Son of a Smaller Hero (16 page)

When they awakened again around noon they heard voices in the living-room. For that’s when Theo arrived with the Kennedys.

Unfortunately the door to Noah’s room was open. Marg turned away discreetly. “Oh,” she said.

John took her arm firmly. “We’ll wait in the car,” he said.

But before they had left to wait in the car they had looked at Theo reassuringly, as though they had meant to be good enough to rub out what they had seen – unless (there had been something practical in Marg’s look) he required witnesses.

Theo turned away from the open bedroom door and collapsed in an armchair and shut his eyes and held his head in his hands. Miriam
leaped out of bed swiftly and flung Noah’s trousers at him. “Your pants,” she said thickly.

Noah got into his trousers calmly, but his head throbbed.

Theo looked up at them blankly. His first sexual experience had been shameful to him. His mother had discovered a set of lewd photographs underneath the shelving paper in the toilet medicine cabinet. She had asked him point-blank how often he masturbated. And Theo had burst into tears. Recalling that incident, facing his adulterous wife and her lover, Theo felt partially gratified. “John suggested that we drive into town to see if you felt better.”

“This is dreadful,” Miriam said.

But from the way she had said that Theo couldn’t understand what had been dreadful – her having been in bed with Noah or his having discovered them.

“I don’t believe this. Why, we’re so happy together. Everybody says so.… You can explain it. I’m sure you can. I’m not going to lose my temper. You were drunk, that’s it. Isn’t it?”

Noah looked at Theo. Their eyes met briefly, and Theo looked away first. But there had been no anger in his eyes. Shock, and something deeper than that.

“We weren’t drunk,” Noah said ruefully.

The room swayed around Miriam. She believed that universal love – an ointment properly applied – would heal all worldly ills. She had arrived at that conclusion not only out of mental laziness but also because she was afraid and ointments obviously conceal more surely than they heal. Such loves, such remedies, are without truth. So, as she found her present circumstances sordid, Miriam suddenly turned against both Noah and Theo. They were ugly, unlovable. She wished them both away. She wrung her hands and wandered into the bedroom and back into the living-room.
Why doesn’t Paul come to take me away?

“Please button your pyjamas,” Theo said.

Obediently, she buttoned her pyjamas.

“Haven’t either of you anything to say? Don’t you think that you owe me an explanation?”

“I’m sorry that it had to happen this way,” Noah said, “but …”

Theo turned to Miriam.

“We had a lot to drink,” Miriam began falteringly, “and we …”

Noah was shocked. He looked at Miriam severely and then turned to Theo. “This is terrible for you, Theo. But it is for her too. Probably more so. But we weren’t drunk. We …”

“Noah. Please, Noah. You go. Later …”

Theo got up and confronted Noah more confidently.

“I took you in off the streets, Noah, and – and – you made her do it. You had to get her drunk first, though. Not that it matters. Except that now my wife and I know exactly what kind of person you …”

“You don’t understand, Theo.” Noah faced Theo firmly, refusing, beforehand, to play the role that was being offered to him so blatantly. To apologize, agree that they had been drunk, and then, afterwards, to go ahead with a surreptitious affair. “You may make love to my wife as long as I don’t see and you don’t tell.” He sensed that Miriam and Theo were united against him in the same way as Melech and Wolf had joined forces much earlier. Wolf had said: “You can go without a hat. Eat ham. But not in front of
Zeyda.”
Perhaps, Noah thought, eating ham was not so unimportant after all. Surely this society has as little veracity, if more novelty, than the one that I have sprung from. Noah was exhilarated. He felt that he was no longer merely a rebel. An iconoclast. He was beginning to develop a morality of his own. Still embryonic, he thought, but … “You don’t understand, Theo.”

“Noah.… If you feel anything for me, if …”

“The Kennedys, darling. I just remembered.…”

“F— the Kennedys,” Noah said.

“Nobody seems to be asking
you
to worry about anything,” Theo said. “But
we’ve
got a reputation. You’re moving out, Noah. Right away. I refuse to allow Miriam to see you again.”

“We’re not having a dirty little affair, Theo. You’ve got a reputation, but Miriam and I are in love. I’m going, but she comes with me.”

“You’re mad!”

Theo tried to turn away from him but Noah blocked his path.

“Ask her.”

