The Main

by Trevanian

  Moishe, too, is revealed in his cardplaying. He collects his hand and arranges it carefully. Behind the round glasses, his eyes take an interior focus as he evaluates the cards. He could be the best player by far, if he were to concentrate on the game. But winning isn’t important to him. The gathering of friends, the talk, these are what matter. Occasionally, just occasionally, he takes a perverse delight in bearing down and applying his acute mind to the job of setting David, particularly if his friend has blustered a little too much that evening.

  Slight, self-effacing, Moishe is the very opposite of his business partner. During the days he is to be found in the back room, tacks in his mouth, driving each one precisely into place with three taps of his hammer. Tap… TAP… tap. The first rap setting the point, the second neatly driving the tack home, the third for good measure. Or he will be working at his small loom, his agile fingers flying with precision. If he is in a repeat pattern requiring little attention, his expression seems to fade as his mind ranges elsewhere, on scenes of his youth, on hypothetical ethical problems, on imagined conversations with young people seeking guidance.

  As a young man he lived in Germany in the comfortable old ghetto house where his great-grandfather had been born, a home that always smelled of good cooking and beeswax polish. They were a family of craftsmen in wood and fabric, but they admired learning, and the most revered of their relatives were those who had the gifts and devotion for Talmudic scholarship. As a boy he showed a penchant for study and that mental habit of seeing things simultaneously in their narrowest details and their broadest implications that marks the Talmudic scholar—a gift Moishe calls “intellectual peripheral vision.” His mother was proud of him and found frequent opportunities to mention to neighbor ladies that Moishe was up in his room studying again, instead of out playing and wasting his time. She would lift her hands helplessly and say that she didn’t know what she would do with that boy—all the time studying, learning, saying brilliant things. Maybe in the long run it would be better if he were a common ordinary boy, like the neighbors’ sons.

  Moishe’s adoring sister used to bring up little things for him to eat when he was studying late. His father also supported his intellectual inclination, but he insisted that Moishe learn the family craft. As he used to say, “It doesn’t hurt a brilliant man to know a little something.”

  When the Nazi repression began, the Rappaports did not flee. After all, they were Germans; the father had fought in the 1914 war, the grandfather in the Franco-Prussian; they had German friends and business associates. Germany, after all, was not a nation of animals.

  Moishe alone survived. His parents died of malnutrition and disease in the ever-narrowing ghetto; and his sister, delicate, shy, unworldly, died in the camp.

  He came to Montreal after two years in the anonymous cauldron of a displaced persons camp. Occasionally, and then only in casual illustration of some point of discussion, Moishe mentioned the concentration camp and the loss of his family. LaPointe never understood the tone of shame and culpability that crept into Moishe’s voice when he spoke of these experiences. He seemed ashamed of having undergone so dehumanizing a process; ashamed to have survived, when so many others did not.

  Claude LaPointe sorts his cards into suits, taps the fan closed on the table, then spreads it again by pinching the cards between thumb and forefinger. He re-scans his hand, then closes it in front of him. He will not look at it again until after the bidding is over. He knows what he has, knows its value.

  For the third time, Father Martin sorts his cards. The diamonds have a way of getting mixed up with the hearts. He pats the top of his thinning hair with his palm and looks at the cards mournfully; it is the kind of hand he dreads most. He doesn’t mind having terrible cards that no one could play well, and he rather enjoys having so strong a hand that not even he can misplay it. But these cards of middle power! Martin admits to being the worse cardplayer in North America. Should he fail to admit it, David would remind him.

  When first he came to the Main, an idealistic young priest, Martin had affection for his church, nestled in a tight row of houses, literally a part of the street, a part of everyone’s life. But now he feels sorry for his church, and ashamed of it. Both sides have been denuded by the tearing down of row houses to make way for industrial expansion. Rubble fields flank it, exposing ugly surfaces never meant to be seen, revealing the outlines of houses that used to depend on the church for structural support, and used to defend it. And the projects he dreamed of never quite worked out; people kept changing before he could really get anything started. Now most of Father Martin’s flock are old Portuguese women who visit the church at all times of day, bent women with black shawls who light candles to prolong their prayers, then creep down the aisle on painful legs, their gnarled fingers gripping pew ends for support. Father Martin can speak only a few words of Portuguese. He can shrive, but he cannot console.

