Solomon Gursky Was Here (50 page)

“But not Bert Smith's. Wasn't that decent of me?”

“More likely foolish.”

“This country has no tap root. Instead there's Smith. The very essence.”

Two provincial policemen arrived: Coté and Pinard. “What can we do to help, Mr. Gursky?”

“I am the manager here,” M. Morin protested.

“Don't make a fool of yourself, Raymond,” the lawyer said. “If Mr. Gursky says he has really bought this white elephant, I expect it must be the case. Somebody has put one over on him.”

“Actually the hotel's completely booked from Friday afternoon, but I do appreciate your concern.”

“Glad to be of help. Incidentally I'm Stuart MacIntyre. I believe you're acquainted with my brother Horace.”

“Indeed I am!”

“He's joining me here on Friday.”

Solomon slipped out to the terrace. She sat at the far table, the sun in her hair and on her bare arms. “Have you really bought the hotel?” she asked.

“Yes. May I sit down?”

“Are you sufficiently wealthy to buy all the restricted hotels in the Laurentians?”

“I ought to introduce myself.”

“I know who you are and what you are, Mr. Gursky. I'm Diana Morgan. And there's no need to stare. You're quite right. One eye is blue and the other is brown. Will they send you to prison?”

“I doubt it.”

“Don't underestimate Stu MacIntyre.”

“You know him, of course.”

“His wife's a Bailey. She's my aunt. Stu and my father go duck hunting together.”

“How long will you be staying here?”

“I come here for tennis lessons. We have a cottage near by.”

“Have dinner with me.”

She shook her head, no. “Your brother is making a bookcase for me. He's such a sweet man.”

Rising, Solomon said, “I apologize for what happened in there.”

“You were looking forward to a real donnybrook, weren't you?”

“Yes,” he said, surprised.

“You don't understand. Those boring but nice people in there abhor a scene even more than they dislike Jews.”

“I don't give a damn about the people in there.”

“What do you give a damn about?”

“I'm looking for the Kingdom of Prester John,” he said, retreating back into the hotel.

Prester John. She wanted to call him back. Stay, she thought, talk to me some more, Mr. Solomon Gursky. But bloody Stu was sitting in the bar. Even as things stood, he was bound to report to her father.
Her luck. Oh well, she thought, if she hurried home there would still be time for a swim before dinner.

Solomon, standing by the window, watched her stride toward her car, a dark green Biddle and Smart sports phaeton. He lingered by the window until she drove off.

“Couldn't get to first base with her, could you, Gursky?” And then Solomon turned back to the room and found himself face to face with the golfer, the latter's eyes dancing with malice.

“Don't you dare condescend to me,” Solomon said, lunging, grabbing the golfer by the throat and slamming him against the wall.
More than a hundred years after Maimonides had written his
Guide for the Perplexed,
your ancestors, pledging each other's health in cups of their own blood, were living in mean sod huts, sleeping on bare boards wrapped in their filthy plaids
.

“Let go of him,” the golfer's wife screamed.

Spinoza had already written his
Ethics
when your forebears still had their children wearing amulets to ward off the evil eye and carried fire in a circle around their cattle to keep them safe from injury
.

“Please, Mr. Gursky. He's choking.”

Solomon yanked the golfer forward, then shoved him back hard, bouncing his head against the wall. His wife screamed again. Then the two provincial police moved in, breaking Solomon's grip on the golfer. “Hey, that's enough,” Pinard said. “Enough.”

Seven

Plump, foolish Ida, her makeup too thick, greeted him at the door. Solomon had come bearing gifts. A flask of scent for her. An enormous teddy bear for Barney. Then he presented Morrie with a complete set of bench stones in an aromatic cedar box; a set of rasps and rifflers, imported from England; and a jack plane made of red beech.

“He's not going back to the office,” Ida said.

Solomon rocked Ida in his arms, kissing her pulpy cheeks. “My God, Ida, you look ten years younger. If you weren't married to my brother I'd be chasing you around the room right now.”

“We could always give him a quarter and send him to the movies, that one.”

“How long can you stay?” Morrie asked.

“A few days maybe.”

