Joshua Then and Now (46 page)

“Do you remember
your
grandfather?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. He was a crippler back in Russia, where he originally came from. If you didn’t want to serve in the Czar’s army, he would put one of your balls on an anvil and smash it. Or shoot a toe off for you. Or maybe just puncture an ear drum. It was good work, but seasonal.”

“We’re some bunch, the Shapiros.”

“Have another beer, kid.”

“Sure.”

“Now Mordecai, he entered Esther in the contest and in those days, before Kotex, they all must have smelled real bad down there, because it took twelve months to clean them up for the king. Quote, six months with oil and myrrh, and six months with sweet odors, and with other things for the purifying of the women, unquote. Anyway, she won. Esther took the crown. But Mordecai he had duped the king, he had no idea Esther was Jewish. And now that he had planted her in the king’s bed, he began sitting at the king’s gate. And there he once heard two guys plotting to rub out Ahasuerus and he put the finger on them and they were both hanged. Now the king’s minister, Haman, he used to see this old kvetchy Hebe sitting at the king’s gate and Mordecai would never bow his head to him, which made him wonder about his muscle. With all his blessings, Haman used to see him there and wonder, quote, Yet all this availeth me nothing, so long as I see Mordecai sitting at the king’s gate, unquote. It burned him, it really burned him. So he went out and got the king’s permission not only to hang Mordecai, but to kill every Hebe in Persia and all its provinces. O.K. Sure. What he didn’t know was that Mordecai
had his uncle’s looker of a daughter planted inside, screwing the royal head off every night, and he got Esther to work on the king and one, two, three, the tables are reversed. Not only is Haman hanging on the gallows he set up for Mordecai, but the king now turns around and grants the right to the Jews, quote, to destroy, to slay, and to cause to perish, all the power of the people and province that would assault them, both little ones and women, and to take the spoil of them for prey, unquote. And listen to this, the people of Persia are now so shit-scared that many of them become Jews. Even so, Mordecai and his followers they kill some seventy-five thousand enemies, men, women, and children, which is why we celebrate Purim, quote, a day of feasting and gladness, unquote. And old Mordecai, really leaning on his connections now, ends up prime minister in Haman’s place.

“Now I’ve told you I read this story three times, and the way I see it there are two morals buried in it. One, Mordecai’s rise out of nowhere proves something I’ve always tried to knock into your head. It doesn’t matter what you know, but who you know. Two, according to the law and what the rabbis say even now, it is an offense to marry out of our religion – we are not supposed to tie the knot with a
goy
or a
shiksa
. But nowhere in the Book of Esther do you find God hollering because she married a
goy
, and I never heard any rabbi complain either. So, if I interpret the law correctly, you are not allowed to marry out of the faith unless it’s into a royal family. Interesting, eh?”

H
OW WAS JOSHUA TO KNOW THEY WOULD FLY TO THE
moon? Gun down another Kennedy? Get Nixon? Trade Bobby Orr? Or that the honest crook and the worldly senator would become such devoted friends?

His father, his father-in-law.

Given to drinking together in the Rideau Club, the senator beckoning cabinet members to their table to be introduced. “I would like you to meet my son-in-law’s father. Reuben Shapiro. He is the most perspicacious Bible scholar I’ve ever met and a former lightweight boxing champion of Canada. He went eight rounds against Mr. Samuel Angott, and I’m proud to say I once had the signal honor of being his wheelman. Isn’t that so, Reuben?”

“Damn right.”

Then, leaning back in his chair, the senator might add, “We’re looking for a little action tonight. Maybe a poker game.”

Ever since his initial meeting with the senator Joshua, brooding on him, had magnified the man as a much-needed figure of rectitude come into his life. Unwinding the spool of that first encounter again and again, he had grown increasingly ashamed of his brash behavior. The truth was, he had reflected more than once, that had he been Pauline’s father, he would not have wanted her to marry the likes of Joshua Shapiro. With hindsight, Joshua had come to respect, even
cherish, the senator, and to measure his own moral lapses against what he took to be the senator’s uncompromising standards. The old virtues of the men who had forged colony into country, refining a frontier society. So he had been considerably more sorrowful than triumphant to discover that the senator was considering accepting a couple of directorships in companies controlled by Izzy Singer. He was indignant that Izzy, who knew the price of everything, had turned out to be a better judge of character than he was. He hadn’t grasped, as Pauline had always known and accepted, that her revered father was the sum of old alliances, with political connections he could redeem at his convenience. His senatorial endowment policy. Obviously, his father-in-law was a man of sensibility and tact. His fingernails clean. His library beyond reproach. Without a police sheet. But there was a little of Colucci in his soul.

