St. Urbain's Horseman (11 page)

Don't antagonize them, Ormsby-Fletcher had said. Jake reached into his pocket and came up with a small bottle of pills. “You're not to take more than two, Harry.”

Harry snickered.

“It went well today,” Jake said. “I think we're going to be all right.”

“You'll be acquitted on Monday, mate. Not to worry. It's me they want.”

“Why is your barrister a Q.C.,” Ruthy asked, “and Harry's isn't?”

“They work as a team,” Jake said.

“You're fucking right they do. Against me.”

“That's just not true, Harry.”

“You're home free.”

“He's got connections,” Ruthy said.

“Right. And failing everything else, I'm sure to get a Queen's pardon. I spoke to Phil only yesterday. He promised. Good night. I'll phone in the morning, Harry.”

“Don't worry. I'm not doing a bunk.”

“I am not worried. I will phone to see how you are.”

“He's ever so thoughtful,” Ruthy said.

I
T WAS DARK WHEN MRS. HERSH WAKENED TO THE
sound of clinking glasses and their heightened voices.

“Jake, I never bug you about your drinking, but please don't pour yourself another one.”

“In spite of everything I'm doing, Harry thinks he's being sold down the river. He thinks his lawyer is working for my interests. Christ Almighty, how could I ever get us into this mess?”

“Yes. Why did you do it, Jake?”

“Do what? What did I do? You think I laid into her with that riding crop?”

“No. Certainly not.”

“Does it excite you? Should we try it?”

“Go to hell.”

“I'm not being vicious. Honestly, when I listen to some of the testimony in court, I actually get a hard-on. I think, jeez, that sounds like it was fun. Wish I'd been there. But I was there and it was not like that at all.”

“I believe you, Jake. For the umpteenth time, I believe you.”

“Where's my ever-loving mum?” he demanded, his drink spilling over. “Why do you keep her from me?”

“I told you she's lying down.”

“Harry will crack if they send him to prison again. He can't stand it. It would be the end of him.”

“But you're looking forward to it. It would be an adventure.”

“It doesn't matter. Who cares? You, me. It doesn't matter. You know what's important to me? Really, really important to me? Dr. Samuel Johnson. I keep wondering, if I had lived in his time, would he have liked me? Would Dr. Johnson have invited me to sit at his table? Luke's back, you know.”

“Is he?”

“It's in the
Standard
. Not the court page, but Londoner's Diary. His arrivals and departures are news. He's a big talent, our Luke.”

“Please don't drink any more.”

“How are the kids?”

“They're all right. I'll make you an omelette.”

“Nancy,” he said, reaching out for her.

“Yes?”

But starting for the kitchen together, they ran into Mrs. Hersh.

“Hullo, Maw.
A guten shabus
. You know my mother used to light candles on Friday night? Every Friday night, when I was a kid, she lit the candles.”

Mrs. Hersh glowed.

“Did you remember to take your pills today?”

“I was a good girl.”

“Nancy's eyes are red. Your eyes are puffy. There's nothing to worry about, honestly. It's in the bag. Once this is over, I'll probably sue for false arrest.”

“Your mother and I had words.”

“It was nothing. A little misunderstanding. Let's not upset Jake.”

“Why not upset Jake? I met Luke for drinks today. I broke down, he drove me home, and your mother saw him kiss me outside. She thinks we're having an affair and that's why I asked her not to tell you.”

“I didn't say a word, so help me God.”

“Would you please explain to her that you are jealous of Luke not because of anything between us, but because he's so successful.”

“Hey, hey. I'm not on trial here. I'm on trial there.”

“Oh, why don't the two of you sit in the kitchen without me,” Nancy cried, fleeing, “and eat something
parve
together?”

“What?” Jake called after her, baffled.

He found her lying on the bed, sobbing, and sat down beside her and stroked her hair. “Nelson Eddy's dead. It was in the
Herald-Trib
today.”

Once her tears had abated, he held a glass of cool milk to her lips.

