St. Urbain's Horseman (21 page)

The history led off with a quotation from none other than the Right Honorable Vincent Massey, Canada's first Canadian governor-general who allowed that the Jews were “a fruitful and fertilizing stream” in Canadian life (which is to say, we're horse manure, Duddy thought) and it skimmed over any reference to prohibition whisky running, the Jewish Navy Gang of the twenties, or latter-day Montreal bookies and gaming house barons. Another professor was hired to write a eulogy on medicine, from Maimonides to Leonard Hyman Jacobson, Toronto's outspoken child psychologist. This, and specimen pages from further essays, Duddy had reproduced, under headings in Old English print, on the most luxuriant paper he could get without paying, by writing off to England for sample rolls, ostensibly soliciting a Canadian franchise for the sheets.

Meanwhile, after riding the fall in uranium shares, as scare stories proliferated, Duddy called his baffled broker again, took his profit in shorts, and then flew to troubled Ottawa to seek out the appropriate minister, waylaying him in the snow outside the Rideau Club. “I must have a word in confidence with you, sir.”

“What's that?”

“Kravitz's the name. I'm a personal friend of Senator Scott's son. You know, the budding playwright,” Duddy added, enjoying himself.

“Yes.”

“I am able to impart to you the true reason behind the miners' illness at Elliot Lake. I wish to offer you this information as a long-standing admirer and lifelong anti-communist.”

Back in Toronto, Duddy called his broker yet again, reversing his investment gears by ordering him to buy uranium shares heavily on option, his reward coming when the self-satisfied minister rose to speak at question time in Ottawa the next afternoon.

The
Globe
ran the story on the front page the following morning and, reading it, Luke whistled with astonishment, and passed it to Jake.

“Well, now,” Luke said, “I'm moved to pity. For they are bound to lock Duddy up and throw away the key, and I certainly never wished that on him.”

“Would you like to bet on it?”

“But he'll never wiggle out of this one, Jake.”

“Say, twenty dollars?”

“Right.”

As Duddy expected, George and his father, quaking with anger, were waiting in the outer office when he arrived, emboldened by the presence of an over-eager young man drumming his fingers on an attaché case.

“You their legal-eagle?” Duddy asked, waving them into his office.

“I am their lawyer, if that's what you mean to say in what I take to be show-business parlance.”

“Azoi.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“George, we could have talked this over together. I'm surprised at you. You've got a lawyer, so now I get a lawyer. And what happens, the letters fly, threats, we get nowhere, and they coin it in hand over foot.”

“It is perhaps the oldest and most pernicious trick in the books,” the young man said, springing out of his chair, “to try to separate a client from his attorney.”

“You'd better read this, Perry Mason,” and Duddy heaved a file at him.

There was a letter to George imploring him not to buy Dr. McCoy's Real Wate-Loss, at best a risky venture, and another letter, to the New York manufacturer, saying Duddy no longer wished to lend his name to a product, whatever its sensational initial benefits, which he feared might ultimately not be in the best interest of users health-wise.

“Why, you sharp Jewish bastard, you haven't heard the end of us.”

Duddy flicked on his intercom. “Miss Greenberg,” he said, glaring at the lawyer's card, “would you please get me Seligman, at the Anti-Defamation League, and ask him who we've got on the bar council? Thank you.” Then, turning on his visitors, he said, “My secretary will give you my lawyer's name on your way out.”

Duddy stayed home that evening to watch Jake's production of Luke's first television play, having decided that he would settle for nothing less than a brilliant production of the shittiest play ever written. But, before the first act was over, he realized that Lucas Scott, Esq., could write rings around anybody in Toronto. It seemed unjust, even perverse, that having been born into everything, he should also be abundantly talented. Well, maybe he'll die young. There's always hope. But Duddy, his mood sour, did not attend the party that was to follow the production.

After the party, Jake and Luke drank in the dawn together, embarrassed to be waiting for the reviews. For if they were bad, it would be
humiliating, and if they were good, it wouldn't be satisfying either, because this was merely Toronto. So when the reporters started to phone, Luke was withering and Jake did his utmost to give offense.

