Solomon Gursky Was Here

One

Strawberry was descended from United Empire Loyalists. The name of his great-great-grandfather, Captain Josiah Watson, was inscribed on a copper plaque embedded in a boulder on the shores of Lake Memphremagog, a memorial dedicated to the pioneers “who braved the wilderness that their progeny, et al, might enjoy the advantages of civilization in one of Nature’s wonderlands.”

One day Strawberry took Moses to see the boulder. It stood on a height that had long since become a popular trysting spot for local teenagers. Strewn about were broken beer bottles and used condoms. Standing alone when it was first set in place, the boulder now overlooked VINCE’S ADULT VIDEOS on the roadside and, directly below, a billboard announcing that the surrounding terrain would shortly be the site of PIONEER PARK CONDOMINIUMS, complete with state-of-the-art marina. Yet another ACORN PROPERTIES development under the supervision of Harvey Schwartz.

Moses found Captain Watson’s name mentioned in Settling The Townships by Silas Woodford. “The first permanent location of what we now call Watson’s Landing was made by Capt. Josiah Watson, U.E. Loyalist from the province of New York, who came from Peacham, Vt., sometime during the later years of the 18th century.”

Perhaps it was the likes of the captain that another local historian, Mrs. C.M. Day, had in mind when she wrote in History of the Eastern Townships, Province of Quebec, Dominion of Canada, Civil and Descriptive: “Generally speaking, the class of men who comprised our earliest population were anything but religiously inclined: indeed, it has been said, and we fear with too much truth, that a really God-fearing man was a rare exception among them.”

No sooner did these ruffians harvest their first crop than they distilled the surplus grain to make spirituous liquors, which prompted Mrs. Day to note with a certain asperity, “The way was thus gradually but surely prepared for drunkenness, poverty, and the various forms of vice which often culminated in crime and its fearful penalties.”

Such was certainly the case with Captain Watson who, staggering home from a friend’s cabin one rainy spring night, managed the difficult feat of drowning in a ditch filled with no more than three inches of water. His son Ebenezer, also a prodigious drinker, seemed destined to follow suit until he was literally plucked out of a Magog gutter one day by that interloper known as Brother Ephraim.

“‘Behold,’” Brother Ephraim said to him, “the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.’”

Brother Ephraim, sole author of Evidence from the Scriptures of the Second Coming of Christ in the Eastern Townships about the year 1850, later revised the date to 1852 and, finally, February 26, 1853.

Thrusting his demons behind him, Ebenezer Watson joined Brother Ephraim and his two leading converts, the Reverends Columbus Green and Amos Litch, preaching against the tyranny of hootch and spreading fear about the coming of Judgement Day.

Many of Ephraim’s followers, Ebenezer Watson prominent among them, taking to heart his warning about camels and rich men, signed over their livestock and the deeds to their properties to the Millenarian Trust Company. In preparation for the World’s End, they also bought ascension robes from Brother Ephraim. The men weren’t concerned about the cut of their loosely fitted robes, but many of the women, especially the younger ones, had to return for innumerable fittings in the log cabin that Brother Ephraim had built for himself in the woods. They came one at a time and only much later did they speculate among themselves about the ridges and deep swirls and curving hollows carved into his back.

The Millenarians never numbered more than two hundred and were subject to ridicule in some quarters. Say, in Crosby’s Hotel or round the hot stove at Alva Simpson & Co., dealers in Proprietary Medicines, Perfumery, Rubber Goods, Hair Preparations, Druggists’ Sundries, &c., &c., &c. The laughter of skeptics heightened after the world failed to end as predicted on June 2, 1851. It was plain to see that the Millenarians, gathered in their robes in the Magog Town Meeting Hall, had been stood up by their Maker. A journal popular in the Townships at the time, The Sherbrooke Gazette, also proprietor of SMITH’S PATENT EGG BEATER (will beat a pint of eggs in five seconds), noted, “From the failure of calculations of Brother Ephraim as to the ‘time of the end’, many of his followers apostatized, but a large number continued steadfast.”

They could hardly be blamed. The land they were attempting to cultivate, once the hunting ground of the Algonquin nation, was ridden with unmanageable humps and strewn with rocks. The first settlers, their grandparents, had organized themselves into groups of forty to petition for a township ten miles square, splitting the forest between them, the agent grabbing the choicest site.

The grandparents set out with a camp-kettle, an axe, a gun, ammunition, sacks of seed, and maybe a cow or two or an ox. There were no roads. There were not even trails. Until they managed to build their first log shanty with a bark roof and an earthen floor, they were obliged to sleep out in the woods, making a bed of hemlock branches, using the largest ones for a windbreak. Without matches they were dependent on flint, steel and spunk. Come June they had to keep smudge fires lit, in the dim hope of fending off moose flies big as bumblebees. There was no hay. So they destroyed the dams in the beaver meadows, drained the flooded land, and relied on the wild grass that grew there. They learned to eat cowslips and nettles, pigweed, ground-nuts, wild onions. They coped with panthers and catamounts, black bears killing calves and carrying them off. Once they acquired lambs and turkeys and chickens, they discovered that these were hostage to lynx and wolves. Most of the clothes they wore were spun and woven by the women who learned to master hand-card, distaff, wheel, and loom. If they were lucky, only three years passed before they brought in their first harvest. If the crop failed, the men felled trees and made black salt, tramping forty miles to market their sacks of potash, for which they were paid a pittance.

By Ebenezer’s time the families lived in real cabins, with a cavity for a root cellar, a stone fireplace, floors of hewn planks, and furniture of a sort. Roads had been opened and covered bridges thrown across rivers and streams. There were grog-shops, saw and grinding mills, general stores, a doctor (struck off the register in Montreal) who could be sent for, churches, newspapers, a whorehouse, and plenty of homebrew whisky. But some things remained the same. For six months the settlers endured isolated and savage winters, enlivened only by the occasional brawl or suicide or axe-murder. They stumbled out of bed at four A.M. to tramp through the snow to milk their cows. Then there were spring floods and black flies and mosquitoes and work from sunup to sundown, and after that the accounts to be done. Usually they were obliged to plant late, because the fields were frozen hard as cement until the end of May. Often they never got to harvest what they planted, because there was an unseasonal hailstorm or the frost struck late in June again, or the fierce summer sun withered the corn in the fields. Idiots and malformed children were plentiful in villages, where marriage among first cousins was the rule rather than the exception. The women who didn’t die in childbirth were old before their time, what with all the cooking and canning and sewing and milking and churning and weaving and candle-making. The men who rose before dawn to clear their poor hilly fields of rocks and stumps and tend to their crops and livestock had to start chopping winter wood in May. The harder they worked, the deeper they seemed to sink into debt. No wonder, then, that they welcomed a prophet who offered them an end to the only world they knew.

Brother Ephraim, consulting with the Reverends Litch and Green, went back to his calculations, leaning heavily on the Book of Daniel, and came up with a brand new date, March 1, 1852, which was happily not too far off. Yet again he exhorted his flock to cleanse itself. So more Millenarians signed over their holdings. Neglecting their farms, they flocked into the Magog Town Meeting Hall once more and were stood up once more. A headline in The Townships Bugle ran:

Brother Ephraim set a new and irrevocable date: February 26, 1853. More property was signed over. While the Millenarians were preparing for the World’s End, however, a twice-disappointed, despondent Ebenezer Watson slid back into drinking, clearing the kitchen shelf of his wife’s supply of the Rev. N.H. Downs’ Vegetable Balsamic Elixir, highly recommended for the cure of neuralgia, rheumatism, headache, toothache, colic, cholera-morbus, and diarrhoea. Once again Ebenezer became a fixture at Crosby’s Hotel.

“Hey, Eb, when you get there if there are no blizzards or bankers or pig shit, would you be kind enough to drop us a note?”

Understandably fed up with ridicule and impatient for the end, Ebenezer one morning consumed a jug of homebrew, donned his ascension robes and climbed to the roof of his barn. At exactly twelve noon he jumped, heading for heaven solo. He didn’t make it. Instead he fell, slamming into a boulder jutting out of the snow, dying of a broken neck.

Ebenezer left his wife and six children no more than the original eighty-acre farm, which, through a fortunate oversight, he had neglected to sign over to the Millenarian Trust. And that night, even as the Watsons grieved, lakeside residents were wakened by the yapping of dogs. They figured that Brother Ephraim was going out to check his traplines on the Cherry River, but he was never seen in Magog again.

Ascension, without Brother Ephraim, was not going to be much fun, so only seventy-odd Millenarians turned up at the Town Meeting Hall on February 26. When they were grounded for a third time, they turned on the Reverends Green and Litch. Both men of God were beaten and tarred and feathered and then driven out of Magog on a sled. News of the swindle was reported with glee in the Montreal Witness, the writer enjoying a good laugh at the expense of the yokels. The next thing the dispossessed Millenarians knew was that three middle-aged strangers, obviously men of substance, came all the way out from Montreal. The strangers put up at Magog House, keeping to themselves, whispering together. They ate dinner with “Ratty” Baker, the local banker, studying surveyors’ maps and consuming a good deal of wine, especially the plump, red-faced fellow, a lawyer.

The next morning the Millenarians were invited to a meeting by the lawyer, who offered to represent their interests in court, saying it was a dead cinch he could recover their property. Pausing to sip from a sterling silver flask, he assured them that they were looking at a grandson of a tiller of God’s green acres himself. He understood what land meant and how it got into a man’s blood. Often, he went on to say, even as he argued a case successfully in the supreme court of the land, he wished he were back on his grandaddy’s farm, cutting hay, the sweetest smell in creation. But even before he began talking nonsense to them, Russell Morgan, QC, just wasn’t the sort to gain the Townshippers’ confidence. He wore a beaver coat and spats and sported a silver cigar cutter, riding a big bouncy belly.

“Yeah, but if you got our land back the mortgages would come with it you betcha.”

“No, sir,” he said, refreshing himself from his flask. Before quitting town Ephraim Gursky—for that, he told them, was the Hebrew scoundrel’s proper name—had paid off all the mortgages with gold nuggets the size of which the bank had never seen before.

The lawyer’s two confederates, Darcy Walker and Jim Clarkson, seated at the back of the hall, immediately grew restive. One of them pulled out an enormous linen handkerchief and did not so much blow his nose as honk it. The other one banged his cane against the plank floor.

“Mind you,” Russell Morgan, QC, added hastily, betrayed only by a rush of blood to his jowls, “Gursky certainly didn’t find those nuggets in Township streams. He brought them with him.”

“He wasn’t a Hebrew,” a boy called out. “He was a Four by Two.”

“That happens to be Cockney argot for Jew, young fella, and Ephraim Gursky is one of the worst of that nefarious race. He is not only wanted by the police here, but also by the authorities in England and Australia.”

A murmur rose among the Millenarians, a murmur that a gratified Russell Morgan, QC, took for outrage, but was actually prompted by naked admiration.

“No shit!”

“Tell us more.”

“Ephraim was transported from London, England, to Van Diemen’s Land in 1835, a forger of official documents. The rest is understandably murky. We don’t know how he came to this great land of ours.”

“What would your services cost us, Mister Man?”

“Why not a penny, sir.”

“We may be stupid,” Abner Watson said, “but we ain’t crazy. How much?”

Russell Morgan, QC, explained that if he lost the case, which was unthinkable given his brilliant record and fabled courtroom eloquence, then his services—much sought after, he needn’t point out—would come to them pro bono publico.

“Come again?”

“Free”

But if he proved to be their saviour, all the timber land adjoining the Cherry River—including mineral rights, he put in quickly—would be signed over to him.

Once saved, twice shy, the Millenarians began to walk out one by one, drifting over to Crosby’s Hotel. Watching from a window, they saw Russell Morgan endure a tongue-lashing from his two confederates, one of whom actually reached into a pocket of Morgan’s beaver coat, yanked out the sterling silver flask, and flung it into a snowbank. As a contrite Morgan retrieved his flask, “Ratty” Baker rushed up, said something, and the three Montrealers immediately set out for Sherbrooke. On arrival, they repaired to the bar of the Prince of Wales Hotel, and there they discovered a short fierce man with hot eyes and an inky black beard drinking alone at a table in a dim corner. They did not so much approach the table as surround it.

“What can I do for you, my good fellows?”

Morgan wagged a finger at him. “You are Ephraim Gursky!”

The fierce little man, his eyes darting, tried to rise from his chair but was quickly knocked back, wedged into place, the three men having joined him at his table. Morgan, charged with glee, took his time lighting an Havana, watching the little wretch begin to sweat. Cornered, they were all the same. That lot. Laughing aloud, his belly bouncing, Morgan blew smoke in his face. “I am trying to decide,” he said, “whether to escort you back to Magog, where you would undoubtedly be hanged from the nearest tree, or whether I should show you a modicum of Christian charity and merely hand you over to the authorities. What do you think, Hugh?”

“Oh, heavens, what a conundrum.”

“Please,” a tearful Ephraim whined just before he slumped forward in a faint.

The waiter was hastily summoned. “I’m afraid,” Morgan said, “that our companion has overindulged himself. I assume that he is a guest of your establishment.”

