Barney's Version (40 page)

The Second Mrs. Panofsky hastily explained that her parents were travelling in Europe, or of course they would have been at the funeral.

“Should business ever bring your father to Winnipeg, he has a friend there now. You tell him that.”

My uncles had always disapproved of my father and been embarrassed by my mother, whom they took to be the family idiot. All the same, Uncle Milty asked my father, “Where will you be sitting
shiva
?”

“My own philosophy, speaking personally, is modern,” said Izzy. “I don't go in for the religious hocus-pocus.”

Relieved, my aunts and uncles made arrangements to fly home. I dropped off The Second Mrs. Panofsky at our house, and drove my father on to Dink's, where we could mourn together in Panofsky fashion.
Only after we were well into it did Izzy begin to sniffle, dabbing at his eyes with a filthy handkerchief. “I'm never going to marry again. Ever.”

“Who in the hell would put up with an old fart like you?”

“You'd be surprised, kiddo. She loved you, you know. When she was pregnant, you were an accident, you know.”

“Oh?”

“She was pregnant, worried about her figure, I said you want an abortion, I can arrange it. Naw, she said. She wanted to call you Skeezix, after the kid in
Gasoline Alley
, but I put my foot down and we settled on Barney, after
Barney Google
.”

“
You mean I'm named after a character in a comic strip?
”

“She hoped one day you would grow up to be a radio personality.”

“Like Charlie McCarthy or Mortimer Snerd?”

“Come on. Those was dummies. Hey, even a spot on Canadian radio would have pleased her. She never missed a ‘Happy Gang' show. Remember? Bert Pearl. Kay Stokes. That bunch.”

“Do you need any money, Daddy?”

“I've got my health, you can't buy that with millions. What I need is a job. I went to see the mayor of Côte-St Luc. How about it, I said? Izzy, he said, I'm a Jew and the alderman is a Jew. It wouldn't look good to have a Jewish cop too. The goyim would talk. You know how they are. He had a point. When I was a youngster, I discovered that they even used to resent Al Jolson. He's not a real nigger, they'd say. It's make-up.”

“Daddy, I don't know what I'd do without you. You don't need a job. I'm going to tear apart our basement and turn it into a self-contained apartment for you.”

“Yeah, sure. Your missus would really go for that.”

As Izzy anticipated, The Second Mrs. Panofsky was furious when I told her I was going to convert the basement into a flat for him. “I won't have that animal here,” she said.

“He's my father. I don't like to think of him all alone in a rented room at his age.”

“How would you like it if mine moved in, he's so sick, a day goes by he doesn't see me, he's miserable.”

The move from a seedy rooming-house on Dorchester to a squeaky-clean, all-mod-con flat on a tree-lined street in suburban Hampstead
did not intimidate my father. He made himself at home at once. Within weeks his planned kitchen reeked of stale farts and White Owl cigars and Chinese takeout food mouldering on abandoned paper plates. No sitting-room chair was without its stack of magazines and newspapers (
True Detective
,
The National Enquirer
,
The Police Gazette
,
Playboy)
⁶⁰
, the magazine cover corners unfailingly ripped off, having served as makeshift toothpicks while he watched
Perry Mason
or
Have Gun, Will Travel
. His bed was perpetually unmade and orange peels and sunflower seeds and chunks of sour pickle and cigar butts filled ashtrays to the overflow. Empty rye and beer bottles rode every surface.

I adamantly refused The Second Mrs. Panofsky's request to attach a lock to the kitchen door that opened on to an interior staircase to my father's flat. Poor Izzy. The intrepid cop who had wrestled second-storey men to the ground, chased bank robbers down lanes, flattened drug dealers with his left hook, and cracked the skulls of muggers with his revolver butt feared The Second Mrs. P. as he had no lawbreaker. Only if he heard me moving about solo would Izzy mount the stairs tippytoe, open the kitchen door tentatively, and ask, “Is the coast clear, kid?”

“She's out.”

Grabbing a glass, Izzy would make straight for the liquor cabinet in the dining room.

“Careful, Daddy. She marks the level of each bottle with a pencil.”

“Hey, you're talking to a detective.”

