The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

  “So, Abromovitch, are you proud of your grandson?”

  “He played without a hat.”

  “Paw. For Christ’s sake!”

  “It would hurt him to wear a hat?”

  “Have you ever heard of the wheel, Paw? Some damn fool invented this thing you attach to a wagon and it turns. We’ve got this business called electricity too now. You press a button, see, and… this is modern times.”

  “He doesn’t wear a hat and he can’t speak Yiddish.”

  “Neither could Chopin.”

  “Who?”

  “Skip it. Never mind. Look, there’s the speaker.” Captain John Edgar Tate, author (Canada, Land of Contrasts) , broadcaster and lecturer, journalist, explorer (first white man to paddle and chart all the tributaries of the Peace River), world traveler and proud descendant of a family of United Empire Loyalists, clutched the speaker’s rostrum like a ship’s prow, cleared his throat fiercely and looked down from under graying beetle brows at his audience of small skeptical round-shouldered men, women with too much rouge, and children, some restless and yawning and others inclined to pick their noses — looked down and stroked a puffy red cheek and measured and realized too late that he had brought the wrong speech with him. But he did not falter. He spoke feelingly of the Red Indian and the first British and French-Canadian settlers who came to the country; and he talked about Jacques Carder, La Salle, and General Wolfe.

  “You see that red nose he’s got? That comes from too much Johnnie Walker.”

  “Louder. Louder, please.”

  “Why couldn’t they have invited one of our own to speak?”

  “Who, for instance?”

  “Dr. Rosen, there’s a speaker for you. To hear him talk about cancer…”

  Captain John Edgar Tate shifted his attention to the present age, the wide world today’s graduates would have to contend with, and after some dark warnings about the communist threat, he concluded, “Don’t drop the ball. Because if you drop the ball you’re passing it to Uncle Joe.”

  There was some mild applause.

  “In Japan when a man gets up to speak he has to hold ice cubes in his hands, and he can only speak for as long as he can hold them. That’s for me.”

  “I’ll tell you, Sydney, this speaker —”

  “Don’t tell me. I know, He doesn’t wear a hat.”

  “Oh, am I ever dying for a cold drink.”

  “How’s about some watermelon instead, Harry? Ice-cold.”

  “Hoo-haw. Don’t speak.”

  At last the graduates were called up to get their diplomas. First came small squinting Hersh (he had come second in the province and won a scholarship to McGill), and behind him came Mendelsohn’s boy, another scholarship winner, and Rita Bloom, who had come fifth in the province.

  “My boy’s in the minors,” Brown said. “He probably doesn’t get his diploma until three in the morning.”

  Shmul Berger was awarded the Ida Berg Scholarship.

  “It’s a gyp. He should have been disqualified.”

  Shmul’s father, Rabbi Isaac Berger, was supposed to have a photographic memory. They said he could stick a pin through any volume of the Talmud and, given the number of the page it had come out on, tell you the exact word it had punctured.

  “That’s the last of the prize winners. Main event now.”

  “About time.”

  One by one to milder and milder applause the boys and girls stepped up to shake the hand of Leonard Bush, M.A., and take their diplomas.

  “There he is!”

  Duddy Kravitz was the four-hundred-and-tenth boy to be handed his diploma. He had graduated third class with failures in history and Algebra II. He accepted his diploma with a thin smile, turned sharply away from Mr. MacPherson’s empty seat on the platform, and walked away on squeaky black shoes.

  Max Kravitz clapped loudly. “Atta boy, Duddy. Atta boy.”

  “Sh,” Lennie said.

  Uncle Benjy turned to his father and the old man looked at the floor.

  “Atta boy,” Max said.

  11

  Duddy found the land he wanted quite by accident.

  That summer, the year he graduated from F.F.H.S., he went to work as a waiter in a hotel in the Laurentian mountains. Rubin’s Hotel Lac des Sables was in Ste. Agathe des Monts, and of all the waiters taken on for the summer, only Duddy was not a college boy. The others were first and second year McGill boys, none had ever been to F.F.H.S. — they came from more prosperous families — and Duddy found it difficult. Some of the other employees, like Cuckoo Kaplan, the recreation director, and the boys in Artie Bloom’s band, had their own rooms, but all the waiters slept in the same dormitory over the recreation hall that extended above the lake. After a long day’s work they often shared a bottle of rye and sang songs like: We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way, Baa! Baa! Baa!