Darcy retrieved the room key from the desk and the three men, supporting Ephraim between them, led him back to his room, dumped him in a chair and slapped him awake.

“Well, my little man,” Morgan said, “I’d say, not to put too fine a point on it, that you are a rat caught in a trap.”

Darcy began to go through Ephraim’s suitcase. Hugh searched the bureau drawers.

“What little money I’ve got is under the mattress. You can have it, if you let me go.”

“Now isn’t that rich, boys. He takes us for common thieves.”

“You are obviously gentlemen of quality. But I don’t know what you want with me.”

“Possibly we wish to buy your illicitly gained properties on the Cherry River.”

“They’re worthless, sir.”

“Oh, why don’t we just take him back to Magog and be done with it?”

Ephraim watched, his eyes bulging with anguish, as Darcy pulled out a heavy pine chest from under the bed. “It’s locked,” Darcy said.

“The keys, Gursky.”

“Lost.”

Morgan dug the keys out of Ephraim’s jacket pocket.

“I collect rocks,” Ephraim said. “It’s a passion of mine.”

“That’s rich. That’s very rich. I should tell you that Mr. Walker is a geologist, and Mr. Clarkson a mining engineer.”

The pine box unlocked, the rock samples lay bare.

“You will find a gold nugget or two in there,” Ephraim said, “but I swear they do not come from any creek near here.”

“Where from, then?”

“The north, my good fellows.”

The men passed the rocks from hand to hand.

“You can beat me,” Ephraim suddenly lashed out. “You can turn me over to the police or take me back to Magog to be hanged, but unless I’m offered a fair price I will not sign over deeds to properties that took me three long years of hard work to accumulate.”

THE MILLENARIANS, their properties lost, were in a hallelujah mood. Brother Ephraim, who had promised to save them, had been as good as his word so far as they were concerned. No sooner did the snows melt than most of the dispossessed packed their wagons and headed south. Free free. Free at last. Free to put the unyielding wintry land behind them. Some struck out for Texas, which they had read so much about in dime novels, but others made it no further than the “Boston-States”, where eight years later a few accepted money to replace rich Yankees in the Union Army.

One of the volunteers, Hugh McCurdy, had been related to Strawberry on his mother’s side. A letter of his survived on three-coloured newspaper from a Magnus Ornamental and Glorious Union Packet. It had been written on the eve of the battle of Shiloh, where McCurdy fell, and one night Strawberry brought it to The Caboose to show Moses.

The next morning Moses had hiked to Strawberry’s house on the hill and together they had rooted through an attic trunk, surfacing with other intriguing items, among them a traveller’s account, from an 1874 issue of Harper’s Magazine, of a trip through the Lake Memphremagog country following its short-lived mining boom. “From Knowlton to South Bolton extends a wilderness. Small bears have been seen, foxes are often killed and the trout brooks yield up their treasures. From there we moved on to Cherry River. Gold was once thought to be abundant in the streams feeding the Cherry River, a Magog banker having displayed several large nuggets as evidence. But sadly for the many investors in New Camelot Mining & Smelting this turned out not to be the case. Therein, however, lies a tale. We sought out Sir Russell Morgan at his Peel Street residence in Montreal, the proud family coat-of-arms emblazoned over the portico. We hoped Sir Russell might enlighten us over what still remains a subject of some controversy. Unfortunately, he was unavailable.”

New Camelot Mining & Smelting was the rock on which three considerable Montreal family fortunes were founded, that of the Morgans, the Clarksons and the Walkers. The mining stock, originally issued at 10¢, soared to $12.50 before it crashed. Radical members of parliament called for an inquiry at the time, arguing that Morgan and his partners had sold before the bubble burst, but nothing came of the protestations.

Sir Russell Morgan, in his privately printed autobiography, A Country Gentleman Remembers, dwelled at length on his progenitors, whom he had no difficulty tracing back to the Norman Conquest of 1066, even though—or just possibly because, some wags ventured—surnames had not yet been introduced in England. But he devoted only two paragraphs to the short, febrile life of New Camelot Mining & Smelting, the company he had founded in partnership with Senator Hugh Clarkson and Darcy Walker, MP. The three of them had been misled in the first place, he noted, by an Israelite renegade who had assured them that the hills were veined with gold. He deeply regretted that many investors had endured a beating. Mining, alas, was a risky business. Mind you, he added, he had never heard so much as a peep from the many more who had made money trading the stock or from those who had profited on his later ventures, but—he reflected—c’est la vie, as our charming habitant friends are so fond of saying.

Two

Hungover, unable to concentrate, Moses reckoned the day would not be utterly lost if he put the books in his cabin into some kind of order, beginning with those scattered on the floor. The first book he picked up was The Unquiet Grave; A Word Cycle by Palinurus. “The more books we read,” it began, “the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having made the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked!”

Well, flick you, Cyril, Moses thought, flinging the slender volume across the room and then, because he held Connolly in such high regard, promptly retrieving it. There was a Blackwell’s sticker on the first page and a notation in his own handwriting: “Oxford, 1956.”

That, of course, was the year Moses caught his first glimpse of the fabulously rich Sir Hyman Kaplansky, seated at Balliol’s High Table, chattering with two of the most tiresome of the dons. Several weeks passed before Moses ran into Sir Hyman again, this time in Blackwell’s bookshop, a malacca cane tucked under the old man’s arm. Sir Hyman introduced himself. “I read your essay on Yiddish etymology in Encounter,” he said. “Excellent, I thought.”

“Thank you.”

“So I hope you won’t take offence if I point out a small error. I fear you missed the mark on the origin of ‘kike’. Mind you, so did Partridge, who cites 1935 as the year of its first usage in English. As I’m sure you know, Mencken mentioned it as early as 1919 in his American Language.”

“I thought I said as much.”

“Yes. But you suggest the word was introduced by German Jews as a pejorative term for immigrants from the shtetl, because so many of their names ended in ‘sky’ or ‘ski.’ Hence ‘ky-kis’ and then ‘kikes’. Actually the word originated on Ellis Island, where illiterates were asked to sign entry forms with an ‘X’. This the Jews refused to do, making a circle or a ‘kikel’ instead, and soon the inspectors took to calling them ‘kikelehs’ and finally ‘kikes’.”

Another month passed before there came the summons from Sinai.

“There’s no accounting for taste,” Moses’s history tutor said, “but it seems that Sir Hyman Kaplansky has taken a fancy to you.”

Sir Hyman, the tutor explained, was a collector of rare books, primarily Judaica, but also something of an Arctic enthusiast. He owned one of the largest private collections of manuscripts and first editions dealing with the search for the Northwest Passage. A Canadian university, the tutor said, McGill, if memory served, had asked to exhibit his collection on loan. Sir Hyman acquiesced and now required somebody to compile a catalogue. “I imagine,” the tutor said, “that you could manage the job nicely in a fortnight. He will pay handsomely, not that you were about to inquire.”

On his next trip down to London, Moses made directly for Sam Birenbaum’s office in Mayfair. Sam, overworking as usual, if only to prove himself to the network, had barely time for a quick pint and shepherd’s pie in the pub section of the Guinea. Then, back at the office, he had the librarian feed Moses the thick file on Sir Hyman.

The elusive Sir Hyman was reported to have been born in Alexandria, the son of a cotton broker, and seemed to have made his fortune speculating on the currency market in Beirut, before settling in England shortly before World War Two. He was knighted in 1945 for his services to the Conservative party, it was said, and went on to amass an even greater fortune as a merchant banker and property developer. The immediate post-war period, however, appeared somewhat murky, Sir Hyman entangled in at least two botched ventures. In 1946, operating out of Naples, Sir Hyman bought two superannuated troop ships and a number of freighters of dubious seaworthiness, incorporating a shipping line. In the end, he had to write off his fleet, selling his tubs for a pittance. Then one of the freighters, still bearing the emblem of his defunct line, a raven painted on the funnel, was caught trying to run the Palestine blockade and diverted to Cyprus by a British destroyer. Fortunately Sir Hyman was able to prove that he had unloaded the ship in question six months earlier, and said as much in his letter to the Times.

Then, in early 1948, there was another unsuccessful flutter, this time in film production. Sir Hyman, known to be an aviation buff ever since he had learned to fly in Kenya, confounded his admirers in the City again, acquiring a villa in Valletta and announcing that he was going to produce a film about the air war over Malta. With this in mind, he began to recruit former World War Two pilots and to assemble a small air force, comprised largely of Spitfires. But the film never went into production, Sir Hyman unable to settle on a satisfactory script. He returned to London in May, assuring a reporter from the Financial Times that he would not plunge into unfamiliar waters again, and allowing that his air force had ended up in a knacker’s yard, costing him a pretty penny. A day later David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel, which he said would be “a light unto the nations.” The new state was immediately attacked by troops from Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Egypt, and Iraq.

The most recent addition to the file concerning Sir Hyman was actually no more than a typed memo from a researcher, requesting a comment regarding an interview Guy Burgess had given when he had surfaced in Moscow only the day before.

“The Bolshie who did a bunk?” Sir Hyman had said. “I hardly knew Burgess and, furthermore, I do not appear on television.”

The file included magazine articles about Sir Hyman’s country estate not far from Bognor Regis on the Sussex coast. The estate, its art treasures and antiques, its garden statuary, had been featured in both the Tatler and Country Life. Lady Olivia was an accomplished steeplechase jumper. She also bred corgis.

Moses longed to see the estate, but, as things turned out, he was summoned to Sir Hyman’s flat in Cumberland Terrace. Moses arrived punctually at four and was shown into the library by the butler.

Left alone, Moses scanned the shelves encountering, for the first time, names that would come to be embedded in his soul:

Sir John Ross, Hearne, Mackenzie, Franklin, Back, Richardson, Belcher, M’Clure, M’Clintock, Hall, Bellot.… Then Moses drifted over to take a closer look at a painting that hung over the fireplace. An Eskimo primitive. Against a stark white background a yellow ball of sun bled red rays. Below, a menacing raven plucked at a floating human head.

“Ah,” Sir Hyman said, entering the library, “I see that you’ve been seduced by the deceitful raven.”

“Is that what it is?”

“Once a raven swooped low over a cluster of igloos and told the people that visitors were on the way. If the people did not encounter the travellers before nightfall, he said, they were to make a camp at the foot of the cliff. The visitors did not turn up and the people built new shelters at the foot of the cliff, as instructed. When the last stone lamp in the igloos was put out the deceitful raven flew straight to the top of the cliff that loomed over the igloos. On the summit, perched on an enormous overhang of snow, he began to jump, run, and dance, starting an avalanche. The trusting inhabitants below were buried, never to waken again. The raven waited for spring. Then, when the snows melted, revealing the bodies of the unfortunate people, he amused himself emptying their eye sockets. According to legend, the raven did not lack for tasty provisions well into summer. What would you say to a sherry?”

“Would you mind if I had a Scotch instead?”

“Of course not.”

They were interrupted by Lady Olivia. Considerably younger than Sir Hyman, blonde, with a daunting jaw, she held up a map of their dining-room table on a clipboard, flags protruding from each setting. “Henry’s secretary just phoned to say he’s iffy for tonight. The House will be sitting late.”

“Then we’ll simply have to do without him.”

“But don’t you see? That means I’d have to sit Rab next to Simon.”

Sir Hyman glanced at the flags. “What if you moved Rab over here?”

“I’ve seated Lucy there. She’ll love it. After all, it’s a coronet she’s shopping for over here, isn’t it?”

“Lucy Duncan?”

“The little Canadian girl.”

“Oh, Gursky. Couldn’t we discuss this later?” Sir Hyman asked, indicating Moses. “I shan’t be very long.”

Moses was reading a book that lay open on a pedestal. The Diaries of Angus McGibbon, Hudson’s Bay Company Chief Factor, Prince of Wales’s Fort:

A half hour later an irritated Lady Olivia was back, clipboard in hand.

“Our problem is solved, daring,” Sir Hyman said. “Mr. Berger will be joining us for dinner. He’s also a Canadian. He met Lucy when he was a child.”

That was hardly sufficient for Lady Olivia.

“He’s at Balliol. A Rhodes scholar. His father is a poet.”

“Oh, how sweet,” Lady Olivia said. “I didn’t know they had any.”

Three

Lucy.

Their first morning together Moses came to shortly before noon, trying to sort out whose silken sheets he was lying on, when he isolated the sound that must have wakened him. It was the sound of retching and flushing. Surfacing, but still far from shore, he pried open his eyes and followed the sound through an open door to where a nude Lucy reclined on her knees before the toilet bowl. She struggled to her feet, wobbly, touchingly thin. “What would you like Edna to bring you for breakfast?”

“Black coffee. Oh, and a vodka with orange juice would be nice.”

Still nude, Lucy pressed a button embedded in the wall and then stood on her scale. A fat, surly black lady drifted into the room without knocking. Lucy didn’t bother to turn around. “Bring us a huge pot of black coffee, a jug of freshly squeezed orange juice and two yogurts. Oh, and Edna, this is Mr. Berger. He’s moving in with us.”

Moses waited until Edna left before he said, “Am I?”

“Well, if you don’t remember you can bloody well leave right after breakfast.”

