Solomon Gursky Was Here

  “But it’s not even noon yet,” she protested.

  “Late in the day for that one.”

  Next Harvey told his secretary to try a salmon-fishing camp on the Restigouche.

  “They’re expecting him on Tuesday.”

  There were no further incidents at the graveside, but a week after Mr. Bernard died Harvey was called upon to deal with yet another conundrum. The Monday following Mr. Bernard’s death, his children had studied the newsweeklies for comment on their father’s passing and then conferred together, uniformly outraged. Lionel phoned Harvey from his perch high in the Gursky building on Fifth Avenue. “I need you here,” he said.

  Harvey hastened to the airport and boarded one of the Gursky jets, a Lear. His lunch, ordered in advance and consumed at 28,000 feet, consisted of cottage cheese salad, a bowl of bran, and a sherbet of stewed prunes washed down with a bottle of Vichy water. Even as he flossed his teeth, Harvey pondered financial reports, but his mind was elsewhere. He knew that Lionel was giving a dinner party for Jackie Onassis that night. Harvey had packed his magenta velvet dinner jacket just in case. He no sooner landed at LaGuardia than a helicopter settled alongside, swallowing him, ascending again, and easing him on to the pad on the roof of the Gursky building, Harvey hurrying to Lionel’s office. Lionel thrust a copy of a newsweekly at him, open at the offending page. “Do you have a ball-park figure for our annual ad budget with Time and Newsweek?”

  Reconciled, Harvey placed a call to the publisher while Lionel listened on the extension on his side of the desk.

  “Mr. Bernard died last Monday after a long illness.”

  “Yes. We know that. Please convey our condolences to Lionel.”

  “He was a great human being. I say that not because of my continuing unique relationship to the family, but from the heart.”

  “Nobody doubts that.”

  “During his lifetime, you know, I had many offers to go elsewhere for more money. But as he was loyal to me, I was loyal to him. His children appreciate that.”

  The publisher didn’t know what to say.

  “From nothing he built one of the world’s largest liquor businesses. Wasn’t that truly remarkable?”

  “Certainly it was.”

  “Then why does his unfortunate passing rate no more than five lines in ‘Milestones’?”

  As the publisher explained to Harvey that there had been a big break in the continuing Watergate story during the week and, consequently, the back of the magazine had been contracted to accommodate it, Lionel flipped the magazine open to another page, scribbled a note, and passed both to Harvey. The note read: “Ask him about the nigger.”

  “Oh, I can understand that,” Harvey said to the publisher. “Only how come an Afro-American dies and he gets a full page?”

  “Louis Armstrong was famous,” the publisher said.

  Lapsing into pleasantries, Harvey continued to chat as Lionel hastily scribbled another note. Taking it, Harvey swallowed hard and interrupted the publisher. “But thinking aloud, if I may, why don’t you make up for overlooking Mr. Bernard’s death by doing a story on Lionel taking over, which is absolutely wonderful. I love him. I love him like a brother. I’m not ashamed to say that. But I think a lot of people are eager to know more about him, like what makes him tick and what are his future plans for McTavish.”

  The deal made, or so he hoped, Harvey hung up; and then he raised his enormous expressionless brown eyes to Lionel, searching.

  Lionel, his grin boyish, responded with a clap on the back. Harvey had seen him do that to manicurists and parking-lot attendants, just before fishing into his pocket for a tip.

  “Join me in a drink?” Lionel asked.

  “You go ahead. I’ll have a Vichy, please.”

  Harvey subsided into a leather chair, spent, as an ebullient Lionel took to the telephone, calling one friend after another, letting it drop that over his objections the newsweekly was doing an in-depth story on him. “They’ll be calling all my friends, you know how they operate. Hey, you won’t tell them about Rumania, right?”

  Rumania, Harvey remembered, sighing.

  A year earlier Lionel had been included in a chartered jet laden with fifty corporate leaders who were flown to eastern Europe by the newsweekly to meet with Communist leaders. Afloat on champagne and caviar, Lionel and a couple of the other middle-aged magnates had started in goosing the stewardesses as soon as the seat-belt-sign blinked off. If some of the girls had been compliant, the longlegged straw-haired one Lionel fancied had clearly taken umbrage. She spurned his red roses and champagne in Warsaw. She slapped his face in the lobby of the Hotel Metropole in Moscow. And come Bucharest there was an embarrassing incident. A drunken Lionel, the stewardess claimed, had forced his way into her room, attempting indecent assault. Not so, Lionel protested, he had been invited. Once back in New York, however, the girl had consulted a lawyer, Harvey had been sent for, and the out-of-court settlement had not come cheap, all things considered.

