St. Urbain's Horseman (28 page)

In his ill-ventilated cell, heated by two electricity bars and hatred, it was Harry's special chore to sift through a client's bills, a year's debaucheries, and calculate expenses, inventing here, fabricating there, any one restaurant bill, from the Mirabelle or Les Ambassadeurs, possibly exceeding his own weekly salary. Indispensable he was. Father Hoffman's most cherished novitiate … but lately an ominous cloud had gathered over the once blessed spires of Oscar Hoffman & Co., Accountants. Increasingly the angel fallen from Inland Revenue contemplated the sacrifices on the altar and pronounced them lacking in sufficient faith, for his Chancellor was a jealous one and would tolerate no other havens before him. Where hitherto the anointed and the fabled had passed out of Father Hoffman's sanctuary, overcome with beatitude and astonishment, for his prayers were always heard, some of them now barged in red-faced and even in tears, voices were raised, threats made, and they strode out in obvious fear and trembling of the angel fallen from Inland Revenue and the judgment to come.

Father Hoffman looked poorly. He shook his head, he pulled his hair. Come noon, he forswore The White E. to partake of cottage cheese salad and yogurt at his desk, nodding over his ledgers. Consulting the books of law as they had been handed down.

“There's a serpent in our midst, Harry. Keep your eyes open, will you?”

There were afternoons now when Father Hoffman paused by the water cooler, contemplating his flock, counting the blessings he had showered on them, loans and luncheon vouchers, bonuses, paid holidays, pension schemes, and the annual party; afternoons when he wondered who had denied him more than thrice. Which was Iscariot?

Once Harry remained in his cell for lunch, unknown to Hoffman, and came out to find him scurrying hither and thither, stooping over wastepaper baskets, riffling through briefcases and rummaging through desk drawers. “Harry, people come to us with their confidences. We are trusted. There's a sewer rat in this office, a bastard without equal, and when I find him I'm going to break his bones.”

Sprung from his office for the day now, Harry Stein, the amateur photographer, footloose in Soho, did the bookshops, not reduced to perusing the cellophane-wrapped magazines hanging on bulldog clips from the walls or comparison-shopping the strip films, but immediately beckoned into the back room to sift through the boxes on the trestle table. Bondage, Unusual Positions, Rubber Garments, Flagellation. Then, with an hour still to kill before classes, he took a pint at the Yorkminster and then, for a lark, put in a 'umble 'arry appearance at the Trattoria Terrazza, asking the haughty girl at the desk for a table for eight at nine p.m.

Impossible, she replied sniffily, and Harry, perplexed and stammering, produced a piece of notepaper and asked if this was
the
Trattoria Terrazza.

Yes, certainly.

Mr. Sean Connery sent me. I'm his driver.

Ah, well, then …

Still feigning to read from his notepaper, he added, garbling his French, that he wanted four bottles of Château Margaux opened to breathe at eight forty-five and a
gâteau
, yes, with thirty-eight candles. Would that be too much trouble?

Then Harry patiently sought out a functioning call box, extracted his little black book and selected the ex-directory number of a star who had sent him out of the office and into the rain earlier in the day –

“Aren't you a sweetie?”

– to fetch a pair of theater tickets while she waited, long shaven legs crossed, for an audience with His Holiness Father Hoffman. “Hullo, my little darlin'.”

“I'm so glad to hear from you again.” Icily delivered this, but fearful. “The police are intercepting all my calls now, you see.”

“Well, I'll tell you why I called then. How would you like me to pop over right now and lick it for you? I mean lick it like it's never been licked before. Lick it bone dry.”

“I'm not hanging up. You just go ahead. They're listening to every filthy word.”

“That is to say, if you're up to it. After the abortion, like. Because I wouldn't want to be spitting out stitches, would I now?” and laughing, he slammed down the receiver.

For it was time for night school and, gathering together his photographic equipment, Harry proceeded to the basement studios of the Graphic Arts Society, of which he was a longstanding associate fellow.

