Son of a Smaller Hero (7 page)

“How do you feel about it, darling?”

“What? … I’m afraid I …”

“I was just telling Noah that we could fix up the study for him. He’s paying ten dollars a week rent where he is. Here, he’d have books. The opportunity to meet people. He can’t get on with his studies driving a taxi eight hours a day. We could manage wonderfully. He could mark my papers. He – what do you say?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Well?”

“Would you mind sleeping on a cot, Noah?”

He wasn’t aware of the irony in her manner. “No. Not at all. But I’d have to pay rent. I wouldn’t think of it otherwise …”

No. You wouldn’t, she thought. You’re not that generous. “We’ll discuss that later.”

“The sooner you move in the better, Noah,” Theo said warmly.

Theo turned to Miriam in bed later that night. “I suppose I should have asked you first. About his moving in, I mean.”

“Oh.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“No. Tell me, darling.”

“Nothing I could explain.”

He put his hand on her arm. Her flesh was warm.

“I hope that John doesn’t make an advertising man out of him,” Theo said.

“John? Noah wouldn’t have anything to do with
him.”

“You say that with such certainty. How would you know?”

“Let’s go to sleep,” she said.

A half-hour later he felt for her in bed but she wasn’t there. Her body was a habit, a comfort, to him and he found it difficult to sleep without her. She was standing by the window and smoking.

“What’s wrong, Miriam?”

“I don’t know.”

“Coming to bed?”

“Soon. You go to sleep.”

He waited. There was that flicker of expectancy in her eyes. He knew what that meant. An ordeal – a pretence – for him; and for her – frustration. Afterwards neither of them would sleep. She would comfort her defeated man. A woman unsatisfied – but triumphant. He waited fifteen minutes, and then said: “I was just thinking. Remember that night before I went overseas, the night of my last leave … You were Chuck’s girl then, weren’t you? I mean …”

“Chuck is dead.”

“I didn’t mean
that
. I was just trying to … I’m not jealous, darling. Besides, that sort of thing doesn’t mean anything. I know that!”

“Yes. I know you know.”

“Marrying a woman doesn’t mean you own her.”

“Theo. Are you happy with me? Seriously.”

“Why, certainly. Of course, darling. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I’m happy, too. I am. I’m coming to bed.”

Montreal is cleanly defined on cold autumn nights. Each building, each tree, seems to exist as a separate and shivering object, exposed to the winds again after a flabby summer. Downtown the neon trembles like fractures in the dark. Fuzziness, bugs, groups of idlers blurring cigar-store windows, have all retreated together. Whores no longer stroll up and down St. Lawrence Boulevard, but beckon from the shelter of doorways or linger longer at nightclub bars. The mountain, which all summer long had seemed a gentle green slope, looms up brutal against the night sky. Streets seem longer, noises more hard.

Autumn is stingy, Noah thought unhappily.

Walking back to his room, down St. Catherine Street, he stopped several times to blow on his hands. He peered into the window of Dinty Moore’s restaurant where sporty men sat around telling masculine jokes and cleaning their fingernails. Later, he thought, they will move on to various nightclubs where they’ll drink cool drinks with bored, anonymous women. But they won’t drink too much.

A man yelled: “
GZET
! Layst noos!
GZET!
Payph!
GZET!
GZET!”

Bums sprawled on the concrete seats on Phillips Square, and across the street in Morgan’s windows, cool mannequins like all our next-door neighbours prepared to pass this and every night on Beautyrest mattresses.

The sign in Rand’s Clothing window said:

When he got back to his room he began to feel that something was wrong. She doesn’t want me to move in, he thought. He got out his pad and wrote down, Pound, Eliot, Kafka, Auden. Then,
remembering Theo’s library, he got up in disgust. There must be some other way, he thought. It would be crazy to read all those books. There isn’t enough time. Noah rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. She’s perfect, that woman. They’re
Goyim
.

Noah’s first encounter with the
Goyim
had been in Prevost, long ago. Prevost is in the Laurentians, about ten miles past St. Jerome.…

That bright, cloudless Friday morning in the summer of 1941, Noah, Gas, and Hoppie were to meet on the balcony of Old Annie’s candy store. They were going to climb the mountain behind the Nine Cottages to get to Lac Gandon, where the
Goyim
were.

Hoppie turned up first.