  Girls recalcitrant or unresponsive, but consumed by avarice, had been Lionel’s problem even at McGill. A terrified Harvey had unfortunately been present the first time a financial settlement had been demanded and Mr. Bernard had flown into one of his legendary rages, spewing obscenities.

  Mr. Bernard, in his forties then, rocking on his tiny heels before the towering marble fireplace, seething. Young Lionel seated on the sofa, unperturbed, riding it out with a supercilious smile. When without warning an exasperated Mr. Bernard strode toward him, unzipped his fly, yanked out his penis, and shook it in his son’s face. “I want you to know, you whore-master, that in all my years this has only been into your mother, God bless her,” and, zipping up again, tearful, adding “and to this day she has the only cunt still good enough for Bernard Gursky. Respect. Dignity. That you still have to learn. Animal.”

  Coming off another telephone call, Lionel looked up, surprised, “I didn’t realize that you were still here, Harvey.”

  “Yeah, well, I was wondering if you needed me for anything else.”

  “Nope.”

  “Hey,” Harvey said, brightening, “would you like to join me for dinner tonight?”

  “Sorry. I can’t.”

  “Busy busy?”

  “Bushed. I thought tonight I’d turn in early for once. Harvey, you look different. What is it?”

  “I do not look different.”

  “Harvey, I loved my father. But he was also something of a tyrant, wasn’t he?”

  “We’ve got a problem, Lionel.” Miss O’Brien’s unfulfilled expectations. The envelope.

  “Good for you, Harvey. How much was in it?”

  “You were there when we opened the safe. There was no envelope.”

  “Was the old goat screwing her for all those years?”

  “No, but there were intimacies of a kind.”

  “Hell, if that’s what he wanted, we could have afforded much better.”

  “He also appears to have told her a good deal about the old days. It might be prudent to discover an envelope with, say, a couple of hundred thousand dollars in it.”

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

  “That’s exactly what I said to Morrie.”

  “What in the hell has that idiot got to do with it?”

  “It was his idea. I told him it was ill-advised. Once you start on a thing like that, you could be paying out for years.”

  “I didn’t say there should be an envelope or that there shouldn’t be an envelope. All I said is I want nothing to do with it. You do what you think best, Harvey. I’d like to be able to count on you.”

  A copy of the drawing of a radiant Ephraim Gursky that hung over the fireplace in the boardroom of the Bernard Gursky Tower in Montreal hung in a gold frame in Lionel’s office. Harvey was so familiar with it that he hadn’t looked at it for years, but he did now. Ephraim, no taller than Mr. Bernard, was, unlike him, all coiled muscle, obviously ready to spring out of the frame and wrestle both Lion
el and Harvey to the ground. Ephraim was drawn alongside a blow-hole, with both feet planted in the pack ice, his expression defiant, his head hooded, his body covered with layers of sealskin, not so much to keep out the cold, it seemed, as to lock in the animal heat lest it melt the surrounding ice. He held a harpoon in his fist, the shaft made of caribou antler. There was a seal lying at his feet, the three masts of the doomed Erebus and jagged icebergs rising in the background, the black Arctic sky lit by paraselenae, the mock-moons of the north. Harvey, unaccountably distressed, looked away from the drawing and indicated the whalebone sculpture resting on a pedestal in the corner. “That’s Eskimo, isn’t it?”

  “You want it, it’s yours.”

  “No. But where did you get it?”

  “I can’t remember how it got here, but I think it belonged to my Uncle Solomon once. Why?”

  “Nothing. Just asking,” Harvey said, lifting the piece off the pedestal to examine its underside, where he espied what, to his uninformed eye, appeared to be a ‘gimel’.

