Joshua Then and Now (22 page)

“So do I.”

They shook hands.

“I’m sure you do, but it may not be enough.”

Early the next morning, too early for Joshua’s taste, he was wakened by a fierce pounding on the door of his room in the Chateau Laurier. “Open up! Open up! We know you have a woman in there!”

The gentlemen of the William Lyon Mackenzie King Memorial Society, piling into two cars, leaving Montreal at 6:30 a.m., had arrived for their Annual Day. Portly, moon-faced Seymour Kaplan was there, Max Birenbaum, Bobby Gross, Leo Friedman, Jack Katz, Eli Seligson, and Morty Zipper, all from Montreal. Momentarily they would be joined by Lennie Fisher and AI Roth, both now living in Toronto, Mickey Stein, who was doing research in social studies
at Harvard, Benny Zucker from
UCLA
, and Larry Cohen, who had just joined the Treasury Board in Ottawa. All of them had been pimply teenagers together at
FFHS
and were, for the most part, still striving. Everything possible. Joshua had already booked a private dining room, large enough to accommodate their society, at the Chateau, and he counted on Seymour, Keeper of the Artifacts, to decorate it appropriately.

As usual, the oak-framed photograph of Mackenzie King wearing his checkered tweed suit with cap to match, one hand caressing his Irish terrier Pat II, would be seated in the place of honor, to be toasted again and again. Another framed photograph of their cunning chipmunk would show him seated in his study, contemplating a painting of his beloved mum. Hanging on the wall would be a framed
Time
magazine cover of ice-skater Barbara Ann Scott, Canada’s sweetheart of yesteryear, and a film still of Montreal actor Mark Stevens from I
Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now?
There would be an action photograph of Maurice “The Rocket” Richard, and another of Johnny Greco in the ring with Dave Castilloux. A Shirley Temple doll, a Betty Grable pin-up, and – a real collector’s item, this – a Lili St. Cyr poster from the old Gayety Theatre. An Al Palmer gossip column from the defunct Montreal
Herald
, demanding, between gutsy paragraphs,
WITH BUTTER NEARLY FIFTY CENTS A POUND, WHY NOT MARGARINE
? would be in evidence. They would also have a tape of an old Foster Hewitt “Hockey Night in Canada” broadcast. There would be records by Kay Kayser, Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Bing Crosby, the Ink Spots, Artie Shaw, Nat King Cole, Glenn Miller, Spike Jones, Mart Kenney and His Western Gentlemen, and, of course, Deanna Durbin. Yo-yos would be available for their annual after-dinner competition. Copies of
Sunbathing, The Police Gazette
, and
Justice Weekly
would sit on the sideboard, as would a bottle of Kik-Cola and a sufficient number of Mae West bars for everyone. Nor would they be without stills of Bogart, Lana Turner, and John Garfield. Or their prized photograph of Igor Gouzenko, the Russian embassy clerk
turned God-fearing informer, wearing a pillowslip over his head for a press conference. Also, a newspaper photograph of their favorite among extant hockey players, the aging Flopper, then still tending the nets for the perfectly dreadful Boston Bruins.

All these artifacts, and more, in everlasting memory of William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Ostensibly bland and boring, William Lyon Mackenzie King, the prime minister of their boyhood, Canada’s leader for twenty-one years, was the most vile of men. Mean-spirited, cunning, somewhat demented, and a hypocrite on a grand scale. Wee Willie was born on December 17, 1874, in Berlin, Ontario. His mother, Isabel Grace Mackenzie, was the thirteenth child of William Lyon Mackenzie, the first mayor of Toronto and leader of the Upper Canada rebellion in 1837. At the age of seventeen, Willie went on to University College at the University of Toronto and from there to the University of Chicago. He had begun to keep a diary. And he was already a confirmed Gladstonian. Which is to say, a horny little fellow, bent on the salvation of prostitutes by day, he did in fact bend over them by night, forking out as much as $1.25 a trick, not counting gratuities. In 1900, at the age of twenty-five, he was called to Ottawa to organize the newly created Department of Labour. He became the department’s first deputy minister. It was that same year, on Thanksgiving Day, that he espied his blessed Kingsmere, the little lake in the hills on the Quebec side of Ottawa, some eight miles from Parliament Hill. King was first elected to Parliament as a Liberal in 1908; a year later he entered Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s cabinet as minister of labour. His beloved mother died in 1917, but Wee Willie was soon to commune with her spirit nightly by means of a crystal ball. In 1919, he was elected leader of the Liberal Party. Two years later he became prime minister for the first time.

Mackenzie King already owned a cottage on Kingsmere Lake in 1920. Two years later he increased his holdings, and an estate at Kingsmere was created, King calling his house “Moorside.” Another
five years passed before he became “owner of house, barns, woods and another 100+ acres of land.” The same year the perspicacious King also purchased an adjoining lot, in order to prevent “a sale to Jews, who have a desire to get in at Kingsmere & who would ruin the whole place,” possibly by opening a kosher delicatessen.

Ah, Kingsmere, where Wee Willie was to create an artificial ruin, instantly time-honored, the “Abbey ruin,” which he thought was “like the Acropolis at Athens.” King diligently added to his ruins during the thirties, but he didn’t make his prize catch until 1941. On the dark day following the bombing of Westminster Hall, King sent a cable to Canada House in London. Blitzed London. The cable was
SECRET AND MOST IMMEDIATE
. It arrived at 10 p.m. and was promptly decoded. The prime minister wanted to know if Lester B. Pearson, then with the Canadian high commissioner’s office in London, could immediately prevail upon the British to round up a few stones from bombed Westminster for his ruins at Kingsmere. An embarrassed Pearson put through the request and, to his surprise, it was not met with indignant refusal. On the contrary. Historic stones were shipped safely via submarine to add a new élan to Wee Willie’s ruins.

