A City Called July (17 page)

“What bit him?”

“Her. Iona Tracy. Iona Lloyd she is now”

“Martha, what bit her?”

“Massasauga rattler. She said it was a yard long. Got her on the leg above her boot. You can’t be too careful.”

“You mean there
are
rattlesnakes down there?”

“One of the few places in the whole province. You get them in the Niagara gorge too and up on the Bruce peninsula.”

“Martha I’m going to bed.” And I did that.

* * *

Next morning I got up to the sound of bacon frying in a frying pan. I’d heard that sound before, in fact I’ve been hearing it all my life. The world’s chief occupation it sometimes seems to me is the baiting and setting of bacon traps. Sometimes I can walk around them, sometimes I can jump over them, and sometimes I fall into them like a tiger into a tiger trap. I wondered how I was going to meet this challenge as I moved stiff legs over the edge of the single bed to the uncovered floor. In the no-nonsense bathroom I tried to simulate a toothbrush with the washcloth. In my head I was making a list of things I would need if I was going to stay clear of my room at the City House. I owed my mother a call for missing Friday night dinner. I wanted to talk to Nathan Geller again about his miraculous telephone conversation with his missing brother.

When I was looking as fit as I could manage in shoes and trousers sponged into passable condition by my landlady, I joined Martha at the kitchen table. “I hope you aren’t one of those morning talkers,” she said, stifling a friendly “Good-morning” before I’d got my mouth open. I drank reconstituted orange juice and tried to outstare the crisp rashers on my plate. I chewed on some cold toast and watched Martha spread peanut butter on hers. In the end I ate the bacon. I always do and I always pay for it before the month is out. Like the time I nearly got drowned under a swimming pool’s nylon cleaning net, after eating bacon out Pelham Road a few years ago. I know these things are related.

When Martha disappeared into her bedroom, I phoned my Ma. It was early, too early to bother her under normal circumstances, but I knew she would be worried about my skipping out on Friday night dinner. It was one of the things I should have mentioned when Geoff, Len and Gordon extended their kind invitation to join them at the gun club.

“Hello?”

“Ma, it’s Benny. Sorry to wake you so early, but I wanted you to know that I’m okay.”

“You’re okay, Benny? That’s fine. Goodbye.”

“I knew you’d be worried when I didn’t show up last night.”

“What time is it?”

“Time? Well, it’s just after eight. Eight-thirteen.”

“Benny, you shouldn’t call so early. I was up till all hours last night with Chopin, George Sand and Paul Muni. I love that music. Chopin wasn’t Jewish was he, Benny?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That would explain the nuns at the end all right.”

“I’m sorry about last night, Ma.”

“No, I liked it. It’s one of my favourite movies.”

“I mean about missing dinner. I was held up, couldn’t get away. I know I should have called.”

“To tell the truth, your father asked where you’d got to. You usually come over. We had a nice brisket and roast potatoes. Your favourite.”

“So, you weren’t worried?”

“No more than usual. Should I have been?” I heard a yawn come over the wire with the words.

“Course not.”

“There you are then. Well, if that’s all, Benny, I’ll turn over and see if I can get back to sleep on the other side. I don’t want to hear the phone ring until the crack of noon. Goodbye, dear.”

After I put the phone down, I picked it up again and called for a taxi, then watched for it out the front curtains. Martha’s living-room was full of overstuffed furniture. A television set held pride of place on a fumed oak tea-trolley. Above the small fireplace was a huge portrait in oils of a bearded man who looked like he thought he was a somebody in the last century. He watched me watching for the taxi. I picked up a copy of
Time
magazine from under the trolley: “Should Germany Rearm?” I replaced it.

When the taxi came, I had him drop me at the station, where I rented a car. I folded the receipt in half and placed it carefully in my wallet. There’s nothing so impressive on a progress report as an expense with a matching receipt. I’d forgotten to get one from the cab. That dampened things. I started wondering, as I drove the small Ford up the gentle incline to St. Andrew Street West, who exactly my client was on this Saturday morning. I thought I’d better confirm that one way or another right away.