“I don't bully old ladies,” she cried, beginning to heave again. “Or say – or say ‘fuck' to them – or – it's not like me. I made such a – such a fool of myself today,” and fitfully, between tearful outbursts, she told him what had happened.

Jake touched her cheek. “I was going through my desk yesterday,” he said, “and I found a snapshot of you taken maybe ten years ago. You were twenty, I guess. Standing under an elm tree, wearing a summery dress and brushing your hair out of your eyes. You looked absolutely achingly beautiful and I hated you for it, because I didn't know what man you were smiling for, and what you had to look so pleased about before you met me. Now I know.” He kissed her. “Please try to get some sleep, the baby's bound to have you up half the night.”

Jake slipped past his mother's door, down the stairs, and into the living room, where he poured himself another brandy. Wrong place, wrong time. Young too late, old too soon was, as Jake had come to understand it, the plaintive story of his American generation. Conceived in the depression, but never to taste its bitterness firsthand, they had actually contrived to sail through the Spanish Civil War, World War
II
, the holocaust, Hiroshima, the Israeli War of Independence, McCarthyism, Korea, and, latterly, Vietnam and the
drug culture, with impunity. Always the wrong age. Ever observers, never participants. The whirlwind elsewhere.

As Franco strutted into Madrid, a conqueror, Jake and his friends sat on the St. Urbain Street stoop and mourned the benching of Lou Gehrig, their first hint of mortality. The invasion of Poland was photographs they pasted into the opening pages of World War
II
scrapbooks, coming in a season they cherished for
The Wizard of Oz
. Unlike their elder brothers, they could only conjecture about how they would have reacted in battle. They collected aluminum pots for Spitfires and waited impatiently for the war's end so that Billy Conn could get his second chance. The holocaust was when their parents prospered on the black market and they first learned the pleasures of masturbation. If, as secure and snotty ten-year-olds, they mocked those cousins and uncles who were too prudent to enlist, then it was an apprenticeship appropriate to encroaching middle age, when they were to exhort younger men to burn their draft cards. From pint-size needlers, callow fans in the wartime bleachers, they had matured to moral coaches, the instigators of petitions, without ever having been tried on the field themselves. The times had not used but compromised them. Too young to have marched into gunfire in Europe, they were also too old and embarrassed, too fat, to wear the flag as underwear.

“When they tote up our contribution,” Luke once said, “all that can be claimed for us is that we took ‘fuck' out of the oral tradition and wrote it plain.” In lieu of
Iskra, Screw
. After Trotsky, Girodias-in-exile. “And sooner or later we will put it on stage, where you can win applause as well as pleasure from the act.”

As it seemed to Jake that his generation was now being squeezed between two raging and carnivorous ones, the old and resentful have-everythings and the young know-nothings, the insurance brokers defending themselves against the fire-raisers, it followed inevitably that, once having stumbled, he would be judged by one when accused by the other. Ingrid would sing, Mr. Justice Beal would pronounce.

What he couldn't satisfactorily explain to Nancy was that he was more exhilarated than depressed by the trial because at last the issues had been joined. Joined, after a fashion. From the beginning, he had expected the outer, brutalized world to intrude on their little one, inflated with love but ultimately self-serving and cocooned by money. The times were depraved. Tenderness in one house, he had come to fear, was no more possible, without corruption, than socialism in a single country. And so, from the earliest, halcyon days with Nancy, he had expected the coming of the vandals. Above all, the injustice-collectors. The concentration camp survivors. The emaciated millions of India. The starvelings of Africa.

Well, I'll tell you, Jake thought, the demented Red Guards of China are going to come, demanding theirs, followed by the black fanatics, who live only for vengeance. The thalidomide babies, the paraplegics. The insulted, the injured. Don't bother barring the door, they'll spill in through the windows.

Jake was not surprised that out of his obsession with the Horseman he had been delivered Ruthy.

Who had sent him Harry.

Who had served him Ingrid.

