Solomon Gursky Was Here (52 page)

“The son is worthless and Harry McClure's a boor. He's a regular at those appalling Beaver Club dinners. All got up in whiskers, goatee, frock coat and beaver hat. Excuse me,” Callaghan said, rising, “but my bladder isn't what it used to be.”

When Callaghan returned, he settled into his chair, reached for the bottle, and said, “Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish the famine; and Jews the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from the Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are still huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared by the Americans on one side and the bush on the other. And now that we are here, prospering, we do our damn best to exclude more ill-bred newcomers, because they remind us of our own mean origins in the draper's shop in Inverness or the
shtetl
or the bog. What was I talking about?”

“Solomon.”

“Okay. Solomon. There are some things even a man of genius can never overcome and that's his origins. He was not her sort. Sure, her grandfather was a swindler, but he was knighted for his efforts. Like Sir Hugh Allan. Had the Jesuits or the rabbis got their hands on Diana she would have been the better for it, left with mysteries to conjure with, real baggage to check. But her school was Miss Edgar's and Miss Cramp's and what she learned there was never to cross her legs, and not to laugh out loud in the theatre or eat in public. She was brought up to believe that a lady only had her name in the newspaper three times: when she was born, when she married, and when she died. And hello, hello, along comes this notorious thundering Jew, who will not be denied, and she was both fascinated and terrified. She didn't turn up at the trial and he never forgave her for that. And she's just one chunk of the wreckage Solomon left in his wake. Damn him.”

“I thought he was your friend.”

“You don't understand anything. I count myself blessed that I knew a man of such roaring. I loved him.”

Moses cooked the fresh asparagus for the two of them, supporting the crowns with crumpled foil to lift them out of the water, and then he asked Callaghan if he had an empty jar he could borrow.

“Whatever for?”

“The water will make a nourishing broth.”

Ten

Diana McClure's second letter, the one delivered posthumously, began:

Having rambled on at length once, and bid you a somewhat self-pitying adieu, here I am again, pen in hand.

Forgive me.

There was no boy with a fishing pole passing on his way to the brook, averting his eyes from my peeled egg of a head. But I thought it a permissible indulgence, a nice literary touch. Look at it this way. As an old lady sits in her wheelchair, grieving over what might have been, waiting for death, Huck Finn passes with his fishing pole. Life goes on. On reflection, most assuredly an image more maudlin than original. A lie, in any event.

You inquired about my first meeting with Solomon at the Chalet Antoine, when I was young and silly but passably pretty and he charged with such audacity and appetite and, above all, rage.

At the time, I would have sworn that I quit the bar for the terrace because I knew that Solomon's intrusion would culminate in violence and wished to avoid it.

Another fib. I was flirting, sending a signal. I wanted him to join me on the terrace. But first I wanted him to follow me with those hot eyes, watching me stride on limbs that had not yet betrayed me and I still took for an entitlement. Look, Solomon Gursky. Look look. Diana Morgan is different. Not only intriguing to look at, one eye brown, one eye blue, but also reasonably intelligent. The things you recall in your senescence. The curse of memory. I had two magazines with me at the time,
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
. I hid them, lest he consider me flighty,
and wished that I had brought my copy of
Ulysses
with me, because that would have impressed him. So why, once he joined me on the terrace, did I turn down his invitation to dinner? I was scared of what the others would say if they found out, especially Stu MacIntyre. But, above all, I was frightened of the turbulence Solomon evoked in me.

No sooner did I return to our cottage than I looked up the entry on Prester John in our Encyclopedia Britannica. Then I went for another swim in that lake that would be my undoing.

I learned from a shopkeeper in the village that Solomon had not left Ste.-Adèle, but was staying with his brother. When the invitation to tea came from Morrie I understood and began to count the hours, deliberating on what I should wear and imagining our conversation, polishing phrases that would do me credit. I also got into a horrid row at the dinner table with my father and Stu MacIntyre. My father, I should explain, was in a justifiably vile temper. The day before the invitation to tea came he had had to drive into Montreal, because our house had been burgled in his absence. He did not yet know that the police would recover everything within a week. Everything, but a portrait that had been painted of me that I, for one, considered no great loss.

According to Stu MacIntyre, Solomon was not only a notorious bootlegger, but a killer whom he intended to see behind bars. My father reminded me that his father, Sir Russell Morgan, had been swindled by Solomon's grandfather Ephraim. “That Jew sold him properties in the Townships that he claimed were veined with gold and then disappeared.”

In the end, the fever struck and I couldn't lift my head, never mind go to tea. Emile Boisvert, our caretaker, explained that I was unwell, but Solomon didn't believe it. Deeply insulted, he almost destroyed the cherry wood table he had made for me. I assume that it has arrived safely and that you are treating it with beeswax, as requested.

The opening days of the trial compounded the initial misunderstanding. Solomon scanning the courtroom every morning, disappointed that if nothing else I wasn't sufficiently curious to attend. Then he spoke with Stu MacIntyre, who told him that I had been crippled by polio. Solomon sent a car round to my house and the two of us met in
a suite he kept under another name in the Windsor Hotel. We met again the following night and the night after that we became lovers, Solomon astonished by the evidence of the sheets. I not only had eyes of a different colour, but I was also a virgin. This prompted a measure of tenderness from him, but I suspected that it was forced in the hothouse, and I had my first glimpse of his vulgar side, a tendency to strut just a little.

Our stealthy meetings in that suite, festooned with red roses, adrift in champagne, were fraught with difficulties. Solomon was well known in town, to say the least, and my condition made me conspicuous. My father and his cronies favoured the hotel bar and so did Harry McClure to whom I was more or less engaged. I could never stay the night, which infuriated Solomon, and led to my turning on him. “And how can you manage it so easily,” I asked, “married, with two children?”