The congregation of B’nai Sholem worshipped at the corner of Church and Calvin, a fact that amused several of my Protestant friends. It was a textured red-brick building with twin garlic-shaped cupolas on top that failed to make it look like a postcard view of the Kremlin but more like a double dollop of Dairy Queen soft ice-cream. There was a wide stairway on the Church Street side leading to an open double door. I’d parked the rented car three blocks away with the cars of others in the congregation. The local reading of holy scripture didn’t prevent members of the shul from driving on the Sabbath, but simply it forbade parking within sight of the synagogue.

I felt a little bogus as I went through the doors into the back of the synagogue. I hadn’t ever been there without my father, and felt both shy and foreign. I borrowed a yarmulka from a cardboard box on a card-table near the door. Although I knew most of the men seated in the pews arranged around the bema, as I took a place in back, I felt all of twelve years old and sitting between my father and Sam (with my mother up in the balcony behind the brass rail with the women).

The place hadn’t changed much since my bar mitzvah. The long pews were stained the same walnut brown as the wood trim of the cream-painted walls. The skylight still showed symbolic beasts painted in a reedy style in faded yellow and green on the four sides of the rectangle. The ark at the front was closed and covered with a winecoloured velvet curtain. On the bema, Mr. Hecht was auctioning off the privilege of opening the curtain and carrying the Torah from the ark to the bema, a privilege for which the merchants of St. Andrew Street often paid big money. I’d seen some highly competitive scenes between several of the leaders of the Jewish community as they fought it out for the right on a hot Saturday in the autumn during the high holy days, while the rest of the congregation took side bets on who’d give up first. At the back, on the same wall as the ark, Rabbi Meltzer could be seen sitting at an old-fashioned slant-top school desk. Under the lid he kept his bound copies of the books, so that he didn’t have to pull out the Torah scroll just to establish the correctness of a citation or conduct a bar mitzvah lesson. The big moment towards the end of preparations for a bar mitzvah was the day when the student got his first chance to read from the scroll just as he would on the big day itself.

Rabbi Meltzer was sitting at his desk watching, but not with particular interest, the fact that Mr. Belkin, the jeweller, and Mr. Hirsch, the druggist, were trying to outbid one another, but the incremental rise at each bid was not large enough to catch the attention of everybody.

“Benny,” the rabbi called, giving me a warm unshaven Saturday morning smile.
“Gut shabbas.
What brings you out on a Saturday? Have I ever seen you on a Saturday? I don’t think so.” He cleared a place beside him and I sat down. We both watched Mr. Hecht’s large eyes as magnified by his thick glasses. He looked for an advance on fifty dollars from Mr. Belkin. Mr. Hirsch went up a dollar. “It won’t hit sixty,” the rabbi said. “Belkin’s courage always fails him around fifty-five or six. What can I do for you, Benny? I expected to hear from you.”

“Is it all right to talk?” I asked. “Here, I mean?”

“Why not? I can’t get away, Benny. If you want to talk this morning, this is where I am.” I’d been more concerned with the correctness of talking sordid business in shul than simply having the rabbi to myself, but I let that pass. Rabbi Meltzer waved his hand and mimed something to the right-hand side of the congregation, and shortly we were joined by Mr. Tepperman.

“Good-morning, Benny. Is your father here?”

“Morning, Saul. No, he’s home and in bed where he is most Saturday mornings.” The sun coming into the synagogue glinted for a moment on one of Saul’s gold teeth. There was silence all around us. Hirsch had won the auction, and the rabbi was now needed. He got up and the service continued. Mr. Tepperman let me look at his prayer book as various members of the congregation were called up to the bema to read a small portion. It all seemed to be building up to something, and then it hit me: I recognized David and Lou Gorbach beaming up there. Then the rabbi called out in his familiar sing-song for Lou Gorbach’s boy to come up to the bema. A nervous thirteen-year-old in long pants went up the step and took his position, like he was over-rehearsed. He read the blessings in a strained voice that carried up to the balcony where his mother was sitting.
“Vilosechi h’oretz eschem …”
The musical decoration was simple and repetitive. I remember that the musical clues were written on the text, curlicues like accents above the words which indicated the next sequence of notes. The boy’s voice cracked a few times, just enough to bring tears to the eyes of most of the women in the balcony, and when he finally came to the end he became the centre of a hail of tiny paper bags with candy in them. Nothing changes in Grantham. I remember scrambling with the younger kids to collect as many of the bags as I could when I was little. Then I remembered that as I stood there on the bema in my first pair of long pants after reading my
mafter,
suddenly I was a man, too old to scramble for candy. I knew then that there was such a thing as dignity and I didn’t think I liked it.

