Joshua Then and Now (17 page)

Joshua, elated, replied, “Well, I’m not sure yet. I’m working on it.” And, brandishing his stick, he retreated from the dressing room.

In the afternoon, he acquired his first white-collar job, one that came with a title: field worker. And early the next morning he was out banging on doors. “Hello, hello. I’m an interviewer with CMC Limited, a national opinion organization, and you have been carefully selected to –”

“No,” the lady said, slamming the door.

He was no more successful with his second bell or the third, but the fourth time out he managed to squeeze into the apartment of a Mrs. Burns and told her that he was conducting a bread survey. “Why do you use bread?” he asked.

“To fill out a meal.”

“Why don’t you use something else instead?”

“What would
you
use instead?”

“When you use bread at a meal,” he asked, “how is it served?”

“I put it on the table and everybody grabs a slice.”

“I’d like you to think back to the last time you bought bread. Think about it for a while, and tell me exactly what happened from the time you approached the bread counter. Ready. Steady. Go.”

“I walked into the store, bought a loaf, and walked out.”

“Right. Now I have one more question for you. It’s sort of a game question. Mind association.”

“I’m a high school graduate,” she allowed.

“Good. Now when I say ‘staff of life,’ what do you think of?”

“If you don’t get out of here this minute,” Mrs. Burns said, sweeping a heavy glass ashtray off the table, “I’m going to call the police.”

Joshua shot out of his chair and made for the door.

“I’m writing down the name of your firm,” she called after him, “and you’ll be hearing from my husband.”

“I love you,” he called back, blowing her a kiss.

“Filth!”

A news photograph of El Campesino was tacked over his sink. There were also some lines by the murdered García Lorca.

Although it had never occurred to him that he might be able to write, really write, he figured out that if he was going to get to Spain he would need a craft to sustain him, and he settled on journalism. But he grasped that his grammar was shaky, his prose trite. So he acquired a Fowler, a thesaurus, other books on style, and he studied them in bed at night until the print danced before his eyes. He bought the
New York Times
, the
Post, Collier’s
, and, taking the stories apart, he made notes on structure. He picked up a rickety but still functional portable typewriter in a pawnshop on Craig Street. With a card pinched from a student locker, he gained access to the McGill library. He read Mencken, all the journalism anthologies available, the
New Statesman
, and, above all, A. J. Liebling. Then, applying himself to Montreal newspapers, he realized that he had taken the wrong models. He turned to the New York tabloids, the
News
and the
Mirror
; he subscribed to
Reader’s Digest
. Six months later, Joshua wrote a hard-hitting first-person exposé of the market research business, and how it manipulated the minds of innocent housewives for profit. He took the article to the managing editor of the city’s only
tabloid, the Montreal
Herald
. Fortunately, CMC was not an advertiser, and the editor, a gruff-spoken man, was willing to buy it at five cents a printed column line, if the details checked out. But Joshua, swallowing hard, said no, if he wanted the article, he had to hire him.

Had Joshua any experience?

Damn right, he said, with the Sudbury
Nugget
, and he produced a letter of reference from the editor typewritten on a letterhead that he had swiped from the old boozer.

“How old are you, kid?”

“Nineteen.”

“Like fuck. But I’ll give you a trial.”

“What will you pay me?”

“Twenty-five dollars a week to start.”

“I speak Spanish. I know French. I’m an expert on boxing lore.”

“Take it or leave it.”

1949 that was, and, living frugally, he began to set aside money for his trip to Spain. Madrid. The Ebro. Teruel. Guernica. But he would visit Paris first.

Paris, France.

Where Hemingway had gone.

Where one Josip Broz, later known as Marshal Tito, had once been ensconced in a Left Bank hotel organizing a flow of recruits through his so-called “secret railway.” The first contingent of volunteers for the International Brigades, some five hundred men, had arrived in Albacete on October 14, 1936. Their leader was “General” Emilio Kléber, a Romanian whose real name was Lazar, and who was described in propaganda releases as “a soldier of fortune of naturalized Canadian nationality.” And, Joshua remembered, grinning, they were already saying that Yiddish was the Internationals’
lingua franca
.

Once in Paris, Joshua brought his scrapbook of clippings to the
Herald-Tribune
and the managing editor sighed and asked him to please fill out a form.

“I thought you might be interested in a series on Spain now. I majored in Spanish history at McGill. I speak the language fluently.”

