Solomon Gursky Was Here (41 page)

Sam wandered into the bathroom, knocking into things, opening the medicine cabinet, pulling out her jar of Vaseline and holding it up to the light, squinting.

“What are you doing?”

“I marked the level it was at with a pencil before we went to dinner.”

“Sam, you're disgusting.”

“I'm disgusting? When they leave burn the sheets.” He shook his fist at the ceiling. “It's an
averah
what they're doing up there.
Makkes
they should have! A
choleria
on them!
Faygelehs! Mamzarim!
”

“Please Sam. Philip is not responsible for tonight. Lower your voice.”

“He plucks his eyebrows. I caught him at it. Maybe you should never have taken baths with him.”

“He was three years old at the time.”

“Okay, okay.”

“What did you and Moses talk about when I went to the ladies'?”

“This and that.”

“He's your oldest friend. You've known each other since you were nine years old. What in the hell did you talk about?”

“The Mets. Moses thinks they can take Cincinnati in the playoffs. Pete Rose. Johnny Bench. Tony Perez. He doesn't know what he's talking about.”

“Raw tapes. What's he after?”

“All I know is that he has that crazy look and I've seen it before.” And then Sam, breaking an old vow, told her the story, making her swear never to say anything to Moses. “In the spring of '62 I think it was, I was drinking in the Algonquin with Mike, shortly after he started with
The New Yorker,
and we were soon joined by a couple of other editors.

They were sharing a private joke about something they called the Berger Syndrome. What's that, I asked? Well, it seems that in the early fifties some kid called Berger, a Canadian, sent them a short story that everybody liked and wanted to publish. They wrote him, asking for a few minor revisions, and he wrote back a nutty letter saying
The New Yorker
regularly prints crap, so long as it is written by their friends, they couldn't tell Pushkin from Ogden Nash, and he was withdrawing his story. When I met Moses the next afternoon for drinks at Costello's, I got up sufficient nerve to ask him about it and he said, no, it was certainly not him. But he was lying. I could tell just looking at him. I thought he was going to pass out on the spot.”

“Why would Moses do such a thing?”

“Because he's crazy.” Settling on the edge of the bed, depleted, Sam asked, “Was I really bragging tonight?”

“A little,” she said, bending to help him out of his trousers.

The bodice of her dress came away from her. Sam peeked. It was still nice, very nice. “Was Moses ever your lover?” he demanded, jerking upright.

“Philip's his son. Now you know. The cat's out of the bag.”

Sam forlorn, his eyes wet, said, “I want the truth.”

“Remember when you were working for the
Gazette
and there wasn't enough money and I said I could give French lessons?”

“Yes.”

“Some French lessons. Moses and I were making pornographic movies together. Now can we get some sleep?”

But he couldn't sleep. He was thirsty. He was dizzy. His heart was hammering. His stomach was rumbling. “They can take everything. The works. I would have settled for writing ‘The Dead'. Never mind
War and Peace
or
Karamazov
. Am I greedy? Certainly not. Just ‘The Dead' by Samuel Burns né Birenbaum.”

“‘The best of a bad job is all any of us can make of it,'” she recited, hoping she had got the lines right. “‘Except of course, the saints …'”

“I wasn't kidding about the sheets, you know. I want them burnt. I want the room fumigated.”

“Sam, he's our son. We've got to play with the cards that we were dealt.”

“Molly, Molly,” he asked, lying on her breasts, weeping, “where has all the fun gone?”

Uninvited, her manner truculent, Molly turned up early at the Madison. She steered Moses into the dining room, slamming her PBS tote bag on the table. “Ever since he got your call saying you were coming he's been on a high. Boy, were the two of you ever going to light up the town. He went through all of our books to make sure there were no compromising best-sellers on the shelves. The signed pictures of him with Kennedy were hidden in a drawer. His framed honorary degrees went into a cupboard. He must have made up and crossed out eight dinner-party lists, saying no, Moses wouldn't approve of them. He laid in a case of Macallan. Our fridge is stocked
with smoked salmon. Then you show up and stick him with the fact that he has a swimming pool. Count on Moses. You don't tell him once—it would really cost you—how damn good and honest he is on TV. Or that he should write that Watergate book, he's dying to, but it scares the bejesus out of him. Philip with that boy in his room is breaking his heart. I find him sobbing in the toilet, but you have nothing reassuring to say to him. I could wring your miserable bloody neck, you self-centred son of a bitch. Then last night he gets drunk, also to please Moses, and he actually asks me if we ever had an affair. He's so pure of heart he doesn't even know that he's a much better man than you are. What are those cuts in the palms of your hands?”