  Three

  Each time he reached that point on the 132 where it overtook the St. Lawrence River and hung in there, twisting with the shore, hugging it—past Trois Pistoles, winding beyond Rimouski—Moses’s spirits soared. In his mind’s eye, he would obliterate the straining Winnebagos and swarms of black-leather motorcyclists and roadside signs: TARZAN CAMPING ICI … BAR BQ CHICKEN CHEZ OCTAVE … 10 DANSEUSES NUES 10. He would shut out the slapdash little riverside towns with their souvenir shops mounted on cinderblocks, windows choked with machine-tooled carvings of cute spade-bearded habitants. He would ignore the houses framed by multi-coloured lights, the owner’s initials woven into the aluminum storm door. Plastic reindeer staked in mid-prance on lawns already adorned with geranium beds set in worn whitewashed tires, the Quebecker’s coronet.

  Blinding himself to what we had made of our provenance, he would try to see the countryside as it must have looked to Cartier and his crew of sea-weary fishermen out of St. Malo in 1534. The year that they first ventured beyond the gulf, sailing into the estuary and up the fjord, anchoring at Ile Verte to scamper after hares for the pot, putting in at Ile aux Coudres to shake wild hazelnuts free of the trees. Sailing into the Kingdom of the Saguenay and beyond, drifting past beluga whales and walrus and unbelievably thick schools of salar the leaper, as the king of freshwater fish was first known. Though the river would fail to lead them to La Chine—a disappointment to François I no doubt—how the poor and pinched men of Brittany must have marvelled at the cornucopia on either shore. The abundance of virgin dark green forest and the river-enriched black soil. The moose and deer and beaver and geese and ducks. The cod. The salmon, the salmon. The silvery, sea-bright salmon rolling in the ripples and leaping free.

  At Mont-Joli, grateful to be exactly where he was for once, even without her, Moses dropped sharply right into the Gaspé on the winding 132. Rising and dipping he spun into the valley of the Matepédia, riverbanks soaring like canyon walls, the spruce and cedar and birch not so much rooted there as scaling the cliffs on which they held no more than a tenuous toe-hold. Then he crossed into New Brunswick at Pointe-à-la-Croix, taking the bridge into Campbellton and then making straight for the camp of the Restigouche. Vince’s Gulch was made up of a dining lodge and a sleeping lodge and a spread of outbuildings, including an ice-house.

  Bouncing into the parking space in his Toyota shortly after five P.M. Moses noted two cars, with North Carolina licence plates, already in place in the shade, a Cadillac and a Mercedes 450 SEL with a Playboy bunny mounted on the rear bumper. Big chunky Jim Boyd, the head guide, walked slowly toward Moses, his catcher’s hand extended but his eyes troubled. “They got here about an hour ago,” he said. “Barney Gursky and his girlfriend Darlene Walton and Larry and Mary Lou Logan. The Logans have a teenage boy with them. Rob. A real doozer. He didn’t know there wasn’t going to be any TV and he suffers from allergies.” Jim allowed that to sink in before he added, “They never fished for salmon before. They’re in furniture, very big, looking to set up a factory, maybe two hundred jobs, either here or in Ontario. They’re guests of that horse’s ass who passes for our minister of trade and he wants them to have one hell of a good time. So we don’t want any trouble, Moses. Where’s Beatrice?”

  “We’re not together any more.”

  “You’re no damn good, Moses, and you’re going to die all alone like me in a tarpaper shack somewheres.”

  Moses handed over his traditional gifts, a pound of Twinings Ceylon Breakfast Tea and a bottle of Macallan Single Highland Malt.

  “You’ve already had two phone calls,” Jim said. “One of them was from England.”

  “I’m not even here.”

  Moses unpacked his things and then stepped out on the lodge porch to look at the water. The screen door to the adjoining bedroom whacked open and out sailed a real life Barbie doll, thirty maybe, blonde, drenched in perfume, her blue eyes not so much made up as underlined and set in italics; everything glowing, twinkly, her confident manner redeemed somewhat by badly chewed fingernails. She was wearing a corn-coloured raw silk top, a necklace ending in a pentangle in the cleft between her high perky breasts, and skintight designer jeans. She was barefoot, her toenails painted black. “Blessed be,” she sang out in a drinker’s husky voice, “I’m Darlene Walton. And what, may I inquire, is your rising house?”

  “Why, I do believe I have a stationary Mercury rising in Pisces,” Moses said. Then he tried to take her arm to help her down from the porch, but she withdrew abruptly from his touch. “There’s a step missing,” he pointed out, irritated.