“So does the guy we’ve got in Madrid.”

Joshua rented a room in a small hotel on rue Mouffetard, not far from the outdoor food market, and most afternoons he read in the garden of the Church of St.-Ménard, where Jean Valjean had once accidentally encountered Javert. Where, in 1727, the Jansenist François Paris was buried, young girls flocking to eat the dirt off his grave. Flogging themselves there, having their tongues pierced, or their breasts and thighs trampled on until they passed out. Five years later the government was obliged to have the cemetery walled and guarded, a rhyme mysteriously appearing on the locked gate:

Spain was close, achingly close, but, overwhelmed by Paris, he was unable to budge. He met Markham, he picked up with Peabody. Then, one afternoon in the autumn of 1951, he found himself sitting out there with Peabody on the terrace of The Old Navy.

“Try Ibiza.”

“Ibiza?”

“Ibiza.”

He yawned.

“You cross the Pyrenees,” Peabody said, “and you’re leaving Europe behind you. Those mountains are a time machine. On the other side, it’s a hundred years ago. Much more in some places.”

Spain beckoned. Yes. But by this time he had already blown most of his stake, some of it on the horses at Longchamps and Maison Lafitte, the biggest chunk in one wild drunken night with Peabody at the roulette tables in a club near l’Opéra. So he set out for London instead, where he would at least be able to find work without a labor
permit. Clippings in hand, he made the rounds. Reuters,
UP, AP, CP
. He filled in on somebody’s vacation on a desk here, subbed somewhere else for a fortnight, and served as a stringer for a number of Canadian newspapers, filing the obligatory crap. If, for instance, a dumpy Canadian actress had a walk-on part in a play on Shaftesbury Avenue, he would write
TORONTO BEAUTY DAZZLES WEST END
. He also turned to plagiarism. Ripping a short story with a twist in its tail from
Collier’s
, he rewrote it, setting it in Calgary, and sent it off to the Toronto
Star Weekly
with a covering letter saying he was a struggling Canadian artist, who simply refused to sell his proud heritage for a fistful of Yankee dollars. The enclosed story had been accepted by the
Saturday Evening Post
, if only he agreed to make the place-names American. This, he wrote, would be a violation of his integrity; he would rather accept less money from a Canadian publication. And, to his surprise, the story earned him a check for $300, and a request for more. Then he was asked by a Montreal editor to go to Cambridge and send them 750 words on Canadian students for an educational supplement.

Cambridge. Everywhere he looked, bats on bicycles. Rotten teeth. But there, on a wet misty Saturday morning in the Market Square, he first encountered Murdoch, literally bumping into him as they were both riffling David’s Bookstall for early Penguins, ancient Everymans, costing no more than sixpence each. In those days the yet-to-be-published Murdoch still read other people’s novels in anticipation of pleasure, and Joshua did not yet take them as fodder for his scabrous reviews, outbidding everybody in invective. Joshua picked up a hardback, a novel published in 1934, and the reviewers’ quotes on the faded jacket were dazzling. “Not to be missed.” “A minor masterpiece. Brilliant.” He had never heard of the author.

Murdoch, with his gift for anticipating what others thought, grinned at him. “It’s a mug’s game,” he said.

Joshua read the first paragraph aloud, they both guffawed, and repaired to Morley’s for a pint.

Soul-mates.

Murdoch was still wiry then, National Health steel-rims riding his fussy nose, mop of greasy black hair, brown eyes amazed, his tweed jacket the standard utility wear. Already pumping wild-eyed energy and malice out of every pore. “Now tell me, who is this Adlai Badly chap they are all talking about so much over there?”

A council school boy from Bradford, a scholarship lad, Murdoch was to earn a double first at King’s. Once, when they stopped there to collect his mail, he asked Joshua to wait outside the porter’s gate. “Sorry,” he said, “but you’re not a member of the college. Indeed, you are my social inferior in every respect.”

“A rare advantage for you, that, Sidney.”

“If you only knew,” he replied, grinning.

But later he retreated into melancholy. “Do you think there’ll be a place for us?” he asked.

“Where?”

“In this world, is where. I won’t stand in queues. I am not going to eat in restaurants that accept luncheon vouchers. Or keep a post office account. I want everything.”

“We’re going to have it, Sidney.”

“You don’t understand this wretched country. It’s not enough to win a double first. It’s pushy.”

