Son of a Smaller Hero (17 page)

Kravitz, the grocer, grinned broadly. “Gin,” he said.

It was a warm, spring night. The door was kept open.

“Hey,” Karl said. “This column. Liss’n, Wolf. ‘City Councillor Max Adler and an unnamed blonde made a cosy twosome at the Chez Paree last night. Canvassing votes, Max? …’
Unnamed blonde
yet. I should have such troubles. Your brudder Maxie is some b.t.o.”

“Look, Karl, those kind of dames mean trouble with a capital T. Here, listen what I just read. Bing Crosby’s wife has died. According to the laws of California that means he has to pay taxes on her share of his property. In other words, a cool million. So what happens? He hasn’t got it. He’s got to mortgage his horses and his yacht and his farm. I’ll bet you tonight Bing Crosby wishes that he was just a little
guy again. Money means troubles. Max is growing too fast. He owns who knows how many cottages up in Ste. Agathe now. But five’ll get you one that he couldn’t raise a G overnight. Everything’s tied up. Comes a depression and first thing you know no more la-de-da in the mountains at four hundred uckbays a cottage. Bango! No more unnamed blondes. And what, tell me, if the blonde has clap? Max isn’t so happy as people think. More than anything he’d like to have a kid. Always he’s asking me where’s Noah. Me, I’d rather stay with my father. I told you what happened with the derrick last winter? So. What if I hadn’t been around to save him? Plunk would have gone three tons of scrap on his head.” Wolf paused. Again he stood by the open door of the inner office, the strong-box almost within reach. “And as far as Noah goes – this is just between us, you know – but … what I hear, he’s in deep with the dames too.”

“Give, give. What do you hear?”

“I hear.”

All talk stopped suddenly.

Wolf looked at the card-players and then followed their gaze to the open door. His eyes met Shloime’s. Shloime grinned.

Karl picked up an empty Coke bottle. “Out,” he said.

“I wanna speak wid my brudder.” Shloime twirled his key chain. “You got a law against that, Mr. Soda Jerker?”

Kravitz got up and began to walk towards the door. He was a big man.

“No, wait,” Wolf said. “I’ll speak to him outside.”

“Listen, boychik,” Kravitz said, “you keep away from this store if you know what’s good for you. Capish?”

“You a communist too, Kravitz? I don’t know what happened to Panofsky. But I hear stories. Maybe us young guys don’t like commies so good? Who knows?”

Kravitz came closer and Shloime backed away. Wolf pulled Shloime outside.

Wolf was sweating. “All right. What do you want?”

“Liss’n. Paw is crazy or sumptin. He’s having a fit. He just kicked me out of the house – for good. He says it was me yet who robbed Panofsky. He’s gone mad. I tell you. You should see him. He ripped up all my pictures and magazines because they’re full of naked women he says.”

“All right. What do you want from me?”

“Look, Wolf. Let’s make it short and sweet. I’m broke and I want fifty bucks.”

“Liss’n, Shloime – man to man – I am a guy who doesn’t take sides. Fifty bucks is nothing. But I give it to you – well, that’s like giving it against Paw. As far as I’m concerned you can do what you like, but I don’t want to get involved.”

“That’s all I wanted to know. Goodbye, sucker. But I’ll fix you too. I’ll fix the whole bunch. I hate them. You included.”

Wolf watched bewildered as Shloime walked away into the warm, spring night. I would never steal, he thought. I’m a Jew. But he almost admired Shloime for stealing. That’s something
they
do. He passed his hand through his hair, and then stared at his hand. Leah was really sick now. Wolf could not understand why he had such awful luck. Everybody likes me too, he thought. I mind my own business. I never say a bad word against a person. I go to the synagogue. Why can’t people let me alone, he thought. What did I ever do wrong?

A car whirled around the corner, but Wolf didn’t notice. It was Ida and Stanley. Stanley, who worked as a cutter in the Knit-to-Fit, owned a ’38 Buick. He parked a short way down from Ida’s house, away from the lamp-post light. He tried to slip his hand under her skirt, but she stopped him quickly.

“A girl’s gotta think of what people say,” she said. “You’ll give me a rep for being hot.”

“Everybody does it but.”

“Look, mister. We’re not going the limit until after we’re married. I’m no Ettie Firstein. Be good, Stan,
please
. I want you to respect me.”

“But we’re going steady, kiddo. Ask anybody but.”