“They mean nothing to me,” he said.

I reproached him for being callous.

“I suppose. Yes. But it's the truth.”

He immediately dismissed any show of concern on my part about the trial.

“On balance,” he once said, laughing, “there are more important trials going on right now in Moscow.”

But, prowling the suite, he raged against his accusers. “You people. You people. My grandfather sailed here with Franklin and hiked out of the Arctic. A mere boy, I once made my way home from the Polar Sea. How dare you sit in judgement. MacIntyre. R.B. Bennett. Bloody fools. Only Smith is not a hypocrite.”

His mockery of his brother Bernard, whom he abhorred, was far from enchanting to behold, but he lashed out at me on the one occasion I made a deprecating remark about him.

“Three hundred years ago in England, even a hundred years ago,
fifty
—or in the France of the Ancien Régime—the peregrinations of my devious brother would have secured the family a title rather than criminal charges. You people. You people. Dig deep enough into the past of any noble family and there is a Bernard at the root. The founder with the dirty fingernails. The killer. No better, possibly a lot
worse, than my brother. Besides, Bernard is blessed. He is foolish enough to think that everything that is important to him
is
important.”

So we had our time together, our pathetically few evenings of the only true love I have ever known and, as I write, I am a lady of seventy-three years. A melancholy confession, possibly. But I could name many others who haven't had as much.

Yes, but why didn't I run away with him, as he asked, even implored, fly away to a new and dangerous life, a question I have turned over and over in my mind ever since.

“I will come for you at six tomorrow morning. We will take nothing with us. We will travel as we are.”

Yes, yes, I said, but I phoned his suite at five
A.M.
to say, forgive me, but I can't do it.

“I thought as much,” he said, hanging up, passing sentence on me, flying off to his death.

Mine too, in a manner of speaking, though I will linger for a few months yet.

I was left with the cherry wood table and the photographs I scissored out of the next day's newspapers and still look at most days. Solomon in his flier's uniform, standing before his Sopwith Camel, on an airfield “somewhere in France.” Solomon seated with “Legs” Diamond in the absurdly named Hotsy-Totsy Club.

I believe what tipped the scales against my flying away with him was our last night together in the Windsor Hotel. That night I felt his eyes on my misshapen limb as I lurched to the bathroom, those hot judgemental eyes, and I have never felt such a chill before or since. All at once I understood that there was something dark in him, something Gursky, and that he would come to resent my imperfection, his passion for me yielding to pity. There would be no growing old gracefully together with a man who was bound to crave variety and renewals with other women and who had always to be in the eye of the hurricane. I was heartbroken, but in some ways just as calculating and understanding of my own nature as Solomon. Put another way, I knew that I would be able to tolerate the inevitable infidelities of a Harry McClure, but that Solomon Gursky could destroy me.

I was disqualified or, conversely, saved by my twisted leg from flying away to a new and dangerous life in quest of the Kingdom of Prester John. I couldn't, as he had asked, travel without baggage.

Look at it this way, Moses.

Do you think Paris would have abducted Helen if she hobbled or, if he had been so blind, that Menelaus wouldn't have said good riddance, leaving Troy intact? Consider Calypso. If she had suffered from an infirmity such as mine, surely Odysseus, far from being detained, would have put his shoulders to the oars. Or imagine what two families would have been spared if Romeo had seen Juliet lurching on to that balcony, her leg brace going click click click.

Cripples are not the stuff of romance.

Only Lord Byron, dragging his club foot, springs to mind as an exception to the rule, but such a failing in a man is regarded as interesting, even provocative, rather than disfiguring. Women must submit to a more exacting measure.

Of course in today's parlance I am no longer crippled but handicapped, a possible participant in wheelchair Olympics were I younger. In the new idiom, Solomon, the most defiantly Jewish man I have ever known, would be adjudged a member of a “non-visible minority”. Solomon non-visible. Imagine that.

Realist (and possibly coward) that I am, I settled for my library and my music and my garden and Harry McClure and the children we would have together. Obviously I would have flown closer to the sun with Solomon. However, the likelihood is that I also would have been burnt to a crisp long ago.

Harry keeps a mistress in an apartment on Drummond Street and is sufficiently unimaginative to consider that sinful rather than banal. But he continues to be a solicitous husband and no doubt he will miss me when I'm gone. Harry has been cursed with bad luck in his business affairs and has had to turn to me for help on more than one occasion, which possibly accounts for the popsy on Drummond Street. Once he risked most of our joint savings on an ill-timed property development in the suburbs. We surely would have been ruined had he not been able to unload the lot on the representatives of a British investor, a Sir Hyman Kaplansky, who was happily ignorant
of local real-estate conditions. More recently his partnership in the brokerage firm founded by his father was in question, which was humiliating. Then, as luck would have it, a Swiss investment trust (its patrimony unknown, naturally) chose Harry to broadcast their millions here. Only I know that he is restricted to buying shares as directed by Zurich, and such is the acuity of those people that his reputation as a shrewd trader has soared. I dearly hope it isn't Mafia money.

Enough.

This letter will be forwarded to you by my executors, after the fact, as it were. I wonder if Solomon would say that I brought the cancer on myself, saying no. Then why didn't he come round anyway and carry me off? Why didn't he insist?

It seems to me that our lives are consumed by countless wasting years, but only a few shining moments. I missed mine. Yes is what I should have said. Of course I should have said yes.

With fondest regards,
DIANA

P.S. Quite the best of recent gardening books is Christopher Lloyd's
The Well-Tempered Garden
. I'd send you my copy but I have written in the margins.