The Gorbach boy didn’t pick up any candy either. It was a coming-of-age ceremony, and as such things go around the world, relatively painless. The only hazard in my day was getting my cheek pinched by the old rabbi when I got something right.

“My dear rabbi, beloved grandparents, relatives and friends …” The little so-and-so was now giving my speech. He got a few things different and changed some of the details because he’d read a different part from the Torah, but the thrust was the same and so were the lessons to be learned from the text. I felt violated by a thirteen-year-old. I picked up a small bag of candy that had landed at my feet and began feeling better right away.

“Nathan Geller has had a call from his missing brother,” I said to Saul Tepperman. “At least he says so.” I added that to show that I didn’t believe it was necessarily true. “He says that Larry’s in Florida. Daytona Beach.”

“And you believe he’s anywhere but Daytona Beach is that right, Benny?”

“It doesn’t make sense that he would tell me where his brother is hiding.” Saul Tepperman licked his lips and ran his finger over his moustache as though he was confirming that he still existed. “Look, Saul, he could be downstairs for all I know. I’ve talked to everybody in sight. It’s like running a stick against a picket fence. One piece makes the same noise as the last. This thing with Nathan, well, I don’t know. I’ll go see him.”

“You mean you’ll stay with the case?”

“I said I’d took around for a few days. That was last Wednesday. I don’t know, Saul. To find out where Larry’s gone will take a bigger organization that I can offer.”

“Look, if you could stay with it until next week.” He turned his head making a helpless gesture.

“In the meantime I’m not making a living, Saul. I’ve got a licence that has to be renewed and I don’t have the five hundred dollars it takes. If I don’t get renewed, I’ll be just another interested amateur.” I said this, then remembered Bagot’s five bills in my wallet. The way I was thinking, it wasn’t the same as real money. I knew I wouldn’t be able to relax with my debts until I’d put the money in an envelope addressed to Glenn Bagot.

“We’re meeting on Thursday,” Saul Tepperman said. I didn’t see how it followed.

“Eh?”

“The committee. I’ll tell them what you’ve done and at the very least they’ll pay you for the time you’ve already spent.” I wondered what he imagined was the most that the committee might do for my sagging affairs, but I let it pass.

“Saul, who in town, apart from his legal friends and his family, was closest to Larry Geller?”

“Apart from them …” he stroked his moustache between his thumb and the knuckle of his first finger, the one I used to call Peter Pointer. (The others were Tom Thumb, Toby Tall, Reuben Ring and Baby Finger.) “Apart from them I don’t think there was anybody. Close, you know what I mean. A family man, that’s what he was.”

“Or appeared to be,” I added, and once I’d said it, the more I liked the idea. The rabbi had now rejoined us, having quietened a dispute at the back over a procedural wrangle. On these occasions he can shut everybody up with the single word, “Sha!” spoken in a loud stage whisper. I asked him the same question I’d just posed to Saul and got the same answer with this addition: “Why not ask Nathan some further questions. If I had to guess which of his brothers Larry was closest to, I’d say it was Nathan not Sid. Sid was more like a father to the two of them. Talk to Nathan. God forbid we shouldn’t get to the bottom of this thing.” I said “Amen” and left the synagogue as quickly as I could, congratulating the Gorbachs at the door and dodging their invitation to join them downstairs in the vestry rooms for a small kiddush.

Once back behind the wheel of the car, I felt like myself again. There was something about religion that made me nervous. It was too closely connected with childish nightmares to leave me feeling wholly grown up and driving my own car. After an hour in the shul I felt an urge to turn over a new leaf and become a better person. It was the bacon in my stomach giving me heartburn and not God’s interference in my life that made me stop the car and buy some antacid tablets. That took care of my metaphysical speculations for about ten minutes.

I parked the rented car where I’d parked the Olds a couple of days ago, at the side of the two-storey warehouse where Nathan Geller did his sculptures. The green garbage bags had been collected but it looked pretty much the same apart from that. The bell still didn’t work, and the door was still open. I went in.