“Stan. Pul-eeze. People can see us.”

“I’m so horny, kiddo. I’m crazy about you but.”

“That makes me the rabbi of a French glue factory in Japan.”

“Let’s go inside.”

“You crazy!”

So they sprawled out on the sofa in the living-room.

“Stan, when are we going to get married?”

“Soon, soon. But do you think Max’ll gimme a job? Christ. I’d like to be an operator like him. Why don’t you introduce me, eh?”

“Stan. Don’t, Stan. I’m scared stiff.”

“It’s just your sweater but. C’mon, everybody does it.”

After he had gone Ida sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette – the first that she had ever smoked. The cigarette made her feel sweetly remorseful. She began to suspect that there were many more pleasures and many fewer punishments than those catalogued in the law according to Melech Adler. She stepped outside and sat down on a chair on the balcony. There was still that pain in her stomach. The night had already begun to fade and there was a rumour of dawn in the sky. Dizzy but calm, she was aware of smoke fumes forming sensual around her. When the cigarette was finished she suffered from a poignant sense of loss, almost as if a death had occurred, and she soon longed for another.

Soon after St. Jerome, a prosperous French Canadian mill town with a tall grey church, the horizon widens and the highway begins to rise, rise and dip, rise again from the valley and into higher hills. Sloping easily on all sides are the slow, pine-rumpled hills. Old and shrivelled cliffs appear like bruised bones here and there, and in the
valleys below, the fertile fields are yellow and green and brown. There is the occasional unpainted barn or silo – blackened by the wind and the rain – rising out of the landscape as natural as rocks. Billboards, more modern, stick out of the earth incongruously. The slim and muddy river, sheltered from the sun by birch and bush, winds northwards drowsily but insistent between the still hills. Cottages – a mess strewn on a hilltop or a pile of them spilled sloppily into a valley – appear every ten miles or so. From time to time, as the highway climbs higher north, some ambitious cliff or hill pokes into the soft underbelly of a low grey cloud. These higher hills, sometimes called mountains, are often ribbed by ski-tows, trails, and the occasional derelict jump. Bears, the stray deer or two, are often rumoured in these parts, but, like the pretty girls who beckon from the travel brochures, they are seldom seen.

About forty-five miles north of Montreal a side-road turns up off into Ste. Adele en-haut. It’s about three miles to the lake. Ste. Adele is the retreat of Montreal’s aspiring middle-class, and, as a resort town, is prone to all the faults and virtues of that group. The cottages are clean but prosaic: no Jews are wanted, but, on the other hand, they are dealt with diplomatically. The French Canadians tolerate the Presbyterians from the city because they have brought prosperity to their village, and the Presbyterians find that the French Canadians add spice to their holiday: they accept their haughtiness as philosophically as rain on Sundays. Few on either side are bilingual.

The pinewood cottage they had rented was about five miles off the highway, pretty high in the hills and by the side of a mountain stream. It had three bedrooms and an open fireplace in the living-room. There was a rock-garden of sorts around by the front and a fine breeze by the stream. The old, musty furniture had been picked up at auction sales many years ago and was bruised in a warming, familiar way.

Noah and Miriam had had a busy week before coming up to the cottage.

They had moved, temporarily, into Mrs. Mahoney’s and they bought a ’41 Ford for three hundred and fifty dollars. Marg Kennedy phoned on Wednesday and asked Miriam to meet her for a drink. Marg was a quick attractive woman who earned more money than her husband and was interested in child psychology. She wrote commercials for a soap company. John, who had got over being a socialist, worked in an advertising agency. The Kennedys were buying a duplex on the instalment plan and planned to have three children, spaced over six years. Miriam met Marg at the Ritz on Sherbrooke Street. That quiet bar is one of the most fashionable in Montreal. Entering the bar, which she had accepted as something nice long ago, Miriam suddenly remembered that first afternoon when Noah had called and she had known instinctively that he would find her sophistication hard. She gazed at Marg, who sipped the correct drink and wore the right dress. This is how I must have appeared to Noah at first, she thought. She was afraid. Marg waved, Miriam smiled. Smiled, and realized with a certain sadness, that this friendship of so many years had lapsed.