Which certainly explained why his father was so amused by him, if not why the senator had come to hold his father in such surprisingly high regard.

It was Joshua, his mood defiant, who had arranged the senator’s meeting with his father.

He and Pauline, as requested by the senator, drove out to inspect her inheritance on Lake Memphremagog in the spring of 1968, with Alex, Susy, and the infant Teddy, whom Pauline was still nursing at the time. They had only been installed in the sinking old house with the wraparound porch for a few days when Joshua invited his father out for the weekend. His step jaunty, Reuben disembarked from the bus in Magog, wearing his straw boater, an ice-cream suit, and one of his vintage hand-painted ties. Autumn, a veritable riot of color, comes to the Laurentian Shield. He arrived on a Friday night, laden with toys for the kids, and the senator, as Joshua should have expected, was far too experienced a man to betray even a flicker of surprise at his father’s appearance. But he did seem a bit chuffed that the children, who were unfailingly reserved in his presence, flew right into Reuben’s arms, competing for kisses. And Joshua feared
that it was not generosity, but a spirit of grandfatherly competition that prompted him to invite his father to join him and Alex on a fishing expedition early the next morning. It was June, the lake still running cold, hungering bass, perch, and even landlocked salmon swimming in shallow waters. Joshua never did find out all that passed between them on that outing, but if the senator, an experienced angler, thought that Reuben would prove comically inept on the lake, he was in for a surprise. Hunkered down in Michigan more than once, Reuben had learned to handle rod and reel with élan.

“Oh, you just help yourself to any lure you want,” the senator had said, opening the tackle box. “They’re all much the same.”

“Yeah. Right,” Reuben said, anticipating the senator’s hand, snatching just the right lure out of a tray before the senator could grab it.

“Now I’m going to throw this line the best I can, Alex, and then, you and me, we’re going to reel it in together, but slowly.”

Reuben, who could cast as expertly as he could jab, immediately struck for the dark shady waters just short of where the lily pads were beginning to send up shoots. When they finally came in, late in the afternoon, Alex was waving eight fish on a dancing line, shouting that he and Reuben had landed six of them together. Joshua was concerned – needlessly, as it turned out. For whatever had passed between his father and the senator on the lake, the amazing thing was that the senator didn’t seem to mind about the fish. He was flushed and exuberant. “I don’t mind telling you,” he said, “that we had some damn good fun out there.”

And, on the evidence, a good deal of rye as well. Reuben and the senator drained the last of the V.O. before the fire, and the senator asked him how he had become so familiar with the Bible.

“Well,” Reuben said, “in the days when I was no more than a club fighter really, and I would have to stay in all those crummy hotels on the road, there was no
TV
in the rooms. We didn’t even have beds
with Magic Fingers yet. I could never get to sleep the night before a fight, so I found myself reading the Good Book, in which I have instructed my worthless son here.”

Pauline, going on very little sleep, nursing Teddy on demand, suddenly let out a sharp cry. She had invited twelve people over on Sunday afternoon and had just discovered there was very little to drink in the house and, of course, the liquor commission in Magog was already closed for the weekend.

“Couldn’t we borrow some bottles from the Hickeys?” the senator asked.

“They’re not invited.”

“What about the McTeers?”

“And they’ll be reminding me about it for the next twenty years. Shit.”

“I know you’re tired,” Joshua said, “but would you please stop overreacting to the most trivial –”

Teddy let out a yelp from his crib. Anticipating, Joshua grabbed Pauline. “Sit, for Christ’s sake. He’ll wait a minute.”

“Oh, a hell of a lot you know about these things,” she said, dashing up the stairs.

The senator frowned and began to poke the fire.

“Yeah, well,” Reuben asked, “are we anywhere near a village called Vale Perkins here?”