They both turned to Miriam.

Miriam stared back at them with terror. Noah’s ruthless manner alarmed her and yet she felt more disgust than compassion for Theo. Oh, if only she were dead. Would they wait? She looked first at Theo and then at Noah. No,
he
wouldn’t. Noah reached for his jacket. He had been slighted once before. “No,” Miriam said, surprised at her own voice. “Don’t. I – Theo, I’m sorry, I – I’m in love with him.…”

Theo stifled a sob. He swung back as though to hit Noah, shut his eyes, tottered, and collapsed on the floor.

“He’s fainted,” Noah said.

“You were so cruel, Noah. I never …”

“He’s fainted,” Noah said stupidly. “He … I did – Miriam,” he said, pulling her to him desperately, “we
must
love each other truly. We … He’s fainted.”

Miriam stared at him disconsolately. She held her hand to her cheek. She was frightened.

T
O UNDERSTAND WHAT A FINE PLACE MONTREAL IS
when spring is coming you must know the winters that come first. Chill grey mornings; sun bright in the cold noon sky but giving off no heat to speak of; skies darkening again early in the afternoon; long frosty nights with that window-banging wind whipping in burning hard from the north, pushing people before it like paper, making dunes and ridges that hurt the eye to look at on the mountain snows, burning children’s cheeks red and cutting like a knife across flat frozen ponds. Old men blowing on their wrinkled hands, boys with blue lips, and women with running noses all huddled up and knocking their feet together in the bitter cold waiting for liquor commissions to open and banks to shut, late dates, streetcars.…

So when the first rumours of thaw reach the city everybody is glad. That first rumour, coming towards the end of February, is usually hidden away in the back pages of the newspapers. It says that two government icebreakers, the
Iberville
and the
Ernest Lapointe
, have started poking their way up the frozen St. Lawrence towards Montreal. That’s a while before the
NHL
hockey play-offs, and most people on the streetcars are talking about how the players are moving slow because of the heat. The resorts up north stop advertising themselves
as the St. Moritz or Davos of Canada: they begin to talk of the sun, their pamphlets saying how so many happily married couples first fell on their beaches. That first thaw is a glory. The big snow heaps on Fletcher’s Field and a whole winter’s caboodle of snowmen begin to shrivel and shrink away. Giant sweepers roar up and down the streets wiping a winter’s precautionary sands off the pavement. You can make out chunks of yellow grass here and there like exposed flesh under the shrinking slush that still sticks to the flanks of Mount Royal. Occasionally, it snows: but noon comes and all the gutters are gurgling again. There is a green, impolite smell to the streets.

With the first thaw the change takes hold: there is a difference to everything, the difference between a clenched fist and an open hand. The kids get out on their roller-skates and make most side-streets a hazard. Belmont Park opens, so do the race tracks. Ships steam into port from Belfast and Le Havre and Hamburg and Liverpool and Archangel and Port-of-Spain. N
DG
organizes softball teams, the ladies of Westmount plan their flower-shows, and the Jr. Chamber of Commerce sets aside one week as Traffic Safety Week. The man who reviews books for the
Star
will say that spring is here but J. P. Sartre is without that traditional Gallic charm, and young writers aren’t cheerful enough. But best of all is St. Catherine Street on an April evening. Watch the girls, eh, their hair full of wind, as they go strolling past in their cotton print dresses. Men, sporting smart suits and spiffy ties, waving enticingly at them. See the American tourists having a whale of a time frantically, a Kodak strapped to one arm and a lulu of a wife to the other.… Kids wandering in and out of the crowds yelling rude things at girls older than themselves.… Sport fans clustering at corners waiting for the
Gazette
to appear.…

In parks, playgrounds, and on Mount Royal, tattered men with leather faces loll on benches, their faces upturned to the sun. Maiden aunts hopeful again after a long winter’s withering knit near to baby carriages which hold the children of others. Come noon, lovers freed
from the factory sprawl on the green mountainside while the children tease and the tattered men watch laconically and the maiden aunts knit near to baby carriages that hold the children of others.

Everybody is full.