“Some people grind their teeth in their sleep. I clench my fists. It's a bad habit.”

“Read your paper and don't look at me. I'll be all right in a minute.”

Moses ordered more coffee for both of them, stirring five spoonfuls of sugar into his own cup.

“What are you doing to yourself?”

“I crave sweets now. I can never get enough. Please don't start crying.”

“I won't. I won't.”

“The last time I was in the clinic there was a beautiful girl there I still can't get out of my mind. I mean genuinely beautiful. A fawn. Maybe only nineteen years old. She would drift into my room, shrug out of that awful starchy gown, and do an arabesque, a pirouette, a
tour en l'air
. She never leaped, she soared. Then she would smile like a naughty girl, squat, and shit on my floor. It's all right, I'd say. I don't mind. She danced and shat on my floor every day for a week and then she was gone. We weren't allowed cutlery, but somehow or other she got her hands on a fork and it was enough to do the job. I don't know why I'm telling you this. If I had a reason I forgot.”

“Have you tried A.A.?”

“Yes.”

“Antabuse won't do it. Can't you cut it out whenever you feel like it?”

“Clever Molly.”

“When Marty's in town he brings his friends around, really bright kids, and Sam adores drinking beer and horsing around with them.
But they don't know who Henry Wallace was or Jack Benny or Hank Greenberg. Sam's Yiddish music hall records don't do a thing for them. It drives him crazy. He's going to be fifty soon. He's jowly. He overeats. It's the tension, you know, all that travelling. His new producer, he's only thirty-two—he discos—he's on coke half the time—he wants Sam to get a facelift. He's done viewer surveys, demographic studies, may he rot in hell. Sam told him when I was with the
Times
I was nominated for a Pulitzer for my Korean stuff Kiss my ass, sonny. But there are rumours that they are testing younger faces and I don't think they'll renew his contract.”

“He ought to do the Watergate book.”

“Sam still collects 78s. You wouldn't believe what he came home with the other night.” She sang, “‘Chickery Chick cha-la-cha-la, Check-a-la romey in a bananika.'”

“Molly, he's a lucky man. You're a good woman.”

“Good bad. I love him.”

“So do I.”

“Hey,” she said, brightening, her old jauntiness and loopy logic shining through, “in that case maybe we should have an affair.”

“Let's save it for our dotage.”

“Come to dinner,” she said, fleeing, because she knew that she was going to cry again.

S
AM, HURRYING HOME
early from the office, changed quickly and made a dash for the pool. He found Philip and his boyfriend sunbathing on the back-yard terrace, sipping champagne. His champagne. “Celebrating something, boys?”

“You really are
quelque chose,
Dad,” Philip said, producing a glass for him.

Immediately regretting it, but unable to help himself, Sam said, “Gay was a perfectly good word until it was appropriated by your kind. Our hearts were young and gay. The gay hussar. Et cetera. Gay means cheerful, merry, sparkling. According to my thesaurus its opposite is joyless, glum, dreary. Whoever gave you the right to pass such a judgement on heterosexual love? Real
chutzpah,
that's what I call it.”

“Oh, Dad, about those hussars. When the Austro-Hungarian empire was still intact no officer below the rank of colonel was legally allowed to wear makeup.”

“How does your family handle it, Steve?”

“They don't.”