There were more plays, larger triumphs, and other postproduction mornings, unwinding with girlfriends until dawn, then deprecating the reviews no matter what they said, for both men continued to take Toronto's approval as a stigma. England was what filled their thoughts more and more. England, England, as soon as the time was ripe.

Duddy, envious of their shared celebrity, sulking as he felt Jake had thrown him over, retreated from both of them, increasingly absorbed in his own dreams.

The Canadian Jewish Who's Who.

After all, it was time for Duddy to bait the hook.

A test mailing of one thousand forms was dispatched across the country to doctors, dentists, lawyers, and businessmen, who were asked to return photographs and biographies, under no obligation to themselves. Their names, they were informed, had been selected as community leaders by an exacting and distinguished committee, for it was not possible to buy your way into an epoch-making compendium that was destined to become part and parcel of our incomparable Jewish heritage. An order form was enclosed in each envelope, in case the recipient wished to reserve a numbered, gold-embossed copy of the limited first printing (
bound to double in value as a collector's item
) of the Canadian Jewish Who's Who. Or the Jew's Who, as it came to be known in the inner sanctum of the Mount Sinai Press.

One hundred and twenty-two people enclosed checks for twenty-five dollars, of which only eighteen bounced, and Duddy hurried over to his bank, threatening to switch elsewhere unless more credit was instantly forthcoming.

Duddy Kravitz cleared fifty thousand dollars in legitimate profit on the Jew's Who, entering Jake free of charge, for old time's sake, as the noted up-and-coming television director, who would soon
move on to bigger and better things, directing on the other side of the pond.

Luke had already left for the Eastern Townships, to spend his last week in Canada on the lake with his family. Jake was taking Hanna to dinner on his final night in Toronto, but Duddy, he said, was welcome to join them.

Join them he did, enormously depressed to see Jake go, and leaving them early to sit in his own apartment and ruminate.

Certainly on the high road to his first million, Duddy nevertheless felt something lacking in his life. His handsomely-appointed apartment with a built-in bar backed by a mural of can-can dancers lit from behind, equipped with hi-fi and a bath-side telephone, was forever in a mess. Smelly socks and soiled shirts strewn everywhere. Pots and pans riding the sink. Salami butts shriveling in corners. And, most distressing of all, he still had to make do with restaurant food or something sent up from the delicatessen. He longed for home-cooked food (chicken soup, flanken, knishes) and something nifty yet
haimeshe
in a wife. What good was a million, he reflected, if you had to eat
dreck
alone every night and then either pulled yourself off to sleep or sent out for a hundred-dollar call girl, still damp from the last customer. Syph-bringers. The girls he relieved himself with were just the thing for a weekend in Buffalo, but not the sort he could take to the Pine Valley Country Club.

Hanna, in a melancholy mood, was tearful throughout dinner, even though Jake assured her he would send her the fare to come to London on a visit, maybe for the opening night of his first film, he joked.

“Everybody leaves this cold country. Joey; now you,” and she told him a story that Baruch had brought back from his travels, a tale told to him by a Spanish sailor. “You know how this country got its name? It was written on a map by the Conquistadors in Peru. On their map of the Americas, one of them wrote on the uncharted space over the Great Lakes, ‘
Aquí está nada
. ' It was shortened to
aquí nada
. Or Canada.”

Baruch, Baruch.

“When he was in agony,” she said, “after they cut off his leg, what kept him going was his hatred for his brothers. They'll bury themselves with twigs, he said, so that when the Messiah comes they can dig their way to him. Fat chance. I'll see them rotting six feet under, he swore, those crazy sons of bitches, and if any of you ever take anything from them, it's good riddance and an old man's curse on you.”

After his leg had been amputated, Baruch returned to Yellowknife, the mining town where Joey had been born, bought a diner, lost it and everything else speculating on claims.

