Joshua Then and Now

  Oh my God, but his loopy mother – who had been unearthed in Winnipeg, where she was now managing a massage parlor called ORAL IS BEAUTIFUL – allowed that she had been surprised to read that he was gay, and that at first she had felt very sad for him, because there was such prejudice on this matter within the straight Jewish community. “And not only here. I mean, take Israel,” she said. “There is a kibbutz for this and a kibbutz for that. You name it, you got it. But if there’s a kibbutz anywhere out there for gays, it’s still in the closet. Or maybe the Gaza Strip isn’t what I think. Ha, ha, ha.” His mother said she had been shocked when his now notorious correspondence with Murdoch had surfaced. “After all, he was always a bit of a prig,” and, to illustrate her point, she told them what had happened at his bar-mitzvah. “But I’m in enough trouble with him already, so you spell that right. P-r-i-g. Ha, ha, ha.” She regretted that she and her son were now estranged, but this, she assured the interviewer, had nothing to do with his coming out. “Don’t quote me on this, but he married up and I never cared for his wife. On the other hand, who knows what Pauline has been through? Maybe she blames me.” Esther was not only active in women’s lib, but she was now also on the executive board of Parents of Gays in Canada, which group, she was at pains to point out, was no branch-plant organization, but entirely independent of the similarly named American society. “We, for instance, are also bilingual. Ha, ha, ha.”

  The Advocate, a more intellectual publication, in considering his collected pieces on sports, ventured that they were necessarily oblique, even deviously straight (which was understandable, the writer allowed, given the context of those pinched years), in contrast to the refreshingly new and flourishing gay book world. “An important fact about ADVOCATE readers at least, and possibly gay people in general, is that we are readers.” Quoting some of the available snippets from the correspondence, it evoked Auden’s relationship with Chester Kallman. But Christopher Street had, somehow or other, actually got its hot hands on some of the letters. Obviously one of their correspondents had penetrated the purportedly secure Rare Manuscripts Collection at Rocky Mountain University, or its curator, Colin Fraser. Or, possibly, both.

  Rereading some of the salacious letters for the first time in more than twenty years, Joshua laughed aloud at outrageous passages until the sharp pain in his ribs made him wince. On balance, he felt that his end of the correspondence was the more inventive, which pleased him enormously. A full-page photograph of the two of them, the way they were – London, circa 1955 – introduced the letters. A much more recent photograph, the one that had become famous, showed them kissing at a Beverly Hills poolside. Markham’s poolside. There followed three full pages of the correspondence and, for the rest, more letters ran down one column in the back pages of the magazine, squeezed between advertisements that he found mind-boggling.

  THE JAC-PACK

  Feels so good

  you’ll swear

  it’s alive!!!

  The Jac-Pack is a hot hole you can really get into! Like natural flesh, it surrounds your every nerve ending with erotic sensations. Gives lifetime manipulation for a total orgasm like you’ve never experienced with ordinary masturbation. Requires no straps, harnesses or hardware to hold in place. Cleans easily with soap and water. Jac-Ream sampler and hot photo instruction booklet included FREE WITH YOUR ORDER!

  Also available, from the same firm, were a salve called Jac-Up (“The name says it all”) and something called Black-Jac. The entire set, the incomparable Jac-Combo, was offered for $19.90, with a free catalogue of adult toys, featuring Jack Wrangler in full color. Canadians, however, would have to add ten percent to the cost of each order.

  Oh God.

  Only three weeks earlier, when tubes had been curling in and out of him everywhere like surgical spaghetti, Dr. Morty Zipper had gently pressed his hand and asked, “Can you hear me, Josh?”

  In response, Joshua had blinked his eyes.

  “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  I’ll be the judge of that, Joshua thought.

  2

  CHARLIE McCARTHY WAS MADE OF WOOD. A DUMMY. The capital of their country was called Ottawa, its prime minister Mackenzie King. Lux was the soap of the stars. The No. 45 streetcar would get him downtown, the 29 take him to Outremont. Girls, even Jewish girls, would grow a bush, just like he would one day, although they had nothing to hide there. He knew, he’d asked around. Howie Morenz was dead and there would never be another hockey player like him. “Before they made him,” Uncle Oscar said, grieving, “they broke the mold.”

  When Joshua was six years old, he also knew the names of the top ten lightweights, his father’s old division, as they were rated in Mr. Fleischer’s Ring magazines, but he had no idea what his father did to earn a living now that his fighting days were finished. He did know that his father never opened the front door to a stranger, but instead sent his mother, sometimes even him, hanging back himself, a length of lead pipe in his curled fist. So when his mother registered him for school, he was surprised to hear her smartly respond “Bill collector” when asked for “father’s occupation.”

  Bill collector? “What does Daddy do, really?” he asked.

  “He’s an undercover man for the RCMP.”

  “Aw, come on. What does he do, but?”

  “Well, you could say that these days he’s in insurance, sort of.”

  The only insurance man he knew, Finkleman, his drifting eyes milky with cataracts, shuffled round once a week to complain about his aching feet and collect fifty cents from his mother, lick his pencil and tick off the payment in his big ledger. “Like from Prudential?” he asked.

