St. Urbain's Horseman (23 page)

“You
are
a clever thing,” Desmond said, tucking in.

Next the cheese board came out, a slab of British Railways cheddar, which looked uncannily like a cake of floor soap. There was dessert too. A running pink blob called raspberry fool.

Desmond did most of the talking. The Tories, he admitted, seemed all played out at the moment, but one of these days another leader with fire in his belly would emerge and then we should see the last of that faceless little man in Number 10.

“We'll leave the men to their port now, shall we?” Pamela said, and, to Jake's astonishment, she led Nancy out of the dining room.

There actually was port. And cigars. Desmond apologized for the absence of his wife. She was in the hospital, he said, adding, “It's nothing. Just a plumbing job.”

Ormsby-Fletcher recalled that when he had done his national service with the Guards on the Rhine he had occasionally gone to Hamburg on leave. “A chance to dip the wick, don't you know?”

Jake leaned back in his chair, aghast; Ormsby-Fletcher, he thought, you saucy fellow, dipping the wick on the Reeperbahn; and just as he was searching himself for an appropriate off-color story, Desmond rode to the rescue with the one about the Duchess of Newbury. “On her wedding night,” he said, “the Duke naturally decided to have a bash. The Duchess, it turned out, couldn't get enough. ‘Is this what they call fucking?' she asked at last. ‘Yes,' the Duke said. ‘Well then,' she said, ‘it's too good for the working classes.' ”

Ho ho ho. Time to join the ladies. Jake excused himself, going to the upstairs toilet, his stomach rumbling, but when he finally rose
to pull the chain nothing happened. This didn't surprise him at first, knowing British plumbing as well as he did, but again and again he pulled, and still nothing happened. Oh my God, Jake thought, a big fat stool staring him in the face. What to do? Ah, he thought, opening the toilet door softly. There was nobody in the hall. Jake slipped into the adjoining bathroom, found a plastic pail, filled it with water, tiptoed back to the toilet, and poured it into the bowl. Now the stool floated level with the toilet seat. Flood tide. Pig, Jake thought. Sensualist. Hirsute Jew.

Wait. Don't panic, Jake thought, opening the toilet window wide. There's a simple solution. Wrap the stool quickly in your underwear, lean back and heave it into the rose bushes.
Yes, yes
, Jake agreed,
but how do I pick it up?
It's yours, isn't it? Your very own bodily waste. Disgust for it is bourgeois.
Yes, yes, but how do I pick it up?
Sunshine soldier! Social democrat! Middle-brow! Unable to face life fully. Everything is holy, Jake. Holy holy.
Yes, but how do I pick it up?
With your underwear. Quickly. Zip, zoom. Then lean back and heave. The Hersh garbage ball, remember? Inimitable, unhitable. In an instant Jake stood resolutely over his stool, jockey shorts in hand, counting down: ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four —— three —— two —— one-and-a-half —— one! —— three-quarters ——
WHOOA!
Voices in the garden
. Jake tottered backwards, relieved. I'm no bourgeois chicken though, he thought. Another second and I would have done it.

Jake lit a cigarillo. So, they're all outside on the terrace again. Good, good, he thought, stepping into his underwear, sneaking out of the toilet, swiftly down the stairs, and then into the downstairs toilet.
Baruch ato Adonoi
, he said twice, before he pulled the chain. It flushed. Should I go upstairs again, fetch the stool, and …? No. Exhilarated, Jake flushed the toilet again, noisily, and then he began to pound on the door. Finally Ormsby-Fletcher came. “I seem to be locked in,” Jake shouted.

“Oh, dear.” Ormsby-Fletcher told Jake how to unlock the door and then he led him into the garden, where Pamela was exhibiting
paintings. A landscape. A boat in the harbor. A portrait. All reminiscent of the jigsaw puzzles of Jake's childhood. He made loud appreciative noises.

“Now nobody tell him.” Then Pamela, bursting with mischief, turned to Jake. “Would you say these pictures showed talent?”

“Absolutely.”

“But amateur?” she asked enticingly.

Jake glanced imploringly at Nancy but her face showed nothing. Bitch. He stepped closer to the picture on display. “Mn,” he said, gratefully accepting a brandy from Ormsby-Fletcher. “Professional. The brushwork,” he added. “Oh, yes. Professional, I'd say.”

