Joshua Then and Now (16 page)

“I have no idea where he is,” his mother told Perreault.

“Aw, Esther, you’re a peach.”

With his father in hiding again, his mother quickly sank into her customary stupor. Chewing 217’s, consuming novels and movie magazines and sipping Dewar’s and a splash as she listened to “Ma Perkins” and “Pepper Young’s Family” on their walnut-finished
RCA
radio. She seldom bothered to dress any more, stalking through the flat in a shimmering black slip, a Pall Mall dangling from her lips. Beds were left unmade, sheets unchanged. If she bestirred herself at all, it was to practice her act. One afternoon Joshua came home to find the living room carpet rolled up, the blinds drawn, and the winking red bulb screwed into the lamp, and another afternoon he opened the front door to a surprise.

“Well,” she said. “Rinky-dinky-doo.”

“Wow!”

“What do you think?”

His mother was wearing a top hat, glittering tights, tails, and long black mesh stockings. Twirling a cane, wiggling her ass, she danced away from him into the living room as Jack Teagarden croaked “Anybody Seen My Baby?” on the gramophone.

Dishes and pans accumulated in the kitchen. Empty milk bottles collected in the hall. The basin under the icebox overflowed again and again, and the box itself yielded no delights. A heel of hard salami. Some moldy cottage cheese. A slushy lettuce. To begin with, Joshua was given fifty cents each evening and sent out to eat his supper; she didn’t seem to mind, she was probably grateful, if he didn’t return for hours. Then a routine of sorts was established. She left the money out for him on the kitchen table in the morning and he took to leaving the house at eight and not returning until eleven at night.

Then, one afternoon in June, feeling feverish, he came home directly from school, only to find himself locked out of the house. Across the street, Euclid was simonizing Mr. Ryan’s black Buick.

“Hey, kid, how would you like to go for a drive?”

“Why, sure,” Joshua said, his smile ingratiating, slipping close enough to heave a rock, shattering the Buick’s windshield, a startled Euclid taking off after him.

Drawing him into the lane, losing him easily, Joshua scrambled over the Zippers’ rotting backyard fence, landing in the old man’s tomato patch. He bolted up their rear stairs to the shed, grabbing a hammer and nails, and darted through the unlocked empty house, emerging on St. Urbain again, where he began to drive nails into the Buick’s tires. He was working on the third one when he looked up to see a winded Euclid running toward him. Dodging him, Joshua took off again, running as far as Fletcher’s Field, collapsing on the grass, his heart pounding. He declined an offer to join a pick-up Softball game and crossed the street to the “Y,” settling down in the gym to watch a basketball game. When he came home again, the
Buick was gone. His front door was unlocked. “This isn’t a house,” Joshua shouted at his mother without warning, “it’s a fucken stable. Why don’t you clean up around here anymore?”

His mother didn’t slap his face. Instead, she stared at him, astonished.

“It’s only a month to my bar-mitzvah,” he continued, emboldened, “and nothing’s been done. Am I going to have one or not?”

“Why is it so important to you to have a bar-mitzvah?” she asked in a small voice.

“Well, you’ve got to if you’re Jewish. Don’t you believe in God and all that stuff?”

“Feh.”

“What does that mean?”

“I could have made a better world myself.”

“I’m going to have a bar-mitzvah.”

“O.K., O.K., if it’s that important to you, you can have one,” she said, getting up to confront the stack of dishes in the sink.

“Well, yeah. Right. And there’s going to be a party for my friends.”

“Who would come here?” she asked, amused.

“The boys.”

“Oh, yeah, their mothers wouldn’t let.”

“Why not?”

“Because my tits don’t hang down to my ankles and your father doesn’t work at a regular job.”

The other mothers wouldn’t speak to her any more, clutching their children by the hand as she passed. Some even crossed the street if they saw her approaching. Mrs. Sivak from downstairs complained to the landlord about her tap-dancing at 2 a.m., Louis Armstrong blasting away on the gramophone, but when old Dworkin shuffled round to the flat Esther sent him flying with a flow of obscenities. She had also very promptly dispatched the social worker sent by the Baron de Hirsch Society to inquire about Joshua’s
welfare. And the more she was socially scorned, the greater was her defiance, the backyard laundry line serving as her banner of rebellion. While immense cotton bloomers and outsized bras flapped worthily in the wind on other clotheslines, sassy little black bras and lacy black panties with unbelievably narrow waist lines danced wickedly on theirs. Right out there in the back lane, where husbands setting out the garbage could look up and swallow hard. Where growing children could see.

