St. Urbain's Horseman (35 page)

A muffled acquiescence.

“Would you play a game with me, Mr. Hersh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Name off the months of the year for me.”

“January … February … March …”

Sapient Herky fixed Jake with a knowing look. “He's testing the old man's reactions.”

Jake glowered and scooped up his bottle of Passover wine, which he had prudently filled with forbidden Remy Martin.

“Difficulty swallowing?” the specialist inquired.

“Yes, sir.”

Fanny Hersh's foolish eyes glowed with pleasure. “When Bronfman was sick, with all his millions, he had the same specialist. He's world-renowned.”

“Daddy's made it at last,” Jake announced, turning on Rifka. “The hands that have probed Bronfman orifices are actually touching him.”

Rifka bounded from the sofa to hurry her boys out to buy ice cream sundaes.

“If we can just turn you … that's it,” the specialist said. “Are you related to Jacob Hersh?”

“He's my son.”

“Is that so?”

“… come all the way from London to see me. He's going to direct the next James Bond film.”

“Hey,” Herky said, suddenly alert. “Congrats.”

“He's doing very, very well.”

“Need any help on the casting couch?”

As Rifka was about to reclaim her place beside Herky on the sofa, her spreading bottom threatening the flattened pillow, Herky slid his hand under, the thumb protruding like a spike. “Gotcha.”

Rifka sprang forward, giggling.

“You goddam fools,” Jake hissed.

“I'm using psychology, you shmock. If we go back into that bedroom wringing our hands will it do him any good?”

No sooner did the specialist emerge from the bedroom than Jake hustled him into the outside hall.

“We haven't met yet, doctor. My name's Jacob Hersh.”

“I've always admired your work on television.”

“Thank you. Now look, I know my father's filled with cancer … but, well, what happens next?”

“Cerebral hemorrhage, possibly. Maybe a heart attack. Or his lungs.”

“He thinks he's recuperating. He'd like to have exercises, therapy.”

“If you want, I can arrange it. But they don't like working on terminal cases. It's depressing for them.”

“It's depressing for my father.” He wasn't, Jake discovered, on morphine yet. “How long has he got?”

“He won't last the summer.”

Jake waited.

“Six weeks maybe.”

A
ND WHAT OF ME, JAKE THOUGHT, FLYING BACK TO
London, what of me and my house? Nancy, Sammy, Molly, and the baby to come. Only a week before Molly was born, he remembered, Mrs. Hersh had insisted on coming over to stay with them. Upstairs, Nancy put Sammy to bed, singing.

Downstairs, Mrs. Hersh kept Sammy busy, helping him make a Lego building.

“Do you know what this building is called, precious one? It's a synagogue.”

Sammy continued to add to his structure.

“Where we pray,” Mrs. Hersh said.

“Church.”

“No, synagogue. Now say it after grandmaw. Synagogue.”

“Synahog.”

“Oh, my precious lamb. Yes. Synagogue.”

They were a new breed, these mixed-marriage kids. With a
Christmas tree in December and matzohs in April. Instead of being unwanted, hounded here for being Christ-killers, mocked there for being bland
WASPS
, they belonged everywhere. With a stake in Jehovah and a claim on Christ. A taste for hot cross buns and bagels.

Bloody Rifka, on first being presented with Sammy, had instantly rummaged through his nappy. “I see you've had him done, Jake. That's something.”

Then the squealing infant Molly had been brought in for her and Herky to comparison-shop.

“A blondie,” Rifka said, pursing her lips.

“So was I,” Jake protested pointedly, “when I was a kid, remember?”

“And all babies have blue eyes,” Herky added placatingly, “isn't that a fact?”

Many brandies later, back at their suite in Grosvenor House, Herky sat down beside Jake, his manner suddenly conspiratorial yet benevolent, and whispered, “I want to talk to you, kiddo.”

“Go ahead, then.”

Herky rose to listen by the bedroom door, satisfying himself that Rifka was asleep. “There's something you ought to know.”

Rifka shoplifts. “Yes,” Jake said warily.

“It's all right now. Everything's A-O.K.”

“Good.”

“You can come home.” Herky patted Jake's cheek, tears welling in his eyes. “Time heals. You read me?”

“Speak plainly, will you?”