  We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray, Baa-aa-aa!…

  Duddy, leaping into a lapse in the harmonizing, tried to introduce items like: Oh, the captain had a one-eyed mate,

  He loved him like a brother,

  And every night at half-past eight

  They buggered one another.

  But the boys, though they never actually asked him to shettup, would not join in and gradually Duddy’s voice died. On other nights, when the boys went on midnight swims or to drink beer in Val Morin, Duddy was not invited.

  Duddy, alone among the boys, was not rattled by the heat and the hurry, the quarrels and the sometimes spiteful squalor of the kitchen. The gift of a bottle of rum insured the cook’s goodwill — Duddy had no trouble getting his orders. In fact he was so quick in the dining room that after two weeks Mr. Rubin gave him three extra tables. This seemed to antagonize the other boys even more and, provoked by Irwin Shubert, they began to ride Duddy hard.

  “It’s the cretinous little money-grubbers like Kravitz that cause anti-Semitism,” Irwin told the boys.

  Irwin Shubert was nineteen, a tall bronzed boy with curly black hair, sleepy black eyes, and a mouth too lavish for his face. Persistently bored and with a tendency to smile knowledgeably, an insider sworn to silence, he seldom lifted his voice above a liquid whisper. His father was one of the most famous criminal lawyers in the province and it was said that Irwin promised to be even more brilliant. He kept his books locked in a suitcase. He owned a marriage manual and a copy of Krafft-Ebing, but his prize was an enormous, profusely illustrated medical volume that was supposed to be restricted to members of the profession. All these books Irwin feigned to approach with scientific disinterest, but Duddy was not fooled. He recognized the hoard as a creep’s equivalent of his own library, beginning with Gasoline Alley Gang Bang, Kitty Tiffany Thayer’s Three Musketeers, he recommended some reading to Irwin. “God’s Little Acre,” said, “that’s the horniest.” He made this suggestion on his second day at the hotel and thereby also alienated Irwin. Duddy couldn’t understand this. For, at the beginning, Irwin fascinated him. He claimed to be able to hypnotize people and he told dandy stories about women and whips and boy scout masters. Duddy didn’t believe any of the stories; he always laughed, in fact, and that infuriated Irwin still more. “You’re great,” he’d tell Irwin. “Jeez, you know more hot stuff…”

  Irwin began to bait Duddy when the other boys were there.

  “Next time you intend to practice self-abuse, David, would you be good enough to lock the toilet door?”

  Another time it was, “Tell me, David, is it true that you and Yvette are cohabiting?” Yvette was the second floor chambermaid. “I’m told she’s wild about soixante-neuf. take care, child. She’s got gonorrhea.”

  “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole.”

  Yet another day it was, “Would you do us all a favor,” Irwin asked, flicking Duddy hard enough with a towel to make him wince, “and take a bath? You stink.”

  “How would you like to hold this for a while?”

  The splash of laughter that followed
then and at other times Duddy at first mistook for approval of his wit. Some of the other boys, like Donald Levitt, seemed fond of him. Bernie Altman had once invited Duddy to join him for a beer and said that when he graduated from McGill he was going to go to Israel. Then one morning Bernie discovered ten dollars missing from his wallet.

  “I’m fifteen,” Irwin said.

  “But we all went to Val Morin last night,” Donald said. “It must be an outsider.”

  “David didn’t come with us,” Irwin said.

  “I’d better check again,” Bernie said. “Maybe I’m mistaken.”

  “Sh,” Irwin said, “here it comes. The Judas.”

  For the first two weeks of the season Duddy and Irwin were separated in the dormitory by an empty bed, that’s all. Irwin often stayed up late and read with a pocket flashlight. Around three o’clock one morning, when all the other boys were asleep, Duddy woke to see Irwin sitting up in bed with the flashlight and the enormous medical book. He took one look at Irwin’s agonized face, saw the book and the other hand under the covers, and quickly guessed what was happening.

  “Jeez.”

