“Don’t tell me you’re going to start making the laws around here?”
“I’ve got dem blues,” Hanna sang, spinning, the broom clutched to her cheek, “I’ve got dem Kotex, rag-time … blues …” coming to an abrupt stop immediately before Jenny. “Is that the kind of manners you learned from Jimmy Durante’s brother?”
“His name happens to be Durant. And he’s an outstanding author.”
The neighbors were astonished to learn that not only could Joey ride horses but he had a commercial pilot’s license. He could actually fly an airplane. They were eager to fill Joey in on all he had missed in his six years’ absence. Zalman Freed, they told him, was an artillery officer. Cooperman’s boy had joined the navy and was serving on a corvette in the North Atlantic. Marv Bloom had been shot down over Malta and his story was broadcast repeatedly in radio spots to promote the sale of Victory Bonds. (“Hey, mister,” the announcer said, “remember Marv Bloom, the fresh, freckled kid who used to deliver your morning newspaper …”) To all these stories, Joey responded with a bemused smile. “And meanwhile,” he would say, “you’re all making money, hand over foot.”
Joey had only been back a week when he began to cough and wheeze, waking in the middle of the night. And so whenever he left the house, Hanna waited up until he returned, which was not until one, sometimes two, o’clock, and Jenny would be wakened by their voices.
“It’s going to be a mild winter, Joey. Everybody says so. Honestly, the winters here aren’t what they used to be.”
Roused by the aroma of spicy food and the clanging of cutlery, Jenny would attempt to join them in the kitchen, where a variety of pots simmered on the stove.
“It’s nothing,” Hanna would say, her smile forbiddingly sweet. “An old bone. A soup. You wouldn’t go for it.”
“I’m not even hungry,” Jenny would reply, aloof.
“Good. Have a nice sleep.”
It was Sugarman, albeit inadvertently, who lit the bomb. He told Joey that the windows in Jewish shops were being broken and swastikas had been painted on the pavement outside the shul on Fairmount Street. French Canadian followers of Adrien Arcand were to blame.
“What are you going to do about it?” Joey asked.
What are we going to do? The children are forbidden to play softball on Fletcher’s Field because of roaming gangs of French Canadian toughs.
The next afternoon Joey collected Arty, Duddy, Jake, Gas, and the rest of the boys and took them to play ball on Fletcher’s Field. He accompanied them the following afternoon and the one after that. Now if the French Canadians got any ideas they sneaked one look at Joey, lolling on the grass behind the batter’s cage, and faded away.
Duddy Kravitz, taking heart in Joey’s presence, shouted obscenities in French after the retreating toughs. When the boys whirled around, Duddy, clutching his genitals, shouted, “Votre soeur, combien?”
One of the French Canadians hurled a stone.
“Yoshka in drerd arein,” Duddy yelled.
Another stone bounced in the dirt. Duddy bent over, pulled down his trousers, and wiggled his pale narrow white ass in the air. “For Pope Pius,” he hollered.
Unwillingly, the French Canadians started back. Joey rose, scooping up a bat, and took a few slices at an imaginary softball. The French Canadians dispersed.
Duddy, Jake, Arty, and the others brought glowing, exaggerated reports of the incident back to St. Urbain, but their parents were not pleased. There was already enough trouble. Street incidents caused by roaming gangs of truculent French Canadians were constantly increasing. Premier Duplessis’s Union Nationale Party circulated a pamphlet that showed a coarse old Jew, nose long and misshapen as a carrot, retreating into the night with bags of gold. Laurent Barré, a minister in the Duplessis cabinet, told the legislature that his son, on entering the army, had been exposed to the insult of a medical examination by a Jewish doctor. “Infamous Jewish examiners,” he said, “are regaling themselves on naked Canadian flesh.” The next morning Uncle Abe, driving to his cottage in the mountains, was astonished to see “À bas les Juifs” painted on the highway. He met with other community leaders who contributed heavily to the Union Nationale election fund and they went to chat with a minister and were photographed together shaking hands and smiling benignly on the steps outside the Château Frontenac in Quebec City. The following day a junior minister issued a statement to the press. “Anti-semitism,” he said, “is grossly exaggerated. Speaking for myself, my accountant is a Jew and I always buy my cars from Sonny Fish.”
