St. Urbain's Horseman

  One night, as he was tucking Sammy into bed, the boy said to him, “Tibbett believes in God. We don’t, do we?”

  “I don’t, but –”

  “Me too,” Molly sang out from the bottom bunk bed.

  “– you’ll have to decide for yourself, Sammy.”

  “What do you believe in, then?”

  He was about to say the Horseman, it was on the tip of his tongue, but, fortunately, he stopped himself. “It’s late. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Retreating from their bedroom, troubled, he grasped that for years now he had begun to insinuate tales of St. Urbain’s Horseman between his bedtime stories about Rabbi Akiba, the Thirty-six Just Men, Maimonides, the Golem, Trumpeldor, and Leon Trotsky. His Jewish allsorts bag. Pouring himself a drink, he realized that ever since he had turned down the film in Israel because, to his mind, it was an offense against everything his cousin stood for, the Horseman had become his moral editor. Considering a script, deliberating for days as was his habit, consulting Nancy, arguing with himself, vacillating, reading and rereading, he knew that in the final analysis he said yes or no based on what he imagined to be the Horseman’s exacting standard. Going into production, whether in television or film, he tried above all to please the Horseman. For somewhere he was watching, judging.

  Once Cousin Joey’s advocate, he was now his acolyte.

  FOUR

  1

  JAKE HEARD FROM RUTHY FOR THE FIRST TIME THE morning after he was fired from the production of his third film, the phone ringing just as he sat down to breakfast.

  “Is this Jacob Hersh?”

  “Can you tell me where your cousin Joseph is, please?”

  “Who’s speaking?”

  “Never mind.”

  “No. I’m sorry. I have no idea –”

  The woman laughed scathingly, as if this was exactly the sort of duplicity she had expected of a Hersh.

  “But, honestly, I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “You are his cousin, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell me one thing. Do you come from an old French Jewish family called de la Hirsch?”

  Jake had to laugh. Immediately, he regretted it. The woman had begun to weep.

  “We’re from Galicia,” he said, feeling foolish.

  “Well, to take the bull by the horns, I’m in trouble. Joseph was supposed to marry me. He’s disappeared. Can you see me?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I finish work at five-thirty. Do you know the King’s Arms on Finchley Road?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  Jake summoned a waitress.

  “I’d like an egg and tomato sandwich, please.”

  “It’s not on the menu.”

  “I know. But could you get me one, please?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, we don’t serve egg and tomato sandwiches.”

  “You serve egg sandwiches, don’t you?”

  “Yes, we do, sir.”

  “And do you serve tomato sandwiches?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, then, if it isn’t too much trouble, could you please make me an egg and tomato sandwich?”

  “But we don’t serve –”

  “Tell you what. You order me an egg sandwich and a tomato sandwich. I’ll pay for both –”

  Americans.

  “– and you, you clever thing, you make me a combination sandwich of the two.”

  “But that would be an egg and tomato sandwich.”

  “Yes, I expect so.”

  “Egg and tomato sandwiches are definitely not on the menu. If you would like to see the manager –”

  “Forget it. Just bring me a large gin, please. And a tonic.”

  Jake didn’t know what, exactly, to expect. But he was certainly not prepared for Ruthy. A Rubenesque lady, big as she was dark, with a plump bosom, clearly in her forties, but managing a miniskirt with élan. Her soft brown eyes were watery, she plucked her eyebrows, and there were minuscule pocks on her chin where facial hairs had been clumsily removed. Ruthy settled into her chair, sighing, her bulging imitation leather handbag landing on the table with a clunk. She worked in a neighboring dress shop, she said.

  “Joseph’s a good man. I know he is. But he’s in psychological trouble and that’s why he lies. My brother never should have interfered.”

  “Couldn’t I get you something?” Jake asked.

  “A Pepsi-Cola, please.”

