St. Urbain's Horseman (3 page)

“You mean the chap with the undescended testicle?”

“Exactly. Well, I jolly well hope he's carrying lots of insurance. No sense opening him up. He's swimming in it.”

Now Jake stood nude, legs spread wide apart and back to the hall mirror, bent over with his head bobbing between his knees, probing his ass hole for cancer nails. Nothing, no early-warning sprouts yet, as far as he could see. Then Jake remembered how Gas Berger of blessed memory had raised his arm to shave one morning and there was this unnecessary little lump above the elbow. Goodbye Gas. Jake searched all his body's hiding places, rubbing, pinching, squeezing, and slapping, testing for tell-tale lumps and bumps, but he could find nothing anywhere. Nothing visible anywhere. More suspicious than relieved he went into the kitchen for another drink, decided against it, squeezed himself an orange juice, and jogged around the table three times.

Once more the hall mirror trapped Jake, and this time he stickhandled into the sitting room, feinting Johnny Bower out of position by winding up for a slapshot, dekeing him, and then gently shifting the puck back in front of the net for the kid to pick up. Naturally the kid missed and Jake had to cut around the net and flip in the rebound. He knew without looking over at the bench that Toe would be smiling, smiling inwardly, as he said to the others, “The old son-of-a-b—— can still make the big move.”

If it isn't lung cancer it will be an airplane crash.

Or my shriveling liver giving out. Or robbery with violence. Or
DDT
poisoning, already begun. Or my back, Jake thought, because his disc felt tender again. Or my heart. Groping for his pulse, he discovered that it was fast, hammering again, indicating acute tachycardia or, God help him,
SOLDIER'S HEART
(or Disordered Action of the Heart or Effort Syndrome), a set of symptoms arising under conditions of great stress, and consisting of palpitation, shortness of breath, speedy exhaustion, depression, and irritability. Damn. It seemed reasonable to Jake, that is to say, he was reconciled to the deaths (sad, inevitable) of others, but he couldn't understand why they wanted him.

6:10. Jake went into the living room, opened the French doors, and stepped onto the terrace and into the garden. Through the wire fence that ran along the southern border of his garden he could see Old Lady Dry Cunt's newly planted rhododendron bed. Old Lady Dry Cunt's bedroom curtains were drawn. Good, good. Jake filled a bucket with water, took it to the greenhouse, poured lime into the water, stirred, and emptied the solution into the tank attached to his
spray gun. Then, pretending to water the dahlia bed on his side of the fence, he directed a spray of murdering lime solution through the fence at Old Lady Dry Cunt's rhododendrons. Even if she was watching from behind the bedroom curtains it would appear – he hoped – that he was treating his own bed with liquid fertilizer. British bitch. He'd teach her to write snotty notes about the noise his brash American children make in the garden.

Inside again, Jake made himself a cup of instant coffee. 6:30. Stock-taking time.

It began well, ritualistically well. You have a gorgeous wife. Three kids. You're loved. All the same you've managed to remain an alienated Jew. Modishly ugly. But at thirty-seven you are a disappointment to yourself, a wash-out, and – and – and – he tried desperately to control the wheel, sensing a catastrophic turn, but he was too late. And he had to admit, looking at things objectively, there were other men in the world who were more talented – no, no, who were
rumored
to be more talented or taller or richer or better in bed than he was, not that he would be so doltish as to let one of them into the house. Still, you couldn't blinker your wife completely. There were always those adoring profiles of the latest golden boy that she could read in the
Observer
, her legs crossed, the skirt riding above the knees. Or the winners who prevailed like Luke at parties they went to. She sitting glowingly still and scented in one of those breast-popping Mary Quant creations and Big Eyes looming over her, Jake hissing, “He's queer. I can tell.” Or this season's Mr. Thingee being cooed over on the telly. How he abominated them, the scintillating people who blazed with confidence on TV panels. Or who could churn out a funny column once a week. Or who had articulate, controversial opinions about everything. She, watching in her kaftan, refulgent Mr. Thingee making eyes at the world and his wife, Jake jumping up and down in front of the telly. “He's talking crap.”

Worse (but inevitable) news. Luke luxuriating on the Frost show. Mr. Fat Cat meets Bugs Bunny.

“Is Canada boring? Well, let me put it to you this way, David. Other people find it boring. My friend Jacob Hersh … you know,” he offered in parenthesis, “the television and film director …”

Frost, who obviously, didn't know, nodded, anticipating.

“… likes to tell the story of the New York publisher who amused himself by drawing up a list of ten books for a new firm that was bound to fail. Leading the list of unreadables was a book titled
Canada, Our Good Neighbor to the North.”

Then Luke convulsed the studio audience by reading them a scene from
The Good Britons
.

Fuck you, old pal. Remembering, Jake poured himself a drink. It's too complicated, life's too spiky for me, he thought. There have been too many betrayals. In the study again, disc aching, Jake lowered himself gently to the floor.
Your lordship, listen to me. Let's clear this courtroom of these expensive lawyers, Regina's and mine. Tell the jury to go home. We'll talk this over, man to man
.

Quite, Mr. Hersh. Quite.