Joey burst into the cigar stores, he visited the barber shops, exhorting the men, mocking them, asking them what they intended to do about such insults.
That was Wednesday. On Friday, a St. Urbain Street boy who had gone to the Palais d’Or dance hall to look over the shiksas made off with a girl whose husband was overseas with the Van Doos. The boy was beaten up and left bleeding on the sidewalk outside his house and the story was printed in all the newspapers. On Saturday morning Joey went from one cigar store to another, this time carrying the newspaper with him, upsetting the men, hectoring, goading, and in the evening a group of twelve embarrassed men, armed, it was reported, with baseball bats and lengths of lead pipe, set out in four cars for the Palais d’Or. French Canadian boys who came out with girls were separated from them and taken into the alley. When the police finally turned up the St. Urbain Street boys had already fled, leaving a French Canadian boy unconscious in the alley. The story made page one perhaps because the boy, who had not been involved in the previous brawl, happened to be a nephew of an advocate who was prominent in the Ste. Jean Baptiste Society. The boy was a student at the University of Montreal. The Palais d’Or was boarded up and the next night and the night after that police patrol cars cruised slowly up and down St. Urbain. Store owners and pool room proprietors were fined for infractions of city bylaws that had not been enforced for years. Huberman, stopped for doing no more than thirty miles an hour, offered the traffic cop the traditional five-dollar bill with his license and found himself charged with attempting to bribe an officer. Leaders of the community sent a contrite letter to the French Canadian boy’s family and another letter to the Star. No stone, the letter said, would be left unturned. A delegation, Uncle Abe among them, went to see the French Canadian advocate and promised that whoever had injured the boy would be uncovered by the community and turned over to the proper authorities for punishment.
On St. Urbain, stores shut down early and hardly anybody went out after dark. A special prayer was said at the Galicianer shul. People sat by their windows, waiting. The next morning, before anyone else in the house was up, Joey, who had been back home for all of five weeks, packed his bags and was gone again. Two days later, Jake remembered, they found Joey’s fire-engine red MG overturned in the woods off the highway. The rest was rumor.
Joey’s car was discovered upended and gutted, burned out, alongside the road to New York, some ten miles out of town. Some said there had been two cars parked down the street from Joey’s house all night and that six men had huddled there, smoking, passing a bottle, until Joey had emerged and they took off after him. Others argued, no, it was an accident. Not bloody likely, Jake thought, because one of Joey’s suitcases had been found ripped open, the contents strewn in the woods. The lid had been torn off another suitcase and somebody had defecated inside. Among other items discovered in the vicinity there had been a photographic sheet with four studies of JESSIE HOPE, exclusively represented by Nate Herman, Wiltshire Blvd., Hollywood. There was a profile and a full-face study, a photograph of Joey in boxing trunks and another showing him in a cowboy’s outfit, drawing a gun menacingly.
Joey’s wrecked MG was found on a Wednesday. The following Monday the cops visited Brotsky, the city councillor, as usual, for the weekly pay-off, and there were no more surprise visits from Wartime Prices & Trade Board inspectors to neighborhood stores and wholesalers. The case against Huberman, who had been arrested for speeding and charged with br
ibing an officer, was dropped for lack of sufficient evidence.
A month later Jenny quit the house on St. Urbain, whisking Hanna and Arty off to Toronto. Escaping, escaping. “From now on this family takes no more money from Uncle Abe,” she proclaimed. “Sweet, fucking Uncle Abe.”
5
JENNY.
How Jake had revered her, how she had once excited him! Jenny, with her Modern Library books, her map of the Paris metro and line drawings of Keats tacked to her bedroom wall. Jenny, who devoured the Saturday Review of Literature from cover to cover and subscribed to every “Y” lecture series. Who read Havelock Ellis. Who wrote impassioned letters to writers she admired, especially the CBC radio playwrights, Douglas Fraser among them. Who visualized herself not as just another yenta, but as a delectable olive-skinned Jewess waiting for some behemoth of a Thomas Wolfe to pluck her off suffocating St. Urbain and set her down in a Manhattan penthouse, a voluptuary, where she would become, she once confided to Jake, his raison d’être.