“So these days I pour myself a single malt,” I said, looking him in the eye, “there's no need to add water. It's already been done for me.”

“It's the new maid. Boy, is she ever a prude.”

“Goddamn it, Daddy, you haven't —”

“I never laid a hand on her, I don't care what she says.”

Izzy especially enjoyed Wednesdays, the night The Second Mrs. Panofsky went to visit her parents in order to avoid my weekly poker game. I would usually be joined by Marv Guttman, Sid Cooper, Jerry Feigelman, Hershey Stein, and Nate Gold. I remember one Wednesday in particular, the one where Irv Nussbaum filled in
for the absent Nate Gold. Shuffling the cards, Irv beamed at Marv. “Well now, did you and Sylvia enjoy yourselves in Israel?”

“It's unreal. We had a marvellous time. I tell you what they're doing there …”

“What they're doing there,” said Irv, addressing the group as he began to deal, “is costing untold millions, and this year everyone, and I mean everyone, is going to have to get behind the bond drive as never before.”

“It's been a lousy year for us,” said Hershey.

“The worst,” said Jerry.

“And with the cost of materials today,” said Marv.

“And what,” asked Irv, “about the cost of fighting the fedayeen, or absorbing our brothers from Yemen?”

Inviting Irv had been a mistake, I realized too late, as within an hour the game began to falter, the guys watching, indignant, as Irv pulled over a cut-crystal bowl filled with chips and began to stack them in piles, according to colour. The chips weren't his, but, on his insistence, represented ten per cent off the top of each pot, proceeds to the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Irv was a governor.

“He never rests,” said Hershey, glaring at Irv.

“Neither,” said Irv, “do our enemies.”

By ten o'clock the fun had leaked out of our game. And, after one more round, awfully early by our standards, the guys decided to pack it in, digging into the goodies I had set out on platters on a side table: smoked meat, salami, chopped liver, potato salad, sour pickles, bagels, and sliced
kimmel
bread. Counting the chips in the cut-crystal bowl once more, Irv announced, “We've collected three hundred and seventy-five dollars for the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. If we each chipped in another twenty bucks that would make five hundred even.”
⁶¹

Which was when Izzy, lured by the promise of food and drink, burst into the dining room, grinning as he brandished his snub-nosed revolver. “Don't anybody move,” he hollered, assuming his gunfighter's stance. “This is a raid.”

“Daddy, for Christ's sake, I'm really tired of that joke. It's asinine.”

Snorting, his mouth clamped on a mushy White Owl, Izzy heaved himself into the chair closest to the food platters. “I keep three guns in the house.” Avoiding my reproving look, he yanked the smoked-meat platter toward him and, reaching for a fork, began to stab at fat slices, flicking the lean cuts aside, as he began to stack meat on
kimmel
bread. “They're well hidden, scattered, you know. Somebody comes in here, uninvited, boy, if he wants to I'll air-condition him, sure as hell.” Then he started on one of his trips down memory lane. “During the Depression, you know what I earned? Twelve hundred bucks a year, that's all, and I'll bet some of you lost that much tonight. Could I live on it? Good question. Don't forget I had a free car. I was in the mood for a piece of tail, it was always compliments of the house,” said Izzy. And then, carrying his wobbly sandwich with him, he drifted over to the liquor cabinet to pour himself a hefty shot of Crown Royal and ginger ale. “You'd go into places, everybody knows you're in the detective office, they're glad to see you, you know how it is? Butcher shops, especially the kosher ones, groceries, most of them are glad to see you. Specially they may need your help. So they load you down with free stuff. Clothing factories too, they may need you in an investigation, like you go inside to scare an employee for them who wants to start a union or shit like that. I didn't feel the Depression at all.” And then, his immense sandwich balanced in one hand, his rye and ginger ale in another, a sour pickle clenched between his teeth, Izzy wiggled his eyebrows at me and retreated to his basement flat.

“He's something else,” said Nate.

“Tell me, Marv,” said Irv, “did you stop over in Europe on your way to Israel?”

“Paris.”

“You shouldn't spend your dollars in Europe. France, especially. In 1943
⁶²
they rounded up more Jewish kids for the gas chambers than even the Gestapo could cope with.”