“You married a
shiksa
. The family didn't exactly flip with joy. So you did the decent thing, not to embarrass us within the community, and you didn't move to Montreal with her. You stayed on here.”

“What?”

“Well, some of us have more modern ideas now and in any case she obviously keeps a clean house for you and you've got kids now and, well, I've had a talk with your father. To make a long story
short, it's O.K.” Beaming magnanimously, he said: “You can come home, Yankel.”

“But, Herky, I live in London out of choice.”

“What's pride? Pride is foolishness. What are you handing me a bill of goods? It's Herky here, your brudder-in-law.”

Desperately Jake grabbed the brandy bottle and poured himself another one.

“Do you mean to say,” Herky demanded, “you'd actually prefer living here than in Montreal?”

“Yes.”

“But they're such cold fish. Even the Jews you meet here speak with a la-di-da accent. Aw, you're kidding me.”

“I'm not kidding you. Honestly.”

“But everything is so broken and old in Europe. At home, we're really going places. Do you know you can drive to Ste. Agathe these days in an hour flat? It's the new highway.
Six lanes.”

The children's mixed heritage, and Jake's faltering attempts to imbue them with a sense of social justice, all came together or, rather, temporarily unstuck, over the garden problem, which culminated in Jake's humiliation two days before Christmas.

When Nancy finally bought a house for them in Hampstead, in April 1966, Jake drove in from Pinewood, where he was shooting, to look it over; he pushed open the French doors in the rear and, lo and behold, there was this seemingly endless unfilled green space. Thick with overgrown and prickly bushes. A stagnant pond buzzing with mosquitoes in the middle, and an Anderson shelter crumbling at the far end.

Immediately, Nancy's goysy Ontario childhood came to the fore, aglow with the memory of granny churning her own ice cream – raspberry picking – homemade jam – old grandad pricking out beds in the greenhouse. “Lookit, Nancy, it's such a big sky.”
Ontari-ari-ario
. Toronto-liberated mother enthralled to be shoveling pig shit
again, singing, Hi, Neighbor, as some Mennonite freak moseys past. And, lookee yonder, it's the Ford V-8, Dad come out for the weekend, escaping the incomprehensible city, where Jewboys own the shoe factories and try, try, try, he couldn't sell enough to please Mr. Goldstein. Goldarn it.

“Henry,” mother calls, “the fish sure are jumpin' in the creek.”

“Yippee!”

Nancy licked Jake's ear, she hugged him, and initiated him to the splendors of their cabala, confounding him with talk of herbaceous and mixed borders, biennials and autumn stalwarts.

Appalled, confused, Jake gruffly reminded her that this was alien to him, he had been raised on urban backyards, wherein you dumped punctured tires and watermelon husks and cracked sinks and rotting mattresses. Within weeks, however, it was Jake who emerged as the household's most perfervid gardener, taking it as his directorial duty to impose order on such an unseemly mess. He came out of John Barnes with a two-stroke lawn mower, pruners, shears, tubs, rakes, insidious sprays, seeds, and secateurs. The following afternoon, as soon as Nancy had gone out shopping, he set to work with Sammy and Molly, burning masses of autumn leaves and clearing his spread, his Hampstead holding as it were, just like Van Heflin in
Shane
. He uprooted one barren-looking bush after another, trimmed the rhododendrons and, forking over the soil, stabbed into some seemingly cancerous-type growths, all of which he unearthed and stacked in the barrow.

Nancy was not pleased. “Oh God,” she exclaimed.

Autumn leaves, properly rotted, she pointed out delicately, could be of enormous value. The scraggly things he had uprooted were in fact mature rose bushes and the cancerous growths he had dug out were not only nonmalignant, they were peony tubers. Bloody
shiksa
, he thought, seething inwardly, Ontario hick, you don't know the Holy One's Secret Name, the sayings of Rabbi Akiba, or how to
exorcise a dybbuk, but you would know that sort of crap, and he retreated to the living room to sulk and study his newly acquired gardening manuals. The Orangeman's Talmud.