“No, I want to stay.” And have Aunt Jemima bring me the newspapers and a yummy yogurt in bed every morning.

“I’ve gained three-quarters of a pound.”

He could, if he chose, count her washboard ribs. “I figure you weigh no more than a hundred.” Maybe one ten, he thought, if she was wearing her jewellery.

“You don’t understand. They need you to be thin. Or don’t you remember anything about last night?”

“I most certainly do.”

“Then who am I testing for this afternoon?”

“Manchester United.”

“Ho ho ho.”

“Remind me, then.”

“Sir Carol Reed.”

“It was on the tip of my tongue.”

“So was I for a good part of last night.”

Moses blushed.

“You’ll find I can be rather coarse, but I come by it honestly. A satyr’s daughter, they say. Do you own a dinner jacket?”

“Of sorts,” he said, figuring he could borrow money from Sam to rent one.

“Good. You’ll need it tonight.” They were, she explained, going to the opening of a new play at the Royal Court and then on to a blacktie party at Sir Hyman Kaplansky’s place. “Can you stay sober until I get back?”

He promised.

“Ken Tynan will be there and Oscar Lowenstein and Joan Littlewood and Peter Hall and God knows who else. Hymie invited them all for my sake.”

Once she was gone, Moses immediately poured himself a straight vodka and then wandered about her bijou flat. Her bookshelves were crammed with play texts, actors’ memoirs, studies of Hollywood greats and near-greats. A wicker basket overflowed with old copies of Stage, Variety, Plays and Players, Films and Filming. Moses decided that just one more little vodka, say three fingers, wouldn’t do any harm, and then he collapsed into a velvet-covered wingback chair. Something bit into the small of his back. He pulled out a pearl necklace, long enough for a fishing leader, which he reckoned must be worth thousands of pounds. Suddenly aware that he was being closely watched from a kitchen porthole, he sent it clattering into the nearest ashtray.

“Can I get you anything, Mr. Berger?”

“No, thank you.”

Lucy returned in a foul mood. “If it ever comes down to a choice between me and some tart in a bed-sitter, she gets the part. I’m being punished for being rich.”

The play, a kitchen-sinker, proved interminable. Charged with significance. If, for instance, somebody turned on the radio it was never to catch the Test Match results or a weather report. It was unfailingly Chamberlain announcing peace in our time or somebody snitching that they had just dropped it on Hiroshima. Outside, her driver waited in the Bentley. Harold drove them to Sir Hyman’s flat, which was awash with important producers and directors, all of whom Lucy pursued relentlessly. Moses, who didn’t know anybody there, retreated to the library and pulled out a familiar title, the book which convinced him that Ephrim (Gor-ski, or Tulugaq, had been fruitful during his sojourn in the Arctic. It was a first edition of Life with the Esquimaux, A Narrative of an Arctic Quest in Search of Survivors of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition, by Capt. Waldo Logan. Logan, a native of Boston, had set sail for the Arctic on the whaling barque Determination on May 27, 1868. A month later, entering Hudson Strait, he wrote: “The next day, June 29th, we once more stood in toward the land, but it still continued foggy, and we were unable to get near until about 4 P.M. having just before again sighted the Marianne. At the time two Esquimaux boys were seen coming at full speed toward us. In a few moments more they were alongside, and hoisted—kyacks and all—into the ship. Their names were ‘Koodlik’ and ‘Ephraim,’ each 5 foot 6 inches in height, with small hands, small feet, and pleasing features except that both had some of their front teeth gone. These boys had brought an abundance of salmon, caplins, sea-birds, &c. and eagerly began to trade with us. Speedily we were on the most friendly terms, and merry-making was the order of the day. On entering the cabin to supper their conduct was most orderly. But Ephraim, the younger one, would not eat before salting his bread and mumbling a blessing over it. I couldn’t catch most of it, but I did learn that the Esquimaux word for bread is lechem.”

Drink betrayed Moses yet again, the print doubling on him. He replaced the book on the shelves and went to a mullioned window, worked it open, and sucked in the night air. Then, feeling marginally better, he wandered over to examine the picture that now hung over the fireplace, displacing the deceitful raven.

“It’s Prince Henry the Navigator.”

Startled, Moses turned around to find that Sir Hyman had come up behind him once again.

“How old are you now, Moses?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Well now, in 1415, when Prince Henry was twenty-one, he severed all connections with the court and became the Navigator. He retired to Cape Vincent, Portugal’s Land’s End, and from that promontory he sent out ships to chart the coast of Africa, but, above all, to seek the legendary Kingdom of Prester John. But you must be familiar with the story.”

“Sorry, no.”

“Ah, the mythical kingdom of the just, a veritable earthly paradise. A realm of underground rivers that churned out precious stones and the habitat of an astonishing breed of worms that spun threads of the most exquisite silk. It was purported to lie somewhere in the ‘Indies’, and it was said that Prester John combined military acumen with saintly piety and that he was descended from the Three Wise Men. It was anticipated that he would help to conquer the Holy Sepulchre as well as defend civilized Europe from the Anti-Christ, the hordes of cannibals to be found in the lands of Gog and Magog. News of the kingdom was first circulated in a letter supposedly written by Prester John in 1165 and sent to the Byzantine emperor of Rome. Unfortunately the letter proved to be a forgery. There is no just kingdom, but only the quest for one, a preoccupation of idiots for the most part, wouldn’t you say?”

An agitated toothy Lady Olivia cantered into the library. “There you are, Hymie! Everybody’s asking for you.”

“Coming, my dear.” He paused at the door and turned back to Moses. “I’m sure you appreciate that Lucy is a troubled young lady. Do be kind to her.”

TO BEGIN WITH, they were actually kind to each other, playing house together, tended to by Edna and Harold and provisioned by Harrods, Paxton and Whitfield, Fortnum & Mason, Berry Bros. & Rudd.

Looking after each other was a game they came to cherish. Lucy, for her part, astonished that she could be concerned for anybody else’s welfare and Moses gratified that somebody gave a damn. Teasing, cajoling, abstaining from wine, she seduced him into abstinence. After he had gone without a drink for a fortnight, lying to her, pretending he didn’t miss it, she pleaded with him to resume work on his study of the Beveridge Plan and the evolution of the British Welfare State.

Out with Harold one afternoon, flitting from Harrods to Asprey’s to Heal’s, she purchased a box of the creamiest bond paper available; an electric typewriter; file cards that came in a darling velvet case, each drawer with a brass pull; a leather armchair; and an antique desk with a tooled leather top. Then, while Moses was out for an afternoon stroll, counting each pub he passed, his own Stations of the Cross, she had her sitting room made over as a study. He found it all more than somewhat pretentious, but he was also pleased, especially by the Fabergé humidor filled with Davidoff cigars. There were, he figured, only two things missing. A portrait of M. Berger, Esq., pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight, and of course cork lining for the walls.

Lucy, he discovered, had come to London (on the first overseas flight anywhere out of Idlewild with her lucky seat number five available) immediately following the breakup of her affair in New York with a South American Grand Prix driver. Her next lover, a beautiful boy encountered at the bar in Quaglino’s, absconded with a necklace of gold, diamonds, and pearls that had once belonged to Catherine the Great. RADA wouldn’t have her, neither would the London Academy, so Lucy stitched together a school of her own. She took acting lessons from a dotty disciple of Lee Strasberg, dance and movement from a drunk who had once performed with Sadler’s Wells (a bitchy old queen, whom Moses enjoyed having lunch with occasionally) and singing from a one-time tenor with La Scala, who claimed to have fled Mussolini, but more likely, Moses thought, scathing reviews. A McTavish Distillery executive arranged for her to be represented by a reputable agency before he realized that she was not Mr. Bernard’s daughter, but Solomon’s, and that he needn’t have bothered.

The morning of an audition Lucy would waken convinced that she looked a total wreck, which was usually the case considering how poorly she had slept. She would patch herself together and hurry off to Vidal’s, her analyst, her masseuse, and her voice teacher, though not necessarily in that order. Then, clutching her portfolio of photographs by David Bailey, regretting that she didn’t look as good as Jean Shrimpton or Bronwen Pugh, she would join the other girls, also clutching portfolios, on the bench outside the sleazy rehearsal hall, waiting for the oily fat man with the clipboard to call her name. Why Lucy, with all that money, humiliated herself, going to market determined on the dubious prize of a bit in some mediocre movie, utterly confounded him. He wished, for her sake, that everybody would turn her down, bringing her to her senses. But unfortunately she was tossed a misleading bone from time to time, sufficient to inflame her fantasies of stardom. Say, the part of a sassy secretary in a Diana Dors vehicle. Or in yet another movie the gum-chewing long distance operator in a call put through to America by no less than Eric Portman or Jack Hawkins. Moses tried to reason with her. “It’s not as if you’re being offered Masha or Cordelia. What do you need this for?”

“Oh, go read a book, you prick.”

Those were actually their sunshine days together. A time when staying at home with him, rather than dashing off to Les Ambassadeurs or the Mirabelle or the Caprice every night, offered her a chance to play a Celia Johnson role. Most evenings he seemed content to settle into the sofa with a book. She tried it herself, but her attention span was short, so she made do with magazines, jigsaw puzzles, or flicking from one TV channel to the other. All the while doing her utmost to squelch an inner voice that kept protesting these were to be your salad days and here you are, wasting in a cave, growing older with a morose reformed drunk, not much good in bed, the real fun elsewhere. No, no, she corrected herself. He will write something stupendous and everybody will point to her, like Aline Bernstein, that voluptuous Jewess whom her college instructor had said made it all possible. Yeah, sure. The trouble is Thomas Wolfe was a big tall goy and Moses, let’s face it, is a little Jewy intellectual with pop eyes and thick lips. Of Time and the River is a classic, it’s in the Modern Library, but a study of the Beveridge Plan with graphs and charts? Forget it.

What she failed to understand was that he loathed staying in every night, reading on the sofa, a habit not answering some dearly held predilection of his but born of penury. A good part of her attraction for him was that she could take him to Les Ambassadeurs or the Mirabelle, a world he longed to experience but couldn’t afford. However, having ventured out with him two or three times she swore never again. Moses, insecure in opulent surroundings but absolutely adoring it, coped with the contradiction by indulging in snide remarks about the glittering couples at the other tables. He embarrassed her in fine restaurants where her arrival had once been treated as an occasion, the maître d’ strewing flatteries like rose petals in her path, by never settling the bill before checking each item as well as the addition.

Bored, he laid his book aside one night and said, “Tell me about Solomon.”

“I was only two years old when he died.”

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you anything?”

“He drove her mad. What more is there to say?”

Her clothes, acquired at the Dior boutique or from the Rahvis sisters, were strewn everywhere, left for Edna to retrieve. Lying on the sofa, absorbed in the latest issue of Vogue, she was given to absently picking her nose. Even more disconcerting, her thumb might find its way into her mouth and she would suck it avidly, unaware of what she was at. Her appalling table manners were explained, he thought, but hardly pardoned by the mad mother, the absent father. For all that, she had a way of teasing him out of his bouts of depression, increasingly frequent now that he was supposed to make do without drink.

“What are we going to do for excitement this afternoon, Moses?”

“What would you like to do?”

“Maybe there’s another Arctic nut with rotten teeth lecturing at the ICA?”

“Would you settle for tea with Hymie, if he’s free?”

Sir Hyman seemed delighted to see them, but they had no sooner settled in when the butler interrupted with a whispered message.

“Really,” Sir Hyman replied. “I wasn’t expecting him today.”

A tall gangly man with a tight little mouth sailed into the room. Sir Hyman introduced him as the Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute and the Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures.

Though Sir Hyman pleaded with them to stay, Moses made his excuses and led Lucy out, but he wasn’t ready for another night incarcerated in her flat in Belgravia. “Why don’t we go to the Mirabelle for dinner?”

No answer.

“I shouldn’t be alienating you from all your old friends.”

“What do you do in that room all day? I never hear your typewriter any more.”

“I am pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight.”

“Edna found an empty bottle of vodka hidden in the bottom of the cupboard.”

For all their bickering, she came to depend on him. Her anchor, she thought. Somebody who could dissect a script, or explain a character that she longed to play, in a manner that allowed her to dazzle many a director with her insights. But she, too, had begun to find their evenings together in the flat unendurable. Even so, she wasn’t going to treat him to a night out until she heard the hum of his typewriter again. So she began to lie, pretending that she was working late with a girlfriend on a scene when she was actually at Annabel’s, and he, grateful for some solitude, began to sneak drinks in earnest, topping the Scotch and cognac bottles with cold tea when Edna wasn’t looking. Then one morning she returned from her agent’s office flushed with excitement. One of the proliferation of new young directors had seen her in something on TV and had invited her to audition for a small but telling part in a new play by a writer whom even Moses had said was not utterly without merit. Her audition was scheduled for the afternoon but it was midnight before she returned to the flat, kicking over an end table, sending a bowl of pot-pourri flying. “He told me I was perfection. Born to the role. Why, he wouldn’t even bother auditioning anybody else.” Then, she said, he asked if she would find it too boring to join him for a light supper. Harold drove them to Boulestin’s.