Vibrant, full-breasted Jenny, St. Urbain’s bursting bud, who was anathema to all the awkward, unprepossessing Hersh girls, that abrasive gaggle of pimply faces, shrill voices, and flat chests. Cousins Sandra and Helen, Uncle Abe’s daughter Doris, and Jake’s sister Rifka, all of whom, tricked out in kiss curls and muslin, pearls and silvery pumps, lost their boyfriends to Jenny in a sweater at family bar mitzvahs and weddings, and were abandoned to pout on the sidelines as she glided across the dance floor, glued to Dickstein’s boy or thrusting against Morty Cohen.
“She gives them what they want,” Rifka explained.
Jenny, in the old days, had certainly given Jake reason to envy Arty. Jake’s big sister, Rifka, would never bathe him, giving him a chance to contemplate her ballooning breasts as she bent over him in the tub. Neither would Rifka ever wrestle with them on long unwinding Saturday afternoons as Jenny did – occasionally – memorably – unworried about flying skirts, trapping Arty in a headlock or Jake’s struggling head against her marvelously firm bosom, sinking to the floor as Duddy Kravitz locked her in a rubbing rhythmic bearhold; and not complaining when the match, inevitably, slowed down and Duddy’s hands no longer pretended to find secret places in error. Instead she would rise briskly but good-naturedly, saying, “That’s as far as we go with the peanut gallery. Enough, shmendricks,” and then she would make them chopped liver sandwiches before going out to a movie. Or to the mountain. “To walk among the falling autumn leaves,” she said.
To which Duddy’s unfailing response was, “Can I come? No pun intended.”
But only Jake, who fetched her books from the “Y” library, was ever allowed to accompany her to Mount Royal.
In the autumn, Jake recalled. When the trees on the mountain went crimson and yellow and curling brown and all at once the streets were strewn with swirling leaves. When the sports pages would be charged with speculation and photographs of youngsters with broken front teeth who were trying out at the Canadiens’ hockey training camp. When the synagogues advertised that there were still seats available for the High Holidays.
Jenny saying, “You won’t catch me growing old selling raffle rickets for Hadassah, my bloated husband snoring on the sofa after dinner.”
Telling him about the drama group she had joined. With Kenny Pendleton, who, Montreal being what it was, had to earn his living dressing Eaton’s windows, but acted – professionally, Jenny emphasized – in CBC radio plays and Montreal Repertory Theater productions. And who, when his flat mate Ross Evans was away, cooked her steaks, which they ate by candlelight in the basement apartment on Tupper Street. Which apartment, no nouveau riche Outremont showcase, was not overstuffed with sofas and lamps, each shade shielded by plastic, but was artistically furnished. With a blown-up photograph of Michelangelo’s David in the dining room. New Yorker cartoons in what Kenny called the throne room. And posters by Jean Cocteau. And Henri Matisse.
“At Kenny’s parties, we sit on the floor and drink French wines. We don’t talk about gall bladder operations or linen sales or the almighty dollar.”
In the golden autumn, lying together on a slope, everywhere you looked, couples necking.
Jenny saying, “I don’t want you to have anything more to do with Duddy Kravitz.”
“Why?”
“Never mind.”
But Arty, she swore, would study at McGill. Even if she had to work overtime. And Jake, her acolyte, mustn’t settle for hateful Outremont. Another money-grubbing complacent Hersh.
“This is nowhere, St. Urbain. We’re nothing here. We have to leave.”
Jenny, who wept for Abélard and Héloïse, lent him Nana, and kept The Shropshire Lad, a gift from Kenny, under her pillow, was, to Jake’s mind, altogether too rare a creature for St. Urbain. So on those evenings when he would contrive to cycle up and down outside Laurel Knitwear at closing time, he would be heartsick to see her emerge, looking as coarse as the other factory girls, her face drawn, sullen, her forehead greasy, until she saw him and would laugh, delighted, allowing him to cycle home beside her.
“Well, well,” she’d say, yanking his hair, “picking up girls outside a factory. What would your Uncle Abe say?”
“Aw.”
One evening she announced he could be her date; she would take him to the movies next Saturday afternoon.
“On shabus?” he whispered.
“You think you’ll be struck by lightning?”
“I’m not even scared.”
