Solomon Gursky Was Here (19 page)

Finally L.B. reached for the big brown envelope from
The New Yorker
and slit it with his leather-handled letter opener which was a gift, in lieu of a fee, for a reading he had given at the B'nai Jacob synagogue in Hamilton, Ontario. Then he retired to his bedroom, removing his pince-nez, rubbing his nose, the small tic of discomfort starting in the back of his neck. It was noon before he heard Moses stumbling about the kitchen and called out to him. “Bring your coffee into my bedroom and shut the door behind you.”

Moses did as he was asked and L.B. took his hand and stroked it. “Moishele,” he said, his eyes shiny with tears, “you think I don't know how it feels right here?” Withdrawing his hand, he pressed it to his skittering damaged heart. “My work hasn't always been in such demand. L.B. Berger wasn't born famous. I've also had rejections from editors who print crap, so long as it is written by their friends, but who couldn't tell Pushkin from Ogden Nash. I have also suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Prizes going to hacks with the right connections when it was obvious I could write circles around them. You have to have a thick skin, my boy. You want to be an artist your motto has to be
nil desperandum
.”

Then he handed Moses the envelope. It had already been slit open and Moses could just make out the printed rejection slip clipped to his manuscript.

“The next attack could be curtains for me,” L.B. said, squeezing his hand again, “so let me tell you that I have always expected you to follow in my footsteps, but not to be intimidated by them. I have such hopes for you. I have always loved you beyond anybody, including your mother.”

Moses swallowed hard, his stomach rising, bound to betray him he feared. Like father, like son.

“Now this is not to be interpreted as a complaint against a good woman. A loyal woman. A real
baleboosteh
. But, to be frank, she has never been a true soul-mate for me. What a man like me needed was refinement, intellectual companionship, like Chopin got from Georges Sand or Voltaire from the Marquise du Châtelet. Whatever gossip you hear after I'm gone, whatever letters future biographers turn up, I want you to understand. I was never unfaithful to your mother, not in my heart of hearts. But I had need of ladies from time to time who I could talk to as an equal. My soul cried out for it. Don't look at me like that. You're a grown man now. We should be able to talk. You think I feel guilty? The hell I do. My family always came first with me. Costing me plenty. You think I ever would have signed on with Mr. Bernard, that
behayma,
if it wasn't because I wanted to do right by your mother, but you above all? Do you have any idea how many hoops I've jumped through there? Furnishing that gangster with a library. Feeding that hooligan literary allusions for his speeches. He couldn't even pronounce the words. I had to coach him. A man who sits glued to the TV for the Ed Sullivan show. You have no idea what I have endured at his table so that your future welfare would not be sacrificed on the anvil of my art. He's coarse beyond belief, Moishe. Even a sailor would blush to hear him in full flight.”

Moses, about to protest, was dismissed with an impatient wave of the hand.

“Don't start. I know what your big-shot reporter friend Birenbaum thinks. I heard him say it to you behind my back. ‘Who does he think he is the way he dresses? His hair. Beethoven.' You buy a poet in this poor excuse for a country, it doesn't honour its literary giants, you want value for money. Long hair, a cape.”

Moses fiddled absently with the flap of the large brown envelope on his lap.

“Hey, wipe your eyes please. Shed no tears for me. At least your father didn't have to feign a hunchback or carry a jester's stick with a bell attached to it. Moishe, I smell talent in you and I have a nose for it.”

“You had absolutely no right to open my mail.”

“And maybe you had a right to give
The New Yorker
this as your return address? Or are you so self-centred, Mr. Rhodes Scholar, that you didn't realize it was meant as a provocation?”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Don't you dare look at me like that. I'm your father and it goes without saying I forgive you this childish business with
The New Yorker
. It mustn't upset you either because it was only natural. You know your Oedipus and so do I. I never published there—not that I ever wanted to—so you would, administering a slap in the face to old L.B. Okay, that
narishkeit
is over with and you know what? You're goddamn lucky. Had they accepted your story you would have gone on to write more formula fiction tailored to their commercial expectations. Moishe, you have escaped a trap. Now I want you to continue to attempt to write and when the time comes I will try your stories on editors who can be trusted. But let's get right down to work, eh? Because the next time you come home I could have shuffled off this mortal coil. You know something? I'm really glad we're having this talk. Letting our hearts speak out before it's too late. I haven't felt as close to you since you were a little boy. My page, I used to say. So say something.”

