TO NONE WILL WE SELL, TO NONE
DENY OR DELAY, RIGHT OR JUSTICE.
Clause 40, Magna Carta, 1215.
Inevitably, I run into The Second Mrs. Panofsky from time to time. Once I caught sight of her in the lingerie department of Holt Renfrew, where I like to browse. On another occasion, at the takeout counter in The Brown Derby, where she was loading up on sufficient quantities of kishka, roast brisket, chopped liver, and potato salad to feed a bar mitzvah party, but which I knew was for herself alone. Most recently, I encountered her in the Ritz dining room, where, to jump ahead in my story, I had taken Ms. Morgan to dinner, if only to continue our discussion of those committed, possibly not irretrievably, to the Sapphic persuasion. The Second Mrs. Panofsky was with her cousin, the notary, and his wife. Her own plate wiped clean of gravy with chunks of bread, she now picked up her fork and began to spear morsels of meat and potatoes off their plates. She glared at us, of course, taking note of the bottle of Dom Perignon floating in a bucket at our tableside. Their bill settled, she contrived to pass by our table, where she stopped, smiled menacingly at Ms. Morgan, then turned to me and inquired, “And how are your grandchildren these days?”
“Don’t look back,” I said, “or you might turn into a pillar of salt.”
The Second Mrs. Panofsky, while never svelte, even as a bride, but once pleasingly zaftig to give her her due, had taken long ago to alleviating her continuing sorrow at the table. Out of necessity, she now wears tentlike caftans to accommodate a girth that would do credit to a sumo wrestler. She walks with difficulty, breathing hard, favouring a cane. She puts me in mind of Garrick’s description of Sam Johnson’s Tetty at fifty: “ … very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastic in her dress, and affected in both her speech and general behaviour.” I’m told she has few friends left, but does enjoy an intimate relationship with her TV set. I like to visualize her in the Hampstead mansion I paid for, supine on the sofa, devouring Belgian chocolates out of a bucket as she watches one soap opera or another, dozing before she settles into dinner, using a shovel rather than a knife and fork, and then sinking to the sofa again before her TV set.
At breakfast, I dutifully went through The Gazette and The Globe and Mail, doing my best to keep up with the comedy we’re living through in Canada’s one and only “distinct society.”
Such is the panic here these days that those prescient, young, middle-class Jewish couples who decamped to Toronto in the eighties, escaping not only endless tribal hassle but also overbearing, intrusive parents, are now at risk. Many of them are getting urgent phone calls from their ageing mamas and papas. “Herky, I know she isn’t crazy about us, your wonderful wife, the shopper, but thank God you have that spare bedroom, because we’re moving in next Wednesday until we can find an apartment in your neighbourhood. Remember, Mama can’t stand rock music, you’ll have to speak to your children, God bless them, and if you must smoke while we’re there, it will have to be on the back porch. But we won’t get in anybody’s way. Herky, are you there? Herky, say something.”
The latest opinion polls indicating a dead heat in the referendum, Dink’s now reverberates with whistling-past-the-graveyard banter. One of the regulars, Cy Tepperman, a clothing manufacturer, anticipating a boycott of his goods in the rest of Canada, has said, “I’m seriously thinking of having ‘Made in Ontario’ labels sewn into my jeans, just in case those bastards win.” The Gazette columnist Zack Keeler can be counted on, as usual, for puerile jokes. “Have you heard that the Newfies are for the Yes side? They think it will take two and a half hours less to drive to Ontario if Quebec separates.”
Ms. Morgan, of “Dykes on Mikes,” told me on the morning of her first visit to my apartment that she intended to vote in favour of independence. “They’re entitled to their own country. They do form a distinct society.”
“I could take you to lunch.”
“You’re old enough to be my grandfather.”
“Next question, please.”
“Had the baby Clara miscarried been born white, would you still have abandoned her?”
“Divorced her, you mean. Well now, that’s an interesting question. I might have been foolish enough to think it was mine.”
“But you are deeply prejudiced against Afro-Americans.”
“The hell I am.”
