Solomon Gursky Was Here

  “How can she wear such a dress, she just had a mastectomy, everybody knows. Oh, I see. They make them with nipples now.”

  “What?”

  “The plastic boobs. I said don’t look.”

  “I’m not!”

  “And don’t use chopsticks. People are staring. You look like such a fool.”

  Ten

  “What did you think, Olive?”

  “He should go on a diet. Like yesterday. Brando used to be so sexy. Hubba hubba!” Mrs. Jenkins didn’t dare mention Last Tango in Paris, which she had slipped out to see alone. Imagine Bert Smith there when Brando reached for the butter. “But,” she added, “I really go for that Al Pacino.”

  “He’s Italian.”

  “Yeah, but cute. Those bedroom eyes. Remember Charles Boyer? Come wiz me to ze Casbah. Those were the days, eh, Bert? What did you think?”

  “I thought it was shockingly immoral from beginning to end.”

  “Said the prioress to the Fuller Brush man. But didn’t you just die when that guy woke up with the horse’s head in his bed?”

  “In real life he would have wakened when they came into the bedroom with it.”

  Squeezing her beady little eyes shut, puffing out her lower lip, Mrs. Jenkins said, “And what if they put it there while he was out, smarty-pants?”

  “Then he would have been bound to notice the bump at the foot of his bed before getting into it.”

  “Oh, Bert, it takes seventy-two muscles to frown but only twelve to smile. Try it once.”

  As usual, they went to The Downtowner for a treat after the matinee. Smith ordered tea with brown toast and strawberry jam.

  “And for you?” the waitress asked.

  “Make me an offer I can’t refuse.”

  “The lady will have a banana split.”

  “One bill or two?”

  “Mr. Smith and I always go Dutch.”

  No sooner did the waitress leave than Mrs. Jenkins snatched all the little tin foil containers of mustard and ketchup on the table and stuffed them into her handbag. “When that waitress wiped the table with that yucky cloth she leaned over for your benefit.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Her jugs.”

  “Please,” Smith said.

  “And maybe, just maybe, that guy didn’t hear them put the horse’s head in his bed because he had taken some sleeping pills before retiring like they all do in Hollywood, if you read up on it.”

  “Then why did he waken later?”

  Mrs. Jenkins sighed deeply and rolled her eyes. “Oh, come off it, Bert. Do cheer up.”

  But he couldn’t. The world was out of joint, every one of his cherished beliefs now held in contempt. Once the G-Men, say Dennis O’Keefe or Pat O’Brien, were the heroes in the movies, but today it was Bonnie and Clyde. The guardians of law and order, on the other hand, were portrayed as corrupt. Even in westerns, when they still made one, it wasn’t Randolph Scott or Jimmy Stewart who was the hero, but Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The memoirs of whores and swindlers became best-sellers. Young Americans with yellow streaks down their backs were being welcomed by a fat Jewess in hot pants at a store-front office on Prince Arthur Street, the book brazenly displayed in the window—Manual For Draft-Age Immigrants To Canada—telling them how to lie to gain entry into the country. Uppity French-Canadians wanted the sons of anglophones who had beaten them on the Plains of Abraham to speak their lingo now, a patois that made real Frenchmen cringe. The shelves of Westmount Library were laden with filth and to go for a stroll in Murray Hill Park on a balmy summer evening was to risk tripping over copulating foreigners.

  Since his wrongful dismissal from the customs office, Smith had never gone on welfare. He had always managed somehow. He had worked as a bookkeeper for an auto-parts outfit in Calgary until he gathered that he was expected to help Mr. Hrymnak diddle his income tax. He had been employed for eight years as a cashier at Wally’s Prairie Schooner, trusted with the bank deposits, and then a new manager came in, a young Italian who wore his hair in a pompadour. Vaccarelli fired Smith and put a young Polish girl with bleached blonde hair in his place.

  Through the wasting years Smith consulted lawyers again and again, the reputable ones nervously showing him the door once he began to rage against the Jews, and the other ones bilking him. Each time a new minister of justice was appointed, he wrote him a voluminous letter, trying to have his case reopened, unavailingly.

