St. Urbain's Horseman (13 page)

“Yeah, now let's go.”

“O.K., O.K.,” he said, leading Jake into the bar. “But facilities should be spotless. Above reproach. Like Napoleon's wife. It's the kind of investment that pays off.”

“Goddammit, Herky, you don't have to sell me.”

“We did a survey. The average guy, if he's in a restaurant or a nightclub and he has to crap, he skips the dessert and cancels the next round of drinks, so's he can let rip at home. Sorry, what are you drinking?”

“Scotch.”

Herky ordered two Scotches. “Public toilets,” he continued, “have a bad image. Now tell me a toilet's nonproductive. I mean when you add up a year's skipped desserts and drinks, well, what's the use of booking Lena Horne for a million dollars a week? We made the findings part of our sales kit.”

“It's a strong argument. Are you rich, Herky?”

“It's all tied up.” Herky put a hand on his heart. “I'd love to help out, kid, but –”

“I'm not asking for money.”

“– you see, I shovel everything right back into the business. Rifka's very active, you know. Socializes like hell. She used to be in cancer, but she didn't care for the
kvetchy
president there. So now she's in heart ailments. In fact, as of last week she's running her own artery. They do a lot of good work, you know.”

“I'm sure.”

“Hey, tell you what. You want some stuff? That I can fix.”

“Stuff?”

“It's free. Charna Rosen. You remember her. Well, now she puts out. She'd be glad to see you.
She reads Dylan Thomas
. Hand her some of the longhair stuff.”

“Herky –”

“Aw, don't tell me. You're getting it regular. A college boy; an assimilationist.
Soixante-neuf
. Oh la la. Well you don't have to spit on us. Me and Rifka, we're the nonconformist type.”

Jake fixed his brother-in-law with an earnest, melancholy stare. “Herky,” he whispered, “I'm glad you said that.”

“Oh, yeah,” Herky said, full of anticipation.

“You see, I'm not interested in girls.”

“What?”

“Remember you once put Rifka up to asking me funny questions. Like was I scared of snakes?”

“Let's get the hell out of here,” Herky said, grabbing him.

They huddled together in Herky's Chrysler in the parking lot.

“You mean to sit there and tell me you're a
faigele?”

Jake nodded.

“We've been to the
YMHA
pool together,” Herky shouted, shaking a finger at him. “In the old days. Oh, you filthy bastard!” Herky bit his lip. “It would kill Rifka. Hell, if she found out …”

“It's no bowl of cherries for me either, you know.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Look at it this way, you go to a dance at the golf course and feel up Charna Rosen or somebody else's wife and the other guys just give you a big wink, but if I turned up and wanted to neck with one of the waiters or caddies –”

“Listen here, you little son-of-a-bitch –” Herky stopped short. He rolled down the window. “Couldn't you see a psychiatrist?”

Jake didn't answer immediately.

“Well?”

“Rifka says your new rabbi is brilliant. Very up-to-date. Maybe I should ask him, well, for guidance?”

“I wouldn't if I were you. He's not reform, you know.”

“Herky, I think it would be best if I left town.”

“Well,” Herky said, starting up the car, “if that's how you feel …”

“I've been thinking of New York. The problem is I'm broke. I haven't got enough money for the fare.”

“We all have our problems,” he said frostily.

“Herky, you don't understand. My passions –”

“Shettup about it, will you! I'm driving.”

“– get out of control. The cops are bound to pick me up one night. On the mountain … or in Outremont …”

“You want to borrow money from me, is that what you're getting at?”

“I'd pay you back. Honestly, darling.”

“I should break your neck. I should pull you out of the car right here and cut it off for your own protection.”

“Two hundred and fifty bucks would see me through nicely.”

“I've always suspected you. You know that, don't you?”

“You're brainy, Herky. There's no denying it.”

“Oh, you snake! Sewer! You really neck with other guys?”

Jake blew him a kiss.

“You take that back. You take that back, you filthy thing.”