  Irwin looked up, startled and pale. Duddy grinned, he winked, and gesturing enthusiastically, he said, “Atta boy, Irwin. Whew! Pull!”

  Irwin dropped his flashlight, he trembled. It seemed that he had begun to cry, but Duddy was not sure. The next morning, however, Irwin would not talk to him and the troubles that were to last all summer began.

  Irwin spoke to Rubin’s only daughter.

  “Look, Linda, I don’t want to cause any trouble. Don’t say a word to your father either, because I don’t want to get the Kravitz kid fired, but somebody’s been stealing money from the boys in the dorm and I want to know if any guests are missing things.”

  Sunday, with so many people checking out and new guests constantly arriving, was the most nerve-wracking day of the week. At ten P.M., his work finally finished, Duddy went to collapse on his cot. He found a bottle of Scotch lying there with a note. The bottle, it seemed, was a gift from Mr. Holstein, who had left that morning without tipping him.

  “Aren’t you going to offer us a drink?” Irwin asked.

  The other boys sat on their cots, heads drooping.

  “I’d like to send the bottle to my grandfather. A gift like.”

  “Oh, it a grandfather,” Irwin said, getting glasses. “Come on, child.”

  “Let him keep it,” Donald said.

  “Naw. Irwin’s right. Let’s all have a drink on me.”

  Irwin quickly brought Duddy the glasses and he filled them one by one.

  “Linda Rubin’s got a crush on you,” Irwin said. “Did you know that?”

  “Aw.”

  “Never mind. Hotel owners’ daughters have fallen for poor boys before. Well, à la vôt —” lifted the glass to his mouth, made a horrible face, and spilled its contents on Duddy. “You filthy little swine,” he said, “is this your idea of a joke?”

  “Wha’?”

  “Don’t any of you touch your glasses. Do you know what this is?”

  Duddy sniffed his glass and his face went white.

  “I know we haven’t exactly been friendly,” Irwin said, “but if this is your idea of how to pay us back — Let’s make him drink his, guys. He deserves it.”

  The other boys, too whacked to fight or decide, began to file out.

  “I came in and I found the bottle on the bed,” Duddy shouted. “So help me God. You all saw. I came in and the bottle was on my bed.”

  Irwin started after the others. “You’re lucky, Kravitz. They should have made you drink it. What a disgusting stunt.”

  Shunned by the college boy waiters, Duddy began to investigate Ste. Agathe on his own when he had time off.

  Some sixty miles from Montreal, set high in the Laurentian hills on the shore of a splendid blue lake, Ste. Agathe des Monts had been made the middle-class Jewish community’s own resort town many years ago. Here, as they prospered, the Jews came from Outremont to build summer cottages and hotels and children’s camps. Here, as in the winter in Montreal, they lived largely with their neighbors. Friends and relatives bought plots of land and built their cottages and boathouses competitively, but side by side. There were still some pockets of Gentile resistance, it’s true. Neither of the two hotels that were still in their hands admitted Jews, but that, like the British raj that still lingered on the Malabar Coast, was not so discomforting as it was touchingly defiant. For even as they played croquet and sipped their gin and tonics behind protecting pines, they could not miss the loud, swarthy parade outside. The short husbands with their outrageously patterned sports shirts arm in arm with purring wives too obviously full for slacks, the bawling kids with triple-decker ice cream cones, the squealing teen-agers, and the trailing grandfather with his beard and black hat. They could not step out of their enclaves and avoid the speeding cars with wolf-call horns. The lake was out of the question. Sailboats and canoes had no chance against speedboats, spilling over with relatives and leaving behind a wash of empty Pepsi bottles. Even the most secluded part of the lake was not proof against the floating Popsicle wrapper, and the moonlight canoe trip ran the risk of being run down by a Cuckoo Kaplan-led expedition to the island. Boatloads full of honeymooners and office girls and haberdashery salesmen singing, to the tune of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”: Onward, Rubin’s boarders, Onward, to the shore,

  With sour cream and latkas,

  We’re staying two weeks more.

  Rubin’s was not the only Jewish resort in Ste. Agathe, either. There were many others. But Rubin had, in the shape of Cuckoo Kaplan, Ste. Agathe’s undisputed number one comic.

  “Cuckoo may be a Montreal boy,” Rubin said, “but he’s no shnook. He’s played night clubs in the States.”

