A Three Day Event (17 page)

Saturday morning at nine–thirty sharp, as he had promised, Mr. Jacobson’s Cadillac slid smoothly to a stop outside the duplex, and Polo’s real life began.

It didn’t take long for Ruthie to find out he couldn’t read. By the time he was thirteen (she was then eleven), Polo was spending more time at the Jacobsons’ home than at his own and he spoke a fluent functional English. She begged him to let her teach him how to read and write. He would never have asked her, but it was what he had been longing to hear. He still considered her to be a spoiled brat–her father called her ‘princess’ in affection, though it was no joke to Polo–but he knew he had to get started soon (and nothing would induce him to go back to school).

Ruthie had been ‘pretend’ teaching with her friends for so long she thought she knew what she was doing. She was enthusiastic, but he didn’t make any progress. One day she cried out that it was no use trying to teach someone if they didn’t want to learn. He retorted in frustration that she must be a bad teacher because he
did so
want to learn. She said maybe he was just
stupid,
that was all. He overturned the desk, smashed his fist into the blackboard (it cracked, and he broke a finger), and stormed out of the house, vowing never to set foot there again.

One week later Morrie showed up at the duplex in the latest Cadillac. Polo said there was no point in going on if they thought he was stupid. Morrie made him come out for a rib steak at Moishe’s, and begged him to come back. Ruthie was miserable, all she did was cry. She wouldn’t eat. What was a father to do?

Listen, Polo, you know you’re smart and so does Ruthie. She’s just mad at herself. Don’t be a putz and lose an opportunity. We’re gonna find the right way, and you’re gonna learn to read, and then you’re gonna feel like a million bucks. Come home–I mean, come on back with me, kid.

So he came back. Ruthie, flustered, blushing and red–eyed, apologized, looking at the floor, and muttered that she would never call him stupid again. They started the lessons. This time she was different. She was patient and reasonable. She was thinking about him learning, not about her teaching. Ruthie was different altogether. Something had changed in her. She was a nicer person now.

So he learned to read and write. Ruthie had asked which language he wanted. Having studied for so many years at College Marie–de–France, she felt equipped to teach him both, but by now Polo was only too aware that the riding circuit was so heavily dominated by anglophones, even in Quebec, that he would be foolish to concentrate on anything but English. Then too, once he started to succeed, he would be in the other provinces and the States a lot. Nobody he ever came into contact with spoke a very good quality of French. His would do for now. Besides, what was the point of him learning to speak and write and roll his r’s like a Frenchman? He’d just be laughed at by everyone he knew.

And those were the most important things in his life for the next seven years: riding, and the hours he spent with Ruthie. He had his own room in the basement, and a side entrance through which to come and go at will. It never occurred to him at the time how peculiar it was that a man in Morrie Jacobson’s position should take him on, feed him, clothe him, get his eyes tested and buy him glasses (he would never forget the ineffable joy of seeing distances for the first time), fix his teeth, buy him horses to ride, drive him back and forth to the stables, and ask for nothing in return but the pleasure of seeing him fulfill his talent for competitive jumping. It also never occurred to him to ask how peculiar it was that he should be allowed to spend so much time, unsupervised, with a pretty daughter whose safety, purity and general comportment were otherwise as strictly monitored as a nun’s.

Ruthie did more than teach him language skills. She introduced him to books. She read to him, which he loved. She told him one day that she was going to read him a story about a horse so famous that he would be recognized and talked about as long as literature existed by millions and millions of people all over the world. Could he guess? Of course he couldn’t. It was Boxer from George Orwell’s
Animal Farm.
He loved that story, which she read in half–hour installments over weeks, and always got a little weepy when he thought about Boxer going off to the knacker’s. He was also touched by her efforts to match his interests to an appreciation of the finer things, although it would have been sappy to tell her so.

Then she would sometimes read to him in French and make him read aloud to her, to improve his pronunciation, and he remembered above all Gabrielle Roy’s
Bonheur d’occasion
, which, she said, was popular in English as
The Tin Flute
, and which she had chosen, of course, because it was about life in St. Henri. He rarely alluded to his family, and she didn’t ask, but he was glad she had read that book, because he knew she understood a lot about him without his having to talk about it.