E
VERY AUTUMN, SINCE CHILDHOOD, HE HAD WATCHED
the birds, the cunning birds, fly south, and this October, at last, Jake was following after. Across the border, to the sources of light. For his uncles, Miami, the Catskills; for his aunts, the wonder doctors of the Mayo Clinic. New York. It had always been their true capital. Ottawa? Quebec City? Those were bush league towns where you went to pay off a government
goy
for a contract or a building permit. They were the places the regulations came from, not life's joys. New York, New York. There wasn't a cigar store between Park Avenue and the Main that did not carry the obligatory New York dailies: the
News
, the
Mirror
, and the
Daily Racing Form
. Ed Sullivan, Bugs Bear, Dan Parker.
The Gumps
and
Smilin' Jack
. Dorothy Dix, Hedda Hopper. But, above all, Walter Winchell.

Jake had only been a boy during the war. He could remember signs in Tansky's Cigar & Soda that warned
THE WALLS HAVE EARS
and
THE ENEMY IS EVERYWHERE
. He could recall his father and mother, his uncles and aunts cracking peanuts on a Friday night and waiting for the United States, for those two unequaled champions of their people, Roosevelt and Walter Winchell, to come off it and get into the war. They admired the British, they were gutsy, but they had more confidence in the U.S. Marines. They could see the likes of John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Robert Taylor making mincemeat of
the Panzers, while Noel Coward, Laurence Olivier, and the others seen in a spate of British war films had all looked too humanly vulnerable. Like you, they could suffer heart failure, rectal polyps, and disrespectful children. But Winchell, marvelous Walter, was proof against plain people's ailments. Out there in Manhattan, night after night, he was always ready to award orchids for the best, regardless of race, color, or creed. Ever-watchful under a broad-brimmed fedora, Walter Winchell cruised in a radio police car, uncovering America-Firsters, giving
FDR
-baiters what for, and smashing Hate-mongers in their lairs. Who was there, if not
WW
, to tell Mr. & Mrs. America and all the ships at sea about the Jewish war effort? About Barney Ross. About Irving Berlin and Eddie Cantor, giving so unselfishly of their time and talent. Or that the bombardier in the first airplane to sink a Nip ship was a Jewish boy, good enough to die for his country, not good enough for some country clubs
WW
could name.

New York was quality, top quality. It sent Montreal Jenny Goldstein and Aaron Lebedoff. When
Abie's Irish Rose
finally reached His Majesty's Theater and uncles and aunts went not once, but twice, the signs outside, a veritable guarantee, read … 
DIRECT FROM NEW YORK
. From blessed New York, where Bernard Baruch sat on a park bench telling presidents and prime ministers when to buy cheap, when to sell dear. Where Mayor La Guardia could speak a Yiddish word. Where there were second cousins on Delancey Street or in Brownsville. Where the side-splitting Mickey Katz records were made. Where Pierre van Paassen flew in from, exacting sobs, demanding donations, as he told an
SRO
audience about the Hagana fighting off Rommel in the desert, sometimes isolated for days and being driven to drinking their own urine.

– Piss. Is that what he means to say?

– Sh.

– Imagine, Jake's mother said, imagine. What a piece of work is man.

It was where Jake's father went for his best material. For only fifty cents a While-U-Wait newspaper headline that read
RITA HAY-WORTH LEAVES ALY KHAN FOR ISSY HERSH
. It was where Jake's father bought his itching powder, metal ink spots, and the business cards which he handed out at Rifka's wedding.

America, the
real
America, was a chance for Jake to see the cream of the Montreal Royals (Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Jackie Robinson, and Roy Campanella) at Ebbets Field. It was
Partisan Review, PM
, and the
New Republic
. It was the liberating knowledge which struck him one day at the university that he was not necessarily a freak. There were others, many more, who read and thought and felt as he did, and these others were mostly in New York. On the streets of Manhattan, where you could see them, real as relations, and maybe even get to touch some, talk to others.

As he packed his suitcases, and promised his mother, yes, to write once a week, as he assured his father that he really meant to find a job, he already saw himself chatting up a cashmere-sweater girl on Kafka in the bar at the Algonquin when the man with the gleaming bald head seated next to him said, “Couldn't help overhearing. Wow! Have you ever opened these tired old eyes! I wonder if you'd be willing to put that down on paper for us?”