“Indeed we are.”

“Then we can’t be far from Owl’s Head?”

“I had no idea you were familiar with this region,” the senator said.

“Well, like, I was in the liquor business once. Deliveries, sort of. And in those days I got to know some of the back roads that lead into Vermont from here.”

“Holy cow,” the senator said, “you were a bootlegger!”

“Now what I’m going to need,” Reuben said, “is a flashlight, maybe a couple of shovels, two empty boxes, and have you got a crowbar?”

“Yes, in the basement.”

“Josh, I’m going to need you.”

“Can I come?” Alex asked.

“Geez, can you come? I’m counting on you, kid. You’re going to be my lookout man.”

“And what about me?” the senator demanded, aggrieved.

“Well now, you’re a very respectable fella. I really don’t know.”

“It’s my car,” he said, petulant.

“Yeah. Right.”

“Let me be your wheelman.”

“Well …”

“I’ll bring my piece.”

“Your what?”

“My cannon.”

When the senator reappeared, he was carrying a pail of water and an old 12-gauge shotgun that had last been used to scare raccoons out of the cornfield.

“Holy shit,” Reuben said, “what do we want with that thing?”

“In case we run into the heat.”

“Oh, yeah. Right. Good thinking. But just be careful where you point it.”

Pauline drifted down the stairs, Teddy suckling happily at her breast, to find them standing there with flashlights, shovels, crowbar, and shotgun. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“We’re going to find you some booze,” Reuben said. “At least, that’s the general idea.”

“Reuben, you are not to break into anybody’s house here.”

“Oh, no. Hell. Nothing like that.”

“And are you going with them, Daddy?”

“Yes,” the senator cried out defiantly.

“At your age?”

“Damn it, Pauline, I’m the wheelman,” he said, hurrying on ahead to avoid further recriminations.

“Joshua, what’s happening?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, fellas.”

They found the senator squatting at the rear of his station wagon, rubbing mud on the license plate.

“Hey,” Reuben said, nudging Joshua, “I can see you’ve been around.”

The senator grinned, immensely pleased.

“Now just let me have a look at that shotgun,” Reuben asked. And, borrowing it for a moment, he slid round to the other side of the car.

They drove to Vale Perkins and then on to Owl’s Head. Beyond it, Reuben pointed out another dirt road that led into Vermont. “We want to go as far as the border,” he said, “turn around and then track back exactly one mile.”

The senator took it slowly.

“O.K. Stop right here.”

Flashlight in hand, Reuben got out to scrutinize the trees by the roadside, and then he started tentatively into the woods. He was back in five minutes. “This may turn out to be a wild goose chase,” he said.

“What do you mean?” the senator asked.

“Well, it’s been a long time since I last passed through here. You and me, senator, we’ve begun to shrink, but these goddamn trees here they just keep putting on new growth.”

They stopped another hundred yards down the road and Reuben got out to examine an old cedar tree, running his hands along the bark. “O.K., just pull up here, boys.”

“Do you want us to stash our wheels anywhere, Reuben?”

“Shit, no. Just come on out of there.”

Following Reuben, they climbed over a fence with a
NO TRESPASSING
sign nailed to it, the senator carrying his cannon. Reuben began to study the trees again, running his hand along the bark here and there. Finally he seemed to find whatever it was he wanted, and
he set out through the grass, stopped abruptly, and called for Alex and Joshua. “O.K., Josh, you start digging here and you here, Alex,” and then he moved off to sit down on a rock with the senator. “Maybe,” he said, “you should be sitting back on the road? Lookout.”

But the senator wasn’t budging. “If anybody comes,” he said, “we’re fishermen digging for nightcrawlers.”

“Hey, Senator, I sure coulda used a fella of your skills back in the old days.”

“This is such grand fun, Reuben.”

Alex called out to say that he had hit wood.

“Well, well, why don’t you get your father to help you uncover it, then?”

Within twenty minutes the unmistakable outlines of a coffin began to emerge.

“Put down that shovel immediately,” Joshua said to Alex, and he charged over to his father, pulling him aside. “Are you crazy, Daddy, bringing Alex out here? Is this your idea of a joke? There’s a coffin in there.”