Instead of starting out together they met furtively on a street corner and did not go to a downtown movie, where they might run into neighbors, but to a movie in an unfamiliar goyische district. Afterwards Jenny took him to a soda bar and lectured him about Emily Dickinson and Kenneth Patchen. They agreed to meet again the following Saturday. Jenny, amused with herself, dressed up for these occasions, but out of consideration for Jake she never, after the first time, wore high heels or her hair in an upsweep, so that Jake, straining (and, though she didn’t know it, with wads of newspaper stuffed under his socks), seemed almost as tall as she was.
On the first Saturday they did no more than hold hands stickily, but just as the main feature came on the second time out Jenny lifted Jake’s arm over her shoulders and snuggled up against him. It was the same the next Saturday and the one after that. Then, one Saturday afternoon, as Jake put his arm around her his hand fell accidentally over her breast, dangling, the little finger barely grazing the softness there. He froze, not bold enough to go further but not willing to retreat either, until Jenny whispered impatiently, “It’s all right. Honestly, it isn’t a crime,” and Jake, swallowing hard, squeezed her breast with such sudden and pent-up savagery that she had to grit her teeth to save herself from crying out in pain. Then Jenny took his hand and showed him how and he began to stroke and squeeze her gently and as soon as he seemed less frantic, Jenny (Oh my God, he thought) unbuttoned her dress, unsnapped her bra, and stroking his hand reassuringly led it over her bare breast and amazingly stiff nipple. Time passed achingly, deliriously slow, until, sweating with fresh alarm, he felt her hand undoing his fly buttons, groping inside, freeing him, and then caressing him and pulling him briefly, too briefly, before he shot off, humiliated, into her hand. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, but Jenny shushed him and reached into her purse for a handkerchief and wiped them both. Afterwards they went to a soda shop. Jenny lit a cork-tipped cigarette. “Want one?” she asked, her eyes taunting him.
“Sure,” he said, but the cigarette made him cough.
“Do you pull off at night? Like Arty. With pictures?”
“You crazy?”
“I thought so,” she said, her smile venomous as she reached for her coat.
“You going?”
“Yes. And no more movies. Come back when you’re old enough.”
Old enough. How they longed to be old enough, Jake remembered. In the afternoons they studied for their bar mitzvahs at the Young Israel synagogue and at night they locked the door to Arty’s room, dropped t
heir trousers to their ankles, and studied themselves for bush growth. Pathetic, miserable little hairs, wouldn’t they ever proliferate? Duddy Kravitz taught them how to encourage hair growth by shaving, a sometimes stinging process. “One slip of the razor, you shmock, and you’ll grow up a hairdresser. Like Gordie Shapiro.” Duddy also told them how Japanese girls were able to diddle themselves in hammocks. Of course Duddy was the bushiest, with the longest, most menacingly veined, thickest cock of all. He won so regularly when they masturbated against the clock, first to come picks up all the quarters, that before long they would not compete unless he accepted a sixty-second handicap.
6
OH GOD! OH MONTREAL!
Today’s TV
2:30 p.m. (12) Medicine and the Bible. Modern endocrinology used to interpret the scriptural events. Could Esau have been suffering from low blood sugar and that’s why he sold his birthright? Could Goliath have had a pituitary gland imbalance? Dr. Robert Greenblatt, author of Search the Scriptures, offers some of his theories.
Stranded. Some three weeks after his abortive trip to New York, Jake was still stuck in Montreal. Unemployed, without prospects. Jenny had made good her escape eight long years ago, in 1943, but not me, he thought, coming out of the System, having survived another triple bill. Abysmally depressed, with nothing to do and nowhere to go, when he saw Gas. Towering, plump Gas Berger, of all people, sailing purposefully down St. Catherine Street, shoulders dug manfully into the wind, carrying a pigskin briefcase.
“Knock, knock,” Jake said.
“Who’s there?” Gas replied, heaving with laughter.
Gas bounced a punch off Jake’s shoulder and Jake reached up and yanked Gas’s buttercup ears rapturously, and they retired to the Tour Eiffel to drink together. Emerging from the dark two hours later to squint into the unsparing autumn sunlight, they bought a bottle of whisky, some delicatessen, and took a taxi to Arty’s rooming house near McGill University.