Joshua Then and Now (2 page)

From his study window, he had a clear view of the Trimble estate across the bay. The shuttered boathouse, with the Grew 212 secured inside; the Tanzer bobbing at anchor, its sails still stored in the padlocked cabin. Because of the sheltering pines he couldn’t quite make out the incomparable tennis court or the rock garden which used to be floodlit at night, but there was the mansion itself, its windows hooded. He knew the French-Canadian pine antiques, the outsized custom-built sofas with the down pillows, the snooker table with the claw legs; everything lay temporarily under sheets. What he didn’t know was whether Trimble was going to put the estate up for sale – his act of contrition – or, more likely, would defiantly reopen the house on Victoria Day weekend, obliging Jane to confront the old bunch.… The hell with the Trimbles, he had enough problems of his own.

Two old men, Reuben and the senator, guarded against intruders. The senator enjoyed rocking on the front porch, reading the latest Travis McGee, a fly swatter on one side, a bottle of Chablis riding in an ice bucket on the other. A shotgun resting on his lap. Reuben – wizened now, his hands flecked with liver spots, but still sporting a straw boater at a jaunty angle – was here, there, and everywhere when he wasn’t contemplating the morning line in the
Daily Racing Form
. Reuben watched over the children on the lake and read to them from his dog-eared Bible before tucking them in at night. He scoured the woods for interlopers and patrolled the dirt road that led to the cottage.

The day before yesterday two men in a red Mustang, a reporter and a photographer, had stopped Reuben on the road, mistaking him for a handyman. “Je m’excuse,” the reporter said, “je cherche la maison de Joshua Shapiro.”

Reuben, letting his wrists hang limp, said, “You don’t look the type.”

The reporter chuckled, appreciative, and explained that he represented the Montreal
Gazette
.

“Well, son, it’s a good thing you stopped me,” Reuben said, pausing to take a sip of V.O. out of his hip flask before passing it on to the reporter.

The reporter, determined to prove a good fellow, drank from the flask without wiping the neck. Retrieving it with a shaky hand, Reuben contrived to spill rye over his jacket. “Whoops. Sorry,” he said.

“Oh, that’s O.K.,” the reporter replied tightly.

“You’re on the wrong road.”

“But we were told –” the photographer began.

“Which is the right road?” the reporter asked.

“I figure that’s worth ten bucks.”

The reporter dug into his pocket for a ten-dollar bill, making a mental note to claim twenty from the office.

“The Shapiro place is like a mile further down the main road. First right, and then take the turn-off second left right after the ‘Patates Frites.’ It’s a dirt road and you keep bearing left. Eventually you come to a sign that says ‘Road Closed, Bridge Under Repair,’ but they’re just trying to jew you. Remove the barrier and plow right through. Got that?”

“Oh, is he ever bullshitting us,” the photographer said.

“I know.”

“That’s the house up there through the trees. I was here once before to photograph the senator.”

Reuben unzipped his windbreaker to show that he was wearing a gun. “If you don’t turn around right now,” he said, “I’m going to shoot out your tires. Ping ping ping.”

“We’ll be back with the police.”

“Officer Orville Moon is the fella you want.”

They found Moon flipping through a copy of
Penthouse
in Lapointe’s General Store.

“Yessir,” Moon said, listening to the reporter’s story, “yes,” and he strolled back with them to the Mustang, waiting for the reporter to slip behind the wheel. “You the one who’s driving?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Because you stink to high heaven of alcoholic spirits,” he said, “and I’m going to have to book you.”

The senator was waiting for Reuben on the porch, arthritic hand outstretched. “My share, please, partner.”

“He was only good for a fiver,” Reuben said, handing him two-fifty.

Reuben Shapiro was Joshua’s father and the senator, Stephen Andrew Hornby, his father-in-law. At night, after the children had gone to bed, Reuben strolled down to the gate, locked it, put out his
BEWARE OF THE DOG/CHIEN MÉCHANT
sign, and set his trip wires on the way back to the cottage. Then he and the senator played gin rummy in the living room or had a Bible discussion or watched the Expos lose again on television. Every now and then Reuben took a turn round the property, checking out his wires. The first night they had been set too low and a raccoon had started all the pots and pans jingling, Reuben diving for his flashlight, the senator leaping for his shotgun.