“We’re special.”

“Bless you. But you don’t understand. If I won a Nobel Prize, the
Times
headline would read, ‘Newsagent’s Boy Wins …’ And where, in God’s name,” he asked, rounding on Joshua, “do you get your confidence?”

Joshua unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a long thin key from a silvery chain.

“What’s that?”

“It’s the key to a box which is in the Royal Bank of Canada on the main street of Cornwall just across the Ontario border.”

“Seriously, Joshua, how come you’re so sure of yourself?”

Me, sure of myself. He had to laugh. “Well,” he said, “I’ll tell you. When I was a kid, my father used to take me out walking downtown, and whenever we ran into somebody he knew, he’d stop him and say, ‘I’d like you to meet my son, Joshua. This is my boy.’ And when I was old enough, he took me to meet Colucci in the La Scala Barbershop, and he said, ‘Your days are numbered, Sonny.’ ‘How come?’ Colucci asked. ‘This is my boy, Joshua, now you just feel that muscle.’ My father wasn’t in town for my bar-mitzvah, he had business elsewhere, but when he got back he took me into his poolroom, marched me over to the rack, handed me a key, and said, ‘This will unlock your cue. It’s yours. Nobody else can use it.’ Then he turned to the boss and said, ‘Off your ass, Stash, and rack ’em up for me and my son here.’ ”

“What do you want, Joshua, really want?”

“Well, my father brought me up to believe I would only be making one trip round. So I want a good life, available on terms that do not offend me. I also intend to enjoy myself.”

Joanna, a fetching Girton girl, smelling of old money and country houses, came between them. She failed to grasp that Murdoch’s insults were a desperate form of courtship and so did Joshua, at the time. He hit it off with Joanna and called at Murdoch’s rooms to ask if he might have the run of the place for the afternoon. “Certainly,” Murdoch said stiffly, and when Joshua returned with Joanna he found that he had left them a bottle of Australian sherry and an envelope with Joshua’s name on it. Inside there was a nasty note. Murdoch had also contrived to disconnect the gas fire, something Joshua reproached him for when he caught up with him later at Morley’s.

“Never mind that. What did you do?” Murdoch demanded, flushed. “How does one go about it?”

“About what, my dear?”

“You know, the funny stuff.”

Joshua ordered another pint, wincing when somebody accidentally brushed against his back at the bar.

“What’s wrong?” Murdoch asked.

Lowering his voice, Joshua said, “Scratches.”

“Good God, really?”

“Mn.”

“Was she wearing garters? I’m absolutely bonkers about suspender belts. Well?”

“That,” Joshua said, “would be indiscreet.”

Sodden, reduced to a child again, Murdoch confessed that he had yearned for Joanna for months, but hadn’t known how or if she would ever … “How do you start it?”

Unwilling to admit that they had done no more than grope at each other, both of them goosepimply and shivering in Murdoch’s subarctic room, Joshua said, “Well, it began with her sucking my toes. It’s an old Orthodox Jewish custom, don’t you know?”

“Go to hell.”

“Just how much,” Joshua asked slyly, “do you know about what
really
goes on at a bar-mitzvah ceremony?”

Early the next morning a flustered Joanna was pounding on Murdoch’s door. With his help, she turned over pillows, rolled back carpets, and moved furniture, hunting everywhere, even behind book-cases, for her pearl necklace. It wasn’t to be found anywhere. Murdoch, when Joshua ran into him later in the day, was most distressed. “They weren’t fake, you know,” he said. “They came from Asprey’s.”

“The strand probably broke,” Joshua said, “and she lost them cycling back to Girton.”

Joanna placed an ad in the evening paper. It ran for three days, but nothing came of it. Joshua returned to Paris, consulted with Peabody about Ibiza, and bought a third-class rail ticket to Seville.

He had to see Seville. On July 18, 1936, there had been an amazing
coup de main
. General Queipi de Llano, commander of the carbineers, accompanied by his ADC, with only three other officers and fifteen Falangists at his disposal, audaciously arrested officers loyal to the Republic and took over the infantry barracks. This put a regiment of
a mere hundred and thirty soldiers under his command, a city of a quarter-of-a-million yet to be subdued. Fortunately for Llano, the artillery barracks agreed to support the uprising, the airport fell, and then only the working-class suburbs resisted the insurrection.