St. Urbain's Horseman (20 page)

“Joey,” Jake said, beaming.

Hanna nodded, reaching for her bottle of Carlings. Then she began to tell them about her husband. “He was a born bummer, my Baruch, an animal. He used to go for the beer, he could guzzle it all day, and at night it was a whore for him or the wrestling matches. He stole from your grandfather, Yankel. As a youngster, he was in and out of prison for disturbing the peace. Years before I met him, ask your father if you don't believe me, your family didn't see Baruch for three, maybe four months, and then my man would turn up at two in the morning, banging on the door with his fists, drunk, his head bloody and stinking of vomit, shouting curses at your grandfather. Jews, he would holler, I'm here! Jews, it's Baruch, your brother is home!”

She continued to reminisce about her husband in the car.

“Once he gave Yosele Altman such a beating he had to go into the hospital for stitches. He didn't care for your paw, you know that, don't you, Yankel? Once he said to him, hey, you know what you are, Issy? No, what? Your father's mistake. Or he would shove a finger under his nose and say, that's the one that went through the paper, Issy. Oh, he was a walking garbage can, my Baruch, a brawler. A crook. And a nut case! I should drop dead if he didn't once travel as a strongman for six months with a French Canadian carnival bunch, chewing razor blades and bending bars in Chicoutimi and Trois Pistoles and Tadoussac. In the old days in Montreal, when there were no sidewalks on St. Urbain, just mud everywhere, and whorehouses, he used to hang out in the taverns on the docks with sailors and naturally one day he signed up for a ship himself. Either he was drunk or kidnapped. Who knows?”

Hanna insisted they come into the house with her, and led them by the hand into the basement, through the playroom, into her own bedroom, where she stood on a chair, stretched her dry twig of a body, and brought a hat box out of her cupboard.

“You know what this is,” she said, gently easing a black-felt, broad-brimmed fedora out of its tissue paper, “it's a genuine Borsalino, my friends. One of the very first to be seen in western Canada. My Baruch used to wear it in Winnipeg,” Hanna said, wiping tears from her eyes, “strutting down Portage Street, and the hunky women would come in their pants, they'd never seen the likes. The Métis, who were afraid of nobody when they had the liquor in them, would step down into the gutter to let a man pass.”

Jake and Luke drove back to their apartment in silence, each unwilling to speak, but neither of them could sleep, so they broke open a bottle of brandy and opened the window to the summery breeze.

There was such a spill of Hershes, Jake explained, second cousins by the bushel and a clamor of aunts, short, red-haired cousins by Shmul Leib's spiteful second marriage and fiercely corseted great-aunts from Motke's side, such a world of Hershes, Jake said, that as a
simple-minded boy he had simply accepted the fact that Hanna, yet another Hersh by marriage, had materialized out of the heat haze one day with three children and no husband. But of course there was a husband.

Baruch.

In 1901 Jake's paternal grandfather and great-uncle abandoned Lód
to come to Montreal, where they both begat enormous families (Jake's grandfather, fourteen children; his great-uncle, twelve) and this, Jake went on to say, he had assumed as a boy, made for the sum total of their Hershes. He had been mistaken. There was a third brother. Baruch. Jake's grandfather and his brother sent money to Poland so that Baruch, the youngest of the three, could join them. Only a week off the boat in Montreal, Baruch cut loose, he was transmogrified. He proclaimed himself a
shoimar-shabus
no more. Defiantly, he ate non-kosher food and was prepared to work on the sabbath. His elder brothers disowned him.

Eventually, Baruch either signed on a ship or, as Hanna suggested, was kidnapped. In any event, he sailed as a stoker to Argentina. He swung around the Cape on an oiler and served for a season as a longshoreman in Australia. He ventured to Japan and peddled slot machines in China. He lived in Tahiti and prospected for gold in the Yukon before he finally settled in Winnipeg, where he married Hanna, had a daughter, and knew brief but gaudy affluence as a whisky runner during prohibition. Baruch was shot up in a gun battle on the Montana border and following that, as far as Jake knew, his luck soured. A leg wound never healed properly, he developed gangrene, and the leg had to be amputated above the knee.