  When he was a young man in seminary, he dared to dream of being a scholar, of writing incisive and illuminating apologetics that applied the principles of the faith to modern life and problems. He would sometimes wake up at night with a lucid perception of some knotty issue—a perception that was always just beyond the stretch of his memory the next morning. Although his mind teemed with ideas, he lacked the knack of setting his thoughts down clearly. Prior considerations and subsequent ramifications would invade his thinking and carry him off to the left or right of his main thesis, so he did not shine in seminary and was never considered for that post he so desired in a small college where he could study and write and teach. There was a joke in seminary: publish or parish.

  But Father Martin’s mind still runs to ethics, to the nature of sin, to the proper uses of the gift of life; so, while being David’s bungling partner is mortifying, the conversations with Moishe make it worthwhile. And there is something right about that, too. A payment in humiliation for the opportunity to learn and to express oneself.

  “Come on! Come on!” David says. “It’s your bid, Claude. Unless, of course, you and Moishe have decided to save face by throwing in your hands.”

  “All right,” LaPointe says. “Fifteen.”

  “Sixteen.” Father Martin says the word softly, then sucks air in through his teeth in an attempt to express the fact that he has a fair playing hand but no meld to speak of.

  “Ah-ha!” David ejaculates.

  Father Martin catches his breath. David is going to plunge after the bid, dragging the uncertain priest after him to a harrowingly narrow victory or a crushing defeat.

  Moishe studies his cards, his gentle eyes seeming to pass over the number indifferently. He purses his lips and hums a soft ascending note. “Oh-h-h. Seventeen, I suppose.”

  “Eighteen!” is David’s rapid reply.

  Father Martin winces.

  LaPointe taps the top of the face-down stack before him. “All right,” he says, “nineteen, then.”

  “Pass,” says Father Martin dolefully.

  “Pass,” says Moishe, looking at his partner slyly from behind his round glasses.

  “Good!” David says. “Now let’s sort out the men from the sheep. Twenty-two!”

  LaPointe shrugs and passes.

  “Prepare to suffer, fools,” David says. He declares spades trump, but he has only a nine and a pinochle to meld.

  Gingerly, apologetically, Father Martin produces a king and queen of hearts.

  David stares at his partner, hurt and disbelief flooding his eyes. “That’s all?” he asks. “This is what you meld? One marriage?”

  “I… I was bidding a playing band.”

  LaPointe objects. “Why don’t you just show one another your hands and be done with it?”

  Moishe sets down his cards and rises. “I’ll start the sandwiches.”

  “Wait a minute!” David says. “Where are you going? The hand isn’t over!”

  “You are going to play it out?” Moishe asks incredulously.

  “Of course! Sit down!”
/>   Moishe looks at LaPointe with operatic surprise. He spreads his arms and lifts his palms toward the ceiling.

  Roaring out his aces in an aggressive style that scorns the effeminate trickery of the finesse, David takes the first four tricks. But when he tries to cross to his partner, he is cut off by LaPointe, who manages to finesse a ten from Father Martin, then sends the lead to Moishe, who finishes the assassination.

  At one point, Father Martin plays a low club onto a diamond trick.

  “What?” cried David. “You’re out of trump?”

  “Aren’t clubs trump?”

  David slumps over and softly bangs his forehead against the table top. “Why me?” he asks the oilcloth. “Why me?”

  Too late, the lead returns to David, who slams down his last five cards, collecting impoverished and inadequate tricks.

  He stares heavily at the tabletop for a few seconds, then he speaks in a low and controlled voice. “My dear Father Martin. I ask the following, not in anger, but in a spirit of humble curiosity. Please tell me. Why did you bid when you had nothing in your hand but SHIT!”