Other times she set him compositions to write. This was difficult, tedious and unpleasant work. He sat at one of the child–size desks in the little schoolroom, chewing on a pencil, labouring over the simple themes she set him: ‘The Horse, Man’s Special Friend’, or ‘My Favourite Christmas.’ Later she would correct them, tactfully explaining how important it was to stick to your theme and try to make your reader visualize what you were thinking of. It was dispiriting to see all the red marks, but there was no question of giving up.

Through the open doorway, as he gnawed on the pencil top and toiled to find the words to please her, he would see Ruthie sprawled on her stomach on the pink bed, lost in a book. There were books all over the room, some of them in English and others in French. He could not believe how much she read. She read with a concentration and intensity that piqued his curiosity and aroused in him an inchoate fusion of yearning and envy. He would feel lonely watching her, and something worse that he could not properly identify. A kind of shame, as though he were spying on her.

Sometimes he would call her name softly just to catch her elfin face in mid–flight between two worlds. The rapt languor in her smoky eyes and parted lips as she swam back to awareness was sweetly shocking to him. Where had she been? Was it like where he went in his head when he rode? At these moments he came closest to admitting to himself what she was to him.

He still went home to the duplex, but it became more and more difficult to fit in there. His siblings and father were wary around him. At first they made crude jokes about his braces or the new glasses, and that was all right, but it was different when they noticed his speech patterns were changing. Then they became self–conscious and sullen in his presence. He felt himself to be more and more an outsider.

For his part he began to notice that nobody had much to say to anyone in his family. Or at least nothing of any particular interest to him. It was either sports–never riding, of course–or who lost their job and was on welfare or who got picked up by the cops for whatever, or what neighbourhood girl was knocked up, and was the guy going to marry her or not (or sniggers if the paternity was in obvious doubt). It wasn’t conversation, it wasn’t an exchange of opinions. It wasn’t
ever
about something anyone had read. Conversation was something he’d learned about at the Jacobsons.

The Jacobsons, on the other hand, never seemed to shut up. They had
too
much to say. They never stopped talking, laughing, describing, judging, explaining, criticizing, complaining. They carried on debates, sometimes pitched verbal battles, even shouting, at the table. It often made Polo very nervous, and he rarely, almost never, joined in when things heated up

When he first started joining the family on a regular basis, listening to Hy and Ruthie and their frequent guests argue about whatever subject was on the agenda from school or the news, Polo had looked at Morrie, waiting for him to tell them to shut up and let him enjoy his food in peace, or to smack one of them. Instead he was usually laughing, awarding points to one or the other, goading them to further excesses. It was
bizarre
.

In fact, if the conversation was just going along normally at the table (that was a whole other thing, dinners–and what dinners!–at a set time and everyone sitting together), Morrie usually got restless and said something inflammatory to get them started. You could bet on it at Friday night dinners, which were long, elaborate affairs. The Jacobsons weren’t religious or anything, but Friday night was always a bit of a deal and nobody was supposed to have other plans. More often than not conversation then was about Jews, the Montreal community or Israel, or the war. Morrie never got tired of that stuff. It was pretty interesting, though. Or if it was about other things–Canadian or Quebec politics–then it was about that and how it affected the Jews.

His visits home became infrequent. By the time he was eighteen, they had stopped altogether, although he kept in touch with his mother by telephone. He loved his mother, but couldn’t think of a way to include her in his life. He didn’t miss his father at all, and was not much moved when he died–Polo was twenty–of a stroke at the tavern, although he attended the funeral, of course. For some reason, he was embarrassed to tell the Jacobsons, and shocked them when it came out months later.

Mme Poisson for her part became shy with her son, and they never talked about what had been, and was, happening. She was embarrassed by the continuing gifts of fabric, but they had made a substantial difference in the household. She made money sewing for other people, and her own children were finally dressed nicely. Her social status improved, but deep in her heart she knew she had sold her son. And to
les juifs.
It was disconcerting. And it wasn’t something she could share with anyone. He lived in another world, and when she saw him in person, so obviously happy, her feelings were conflicted. It was easier when she didn’t see him, only thought about him. Eventually it was easier not to think of him.