  Smith first drifted to Montreal in 1948. Answering a want ad in the Star, scraping bottom, he actually found himself working for a Jew. Hornstein’s Home Furniture on the Main. Smith’s first day on the job, he discovered that he was one of six rookies on the floor. Gordy Hornstein gathered them together before opening the doors to the crowd that was already churning outside, jostling for position, rapping on the plate-glass windows. “You see that three-piece living-room set in the window? I took a half-page ad in the Star yesterday advertising it for $125 to our first fifty customers. Anybody who sells one of those sets is fired. Tell those bargain-hunters outside whatever you want. Delivery is ten years. The cushions are stuffed with rat shit. The frames are made of cardboard. Tell them anything. But it’s your job to shift them into pricier lines and to sign them to twelve-month contracts. Now some words of advice because you’re new here and only three of you will still be working for Hornstein’s once the week is out. We get all kinds here. French-Canadians, Polacks, guineas, Jews, hunkies, niggers, you name it. This isn’t Ogilvy’s or Holt Renfrew. It’s the Main. You sell a French-Canadian a five-piece set for $350, ship him only four unmatched pieces from cheaper sets he won’t complain, he’s probably never been into a real store before and he buys from a Jew he expects to be cheated. I trust you have memorized the prices from the sheets I gave you because none are marked on the actual items. You are selling to Italians or Jews, you quote them double, because they don’t come in their pants unless they can beat you down to half-price. One thing more. We don’t sell to DPs here.”

  In those days DP was the Canadian coinage for Displaced Persons, that is to say, the trickle of European survivors that had recently been allowed into the country.

  “Why don’t we sell to refugees?” one of the rookies asked.

  “Oh shit, a DP by me isn’t a greener, it’s a nigger. We call them DPs because all that interests them is the Down Payment. They fork out for that, load my furniture on to their stolen pickup, and it’s goodbye Charlie. Tell them we’re out of anything they want. Whisper they can get it cheaper at Greenberg’s, he does the same to me, may he rot in hell. But do not sell to them. Okay, hold your noses. I’m now gonna open up dem golden gates. Good luck, guys.”

  Smith, who didn’t last the week, promptly found a better job, this time as a floorwalker in Morgan’s department store. He had only been at it for a month when, riding a number 43 streetcar, he saw Callaghan staring at him from a street corner. The liar. The Judas. And shortly afterward the Gurskys made a serious attempt to snare him with an obviously spurious notice in the Star, the bait an unclaimed legacy of fifty thousand pounds for one Bert Smith. They must think I’m stupid. Really stupid. Looking to be found lying in a puddle of blood on a railway station floor, like McGraw. Or to be discovered floating down the river. Too clever to be caught out by such a transparent ruse, but alarmed all the same, Smith packed his bag and quit Montreal, fleeing west, his cherished photograph of Archie and Nancy Smith posing before their sod hut in Gloriana, wrapped in a towel to protect the glass. Smith comforted himself on the train by imagining the Gurskys in conclave, fabulously wealthy, yes, but frightened by the knowledge that there was a poor but honest man still out there who had their measure and could not be bought, a man watching and waiting, writing to government officials in Ottawa.

  Smith worked the phone for a small debt-collection agency in Regina, he was a department-store security officer in Saskatoon, and rose into a bookkeeping job again, in Edmonton, until his employer discovered that he had once been discharg
ed from the customs office as a troublemaker, maybe worse.

  Then, in 1963 he was drawn back to Montreal, wandering up the mountainside to survey the Gursky estates, passing the high brick walls topped with menacing shards of glass, peering through the wrought-iron gates.

  The tabernacles of robbers prosper,

  and they that provoke God are secure;

  into whose hand God bringeth abundantly.

  Driven by extreme need, Smith approached his bank for a threehundred-dollar loan. The clerk he was sent to see, a slinky black girl less than half his age, seemed amused. “My God,” she said, “you’re sixty years old and you haven’t got a credit rating. Haven’t you ever borrowed money before?”

  “I would like to speak with the manager, please.”

  “Mr. Praxipolis doesn’t deal with small loans.”

  “And at the Royal Bank I expected to deal with my own kind,” Smith said, fleeing the office.

  Fortunately, the affable Mrs. Jenkins accepted a post-dated cheque for his first week’s rent, and now he had been lodged in her house for ten years.

  A decade.