Elijah the Prophet had disappointed him, never coming to sip from his silver wine cup at the Passover table. Not so the vandals.
After years of waiting somebody had at last come to ask him, Jacob Hersh, husband, father, son, house owner, investor, sybarite, film fantasy-spinner, for an accounting.

“In 1967, while 450 million people were starving and, in England, at least 18 per cent of this happy breed lived below subsistence level, and society's golden rule was alcoholism, drug addiction, and inchoate brutality, I, Jacob Hersh, descendant of the House of David, paid £15,000
not
to direct a fun film, made love to my wife on crisp clean sheets, sent my progeny to private schools, worried about corpulence gained through overindulgence and play hours lost through overimbibing. Furthermore, I envied friends more successful and cursed those invited to more parties. I complained about our maid's indolence. I lamented the falling off in the British craftsman's traditional pride and a rise in the price of claret. While the rich got richer and the poor poorer, I survived very nicely. As Luke once put it so pithily, if we're all on the Titanic, at least I'm going down first class.

Amen.”

The slap of slippered feet wakened Jake. It was Mrs. Hersh.

“Does Nancy know you send money every month to a woman in Israel?”

“Maw, if I thought you were going through my mail, I'd hit the roof. I really would.”

“The letter was lying on the floor. I picked it up. Is the child yours?”

“I already have a
kaddish
. Haven't you enough grandchildren?”

“That's no answer.”

“All right then, no, it's not mine.”

“So why does she send photographs?”

“Everybody wants to be cast in a Jacob Hersh production.”

“The way people live today, I don't understand. I just don't understand.”

“Once,” Jake said, “my father talked to me about careers I might take up. He advised me not to become a doctor because I'd be at everybody's beck and call. Even in the middle of the night. Dentistry, he said, would involve me in expensive equipment. Become a rabbi, he said, and you don't need to make any capital outlay. All you need is what I already had, a big mouth. Do you think I would have made a good rabbi?”

“You could have been anything you set your mind to.”

“With a house in the higher reaches of Outremont and a good Jewish girl for a wife.”

“I've never said a word against Nancy.”

“And it's best that you never do,” he said, “because I love her. And so long as she loves me, I cannot be entirely bad.”

Watching him stagger off to the glass-topped table, seeking his bottle, she thought, why, oh my God, why did he ever leave Montreal, the fool? In those years, after the war, who wouldn't have given his right arm for a Canadian passport? What Jew wasn't on his knees to be let into such a good country?

“Here it is,” Jake said, rocking with the book in one hand and his glass in the other. He read aloud. “ ‘When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time, with some disorders of the body and disturbances of the mind very near to madness, which I hope He that made me will suffer to extenuate many faults and exercise many deficiencies.' ” Capping the book shut, he announced, “From the diary of the late, great Reb Shmul Johnson. Easter Eve. 1777.”

H
OW IT MADDENED JAKE WHEN HE REMEMBERED
, standing in the dock at the Old Bailey, that his abortive trip to New York years ago, the true beginning, albeit inadvertent, of what was to become his ride to ruin with St. Urbain's Horseman, was, looked at baldly, no more than an immigration officer's clerical error.

1951 it was and Jake, who had been studying at McGill for three years, had decided not to register for the autumn term, beginning tomorrow. New York, New York, was his heart's desire. If only, he thought, lying on his bed, smoking, I can raise the fare. And money to keep me for a month.

His mother entered his room without knocking. “You should tell your father what you've decided to do. He's so bloated. I saw him on the street, he looks like a frog now. I wouldn't say a word against him, after all, he's your father, you hear?
Where are you going suddenly?”

Compulsively, without design, he drifted all the way down to St. Urbain Street, entering Tansky's Cigar & Soda to phone his father, who had lived in a room nearby, ever since his parents had finally divorced four years earlier. Mr. Hersh came to fetch him in his battered Chevy, the back seat, as ever, buried in samples. Stationery supplies, ballpoint pens, calendars, blotters. Another inclement Montreal winter had eaten into the body work since Jake had last seen him. The car was rusty and rotting. “How are you, Daddy?”