Old Annie, who was a tiny, grey-haired widow with black, mournful eyes, looked the boy up and down suspiciously. A first-aid kit and a scout knife were strapped to his belt. “What is?” she asked. “A revolution? A war?” Hoppie grimaced. “He who hears no evil, speaks no evil,” he said. Old Annie’s store was a yellow shack that was all but covered with red-and-green signs advertising Kik and Sweet Caporal cigarettes. She wasn’t called Old Annie because she was sixty-two. Long ago, in Lithuania, the first three children born to her parents had not survived their infancy. So the village wise man had suggested that if another child was born to them they should call her
alte
(old) immediately, and God would understand.

Gas arrived next. He had a
BB
gun and a package of sandwiches.

“Knock, knock,” he said.

“Who’s there?” Hoppie asked.

“Ago.”

“Ago who?”

“Aw, go tell your mother she wants you.”

Behind Old Annie’s store was the yellow field that was used as the market. Early every Friday morning the French Canadian farmers arrived with poultry, vegetables, and fruit. They were a
hard, sceptical bunch, but the Jewish wives were a pretty tough crowd themselves, and by late afternoon the farmers were worn out and grateful to get away. The women, who were ruthless bargainers, spoke a mixture of French, English, and Yiddish with the farmers. “S
o fiel
, M’nsieur, for dis
kleine
chicken?
Vous
crazy?”

Pinky’s Squealer saw the two boys sitting on the steps, waiting for Noah. He approached them diffidently. “Where you goin’?” he asked.

“To China,” Gas said.

When the Squealer’s mother wanted him to go to the toilet she would step out on her balcony and yell: “Dollink, dollink, time to water the teapot.” Pinky, who was the Squealer’s cousin, was seventeen years old. His proper name was Milton Fishman. He was rather pious, and conducted services at Camp Mahia. The Squealer was his informer.

“I’ve got a quarter,” Pinky’s Squealer said.

“Grease it well,” Gas said.

Those Jews who lived on St. Dominique Street, St. Urbain, Rachel, and City Hall clubbed together and took cottages in Prevost for the summer. How they raised the money, what sacrifices they made, were comparatively unimportant – the children had to have sun. Prevost has a very small native population and most of the cottages are owned by French Canadians who live in Shawbridge, just up the hill. The
C.P.R.
railway station is in Shawbridge. Prevost, at the foot of the hill, is separated from Shawbridge by that bridge reputedly built by a man named Shaw. It is a confusion of temporary clapboard shacks and cottages strewn over hills and fields and joined by dirt roads and an elaborate system of paths. The centre of the village is at the foot of the bridge. Here are Zimmerman’s, Blatt’s, The River-View Inn, Stein the Butcher, and – off on the dirt road to the right – the synagogue and the beach. In 1941 Zimmerman and Blatt still ran highly competitive general stores on opposite sides of the highway. Both stores were sprawling dumpy buildings badly in need of a paint job and had dance halls and huge balconies – where
you could also dance – attached. But Zimmerman had a helper named Zelda and that gave him the edge over Blatt. Zelda’s signs were posted all over Zimmerman’s.

Over the fruit stall:

Over the cash:

However, if you could get it cheaper at Blatt’s, Zelda always proved that what you had bought was not as fresh, or of a cheaper quality.