“Oh, isn’t this fun,” the director said, rubbing his chubby little hands together. “It calls for a proper celebration. Wouldn’t you say, my dear?”

“Yes.”

“We could start with masses of beluga and a bottle of Dom Perignon unless you object?”

“Certainly not.”

He told her wicked stories about Larry and Johnny G. When admirers stopped at their table he introduced her as his latest discovery. “What would you say to lobster?” he asked.

“Why not?”

“Good girl.”

“Oh, and we’ll have to give Vincent a warning right now if we want the baked Alaska.”

“Wonderful idea.”

He called for a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet. Finally, when he was into his second snifter of armagnac, she said, “Forgive me if I’m being pushy, but when do we begin rehearsals?”

“Glad you asked me that because there is a wee problem.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s nothing, really,” he said, deftly shifting the saucer with the bill on it closer to her place, “but we do have to raise another fifteen thousand quid before we plunge ahead.”

“Is that all?”

“I knew you’d understand.”

She asked him if he’d like another bottle of bubbly.

“Well, do you think your driver would be able to take me home, or is that too much to ask?”

“Of course he will.”

“It’s in Surrey, actually.”

“So?”

“Damned good of you too.”

Then Lucy told Moses, “Once Mario had popped the cork, I yanked the bottle out of his hands, pressed my thumb against the lip, pumped it three or four times, and let him have it right in his fat face. Then I fled the restaurant, shouting at Vincent to mail me the bill. And now if you don’t mind you can pour me a cognac and you might as well have one yourself. I know what’s going on here. Let’s not pretend any more.”

They drank through the night and well into the next afternoon. Between crying jags Lucy told him tales of Mr. Bernard, Henry, and her mad mother. Mr. Bernard, she said, had turned against Nathan when he discovered that his son, then only seven years old, had run away from a fight at Selwyn House. “I’m going to phone the Jewish General Hospital right now,” he had said, “to see if they’ll exchange you for a girl.”

But the call had been unsuccessful. “I’m stuck with you. They don’t take cowards.”

And then, Lucy said, when they had still been allowed to play with the other Gursky children, Mr. Bernard had told them that when he was a boy jumping into a corral churning with wild mustangs was nothing for him.

“And look at the Gursky children now,” Lucy said, “every one of us a basket-case. Except for Lionel. A worse son of a bitch than his father. Henry’s God-crazy. Anita buys a new husband once a year. Nathan’s afraid to cross a street. Barney has broken my Uncle Morrie’s heart, he won’t even talk to him, and will probably end up behind bars one of these days. I don’t understand Morrie. The more my Uncle Bernard rubs his face in the dirt, the more devoted he is to the old pirate.”

After Solomon had been killed, Lucy said, when his airplane had exploded, a weepy Mr. Bernard had come to the house to assure her mother that he would be their father now. “I swear on the grave of my saintly mother that I will treat Solomon’s children like my very own.”

“Murderer,” she had cried. “Get out and don’t you dare come here again.”

“Murderer?”

“To the day of her death she believed the explosion was no accident. But the truth is my father didn’t deserve her loyalty. He married my mother because she was pregnant and when she miscarried he took that as licence to come home only when it suited him.”

“Why didn’t she divorce him?”

“Well they didn’t in those days. Or she might have if Henry hadn’t come along. Or me. Oh, my father was such a bastard. She once told me that he would leave his journal on his desk where she could read about his other women.”

“Solomon kept a journal?”

“Yes. No. So what?”

“What happened to it?”

“It’s none of your business. Morrie, that creep, has it maybe.”

“Would you like to get your hands on it?”

“You and Dr. Hersheimer. Some pair. No, I wouldn’t. I know more than enough about him as it is.”

“But he was your father.”

“And you’re so fond of yours, right? Remember the first time we met?”

“Yes.”

“And there was that blank space for a picture on the wall—the portrait of that lady with the eyes of a different colour—the one that was stolen.”

“Yes.”

“It was a mistress of his, obviously, and he had it hung where my mother could see it every day.”

Finally Lucy and Moses fell asleep, wakening to a breakfast of Bloody Marys and smoked salmon. Lucy was violently ill and consumed by remorse. “I lied to you,” she said.

“About what?”

“The champagne in his fat face. I wanted to do it, but I didn’t have the guts. But I did leave him stranded in the restaurant.”

Lucy phoned her agent and was told he was in a meeting. She called again at noon. Her agent was out to lunch. She and Moses moved on to Scotch and Lucy called her agent again at five. He was unavailable.

“There are other agents,” Moses said.

She fled the flat and didn’t return until noon the next day. “I got in touch with the director,” she said, “but I’m too late. He found the money elsewhere.”

Only then did she notice Moses’s packed suitcases.

“You can’t walk out on me now. I’m going crazy. Look, you can drink as much as you want. I won’t say a thing. Stay. Please, Moses.”

In the morning she hurried to a gallery on New Bond Street to buy Moses a Hogarth etching he had once admired and, in another shop, a first edition of Sir John Franklin’s Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea. She fired Edna the same afternoon.

“But I thought you adored her,” Moses said.

“I did. I do. But haven’t you read about the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, you shmuck? Everybody’s talking about that Martin Luther King now. I found out people are saying it’s just typical of Miss Moneybags to have a black maid. I had to let her go.”

“I hope you told her why.”

“She’s so thick, that one, she’d never understand.”

A couple of days later Lucy rented an office on Park Lane, hired a secretary and a script reader and began to option novels and plays and to commission hacks to turn them into film scripts in which she could play the lead. Soon avaricious agents and inept writers began to beat a path to her door, shaking the legendary Gursky money tree. She was consulted. She was listened to. All she had to do in return was scribble cheques. Fifteen hundred pounds here, twenty-five hundred there, two thousand somewhere else. It was amazing how little it took to satisfy them. Baffled, she asked Moses, “How much does a writer earn?”

“One of your screenplay spivs or a real one?”

“Okay, a real one.”

He told her.

“Boy, am I ever dealing with a bunch of jerks.”

But one of them, a former juvenile lead in more than one West End farce, caught her eye. Jeremy Bushmill, in his forties now, was trying to carve out a place for himself as a writer and director. The first draft of a screenplay that she had optioned from him actually attracted the attention of Sydney Box’s story department. Lucy, armed with the notes that Moses had fed her, invited Jeremy to dinner. To her delight, he insisted on paying the bill. They carried on from Wheeler’s to the Gargoyle Club, which wasn’t the same, he said, now that poor Dylan was gone. But a sodden Brian Howard was there and Jeremy told her that he had been the model for Ambrose Silk. Lucy didn’t get home until two in the morning. Moses, pretending to be asleep, didn’t stir. But when he heard her pouring herself a bath he understood. He switched on the bed lamp and went to find himself a drink and a cigar and then waited for her to emerge from the bathroom. “Have fun?” he asked.

“He’s a bore.” She fetched herself a drink and sat down on the floor. “What if we got married and had children together?”

“I’m an unredeemed drunk. I also think you ought to complete your own childhood before thinking of taking on kids of your own.”

“Who was Ambrose Silk?”

“A character in one of E.M. Forster’s novels.”

“Which one?”

“Captain Hornblower.”

In the week that followed, Moses found himself a satisfactory flat in Fulham, but it wouldn’t be available until the first of the month. Lucy was absent a good deal, usually coming home late and slipping into her tub. Later she clung to her side of the bed, careful that their bodies didn’t touch anywhere, her thumb rooted in her mouth. Then one evening, even as she was applying her makeup in the bedroom, the bell rang. It was Jeremy, tall and handsome in his deerstalker hat and Harris tweed coat; Jeremy bearing roses.

“I’m afraid she’s still getting ready. Shall I put these in a vase, do you think?”

“Bloody awkward, isn’t it?”

“How goes the scriptee?”

“She’s a marvel. Her notes are always bang on.”

Lucy came home earlier than usual. “I have something to say to you,” she said.

“You needn’t bother. I’m moving out tomorrow morning.”

She wanted him to join her production company as script editor for an annual retainer of ten thousand pounds. “We would have lunch together every day.”

“Lucy, you continue to amaze me.”

“I hope that means yes.”

“Certainly not.”

“Oh Moses, Moses, I’ll always sort of love you. But I need him. It’s the physical thing.”

“I understand.”

“I have something else to tell you.” As no director, she said, would give her a chance, she had decided to mount a showcase production of her own and invite a selected group of directors and producers and agents to see her. She had acquired the rights to revive The Diary of Anne Frank for three performances only and had rented the Arts Theatre for that purpose. Jeremy was going to direct, play Mr. Frank himself, and put together the rest of the cast. “What do you think?”

“I think you should hire an audience as well and pay them to applaud.”

“I want you to come to rehearsals and make notes and tell me what I’m doing wrong.”

“The answer is no.”

“Will you at least come to the opening performance?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“We’re always going to be friends.” She snuggled into his lap, cuddling. But he could tell that something was still troubling her.

“Moses, who wrote Mr. Norris Changes Trains?”

“P.G. Wodehouse.”

“Should I read it?”

“Why not?”

SIR HYMAN KAPLANSKY came to the opening night. So did some producers, directors, and a surprising number of performers at liberty. Some had come out of curiosity, others because they were pursuing Lucy’s production company for outlandish deals; there was also a Bushmill claque, but still more were there in a perverse spirit of fun, anticipating the worst. Bushmill played the mushy Dutch condiments dealer, Otto Frank, as if he had wandered into the doomed attic out of a Tory garden fête. The other performers were competent at best. But Lucy was intolerable. A natural mimic, but clearly no actress, she played her scenes like an overwrought Shirley Temple with a disconcertingly gay Peter Van Daan. When that didn’t work, she switched to the Elizabeth Taylor of National Velvet.

Moses wandered into the theatre dangerously drunk, but determined to behave himself. Unfortunately the excruciatingly banal play outlasted his resolution. Nodding off briefly in the first act he was confronted by Shloime Bishinsky in his mind’s eye. “What I’m trying to say, forgive me, is that such princes in America are entitled to their mansions, a Rolls-Royce, chinchilla coats, yachts, young cuties out of burlesque shows. But a poet they should never be able to afford.” Or a theatre. Or an audience. “It has to do with what? Human dignity. The dead. The sanctity of the word.”

They were being noisy up there on stage, which wakened him to the troubling sight of an attic and its denizens trebling themselves. Poor Bushmill, emoting about something or other, now had six weak chins stacked one on top of another and maybe twenty-two eyes. Moses shook his head, he pinched himself, and the stage swam into focus again. Damn. It was that maudlin Hanukkah scene, overripe with obvious irony, wherein the pathetic Mr. Frank Bushmill seated with the others at the attic table—all of them hiding from the Gestapo—praises the Lord, Ruler of the Universe, who has wrought wonderful deliverances for our fathers in days of old. There were no latkes, but insufferably adorable Anne (the bottom of her bra stuffed with Kleenex) came to the table armed with touchingly conceived pressies. A crossword-puzzle book for her sister. “It isn’t new. It’s one that you’ve done. But I rubbed it all out and if you wait a little and forget, you can do it all over again.” There was some hair shampoo for the horny Mrs. Van Daan. “I took all the odds and ends of soap and mixed them with the last of my toilet water.” Two fags for Van Daan’s oafish husband. “Pim found some old pipe tobacco in the pocket lining of his coat … and we made them … or rather Pim did.”

Once more the images on stage throbbed, trebling themselves. Moses squinted. He made fists, driving his fingernails into the palms of his hands. And there were four Anne/Lucys, each one of them out of tune, rising to sing:

Suddenly there was a crash from below the attic. The Green Police? The Gestapo? Everybody on stage froze. Straining to hear. For a few seconds there was a total silence and then something in Moses short-circuited. Not rising, but propelled out of his seat, he hollered, “Look in the attic! She’s hiding in the attic!”

The next morning the telegram came from Moses’s mother and he immediately booked the first available flight to Montreal.

Four

“Not that I have anything to hide, but does my brother know that you’re here?”

“When I asked if I could see you I had no idea that it was necessary to clear my visit with Mr. Bernard.”

“Nonsense necessary. I’m not Bernard’s keeper and he’s not mine. I was curious, that’s all. Are you parked outside?”

“I walked.”

“From which direction?”

“Downtown.”

“Good for you. It’s such a lovely day it makes a man grateful to be alive,” he said, drawing the blinds. “Oh, forgive me. What a thing to say to a young man in mourning. My brother was in tears. Such a loss to the community and of course to you and your mother it goes without saying. How long will you be in Montreal?”

“I’m flying back to London the day after tomorrow.”

“You think I don’t remember what a nice boy you are? Something to drink maybe?”

“Coffee, if it’s not too much trouble?”

“You’re not living up to your reputation. But I’m relieved to see that. Moderation in all things, that’s the ticket. Hey, if I’m smiling like an idiot it’s because I look at you and what do I see? L.B. as a young man.”

“Maybe I’ll have a Scotch after all.”

“My pleasure. You know, before you were born even I attended one of his readings.”

“Not many people did.”