Joshua told her about the other parties. The movies. The doubleheader at Delorimier Downs. “What are you going to do for mine?” he asked.

“I’ll fly in Mr. Teagarden. And I’ll bake a marble cake.”

Shit.

“Don’t worry, kiddo. You’re going to have a party. Oh boy, are you ever going to have a party!”

A
RE YOU A MAN OR A MOUSE
,
MUELLER DEMANDED, BITING
into that ivory cigarette holder.
A man or a mouse
, he taunted.
Man, mouse
. And Joshua, wakening, discovered that he was sliding in sweat.

Ibiza, Ibiza.

But he wasn’t back on the island again, he was on an airplane. Air Canada flight 274. Flying home from yet another television assignment on a June morning in 1976.

“Isn’t that Joshua Shapiro?” a passenger asked his wife.

“Everybody looks sick in this light,” she replied.

Joshua began to order double Scotches from the stewardess, wondering how, once a promising thief sprung out of St. Urbain, he had ever become a television personality, a husband and a father of three, charged with contradictions. He sent his children to private schools and complained in other people’s houses about being the father of children who attended private schools. Anybody good on camera was an abomination to him, yet he owed his reputation to television.

Ibiza.

Monique didn’t matter. He certainly didn’t want to see her again. But, increasingly, he felt a need to confront Mueller one more time and to make a final effort to find the Freibergs. The mousy Freibergs, whom he had most assuredly ruined.

One night in London, 1953 it must have been, maybe a year after he had been obliged to flee the island, he had worked up sufficient courage to put through a long-distance call to the Hotel Casa del Sol in San Antonio. “I would like to speak with Mr. Freiberg, please,” he had said, his heart thudding.

A pause. Crackling. “We have no Mr. Freiberg registered here.”

“He’s not a guest,” Joshua had cried, outraged. “He owns the hotel.”

“You must be mistaken. The proprietor here is a Señor Delgado.”

“Then where in the hell can I reach the Freibergs?”

“I know of no Freibergs.”

From the airport, Joshua hurried right out to Selwyn House, late for the graduation ceremonies. Teddy, only eight years old then, was certainly not graduating, but he was to be presented with a certificate of distinction for his work in grade two, and Joshua edged into a folding chair beside Pauline just in time to watch him climb up to the platform, his curly-topped head bobbing.
I ran once
, Joshua thought.
Me, your father. Leaving a couple of mice behind
.

The gym was already choked with parents. Mostly stockbrokers, corporation lawyers, or accountants who specialized in tax work. The news they were getting from the platform was bad. Should the Parti Québécois ever come to power, nobody could say with any certainty what would be the future of private English-language schools in the province; but diminishing subsidies, and a consequently hefty hike in fees, were most likely. Then the speaker was before them. Stout, clear-eyed, ruddy-faced. A trust company executive who had served with a good regiment during World War II and now sat on the boards of a hospital, a charitable foundation and McGill University. Stitching bromides deftly together, he finally turned to the graduating class, offering solemn advice born of the school of experience. In these days of rampaging trade unions, he told them, learn to be handy about the house, to paint and do carpentry work, because it will serve you well once you venture into the wide world. Beyond
Westmount. Where kids still wear itchy sweaters from Knit-to-Fit.

What in the hell am I doing here? Joshua thought.

Once, he had obliged Alex, Susy, and Teddy to watch a
TV
documentary about World War II, and as Hitler did his notorious victory jig in the Compiègne forest after accepting the French surrender, they began to fall about, giggling. Unforgivably, Joshua lost his temper. “It isn’t funny. Now you be quiet and watch.”