“Us?” Jake says coldly.

“Oh. Sorry. My name's Ed. Ed Wilson.” (Or would he say “Bunny”?) “I'd like you to say hello to Dorothy here … S. J., he's the one with the Groucho mustache … E. B. and Harold.”

Or he's having a quick drink at Jack Dempsey's bar and a young Italianate man gives him a shove (“Move over, Hymie.”) and Jake flattens him with a punch (the feared Hammer of Hersh, the very
whisper of which is enough to turn champions to jelly), upsetting the Italian's middle-aged companion no end. “Rocky, speak to me. My God, you've broken his jaw. He was going against Zale in the Garden tomorrow night. Now what am I going to do?”

Rising with the birds, the migrating birds, Jake caught the early morning train, thinking, I'm not going away, I'm heading for my spiritual home.

He's eating
latkas
or cheese cake or whatever it is Lindy's is famous for, reading that
WW
has wished him orchids again, Leonard Lyons ditto, when Lauren Bacall drifts over to his table, crossing her legs showily, trying to lure him to her hotel suite, anything to get Jacob Hersh to direct a film for her.

“Sorry,” Jake says, “but I couldn't do it to Bogie.”

Or even though he went twelve innings in the series opener the day before yesterday, allowing only two cheap hits, Leo looks at the loaded bases, Mantle coming up, their one-run lead, and he asks Jake to step in again.

Jake says, “On one condition only.”

“Name it.”

“You've got to tell Branch I want him to give the Negroes a chance in the big leagues.”

Ar ten o'clock, as they were approaching the border, the latest Italian star, even sexier than Lollobrigida, began to shed her clothes in Jake's penthouse.
They've got to stop doing this
, he thought. Zip, zip. Then the fall of silk. No, a cascade. Ping goes the garter belt. Snap goes the bra clip … And Jake, looking down at the sudden upspringing of a pup tent between his legs, hastily covered his embarrassment with Norman Vincent Peale's column in
Look
, coughed, and lit a cigarette, as he was startled by a tapping on his shoulder.

“Yes?”

An American immigration officer with a sour purple-veined face, tufts of hair curling high on his cheeks, loomed over him. Sucking at a stubborn sliver of meat caught between his yellowing teeth, he
asked to see his birth certificate. He looked at it, grunted, scribbled Jake's name down on a pad, and waddled away, rocking with the train. Fifteen minutes later, just as the Italian star was pleading for help with a troublesome zipper, Jake was tapped on the shoulder yet again with a chewed-out pencil.

“You get off at the next stop, fella?

“What?”

“The desirability of your presence in the United States is suspect. The next stop will be St. Albans, Vermont. You get off there so that immigration officers can make a more thorough appraisal of your desirability,” the officer said, waddling off again.

Jake sat for a minute, petrified, remembering that he had signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal and a petition asking for clemency for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Oh, you fool, you goddam fool, hadn't you ever heard of Senator McCarthy? Jake, having decided to go forward in search of more information, jumped up,
Look
spilling to the train floor, the tent between his legs remembered and prominent. Oh, my God! Mindful of the other passengers, Jake's hands went swiftly, instinctively, to cover his groin and just as swiftly retreated again, as he grasped that he was only drawing attention to his hard-on. Jake collapsed, cheeks burning red, into his seat.

Goddammit. Closing his eyes, concentrating, he lifted
Look
onto his lap again and willed the star back into his penthouse.

– Get your filthy hands off that zipper, she said.

– You've been leading me on. Why did you come here, then?

– I didn't realize you were so short and funny-faced –

– (The throbbing abated.)

– so jewy –

(Good, good.)

– and besides I'm a lesbian –

(aaaaahhh)

Relieved, clearing his throat, and lighting up again, Jake went forward. He found the immigration officer sitting in an empty
coach, working on his teeth with the edge of a bookmatch as he scanned a book full of names the size of a telephone directory. “Why am I being taken off this train?”

“You will have to make a formal application for admission to the United States in St. Albans. If you pass the examination there, you will be allowed to go to New York tonight. If not, you will be sent back to Montreal.”