  Cuckoo was billed as Montreal’s Own Danny Kaye and his name and jokes often figured in Mel West’s What’s What. and wiry, with a frantic, itchy face, Cuckoo was ubiquitous. At breakfast he’d pop up from under a table to crack an egg on a bald man’s head and at midnight he’d suddenly race through the dance hall in a Gay Nineties bathing suit and dive through a window into the lake. He always had a surprise for lunch too. Once he might chase the cook through the dining room with a meat cleaver and later in the week chances were he’d hold up two falsies, saying he had found them on the beach, and ask the owner to claim them. Aside from organizing games when it rained and his regular nightly act — his Romeo and Juliet Capelovitch skit was a knockout — Cuckoo had some special routines for the winter season and was good at getting publicity. He got his picture in the paper on the first subzero day of winter by sawing a hole in the ice and taking a dip. For this annual picture, with Rubin’s Hotel Lac des Sables prominent in the background, Cuckoo wore a hilarious wig, blackened two front teeth, and put on a long black woolen bathing suit. Once, after his annual dip, he was in bed with a fever for two weeks.

  Cuckoo’s father couldn’t understand him. “What is it with you, Chaim? For a lousy ninety dollars a week,” he said, “to make a fool of yourself in front of all those strangers.”

  But Cuckoo was not without hope. He had once been held over for three weeks in a night club in Buffalo and another time he had stopped the show at the Pink Elephant in New Jersey. Each year on his vacation he went to New York and walked from one agent’s office to another with a large folio under his arm. Meanwhile, he was adored in Ste. Agathe. Guests from all the other hotels came to Rubin’s on Saturday night to catch his act.

  Duddy, too, was most impressed with Cuckoo, and he used to bring him breakfast in bed. Cuckoo, who was familiar with Max the Hack by name, gave Duddy bit parts in two of his skits. He could see that the boy was lonely and he didn’t mind when he came to his room late at night to talk.

  The bed in the hot, smoke-filled little room was always unmade. Usually the breakfast tray was still on the floor and there were cigarette butts and soiled laundry and empty rye bottles everywhere. Duddy usually cleared a space for himself on
the floor and Cuckoo, reduced to his underwear, curled like a coiled spring on a corner of the bed with a glass in his hand, mindless of the cigarette ashes he dropped on the sheets.

  Duddy told Cuckoo about some of his business ideas.

  Next summer, he thought, he might try to set up in the movie rental business. All he needed was a truck, a projector, and a goy run the camera, and with a good movie, playing a different resort each night, he would rake in no fortune, but… Another idea he had was to make color movies of weddings and bar-mitzvahs. There might be a goldmine in this, he told Cuckoo, and he was thinking of calling himself Dudley Kane Productions. Who knows, but if the idea caught on, five-six years from now he might be able to make a feature-length comedy right here in Montreal, starring Cuckoo Kaplan. But to begin with, he needed that truck and projector and a goy operate it. Maybe the Boy Wonder, who was an intimate of his father’s, would stake him. Duddy said that he would see about that in the autumn.

  The rye helped to calm Cuckoo. Gradually he stopped scratching his head and, if Duddy stayed long enough, he sometimes tried out one of his new routines on him. But first he’d say, “You’ve got to be honest with me. I want to know exactly what you think. I can take it.”

  Duddy was flattered by the tryouts in the small bedroom and every one of Cuckoo’s routines made him howl. “You kill me, Cuckoo. My sides hurt me, honest.” When Cuckoo was depressed after playing to a hostile house on a Saturday night, Duddy would hurry to his bedroom with sandwiches and a pitcher of ice cubes. “Look,” he’d say, “you think it was always such a breeze for Danny Kaye when he was playing the borscht circuit?” On and on Duddy would talk while Cuckoo consumed rye with alarming haste. When Cuckoo replied at last, he’d say in a slurred voice, “That’s show biz, I guess. That’s show biz.” It was his favorite expression.

  “You know something, kid, my trouble is I’ve got the wrong face for a comic. People take one look at Danny Kaye or Lou Costello and right off they howl. I have to work too hard. They take one look at my kisser and they want to buy me a sandwich or help me find a girl.”