  Smith darned his own socks, but Mrs. Jenkins did his laundry and, after their first year together, only charged him a token rent. In return, Smith did minor repairs, kept the rent books, made the bank deposits, and filled out Mrs. Jenkins’s income tax returns. He was able to survive on his pension and the occasional odd job, filling in here and there as a temporary night watchman, dishwasher, or parking lot attendant. Mrs. Jenkins allowed him a shelf in her refrigerator. They watched TV together. And then, retiring to his room, Smith often went through his Gursky scrapbooks, thick with the family’s activities.

  Over the years Smith saw buildings endowed by the old bootlegger and bearing his name rising everywhere. He read that the prime minister had had him to lunch. Only a few months later Lionel Gursky succeeded in having St. Andrews, the home of the British Open, accept a two-hundred-thousand-pound purse for the Loch Edmond’s Mist Classic Tournament. Lionel’s latest concubine was featured in Queen:

  “‘Some spend on things they can use, I splurge on paintings,’ says dazzling Vanessa Gursky, the English beauty, wife of Lionel Gursky, likely the next CEO of the James McTavish Distillery Ltd. Chatelaine of a castle in Connemara, but equally at home in her Fifth Avenue penthouse (‘My crash pad in the Big Apple,’ as she so charmingly puts it) or her Nash terrace flat in Regent’s Park, the peripatetic Vanessa’s portrait has been painted by both Graham Sutherland and Andy Warhol. Here, left, she is seen standing before her favourite, the portrait painted by Annigoni, a picture of beguiling elegance.”

  On the occasion of Mr. Bernard’s legendary seventy-fifth birthday party at the Ritz-Carlton, in 1973, the Gazette printed a list of those fortunate enough to be invited. And within months the old bootlegger was dead. Cancer. Smith went to the funeral, mingling with the mourners, and there he was confronted by the Judas himself.

  “I’m Tim Callaghan. Remember me?”

  “I remember you.”

  One morning only a week later Mrs. Jenkins rapped on the door to Smith’s room. “There’s a gentleman here to see you.”

  “I’m not expecting anybody.”

  “He says it’s important.”

  And he was already there, sliding past Mrs. Jenkins, his smile benevolent. “Bertram Smith?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I’d like to speak to you alone.”

  Mrs. Jenkins, her massive bosom rising to the insult, didn’t budge.

  “What’s black and white and brown,” she asked, nostrils flaring, “and looks good on a lawyer?”

  “How did you know I was a lawyer?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then?”

  “Black and white and brown and looks good on a lawyer?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Sorry.”

  “A Doberman,” Mrs. Jenkins said, marching out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  “Now tell me what you want here,” Smith said.

  “Providing that you are Bert Smith, the only issue of Archibald and Nancy Smith, who came to this country from England in 1902, and that you can produce the necessary documents to prove your identity, what I want, sir, is to tell you that we have been looking for you for years. You are the beneficiary of a considerable legacy.”

  “Hold it,” Smith said, inching open the door to his room. But she wasn’t listening outside. “All right, then. Go ahead. Tell me about it.”

  Three

  One

  Strawberry was descended from United Empire Loyalists. The name of his great-great-grandfather, Captain Josiah Watson, was inscribed on a copper plaque embedded in a boulder on the shores of Lake Memphremagog, a memorial dedicated to the pioneers “who braved the wilderness that their progeny, et al, might enjoy the advantages of civilization in one of Nature’s wonderlands.”

  One day Strawberry took Moses to see the boulder. It stood on a height that had long since become a popular trysting spot for local teenagers. Strewn about were broken beer bottles and used condoms. Standing alone when it was first set in place, the boulder now overlooked VINCE’S ADULT VIDEOS on the roadside and, directly below, a billboard announcing that the surrounding terrain would shortly be the site of PIONEER PARK CONDOMINIUMS, complete with state-of-the-art marina. Yet another ACORN PROPERTIES development under the supervision of Harvey Schwartz.

  Moses found Captain Watson’s name mentioned in Settling The Townships by Silas Woodford. “The first permanent location of what we now call Watson’s Landing was made by Capt. Josiah Watson, U.E. Loyalist from the province of New York, who came from Peacham, Vt., sometime during the later years of the 18th century.”