Desmond clapped a pink hand to his mouth, stifling a laugh.

They're hers, Jake thought. Afternoons, wearing her spidery black bra and nearly nothing panties, she –

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” Ormsby-Fletcher said. “Tell him.”

Pamela waited, savoring the expectant silence. Finally, breathlessly, bosom heaving, she exclaimed, “All these pictures were executed by mouth and foot painting artists!”

Jake gaped; he turned pale.

“Didn't guess,” Pamela said, shaking a finger at him, “did you?”

“… no …”

Ormsby-Fletcher explained with a certain pride that Pamela was a director of the Society for Mouth and Foot Painting Artists.

“And still finds time to make such sumptuous meals,” Desmond said. “Oh, you are clever.”

“This picture,” Pamela said, holding up a seascape, “was done by a boy of seventeen,
holding the brush between his teeth.”

With trembling hand, Jake held out his brandy glass to Ormsby-Fletcher.

“He has been paralyzed for eight years.”

“Amazing,” Jake said weakly.

Desmond felt the group's work should be publicized in America. Swinging London, decadence, and all that tosh. Here was a bunch
of disabled people who refused to cadge on the welfare state. An example to all of us, especially the run-down-Britain brigade.

“This one,” Pamela said, holding up a portrait of General Montgomery, “is a foot painting. It's one of a series done by a veteran of El Alamein.” Next she showed another mouth painting, a still life, done by a street accident victim.

Shamelessly holding out his glass for yet another brandy, Jake shouted, “I'll buy it.”

Pamela's mouth formed an enormous reproachful O. “Now you'll go away thinking I'm frightful,” she said.

“But it's for such a good cause,” Jake said.

Pamela's enthusiasm ebbed. “You may only buy one if you really, really think it's good.”

“Oh, but I do. I do.”

“You mustn't condescend to disabled people,” she said sulkily.

Jake pleaded and Pamela, all forgiveness now, allowed him to have the Montgomery portrait for twenty-five guineas. Then, bosom heaving again, she added, “And I'll tell you what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to take you to see the artist in his studio.”

Jake shook his head, he waved his hands imploringly, no, but he didn't know what to say.

“It would be so encouraging for him to know,” Pamela continued, “that somebody in your position admired his talents.”

“Couldn't I just write him a letter?”

“But you'd adore Archie. He has such a wonderful sense of humor.”

“He has?” Jake's voice quivered.

“And courage. Buckets of courage.” Then Pamela started into what Jake figured must be her set piece for women's club luncheons. “If a man has the talent and urge to paint,” she said, “he will paint. He will paint even if it means living in a back street garret on a near starvation diet. If he has no arms he will paint with the canvas on the floor and a brush between his toes. If both arms and feet are lost he will grip the brush between his teeth.”

The upstairs light went on. Jake gripped his brandy glass tighter and hastily lit a cigarillo.

“Speaking as a creative person, wouldn't you say, Jake,” Pamela asked heatedly, “that art thrives on difficulty?”

Another upstairs light was turned on. “You're goddam right,” Jake said.

The
au pair
girl raised her voice, a pause, then Eliot began to shriek. Ormsby-Fletcher leaped to his feet. “I'll see what it is, darling.”

“It seems to me,” Pamela said, “the sterner the trials of creation, the finer that which is created.”

“My wife isn't feeling well,” Jake said, shooting Nancy a fierce look.

“Pardon?”

“I must take Nancy home immediately.”

In the house again they ran into a flushed ill-tempered Ormsby-Fletcher; he was coming from the kitchen, carrying a pump.

“What is it?” Pamela asked.

Eliot sat at the top of the stairs, tears running down his cheeks. “Didn't do it,” he wailed. “Didn't do it.”

“He's been naughty,” Ormsby-Fletcher said tightly.

“Don't be too hard on him,” Jake pleaded compulsively.

Ormsby-Fletcher seemed to notice Jake for the first time. “Not going so soon, are you?”

“It's Nancy. She's unwell.”

“Just an upset stomach,” Nancy said, trying to be helpful.

“No. Not a
–” Jake stopped himself. “What I mean is … she's being brave. Good night, everybody.” He assured the Ormsby-Fletchers that they had had an absolutely super evening and, clutching his Montgomery portrait, he hurried Nancy to the car. Eliot's howling pursued him.