F
OR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS
Moses sat in a small stuffy screening room looking at footage of the Watergate hearings, circling sections on certain frames and having the lab blow them up, unavailingly. Then on Moses's fifth day in the screening room there he was, seated immediately behind Maureen Dean, smiling that smile of his, a gold-tipped malacca cane clasped between his knees. Moses fled to the washroom and splashed cold water on his face. He went for a walk. He stopped for a hamburger somewhere. Then he returned to the screening room and sat staring at the frame, sliding in sweat, for the better part of an hour.

Back in his hotel mom, Moses pulled the blinds and collapsed on his bed, chain-smoking through the rest of the afternoon.
Once by air,
he recalled,
and once by water
. He washed the blood off the palms of his hands and had already begun to pack when the phone rang. It was the front desk.

“Will you be checking out today, Mr. Berger?”

“Yes.”

The assistant manager had a letter for him.

“It was left here by a most distinguished-looking gentleman who said you would be turning up eventually.”

“Why didn't you give this to me before?”

“His instructions were most explicit. We were not to let you have it until you were checking out.”

Moses opened the letter in the bar.

If the Catholic Church could outlast Pope Innocent IV, Auto-da-fé, and Savonarola, why can't Marxism survive the Georgian seminary student and his acolytes. For the record, I didn't erase the tape.

When the waiter approached his table, Moses ordered a Macallan. A double. Neat.

Seven

The next morning Sam sought out the editor who had worked with Moses. “I understand that you were a great help to my friend. Now show me what he wanted.”

So Barry screened the pertinent out-take for him, a panning shot of observers at the Watergate hearings, including many familiar faces, among them Maureen Dean and, immediately behind her, an old man with a gold-tipped malacca cane clasped between his knees. “It was either Mo Dean or the old guy seated right behind her who turned him on,” Barry said. “He shot right out of his seat to have a closer look, and then he lit out of here like he had been badly burnt.”

“Blow up the old guy for me. Big and bigger.”

Sam ate lunch at his desk, pondering the photographs Barry had brought him. I know that face, he thought. But where and how eluded him.

Later Sam took the photographs home with him and retreated to the library, but once more how and where he knew that face remained tantalizingly out of reach. So he began to pull down scrapbooks that Molly had put together in spite of his objections, poring over old newspaper stories that he had churned out on four continents, hoping something would evoke that face for him. It didn't work. In fact all his efforts only muddled him, rendering the face even more elusive, and he went to bed wondering if he was mistaken after all.

Unable to sleep, he tried to play a game that had worked for him before. Think of something else, anything else, and the right brain circuits would connect without effort, putting a name to the face. He replayed Ralph Branca's home-run pitch to Bobby Thomson, striking
him out in his mind's eye. Once again he savoured Ron Swoboda's ninth-inning catch in the fourth game of the '69 Series. Then, sinking into sleep, other images drifted into his mind. Moses saying, “Oh come on. Let's take a peek.”

“I don't think we ought to.”

“It's probably the new Bonnard he bought.”

Lifting a cloth revealing what, at first glance, appears to be the most conventional of portraits, the sort that would be welcomed by the Royal Academy. A lovely young bourgeois lady seated in a wicker chair. Long blonde tresses, flushed cheeks. She wears a broad-brimmed straw hat with a pink bow, a multi-layered chiffon dress, also with a pink bow, and holds a bouquet of sweet williams in her hands. But there is something quirky about the portrait. The young lady's eyes are of a different colour. One eye brown, one eye blue.

Eight

North, Moses knew, is where he would find him.

Where north?

Far.

On his return from Washington, Moses picked up his Toyota at Dorval, and set out for his cabin in the Townships to pack his northern gear. Then he collected his mail at The Caboose, drank for a couple of hours with Strawberry, and drove back to Montreal, where he had recently rented a
pied-à-terre
on Jeanne Mance Street. Every bottle in his flat was empty. So Moses took a taxi to Winnie's, and carried on from there to Big Syl's and when all the bars shut down for the night, he moved on to the Montreal Press Club, floating between tables to a dim corner and falling asleep almost immediately.

“Moses?”

Drifting awake, he was claimed by a fuzzy raven-haired figure, sweetly perfumed, throbbing in and out of focus. Her smile, tainted with benevolence, irritated him.

“Beatrice?”