  Perhaps it was the likes of the captain that another local historian, Mrs. C.M. Day, had in mind when she wrote in History of the Eastern Townships, Province of Quebec, Dominion of Canada, Civil and Descriptive: “Generally speaking, the class of men who comprised our earliest population were anything but religiously inclined: indeed, it has been said, and we fear with too much truth, that a really God-fearing man was a rare exception among them.”

  No sooner did these ruffians harvest their first crop than they distilled the surplus grain to make spirituous liquors, which prompted Mrs. Day to note with a certain asperity, “The way was thus gradually but surely prepared for drunkenness, poverty, and the various forms of vice which often culminated in crime and its fearful penalties.”

  Such was certainly the case with Captain Watson who, staggering home from a friend’s cabin one rainy spring night, managed the difficult feat of drowning in a ditch filled with no more than three inches of water. His son Ebenezer, also a prodigious drinker, seemed destined to follow suit until he was literally plucked out of a Magog gutter one day by that interloper known as Brother Ephraim.

  “‘Behold,’” Brother Ephraim said to him, “the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.’”

  Brother Ephraim, sole author of Evidence from the Scriptures of the Second Coming of Christ in the Eastern Townships about the year 1850, later revised the date to 1852 and, finally, February 26, 1853.

  Thrusting his demons behind him, Ebenezer Watson joined Brother Ephraim and his two leading converts, the Reverends Columbus Green and Amos Litch, preaching against the tyranny of hootch and spreading fear about the coming of Judgement Day.

  Many of Ephraim’s followers, Ebenezer Watson prominent among them, taking to heart his warning about camels and rich men, signed over their livestock and the deeds to their properties to the Millenarian Trust Company. In preparation for the World’s End, they also bought ascension robes from Brother Ephraim. The men weren’t concerned about the cut of their loosely fitted robes, but many of the women, especially the younger ones, had to return for innumerable fittings in the log cabin that Brother Ephraim had built for himself in the woods. The
y came one at a time and only much later did they speculate among themselves about the ridges and deep swirls and curving hollows carved into his back.

  The Millenarians never numbered more than two hundred and were subject to ridicule in some quarters. Say, in Crosby’s Hotel or round the hot stove at Alva Simpson & Co., dealers in Proprietary Medicines, Perfumery, Rubber Goods, Hair Preparations, Druggists’ Sundries, &c., &c., &c. The laughter of skeptics heightened after the world failed to end as predicted on June 2, 1851. It was plain to see that the Millenarians, gathered in their robes in the Magog Town Meeting Hall, had been stood up by their Maker. A journal popular in the Townships at the time, The Sherbrooke Gazette, also proprietor of SMITH’S PATENT EGG BEATER (will beat a pint of eggs in five seconds), noted, “From the failure of calculations of Brother Ephraim as to the ‘time of the end’, many of his followers apostatized, but a large number continued steadfast.”

  They could hardly be blamed. The land they were attempting to cultivate, once the hunting ground of the Algonquin nation, was ridden with unmanageable humps and strewn with rocks. The first settlers, their grandparents, had organized themselves into groups of forty to petition for a township ten miles square, splitting the forest between them, the agent grabbing the choicest site.

  The grandparents set out with a camp-kettle, an axe, a gun, ammunition, sacks of seed, and maybe a cow or two or an ox. There were no roads. There were not even trails. Until they managed to build their first log shanty with a bark roof and an earthen floor, they were obliged to sleep out in the woods, making a bed of hemlock branches, using the largest ones for a windbreak. Without matches they were dependent on flint, steel and spunk. Come June they had to keep smudge fires lit, in the dim hope of fending off moose flies big as bumblebees. There was no hay. So they destroyed the dams in the beaver meadows, drained the flooded land, and relied on the wild grass that grew there. They learned to eat cowslips and nettles, pigweed, ground-nuts, wild onions. They coped with panthers and catamounts, black bears killing calves and carrying them off. Once they acquired lambs and turkeys and chickens, they discovered that these were hostage to lynx and wolves. Most of the clothes they wore were spun and woven by the women who learned to master hand-card, distaff, wheel, and loom. If they were lucky, only three years passed before they brought in their first harvest. If the crop failed, the men felled trees and made black salt, tramping forty miles to market their sacks of potash, for which they were paid a pittance.