“Wonderful,” Morrie said, frightened.

Solomon brought them up to date on Montreal. How difficult it was to sleep, it had turned so hot. “Honestly,” he said, “you're better off right here.”

“You should have brought Clara and the kids with you,” Ida said, fishing.

King Kong,
with Fay Wray, was playing at the Palace, Solomon said, and there was a new Jean Harlow at the Loew's. Everybody was singing the hit song from the new Moss Hart and Irving Berlin show. Solomon, who had brought the record with him, put it on the victrola.

She started a heat wave,

By letting her seat wave.

And in such a way that the customers say,

That she certainly can can-can.

Ida played the record again and shimmied along with it. “Isn't anybody going to dance with me?” she asked.

“No,” Morrie said.

At dinner, Ida warned Solomon to not so much as dip his little toe into the lake. It hadn't been quarantined like the North River in Prévost. It wasn't nearly as bad as Montreal, where all the children's day camps had been shut down. But there were already nine polio cases confirmed in Ste.-Agathe, six in Ste.-Adèle. “Don't even brush your teeth with water from the tap. I'll bring a jug of freshly boiled to your bedroom in the morning.”

“Solange can bring it to him.”

“Hey there, Barney McGoogle, ain't he my brother-in-law?”

Solomon refilled Ida's wine glass and then demanded a tour of the woodwork shop. Morrie vacillated.

“Well, I'm not afraid of what will happen to
me
in the dark. I'll take him,” Ida said.

“You wait here.”

“Secrets,” Ida called after them. “Dirty jokes maybe. You think I couldn't do with a laugh?”

The workshop was fired by a wood-fed boiler. The craftsman's bench was built in the traditional European style, made of steamed beech with a rubbed-oil finish. There was a large front vice, bench dog holes in front and a recessed tool trough running along the back. Solomon wandered into the rear and passed his hands over the planks stacked neatly in steel trays. Pine, oak, cedar, butternut and cherry wood. He went on to admire all the tools mounted just so on pegged boards or resting on shelves. Mallets, moulding and scrub and block planes, skew and butt chisels, roughing gouges, special bow and fret saws, dowelling jigs and pins and a threading kit.

“I know I have to testify at the trial,” Morrie said. “Don't worry. I'll get everything right.”

“Did you make this yourself?”

A kitchen chair. Solomon sat on it.

“You've seen enough. Let's go.”

“And this bookcase?” Solomon asked, passing his hand over the one slightly jagged edge.

“It was ordered by a customer. A lady. Let's go now.”

Solomon sat down at the craftsman's bench and toyed with the vice. “Will she pick it up or do you deliver?”

“She's supposed to come for it a week from Friday with her caretaker. They have a small truck.”

“Invite her to tea.”

“I knew something was up. Listen here, Mr. Skirt-Chaser, she happens to be Sir Russell Morgan's granddaughter. Please, Solomon.” He cracked his knuckles and sighed. “You only just get here practically and already my heart is hammering. Okay, okay, I'll invite her to tea. But only if you swear you won't try any monkey business.”

“Would you let me try my hand at making something in here?”

“You've got to be kidding. It takes training. A lot of my tools are very delicate.”

Ida hollered from the kitchen window. “Have I got B.O. and even my best friends won't tell me?”

“I'll be careful with your tools.”

Early the next morning Morrie drove Barney to Count Gzybrzki's stables for a ride on a shetland pony. Ida, perfumed and powdered, hurried to Solomon's bedroom. “Ready or not here I come with a jug of water,” she called out, all giggly. “But no funny stuff, eh?”

The bed was empty.

Ida was brooding over a third cup of coffee with toast and strawberry jam before Morrie got back.

“I thought he was with you,” Ida said.

“You'll never believe this, but Solomon's in the workshop trying to make something. Whatever it is, let's tell him it's wonderful.”

“I'll take him lunch.”

“Neither of us is to even go near the shop until he's finished in there. He took the keys. He says what he's making has to be a surprise.”

“Oh, for me!”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“Don't be ridiculous. He looks at me I can tell he's undressing me with his eyes.”