  “You know what killed the cat?”

  “Curiosity.”

  “Right. Now for the sixty-four-dollar question. Who did Max Baer, that reckless looter in Lovers’ Land, the magnificent swashbuckler, beat for the heavyweight crown?”

  “Primo Carnera. New York. June fourteenth, nineteen thirty-four. An eleventh-round K.O.”

  “And who was counting for knockdowns if you’re so smart?”

  “Judge Artie Idella.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” his mother announced, “we are proud to present tonight’s stellar attraction, for the lightweight championship of the world … weighing one hundred and thirty-six pounds and wearing white trunks, the challenger from Montreal, Canada … RUBY SHAPIRO! … and his opponent … weighing one hundred and thirty-five pounds and wearing purple trunks … the lightweight champion of the world … from New York City … SAMMY ANGOTT!”

  His mother was utterly unlike the other mothers on the street, even then. She was indifferent to his report cards and she did not oh and ah over his crayon drawings. His mother didn’t care how late he came home from school, or where he hung around. She was not determined that he would be the one to grow up and discover the cure for cancer. Or, failing that, marry Outremont money.

  In those days his mother was uncommonly beautiful, with thick black hair, a high girlish bosom, delicate white skin, and a laugh that reminded him of honey. But it was his father who could evoke her laughter, not he. Joshua could do nothing to please her. She did not even appreciate that he had to defend her good name with his fists against the other boys on the street. Their striving mothers, grown fat and sour with the years, bitterly resented his. Her marriage had not been arranged between families, as was only proper, but had been a scandal in its time, a love-match. His mother, actually born into Outremont affluence, a Leventhal, had defied her cultivated family, descending to their grubby street and marrying into a family of thugs out of Odessa, taking a struggling club fighter, lucky to get a semi-final in Albany, for her husband. Worse news. After a turbulent six years of marriage it was abundantly clear that she was still smitten with him. She could be seen leaning on his shoulder, obviously embarrassing him, all through a double feature at the Regent. She did not send his white-on-white shirts to the Chinese laundry, but ironed them herself, doing the collars just so. With money saved from he
r household allowance, or a good run at poker, she bought him hand-painted ties and once a fourteen-carat gold stickpin with his initials, RS. His mother kept herself indecently perfumed, her hair touched with henna, a girl, just for him. Or so it seemed. She had not yet begun to drink heavily. Or demonstrate. But so far as the other mothers on the street were concerned, she was already wanton.

  Joshua could still remember the Saturday morning he first did something to please his mother. He was eleven, it was autumn, and only two months had passed since his father had been obliged to hit the road again, leaving them abruptly. His mother had grown increasingly anxious, roaming their cold-water flat at all hours of the day and night, unable to sleep, chewing 217’s, playing Duke Ellington records on the gramophone, the blinds pulled down so that she could practice her routines. She consumed one lending-library book after another. Anthony Adverse, Trader Horn, an endless spill of Ellery Queens, anything by Edna Ferber. Every Friday morning she grudgingly marched him over to Fletcher’s Field, shot a roll of film of him with her Kodak Brownie, and walked to the corner of Jeanne-Mance, where a man waited in a car. He would extract the roll of film, hand back the camera, grunt, and drive off. Then one Saturday morning, after they had just returned from a shopping expedition to Rachel Market, they discovered their front door ajar, the glass broken, the wood round the lock splintered. His mother cursed and set down her parcels in the hall. “You wait here,” she said.

  But unwilling to be left alone, he trailed after her all the same. The mattresses in her bedroom and his had been razored open, bleeding ticking. The same was true of all the sofa cushions in the living room. His father’s favorite easy chair had been slashed. Every dresser drawer in the house had been overturned, clothes strewn all over the place. His father’s white-on-white shirts. His spats. His black silk socks. His father’s clothes closet, the one he had put his own cedar lining into, had also been ransacked. Somebody had put his foot through his straw boater. He had also defecated on his father’s ice-cream suit. The worn kitchen linoleum had been rolled back, and some of the floorboards had been lifted.

  “Should I call the police?” he asked.

  His mother opened her purse, fished out a Pall Mall, and lighted it. “You mustn’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not,” he lied.

  “They wouldn’t dare come if we were here.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever.”

  “What do they want with us?”

  “The gas ration coupon business, you know, is very competitive. It’s no bowl of cherries.”

  “I see,” he said, baffled.

  “Good. Now Josh, I think Daddy left something with you. A key, maybe.”

  He hesitated.

  “And I suppose you hid it somewhere in the house here?”

  “No. I carry it with me all the time.”

  He showed his mother the key and she laughed and actually hugged him. “I’m going to take you to a restaurant, just you and me.”

  His mother slipped into her green shirtwaist dress, pinned a straw hat into her hair, and touched her mouth with ruby-red lipstick. She didn’t take him to a poky neighborhood delicatessen, but to a real restaurant, on St. Catherine Street. Dinty Moore’s. Where the manager kissed her on the cheek, his mother, and a waiter immediately brought a Dewar’s and a splash to their table.