“I have been in touch with Ismail ben Yussef, whom you knew under his slave name, Cedric Richardson, and he claims you have taken to sending him abusive letters.”
“I’m willing to swear on the heads of my grandchildren that he’s lying.”
She reached into a folder and passed me a Xerox of a letter, which was an appeal on behalf of something called The Elders of Zion Foundation to establish mugging fellowships for black brothers. “This is absolutely disgraceful,” I said. “It’s in the worst possible taste.”
“But isn’t that your signature at the bottom of the page?”
“No.”
She sighed heavily.
“For years now Terry McIver — that racist — that misogynist — has been sending people abusive letters and signing my name to them.”
“Come off it.”
“And if you want respectable men not to stare at your charming bosom, why don’t you wear a bra, so that your nipples don’t protrude. It’s disconcerting, to say the least.”
“Now look here, Mr. Panofsky, I’ve already been pinched or grabbed by enough men tripping on penis power, so cut out the funny stuff right now. The reason why gay women frighten you is because you are terrified of what this would mean to the quote, normal, unquote patriarchal, authoritarian system based on women’s submission to men.”
“I don’t mean to pry,” I said, “but what do your parents think about your being a lesbian?”
“I prefer to think of myself as a humansexual.”
“Then we have something in common.”
“Did you agree to this interview just to poke fun at me?”
“Why don’t we continue this discussion at lunch?”
“You can go straight to hell,” she said, gathering her things together. “If not for you, Clara would be alive today. Terry McIver told me that.”
14
Paris 1952. Grudgingly surfacing from yet another vodka stupor only a few days after Clara’s death, unsure of my whereabouts, it seemed that I was being summoned by something between a scratching and a knocking at my door, wherever it was. Go away, I thought. But the knocker persisted. Boogie again, perhaps. Or Yossel. My well-intentioned nurses. Go away, I thought, turning to the wall.
“Mr. Panofsky. Mr. Panofsky, please,” pleaded a voice unfamiliar to me. A supplicant’s voice.
“Fuck off, whoever you are. I’m not well.”
“Please,” came the whiny voice again. “I will stand here until you open the door.”
Five p.m. I rose from the sofa, broken springs twanging, stumbled into the bathroom, and splashed cold water on my face. Maybe it was somebody who wanted to take the apartment off my hands. I had advertised it in the International Herald-Tribune. So I hastily gathered up soiled laundry, empty bottles, and plates with uneaten frankfurters or egg remnants on them, and dumped them into the nearest drawer. Careful not to trip over packed cartons containing her things, I opened the door to a small, tubby stranger, with a salt-and-pepper Van Dyke beard, wearing horn-rimmed glasses that magnified his sad brown spaniel’s eyes. I took him to be in his early fifties. He wore a woollen winter coat with a Persian lamb collar and a homburg, which he promptly removed to reveal a black yarmulke fastened to his flowing grey hair with a bobby pin. His coat was unbuttoned and I saw that the fat of his tie had been neatly rent with scissors. “What do you want here?” I asked.
“What do I want here? But I’m Charnofsky,” he said. “Chaim Charnofsky,” he repeated, as if that explained everything.
Charnofsky? Her first husban
d. I shook my pounding head, trying, unavailingly, to clear it of the jackhammer within. “The art teacher?” I asked, baffled.
“The art teacher? You understand Yiddish, may I be so bold to inquire?”
“Some.”
“I’m your machuten. Clara’s father. May I come in?”
“Yes. Certainly. Excuse me a minute, will you?”
I splashed my face with water once more, and emerged to discover I wasn’t hallucinating. Mr. Charnofsky was still there. Hands clasped behind his back, he was studying the ink drawings that still hung on the wall. “I take it you are an artist, Mr. Panofsky.”
“Clara’s,” I said.
“Clara’s. Why would she buy such disgusting things?”
“She made them.”
“She made them. I couldn’t help noticing in that little room there, a crib. There is a child?”
“We lost him.”
“So you lost a son and I lost a daughter. May there be no more mourning in your house or mine.”
“Would you care for some coffee?”
“It gives me gas. Especially the Frenchy kind they serve here. But a cup of tea would be nice, if you don’t mind?”
