars for Benoît O’Neil, who had been caretaker of the cottage in the Laurentians for years.

  Five hundred thousand dollars for Chantal Renault.

  His two tickets in the reds in the new Molson Centre were to be maintained for five years, and left to Solange Renault.

  The estate was obliged to settle John Hughes-McNoughton’s monthly bar bill at Dink’s for as long as he lived.

  One hundred thousand dollars was to go to a Mrs. Flora Charnofsky in New York.

  There was also a surprise, considering how often our father joked about shvartzers. A two-hundred-thousand-dollar trust fund was to be set up to establish a scholarship at McGill University for a black student who excelled in the arts — the aforesaid scholarship in memory of Ismail Ben Yussef, a.k.a. Cedric Richardson, who had died of cancer on November 18, 1995.

  Five thousand dollars was to be set aside for a wake at Dink’s, to which all his friends were to be invited. No rabbi was to speak at his funeral. He was to be buried, as he had already arranged, in the Protestant cemetery at the foot of Mont Groulx, but there should be a Star of David on his stone, and the adjoining plot had been reserved for Miriam.

  Saul undertook to consult our mother. Before hanging up, all she could manage was, “Yes. That’s how it should be.”

  Following the settling of his affairs, my father’s decline was precipitous. From an increasingly frequent inability to find the right word for the most commonplace objects, or to remember the names of those near and dear to him, he might waken unaware of where or who he was. Summoned again to Montreal, Kate, Saul, and I had another meeting with Dr. Herscovitch and the specialists. A pregnant Kate offered to have Barney move in with her, but the doctors cautioned that unfamiliar surroundings would only compound Barney’s difficulties. So, to begin with, Solange moved into the apartment on Sherbrooke Street with Barney. If he addressed her as Miriam, and denounced her as an ungrateful whore who had ruined his life, she continued to feed him and to wipe his chin with a napkin. When he dictated a letter to her, the words incoherent or mispronounced, jumbled phrases repeated, she promised to mail it at once. If he turned up at breakfast with his left arm in his right shirtsleeve, or his trousers back to front, she didn’t comment. Then he began to rant against his reflection in the mirror, taking the image to be somebody else’s, addressing it as Boogie, Kate, or Clara. Once, mistaking his own mirrored image for that of Terry McIver, he butted his head against it, and required twenty-two stitches in his scalp. So Kate, Saul, and I came to Montreal again.

  Over Solange’s objections, on August 15, 1996, we had our father committed to the King David Nursing Home. Although he is now beyond recognizing anyone, his children included, we have not abandoned him. Kate comes once a week from Toronto. As luck would have it, she was playing Chinese checkers wi
th Barney on an afternoon when Miriam appeared, Miriam, who had only recently recovered from a minor stroke. She and Kate had a fearful row and would be estranged for months. They weren’t even on speaking terms when Saul brought them together for a lunch in Toronto. “We’re still a family,” he said. “So behave yourselves. Both of you.” His gruff manner, so reminiscent of Barney’s, won them over. Saul visits the hospital frequently. Once, sending Barney’s building blocks flying, he hollered, “How could you let this happen to you, you bastard,” and broke down and wept. His visits are dreaded by the nurses in attendance. If he detects an egg stain on Barney’s dressing-gown, or bedsheets that don’t appear freshly laundered, he threatens mayhem. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” One afternoon, arriving to find the TV set turned to Oprah Winfrey, he yanked it off its perch and smashed it on the floor. Nurses came running. “This is my father’s room,” he shouted, “and he doesn’t watch such crap.”

  My younger brother is the one who has inherited something of our mother’s beauty as well as our father’s hot temper. Between Barney and Saul it was always a gladiatorial contest, strength pitted against strength, neither one ever yielding an inch. Barney, who had secretly adored the teenage left-wing firebrand, and never tired of telling the story of the 18th of November Fifteen, later came to abhor his shift to the unforgiving right. All the same, he remained the favourite son, if only because he was the writer our father always longed to be. On the opening page of my father’s memoir he ventured that, violating a solemn pledge, he was scribbling a first book at an advanced age. This, like a good deal of what he went on to write, was not quite true. Going through Barney’s papers, I discovered several attempts, over the years, to write short stories. I also found the first act of a play and fifty pages of a novel. He was, as he claimed, a voracious reader, an admirer of stylists above all, from Edward Gibbon to A. J. Liebling. Flipping through his “Noter’s Write Book,” I saw that he had transcribed many a sentence of Gibbon’s. Take these two, for instance. Gibbon on the Emperor Gordianus:

  His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than ostentation.1

  And from A. J. Liebling, on the boxing trainer Charlie Goldman, a.k.a. the Professor:

  “I never married,” the Professor says. “I always live à la carte.”2

  “Like Zack,” he wrote underneath.

  I am the beneficiary of Barney’s gift for money-making. Alas, it is an attribute he always deplored in himself, which is why, I suppose, I was his least favourite of the children, the one who bore the brunt of his sarcasm. His rush to judgment. In spite of what he has written, Caroline and I have sat through Don Giovanni more than once. As my footnotes amply testify, I have also read the Iliad, Swift, Dr. Johnson, and others. But if I happen to believe that this exclusionary Eurocentric pantheon has to be revised, and enlarged, and if I also find merit in Mapplethorpe, Helen Chadwick, and Damien Hirst, surely this is my prerogative. I cannot deny my resentments. Even so, I try to fly over to see Barney once every six weeks. Possibly, I suffer least from his altered state, because the truth is we never did communicate.