  It didn’t work out. Emboldened by the sweet memory of his mother’s embrace, he chattered on mindlessly about school and his life on the street until, whatever her good intentions, he sensed her eyes glazing over, bored. Later he would realize that she was more frightened than she allowed, and that if not for his unwanted presence she could have been with his father, who was hunkering down in a fishing lodge in Irish Hills, Michigan, always remembering to check out the trip wires he had set on the property before turning in for the night. But for him, his mother could have joined him there, making sure nobody else was cooking corned beef and cabbage for him or ironing his shirt collars just so.

  Even as Joshua struggled to hold her interest, they were joined by a man who he later learned was a city councillor named Ed Ryan. Mr. Ryan, a beefy man with joyful blue eyes, his nose a network of burst capillaries, was smoking a Havana. He slid into his mother’s side of the booth uninvited and flicked his fingers for the waiter, directing him to bring her another Dewar’s and a splash, as well as the usual for him, and a banana split for the lad.

  “What a pleasure it is to see you here, Esther,” he said.

  “You’ll get over it,” his mother said, flushing.

  “And how are you managing these days?”

  “Better than Billy Conn. Not as good as J. Edgar Hoover.”

  “Ah, isn’t it a sad business,” Mr. Ryan said, his voice soothing, “a most lamentable state of affairs, but everything that can be done is being done.”

  “Please don’t do that,” his mother said, moving tighter to the wall. “You’re trespassing on somebody else’s property.”

  He didn’t know what Mr. Ryan was doing, but Ryan guffawed, bringing a hairy hand up from under the table, and recited:

  “There was a young lady named Riddle

  Who had an untouchable middle.

  She had many friends

  Because of her ends,

  Since it isn’t the middle you diddle.”

  His mother snickered nervously and indicated Joshua’s presence. Mr. Ryan edged closer to his mother even as he winked at Joshua. “Did anyone ever tell you,” he asked, “that you have your mother’s haunting brown eyes and her delicate complexion?”

  Fuck you.

  “And how would you like to go to Belmont Park this afternoon and try all the new rides?”

  “Why not?” he said, misunderstanding, assuming he meant all three of them.

  “Euclid,” Mr. Ryan called out, still smiling directly at Joshua.

  A small, peppery French Canadian hurried over to their booth.

  “How would you like to take the charming young Mr. Shapiro here to Belmont Park this afternoon?”

  Confused, he appealed to his mother, who was squeezed even tighter to the wall, Mr. Ryan crowding her. “What should I do?”

  “Go. Stay,” his mother said in a thick voice.

  Euclid was already tugging him by the elbow. “Come on, sonny, we’re going to have lots of fun.”

  He didn’t remember much about his afternoon in the amusement park, but he did recall that it had already turned dark when he let himself in the front door. His mother was on the phone, hollering at somebody. “I’m going to tell him everything you did to me, you son of a bitch.” Slamming the receiver back into the cradle, she saw him standing there. “Why did you go?” she demanded.

  “You said I should.”

  “I didn’t want you to go.”

  The room stank of cigar smoke. His mother’s feathery pink fans lay on the carpet. But there was only one purple balloon. The other had been burst.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “What happened happened.”

  His mother was wearing a flowery housecoat over her costume. “And will you please stop staring at me,” she said.

  “I’m not staring at you.”

  “I should be with your father. I shouldn’t be stuck here alone.”

  “I’m here.”

  “Wowee,” she said.

  Recognizing her mood, grittily determined not to be left behind again, he surprised himself by speaking harshly to her. “If you leave me with Aunt Fanny again, I’m going to run away.”

  “Where would you go?” she asked, interested.

  “I’d manage.”

  “I wonder.”

  Now he was really scared. “If I ran away, Daddy wouldn’t like it.”

  They stared at each other, a moment of recognition, and then, frightened, they both retreated.

  “What would you like for supper?” she asked.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said fiercely. “You are not onl
y going to eat, you’re going to stuff yourself. So when we go out to take your picture on Fletcher’s Field this Friday, I don’t want a message back that his precious one looks thin.”

  When he wakened the next morning he found his mother on her hands and knees with a bucket and brush, scrubbing the hall floor. “He should have left the key with me,” she said. “I’m his wife.”

  “I didn’t ask for it, but.”

  “Some bigshot. You’re not even a man yet, if you know what I mean?”

  Lying in bed in his Lower Westmount townhouse one morning, two weeks before his accident, before the letters had surfaced or anyone had accused him of being a closet queer, sifting through the conundrums of a childhood that still bewildered him, Joshua was suddenly jolted awake by the front doorbell. Damn it, he had not even had his breakfast yet, and when he peeked out of his bedroom window he saw a police car parked in the drifting snow. Relieved that the kids had already left for school, he hurried into his dressing gown and raced downstairs to open the front door, in such a rush that he totally forgot what he was still wearing underneath. He beckoned the two cops inside, determined to have them state their business – especially if it was what he feared – without benefit of onlookers.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked warily.

  “It’s what we can do for you, sir.”

  Aha.

  “We found your car parked downtown with the keys still in the ignition.”

  “Outside The King’s Arms?” Joshua asked, his head pounding.