The reporters didn’t get anywhere asking questions in the village either, because the cottage had been in the senator’s family since he had been a boy himself and everybody for miles around remembered Pauline as a child. “Trout” they used to call her, because her fair skin was speckled with freckles. Now they felt sorry for Pauline and resented Joshua. I hardly blame them, Joshua thought.

Joshua was allowed to read his mail now, although he suspected certain letters were still being withheld. Yesterday a real zinger had slipped through Reuben’s net. It was from the David and Jonathan Society, a newly formed group of young, caring, Jewish faggots. They wished him well, “Shalom, coming out is easier with friends,” and invited him to be a guest of honor at their Purim ball. To each his own Queen Esther. He was also now considered well enough to see the newspapers and magazines. On the whole, his colleagues had not dealt viciously with his case, delivering no more than he deserved, but he realized there was no way his
TV
contract could be renewed for next season. The hell with it. Meanwhile, as might have been expected, gay publications everywhere had sprung to his defense.
The Body Politic
, Canada’s very own journal for homophiles, had put him on its cover. A martyr. The Glad Day Bookshop, in Toronto, was moving the old paperback edition of his badly dated
The Volunteers
– an appreciation of the men who had fought with the International Brigades in Spain – faster than the latest Gore Vidal.
Mandate, The International Magazine of Entertainment & Eros
, had managed to get an interview with his mother, or, more likely, she had sought them out. Esther Shapiro, née Leventhal, but best known as Esty Blossom.

Oh my God, but his loopy mother – who had been unearthed in Winnipeg, where she was now managing a massage parlor called
ORAL IS BEAUTIFUL
– allowed that she had been surprised to read that he was gay, and that at first she had felt very sad for him, because there was such prejudice on this matter within the straight Jewish community. “And not only here. I mean, take Israel,” she said. “There is a kibbutz for this and a kibbutz for that. You name it, you got it. But if there’s a kibbutz anywhere out there for gays, it’s still in the closet. Or maybe the Gaza Strip isn’t what I think. Ha, ha, ha.” His mother said she had been shocked when his now notorious correspondence with Murdoch had surfaced. “After all, he was always a
bit of a prig,” and, to illustrate her point, she told them what had happened at his bar-mitzvah. “But I’m in enough trouble with him already, so you spell that right. P-r-i-g. Ha, ha, ha.” She regretted that she and her son were now estranged, but this, she assured the interviewer, had nothing to do with his coming out. “Don’t quote me on this, but he married up and I never cared for his wife. On the other hand, who knows what Pauline has been through? Maybe she blames me.” Esther was not only active in women’s lib, but she was now also on the executive board of Parents of Gays in Canada, which group, she was at pains to point out, was no branch-plant organization, but entirely independent of the similarly named American society. “We, for instance, are also bilingual. Ha, ha, ha.”

The Advocate
, a more intellectual publication, in considering his collected pieces on sports, ventured that they were necessarily oblique, even deviously straight (which was understandable, the writer allowed, given the context of those pinched years), in contrast to the refreshingly new and flourishing gay book world. “An important fact about
ADVOCATE
readers at least, and possibly gay people in general, is that we are readers.” Quoting some of the available snippets from the correspondence, it evoked Auden’s relationship with Chester Kallman. But
Christopher Street
had, somehow or other, actually got its hot hands on some of the letters. Obviously one of their correspondents had penetrated the purportedly secure Rare Manuscripts Collection at Rocky Mountain University, or its curator, Colin Fraser. Or, possibly, both.

Rereading some of the salacious letters for the first time in more than twenty years, Joshua laughed aloud at outrageous passages until the sharp pain in his ribs made him wince. On balance, he felt that his end of the correspondence was the more inventive, which pleased him enormously. A full-page photograph of the two of them, the way they were – London, circa 1955 – introduced the letters. A much more recent photograph, the one that had become famous, showed them kissing at a Beverly Hills poolside. Markham’s poolside. There followed
three full pages of the correspondence and, for the rest, more letters ran down one column in the back pages of the magazine, squeezed between advertisements that he found mind-boggling.

Also available, from the same firm, were a salve called Jac-Up (“The name says it all”) and something called Black-Jac. The entire set, the incomparable Jac-Combo, was offered for $19.90, with a free catalogue of adult toys, featuring Jack Wrangler in full color. Canadians, however, would have to add ten percent to the cost of each order.

