Barney's Version (44 page)
Authors: Mordecai Richler
“I must say, she is given to verbosity. In full flow, there was no stopping her, and I fear my mind had begun to drift. But the next thing I knew, she leaned over to remove my tray and I caught a glimpse of her pleasing bosom. She sat down on my bed again, and began to sniffle, and I felt obliged to take her in my arms to comfort her, and still she didn't stop her prattling. I began to stroke her here and then there, and her protests, a kind of cooing, struck me as an invitation. âYou mustn't.' âWe ought to stop right now.' âOh please, not there.'
And then, pretending that she wasn't returning my caresses, she started in on a dream she had had the previous night, even as she voluntarily raised her arms so that I could ease her out of her nightie, and, man, I figured the only way to shut her up was to fuck her, and that's how it happened. I think this bottle is empty.”
I went and fetched another.
“Chin-chin,” he said, reaching for a dish towel to wipe the sweat off his chest. “Are all the windows open?”
“I ought to knock your teeth out, Boogie.”
“Only after I've had a swim. Oh, she asked a lot of questions about Clara. You know, on reflection, I think I was no more than a convenient
deus ex machina
. She wanted to get even with you for that woman you're keeping in Toronto.”
“One minute,” I said. I hurried into our bedroom, and returned with my father's old service revolver, which I set down on the table between us. “Scared?” I asked.
“Couldn't that wait until after I've done some snorkelling?”
“You could do me a great service, Boogie.”
“Anything.”
“I want you to agree to be a co-respondent in my divorce. All you have to do is testify that I came home to my beloved wife and found you in bed with her.”
“Why, you planned this, you bastard. Taking advantage of an old friend,” he said, holding out his glass for a refill.
I scooped up the gun and aimed it at him. “Will you testify?” I demanded.
“I'll think it over on my swim,” he said, rising shakily to fetch my snorkelling equipment and flippers.
“You're too drunk to swim, you damn fool,” I said, following after him with that revolver still in hand.
“You come too,” he said, starting down the steep grassy slope to the water. “It will do us both good. Ime-tay or-fay old oys-bay to et-gay ober-say.”
“I'm going to lie down. So should you. Look at you, you can hardly walk in a straight line. Don't, Boogie.”
“Last guy in the water does the washing up.”
“Stop,” I hollered, “or I'll shoot.”
Boogie guffawed in appreciation of my jest. He paused to adjust his snorkelling gear, falling down twice, and then continued down the slope in his flippers. “Look out,” I said, and I fired a shot well over his head.
Boogie's arms shot up in a gesture of surrender. “
Kamerad
,” he called, “
kamerad. Nisch shissen
.” Then he zigzagged the rest of the way down the slope, raced across the dock, and plunged into the lake, disappearing underwater.
I retreated into the living room to lie down, and had just begun to drift off on the sofa when the phone rang.
“I am calling to inform you that my daughter will be staying with me for the foreseeable future. I am instructed that you are not to attempt to communicate with her, but may address any inquiries to Hyman Goldfarb,
QC
.”
“Why, Goldilocks, that ain't very friendly.”
“How dare you.”
“And tell her for me that Miriam Greenberg hasn't got an unfortunate voice. It is a beautiful voice,” I said, hanging up.
Big-mouth, I thought. Now you've gone and done it. Hughes-McNoughton will blow his top.
Getting down on all fours, I made it back to the sofa and fell into a contented sleep instantly. I had only been out for minutes, it seemed to me, when a roaring, like an airplane engine, shook the room, and I dreamt that my plane was going down. Shaking off my stupor, I was overwhelmed by confusion. Was I in Montreal? Miriam's apartment? The cottage? Scrambling slowly to my rubbery feet, I staggered outside, trying to locate the source of that roaring. It had been a passing airplane, but it was now so far away I couldn't tell whether it was one of those
NATO
fighters out of Plattsburg or a transatlantic jet. Then I saw that it was dusk. Glancing at my wristwatch, I was surprised to discover that I had been asleep for more than three hours. I slipped back into the cottage, splashed my face with cold water, and then stood at the foot of the stairs and called out, “Boogie.”
No answer.
“Wakey, wakey, Boogieman.”
He wasn't in his bedroom, or anywhere else in the cottage. Passed out on the dock, probably, I thought, but he wasn't there either.
Oh, my God, he's drowned. No, not Boogie. Please, God
. The lake is shallow and clear for forty feet out from our dock. I leaped into our boat, got the outboard motor to start, and began covering water, searching the bottom, increasingly frantic. Finally I climbed back up to the cottage and phoned the provincial police. They arrived two endless hours later and I gave them an edited version of what had happened. I didn't mention my quarrel with The Second Mrs. Panofsky, or even her earlier presence at the cottage. However, I did allow that Boogie and I had been drinking, and that I had pleaded with him not to swim.
Boogie's body had not yet floated to the surface, and a police motor boat launched at Merkin's Point, and covering the shoreline, could find nothing.
“Maybe he's tangled in weeds somewhere,” I said.
“No.”
Late the next afternoon the provincials were back, accompanied by a detective. “My name's Sean O'Hearne,” said the detective. “I think we should have a little chat.”
Boogie plunging into the lake was the last I ever saw of him. I'm willing to swear on the heads of my grandchildren that was exactly how it happened, but he'd disappeared more than once before, and I have never given up hope. Not a day passes when I don't think there will be a postcard from Tashkent or Nome or Addis Ababa. Or, still better, that he will sneak up behind me at Dink's and say, “Boo.”