“Let me tell you something, as if you didn’t know. You were blessed with a great man for a father. And you think we weren’t aware how much he suffered in private, never able to take your poor mother anywhere.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oy vey, have I let the cat out of the bag? Please, it’s not something he talked about, a man of his natural dignity, but it slipped out, you know, when my brother asked how come L.B. never brought his wife to dinner. You’re upset. I can see that. Listen here, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Look at Solomon’s widow. What’s the mind? A muscle. Doctors will tell you it’s an illness like any other. But who will take care of your mother now that L.B.’s gone? Don’t tell me. I know. You are as devoted to her as he ever was.”

“Would you mind if I topped up my glass?”

“Isn’t there more where that came from?”

“Thank you.”

“I want to tell you that when your father came here to dinner with us and sat in this very room it was a real honour for Ida and me. Such a goldener yid. A true idealist. But, please, don’t get me wrong. A great artist dies and suddenly everyone who shook hands with him once is his best friend. Unfortunately I wasn’t close to him like Bernard. I’m not the reader in the family with the big library.”

“I’m told it was Solomon who was the prodigious reader.”

“You know what I wish? I wish I had your education. But your father, may he rest in peace, my, my, was there a book he hadn’t read? In his presence I was tongue-tied. Once, you know, he came to tea with one of his admirers. What was her name, that sweet young girl?”

Moses reached for the bottle again.

“Peterson. Marion Peterson. He wanted her to see my brother’s paintings, but he wasn’t home. So they came here, he was kind enough to inscribe his books for me, every one of them, and to this day they rest in that glass bookcase over there.”

There was also a concert piano that had once belonged to Solomon in the living room. The surface was covered end to end with photographs of Barney and Charna mounted in sterling silver frames. Barney and Charna, still toddlers, romping on the grass in Ste.-Adèle. Barney on horseback, a beaming Mr. Morrie holding the reins. Charna in her white Sweet Sixteen gown. Barney raking the barley floor in the Loch Edmond’s Mist distillery in Skye.

“Now tell me what it is I can do for you,” Mr. Morrie said.

“Actually I’m here because of Lucy. She was only two years old when Solomon died and she’d like to know more about him.”

“A little birdy told me that you and Lucy are living together in London.”

“Lucy is convinced that you’ve got her father’s journals and she would be grateful if she could have them.”

“How did you meet? Come on. Spill the beans. You’re looking at a real sucker for a love story.”

“We knew each other as children, as you know, and Henry and I have been friends for years.”

“Does he still stutter so bad that poor boy?”

“No.”

“I’m glad. Now tell me how you met Lucy after so many years.”

“At a dinner party at Sir Hyman Kaplansky’s.”

“I’ll bet if Canadians were still allowed to accept titles my brother would be number one on the list.”

“Solomon’s journals would mean a good deal to Lucy.”

“Poor Lucy. Poor Henry. Poor Barney. It’s a shame that their generation had to be caught up in family fights over what? Money. Position. Power. I’m not surprised that Lucy became an actress. She’ll be a star. I’d bet money on it.”

“Why are you not surprised she wants to act?”

“Because it’s in her blood, it’s got to be. That’s what Solomon really should have been. A stage actor. When we were kids he was always dressing up, writing little plays for us to perform. He could do accents. It was amazing. Later, you know, we had our first hotel already, the bar is filled with girls of a certain type; what were we supposed to do? Throw them out into the snow? Bernard was never a pimp, and if anybody ever says that, I’m just a little fella, I’ll still punch him in the nose. Anyway Solomon comes back from the war, a flier yet, and he phones Bernard at the hotel and pretends to be the RCMP. He was letter perfect, let me tell you. Cruel too, of course, but we’re talking Solomon here. He did a Chinaman, he even walked like one. The German butcher. The blacksmith, a Polack. He could do anybody. He also had a gift for languages, but I suppose he inherited that from my grandfather.” Mr. Morrie leaped up. “I think I heard a car. Bernard must be home. You walked here you say?”

“From downtown.”

“Was my sister-in-law in the garden?”

“No.”

“Libby’s a wonderful wonderful woman. You know when Bernard married her, she was considered the catch. Her father was president of the shul and the Beneficial Loan Society. Nobody suspected him.”

“Of what?”

“Listen here, I’m not one to carry tales. He was unlucky in the market, but he meant to return every penny and it’s no reflection on Libby. She presides over so many charities because she has a heart bigger than the St. Lawrence River and you could open the books on any one of them and I’ll bet they would balance perfectly. Libby isn’t trying to prove anything.”

“Did you know that your grandfather is mentioned several times in Lady Jane Franklin’s letters?”

“You don’t say? Hey, I’m sitting with a scholar from the scholars. Why I’ll bet even Bernard doesn’t know that.”

“Twice in letters to Elizabeth Fry and once in a letter to Dr. Arnold of Rugby.”

“To think that rascal couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old at the time and still he caught that good lady’s eye.”

“It started with the snakes, you know. Van Diemen’s Land was infested with snakes, which appalled her. So she offered convicts a shilling a head for them and he came up with so many the first day she just couldn’t stop laughing.”

“Some kid he must have been. But, if you don’t mind my asking, what is your interest in our family history?”

“Lucy.”

“Ah. I was worried maybe you were thinking of writing something. Bernard wouldn’t like that. And digging up the past would be painful to Lionel, God bless him, who is striving so hard to make his way in society. So just between you, me, and the lamp-post, what are you up to, Moses?”

Moses reached for the bottle.

“Don’t worry. It doesn’t stain. Just pour yourself another.”

“Didn’t Ephraim ever tell you anything about his stay in Van Diemen’s Land?”

“Let’s be frank. If he talked to anybody in those days it was Solomon. Once he kidnapped him, you know. What was that?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sh.” Mr. Morrie went to the window and peeked out from behind the blind. “Bernard and Libby are going out. That’s odd.”

“Is it?”

“‘Dragnet’s’ on tonight. Oh, I get it. He must have got them to send him a copy of the film in advance. Once, you know, he couldn’t wait to see how a Dick Tracy turned out, it was killing him, and so Harvey Schwartz had to fly down to see the people at King Features and bring back the comics before they were even printed in the newspapers. Oh you should have seen Bernie after Harvey came back with the goods, nobody the wiser. We were in the middle of a board meeting. Should we buy this vineyard just outside of Beaune for X million or should we build the office tower in Houston for Y million? Everybody’s making their pitch, quoting facts and figures, watching Bernard’s face. ‘Hey,’ he says, suddenly perking up, ‘I’ve got a hunch how Dick Tracy bails out of his latest jam and about exactly what happens to Pruneface. I could be right, I could be wrong. But I’m willing to bet a ten spot on it. Who’s coming in?’ Well, naturally, everybody forks out their ten bucks, not because they’re afraid of my brother, that’s nonsense, but because they adore him. And then Harvey, that little devil, he says, ‘I raise you twenty, Mr. Bernard.’ So everybody digs into their pocket again. I suppose you know Harvey Schwartz?”

“Yes.”

“Such a brilliant boy. Loyalty should be his middle name. I can’t tell you how lucky we are to have him here. And devoted to his lovely talented wife? You better believe it. You know she couldn’t get her book published at first. So Harvey goes to Toronto, meets with the number-one publisher there, invests in the company out of his own pocket, and that beautiful book comes out. Hugs, Pain, and Chocolate Chip Cookies. But Ogilvy’s book department here orders only four copies. Becky’s in tears. She’s got cramps. Her period is late. Harvey gets on the phone rat-tat-tat to the chairman of Ogilvy’s board and he says ahem ahem this is Harvey Schwartz speaking. I’m in charge of special projects for Jewel Investment Trust, and my boss Mr. Bernard Gursky just asked me how come your book department has taken only four copies of my wife’s book? Bing bango bongo. They order another four hundred and display them in the window. I understand that in the end they had to burn just about all of them, but I don’t have to tell L.B.’s son that art isn’t the fastest moving commodity in this country. Don’t worry. It doesn’t stain. Just pour yourself another.”

“Did you say Ephraim once kidnapped Solomon?”

“He sure did. Solomon is only nine years old and Bernie and I get out of school just in time to see Ephraim riding off on his sled with him. Okay, why not? Only now it’s seven o’clock at night, we are sitting down to supper, there’s a blizzard blowing out there, and where are they? God forbid an accident. Finally a messenger comes from this Indian fella, George Two Axe, saying Ephraim said to tell us Solomon is spending the night with the Davidsons. Fishy. Very fishy. Because only an hour earlier the Mounties have paid us one of their friendly visits. There’s been trouble out on the reservation where Ephraim is shacked up with this young Copper Indian woman. Let me tell you she was something to look at. Anyway Lena has been stabbed and somebody has shot André Clear Sky’s father dead. Have we seen or heard from Ephraim, the corporal wants to know. Why? Just asking, he says. Yeah, sure. The next question is does Ephraim have any friends in Montana? How in the hell would we know? To make a long story short, my grandfather has taken the boy all the way back to his old haunts in the Arctic with him. They are gone for months, and that’s where Solomon learned how to speak Eskimo and hunt caribou and God knows what else. And that was the last we ever saw of my grandfather, aged ninety-one, buried out there somewhere, according to Solomon, who also expects us to believe he made his way home all alone. From the Polar Sea? Tell me another one, my father says. Well, Solomon says, he had a map with him and he had marked a tree with a gash in each of their camps on the way out. Sure, my father says, and what about before you reached the tree line? A raven led the way, Solomon says with a straight face. Ask a foolish question, my father says, and what did you eat all that time? I hunted and I fished and, besides, Ephraim had left food caches for me underneath each of my marked trees, and before we parted he gave me this. Ephraim’s gold pocket watch. Tell me if I’m boring you. Ida says that once I get started I’m worse than a broken record.”

“Did Solomon ever mention anything in his journals about that first trip north?”

“Boy, speak of the third degree. You know, you could tell me something. What’s poor Henry doing out there?”

“Poor Henry is happier than you know.”

“My mother used to say that there’s nothing like a religious education, but Henry, my God.” Mr. Morrie sighed. “The children, the children. We made all that money, more than you can spend in three lifetimes, and my Barney just can’t settle down and my Charna now lives in a commune with a bunch of nut-cases and calls herself Sunflower Dark-Crystal.”

“I suppose control of McTavish will eventually fall into Lionel’s hot hands.”

“Listen here, I love Barney. I understand what a blow it was to him that McTavish would never be his to run. So I forgive him his mistakes. He walks in here right now I’d hug him. Wait till you’re a father. But, let’s face it, Lionel is the only one of his generation with a touch of Bernard’s genius and I don’t blame him he doesn’t trust anybody. The thing very few people appreciate is the rich have their problems too. You come from our kind of money you’re a marked man. If Lionel hadn’t had Fenella followed how could he have known that she was having an affair with a schwartze yet, which must have been very humiliating for such a proud fella. And have you any idea what that marriage cost him, it didn’t even last a year? The alimony. The diamonds. The sables he never got back. Some people say it’s bad taste, but I don’t blame him for one minute that he now has each new wife sign a divorce settlement before he marries her. All that gossip about receipts for gifts, however, is highly exaggerated. I can assure you Melody doesn’t have to sign a return-on-demand voucher for anything valued under one hundred thousand dollars. But that’s not why she insisted on the cheaper tiara at Winston’s. She did that because it’s not in her nature to be a grabber. Now tell me something. Is it true that Henry has some meshuggena theory about a new ice age, a punishment for the Jews?”

“Certainly not,” Moses said.

“To be orphaned so young. Oy vey. You know it breaks my heart to this day that Solomon died in the prime of his life in that frightful plane crash. I still suffer from the nightmare. I dream of that Gypsy Moth exploding, Solomon’s body blown to bits, the white wolves of the Arctic carrying off his bones.”

“What if he wasn’t blown to bits, but parachuted out before the explosion and walked out of the barrens?”

“What are you talking?”

“He’d walked out of the barrens once before, hadn’t he?”

“Oh come on. Please.”

“And I’m told he had to parachute twice out of his Sopwith Camel during the First World War.”

“So where has he been all these years?”

“Damned if I know.”

“His bank accounts were never touched, not a penny withdrawn. I’m surprised to hear you talk such foolishness. Listen!” Mr. Morrie leaped up and peeked out from behind the blinds again. “The car’s back. They’re going to watch ‘Dragnet’ after all. I think I’d better switch it on. Moses, I’ve been keeping you too long. I’m sure you have more important people to see.”

“What do I tell Lucy about Solomon’s journals?”

“If I had them,” Mr. Morrie said, “it would be my sincere pleasure to pass them on to her. Tell her that and give her a big kiss for me.”

“What do you think happened to the journals?”

“God knows. But I’ll tell you the best thing that could have happened is that they were burnt in the plane crash. I got a peek at some pages once and boy oh boy Solomon could tell some real whoppers in his day. If those journals, should they still exist, ever fell in the wrong hands they could be dynamite. Do you mind if I turn on the TV?”

“No.”

“Bless you. And now I’m going to ask you a favour. May I?”

“Of course.”

“My Barney, he has had such bad luck in so many of his ventures, poor boy, has decided to become a writer and has written a book. But nobody in New York will print it for him. Do I have to explain to L.B.’s son how difficult such things are?”

“Certainly not.”