Moses fled the room, his stomach heaving, sinking to his knees before the toilet bowl just in time. Then he dug out his bottle of Scotch from its hiding place. When he finally entered the kitchen he found that L.B., celebrating his escape from a migraine, was already into his favourite meal: scrambled eggs with lox, potatoes fried in onions, bagels lathered with cream cheese. “Sit down, my boy. Maw has made enough for both of us.”

“Some
baleboosteh,
isn't she?”

“I thought the conversation we had in there was strictly
entre nous.”

Bessie, sniffing trouble, looked closely at her son. “What's wrong?” she asked.

“Our neophyte artist here has had his first rejection slip and he's taking it hard instead of appreciating how lucky he is.”

“I would like to say something,” Moses said. L.B. shot out of his chair, snapping to attention.

“Not all neglected writers are unjustifiably neglected.”

“How dare you speak to your father like that?”

“Here is a boy,” L.B. said, “once my pride and joy, bright with promise, who cannot accept responsibility for his own failures, but would lay them on his father's white head. Well, I've got news for you. I didn't make you a drunk. I deserved better.”

Five

The night before the big brown envelope from
The New Yorker
shot through the mail slot Moses had been a guest at Anita Gursky's first wedding. Actually he hadn't been invited. He had been strolling aimlessly down Sherbrooke Street, hard by McGill, past the sullen grey limestone mansions built by the Scottish robber barons who had once ruled the country. Self-absorbed, he passed the former homes of shipping and rail and mining magnates who had flourished in a time, sublime for them, when there had been no income tax or anti-trust laws or succession duties. Sir Arthur Minton's old house, now a private club; the Clarkson home, converted into a fraternity house; Sir William Van Horne's former residence with its delightfully loopy greenhouse. And then he ran into Rifka Schneiderman, of all people. Rifka Schneiderman, who had used to belt out “The Cloakworkers' Union Is a No-Good Union” on the other side of the mountain, but a world away, in the dining room of the cold-water flat on Jeanne Mance Street. Rifka, to his astonishment, had grown into a fetching if rather overdressed young lady, her once-unruly hair tamed by a poodle cut. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “I thought you were studying at Oxford or Cambridge or something.”

“My father had a heart attack.”

Rifka was to be a bridesmaid at the wedding. However her fiancé, Sheldon Kaplan, had been struck with one of his allergy attacks. Rifka, her mood sentimental, asked Moses to escort her instead.

“Only if you promise to sing your song,” he said.

Anita Gursky had met her first husband on the ski slopes of Davos. A New Yorker, the wayward son of a German-Jewish banking
family, he hoped to make his name as a tennis player.
Life
came to the wedding at the Ritz-Carlton.

Becky Schwartz leaned closer to Harvey. “Don't look now,” she said, “but the Cotés just walked in looking like they smelled something bad. How can she wear a backless dress with those shoulders like chicken wings?
I said don't look
.”

“I'm not.”

“I thought I told you to cut your nose hairs before we went out. Feh!”

Plump, double-chinned Georges Ducharme, parliamentary secretary to the minister of transport, winked at Mimi Boisvert. “I'm going to be the first to boogie-woogie with the rabbi's wife.”

“Tais-toi, Georges.”

“Do not talk in the language of the peasantry here. Speak Yiddish.”

Cynthia Hodge-Taylor was there, so was Neil Moffat, Tom Clarkson, a Cunningham, two Pitneys, and other insouciant young Westmounters. Their far more punctilious parents would not have blessed a Gursky wedding with their presence, but for the young set it was sport, and possibly, just possibly, a chance to see their photographs published in
Life
.

Jim MacIntyre said, “My father, you know, was one of the government prosecutors in the trial. When Solomon was confronted by a particularly damning piece of testimony all he could say was I AM THAT I AM, and right there, my father swore, the temperature in the courtroom dropped by twenty degrees. The judge looked like he was going to have a stroke.”