  Barney does not lack for other, more regular visitors. Solange is there just about every day to bathe and help him crayon colouring books. Old drinking companions from Dink’s pass through often: a disreputable lawyer called John Hughes-McNoughton, an alcoholic journalist named Zack, and others. Only after I was sent a severe letter from a hospital administrator did I learn that a certain Ms. Morgan came by once a week to masturbate him. A sprightly old man, Irv Nussbaum, pops in often with a bag of bagels or long strings of karnatzel from Schwartz’s Delicatessen. “Your father,” he once said to me, “was one of your real wild Jews. A bonditt. A mazik. A devil. I could have sworn he was out of Odessa.”

  On Barney’s most recent birthday, he surprised us by responding to his name with an impish grin. We brought balloons, funny hats, noise-makers, and a chocolate cake. Miriam and Solange, conspiring together, had what seemed like an inspired idea. They hired a tap-dancer to perform for him. A gleeful Barney clapped hands and sang bits of a song for us:

  Mair-zy Doats and Do-zy Doats and lid-dle lam-zy div-ey A kid-dle-y div-ey too, would-n’t you?

  But Barney stumbled and fell, and wet himself when he tried to emulate Mr. Chuckle’s steps, and Miriam, Solange, and Kate fled into the hall and fell into one another’s arms.

  I remember another moment of recognition, as it were. A letter came for my father from California. It was incomprehensible to me, but not to my father, who read it and wept copiously. It read:

  Mother explained that the letter was from Hymie Mintzbaum, who had suffered a bad stroke some years earlier. In London, back in 1961, she said, Hymie had taken her to lunch and said that she simply had to marry Barney. “Only you can save that bastard,” he had said.

  To digress briefly, as Barney was so fond of saying, all my recent trips to Montreal have been depressing. This, not only because of our father’s condition, but also in recognition of what has become of the city I grew up in. When I got out the phone book, hoping to get in touch with old friends who had been to McGill with me, I discovered that all but two or three had moved to Toronto, Vancouver, or New York, rather than endure the burgeoning tribalism. Of course, looked at from abroad, what was happening in Quebec seemed risible. There are actually grown men out here, officers of the Commission de Protection de la Langue Française, who go out with tape measures every day to ensure that the English-language lettering on outdoor commercial signs is half the size of, and in no brighter colour, than the French. In 1995, after a particularly zealous language inspector (or tongue-trooper, as they are known in the local argot) discovered boxes of unilingually labelled matzohs on display in a kosher grocery, the offending product was ordered withdrawn from the shelves. Such was the protest, however, that, in 1996, the Jewish community was offered special dispensation: unilingually labelled boxes of matzohs were declared legal for sixty days of the year. Old Irv Nussbaum was delighted by the ruling: “Listen here,” he said, “marijuana, cocaine, and heroin are banned here all year round, but, come Pesach, Jewish druggies are now a special case. Sixty days of the year we can munch matzohs without drawing the blinds or locking the doors. Please don’t think I’m meddling, but I know your father always hoped that your children would have a proper Jewish education. You want to treat them to a trip to Israel, I’d be glad to help with the arrangements.”

  My father’s manuscript created problems for us. Kate was for publication, Saul argued for both revisions and cuts, and I vacillated, distressed by his gratuitously cruel remarks about Caroline. But the truth is, there was nothing to be done. Barney had already come to an arrangement with a publisher in Toronto, and a codicil in his will absolutely forbade any changes or cuts being made. It also stated, surprisingly, that I was to be responsible for seeing the manuscript through to publication. After protracted negotiations with the publisher, it was agreed that I could add footnotes, correcting the most egregious factual errors, a chore that obliged me to do a good deal of reading. I was also granted two other privileges. I was allowed to rewrite the incoherent, faltering chapters, dealing with Barney’s discovery that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s, after consultations with Solange and Drs. Mortimer Herscovitch and Jeffrey Singleton. I was also authorized to add this afterword, subject to the approval of Saul and Kate. But they were not pleased. We quarrelled.

  “I’m clearly the writer here,” said a sullen Saul, “and I should be the one to handle the manuscript.”

  “Saul, I’m not looking forward to this job. If he picked me, I have to accept that it was his ultimate putdown. Because, just as he wrote in that patronizing manner of his, I’m so punctilious. I could be counted on to correct his most glaring memory l
apses.”

  “I happen to know,” said Kate, “that many of his so-called errors, quotes attributed to the wrong author here and there, were actually traps baited just for you. He once told me, ‘I know how to make sure that Mike finally gets to read Gibbon, Auden, and lots of other writers. My system is foolproof.’ ”

  “As it happens, in spite of what he thought, I had already read most of those people. But we have a problem.”

  “Boogie?”

  “Here we go again.”

  “Kate, please. Don’t start. He was my father, too. But when he wrote again and again that he was still expecting Boogie to turn up one day, he was obviously lying.”

  “Daddy did not murder Boogie.”

  “Kate, we’re just going to have to come to terms with the fact that Daddy wasn’t all he pretended to be.”

  “Saul, you’re not saying anything.”

  “Shit. Shit. Shit. How could he do such a thing?”

  “The answer is he didn’t.”

  I put the question to John Hughes-McNoughton. “As a rule,” he said, “a lawyer doesn’t ask his client. The answer could be unhelpful. But Barney volunteered more than once that the story he told O’Hearne was the unvarnished truth.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “A jury of twelve honourable men adjudged him innocent.”

  “But now there is new and damning evidence. We have a right to know the truth.”

  “The truth is he was your father.”

  Our father, before he was reduced to a near-vegetable state, cast a large shadow. Kate’s husband, for instance, had always felt diminished in his presence, and did not enjoy his visits to Toronto. Barney’s pathetic condition, and Kate’s slow, reluctant acceptance of what he had done, not that she would ever acknowledge it, drew them closer together. But something within her broke and was badly in need of mending. Happily, however, giving birth to a baby boy did a good deal to restore her sunny disposition. She has named her son Barney.