Luke rose shakily, staggered into the kitchen, and boiled some water for instant coffee. “Hey, it's getting brighter,” he said, “or they've just polished off Etobicoke with the Bomb.”

In the distance, the sky was on fire. Bleeding red.

“Let's call some girls,” Luke suggested. “Gorgeous girls, eh, with long legs and filigreed undies.” But it was 5:30 a.m. “It must be spiffy,”
Luke mused, “to have your own breasts. To get up in the morning, you know, and not have to send out.” Then he sat in the window sill, glaring into the gathering traffic below, and began to excoriate all things peculiar to Toronto. “I hate this city. It's ugly. It's provincial.”

“It's the farm club, Luke. We are permitted its minor league facilities so long as we don't linger.”

England, England, Jake thought, and, though he had yet to direct his first TV play, he declared he would settle for nothing less than becoming a film director of international importance. “If I'm thirty and still in TV, I quit.”

Luke swore his first stage play would have to be good enough to open in London or New York. Or not at all.

They had only just fallen asleep, it seemed, when the door bell rang, Luke taking it.

“It's not you I want, Mr. Scott, sir.”

Duddy went to Jake's room, shaking him awake, and, resentfully, Jake struggled into his clothes and accompanied him to the bank to sign for the twenty-five hundred dollar loan.

With which, after shaking salt over his left shoulder, slipping into a synagogue to kiss a
sefer torah
, touching the first cripple he encountered on Jarvis Street, Duddy registered Dr. McCoy's Real Wate-Loss as a limited company, cajoling an acquaintance he had already softened up, the corner druggist's son, a dense but greedy Bavarian, to serve as vice-president and mail drop for a cut of the gross. It was more than a dumb hunch. Two weeks earlier, brooding over a midnight coffee at Fran's, kidding the obese waitress, Duddy had doled out one of his pills, promising it would help. To his amazement, when he popped in again ten days later, the fat Polack bitch had actually lost eighteen pounds. Even though, as she swore, she was still eating prodigiously. More than ever, with insatiable appetite.

Dr. McCoy's Real Wate-Loss pills, its mail order advertising limited, sales ultimately dependent on word of mouth, caught on
surprisingly well from the beginning, especially in rural areas and mining towns, like Sudbury and Elliot Lake. Duddy, his projected profits huge, luxuriated in Jake's apartment, foolishly impervious to Luke's withering presence, saying he would soon cut out his New York supplier and manufacture the pill himself, going Canada-wide with a splash, and maybe even dropping the Bavarian punk.

“Probably, he's a Nazi anyway,” Luke said.

“Well, you'd know, wouldn't you? That's your line.”

Luke cursed, he lashed out impatiently. Again and again they went at each other with knives, with a penchant for evoking the worst in each other.

Luke, burdened by his acquired liberal baggage, and possibly a shade too proud of it, castigated Duddy because he felt that it was just this manner of unprincipled operator who undermined his impassioned defense of Jews to his father and his bemused cronies at the Granite Club.

Duddy feared Luke. He didn't trust him.

“You know, Jake, when I want something, I grab it. I fight, no holds barred. That bastard, he's a cool one, he sits back and waits for it to drop in his lap. Because it's coming to him, like everything else in this country. What's the world? It's the inheritance of Lucas Robin Scott, Esq. But underneath that self-mocking tone, and that cool, there's a heart of stone. He takes care of number one just like you and me, Yankel, but he was raised to coat it with sugar.”

Instinct, albeit based on a distressing incident, saved Duddy from going Canada-wide, as he had bragged. Ensconced in Fran's one night, sipping coffee as he scrutinized the market pages in the
Globe
, he inquired solicitously after his once corpulent waitress. Maria was in the hospital, wasting away, they said. God knows, he thought, it could be an abortion. Or the clap. But all the same, on his next trip to Montreal, Duddy sought out a French Canadian druggist, somebody unlikely to ask questions, and had the pill analyzed, saying it was
something his overweight wife had been given on their Mexican holiday. When he discovered the pill's crucial component, he drove all through the night back to Toronto, where the enraptured Bavarian boy, his proud father burbling blessings over both of them, greeted him with more orders.