S
AMMY
.

Jake imagined once the doctor had pronounced her pregnant beyond doubt, anointing her, so to speak, she would become ethereal, a stranger to lust, and he, attentive, solicitous, not to say self-sacrificing –

“Don't worry, darling. It will go down by itself.”

– would demonstrate the magnitude of his love by approaching her with tenderness in lieu of passion, taking her as an object of adoration rather than a love vessel.

Fat chance.

Instead of maternal content, Nancy's swelling belly unleashed the wanton in her. Not so much the Holy Mother as Our Lady of the Orifices. A sexual acrobat. So, heedless of her condition, even as her rock-hard breasts began to yield a sugary substance, making him an even more recalcitrant lover, she, abandoned to pleasure, came clawing after him nightly. With teasing fingers. Breasts that brushed him erect. A tongue that licked him alive. And self-denying Jake, roused beyond any possible concern for the unborn, rode her to a climax, a shared and soaring release, anxious only afterwards for the creature swimming within her.

Some introduction to my son, he'd think, lighting up, asking if she was all right, if he hadn't been too brutish. Some how-do-you-do,
ramming him like a crazed billygoat. He was tormented by a vision of the boy, his
kaddish
, born with a depression in his skull, bearing into manhood the imprint of Jake's cockshead in his scalp. An unanswerable reproach. In another nightmare, even as he stooped to lick her nether lips, teasing, biting – lo and behold, a nose protrudes.
Hello, hello
. Or a tiny, unspeakably delicate hand reaches out to stick him in the eye.
Hello, hello
. Or the waters break, drowning him. Deservedly, you satyr. Or trembling, quaking to a climax, she actually expels the baby, squirting him across the bedroom in a sea of placenta and blood. And me, he thought, I wouldn't even know how to tie the cord. I'd fail her, fainting.

Nancy did nothing to alleviate his anxiety when, her passion spent, she would suddenly say, “Give me your hand! ”

“What now?”

“Can you feel the movement?”

Yes, he'd say, snatching it away, scorched.

“He's some kicker, isn't he?”

Kicker? The poor bastard is choking on my semen. “Maybe we should lay off, well, until afterwards …”

Nancy was well into her eighth month when Jenny and Doug passed through London on their way to an international conference in Tangiers: Television and the Developing Countries.

“We haven't seen you since Duddy staged your play in Toronto,” Jake said. “I'm sorry about that. I do think it deserved better notices.”

“I wasn't the least bit surprised. After all, nothing offends like
gravitas
. But I will say this for Kravitz, he resisted every commercial pressure, the director's, Marlene, he wouldn't let them change a word.”

“He respected your integrity as a writer.”

Doug nodded. Jenny, eager to change the subject, asked Jake if he remembered Jane Watson, a Toronto actress.

“Yes.”

“She had a boy. It was a normal birth –”

“You see,” Jake said to Nancy.

“- and three months later she developed this growth in her womb. When they removed it they found it was a tumor with teeth and a little beard.”

“Charming. And how come,” Jake charged, surfacing nasty, “you've never been pregnant, Jenny? Do you take the pill?”

“I don't take Doug,” she said.

Eventually, Jake was able to have a word alone with Jenny. He told her how he had been mistaken for Joey twice. On arrival in London and when a registered letter from Canada House had come to him in error. “I wonder where he is now?”

“Israel maybe. Or Germany.”

“Germany?”

“Hanna gets postcards from time to time.”

Hanna, who had still to take up Luke's invitation and come to London.

“What's the last address you have for him?”

“Joey never sends addresses. But he was in Israel in forty-eight. During the so-called War of Independence. Hanna still gets letters from a woman there who claims to be his wife.”

“What does she say?”

“She asks for money, what do you think? She claims Joey deserted her.”

The next morning Jake read in the
Times
,

Oh, Nancy. Nancy, my darling.