Enough is enough. Boogie would be seventy-one years old now â no, seventy-two â and I can't understand why he won't appear to clear my name once and for all.
34
The Weizmann Institute in Rehovot.
35
It's veal marrow.
36
Actually, “Itsy-Bitsy” was a hit in 1960.
37
Actually, “downsizing” didn't enter the language until September 1975, when
U.S. News & World Report
informed its readers, “Â âLonger, lower, wider' is out. âSmall, smaller, smallest' is in. Detroit's engineers call the current trend âdownsizing.'Â ” Six years later, when the recession struck in 1981, and companies began to lay off workers by the thousands, “downsizing” made the leap to its current meaning.
38
Ibiza.
39
Actually, this letter from Boogie was written in 1957 and mailed from New York, not Taiwan, after Boogie had been to his first rock ân' roll concert.
40
As I was going through my father's manuscript, limiting myself to correcting facts and filling in names, places, or dates, where memory had failed him, I also happened to be reading Peter Vansittart's memoir of postâWorld War II London,
In the Fifties
(John Murray, London, 1995), and came upon the following passage on
this page
:
In 1938, a mildewed colonel about whom we gibed that he had lost one leg at Mons, another at Ypres, a third on the Marne, and the last of his wits on the Somme, had barked at me: “Your Mr. Auden's no great lover of Herr Hitler, but will he be joining me to fight the bugger?” Many whom Auden derided â colonels, retarded public school boys, suburban golfers, trite-tongued mediocrities, romantic but goofy stuffed shirts â saved Western civilization. My vision of Auden as anti-Fascist commando could not be maintained when, with the barbarians at the gate, he departed to America.
I can't add plagiarism to the many sins my father has to answer for. Rather, I prefer to think Kate was right when she insisted that this had to be an innocent error. “No doubt,” she said, “shuffling through his index cards, Daddy mistakenly took a thought of Vansittart's that he had transcribed for one of his own.”
41
Chico. But there was also a fourth brother, Zeppo, who appeared in many of the films.
42
In Scotland, an advocate, or, following recent legislation, a solicitor-advocate, would have pleaded her case.
43
“Pepsi” is pejorative. Slang for French Canadians, who were reputed to drink Pepsi-Colas for breakfast.
44
Backstrom scored at 4:12, assisted by Geoffrion and Moore.
45
Actually, it was Ezio Pinza in
South Pacific
, which ran four years nine months on Broadway.
46
Geoffrion scored at 13:42, assisted by Backstrom and Harvey.
47
Johnson scored at 16:26, assisted by Backstrom.
7,8
Actually, it was Pulford who scored first, at 4:27, assists Armstrong and Brewer. Bonin scored at 9:56, assisted by Henri Richard and Harvey, and Geoffrion scored at 19:26, assisted by Backstrom and Johnson.
49
Toronto scored twice in the third period. Mahovlich, at 12:07, assisted by Harris and Ehman, and Olmstead, at 16:19, on a power play, assisted by Ehman.
50
My doubts about the chronology of these events were confirmed when I discovered that the hockey game, on April 9, 1959, ended at 10:29, but the overnight train to Toronto left at 10:25, which meant that it would have been impossible for my father to learn the final score and still have time to race to Windsor Station and board my mother's train. However, when I confronted my mother with these troubling details, her lower lip began to tremble. “It's true,” she said, “it's true.” And then she began to sob, and I thought it insensitive to pursue the matter further.
I do not doubt my father's veracity or my mother's testimony, but I do believe Barney muddled things. Miriam probably left the Ritz at the end of the second period, at 9:41, and my father's taxi was not tied up in Stanley Cup traffic until he returned from the Montreal West station. Another possibility is that the departure of the overnight train to Toronto was delayed. I have twice written to Canadian Pacific to ask for the departure time of the overnight train to Toronto, on April 9, 1959, but I am still waiting for a reply.
51
They are called Fruits of Islam.
52
Eugène Ionesco (1912â1994), Romanian-French dramatist of the Theatre of the Absurd, author of
The Bald Soprano
,
The Lesson
, and other plays.
53
Rhinoceros
.
54
Described as “a tartan skirt” on
this page
.
55
The song was “Mair-zy Doats” on
this page
.
56
Glenn Close.
57
Fatal Attraction
, co-starring Michael Douglas. Released in 1987 by Paramount. Its North American box-office gross was $156,645,693.
58
Cedar.
59
Monsieur Verdoux
(Universal, 1947) was not Chaplin's last film. His last one was
A Countess from Hong Kong
(Charles Chaplin, 1967), and it starred Marlon Brando.
60
Actually, the first issue of
Playboy
did not appear until December 1953.
61
$375 plus 6 times 20 actually equals $495.
62
On July 16, 1942, thousands of French police officers rounded up thirteen thousand Jews in Paris, invalids, pregnant women, and three thousand children among them. The Jews were locked into the winter Vélodrome without food or water to await deportation to an extermination camp. The round-up was part of an agreement Vichy's Pierre Laval had made with the Nazis, who were hard put to cope with the transportation of so many Jews at one go.
63
Actually the quotation is from
The Young Author
, written when Dr. Johnson was twenty years old.
64
John Ogilby is long forgotten and so is Elkanah Settle, once the official “City Poet” of London.
65
Stephen Spender. Lines from “I think continually of those who are truly great,” p. 30,
Collected Poems
,
1928â1985
. Random House, New York, 1986.
66
Srinagar.
67
Actually this observation was first and famously made by Truman Capote.
68
Dopey and Bashful.
69
Sloan Wilson.