He burdened the kids boorishly with his own past, he felt. He couldn’t help himself. So when Alex, once a model airplane enthusiast, innocently brought home a Messerschmitt to construct, he made him take it back to the shop at once. He wouldn’t have it in the house. Embarrassed because he had made Alex cry, he sat down with him afterwards and told him what he could remember about Guernica. About the famous oak tree before which the parliament of Basque senators had used to convene. About the air raid on April 26, 1937, when the small town was crowded with refugees and retreating soldiers. He tried to explain that at their age he had sat in a St. Urbain Street flat, his father fiddling with the shortwave band of their radio until they caught Hitler addressing the Reichstag, Hitler in a rage, cresting waves of
sieg heil’s
and static. He told them how the war in Spain had begun, and about Dr. Norman Bethune of the International Brigades, and the unit he had formed, Servicio Canadiensi de Transfusion de Sangre, which introduced transfusions to the actual battlefront.

If he still worshipped any heroes whatsoever, he explained, they were the men who had served in the International Brigades.

Spain.

His education, begun in the pages of
Life
, continued through high school, his obligatory stint at The Boys’ Farm after he had been nabbed for stealing a car, and all the jobs of his adolescence. He applied himself to learning a political alphabet, acquiring an ideological Dr. Seuss kit for Beginning Left-wingers. Combing through second-hand bookshops for anything on the Spanish Civil War. Reading Alvah Bessie, the Duchess of Atholl, Barea, Orwell, Gustav Regler, Malraux, and Geoffrey Cox. A map of Guadalajara, with the March 1937 battle lines, was pinned to a wall of his room, some lines by Charles Donnelly, an Irish volunteer, penciled in underneath.

In
Casablanca
, which he saw three times, it was a veritable guarantee of Bogart’s integrity and eventual redemption that he had once run guns for the republicans. Devouring Hemingway, especially
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, he never necked with a girl without wondering, if never daring to ask, O Riva Mandelbaum, O Hanna Steinberg,
“But did thee feel the earth move?”

Like Seymour Kaplan, who shared his obsession with Spain, Joshua drifted to sleep dreaming not, as James Thurber once suggested, of striking out the batting order of the New York Yankees, but of Gary Cooper as Robert Jordan, his leg smashed, taking his place behind a machine gun to cover the retreat of Ingrid Bergman, Akim Tamiroff, and the other partisans.

Seymour and Max, Izzy, Al and Eli were all at McGill now wearing red-and-white sweaters, but Joshua, without so much as a high school leaving certificate, already determined to get to Spain, disappeared into a mining camp in the northern bush for a season, emerging with his neck riddled with black-fly bites but his bankroll fat. At the time, Reuben had already walked out on Esther. He was roistering in Havana with Colucci, and she was bumping-and-grinding her way through a circuit in New Jersey. Joshua rented a room on Dorchester Boulevard. Teaching himself Pitman’s shorthand at night, he also began to attend a number of McGill lectures on the sly, slipping into a Spanish-language course and another on the history of Iberia. McGill was, as far as he could make out, an incredible scene. Lanky boys on an allowance, at ease with themselves, wearing white cardigans and tooting the horns of their convertibles as they geared down to pass through the Roddick Gates. Golden girls in cashmere twin sets, pleated tartan skirts, bobbysox, and scuffed loafers. He made the mistake of crashing something called the Harvest Moon Dance and picking up one of the girls. Fat Sheldon espied him on the dance floor.

“Hey, Joshua, what are you doing here?”

He tried to thrust the girl toward the far end of the crowded floor, but Sheldon was already in malicious pursuit.

“You’re not supposed to be here unless you’re a student.”

Suddenly, it seemed that everybody was grinning at him, the interloper. Westmount faces. Outremont faces. He abandoned the girl, fleeing. Humiliated. And the next morning, charged with rage, he smashed open a locker, found a hockey uniform that fit him, and bluffed his way onto the ice to practice with candidates for the university hockey team. The better-bred boys were justifiably startled
by his manner with a stick. Flying into corners, he was all elbows and spear. In crazed pursuit of faster skaters with the puck, he slipped his stick between their skates, upending them. Between times, he lined up innocent wingers, trailing the play, and sent them bouncing into the boards. The other players were not amused by his loutish behavior. In the dressing room, they began to whisper among themselves, and finally one of them challenged him. “Who in the hell are you?” he asked.