It was no use. He lacked the touch. So Jake shiftily argued that what with the need to decorate and furnish a newly acquired house, as well as there being the children to attend to, they ought to hire a jobbing gardener to come in twice a week. They're hopeless, Nancy warned. Overriding her objections, he insisted. Largely because he wanted control, and the hired hand was bound to be responsible to him in his office as guv'ner. But beery old Tom, the gardener, a Scots countryman cunning as he was leathery, with a hound's nose for class distinctions, immediately sniffed out an urban rat in Jake, somebody who didn't know leaf curl from mildew and, from the first, he merely tolerated him, his smile small. Nancy was something else again. Nancy, poised and knowledgeable, the beautiful countrywoman fallen into the hairy Jew's grasp, he truly revered and constantly deferred to. Standing by the window, outraged, Jake watched them stroll together through his garden, two bores out of a Thomas Hardy novel, delighting in rustic trivia, exchanging their Gentile secrets, the text derived from the Protocols of the Elders of the Compost Heap.

Determined to eke at least a splinter of satisfaction out of Tom's presence, Jake tried to use him as a case in point to further Sammy's sense of social justice. As his son, home early from prep school, raced across the garden to him, shouting they had won the cricket match for once, Jake suddenly said: “Tom's grandchildren won't go to a private school, but you're not better than they are.”

Sammy stared, startled.

“What I mean is your grandfather is a poor Jew,” Jake continued defensively.

Only the evening before, at the school concert, Jake had sat, the only glowering man among as many beaming parents, as Sammy sang with the others:

The next afternoon, after a hard day's editing at Pinewood, Jake poured himself a gin and tonic and thought to seek solace in his garden. There, lying in wait, shedding his sweat-stained fedora to mop his brow, was the cunning old
goy
. Jake felt obliged to return to the kitchen and fetch his hired man a gin as well, which made him resentful. He couldn't fob Tom off with a beer as that went against his egalitarian ideas. It was also a bad example for Sammy. But even sharing his liquor with Tom, he was made to feel an intruder in his own garden. For Jake had only to sink into a deck chair in the shade for old Tom to begin to dig with maniacal drive, He thinks I only sit out here to demand my pound of flesh, Jake thought, and he dismissed Tom abruptly, doing the old man out of two afternoons' work a week rather than continue to subject both of them to embittering class conflict.

“Why doesn't Tom come any more?” Sammy asked.

“I fired him. He was lazy,” Jake blurted out, remembering too late that only the night before, tucking in Sammy, he had explained to him that it was unforgivably rotten to complain, as other parents did, about how lazy the working man was. “Men like old Tom,” he had said, “and others, who work on factory assembly lines, have to do jobs they hate in order to earn their daily bread. So, naturally, they're resentful and do their jobs grudgingly. Really, there's nothing worse for a grown man than to have to go to a job he hates day after day. You're getting a good education and when you grow up you will be able to choose. You won't be forced into soul-destroying work. So you must always be especially considerate to those who weren't so lucky.”

And now, not surprisingly, Sammy looked at his father quizzically. All eyes.

“He wasn't lazy. He annoyed me.”

Tom continued to labor for others on Jake's road. In the evening, Jake would step up to the saloon bar in his local, ordering a large gin; and, in the public bar, rolling a cigarette with a shaky hand as he contemplated his pint, sat Tom, his smile malevolent.

Come autumn, Tom was seen less and less often on the road. Nobody needed him. But only two days before Christmas, he surfaced again.

Yuletide was, in any event, an uneasy season for Jake, the tree in the living room an affront no matter how rationally he explained it away to himself. As a fertility symbol. As a pagan ritual. As Nancy's birthright, and the children's, for after all they did spring from both traditions, and in Hersh's half-breed house they did not festoon the tree with anything but interfaith baubles. Which is to say, there was no haloed
Yoshka
riding over all. And yet – and yet – hang it with chocolate Santas, spray it with silver, drape it with colored balls, even rub it down with chicken fat, if you like, and, by God, it was still a Christmas tree. His forebears hadn't fled the
shtetl
, surviving the Czar, so that the windows of the second generation should glitter on Christmas Eve like those of the Black Hundreds of accursed memory. Old Hanna, for one, would have said, feh, Yankel. Yes, yes, he argued with her, but this was Nancy's home too. Sammy's and Molly's maternal
zeyda
was merely a
goy
. Untroubled by Spinoza, not perplexed by the enigmas of the Zohar, he was, to be fair, nourished by the intellectual illuminations common to his breed. He perceived, for instance, that wrestling matches were fixed, and having allowed him as much, Jake was so pleased with himself that he slapped his knee and laughed out loud.