  She shrugged fetchingly, crinkling her sweet little nose and rolling her eyes, her alarm signals overlarge, like that of a silent movie actress, all to warn him against the man watching from the porch of the dining lodge.

  Barney Gursky might have been forty or sixty. If you didn’t know, it would be difficult to tell, for he was the manner of man who after forty didn’t age but settled into himself. His black hair hadn’t been cut but sculpted. He was bronzed and tall, not a hint of flab on him, with hard blue eyes and a sullen calculating mouth. Had Moses not known him he would have taken Barney for a golf pro who had failed to qualify for the tour, or a local TV morning host still waiting for that network offer. Darlene hastily introduced Moses, explaining, “I opened the screen door and there he was.”

  Either Barney didn’t remember Moses, or he wasn’t allowing that he did. “Do they call you Moe for short?”

  “No. They don’t.”

  “Well, glad to meet you anyway, buddy boy.”

  Barney was the Gursky cockatrice. A week after Anita’s first wedding, he had acquired a Lamborghini, shifted into overdrive, and lit out for California and then Florida, rumoured to have invested in turn in a roller-derby team, film production, oil exploration, the international arms market, a wet T-shirt girls’ basketball league in which he held the rights to the Miami Jigglers, et cetera.

  Wanted, at one time or another, on various charges including fraud and alimony payment arrears, by the authorities in Florida, California, New York, and British Columbia, he hadn’t even attended his sister’s funeral in 1963. Charna had been discovered drowned in a swimming hole at the Friends of the Earth commune in northeastern Vermont four o’clock one morning, wearing nothing but a pair of snakeskin boots.

  The Logans were waiting in the living room which, to Moses’s astonishment, was festooned with red roses and actually had a bartender in attendance, something he had never seen before. The middle-aged Logans seemed an ill-matched pair. Mary Lou looked happily plump, wearing harlequin glasses with the sort of lenses that both magnified and blurred her eyes. But Larry was a scrawny bird, his bald head shiny, his dentures gleaming. Had he been a customs inspector he would have searched the bags of anybody that he considered saucy or younger or more privileged than he was. Their enormous son, who wore a Rolling Stones T-shirt over an immense belly and outsize faded jeans, sat apart. His button-nose cherry red,
Rob held a box of Kleenex and two large Lowney’s Nut Milk chocolate bars on his lap. The Logans were casually dressed, but Barney Gursky was even more fashionably turned out than his dishy girlfriend— Ralph Lauren polo shirt and dungarees and Tony Lama boots. Summoning the bartender with a flick of his manicured fingers, he asked Moses, “What can I offer you to drink?”

  “A soda water, please.”

  “Shucks, I think we got us a teetotaller, Larry. Bring this admirable fella a soda and the former Miss Sunset Beach here,” Barney said, indicating Darlene, “will have a vodka on the rocks, but just one before dinner. She’s watching her calorie intake.” The Logans were from Chapel Hill, Barney said, furniture manufacturers, very big, and Barney’s investment group was backing them in a venture that was willing to bet some twenty million plus on a Canadian plant. “And, hey, the fishing’s going to be just great, because Jimbo here won’t be holding us to the legal limit of two measly salmon a day, will you, boy?”

  “We can’t do anything illegal, sir.”

  “Now isn’t that nice,” Mary Lou said, “really nice. Jim here must have been told that we’re very important VIPs, but he won’t bend the law none for us. I respect that. Where do you hail from, Moe?”

  “He doesn’t like being called Moe for short,” Darlene said, wandering in narrowing circles, closer and closer to the bar.

  “Forget it, baby.”

  “Holy Toledo, I was just going to put my glass down.”

  “Montreal.”

  “We stayed at the Le Château Champlain there,” Mary Lou said.

  No sooner did Moses begin to unwrap a Monte Cristo than Rob leaped up and pointed a fat trembling finger at him.

  “If you intend lighting that thing,” Mary Lou said, “you’ll have to step outside pronto.”

  Jim Boyd, tying a fly at the corner table, pricked his finger on a hook.

  “And what,” Barney asked, “would be your chosen field of endeavour, Moe?”

  “He likes to be called Moses. He must think we’re simply dreadful.”