Oh God.

Only three weeks earlier, when tubes had been curling in and out of him everywhere like surgical spaghetti, Dr. Morty Zipper had gently pressed his hand and asked, “Can you hear me, Josh?”

In response, Joshua had blinked his eyes.

“You’re lucky to be alive.”

I’ll be the judge of that, Joshua thought.

C
HARLIE McCARTHY WAS MADE OF WOOD. A DUMMY
. The capital of their country was called Ottawa, its prime minister Mackenzie King. Lux was the soap of the stars. The No. 45 streetcar would get him downtown, the 29 take him to Outremont. Girls, even Jewish girls, would grow a bush, just like he would one day, although they had nothing to hide there. He knew, he’d asked around. Howie Morenz was dead and there would never be another hockey player like him. “Before they made him,” Uncle Oscar said, grieving, “they broke the mold.”

When Joshua was six years old, he also knew the names of the top ten lightweights, his father’s old division, as they were rated in Mr. Fleischer’s
Ring
magazines, but he had no idea what his father did to earn a living now that his fighting days were finished. He did know that his father never opened the front door to a stranger, but instead sent his mother, sometimes even him, hanging back himself, a length of lead pipe in his curled fist. So when his mother registered him for school, he was surprised to hear her smartly respond “Bill collector” when asked for “father’s occupation.”

Bill collector? “What does Daddy do, really?” he asked.

“He’s an undercover man for the RCMP.”

“Aw, come on. What does he do, but?”

“Well, you could say that these days he’s in insurance, sort of.”

The only insurance man he knew, Finkleman, his drifting eyes milky with cataracts, shuffled round once a week to complain about his aching feet and collect fifty cents from his mother, lick his pencil and tick off the payment in his big ledger. “Like from Prudential?” he asked.

“You know what killed the cat?”

“Curiosity.”

“Right. Now for the sixty-four-dollar question. Who did Max Baer, that reckless looter in Lovers’ Land, the magnificent swashbuckler, beat for the heavyweight crown?”

“Primo Carnera. New York. June fourteenth, nineteen thirty-four. An eleventh-round K.O.”

“And who was counting for knockdowns if you’re so smart?”

“Judge Artie Idella.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” his mother announced, “we are proud to present tonight’s stellar attraction, for the lightweight championship of the world … weighing one hundred and thirty-six pounds and wearing white trunks,
the
challenger from Montreal, Canada … 
RUBY SHAPIRO
! … and his opponent … weighing one hundred and thirty-five pounds and wearing purple trunks … the lightweight champion of the world … from New York City … 
SAMMY ANGOTT
!”

His mother was utterly unlike the other mothers on the street, even then. She was indifferent to his report cards and she did not oh and ah over his crayon drawings. His mother didn’t care how late he came home from school, or where he hung around. She was not determined that he would be the one to grow up and discover the cure for cancer. Or, failing that, marry Outremont money.

In those days his mother was uncommonly beautiful, with thick black hair, a high girlish bosom, delicate white skin, and a laugh that reminded him of honey. But it was his father who could evoke her laughter, not he. Joshua could do nothing to please her. She did not even appreciate that he had to defend her good name with his fists against the other boys on the street. Their striving mothers, grown
fat and sour with the years, bitterly resented his. Her marriage had not been arranged between families, as was only proper, but had been a scandal in its time, a love-match. His mother, actually born into Outremont affluence, a Leventhal, had defied her cultivated family, descending to their grubby street and marrying into a family of thugs out of Odessa, taking a struggling club fighter, lucky to get a semi-final in Albany, for her husband. Worse news. After a turbulent six years of marriage it was abundantly clear that she was still smitten with him. She could be seen leaning on his shoulder, obviously embarrassing him, all through a double feature at the Regent. She did not send his white-on-white shirts to the Chinese laundry, but ironed them herself, doing the collars just so. With money saved from her household allowance, or a good run at poker, she bought him hand-painted ties and once a fourteen-carat gold stickpin with his initials,
RS
. His mother kept herself indecently perfumed, her hair touched with henna, a girl, just for him. Or so it seemed. She had not yet begun to drink heavily. Or demonstrate. But so far as the other mothers on the street were concerned, she was already wanton.