  Moishe removes his glasses and lightly rubs the red dents on the bridge of his nose. “There was nothing Martin could have done to save you. You overbid your hand and you went set. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Don’t tell me that! If he had come out with his ten earlier—”

  “You would have won one more trick. Not enough to save you. You had two clubs left; I had the ace, Claude the ten. And if you had returned in diamonds—at that time you still had the queen—Martin would have had to trump it with his jack, and I would have overtrumped with the king.” Moishe continues to rub his nose.

  David glares at him in silence before saying, “That’s wonderful. That is just wonderful!” The tension in David’s voice causes Martin to look over at him, his breathing suspended. “Listen to the big scholar, will you? If my jack of hearts has its fly unbuttoned, he remembers! But when it comes to accounts, suddenly he’s a luftmensh, too busy with philosophical problems to worry about business! Oh, yes! Taking care of the business is too commonplace for a man who spends all his time debating does an ant have a pupik! For your information, Moishe, I was talking to the priest! So butt out for once! Just butt out!”

  David jumps up, knocking the table with his knees, and slams out of the room.

  In the ensuing silence, Father Martin looks from Moishe to LaPointe, upset, confused. LaPointe draws a deep breath and begins desultorily to collect the cards. The moment David began his abuse, Moishe froze in mid-action; and now he replaces his glasses, threading each wire temple over its ear.

  “Ah… listen,” he says quietly. “You must forgive David. He is in pain. He is grieving. Yesterday was the anniversary of Hannah’s death. He’s been like a balled-up fist all day.”

  The others understand. David and Hannah had been children together, and they had married young. So close, so happy were they that they dared express their affection only through constant light bickering and quarreling, as if it were unlucky to be blatantly happy and in love in a world where others were sad and suffering. After they immigrated to Montreal, Hannah’s world was focused almost totally on her husband. She never learned French or English and shopped only in Jewish markets.

  During the pinochle games, David used to talk about Hannah constantly; complaining, of course. Bragging about her in his negative way. Saying that no woman in the world was so fussy about her cooking, such a nuisance about his health. She was driving him crazy! Why did he put up with it?

  Then, six years ago, Hannah died of cancer. Sick less than a month, and she died.

  For weeks afterward, the card games were quiet and uncomfortable; David was distant, uncharacteristically polite and withdrawn, and no one dared console him. His eyes were hollow, his face scoured with grief. Sometimes they would have to remind him that it was his play, and he would snap out of his reverie and apologize for delaying the game. David apologizing! Then, one evening, he mentioned Hannah in the course of conversation, grumbling that she was a nag and a pest. And moreover she was fat. Zaftig young is fat old! I should have married a skinny woman. They’re cheaper to feed.

  That was how he would handle it. He would continue complaining about her. That way, she wouldn’t be gone completely. He could go on loving her, and being exasperated beyond bearing by her. Occasionally the sour void of grief returned to make him desperate and mean for a day or two, but in general he could handle it now.

  The complicated double way he thought of his wife was expressed precisely one night when he happened to say, “Should Hannah, alshasholm, suddenly return, cholilleh, she would have a fit!”

  “So just pretend nothing happened when he comes back,” Moishe says. “And whatever you do, don’t try to cheer him up. A man must be allowed to grieve once in a while. If he avoids the pain of grieving, the sadness never gets purged. It lumps up inside of him, poisoning his life. Tears are a solvent.”

  Father Martin shakes his head. “But a friend should offer consolation.”

  “No, Martin. That would be the easy, the comfortable thing to do. But not the kindest thing. Just as David is not grieving for Hannah—people only grieve for themselves, for their loss—so we wouldn’t be consoling him for his own sake. We would be consoling him because his grief is awkward for us.”

  LaPointe feels uncomfortable with all this talk of grief and consolation. Men shouldn’t need that sort of thing. And he is about to say so, when David appears in the doorway.

  “Hey!” he says gruffly. “I went out to make the sandwiches, and I can’t find anything. What a mess!”

  Moishe smiles as he rises. David has never made the sandwiches in his life. “You find some glasses for the wine. I’ll make the sandwiches, for a change.”