“It’s a detective story, maybe a little too sexy for my taste, but what do I know? Barney’s in Mexico now, partners with this doctor in some kind of cancer clinic, and he has asked me to try the manuscript on publishers in Toronto. But first, what I’d really appreciate is somebody of your education, not to mention the literary background, to read it and tell me what you honestly think.”

“I’d have to take it with me to London.”

“I knew I could count on you. Now come down to the garage, I’ll give you the manuscript, and my driver will take you back to your hotel.”

“I can walk.”

“No, it’s my pleasure. Ida will be jealous that she missed you. L.B.’s son in our house. You know what they say, don’t you?”

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“Such a nice boy. To be your uncle one day would be a genuine honour for me. Don’t stand in front of the lamp, please. It casts a shadow on the blind. Come, Moses, and let me hear from you soon.”

Five

It was sort of Friday afternoon, late, time to close down the office. Send Myrna home. Pile into my heap and tool down to Nick’s Bar & Grill on the main stem for a quick snort. Nick and I have been through hell and back again together. Sweeping Normandy clean of Nazi punks.

Normandy.

Where Nick’s right leg is buried and they pinned the Military Cross on my chest, to go with the rest of the fruit salad, forgetting that I was a Hebe, born and bred. “For valour beyond the call …” Forget it, kid. War’s over. With my MC and fifty cents I could buy myself a burger and fries and a cup of java.

Time for a snort.

Maybe two.

Trouble was my tab at Nick’s was already longer than a night in a fox-hole and my cash box emptier than my .45 after I had pumped six of the best into Spider Moran’s fat gut. But that’s another yarn.

Anyway there I stood, six foot two, reaching for my chapeau, when Myrna opens the door. “There’s a dame here to see you.”

I was in no mood for another splitsville case, tailing some henpecked sucker until I caught him with a bimbo in a motel room. “Tell her to come back Monday morning.”

“She’s got gams that go all the way and then some, and I think she’s in trouble, Hawk,” she opinioned.

Next thing I knew in sashayed Tiffany Waldorf smelling like the day the swallows came back to Capistrano. Flaming red tresses you want to walk through barefoot. Blazing green eyes. Class written all over her, but stacked. Breasts fighting her tight silk dress. Hour-glass waist. Curves in all the right places.

“Sit down,” I said

Tiffany shook off her sable wrap and poured herself into a chair, crossing those million-dollar legs. Then she opened her handbag that cost some poor alligator its skin and peeled off five c-notes. “Will this do as a retainer, Mr. Steel?”

“That depends on how many rats you want me to exterminate. Tell me about it, kid.”

“There’s a body lying on my bedroom floor with a shiv planted where his heart used to go pitter-patter.”

“Then you’ve been a naughty girl.”

“I am a naughty girl,” she said, tossing her head high, “but I didn’t do it.”

“Then why don’t you go to the cops?”

“Because that shiv happens to belong to yours truly. It’s a priceless, diamond-studded sixteenth-century dagger worth one hundred thousand dollars. It was presented to me by Crown Prince Hakim at Monte Carlo last season.”

“For services rendered?”

“I ought to slap your face,” she said, casting her eyes at me.

“You look good when you’re angry.”

“I didn’t get in until very late last night and there he was lying on my bedroom floor. The body was still warm.”

“I take it you recognized the hombre?”

“I was his chick until I found out what a louse he was.”

“What’s his monicker?”

“Lionel Gerstein.”

I had bought myself trouble. A ton of it.

Lionel Gerstein was the number-one son of old Boris Gerstein, a former bootlegger, worth zillions, who had crawled out of his sewer and gone legit some years back. But he was still connected. You could bet the farm and your beloved Granny’s Maidenform bra on that one. Old BG was meaner than a rattlesnake with a hangover and just as dangerous.

Originally there had been three Gerstein brothers. Boris, Marv, and Saul. Marv, no more than knee-high to a mouse in his elevator shoes, was weaker than a bar Scotch. A born boot-licker. But Saul was a hell-raiser. So old BG, who didn’t care to share the wealth, had him taken out. Erased. He had a bomb planted on Saul’s private airplane.

“I hope,” Tiffany said, “taking on the Gersteins isn’t too much for you, Hawk.”

“I think we’d better go and take a gander at that stiff, kid.”

But my feelings were mixed. Whoever had planted that shiv in Lionel had done a good deed. The Gersteins were a bad bunch. Except for Marv’s boy, Brad, who had fought with me in Normandy, but wasn’t ever coming home. Lost an argument with a Nazi machine-gun nest.

“If I ever get God in a corner,” I said to Tiffany, taking her arm, “I’ve got a hot one for him. Namely, why do the good and the beautiful die young?”

Six

Madness, Moses thought. Unforgivably loopy. A fifty-two-year-old man turning his cabin inside out searching for a salmon fly. A bloody Silver Doctor that could be replaced for three dollars. Yes, but the missing one had been lucky for him, once hooking him a sea-bright eighteen-pound hen on the Restigouche and another time an even friskier fish on the Miramichi. Reaching under his bed, Moses found his other slipper. He caught his finger in a mouse trap. He retrieved a mouldy pizza carton, an empty bottle of Macallan Single Highland Malt, a broken glass, a pair of Beatrice’s panties (sloppy bitch, that one), a letter from Henry, his baseball glove, and the copy of Encounter with his essay on Yiddish etymology.

Excellent, I thought.

Thank you.

Fool. Moses considered banging his head against the stone fireplace. My God, how could he have been so naïve when he was at Balliol? Manipulated in the first place by Sir Hyman and later by Mr. Morrie. The calculating Mr. Morrie—spontaneously, as it were—foisting Barney’s manuscript on him. But Saul was a hell-raiser. So old BG, who didn’t care to share the wealth, had him taken out. He had a bomb planted on his private plane.

Gurskys. Gurskys.

“If you have to go to the toilet, you ask me and I’ll show you where there is one for the guests.”

As L.B. had been indentured to Mr. Bernard, so Moses acknowledged, he had come to be in thrall to Solomon, Ephraim’s anointed one. Furthermore, he had been led like a lamb to Ephraim by Sir Hyman. At the time, Moses had been vain enough to believe that McGibbon’s diary had just happened to be open on the pedestal and that Ephrim Gor-ski had been his discovery.

Ho ho ho.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” the doctor in the clinic in New Hampshire had once said, “that your obsession with Solomon Gursky can be explained by your self-evident search for a father, having dismissed your own as unacceptable?”

“The food here is abominable. Do something about it.”

“You seem to require the admiration,” the doctor said, “even the love, of older men. Take your friendship with Callaghan, for instance.”

How to explain, Moses thought, emptying a cardboard carton on the bedroom floor, that it had all started years ago as an attempt to discredit the Gurskys, digging up dirt to shove at L.B.

Then there had been Henry.

Lucy.

Sir Hyman Kaplansky, as he then styled himself.

Two A.M. Collapsing onto his unmade bed, sinking into sleep, Moses dreamt he was in New Orleans again, not there to see if he could find any record of a Civil War gun-runner called Ephraim Gursky, no, no, but as a treat for Beatrice. He was in New Orleans again, splurging on a breakfast with Beatrice at Brennan’s, restitution for last night’s sins. Only this time the waiter didn’t return his American Express card. “Sorry, sir, but—”

A humiliated Beatrice saying, “Take mine,” and then turning on him. “I suppose you threw out the bill with the junk mail again or your envelope with the cheque in it is in a jacket pocket somewhere.”

Only this time a small embarrassment didn’t escalate into tears and recriminations. He dreamt he was in New Orleans with Beatrice again only this time he didn’t disappear after lunch, turning up at the hotel three hours late in a sorry state. Only this time they got to Preservation Hall, where benign old black musicians were doing nothing more than going through the motions until a saucy little white man rested his malacca cane against the wail and sat down to the piano, stomping his foot one, two, three, four … and suddenly the band was transported, digging deeper. Moses, his quarry in sight at last, just out of reach, was set to make a grab for him, but his legs wouldn’t work. He couldn’t budge. Then, even as he was gaining control over his limbs, the gleeful piano player faded and Moses came awake, sweaty and trembling.

It was still dark, but he got up all the same, reheating what was left of the coffee and lacing it with a shot of Macallan. Then he dug into the bedroom closet again, emptying another carton, and out tumbled the Fabergé humidor that Lucy had once bought him. Inside he found the letter Henry had sent him a week after he had ruined Lucy’s debut at the Arts Theatre. A clipping from the Edmonton Journal was enclosed.

Seven

In his prime, nibbling cashews or sucking on a Popsicle, pontificating for the benefit of a Fortune reporter or a hotshot from the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bernard had been fond of saying, “Lewis and Clark, Frémont hoo ha, my grandpappy Ephraim was right up there with them. He came to this country to help Sir John Franklin in his search for the Northwest Passage. My enemies—I know you will have to listen to their slanders, it’s your job—will tell you Bernard Gursky he came out of nowhere. Not like them, eh? Don’t make me laugh. Westmount oy vey. It doesn’t fool me that they get into a skirt once a year for the St. Andrew’s Ball, pretending they come from quality and that they didn’t get the shit kicked out of them at Culloden.

“And the Frenchies? The higher one of them holds his perfumed nose in the air the more likely it is that his great-grandmama was a fille de roi, a little whore shipped over by the king so that she could marry a soldier and have twenty-five kids before she was forty. To this day you know what a French-Canadian family gives the daughter for a wedding present she’s only sixteen years old? Hold on to your hat, fella. They send her to a dentist to have all her teeth yanked out and to fit her with false ones, which they consider prettier. Where was I? The Gurskys, yeah. Well the Gurskys didn’t come here steerage fleeing from some drecky shtetl. My family was established here before Canada even became a country. We’re older, how about that?”

But in a more mischievous mood, dandling one grandchild on his lap, the others gathered round his chair, he would say, “Your great-great-grandpappy, hoo boy, he was something else. I was his favourite, you know. But I have to say that Ephraim, that old son of a gun, why he never did an honest day’s work in his life.”

Actually that was not the case. Ephraim’s first job, after he had run away, was in a coal mine in Durham. He was a scrawny thirteen-year-old at the time and his duties were twofold. Working deep underground, near the heading of a new road, he had to convey oxygen from the shaft by opening and closing ventilator doors, regulating the air current. He also had to maintain traffic on the courses, clearing the mullock for the man labouring at the face. The area he was obliged to crouch in was only three feet high and wide. The coal dirt was loaded into sledges known as dans with an iron ring welded to each end. It was dark down there, dark as a raven’s wing, the only available candles fixed to the ends of the stages. And in those days the sledges didn’t ride the rails, but had to be dragged along wet clayey soil to the gob, where they would be emptied. Ephraim, stripped to the waist in the heat and the dark, wore a sturdy rope belt with a chain attached. Hooking the chain to the sledge, sinking to all fours, mindful of scuttling rats, he would crawl along, dragging his load, singing the songs he had learned at his father’s table:

Twice a day at fixed times during his twelve-hour shift he would stop to gorge himself on huge chunks of pulpy white bread, a gristly beef bone, and cold coffee gulped out of a tin canteen that unfailingly tasted of anthracite grit. The crash of shifting rock and coal above his head was alarming, but the pay was excellent—ten pence a day, five shillings in a good week. When he got to the top, panting, sucking air, he could always flirt with the pitbrow girls, who sorted and graded the coal at the surface. Among themselves the girls called him Little Lucifer. They were afraid of him. Not Kate, however. Once a week Ephraim paid Kate, one of the County Clare girls, a sixpence to go with him to the leaky shack at the far end of the slag heap. Standing on a box, he would have her against the wall, the earthen floor too mucky for such sport.

Ephraim had only been employed in the mine for six months when he became a trapper-boy, minding the doors to allow putters to pass with their ponies and coal-tubs. This called for quickness of feet as empty tubs came hurtling down a steep incline toward him in trains of sixty.

The miners taught him bawdy songs.

Ephraim became a putter himself. His new job was to push, or put, the trains of coal that had been filled by the hewers as far as the crane, where they were hoisted on wagons to be hauled the rest of the way by ponies. The average heft of a loaded tub was six to eight hundredweight, and Ephraim, paid by the number of tubs he put, now earned as much as three shillings, six pence a day. He supplemented this by delivering newspapers for a newsagent in an adjoining village, which is how he came to meet the affable Mr. Nicholson, the schoolmaster. Mr. Nicholson was astonished to learn that Ephraim could read and write. In spite of Mrs. Nicholson’s objections, he began to lend the boy books. Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Robinson Crusoe. “Tell me, boy,” Mr. Nicholson asked one day, “did you know that your namesake was the second son of Joseph, born of Asenath, the daughter of Potipherah?”

Confused by the names pronounced in English, Ephraim refused to commit himself.

Mr. Nicholson brought out the family Bible, turned to Jeremiah, and read aloud what the Lord had said unto his prophet. “‘I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.’” Moving his finger lower down the page, he found the other passage he wanted. “Jeremiah, you know, foretold the coming of Christ. ‘Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah, with the seed of man …’”

Ephraim leaped up as Mrs. Nicholson brought them tea with bread and strawberry jam.

“‘… and with the seed of beast,’” she said.

Considerably younger than Mr. Nicholson, she was pale, her manner severe, disapproving.