Sensing trouble, everybody hurried into their coats and fled. Standing at the top of the stairs to my father's flat, I shouted, “You're a pig, a
chazer
, and I can see through all your childish tricks.”

Slippers flapped on the stairs, and my father ascended, his face ashen. There were times he looked fifty, his energy boundless, and other times, like now, he seemed old and crushed. “You all right, Daddy?” I asked.

“Heartburn.”

“I'm not surprised, packing away a sandwich like that.”

“Can I have an Alka-Seltzer, or has she locked that up?”

“Please don't start, Daddy. I'm tired,” I pleaded, fixing him an Alka-Seltzer.

Izzy accepted the glass, gulped it down, and belched resoundingly. “Barney,” he said, a quiver in his voice, “I love you.” And suddenly, unaccountably, he was in tears.

“What is it, Daddy? Tell me, please. Maybe I can help.”

“Nobody can help.”

Cancer
. “Here, Daddy.”

My father accepted a Kleenex, blew his nose, and wiped the corners of his eyes. I stroked his hand and waited. Finally he raised his tear-streaked face and said, “You don't know what it's like not to be able to fuck regular any more.”

Here we go again, I thought, angrily withdrawing my hand, as once more Izzy lamented the departure of Madame Langevin, our first maid. “Forty-eight years old,” he said, grieving, “and she had breasts,” he reminded me again, rapping a tiled counter top with his knuckles, “hard as this.”

Madame Langevin, once The Second Mrs. Panofsky had found out, had been sent packing over my objections. Our new maid, a West Indian, was not allowed into the basement flat unless Izzy was out.

“Daddy, will you go to bed now, please.”

But he was back at the liquor cabinet, helping himself to another rye and ginger ale. “Your mother, may she rest in peace, suffered terribly from gas. What held her together during those last years? Wire and string. Stitches. All those operations. Shit. Her stomach was so criss-crossed it looked like centre ice at the end of the third period.”

“You're not being decent,” I protested.

Izzy, drunker than I imagined, embraced me, kissing me on both cheeks, his eyes welling with tears again. “I want you to hang in there, Barney. Get as much as you can while the going is good.”

“You're a disgusting old man,” I said, disengaging myself.

Izzy shuffled over to his stairs, paused, and turned to me once more. “Jeez. The garage doors. It's her car. The Duchess of Outremont is back. See you around, kid.”

Ten days later he died of a heart attack on a massage-parlour table.

On a sweet summer evening in 1973 I was out to dinner with a radiant Miriam, by then the mother of our three children, and like everybody else in those days we were caught up in a heated discussion of the televised Watergate hearings, which we had watched all afternoon. “The tapes are going to do him in,” she said. “He's going to have to resign.”

“The hell he will. He's a survivor, that bastard.”

Of course she was right, as usual. And I, as usual, brought her my office problems. “I never should have commissioned Marty Klein to write those scripts.”

“I hate to say I told you so.”

“But his wife's pregnant and he left the
CBC
to come to me. I can't fire him.”

“Then promote him. Make him executive producer, or vice-president in charge of ashtrays. Anything. So long as he doesn't write.”

“I couldn't do a thing like that,” I protested.

It took me three days, as usual, to absorb Miriam's advice, and then I did exactly as she had suggested, pretending it was my idea. Other couples used to joke about us. We would go to a party and end up in a corner, or sitting together on the stairs, gabbing away, ignoring everybody else. Then some gossip wound its way back to Miriam. She was out to lunch with one of her so-called girlfriends, then embroiled in an ugly divorce action, and she was told, “I thought Barney had eyes only for you. At least that's what people say. Now
please don't be angry with me, but, speaking from experience, I don't want you to be the last to know. Dorothy Weaver, you don't know her, saw him at the Johnsons' cocktail party last Wednesday. And there was your devoted husband coming on to a woman. Chatting her up. Whispering in her ear. Massaging her back. They left together.”

“I know all about that.”

“Thank God, because the last thing I want to do is upset you.”

“Oh dear, I'm afraid that woman was me, and we went on to the Ritz from there, to drink champagne, and afterwards, now don't you repeat this, but I agreed to go home with him.”