Joshua Then and Now

  “Sure,” Joshua said, baffled.

  “Now right here, look, it says, quote, Man that is born of woman is few of days, and full of trouble, unquote. Now you tell me,” he said, “which character in the Bible was not of regular-type fucking born?”

  Stumped, Joshua reached for the beer.

  “Jesus H. Christ, that’s who. He was made through immaculate conception. And do you know what that means?”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s getting knocked up by God himself, which is so rare it only happens once in the whole book, and look how many pages.”

  “You don’t believe that shit, do you?”

  “According to the covenant, the Hebes are only signed up until page eleven hundred and eighty. Hey, where you going?”

  “Then we’re through, aren’t we?”

  “Sit down. Now we turn to the New Testament. Jesus.”

  “Why bother?”

  “For polish.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you get out into the world and meet Christians, you’ll find like, they lean on it an awful lot. Like, if a guy is ever going to shit on you he usually leads with a quote from it. Say, he won’t let you check into one of his hotels, it’s restricted, but he doesn’t want you breaking the furniture or slugging him. ‘Blessed are the meek,’ he says, ‘the meek shall inherit the earth.’ Bullshit. Or, say you catch one of them in bed screwing his daughter, which they go in for a lot out on the prairies, where the winters are long. You know what they say? They say, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ Or, for instance, you’re running a book and the mayor’s bagman wants you to show your appreciation that he doesn’t shut you down. He says, ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.’ The dirtier the sin, the sweeter the saying. The New Testament covers everything. I recommend it highly. Now, Josh, I want you to give up that asshole job and go back to school.”

  “I’m not going back to school,” he said, digging in, “and that job is just a handle to get me into the newspaper business.”

  “You mean you’re going to become a reporter by ringing doorbells?”

  “You better believe it.”

  “He was a rabbi, you know,” his father said, grinning, as he passed the beer.

  “Who?”

  “J.C.”

  Joshua had to laugh.

  “But he didn’t like the way the temple was being run and after he was counted out by Pontius Pilate, they banged him into that stick, which is what they used to do to crooks in those days, no bail, no copping a plea, no time off for good behavior, nothing, and he died. Then his bunch, they didn’t fly apart like they did here after Galento was shot down. Everybody grab, grab, grab. Guys afraid to stand in front of a window or start their cars. They stuck together, like, and started a church and it was hundreds of years before they split into rival gangs. Protestant and Catholic. The Catholic church is better run, nobody can beat them at collections, and they own property all over town. Everywhere. Well, the Catholic church was built on a rock, according to Peter, but the Protestant on the love of cunt, if you ask me, though to look at those grim bastards today, it makes you wonder. It really got going with Henry the Eighth, who was king of England, and had his mind on only one thing, nookie, and was always sniffing around for a fresh wife. But the Pope, well, he frowned on divorce. ‘No soap,’ he said. So Henry, he quit on him and joined up with the Protestants, who are everywhere you turn now. Me, I prefer the Catholics. I mean, you know, you become a priest and you swear off fucking for life, which means you’ve got to be very, very dedicated. I give them full marks.”

  Seizing the opening, Joshua reminded his father once more that he had yet to be laid.

  “We’re going to the synagogue tomorrow,” he reminded him sharply.

  “O.K., O.K.”

  “I’ll tell you what. You go to the place on Union Avenue. Kitty’s. But, listen here, you don’t pay more than five-and-two.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  His father shook his head, dismayed. “Five for the girl, two for the room, and don’t say I sent you, I’m your father for Chrissakes, it would be embarrassing.”

  Joshua got up to go.

  “Not now. Geez. These are the Days of Awe.”

  “When, then?”

  “I don’t care when, but not now.”

  Joshua sank to the sofa in the backyard again, sulking, and there was a long and brooding silence between them. Finally, his father said, “Go early.”

  “What?”

  “You go early, they’re cleaner and not yet wet from all the others and, look, you’re a gentleman, you never hit a whore. You are very polite.”

  “Yeah, I know. I step into her room, I take off my hat.”

  “Hey, that’s right, Josh,” he said, pleased.

  “Only I never wear one.”

  “Oh yes you do. Tomorrow. For the synagogue.”

  The next morning they started out once more for the B’nai Jacob synagogue on Fairmount Street. His father looking spiffy in his straw boater and ice-cream suit; Joshua, with his trousers pressed to perfection and his black shoes gleaming. And once more, the closer they got to the synagogue, the more his father dragged his feet. “They’re guys who go there every night, you know, just like to the track. It’s amazing.”

  “Yeah, only they must be very Jewish, not like us.”

  Men in prayer shawls spilled over the outside steps; they gathered in knots on the sidewalk. Smoking, gossiping.

  “What are they all doing out on the street?” his father asked, irritated.

  “It’s probably jammed inside.”

  “You don’t see that welching son-of-a-bitch of a dentist anywhere? Orbach?”

  “No. But he could be inside.”

  “Remember, I give you the elbow once, you stand up, twice, you sit down again.”

  “Right. Let’s go.”

  “We could look for another synagogue. The one in Outremont. Near Bernard. Maybe it’s not so crowded.”