Now that Melech Adler was without work he did not know what to do with all his days. He still started off his morning by reading the obituary column in the
Jewish Star
, but the death of old friends no longer made him sad. He still attended services in the synagogue every evening but the other old men avoided him. Melech Adler made many crude jokes about death, and they thought him morbid. He had begun to read the illustrated magazines and daily papers. Here he read of a strange and unlikely world,
their
world, wherein crimes were committed for the sake of passion and men had mistresses and were not afraid of being judged. Then, likely as not, he would turn to Jenny. Their old men had young women. They hadn’t devoted all their lives to their families. He recalled the stories that he had heard about Greenbaum and the young French Canadian girls who did piece-work in his factory. What if Greenbaum outlives me, he thought. He prayed harder. He remembered those beautiful evenings, long ago, in the home of Jacob Goldenberg the Zaddik, and cursed himself for having been so shy then, for having been too overawed by the other man’s holiness to ask questions. Jacob, may he rest in peace, had used to tell of the trials of the Baal Shem Tob so wonderfully well. Oh, to be a man of God. He remembered his pious father, the scribe, who had written many Torahs by hand. I could have been a scribe too, he thought nostalgically.
I didn’t go against him. I renounced Helga, who clapped her hands together when she sang
.

Every afternoon Melech Adler locked himself up in his office for two hours and Wolf sat outside and wondered.

“Nu
, Jenny, you know what they call their children? Byron, Cecil. Are these Yiddish names? Do dey come to visit us any more on Sundays? They go to Plattsburg. Nurses they get for the children.
My missus wishes to kiss her own grandchildren so it ain’t sanitary. I should retire, Max says. What …”

“Max means everything good,” Jenny said gently.

“Max. We got him for a prime minister in the family. I should retire, yeah? Go to Plattsburg? Go to the beach to look at naked women? Me, I work. I worked hard. So what do I get for a thank you? Leah is ashamed for the coal yard. Who paid – I’m not saying nothink, he was a fine man – but who paid her fodder’s funeral? Ida hangs the walls with movie stars. And Shloime? Shloimi is a …” Mr. Adler began to cough. He no longer visited Panofsky because he was ashamed of what had happened. He cleared his throat and took another sip of tea.

“Shloime will learn,” Jenny said. “He’s young yet. He …”

“He’ll learn is right.” Melech got up. “Right now – for a fact – I’m going to teach him his first lesson.”

“Melech. Please, Melech.…”

But he had already loosened his trouser belt and started up the stairs.

“If you ask me,” Wolf Adler said, putting his Coke down on the counter and wiping the crumbs off his lips, “if you ask me, Karl, doctors don’t know from their ass to their elbows. Look, your paw got hit over the head so they sew him up and say, goodbye, good luck, I’ll send you a bill in the mail. But he’s not the man he was, is he? Just between you me and the lamp-post, he’s not the same guy. Take my wife now. They tap her chest and take samples of this and X-rays of that but so what –
so what?
You’re as good as gold, Mrs. Adler. That’s what they say. Honest. But she says she’s sick and she oughta know. So if you ask me – and I’ve had experience let me tell you – if you ask me, doctors should be taken with a grain of salt. Certain diseases are still a mish-mash to them.”

Karl unscrewed the top of the biscuit jar, took out a chocolate biscuit and offered one to Wolf. Then, overturning his Coke bottle,
he downed his drink in three quick gulps. “Poison,” he said, popping a mushy chocolate biscuit into his wet, wide-open mouth. His jaw clamped shut and the biscuit crumbled, bits of brown fluid trickling down the sides of his fat pink lips. He wiped his lips clean on the sleeve of his soiled white shirt, and burped loudly.

Wolf grinned. He gobbled down his biscuit, then slipped his thumb into his mouth and picked a sliver of crust free of a tooth.

The boy came in with Karl’s
Gazette
, and the two friends split the paper wordlessly. Karl took the sports section.

Panofsky’s was buzzing. Men crowded around the two bridge tables which had been set up near the Coca-Cola freezer. Gin rummy was being played at one table and pinochle at the other. Most of the men were jacketless and two of them, who lived right around the corner, were wearing their slippers. Their talk was easy and their jokes were familiar. They had known each other for years, and most of them were related in one way or another. They, the sons, were still orthodox. The synagogue was a habit and a meeting place for them. The
Goyim, a
mystery. Something to talk about. They were substantial men. Extremely good to their wives and enormously fond of their children. They worked hard all week. Sunday was their night.