“He might not come home to sleep for maybe a week and I wouldn't stop sobbing or cursing. And when he'd come home, finally, with bottles and his
goyische
ruffians, he would smack me on the ass, push a bloody parcel into my hands, and send me still crying into the kitchen to cook him
traifes
, sweetbreads, and pork chops … and he'd pull Joey out of bed, and Jenny too, kissing and pinching them, passing them from hand to hand. He'd pull down Joey's pajama bottoms, grab him, and shout, There's a cock for you, a Jewish cock, when he grows up, watch out for your daughters. He would give Jenny beer to drink and laugh when she spit it out and he would put a cigar in Joey's mouth and light it … and we would have to stay there, drinking and eating with his cronies, until he started a fight with one of them. There isn't one of you here, he'd boast, who can pin this one-legged Jew to the floor. Or maybe he'd pass out cold and the other men, ashamed for me, would file out of the house,
saying polite things, telling me that Baruch had forced them to come to the house and that he was one hell of a fellow.”

Baruch moved the family to Toronto, where Arty was born, and squeezed out a fitful living hustling worthless claims and penny mining stocks. He acquired a mistress and began to drink heavily again. Joey was taken over by the Baron de Hirsch Institute and placed in an orphanage. He fled, ending up on the Boys' Farm. Hanna ran to Montreal, where she literally threw herself at the feet of Jake's grandmother and Uncle Abe.

So Hanna and her three children, Jake recalled, as he brooded on the train to Montreal, were whisked into a cold-water flat on St. Urbain and put on an allowance.

Jake said goodbye to his mother, promising to write regularly from London. He went to see his father and his uncles, informing them, not that they had asked, that Hanna was well, and bringing the conversation around to Baruch, who, once abandoned by his mistress, had settled into a rooming house in Toronto's Cabbagetown.

“Whatever money he needed for beer and beans, that one,” Jake's father said, laughing, shaking his head, “he made selling newspapers outside office buildings and washing up in restaurants. He kicked the bucket in 1946, you know.”

“Yes,” Jake said sharply, “I am very well aware of that.”

Uncle Abe, recently made a Q.C., with larger triumphs hinted at in the future, smiled, amused. “You've got a lot to learn, Jake.” He patted Irwin's ten-year-old head and added, “You should get to know my boy here. His teachers are amazed. They've never seen anything like him. Irwin can recite the names of all the forty-eight states of America.”

Which set Jake off. He scolded his uncles for being smug, he accused them of abandoning a broken old man to a lonely death in a squalid rooming house and of treating Cousin Joey, the only Hersh
to have actually fought in the Spanish Civil War, even more shabbily. His uncles guffawed; they retorted heatedly, but justifiably, that any (or almost any) Hersh could get work with one or another of them, which only fired Jake's anger more. He warned them that he was bound to come across Joey somewhere, in England, where he was last heard from, or Israel, possibly. He would never abandon him, as his uncles had Baruch. On the contrary, he would do everything he could to help him.

Without realizing it, Jake had become Cousin Joey's advocate.

N
EIGHING, THE STALLION REARS, OBLIGING THE
Horseman to dig his stirrups in. Eventually he slows. Still in the highlands, emerging from the dense forest to scan the scrub below, he strains to find the unmarked road that winds into the jungle, between Puerto San Vincente and the border fortress of Carlos Antonio López.

In Frankfurt, the Horseman sits in the court presided over by Judge Hofmeyer.

A witness remembers Mengele.

“Exactly the way he stood there with his thumbs in his pistol belt. I also remember Dr. König, and to his credit I must say that he always got very drunk beforehand, as did Dr. Rohde. Mengele didn't; he didn't have to, he did it sober.”

Dr. Mengele was concerned about the women's block.

“… The women often lapped up their food like dogs; the only source of water was right next to the latrine, and this thin stream also served to wash away the excrement. There the women stood and drank or tried to take a little water with them in some container while next to them their fellow sufferers sat on the latrines. And throughout it all the female guards hit them with clubs. And while this was going on the S.S. walked up and down and watched.”