  Ruthy was a widow with two children. Her husband had died five years ago, a heart attack. “Where can anybody my age meet a decent, compatible man?” Ruthy had formed a Reading and Discussion Circle and Joey had seen the advert in the Jewish Chronicle and drifted into the first meeting. “There were several women there and he made an impression on all of them. One immediately asked if he was married, isn’t it disgusting how some people are? But you could tell from Joseph’s manner that he did not wish to give any information about his private life.”

  I’ll buy that.

  “He stayed on after the others had left and we talked. He’s very interested in construction, but I suppose you know that, and he warned me about the damp in the kitchen wall. I should speak to the landlord, he said. Well, that’s me, I said, and we had a giggle together. He came to visit me again during the week.”

  The somnolent waitress handed Jake his large gin and poured Ruthy’s Pepsi into a glass. She was about to remove the empty bottle when Ruthy seized it, jolting the girl awake. “Oh, well,” the waitress said sniffily.

  “Before the evening was over he told me he was a bachelor and asked me to marry him,” Ruthy said, peeling the label off the Pepsi bottle. “Well worse accidents happen at sea, I suppose. I told him it was too soon to know what he was like, but he told me that when two people meet who can be well mated it was a waste of time at our age to let even one day pass and not be together. I thought to myself,” she continued, slipping the label into her handbag, “here is a man who is forthright. I had also observed that he was quick-witted, quiet, and sincere. Joseph said I would have to give him an answer within a week because it was beneath his dignity to beg a woman. Well I fancied him very much, he certainly attracted me physically. I also must say that I could tell he was well versed in philosophy and Greek mythology. But how could I tell he didn’t have a wife somewhere? I shouldn’t have asked him. It made him terribly indignant. ‘I could hardly be after your money,’ he said, ‘since it’s obvious you have none.’ Well not none, I said. Not quite none. He told me if we married, I could give up work. He didn’t say what he did for a living, but you could see that he was an employer, not an employee.

  “I talked to my brother – that was my first mistake – and he said I must try to find out something about the man first. You can’t just marry a stranger. Meanwhile, I was afraid of losing Joseph. When he came around again I asked him why he hadn’t married until now and he said he was always on the lookout for a clever woman with a great deal of sex and beauty. He said he was certain I possessed all three of these qualities. He seemed to be a great lover of feminine beauty, beauty of the body. And speaking frankly, I didn’t know if I could live up to that. I told him that, objectively speaking, I was not beautiful. I had incisions on my body. Also I told him I didn’t know if I could satisfy him sexually. But,” Ruthy said, twirling her empty glass, “he dispelled these fears.”

  “Would you care for another Pepsi?”

  “Ta.”

  “We’ll have the same again,” Jake told the waitress. “No, one moment, please. Make it a large gin and two Pepsis.”

  “Still I told him no – it takes more than sex to make a fruitful marriage. I had to be reached spiritually, mentally, and then sexually. We’re not animals, don’t you think?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I could not mate with a man who did not give me understanding and companionship. Well, he continued to put up many arguments about sex.” Ruthy sucked in a deep breath. “Like Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He was certainly ve
ry well read. But the body-beautiful stuff frightened me. Also his love-making was – well very torrid. I said we should wait, but he said the love-making could proceed while I made up my mind. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound.” As the waitress approached with her tray, Ruthy leaned closer to Jake. “Keep your Pepsi bottle,” she whispered.

  But this time the waitress, her manner haughty, did not even attempt to remove the Pepsi bottles.

  “The next thing was I didn’t hear from him for a fortnight. Nothing. Not a word. I had a heartache, a bad one let me tell you. I thought my brother had scared him off, but he said he hadn’t done a thing. Then suddenly he’s at my door again. He said he had had to go away on an unexpected business trip –”

  “To Germany?” Jake asked.

  “No. But he’s very well traveled, you know.”

  “Yes, I do. Did he tell you that he’d ever been to Germany?”

  “For a spell, he said.”

  “What did he tell you he was doing there?”