“Joshua, the son of Nun, was descended from your namesake,” Mr. Nicholson said, all twittery.

Mrs. Nicholson set down her teacup, shut her eyes, and swaying just a little in her chair recited, “‘And Joshua the son of Nun sent out of Shittim two men to spy secretly, saying, Go and view the land, even Jericho. And they went and came into an harlot’s house, named Rahab, and lodged there.’”

The colour rising in his cheeks, Mr. Nicholson said, “When Jacob was ailing he acknowledged the two sons of Joseph, blessing Ephraim with his right hand and Manasseh with his left.”

“Do you know why, boy?” Mrs. Nicholson demanded.

“It was to show that the descendants of Ephraim would become the greater people.”

“Hip hip hurrah,” Mr. Nicholson said, “you have read your Old Testament.”

“Only in Hebrew, sir.”

“Fancy that.”

Shutting her eyes, swaying again, Mrs. Nicholson declaimed, “‘Gilead is a city of them that work iniquity, and is polluted with blood. And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests murder in the way by consent: for they commit lewdness.’” Her eyes fluttered, they opened, and she stared at Ephraim. “‘I have seen an horrible thing in the house of Israel: there is the whoredom of Ephraim, Israel is defiled.’”

“Yes, yes, my dear. But surely not this sweet little Ephraim. Where are you from, boy?”

“Liverpool.”

“Is that where your parents be?”

“They are dead, sir.”

“Or have been transported, more likely,” Mrs. Nicholson said.

“And where did they come from?”

“Minsk.”

Mrs. Nicholson snorted.

“I would like to study Latin and penmanship with you, sir, providing you set a fair price.”

Mr. Nicholson rocked on his heels. “Oh dear me,” he said, shaking with laughter, “a fair price, is it?”

Mrs. Nicholson managed to convey her disapprobation by the manner in which she swept up the tea things, and then retreated into the kitchen.

“I will take you on, boy,” Mr. Nicholson said, “but I cannot, in conscience, accept an emolument.”

“I will do chores for Mrs. Nicholson.”

“You will find,” Mrs. Nicholson said, her face hot, “that I am most particular.”

Mr. Nicholson proved kindly to a fault, irrepressibly jolly, and Ephraim’s lessons with him went exceedingly well. He earned pats on the head, playful little jabs and tickles, and exclamations of joy. “Well done, my pretty one!” But when Mrs. Nicholson chose to join them, seated darkly behind their deal table doing needlework in her rocking chair, Mr. Nicholson would become abrupt, impatient, his back stiffening each time her rocking chair creaked. One evening Mr. Nicholson, having quite forgotten his wife’s presence, covered Ephraim’s hand with his own to guide him in a penmanship exercise. Ephraim, fully aware that she was there, contrived to draw his head closer to Mr. Nicholson, their cheeks brushing. Mrs. Nicholson spoke out: “‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God.’”

Mr. Nicholson’s eyes filled with tears. His lower lip trembled. “That will be sufficient for today, boy. Now you run along and see that you make yourself useful to Mrs. Nicholson.”

Following his first lesson, Mrs. Nicholson had set Ephraim to cleaning the living-room carpet. After he had beat it, sent back twice before it was done to her satisfaction, she had him lay it out on the flagstones in the little back yard, where hollyhocks thrived in spite of the soot. Then he sprinkled it with a thick layer of salt mixed with used tea leaves, annoying her by singing the Hebrew songs he had learned at his father’s table.

Next she had him clean the kitchen range with black-lead, burnish a copper pot inside and out, and clean and trim the oil lamps. Then he returned to the carpet, clearing it of every single tea leaf with a hard brush, and going over it with a wet cloth laced with vinegar to restore the fading colours. His efforts brought out damp patches under his armpits. He stank of sweat. Sniffing to show her displeasure, Mrs. Nicholson helped him hang the carpet on a line to dry. Then she brought him a slice of bread fried in dripping and two rashers of bacon and sat down to watch him eat it. “‘And the swine,’” she said, “‘because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto you: ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch their dead carcase.’”

Ephraim looked her directly in the eye and smiled.

“In the first house where I worked,” Mrs. Nicholson said, lowering her eyes, “all I had for dinner every night was a herring with bread and dripping. I had to leave after the master’s son, who had served with Gough in Bangalore, came home on leave. He tried to administer laudanum to me. Do you understand why, boy?”

“No, madam.”

“It was his vile intention to make me subservient to his passions.”

Following his lessons and increasingly onerous chores Ephraim was allowed to curl up on the stone floor next to the fireplace and sleep there in one of Mr. Nicholson’s old nightshirts until he rose shortly before dawn to walk five miles to the pithead. The nightshirt had been Mrs. Nicholson’s notion. Once she had been taken to a zoo and there she had seen a gazelle with its perpetually swishing tail. She had expected as much of him or at least cloven hoofs, but he had neither. The first night that he had been allowed to stay, Ephraim had barely fallen asleep when he felt a bare foot probing his face. An indignant Mrs. Nicholson loomed over him, wearing a crocheted black shawl clutched tight over her long flannel nightgown. “Have you said your prayers yet, boy?”

“No, madam.”

“I thought not. I worked once for a certain Mrs. Hardy, who was related to the Duke of Connaught. I had to climb dark stairs to my little iron bed in the attic, but each night, heedless of the cold, I remembered to fall on my knees and say my evening prayers. So long as you are taking advantage of Mr. Nicholson’s charity you will most certainly do the same in this house, boy.”

His smile, which cunningly mingled compliance and insolence, infuriated her.

“I will leave my chamberpot outside my bedroom door and you will empty it before you leave in the morning. Quietly as you go, mind you.”

She had him tend to the sterling silver, inherited from Mr. Nicholson’s uncle, returning the candlesticks to him for a second and even a third polish before it gleamed to her satisfaction.

“Where is Minsk?”

“It is in Russia.”

“I’m glad you at least know that much. How did your parents get from there to here?”

“They walked.”

“Stuff and nonsense.”

She ordered him to dust the furniture and when he was done she inspected the chair legs and under the tables. “What possible need,” she asked, “has somebody of your dubious origins and modest expectations for Latin and penmanship?”

“It interests me.”

A pattern developed. Once Ephraim’s lessons were done, an amused Mr. Nicholson fled the cottage, charged across the heath, blind to passersby, and retired to The Wagon and Horses for a pint. Ephraim would put himself at Mrs. Nicholson’s disposal. She had him wash down the paintwork and do the ironing and then she served him a hardboiled egg and toast. “Once I had a post in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, which is in London. And there I enjoyed excellent daily fare, augmented by occasional delicacies left over from grand dinner parties. I daresay that for all your cheek and singular lack of humility you have never tasted quail’s eggs?”

“No, madam.”

“Or venison or partridge?”

“No, madam.”

“Or smoked salmon?”

“No.”

“I thought not. But I have partaken of all of them more than once and we were also allowed a quart of ale for its nutritional content. Alas, my mistress’s brother kept trying to corner me in one bedroom or another. He thought me fair game, but he was sadly mistaken. Do you understand, boy?”

He smiled.

“I know very well why you have come here. Undoubtedly you intend to prey on Mr. Nicholson’s weakness and expect to profit from it.”

Each time he slept over next to the fireplace, he no sooner drifted off than he was prodded awake by her bare foot and reminded to say his prayers. The seventh time she came to him, he reached out to snatch her slender ankle and took all her toes into the warmth of his mouth. Scorched, she fled from him. But some weeks later she was back. Covering her face with her hands, moaning, she let him do it again. When he let go, she promptly served him the other foot. He drew the toes apart, driving his tongue between them. Standing over him, her eyes rolled upward, she was seized by shuddering. Once it subsided, she pulled herself free and whacked him hard on the nose with the heel of her foot, stunning him. “Auntie’s little sodomite,” she cried, fleeing.

She had learned what they called Mr. Nicholson after she had gone to buy a quart of ale in The Wagon and Horses and had overheard those mincing voices drifting through the shutters of the private bar.

“Where’s Auntie tonight?”

“Cuddling with his little bit of stuff from the mines. The dark Israelite with the hot eyes.”

During the week she was afflicted with spells of dizziness, and the camisoles she had worn for years without complaint were suddenly an irritation to her breasts. The next time Ephraim came to the cottage she sat in her rocking chair throughout his Latin lesson and then had him scrub the tiled floor in the kitchen with hot soda water three times before she was satisfied. “I am going to instruct Mr. Nicholson that you are not to come here any more. I know what the two of you are about.”

But she came to him later, offering her foot, and he obliged her once more, steadying her by pretending to make a game of it, panting, growling like a pet puppy with a bone. She presented the other foot. Emboldened, as her breath began to come short, he let his hand fly up her leg. She withdrew, gasping. But she didn’t flee. Instead, after a pause, she drew close to him again. Rolling over on his back, he slipped a hand under her nightgown to fondle her. But he couldn’t quite reach. Keening, she had to squat. Afterward, her eyes charged with rancour, she said, “You are not to come here next Sunday. Mr. Nicholson will be away. A poetry reading.”

“Leave the bolt off the door and I will come after dark.”

“Oh, no,” she pleaded, rocking her face in her hands, sniffling; and he had to move smartly to avoid a kick in the groin.

The following Sunday, a misery to her, she paced up and down the cottage, wringing her hands, bumping into things. She bolted the back door immediately before sunset and lay down to rest, fighting another dizzy spell, a pillow squeezed between her thighs, weeping. It was no good. She started each time she thought she heard him on the cinder path. She unbolted the door and made herself some tea. She couldn’t keep it down. She tried needlework, but her hands wouldn’t stop trembling. She shot the door bolt again, angrily this time, but still he didn’t come. She set her rolling pin on the kitchen table and unbolted the door. It didn’t matter any more. He wasn’t coming. It was too late. Probably he was with Mr. Nicholson. Imagining postures that disgusted her, she filled a basin with water and washed, remembering to bolt the door first. When she heard him on the path, singing one of his mournful synagogue songs, she blew out her candle and didn’t move. Her eyes filled with tears. Silence. Then cinders flew against the kitchen window. The neighbours, the neighbours. She relit her candle and quickly unbolted the door and let him in. “You must leave at once,” she said.

But he was already inside, smiling. She retreated to her rocking chair, her eyes rimmed red, the family Bible on her lap. “Do not comfort yourself, boy, thinking hell is an abstraction. It’s a real place waiting on disgusting little sinners like you. If you have ever seen a swine roasting on a spit, its flesh crackling and sizzling, squirting fat, well that’s how fierce are the eternal flames in hell’s coolest regions.”

He sat down in Mr. Nicholson’s chair and shook off his wooden shoes.

“There is laundry stacked and ready,” she said, “and it appears to me that these tiles have lost their sparkle.”

He did the laundry, seemingly more amused than angry, and then he got down on his hands and knees and tackled the kitchen floor. Coming close to her rocking chair, he startled her, nuzzling her legs, growling. She jumped free, tore chunks out of a loaf of bread and tossed them in the air, making him leap for them. When he missed, she reached for her rolling pin, threatening him. He sank to all fours, pawing at the stones with his head bowed, whimpering. She laughed, which he took as an invitation to nuzzle her between the legs again, somewhat higher this time. She stumbled backward, appalled, suddenly seeing him not as a playful pup but as a menacing goat. She reached for her rolling pin and struck him with it, the blow glancing off his shoulder. Incensed, he tore it from her, sending it bouncing off a wall. She retreated hastily behind a chair, panting, and once more asked him to leave.

“No,” he said.

Only then did she notice the parcel he had brought with him. It was wrapped in old newspapers and tied with a string. “What have you got there?” she asked.

“A surprise for you, Mrs. Nicholson.”

“That would be most improper. You will take it with you when you leave, boy.”

“After I have emptied the slops?”

“Yes.”

Subdued, apprehensive, she swept the remaining chunks of bread into a corner and then led him to the deal table and introduced him to the New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. “‘Again,’” she intoned, swaying her eyes shut, “ ‘the devil taketh him up into an exceedingly high mountain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things I will give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.’”

Finally she showed him his usual place, reminding him of his prayers and the slops, and then she retired to her bedroom, leaving her door ajar. But he didn’t follow. Instead he slipped into Mr. Nicholson’s old nightshirt and waited on the stone floor, hands clasped behind his back, singing:

He heard her thrashing about. She called out to him, but as if possessed, his name plucked from a nightmare against her wishes. He didn’t answer. He sang:

Soon she called out again, peremptorily this time, demanding a fresh candle. He brought it to her, lit it, and retreated to his place. Within the hour she stood over him. “Are you diseased?” she asked.

“No, madam.”

“Well, then.”

He padded after her into the bedroom and the first thing he did was to show himself and piss into the chamberpot. “Empty it,” he said.

Retreating into a corner, she began to weep.

“Do as I saith.”

She emptied the chamberpot and then blew out the candle. He thrust her on to the bed and she would not remove her long flannel nightgown but raised it, hiding her face. He let that go the first time, which was quick for both of them, but before he took her again he relit the candle and made her shed her nightgown and look on him. Afterward, even as she wept softly, he retrieved his package, undid the string, and dumped his coal black laundry on her sweaty body. “I will not leave here before dawn,” he said, “if it is not ready for me.”