Solomon had begun work at six-thirty, firing the boiler. Then he rooted about for some framing squares and sorted out mallets and chisels and other essential tools. He retrieved four drawer pulls mixed up with other fixtures from a large bucket. They were flush-fitting and made from cast brass. Exactly what he wanted. Sifting through the lumber that was stacked on the steel trays, he was tempted by the bird's-eye maple, but finally settled on the wild cherry wood. Difficult to work with, but strong. It was light brown, but of an amber hue at the heart that would darken further with age, its pores following the outline of the growth ring boundary. He sorted out the planks, sniffing and stroking them, and then he studied them for checking and warping. There was more than sufficient lumber for his needs. A good thing, because Solomon anticipated a lot of wastage. Except for the drawer pulls, not one nail, not one screw, would compromise his work. All the joints would be tongue-and-groove or else mortiseand-tenon. The piece he had in mind for her was a dressing table. She would keep her diary, rich in girlish surmise, in one drawer, and the jewels he would astonish her with in another. There would, no doubt, be fragrant sachets in each drawer. On the surface, a silver candlestick, a crystal bowl filled with pot-pourri, her vanity set. On a hot summer's evening, the window open to catch the breeze from the lake, she would sit there brushing her thick honey-coloured hair, counting the strokes.

Solomon was determined to finish the table by Friday noon, but the first day he was content to square his lumber, smoothing the edges with a joiner plane.

He had met her father once. A big man, barrel-chested. My name is Russell Morgan, Jr., K.C., look on my inheritance, ye mighty, and despair. He was active in the Empire League and a colonel in the Black Watch. He was the inept, hard-drinking senior partner in Morgan, MacIntyre and Maclean, whom the younger partners tolerated only because of his esteemed name and useful Square Mile connections. He was a notorious snob. But, to be fair, there was also something quixotic in his nature. Twice he had stood for parliament in Montreal as a Tory and twice he had gone down to inevitable defeat. Once, a Liberal heckler planted at one of his meetings put a
question to him in French. Russell Morgan, Jr. tried to dismiss him with a wave of his hand, but the heckler persisted. “Is it possible,” he demanded, “that your family has been here all these years and you still do not speak French?”

“It is no more necessary for me to speak French, my good man, than it would be contingent upon me to understand Chinese if I lived in Hong Kong.”

Mr. Bernard, terrified by rumours that the brilliant Stuart MacIntyre might be representing the government in court, had foolishly approached the firm himself. Russell Morgan, Jr. had never heard of anything so outrageous. So Mr. Bernard, compounding his folly, tried to seduce him with numbers.

“Oh, isn't that rich, boys?”

Finally Mr. Bernard played his ace in the hole. “I wonder if you are aware that your grandfather and mine were once involved in a business negotiation? The New Camelot Mining & Smelting Company.”

“Miss Higgins will show you to the door, Gursky, as surely as Stu MacIntyre will see you and your brothers behind bars where you belong. Good-day.”

T
HE LIGHT WAS FAILING
when Solomon slipped into the kitchen to find a sour Ida waiting for him.

“Ida, you look adorable.”

Her shoulder-length permed hair had been gathered into a flat rolled chignon. She wore a black lace dress by Chanel, that threatened to split at the seams. “It's nothing,” she said, sucking in a breath.

Barney had already eaten and been put to bed when Ida served dinner by candlelight. Morrie, bubbling with good humour, said, “Maybe I should take him on as an apprentice. What do you think, Ida?”

Solomon was out of the house at six-thirty every morning and didn't return until nightfall. But he didn't spend all of his time in the workshop. He also went for walks. Once he saw her from a distance. At ease in her rose garden, cutting blooms for the table. She wore a broadbrimmed straw hat with a pink bow.
She will keep the book she is reading on the surface of her table. It will be encased in a tooled
leather slipcover with a red silk bookmark. Say,
Sense and Sensibility
or
Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets.
He will read aloud to her at night. He would tell her about Ephraim in Van Diemen's Land and on the
Erebus
and how her grandfather had held him prisoner in that hotel in Sherbrooke
.

“Say,” Ida said, “could you use a sweeper-upper in there? I charge two bits an hour, but no pinching.”