He cleared a space for himself at the table, ostentatiously brushing it free of crumbs, and sweeping aside a half-filled mug in which several Gauloise butts floated. He inspected his teaspoon and wiped it on the edge of the tablecloth. “Lemon, you’ve got some?” he asked.
“Sorry. I’m out.”
“He’s out,” said Mr. Charnofsky, shrugging. And then, sucking on a sugar cube, sipping tea, he told me he was the cantor of the B’nai Jacob synagogue in Brighton Beach. “It’s not a princely living,” he said, “but they provide us with an apartment, the building belongs to the synagogue’s president, he would die before he would agree to a paint job, never mind fix a leaky toilet bowl, his wife’s barren, it’s a shame, so who will he leave his fortune to? His problem. I have plenty of my own. Gall-bladder stones, you shouldn’t live to see the day. I also suffer from sinus trouble, varicose veins, and corns on my feet. It’s from standing so much in the synagogue. Listen here, cancer it isn’t, right? And, oh yes, there is the pittance I earn from performing at weddings and funerals, they slip you fifty dollars they want a tax receipt, and I preside over seders every Pesach at Finestone’s Strictly Kosher Hotel in the Catskills. Every year sold out because of me. My voice. A gift from the Almighty, Blessed be He. But where does Fine-stone put me up, he’s so grateful for the money he’s raking in? In a room the size of a cupboard behind the kitchen, the fridge and the larder locked up at night in case I might steal a Coca-Cola or a tin of sardines. I have to walk a mile to do my business. Anyway, I sent Clara whatever I could spare care of American Express, which is the only address I had for her.”
Mr. Charnofsky had two children. There was Solly, an accountant, an alrightnik, married, blessed with two lovely kids. Rank-one scholars, both of them. He showed me photographs. “You’re their uncle now. Milton was born on February eighteenth and Arty on June twenty-eight, if you care to write that down for future reference.” And of course there was also Clara. “Aleha ha-sholem,” he said. “You look, epes, surprised to see me.”
“I need time to take this in.”
“Time he needs. And what about me, mister? Did I even know she was married, my own daughter?” he asked, his ingratiating manner yielding to anger. “You did say my Clara drew these filthy pictures?”
“Yes.”
Obviously the condition of our apartment had emboldened Mr. Charnofsky. Mind you, to his Brighton Beach eyes it had to appear a dump, not the prize that had cost me a good deal of key money. He pulled a white linen handkerchief out of a trouser pocket and dabbed his forehead with it. “And she never told you about us, it goes without saying?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“He’s afraid not. Well, for my part, I’m certainly surprised Miss Cat’s Meow married a Jewish boy. A nigger would have been more like it. She adored them.”
“I don’t like anybody calling them ‘niggers,’ if you don’t mind.”
“If I don’t mind. Be my guest. Call them what you like,” said Mr. Charnofsky, sniffing the stale air, his nose wrinkling. “If you were willing to open a window, I wouldn’t say no.”
I did as he asked.
“If you are not an artist, Mr. Panofsky, do you mind if I ask what, exactly, is your field of endeavour?”
“I’m an exporter.”
“He’s an exporter. But business can’t be so hot. To live like this. Five flights up and no elevator. No fridge. No dishwasher.”
“We managed.”
“You think I’m being unfair. But if your son, your own flesh and blood, alav ha-sholem, had lived and grown up and was ashamed of you, how would you feel?”
I got up, found the cognac, and poured some into my coffee. Mr. Charnofsky clacked his tongue. He sighed. “Is that schnapps I see?”
“Cognac.”
“Cognac. Honour thy father and thy mother. That’s a commandment. Do you do that at least?”
“My mother’s a problem.”
“And your father, what may I ask does he do for a living?”
“He’s a cop.”
“A cop. Oh ho. Where are you from, Mr. Panofsky?”
“Montreal.”
“Montreal. Ah. Then perhaps you know the Kramers? A fine family. Or Cantor Labish Zabitsky?”
“Sorry. No.”