Nancy's water broke at three a.m., on a Thursday morning, and the baby was delivered without mishap. Sammy had no dent in his head and appeared, on first count, to have the prescribed number of everything. Reassuringly, he wore a bracelet with his name on it, but all the same Jake committed distinguishing features to memory. After all, this was his
kaddish
.

Luke, in spite of everything, was invited to become Sammy's godfather. “Why, if you hadn't leaped at the chance of getting me to pay for your dinners at Chez Luba, Nancy and I might never have gotten together in the first place.”

“What do you think of her now?” Luke asked.

“Not much. You?”

Once having married, letting herself go, such was Nancy's bliss, her pleasure in Jake, the baby, looking for a house, that she could not understand why she had hesitated. But she soon grasped that her husband was not all of a piece, as she had hoped. On the contrary. Jake was charged with contradictions. Ostensibly consumed by overweening ambition, he was, on black days, filled with self-hatred and debilitating doubts, largely because he took himself to be an impostor and his work, given its fragile nature, a con. She began to wonder why he had chosen to become a director in the first place and feared, in agonizingly lucid moments, that if he did not rise as far as he hoped, he might yet diminish into bitterness.

Swaying gently as she nursed Sammy in the kitchen at three in the morning, she searched for a way of assuring him that he did not have to become famous for her sake. Or Sammy's. But such was his drive, there seemed no way she could say as much without wounding him and, rather than that, she said nothing.

If, on rare occasions, he eked some satisfaction out of his work, he was, for the most part, laden with contempt for his peers, too many of whom, he felt, presented with a script, knew instinctively what would play well, and that's all. Almost everybody in television was a
lightweight, he complained to her, and a cliché monger. Such was his scorn for actors that, watching him on the set one day, she wondered why they endured him. For, unlike the others, he would not flatter and cajole those he needed, arousing them to surpassing performances. Instead he mocked, he teased, he laid low with pointed jokes. He flayed them for their vanity. Even he could not understand why they tolerated him. “When I directed my first play in Toronto,” he once said to her, “telling the writer what had to be rewritten again and again, not that a hack could ever get it right, and keeping the actors late and making them go through a scene for the umpteenth time, I had to retreat to the toilet more than once, overcome by giggles – incredulous – because they had listened.”

He seldom took one of his leading actors to dinner, he never sent flowers to a leading lady. The only companions he sought out on any production, those he fooled and played poker with, were the cameramen, the grips, the stagehands, and that company of failed actors, the bit players of whom no wrong could be uttered, who were jokingly referred to as Jacob Hersh's Continuing Rep. Largely drunks, has beens, never beens, itinerant wrestlers, wretched drag queens, superannuated variety artists, decrepit Yiddish actors, befuddled old prize fighters, and more than one junkie, all of whom not only counted on Jake for work and handouts but, in a suicidal mood or awakened in a hospital after a bender, could summon him in the middle of the night.

All of this, however endearing, would only have been acceptable, Nancy felt, had Jake been blessed with a talent of the first order, but, she sadly allowed, this was not the case, and so she was fearful for his sake. Fearful, touched, and apprehensive. For it made her heartsick to see how ferociously he threw himself into each play he did, however ephemeral, often going sleepless for nights while he blocked it, and afterwards, drained and becalmed, waiting for the telephone that didn't ring with the offer of a film. Then besieging his agent's office, quarreling with him, demanding to know how he got lesser directors film assignments.

Adding to his troubles, Jake had begun to insult the writers available to him in television. Those he longed to work with were either not the type to accept a commission or, though they liked him personally, were chary of committing a screenplay to a director unproven in film.

The less satisfaction his work gave him, even as he drifted on the crest of the television plateau, having done everything he could there and beginning to repeat himself, the more he began to talk about his cousin Joey, speculating about his whereabouts, wondering what he was really like, oddly convinced that somehow Joey had answers for him.

Once, there was a telephone call.

“May I speak with Joseph Hersh, please?” a man asked.

“He doesn't live here. This is Jacob Hersh's house. Why do you want to speak to him?”

“Do you know where I can reach him tonight? It's important.”