There were thousands of red roses in vases all over the ballroom. At the appropriate moment, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians swung into “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, and Mr. Bernard took to the floor for the first dance, tears streaming down his face as he foxtrotted cheek-to-cheek with Anita.

Moses danced with Kathleen O'Brien, whom he had chatted with more than once at The Lantern. “Come on,” she said, “We're going to get some fresh air.”

“I'm not drunk.”

“Your dad wrote a poem for the bride and groom. In exactly five
minutes Becky Schwartz will step up to the microphone and read it aloud.”

Outside, Moses said, “Well, he always wanted to be a poet laureate.”

“I hope you don't drink like this in Oxford. I believe your father is counting on you to come home with a First.”

“Actually nothing would delight him more than my being sent down.”

“Now now now.”

Back in the ballroom she led him to the table where Mr. Morrie was rooted with his wife, Ida, and their enormous pimply daughter, Charna. “He's the sweet one,” Kathleen whispered before making the introductions. “Be nice.”

“How's your father?” Mr. Morrie asked.

“Getting better.”

“Thank God for that.”

“Is his father the writer?” Charna asked.

“And how.”

“Big deal,” she said, glaring at Moses. “I could write a book too. I just wouldn't know how to put it into words.”

“Bless you,” Ida said.

Mr. Morrie squeezed Moses's arm. “Don't think I don't know all about you from your father, Mr. Rhodes Scholar.”

Responding to a kick from Kathleen, Moses said, “Oh yes, thank you,” but he was watching Barney, who was flirting with Rifka Schneiderman on the dance floor.

Barney, they said, still hoped to be the one to draw the sword from the stone, becoming McTavish's next CEO. Certainly he had done everything possible to establish his claim. While Lionel fiddled, he had driven a truck for McTavish. He had spent a summer in Skye, working in the Loch Edmond's Mist distillery, starting out by raking the barley floor, absorbing what he could in the mash house and then moving on to tend to the worm tubs in the stillhouse. On his return to Canada, he had become an expert on cooperage, and travelled out west to sit in on grain purchase negotiations.

Rifka quit the dance floor, leaving Barney standing there in the
middle of a number, laughing too loud. Then Barney joined Lionel, the two of them swooping from table to table, drawing closer.

Lionel had bet Barney five thousand dollars that he could drink the most champagne without upchucking and that he could get laid before midnight without having to pay for it. Bottle in hand, he bounced from table to table, Barney trailing after. Lionel saying, “Hi, Jewel, want to stroke my cock?” And at another table, “Any of you girls want to fuck?”

(Years later a best-selling hagiographer of the family wrote, in a chapter titled “Lionel as Prince Hal”, that though many took Lionel to be a vulgarian at the time, lacking the royal jelly, the truth is “he was a lonely young man, lonely as a lighthouse keeper on Valentine's Day, overwhelmed at a tender age by the secret knowledge that one bright dawn his would be the keys to the Gursky kingdom, even though he would have preferred breeding horses in Elysian fields.” An abiding passion, a footnote pointed out, that led to the establishment of The Sweet Sue Stables in Louisville, Kentucky, the name changed to Big Cat after his first divorce.)

Finally the Gursky scions swayed over the same table and Barney heard his cousin say, “But everything's settled. It's all going to be mine one day. So think carefully before you turn me down, honey.”

Barney grabbed Lionel by the lapels and shook him. “What are you talking about?”

“Didn't your father tell you?”

Barney, the colour drained from his face, descended on Mr.Morrie's table, but he wasn't there. Barney found him in the men's room, washing his hands. Blind to the presence of another man in one of the cubicles, Barney began to curse his father for allowing Mr. Bernard to swindle him out of his patrimony. Soaked in sweat, his chest heaving, Barney said, “If Uncle Bernard put a saucer of milk on the floor you would get down on all fours and lick it up.”

“Please, Barney, don't be angry with me. I love you.”

“Big fucken deal.”

“When you are thirty-one years old you will inherit millions.”