The beach was a field of spiky grass and tree stumps. Plump, middle-aged women, their flesh burned pink, spread out blankets and squatted in their bras and bloomers, playing poker, smoking, and drinking Cokes. The vacationing furriers and pressers seldom wore bathing-suits either. They didn’t swim. They set up card-tables and chairs and played pinochle solemnly, smoking foul cigars and cursing the sun. The children dashed in and out among them playing tag or tossing a ball about. Boys staggered between sprawling sun-bathers, lugging pails packed with ice and shouting: “Ice-cold drinks. Chaw-lit bahs. Cigarettes!” Occasionally, a woman, her wide-brimmed straw hat flapping as she waddled from table to table, her smile as big as her aspirations, gold teeth glittering, would intrude on the card players, asking – nobody’s forcing, mind you – if they would like to buy a raffle in aid of the Mizrachi Fresh Air Fund or the
J.N.F
. Naked babies bawled. Plums, peaches, watermelons, were consumed, pits and peels being tossed indiscriminately on the grass. The yellow river was unfailingly condemned by the Health Board during the last two weeks of August, when the polio scare was at its worst. But the
children paid no attention. They shrieked with delight whenever one of their huge mothers descended into the water briefly to duck herself – once, twice – warn the children against swimming out too far and then return – refreshed – to her poker game. The French Canadians were too shocked to complain, but the priests sometimes preached sermons against the indecency of the Jews. (But as Mort Shub said: “Liss’n, it’s their job. A priest’s gotta make a living too.”) At night most of the Jews crowded into the dance-halls at Zimmerman’s and Blatt’s. The kids, like Noah and Gas and Hoppie, climbed up the windows, and, peashooters in their mouths, took careful aim at the dancers’ legs before firing. Fridays, the wives worked extremely hard cleaning and cooking for the sabbath. Everybody got dressed up in the afternoon in anticipation of the arrival of the fathers, who were met in Shawbridge, most of them having arrived on the 6:15 weekend excursion train. Then the procession through Shawbridge, down the hill and across the bridge, began. That event always horrified the residents of that village. Who were those strange, cigar-smoking men, burdened down with watermelons and Kik bottles, yelling to their children, laughing, slapping their wives’ behinds and – worst of all – waving to the sombre Scots who sat petrified on their balconies?

Noah showed up last.

“Pinky’s Squealer wants to come with us,” Gas said.

“Did you tell him where we’re going?”

“Ixnay,” Gas said. “You think I’m crazy?”

“He’s got a quarter,” Hoppie said.

Pinky’s Squealer showed Noah the quarter.

“All right,” Noah said.

Old Annie, shaking her head sadly, watched the four boys start off across the fields. Noah led. Hoppie, who came next, was Rabbi Drazen’s son. He was a skinny boy with big brown eyes. His father had a small but devoted following. Hoppie hung around the synagogue every evening and stopped old men on their way to prayers.
“Gimme a nickel and I’ll give you a blessink.” He didn’t do too badly. “I’m holy as hell,” he told Noah one evening.

“What’s the difference between a mailbox and an elephant’s ass?” Gas asked.

“I dunno,” Pinky’s Squealer replied quickly.

“I wouldn’t send
you
to mail my letters.”

Gas was plump, fair-haired, and covered with freckles.

They turned up the dirt road that led to the Nine Cottages, the sun beating down ruthlessly on their brown bodies. They passed Kravitz’s cottage, Becky Goldberg’s place, and the shapeless shack that housed ten shapeless Cohens.

There was still lots of blue in the sky but where there were clouds the clouds got very dark. The tall grass at the foot of the mountain was stiff and yellow and made you itch. There were also mushy patches where bulrushes grew, but they avoided those. The mountain was cool, but the boys had a long climb and descent ahead of them. The soft plump ground they tramped on was padded with pine cones, needles, and dead leaves. Sunlight moved deviously among the birch and maple and fir trees and the mountain had a dark, damp smell to it. There was the occasional cawing of crows: they saw two woodpeckers: and, once, a humming-bird. They reached the top of the mountain around one o’clock and sat down on an open patch of ground to eat their lunch. Gas chased around after grasshoppers, storing them in an old mayonnaise jar that had two holes punched in the top. After they had finished their sandwiches they started out again, this time down the other side of the mountain. The foliage thickened, and in their eagerness to get along quickly they scratched their legs and arms in the bush, stumbling into the occasional ditch concealed by leaves and bruising their ankles against stones. They heard voices in the distance. Noah, who had been given the
BB
gun, pulled back the catch. Gas picked up a rock, Hoppie unstrapped his scout knife. “We’ll be late for
shabus,”
Pinky’s Squealer said. “Maybe we should go back?”

“Go ahead,” Hoppie said. “But watch out for snakes, eh?”

“I didn’t say anything!”

Voices, laughter, too, now, came splashing loudly through the trees. The ground began to level off and, just ahead, they saw the beach. There were real canoes, a diving-board, and lots of big crazy-coloured umbrellas and deck-chairs. The boys approached the beach cautiously, crouching in the bushes. Noah was amazed. The men were tall and the women were awfully pretty, lying out in the sun there, just like that, not afraid of anything. There was no yelling or watermelon peels or women in bloomers. Everything was so clean. Beautiful, almost.