  “He didn’t say. Anyway, he said there was this unexpected business trip and he had felt insulted by me so he hadn’t phoned. But the truth was he couldn’t stay away from me. He said the time had come to have a serious talk about our future. You should know I’m kosher and Joseph even discussed this matter with me. He said he didn’t care for kashruth at all, he made no secret of it, but he told me I could keep a kosher home – he wouldn’t interfere with it. I think that was very generous of him. Don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” she mused, absently peeling the labels off the two Pepsi bottles, “actually he’s not such a big eater.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Anyway from the beginning my brother felt there was something fishy about Joseph. My brother’s a real-estate agent and property developer. You looking for a house?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “You don’t have to go to him. I’m not the pusher type, you know. If a customer comes into the shop, I don’t try to sell her this and sell her that, anything to make a sale, isn’t it dreadful? And the way they bargain! Well, my brother’s honest too and that’s a quality these days. You could say my brother’s well known for his honesty. In his line he meets the public and he prides himself on being a judge of character …”

  Ruthy’s brother, the character judge, met Joey only once, visiting him in his flat, in Earl’s Court, and immediately warned Ruthy against him. But when Joey came to her the next day, obviously overwrought, and explained that he needed money urgently to fly to Israel and wind up his tangled business interests there, she dipped into her Building Society account and lent him seven hundred pounds.

  “As soon as he came back, we were going to get married. I knew he planned to come back. He even left his riding clothes behind.”

  Joey, she went on to say, was a superb horseman. He cantered through Richmond Park twice weekly.

  “Well, that was more than a month ago, and then I got this letter.”

  The letter was from a hotel in Galway. Galway, Jake thought, his heart hammering, where Skorzeny has settled on a vast estate. S.S. Colonel Otto Skorzeny, who had landed a Fieseler-Stortch near the hotel in Gran Sasso d’Italia, the highest range in the Abruzzi Apennines, and flown out again with Mussolini. Who on July 20, 1944, after Stauffenberg’s bomb had failed at the Wolf’s Lair, had rallied the S.D. at the tank formation school and gone to the Bendlerstrasse and put handcuffs on the remaining plotters. Who had slipped through the lines in the Ardennes, his men wearing American MP’s uniforms, and spread confusion. Tried and acquitted by a U.S. tribunal at Dachau in 1947. Then to Spain and South America, and from there to Galway, where there were so many of them now. Gentlemen farmers.

  Joey’s letter said please trust me, I love you, but for personal reasons I can’t return to Israel at this moment. I’m going to Argentina to discuss an important position with an internationally known engineering firm and I will send for you in six months’ time.

  Argentina. Entre Ríos, perhaps. Where Argentina meets the Paraná River and Uruguay.

  “He’s got all my savings. What do you think?”

  Jake didn’t dare say what he thought.

  “I know he loves me. Tell me, is your family renowned for its philanthropic activities in Canada?”

  “The Hershes? Well, um, I suppose they do give money. Yes, of course,” he added hastily. “UJA, yeshivas, Israel … I haven’t been home for rather a long while.”

  “O.K. He lies to glamorize himself. It’s not murder, is it? I mean to say, you open a newspaper today and there’s the H-Bomb. I’m against it, of course. They are contrary to what George Bernard Shaw called the life force. But do I care you don’t come from the French nobility? I want Joseph. I love him. Your family was shocking to him. He says they’re very bigoted.”

  “Well, yes, narrow. You could say that. Now, Ruthy, you tell me something. Obviously, you know I’m Joey’s cousin because he said so. Did he ever explain to you why he never comes to see me?”

  “Oooo,” she said, “now you’re having me on, aren’t you?”

  “Am I?”

  “You see each other. And how.”

  “He told you he was in touch with me, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has he ever mentioned my work to you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Is he avoiding me, Jake wanted to ask, because he has such a poor opinion of me? “Has he seen my films?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I see.”

  There was a heavy pause.

  “Well now, if you see him when he comes back tell him I paid his rent for him and took his riding clothes with me,” Ruthy said, rising. “I’m keeping them for him.”

  “If I see him,” Jake said.