“But Cantor Zabitsky is well known. We have performed in concerts together at Grossinger’s. People had to book early. Are you sure you never heard of him?”
“I don’t come from an observant family.”
“But you’re not ashamed of being Jewish,” he cried, a burst furuncle. “Like her. Like Clara.”
“Aleha ha-sholem,” I said, reaching for the cognac bottle again.
“She was twelve years old and she began to tear her hair out in clumps for a how-do-you-do. ‘Dr. Kaplan,’ I said, he’s an honoured member of our congregation, a big contributor, ‘what should I do?’ ‘Have her periods started yet?’ he asked. Feh! How should I know a thing like that? ‘Send her to see me,’ he said. So you think Clara was grateful, he didn’t even charge me. ‘He felt up my tits,’ she said. A twelve-year-old. Language like that. From the gutter. Mrs. Charnofsky held her down and I washed her mouth out with soap.
“Then it started. What am I talking? It had already started. The craziness. ‘You’re not my parents,’ she said. We should be so lucky. ‘I’m adopted,’ she said. ‘And I want to know who my real parents are.’ ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘You’re the daughter of Czar Nicholas. Or maybe it’s King George of England. I forget which.’ ‘I’m not Jewish,’ she said. ‘I know that much. So I want you to tell me who my real parents are.’ Until we told her she said she wouldn’t eat. So eventually we had to force open her mouth, and she was a biter let me tell you, pouring chicken soup into her mouth through a funnel. And then she would vomit all over me on purpose. My good suit. It was positively disgusting.
“Next I would find filthy books under her mattress. Translated from the French. Nina or Nana or some such. Poetry by that bastard Heine, he was also ashamed of being a Jew. Sholem Aleichem wasn’t good enough for Miss Hotzenklotz. And she started to go to Greenwich Village and could be gone for two days. That’s when I started locking her into her room at night. Too late, I found out. Because she was no longer a virgin. Going out on the street dressed like a whore. Our street. People were talking. I could lose my position in the synagogue, and then what? I’d have to sing on street corners. Listen here, that’s how Eddie Cantor got started, and look at him today, with such a thin voice and those popping eyes. I’ll bet he isn’t even five feet tall. But he’s a millionaire yet, so they look up to him, the goyim.
“It got to be too much. Her tantrums. The filth she talked. Sometimes not coming out of her room for ten days, sitting there, staring at nothing. Thank God for Dr. Kaplan, he arranged for a mental hospital. Expert care
she got, never mind the expense. We did without. They gave her electro-shock therapy, the latest thing in modern medicine. She comes home, she slits her wrists in the bathtub for a thank-you. The ambulance sits outside. Everybody is peeking through their curtains. Mrs. Charnofsky was so ashamed she wouldn’t leave the apartment for a week. On top of all my other duties I have to do the shopping or come home to tuna sandwiches.
“I want you to know, Mr. Panofsky, you shouldn’t blame yourself, because it wasn’t the first time she tried suicide. Or the second. Dr. Kaplan tells me it’s a cry for help. She wants help, she can ask. Am I deaf? A bad father? Nonsense. Mr. Panofsky you’re still a youngster,” he said, hauling out his immense handkerchief to blow his nose. “Exporting is a top-notch line of business and you should do better at it if you work hard. You should marry again. Have children. All those cartons on the floor. Are you moving out of here, I wouldn’t blame you?”
“They’re her things. Leave me your address and I’ll have them shipped to you.”
“What things, for example?”
“Clothes. Her notebooks. Poems. Diaries. Her ink drawings.”
“What would I need them for?”
“There are people who think highly of her work. You should have a publisher look at it.”
“Diaries, you said. Full of lies about us, I’ll bet. Filth. Making us out for monsters.”
“Maybe it would be better if I handled this.”
“No. Ship them. I’ll leave you my card. My nephew should look at it. He’s a professor of literature at NYU. Highly thought of. He used to encourage her.”
“Like you did.”
“Like I did. Oh, very nice. Thank you, I’m sure. After all Mrs. Charnofsky and I suffered. The shame she brought on us.”
“Electro-shock therapy. My God.”