Polo wasn’t aware of being in love with Ruthie. He only thought of her as an indispensable part of his life, like horses. It was a hopeless kind of love, hopeless in that nothing material could ever come of it. Polo didn’t articulate these thoughts to himself. Ruthie as a female was
taboo,
he knew unconsciously there was a line he must never cross with her, even in his thoughts, and that was it.

And so the love of his mother was lost to him and what might have replaced it was forbidden, but he was not an introspective or a self–pitying boy, and he didn’t think along these abstract lines. He was conscious of his blessings and happy in the intensely physical, demanding work he had chosen. When he wasn’t riding Morrie’s horses, he earned money working around the stables. Feeding, hot–walking, mucking–out, hauling hay. Nothing was beneath him, it was all part of his plan, his determination to become a complete professional.

He never thought he knew enough. He followed the vets around, pestering them as they worked and afterward with questions and further questions until they begged him to leave them alone. The same with the blacksmiths. He took in what they said with the whole and lasting memory of the longtime illiterate.

He also trained and competed for other people as a ‘catch’ rider. He was a quick study with difficult horses, and earned a reputation as a last–resort rider for desperate owners. When he showed them to advantage in the ring and ‘sold’ them, the owner usually gave him ten percent of the profits. In time it was a modest living, along with his winnings, and he had self–respect in addition to his other advantages.

Polo loved Ruthie, but he wasn’t faithful to her. What would have been the point? He had started sleeping with the wife of the stable owner where Mr. J. boarded his horse when he was fourteen. He had learned quite a lot about what women were like–and liked–from her, and he had gone on to girl riders and later groupies when opportunities presented. He never had a romantic girlfriend. None of his sexual partners thought for a minute that any possibility of a deeper relationship existed.

Ruthie never came to his horse shows. She had her own life, and he never expected her to cheer him on. The riding was always a thing apart from whatever it was that they shared. Except once. She drove up to St. Lazare, to the “Classic”, representing Morrie, who had to go to a wedding. It had been a hot day, though, and it was too bad her one and only horse show had ended with her getting sunstroke.

But other important things had happened that day too. As soon as he got his ribbon and sent his horse off with the groom, Mr. Ankstrom had taken him aside. Mr. Ankstrom had told him that in spite of his win having qualified him for the Canadian team, they felt the team’s “cultural homogeneity” would be compromised by his presence–those were his actual words–and he had even suggested Polo, or rather his sponsor, lend Panjandrum to another, more recognized rider of their choosing–to which Polo, stunned more than angry, had curtly said no. He had called Mr. J. to tell him the bad news. And then the next day Ankstrom had called to say they–the board of C–FES–had reconsidered and he was mysteriously back on the team.

And that was pretty well it, as far as the Jacobsons were concerned. Morrie told him, as soon as Polo’s place on the Team was confirmed, that he was getting out of horse sport. After the Royal Winter Fair. When Polo cleaned up at the Fair, won pretty well all there was to win, Morrie took him to breakfast at the Royal York Hotel and told him he was selling Panjandrum. He’d had an offer five minutes after the show closed the night before. It was for a crazy amount, crazy. From an American, of course. Now Polo had a choice to make.

Polo, you know I never jerked you around in all the time we been together. I’m telling you straight, I’m not leaving you anything when I go. The business, the money, it’s all for Hy and Ruthie. But I want you to have a good life. I want that you shouldn’t be dependent on these schmucks in the horse business. So I’m giving you half the money from the horse. It’s a lot of money. You can do what you want. You can buy three more horses and blow your brains out on the circuit trying for the jackpot again, and end up kissing some rich jerks’ asses and eating shit for the next thirty years just so they’ll pay your way–you know as well as I do, this kind of luck is one in a million–or you can take the money and make an investment: buy a piece of land, build a house, put it all into T–bills, I don’t care, but an investment, Polo, you see what I’m saying here? Something to build a real life on. A man’s life.