The following Sunday, with an especially jolly Mr. Nicholson there, Ephraim mortified her by teasing her with his foot under the table when they sat down to supper together. He was more than somewhat surprised when she did not come to him by the fireplace once Mr. Nicholson had begun to snore. But then, in the early hours of the morning, she was there, rousing him from a deep sleep with her foot. “I had expected you earlier,” he said. “Go back to your room.”

Stung, she turned to flee.

“Wait.”

She paused.

“Here,” he said, tossing her his parcel.

The next Sunday no sooner did Ephraim sit down to the deal table for his lesson with Mr. Nicholson than Mrs. Nicholson swept into the room, her needlework to hand.

“You will not sit here through my lessons any more,” Ephraim said.

Mrs. Nicholson fled.

“Oh dear,” Mr. Nicholson stammered, “what have you done now?”

“You are a sweet man, sir, of kind and gentle disposition, but I am not of your sort.” Unbuttoning him, he added, “In payment for these lessons and because I hold you in high regard I will do this much for you, but no more.”

Afterward Mr. Nicholson took off through the back door, charging across the heath in a turmoil.

Ephraim took Mrs. Nicholson by the hand and led her toward the bedroom.

“Are you mad?” she demanded, hanging back.

“Mr. Nicholson will not be back until the morning. It is arranged.”

Monday, and through the rest of the week, Mr. and Mrs. Nicholson did everything possible to avoid each other. They ate in silence. If their eyes met, she blushed and his lower lip began to tremble. On Saturday he pretended not to be aware of her weeping over the kitchen sink. Peeling potatoes, she cut herself. The sight of her blood was too much for him. He repaired to The Wagon and Horses and lingered there until closing time and had to be helped home by two of his young friends. “Easy does it, Auntie.”

Sunday was intolerable.

“Bolt the door. We won’t let him in, Mr. Nicholson.”

“Yes.”

But when they heard him singing on the cinder path they both leaped up. She raced to undo the bolt, but he managed to be the first to greet him.

Because she was knitting him a sweater he presented him with the gold pocket watch that he had inherited from his uncle. When she splurged on a joint for Sunday night dinner he hurried out and bought a bottle of claret for them to share at their lesson. Other accommodations were made, but not spoken of. She, for instance, would wind into her shawl and go out for a stroll while they were at their lessons. Then he would leave the cottage and not return until Monday morning. In return for his consideration, on Wednesday nights she now retired early to her bedroom and allowed him to entertain his young friends from the poetry society. In preparation for these visitations he sometimes borrowed one or another of her garments, but she did not taunt him with Deuteronomy, Chapter 22, verse 5. Neither did he remark on the scent she trailed on Sunday mornings.

Ephraim carried on until he grasped that his knowledge of Latin and penmanship far surpassed Mr. Nicholson’s ability to help him further. There was something else. One Sunday night he observed how her breasts had begun to swell and the dark brown nipples trickled an unfamiliar sweetness. Only then did he notice the thickening of her waist.

The following Sunday Mr. and Mrs. Nicholson sat and waited until after dark and still he did not appear.

“He’s not coming,” she said.

“Nonsense, Mrs. Nicholson. He’s been late before.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, weeping, “your uncle’s candlesticks are gone.”

Pearls of sweat blossomed on Mr. Nicholson’s forehead.

“It’s your duty to inform the authorities,” she said.

WEARING HIS NEW SWEATER, carrying a gold pocket watch, the candlesticks, and a purse with five pounds and twelve shillings in it, Ephraim quit the mine in Durham and started out on the road to London. He also had with him some mementoes from his father’s house. Phylacteries, a prayer shawl, and a Hebrew prayer book.

Spring it was, the earth moist and fragrant, rhododendrons and azaleas in blossom.

Ephraim never saw Mrs. Nicholson again, or laid eyes on his son, the first of what would become twenty-seven unacknowledged offspring, not all of them the same colour.

Eight

“What did you think, Olive?”

“I’m not saying, because you’ll just point out a boo-boo and spoil this movie for me too.”

As usual, they went to The Downtowner for a treat. Mrs. Jenkins gave him what she hoped was a piercing look. “I’ll bet you’ve had a wife stashed away somewhere all these years, Bert, with grown kids, and she’s finally tracked you down for back alimony payments.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“The shyster from Denby, Denby, Harrison and Latham who came to see you, what is it a month now? You still haven’t told me what he wanted.”

“It was a case of mistaken identity.”

“Don’t look now, Pinocchio, but your nose just grew another three inches.”

“Mr. Hughes was looking for another Smith.”

“Then how come you get all that mail from those lawyers and suddenly you keep a locked strongbox under your bed?”

“You’ve been snooping.”

“What are you going to do about it? Move out. Go ahead. Make my day. For all I know your name isn’t even Smith. Bert,” she said, covering his hand with her own, sticky with chocolate sauce, “if you’re wanted by the cops you can count on Olive, your only pal in this vale of tears.”

“I’ve never broken a law in my life,” he said, sliding his hand free before anybody saw.

“Hey,” she said, giggling, “what’s the difference between a lawyer and a rooster?”

He didn’t want to know.

“A rooster clucks defiance.”

He didn’t even chuckle.

“It’s a play on words, Bert. I’ll explain it to you, if you want.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Said the farmer’s daughter to the preacher.”

Rattled, Smith paid both their bills for once and left a sixty-five cent tip in the saucer.

“I think somebody’s ship has come in and he’s not telling.”

Pleading a headache, Smith did not join her in the parlour that night to watch “Kojak”.

“Somebody saw you come home in a taxi last Tuesday, but you got out at the corner so that Olive couldn’t see from her window.”

“I was feeling dizzy.”

“Bert, whenever you’re ready to spill the beans, I’ll be waiting. Meanwhile,” she sang, “I’ll tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree.”

“Thank you.”

“Loyalty is my middle name. Let’s just hope it’s yours too, old buddy of mine.”

The legacy, which Smith was told had been left to him by his late Uncle Arnold, who had died childless in Hove, had come to $228,725.00.

“But I thought it was fifty thousand pounds,” Smith had said.

“That was in 1948. It was invested on your behalf.” Trudging through the driving snow, Smith had taken the certified cheque right to the Royal Bank. Deposited it. Started home. Panicked. Hurried to the Westmount post office to rent a box. Then back to the bank to tell them no statements were to be mailed to his home address any more, but only to his P.O. number. He was back first thing in the morning to test things, drawing two hundred dollars in cash.

Smith decided that he was too old to have his teeth fixed. He considered buying a Harris tweed jacket, some shirts that weren’t drip-dry, a pair of wingtip shoes, but Mrs. Jenkins would demand to know where the money had come from. Strolling through Eaton’s, he saw a small refrigerator that would do nicely for his room. He came across an electric kettle that would be a blessing. He could fix himself a cuppa whenever he felt the urge. Not Salada tea bags, either, but Twinings Darjeeling. No, he didn’t dare. Olive never missed a trick.

“What do you make of Murph Heeney in number five, Bert?”

Heeney, the new roomer next door to him, was a big bear of a man, hirsute, a carpenter, never without a bottle of Molson Export in his paw.

“He’s not my type.”

“Guessy guessy what I found under his bed? A stack of Playboys. Certain pages stuck together with his spunk.”

Olive Jenkins turned Smith’s shirt collars. If he was feeling poorly she climbed the stairs to his room with beef tea made from an OXO cube. During the longest week of the month, the week before his pension cheque came, she had fed him bangers and mash or toad in the hole for supper. Well, now he could buy her a new colour TV or treat her to a movie and Murray’s for supper once a week. No. She’d smell a rat. “Where did you get the do re me, Bert?”

All that money in the bank. He could visit the Old Country, see where his parents had come from. Lightheaded, he ventured into Thomas Cook & Sons and inquired about ships to England, astonished to discover that now only Polish or Russian liners sailed from Canada, which would never do. But the insolent young clerk, his look saying you just stepped in here to get warm, you old fart, still stood before him, reeking of pansy aftershave, brandishing ship plans with cabin locations, quoting fares.

“Would that include meals?” Smith asked.

The clerk, cupping a hand to his mouth, failed to squelch his laughter.

“I suppose you own this establishment,” Smith said, fleeing.

Smith continued to draw two hundred dollars a week from his account. He stashed what he didn’t spend, which was most of it, in a hiding place that he had prepared by sawing through a floorboard one night. He took to treating himself to solitary lunches at Murray’s, requesting a table in the rear, but even so he started whenever the door swung open. Most afternoons he stopped at Laura Secord’s for a half-pound of cashews or chocolates, and then he would move on to the lobby of the Mount Royal Hotel or Central Station, never going home until he had finished every last bit.

“Where have you been all day, old buddy of mine?”

“Looking at magazines in the library.”

“What did you do for lunch?”

“Did without.”

Not according to her information.

“As the vicar said to the rabbi’s wife, I think we ought to have a little chat.”

She made tea. And when he sat down she spotted his new socks at once. Argyle. Knee length.

“Bert, I want to know if you’re shop-lifting.”

He was stunned.

“If you’re short, Olive will see you through, but you must tell me if you’re in trouble.”

He shook his head no, and started for his room. Mrs. Jenkins followed him to the foot of the stairs. “You never used to hold out on good old Olive.”

“Maybe I’m not the only one who’s changed.”

Once Smith had been the only one favoured with a special place in Mrs. Jenkins’s refrigerator, but now the shelf below his was crammed with bottles of Molson that rattled whenever the door opened or the engine started up. Saturday night TV with Olive, the two of them resting their tootsies, as she liked to say, sharing Kool-Aid and Twinkies, watching the Channel 12 movie, was now also a thing of the past. Olive no longer wore any old housecoat on Saturday nights, her hair in curlers. Now she was perfumed and girdled, Shirley Temple curls tumbling over her cheeks, wearing a candy-floss pink angora sweater a size too small and a green miniskirt, her fat legs sheathed in black fishnet stockings and her feet pinched into fluffy white slippers with baby-blue pom-poms. And it was “Hockey Night in Canada” on TV, the parlour stinking of spilt beer and pizza and White Owl cigars, Murph Heeney in attendance.

“Hey, Olive, how am I gonna concentrate on the power play when you’re making me feel so horny?”

Olive shrieked with laughter, squirting beer. “You’d better clean up your act, buddy, because after these messages.… Here comes Johnny! Whoops, I mean Bert, my loyalist pal in this tear of vales.”

“Am I intruding?”

“Naw,” Heeney said. “Come on in and haunt the room for a while, Smitty, you old turkey you. Canadiens 3, Chicago 4, with eight minutes to go. Time is becoming a factor.”

Smith fled to his room, scandalized, and the next morning he slipped out early for an Egg McMuffin breakfast at McDonald’s. Then, stepping out into the slush, he searched for a taxi. He waved off the first to slow down, because it was driven by a black man, but got into the next one.

“Central Station, please.”

“Hey, you know who once warmed their arses right where you’re sitting right now, mister? Nathan Gursky and his wife. Big bucks that. So I asked him for his philosophy of life. I collect them, you know. He says his old man taught him all men are brothers and his wife laughs so hard he turns red in the face. Guess where he’s going? Old Montreal. His shrink. How do I know? His wife says, ‘At those prices please don’t sit there for an hour saying nothing but um, ah, and er to Dr. Weinberg. Tell him the truth. Now it’s Lionel you’re afraid of.’ Imagine that. All those millions and he’s a sicko.”

Smith bought yesterday’s Gazette at the newsstand and sought out a bench that wasn’t already laden with drug addicts. He dozed and then ate lunch at the Peking Gardens, indulging his one daring taste, an appetite for Chinese food. Then he wandered over to the Mount Royal Hotel and rested in the lobby. Next he drifted through Alexis Nihon Plaza, stopping for a Tab, and snoozing on a bench. Later he splurged on an early dinner at Curly Joe’s. Steak and french fried potatoes. Apple pie. Bloated, more than somewhat flatulent, he was back at Mrs. Jenkins’s house before eight, resolved to announce that he was moving out, but not before giving the two of them a piece of his mind.

Murph Heeney was wearing a crêpe-paper party hat. “Surprise, surprise! We thought you’d never get here.”

“Said the curate to the go-go dancer,” Olive shrieked, blowing on a noisemaker.

Hooking him under the arms, they danced a shaken Smith into the parlour, where the table had been set for three.

“For horse-doovers we got devilled eggs and then Yankee pot roast and chocolate cake with ice cream,” Heeney said, shoving a chalky-faced Smith into a chair.

Smith managed to force an acceptable share of food down his gullet while Olive entertained Heeney.

“This guy goes to the doctor he’s told he has to have his—his—” She stopped, censoring herself in deference to Smith, and continued, “—his penis amputated, he hits the roof …”

Smith begged off coffee and struggled upstairs to his room. He wakened, his stomach churning, at three A.M., and raced to the toilet down the hall only to run into that hairy ape emerging in his BVDs. Heeney grabbed him by the arm, possibly to sustain his own uncertain balance. “I’d wait a while I was you,” he said, holding his nose.

“Can’t,” Smith said, breaking free of Heeney’s grip.