The judge didn't understand. Nobody did. Even Nancy. Of course Jake suffered his agonies, his guilt, his attacks of fear, but there were also times when it was getting off that alarmed him more than going to prison for two years – say one. In Jake's absence his friends would support his family and feel all the better for it. Slowly, shiftily, his unit trusts would accumulate capital growth and income, just like those tantalizing sales promotion charts had promised. When he finally got out, decent people would feel touched by him (slender again, his temples flecked with gray) because he had suffered an injustice. The Sacco of the sexual revolution. Juicy girls would cream for him at parties. To no avail.

“No, dear. It's not that. You
are
beautiful. Young. Firm. A
mechaieh
, I daresay. But I'm not the sort to risk my hard-won happiness, my wife, my children, my home, for an afternoon's abandon. I'll just stand here and drip.”

He could count on being asked to direct a documentary on prison
life. Hand-held cameras, jump cutting. Old lags, their heads held discreetly in the shadows, calling a spade a spade. “What's obscene? You can collect stamps with impunity. With me, it's jock straps. I'm a pouch-taster. It happens to be my kind of loving and as a result I've been rotting in this cell for twenty years. You know what's obscene? General Westmoreland. The
CIA
. Factory farming.” Probing, thought-provoking stuff it would be.
Très
ballsy, very
cinéma vérité
.

People who had dropped him would possibly start inviting him around again. “You should have known Hersh in the old days. He used to be so talkative, such a bouncy guy, but now … he opens his mouth and out comes an aphorism.” But if he was found not guilty they'd say, “Wouldn't you know he'd get off, the prick? They made Harry Stein the fall guy.”

No.

W
ITH HIS BLEEDING COLONIAL HEART, CHARGED AS HE
was with war guilt, Jake, when he had first come to London twelve years ago, had asked everywhere about the blitz. “How you must have suffered …” But everyone spoke longingly about the blitz. “People were so friendly then.”

Only Harry, his co-defendant, spoke with rancor about the blitz.

Say “evacuee” and Jake, in his Canadian mind's eye, instantly conjured up an image of huggable Margaret O'Brien, shrinking in the corner of a foreign station platform that was forever England, a tattered golliwog in her hand, only to be redeemed by Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire, parents enviable because, unlike Jake's, one didn't belch at the table and the other didn't nag.

Oh to be blitzed, Jake used to dream, orphaned and adopted by M-G-M; but it was something else for prickly Harry Stein. Even before the
Luftwaffe
struck, ten-year-old Harry, scruffy and sty-ridden, was uprooted from his Stepney council school, tagged, issued a gas mask, and shoveled into a train crammed with squealing mums and babes, other slum kids (some covered with septic sores, still more lice-infested), and frantic teachers; a train without food and insufficient toilets, each one at flood-tide, the floor slithery; to be finally disgorged on a station platform in the outer wilds of Buckinghamshire, where the ill-tempered gentry, aghast to discover
such urban pestilence in their midst, had nevertheless foregathered to take their pick.

“It was a bloody selection ramp,” Harry was fond of saying, “but, in lieu of old Eichmann, there were market farmers and shopkeepers to poke and prod us, choosing the healthiest lads, the most promising-looking workhands. And unspeakable old biddies to snatch the girls who would make the best unpaid maids.”

Insolent and disheveled Harry, naturally, was among those urchins rejected, still left shivering in the cold after the second pick, ultimately forced on a late-to-arrive family by an irate billeting officer.

“The way they looked at me, you'd think I was going to steal their silver or shit on their carpets.”

Harry was immediately lowered into a bath and then deposited in an unheated attic room, though decidedly more agreeable quarters lay empty. But he exacted retribution by slipping into the library and tearing pages out of the reactionary old bastard's collection of first editions. And wetting his bed triumphantly.

“You think the war was all fun and games, don't you? After the raid, cockneys crawling out of the rubble with a wisecrack. Churchill traipsing through the bomb damage and asking, ‘Are we downcast?' the forelock-touching workers shouting back, ‘No!' ”

Unwisely, Jake once tried to tease Harry out of his denigrating mood.

“Why, Hershel,” he said, calling him by his Yiddish name. “Bai Jove, Hershel, how you disillusion me. I cherish the notion of you surviving the war at Greyfriars, admittedly not so much a swell as the Bolshy of the Remove. Thick with Harry Wharton and Billy Bunter, but standing up for the proles and nignogs all the same. Out there on the pitch, Hershel, proving your mettle to Fisher T. Fish and other cads, secretly proud of the old gray stones …”

His sojourn in Buckinghamshire cut short, Harry, like so many other East End kids, was returned to Stepney in time for the blitz, where his father, no Churchill-idolater but an avid Left Book Club
subscriber, dragged him out to absorb all the anti-Semitic sights, from the walls scrawled with “It's a Jewish War” to the poster that read

altered by the Mosleyites to read
JEW VICTORY
.

While Jake, in Montreal, learned Stuka recognition from chewing gum cards and thrilled to hear, on
Carry On, Canada
, that when Churchill returned to his post as First Lord of the Admiralty, out to the Fleet went the signal, “Winston is back,” Harry, in Stepney, looked up to see the sky aflame and plunged into the throng rattling the gates to Liverpool Street tube station, where he was to bunk down almost every night of the blitz.