Afterwards Miriam joined Noah in the Yacht Club. She had a lot to drink. “Sweet Marg says that I’m thirty. She says that you, Mr. Adler, are a dirty little boy who needs a haircut. She says that she used to like having a bit of fun herself but that – let’s face it – we’re getting on and the time has come to settle down. Theo, sweet Marg says, wouldn’t mind if I had an affair or two, but why humiliate him? She also says that John’s lousy in bed. That John is not as bright as she is, and that that makes it tough.”

They drove up to Ste. Adele on Friday night.

Those first two weeks were the happiest of their lives. Not that there had been any especial afternoon or evening that was so very memorable, but everything, even the most commonplace incident,
seemed quite beautiful in retrospect. They got up early every morning and walked hand-in-hand in the woods. They ate lunch on the screened porch and afterwards took a blanket out and slept or read in the sun. Noah felt freer than he ever had previously: there was no past and no future. He did not worry about his family. She watched him jealously. For the first few days she had missed Theo. Earlier, when she had been shopping in Montreal, she had been able to stifle her thoughts with work, but those first few days in the mountains he had intruded on her joy like a recurring bad dream. For several years she had lived narrowly but within certain conventions, everything being habitual. Secure, also. Alone, they had had very little to say to each other, but that, in retrospect, had been more reassuring than boring. She worried about Theo. Had he remembered to thank Aunt Clara for the lamp she had sent for Christmas? Would he pay the butcher bill? Remember not to be so belligerent about his politics when the dean was around?

Theo and Miriam had met at McGill. That had been a time of baffled men and evening and paper souls and loving like fast handshakes. Writers, famous and forgotten since, who had been crackerjacks with French-kiss symbols. Indolent, imitation Rimbauds. With John Kennedy, Marg Bradshaw, Herb Shields, Chuck Adams, Mary Walsh, Pip McLeod, and others, they had formed a group of vigorous and politically conscious rebels. Nobody had thought of Theo and Miriam as being anything more than a part of a group. As a matter of fact, Miriam seemed to be seeing a lot of Chuck Adams. Chuck, however, was one of the first to go. He joined the
RCAF
. The others followed quickly. Theo, through no fault of his own, was the last to go. That’s how the two of them had been thrown together.

Second-Lieutenant Hall searched for his friends on his last night in Montreal but all of them, except Miriam, had dispersed. So Theo
and Miriam set out into the night intent on drinking their way through every bar in town. But without the rest of the crowd – without Chuck in particular – they had surprisingly little to say to each other. They tried, however. Miriam evoked a few forced laughs by reminding him of that night when Mary had disrupted all of Windsor Station – outraging the flag-carriers and scandalizing the teary-eyed – by coming down to see off Pip McLeod dressed in widow’s black and sweeping down the platform on roller-skates. Some girl, Theo said, and then told the story of how Chuck had damn near got himself thrown out of McGill. Chuck was mad, Miriam said. And so they drifted from bar to bar, determined to have a night that could be committed to memory, embellished upon and written of to the others, who were in Alexandria or London or Hong Kong or Toronto. But they soon ran out of anecdotes and they did not know how to talk to each other. Miriam felt that she had failed the others. Theo remembered that when Chuck had gone off there had been a hell of a party. Everybody had had fun.

But they couldn’t call it quits. They watched the clock in one anonymous bar after another, until Miriam frantically suggested that they go up to her apartment. That had been his thought, too, but only as a last resort. Miriam, he thought, was Chuck’s girl. Chuck was away fighting. So they failed at making love, too, lonely for the others even in bed. Afterwards they were still left with time. Theo started off on another Chuck Adams anecdote and Miriam, suddenly conscious of the pathos of their situation, took him into her arms and wept bitterly. Theo did not understand. Miriam sobbed. Theo fled. He waited around for more than an hour in that chill station which was as vast as his melancholy, until his train left at 7:15 a.m. Miriam didn’t see him.

He wrote her from England, France, Germany, and from England again. At first she answered his letters as a kindness. His early letters were cautionary. Hers were factual. Then one day she wrote him a
long and gloomy letter. Chuck was missing over Germany. “When will this madness end? What if Stalingrad falls?” And he wrote back: “Remember that night in Montreal, the night of my departure …”

Memory swindled them. That wretched night took on glamour in retrospect. They recalled that there had been drinks and love-making, and not the desperation that had been inherent in both. Wave after wave of yearning letters broke on her, each one more full than the last. Soon she found herself thinking, why shouldn’t I be loved too? I’m tired of running, tired of searching. He’s so solid.…