  But when they found it, there were men gathered outside there, too.

  “What do you think?” his father asked.

  “It’s up to you, Daddy.”

  “Isn’t this where your Uncle Harvey and Aunt Fanny go?”

  “I think so.”

  “Let’s go get a coffee and talk it over.”

  8

  IN THE AUTUMN, THAT MOST PERFECT OF NORTHERN seasons, Kevin’s face, shining with assurance, appeared to anoint the gossip columns at least once a week, which distressed Pauline.

  Westmount’s prodigal son, back from playing truant in Bermuda, was here, there, and everywhere. Flourishing. Outfitted by Brisson & Brisson, driving a silvery Porsche. That season it seemed no consulate dared celebrate its national day, or new disco open its doors, without Kevin there to offer a benediction. Usually with a jowly Jack Trimble, disconcertingly merry, and a glowing Jane in tow. Whatever they were up to, it was ostensibly doing the three of them nothing but good. Although the stock market continued in the doldrums – money tighter than ever in a diminishing city – the investment fund Trimble had launched, Kevin at the helm, had got off to a rousing start.

  Pauline remained unconvinced. Kevin, for his part, avoided her, even their brief phone conversations abrasive.

  “How,” she wanted to know, “can you afford to buy a Porsche?”

  “Why,” he shot right back, “are you always prepared to believe the worst of me?”

  Pauline went to Ottawa to have lunch with the senator.

  “Kevin’s back,” she said.

  “I do read the financial pages, you know.”

  “Couldn’t you see him?”

  “I rather suspect,” he said, “that he knows where to find me,” and he immediately changed the subject.

  When Joshua ran into Trimble late one afternoon on Crescent Street, and they ducked into The Troika together for drinks, it was immediately clear that his black mood had passed as swiftly as the summer. “Joshu
a, old son, we both misjudged Kevin badly. He’s a remarkable chap. A late bloomer, certainly, but all he needed was a push. Somebody willing to show confidence in him.”

  “Come on,” Joshua said, “you’re the one who’s running that fund. He’s only window dressing.”

  “The hell he is. He makes every bleeding decision on his own. I bless the day he came back here.”

  “Do you now?”

  “Yes, and business is only the half of it. He’s got me out on the golf course a couple of afternoons a week, imagine that, and Jane is looking ten years younger. I only hope the others realize how much he’s doing to prove himself. It’s important to him.”

  Joshua shrugged.

  “Those Westmount wankers, if they had to do business in London and New York, like I do, they’d find out soon enough that they’re strictly third-division. They haven’t got what it takes. Fortunately for them, they can believe this little provincial backwater is society. But we’ve been around. We know different, don’t we, old son?”

  “Yes, we do,” he said, “but that hardly explains why you continue to play the fool for them.”

  “I don’t get the drift,” he said, hardening.

  Joshua paused to light a cigarette. “You’re no more British than I am, Jack.”

  Trimble didn’t blanch. He laughed. He slapped his knee. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “You were born right here, old son.”

  “I was born in Putney. I didn’t settle here until ’forty-nine. Everybody knows that.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not about to spill the beans.”

  “The beans. There are no beans. You bloody imbecile. You little hack. What you mean to say is, you are not about to risk spreading slanderous stories about your betters, because you know damn well you’d be hearing from my solicitors.”

  “Lawyers.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And, oh, something else,” he added with a thin smile. “Your brother-in-law is giving me tennis lessons.” And he stomped out of The Troika.

  Joshua, feeling crummy, lingered at the bar, ordering another drink. He hadn’t wanted to threaten Trimble, even obliquely. He disliked himself for it. But there was Pauline to consider, and the senator, and if there was going to be any trouble, it was best Trimble knew beforehand that he had something on him. Some muscle. And yet – and yet – the more he pondered it, ordering yet another drink, the more it seemed to him that if anybody was going to play dirty, it was most likely to be Kevin. The pusillanimous brother-in-law he was now lumbered with. So he quit the bar angry with Pauline for obliging him to hammer Trimble.

  The night of the dinner party on the lake, when a turbulent Trimble had first announced his surprising association with Kevin, Joshua and Pauline had sat up talking until dawn, drinking on the tilting wraparound porch.

  “What you see,” she said, “is a pathetic, broken-down athlete, a forty-one-year-old boy, certainly not bright by your standards. Or Murdoch’s. Or even Seymour’s. But he was such a beautiful boy, Josh. So naturally graceful. A faun. Every head turned when he passed. He was a favorite of the gods, or so it seemed once. If I haven’t told you about him before, it’s really because of my father and you. It’s surprising, but you get along so well now, you really do. I don’t want to spoil that for either of you. In a certain sense you have become the son he wanted, and I just couldn’t bear for you to think badly of him now.”

  “Why should I?” he asked, interested.

  “Because Kevin is the son he destroyed.”

  As he started to protest, she held up her hands. “I know. Don’t start. I’ve heard you on the subject before. We can’t blame everything on our parents. We are responsible for what we become. And God help us all if Alex doesn’t turn out just right, because you’re a hard man, Joshua Shapiro, oh yes you are.”

  “We were talking about Kevin,” he said evenly.