“George,” Duddy said, “this has to be a small gold mine, right? I mean, projecting conservatively, there has to be ten thousand dollars a year net in this with hardly any work or capital outlay, and that's only the beginning?”

George beamed, his father clucked gleefully.

“But I'm in bad trouble.”

Gravely, the old man brought out a bottle, pouring Scotch into beakers.

“I've got a real estate problem in the Laurentians. A tax headache. I need ten thousand dollars. Like yesterday. I hate doing this to you, fella, because we're buddies, but I've found a buyer –”

“We're partners,” George brayed.

“– and the shrewd bastard, he wants it all.”

“You are partners, Mr. Kane. My son and you –”

“I don't want to be unpleasant, but if you study our letter of agreement, you will see I have the right to buy you out at any time.”

Father and son consulted heatedly in German.

“Ten thousand lousy dollars. It's a steal. But what am I to do? I'm cornered.”

“What if my father was to raise the money?”

“Naturally, I'd rather sell to you, but, fellas, let's be realistic. Where can you raise ten thousand dollars” – Duddy paused – “within ten days” – and paused again – “in cash?”

Which simultaneously provided Duddy with a stake and washed him clean of Dr. McCoy's Real Wate-Loss. None too soon, either. For a week later the first ambiguous news story trickled out of Elliot Lake. Two uranium miners had been admitted to the hospital in an
emaciated condition. Duddy, joyously laying the
Star
aside, called his broker, overriding his objections to put in a hefty order for uranium stock shorts, and then wrote letters to three of the most radical socialist M.P.'s in Ottawa, enclosing the
Star
clipping. Only three days passed before one of them rose indignantly in the House to ask a leading question about the inherent dangers of radiation to miners and, just as Duddy had anticipated, the stocks began to tumble.

Hoo haw, Duddy thought, singing in the shower, dancing into his suit, as he prepared to attend the party in honor of the first television play to be directed by Jacob Hersh. His schoolmate, little Jake, with his name up there on the trans-Canada network screen. “General Motors Theater presents …”

Doug Fraser was there, so was Jenny, all the girls from the cast, the crew, and, naturally, loping, straw-haired Lucas Scott, Esq., still a zero, up to his neck in rejected scripts.

“How goes it, Shakespeare?” Duddy asked, beaming.

“Don't ever make the mistake of trying to match witticisms with me, Kravitz. You haven't a hope.”

Retreating, Duddy joined the circle on the floor around Hanna, who was telling tales of Joey. “He was born in a freezing miner's shanty in Yellowknife, with the help, if you can call it that, of a Polack midwife …”

Because Jake, caught up with his goysy set, Scott's rich bunch, seemed to have no time for him, Duddy left early, hoping to buy a
Globe
and check the latest uranium market figures. Which were beautiful.

Go-ahead money, Duddy thought. Real and desperately needed go-ahead money.

For all the while Duddy had not rested from his labors on his Canadian Jewish Who's Who, the work slow and increasingly frustrating, as he had urgently required a presentable office, sizable bank credit, a printer, and a sales staff, all of which would now be available to him. And so he would at last be free to concentrate on the pursuit
of fat cat sponsors, whom he hoped to secure by his promise of turning over ten per cent of his profits to Jewish charities.

Working in secrecy, Duddy pored over Canadian telephone directories from coast to coast, the social pages in newspapers and Jewish weeklies, extracting the names of Jewish professionals and businessmen. On Jake's advice, he commissioned a shnook in Winnipeg, one of those poetry-writing professors, to compose a stirring ten thousand-word history of Jewish achievement in Canada, beginning with the first settlers who came over in 1759 with General Amherst, conspicuous among them Reb Aaron Hart, the commissary officer (buying cheap, selling dear even then, Duddy mused) and many more, who took one quick look around and leaped into the fur trade. “Bringing,” Duddy wrote into the margin, “modern marketing knowhow and sales savvy to hitherto underdeveloped but colorful
coureurs-de-bois.”