“What in the hell's got into you?” Nancy asked.

But Jake wouldn't talk until they reached the highway. “I've got a splitting headache, that's all.”

“What do you think the child did?”

“Stuffed his bloody golliwog down the toilet, that's what.”

While Nancy got ready for bed, Jake poured himself a stiff drink and sat down to contemplate his Montgomery portrait. What am I doing in this country, he thought? What have I got to say to these nutty, depraved people?

Well, Yankel?

I
F. IF, IF. IF ONLY I HAD NEVER LEFT TORONTO FOR
London.

London, Why, in God's name, had he come to London in the first place? Because, thanks to the Horseman (and his own big mouth), New York wouldn't have him.

As a boy England had signified many things to him, but he had never been drawn toward it. He was a Labor-Zionist. He had despised the British because they stood between him and his homeland. He used to sit by the radio with the rest of the family when Churchill spoke. “… some chicken, some neck …” He could recall toothy photographs of Elizabeth and Margaret in their Brownie uniforms. The blitz. “The King,” his mother said one night, “only pours one inch of hot water into his bath now. It's to set an example to the people.”

“Who knows what he does when he's alone in the toilet,” his father said.

They played commandos in the alley behind the synagogue, pelting Narvik with frozen horse buns. He read books by G. A. Henty and H. G. Wells. Crunching through the snow, bundled against the wind, on his way to Fletcher's Field High each morning, he passed the armory of the Canadian Grenadier Guards and outside, under a funny fur hat, there always stood some tall unblinking
goy
. “If they were ordered to do it,” he was told, “they'd march over a cliff.
There's discipline for you.” He helped collect money for Bundles-for-Britain and later, from the same houses, more money to buy arms for Hagana. A British Ferry Command pilot with a handlebar mustache came to sell his father a Victory Bond. “The Russians aren't such a bad lot, actually,” he said. “You have to look at it this way. They never had an industrial revolution. They're squeezing a hundred years of progress into a generation.”

He had been misinformed. Not everyone on St. Urbain Street was a red.

“In Finland,” his father said, “they had to chain them to their guns. That sort of thing is bad for morale.”

England was George Formby, Tommy Farr, and fog. “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Big Ben. His mother coming home with puffy eyes from
Mrs. Miniver
. On Empire Day, in Shawbridge, the ghetto's summer swimming hole, a young girl drowned after eating too many
latkas
. Over the mountain, where there was a real lake, the Gentiles swam. England was where they drank tea all the time. Without lemon. They were the finest craftsmen in the world. Once, one of ours had been their prime minister. England was the fox hunt. G.B.S. Bulldog Drummond. Charles Laughton tossing a chicken leg over his shoulder. Ed Murrow. A Nightingale Singing in Berkeley Square. It also meant his own Scots schoolmaster making them memorize Tennyson: “Break, break, break/At the foot of thy crags, O sea!” and Scott: “The stag at eve had drunk its fill/As danced the moon on Monan's Rill.” They felt no attachment.

At college, where they began to borrow from a different set of ideas, England came into another, equally distorted focus. A literary experience. The exquisite novels of Jane Austen. Decency, wit, political maturity.

England, England. He and Luke set out to conquer.

Standing by the ship's rail, as they slid out of Quebec City into the broadening St. Lawrence, impossibly exhilarated, Jake demanded of Luke, “I say! I say! I say! What's beginning to happen in Toronto?”

“Exciting things.”

“And Montreal?”

“It's changing.”

Their first contact with England was sooty Liverpool. On the boat train they were amazed by the enormous dessert spoons, grit in your luke-warm tea, and a notice that read, “Gentlemen will please lift the seat.” Trundling into London in a taxi, they experienced only a moment's self-doubt when they espied all those bow windows on either side of the road, dressing tables shoved against them from within to shut out the obtrusive sun. Should it appear.

They froze.

Jake remembered the first weeks in London as an unending fight against the bone-chilling damp. A spill of shillings down the gas meter because parsimonious Luke insisted on the cheapest hotel available while they looked for a flat. They made the required, wearying pilgrimages to the British Museum, the Tate, and Westminster, scornfully avoiding (though they were both desperate to see it) the changing of the guard.