  “You didn’t like that?”

  “No.”

  All right. O.K. Kevin, she explained, had once been all but overwhelmed with love and approval. Pauline had worshipped him. Stephen Andrew Hornby, who had always yearned for a son, wept with joy on the day he was born. But, above all, it had been their mother who had doted on him, taking him everywhere with her, even when he was a tot. To sit on Mackenzie King’s lap, to be introduced to the Governor-General. If she came home late from a party, her first stop was the nursery. One governess after another was found wanting. The Swiss one bullied him too much and another one, brought over from England, didn’t have quite the right accent. Kevin had hardly started school when their father began to read aloud to him every night, and to prepare him for the great things to come.

  “And what about you?” Joshua asked, concerned.

  “I was merely a girl.”

  “Right right,” Joshua responded warmly, beginning to stroke her inner thigh.

  But she moved away from him, absorbed in her story.

  Every night, before dinner, Kevin was given a list of topics that were to be discussed at the table, and an hour to prepare himself for them in the library. Social justice. The British North America Act. The Magna Carta. His every response was applauded before their father gently corrected his errors in logic, teaching him, he hoped, how to marshal his arguments for the parliamentary debates that were bound to come. Their mother bought him a pony. He had his own French tutor. And then, without warning, their family life began to come apart. Stephen Andrew Hornby, rather than getting the portfolio he was counting on, the job that Mackenzie King had promised him, was abruptly retired to the Senate. The bone-yard. Not, mind you, because he lacked the ability, but because political cunning called for a French Canadian to be put forward at the time. So he was no longer a presence, a prince. There was no longer a quickening when Stephen Andrew Hornby entered a room, or the bar in the Rideau Club. He became sour. Difficult. Younger men didn’t smile at his witticisms any more. And that’s when their mother, always a flirt, began to have her affairs, discreetly at first and then with a certain defiance. And now when the senator drifted into the Rideau he imagined the other men whispering, and he wondered which one, if not all of them, had been to bed with his wife. Rightly or wrongly, he began to suspect that darling Kevin had become his wife’s accomplice. Kevin would pretend that he and his mother had been together all afternoon, when the truth was he had been dropped off at a movie, while his mother romped elsewhere. Then there was the trip to Europe. A grand tour. Ostensibly, to further Kevin and Pauline’s education. They would listen to the debates in Westminster. Visit the Louvre. See the Vatican. But actually it was no more than an excuse for their mother to run wild. She had begun to drink a good deal by this time, and the more she drank, the less fastidious she became about her lovers. Pauline was now talking about gondoliers and croupiers and the kind of bronzed young horrors who sat at the bar of the Ruel or on the terrace of the Carlton in Cannes, waiting. She was terrified. They were often in the bedroom next to their mother’s in the hotel in Ville-Franche or St.-Paul-de-Vence or Antibes. Pauline would lie in bed with a pillow over her head, trying to shut out their love-making noises. But Kevin was enthralled. He would hold an inverted glass to the wall, listening to them. “Oh boy,” he’d say, “are we ever going to have treats tomorrow. We can have anything we want tomorrow.” And when they got back from Europe, Pauline ran right into their father’s arms when he stepped on board the ship in Quebec City. But he took one look at Kevin and he went rigid. He knew. He took one look, and he understood he was no longer a towering figure in his son’s life. Instead, he was something pathetic. An old fool. A cuckold.

  As before, topics were set for discussion at the dinner table. The Family Compact. Heredity. Property rights. But now Pauline was included and listened to with kindness. And once Kevin had made his case, his manner just a little too cocksure now, the senator would sit back with an ironical smile on his face and demolish it. Kevin would have appealed to their mother for help, but if she wasn’t out, she was indisposed
. She seldom joined them at the dinner table any more. They were living in the Westmount house again, on Upper Lansdowne, the senator going to Ottawa for only a couple of days a week. And if he turned on Kevin in their mother’s presence, she would cry, but she made no protest. And one day she just packed her bags and was gone, leaving Kevin stranded. Loving postcards came for him from New Orleans, San Francisco, and even Cairo once. And if she was in town between planes and lovers, she would take them to lunch at the Ritz, spilling her drinks, tears running down her powdered cheeks, embarrassing Kevin and frightening Pauline. Now Pauline became Kevin’s only support. He began to lie, he began to cheat. He wasn’t awfully good at school, and so on the way home from Selwyn House he would doctor his report card. He was a natural athlete. Star of the hockey team. Unequaled in track and field. But their father simply didn’t give a damn any more.

  Kevin now had to reconcile school, where masters and boys doted on him, and the lake in summer, where Jane wasn’t the only girl who swooned in his presence, with what had become their grim and unyielding house on Upper Lansdowne, where disapproval was all but absolute. “Oh, and he was such a beautiful boy, Josh, he didn’t deserve to become a counter in my parents’ quarrel. He was hardly to blame for Mother’s infidelities. He deserved better of my father, much better. And just as my father seemed to be coming around, if only a little, my mother had her stroke, and died in a room in the Royal Vic with my father holding her hand. I have no idea what passed between them in that room, what he said or what she said, but he hardened against Kevin once more.”