  2

  BLOOM LICKED HIS PENCIL AND CHECKED OVER HIS account sheets for the third time, not that there was any point to the exercise. Count on Harry to find an error, no matter what. Harry, the momzer. Recently, Bloom had come to think that Harry altered a figure here, a figure there, himself, for it sometimes seemed that there were more eraser marks when Harry returned the sheets for correction than there had been before. There was nothing Harry wouldn’t do for a little giggle. Hadn’t he seen him, with his very own eyes, on the day of the office picnic at Brighton, conceal Miss Pinsky’s handbag, when he knew she was having her monthlies, and not yield it until she had stained herself, fleeing in embarrassment? He hates me. Why? Because I’m kosher. Bloom had to lock his luncheon sandwiches in the bottom desk drawer ever since Harry, in one of his inspired moods, had substituted traifes for his chicken sandwich, not saying anything until Bloom had swallowed it. It made him choke that other Jews believed. Had respect.

  “Tell me, Bloom, you’re such a devout little Jew, did you know it is written in the Talmud that we are supposed to charge Gentiles a higher interest rate than our brethren?”

  “And why not?”

  “And vy not? Lucky is the born ignoramus.”

  “With you around, who needs Nasser? You’re no better than me.”

  Above all, Harry exulted in tormenting Bloom about his daughter Aviva.

  “I don’t understand you, Bloom, you’ve had no life at all. For all you’ve tasted of this world’s delights, and I willingly include your experience of la dolce vita at Bournemouth, you might as well not have been born. Married to a yachna. Pinching pennies all these years and for what, so that you can afford a wedding at the Grosvenor Hotel for Aviva?”

  “It offends me to even hear her name from your filthy mouth.”

  “Don’t you know sexy Jewish girls don’t marry doctors any more? Or go in for big weddings, with the guest list in the Jewish Chronicle? They go for the spades, Bloom –”

  “Go to hell.”

  “– and if they get married at all it’s at the registry office, because they’ve got one in the oven.”

  “You know what I say? I say you’re around the bend. Paying girls so you
can take filthy pictures of them. Some man about town. Look out, James Bond! Take care, Rex Harrison! Here comes little Harry Stein, can’t make a girl do it with him unless he pays her a flyer.”

  “How much do you want to bet Aviva is on the pill?”

  “Oh, look at him. Red in the face. I’ve got your number, haven’t I? Don Juan? More like Yosel Putz, if you ask me.”

  Once more Bloom licked his pencil and worried over his account sheets, before Harry opened the door to his cubicle, and called, “Bloom!”

  Harry contemplated the sheets, nodding, and suddenly smiled and said: “Congratulations.”

  “What for?” Bloom asked guardedly.

  “I hear Aviva has been accepted at the University of Sussex.”

  “And Oxford. And Cambridge. Now that you’ve mentioned it, Mr. Stepney Grammar School.”

  “But she’s going to Sussex.”

  “Yes.”

  “Smart kid. It’s the swinging university, you know. They screw each other black and blue there.”

  “You know what I smell? I smell sour grapes.”

  “You don’t believe me? Here,” and he passed him the clipping, “it was in the Sunday Telegraph. There’s plenty of pot smoking at Sussex, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Pot. It’s not for brewing tea. I speak of marijuana. Drugs. It makes the girls crazy for it.”

  Bloom began to shake.

  “You know what happened when the police gate-crashed the Rolling Stones party? They found a bloke sucking a chocolate bar out of a girl’s cunt. But at Sussex the girls are famous for another specialty. The human sandwich. Girl in the middle. Boys poking into either end.”

  “One day I’ll kill you. I’ll pick up a knife and put it through you.”

  Harry smiled benevolently. “Meanwhile, if you don’t mind, I’ll see how many mistakes I can find here,” and he started into the hall.

  Where a man sat chain-smoking outside Father Hoffman’s confessional.

  “I would like to take this opportunity to tell you,” Harry said to him, “how much I enjoyed your first film.”