  As David rummages about grumpily for the glasses, Moishe steps to a narrow table against the wall on which are arranged cold cuts and a loaf of rye bread. He cuts the bread rapidly, one stroke of the knife for each thin, perfect slice.

  “It’s amazing how you do that, Moishe,” Father Martin says, eager to get the conversation rolling.

  “Agh, that’s nothing,” David pronounces proudly. “Have you ever seen him cut fabric?” He spreads two fingers like scissors and makes a rapid gesture that narrowly misses Father Martin’s ear. “Psh-sh-sht! It’s a marvel to watch!”

  Moishe chuckles to himself as he continues slicing. “I would call that a pretty modest accomplishment in life. I can just see my epitaph: ‘Boy! Could he cut cloth!’ “

  “Yeah, yeah,” David says, fanning his hand in dismissal of Moishe’s modesty. “Still, think what a surgeon you would have made.”

  Father Martin has a funny idea. “Yes, he’d make a great surgeon, if my appendix were made of damask!”

  David turns and looks at him with heavy eyes. “What? What’s this about your appendix being damask?”

  “No… I was just saying that… well, if Moishe were a surgeon…” Confused, Martin shrugs and drops it.

  “I still don’t get it,” David says flatly. He is embarrassed about his recent loss of control, and Father Martin is going to feel the brunt of it.

  “Well… it was just a joke,” Martin explains, deflated.

  “Father,” David says, “let’s make a deal. You listen to confessions from old ladies too feeble to make interesting sins. I’ll tell the jokes. To each according to his needs; from each according to his abilities.”

  “Look who’s the communist,” Moishe says, trying to attract some of the fire away from Martin.

  “Who said anything about being a communist?” David wants to know.

  “Forget it. Did you manage to find the glasses?”

  “What glasses? Oh. The glasses.”

  Moishe puts a plate of sandwiches on the table, while David brings three thick-bottomed water glasses and a handleless coffee mug, which he gives to Father Martin. The wine is poured, and they toast life.

  David drains his glass and pours anot
her. “Tell me, Father, do you know the meaning of aroysgevorfeneh verter?”

  Father Martin shakes his head.

  “That’s Yiddish for ‘advice given to a priest about how to play pinochle.’ But that’s all right. I forgive you. I understand why you overbid.”

  “I don’t believe I overbid…”

  “The reason you overbid was because you had a marriage of hearts. And who can expect a priest to know the value of a marriage? Eh?”

  Father Martin sighs. David always delights in little digs at celibacy.

  “Now me!” David gestures broadly with his sandwich. “I know the value of a marriage. My wife Hannah was Ukrainian. Take my advice, Father. Never marry a Ukrainian. Nudzh, nudzh, nudzh! When she was born, she complained about the midwife slapping her on the ass, and she never got out of the habit. There is an old saying about Ukrainian women. It is said that they never die. Their bodies get smaller and smaller through wind erosion until there is nothing left but a complaining voice by the side of the fireplace. Me, I know the value of a marriage. I would have bid nothing!”

  LaPointe laughs. “I’d like to see the hand you wouldn’t bid on.”

  David laughs too. “Maybe so. Maybe so. Hey, tell me, Claude. How come you never married, eh?”

  Father Martin glances uneasily at LaPointe.

  When Martin was a young priest on the Main, he had known LaPointe’s wife. He was her confessor; he was with her when she died. And later, after the funeral, he happened upon LaPointe, standing in the empty church. It was after midnight, and the big uniformed cop stood alone in the middle of the center aisle. He was sobbing. Not from grief; from fury. God had taken from him the only thing he loved, and after only a year of marriage. More urbane men might have lost their faith in God; but not LaPointe. He was fresh from downriver, and his Trifluvian belief was too fundamental, too natural. God was a palpable being to him, the flesh-and-blood man on the cross. He still believed in God. And he hated His guts! In his agony he shouted out in the echoing church, “You son of a bitch! Rotten son of a bitch!”