It was in 1938 that King, now a confirmed spiritualist, first met Adolf Hitler and quickly recognized something of a kindred spirit, another leader profoundly devoted to his mother’s memory and the value of
Judenfrei
real estate. I believe, he wrote in his diary, the world will yet come to see a great man, a mystic, in Hitler. He “will rank some day with Joan of Arc among the deliverers of his people, & if he is only careful may yet be the deliverer of Europe.”

In 1924, friends of King gave him a dog, an Irish terrier called Pat, which he soon took to be a living symbol of his mother. Kneeling in prayer before his mother’s portrait in 1931, “little Pat came up from the bedroom and licked my feet – dear little soul, he is almost human. I sometimes think he is a comforter dear mother has sent me, he is filled with her spirit of patience, and tenderness & love.” Pat died in his arms in 1941, even as Willie sang aloud to him “Safe in the Arms
of Jesus.” “I kissed the little fellow as he lay there, told him of his having been faithful and true, of his having saved my soul, and being like God.” Fortunately, another Irish terrier, Pat II, soon came into his life, and before going to bed, King and his little angel dog often used to chat together about the Christ child and the animals in his crib. Of Pat II’s death, on August 11, 1947, the prime minister of Canada wrote, “I felt as if he had died for me, that my sins might be forgiven me.” His dog’s death put him in mind of Christ’s crucifixion. Pat II was buried near what King called “the Bethal Stone” at Kingsmere.

King’s obsession with the position of the hands of the clock seems to have begun in 1918; he regarded it as auspicious if the hands were together, as in twelve o’clock, or in a straight line, as at six o’clock. By 1932 he was attending séances and consulting mediums in Canada, the United States, and England. He also went in for table-rapping, wherein it was revealed to him in 1933 that he had been predestined to become prime minister, the fate of Canada being in his hands. Leonardo da Vinci appeared at King’s little table, as did Lorenzo de’ Medici and Louis Pasteur, who was good enough to prescribe for little angel dog Pat’s heart condition. Another visitor to King’s table, the spirit of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, assured him that President Roosevelt loved him. “He will treat you like a prince.” However, when Roosevelt and Churchill came to Canada for the Quebec conference during World War II, they wouldn’t let Wee Willie anywhere near the big table, and only grudgingly allowed him to have his photograph taken with them. To be fair, however, Roosevelt proved to be a lot nicer after his death. He appeared before King, begging him not to retire, if only because, said the late president, he had the wisdom that Churchill lacked, as well as “the caution and the integral honesty that holds a country together.” From time to time Willie’s mum would appear to “my own dearest boy, my pride and joy, best of sons.” Once she went on to introduce President Roosevelt to him. “Frank, as I call him.” This time out, Frank pleaded with King to take a real rest, “knock off for at least a year.” He also said that it was vital that
King should write his memoirs, including “the important chapter, your firm faith in a future life, that you have evidence of it.”

William Lyon Mackenzie King, the longest-serving prime minister in the history of the Commonwealth, survived both his dearest loves in this world, Pat I and Pat II, and passed on to the Big Kennel in the Sky on July 22, 1950. Just as he died, thunder and lightning and torrents of rain came without any warning. The rain fell only at Kingsmere, not in Ottawa.

King, who always presented himself as a man of very modest means, earned $7,000 a year when he first became a minister in 1909. On his retirement in 1948, his pay and allowances totaled $19,000 annually. And yet – and yet – miraculously, perhaps – he died leaving a fortune of over $750,000, and this did not include the Kingsmere estate, which he left to the nation.

Their Annual Day in honor of the scheming old fraud began, quite properly, at Kingsmere, the Jews getting in to ruin the whole place at last, with a champagne breakfast on the site of the “Abbey ruins.” From there they moved on to pay their respects to Pat II, at the Bethal Stone, where they sang “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” but in Yiddish, this version being the inspiration of Mickey Stein.

Then they adjourned to Laurier House.

Laurier House was left to Wee Willie by Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s widow in 1922. Friends of King’s clubbed together to renovate and refurbish the house for him before he moved in a year later. As usual, the gentlemen of the Mackenzie King Memorial Society began their tour of the residence from which Canada had once been governed with a visit to the dining room, the table set exactly as King had liked it. “At this table,” the guide solemnly declared, “sat all past presidents of the United States, as well as Shirley Temple.”

In the living room, they stood to marvel at the crystal ball that still rested on the piano, and the painting of King’s mum, where he had knelt to pray nightly.

Next they assembled in their private dining room in the Chateau Laurier to drink more champagne. A disgruntled Seymour abruptly demanded, “How long have you known that Auden was a queer?”

“I don’t know,” Joshua replied, surprised. “For years, I guess. Why?”

“First Dostoevsky and then that little Eliot, whose lines I once committed to memory, turn out to be
farbrinter
anti-Semites, and now I find out that Auden, my Auden, has been a cocksucker all these years. ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love,’ yeah, but you know where. What can you put your trust in these days?”

Lennie Fisher, his manner urgent, strongly recommended ITT.

Seymour, just married the previous summer, was showing all the out-of-towners, including Joshua, photographs of his wife, apologizing each time. “I know it’s a corny thing to do, but …”

At the time, Seymour was still running his bookshop on University Street, roosting in the apartment upstairs. If an unsuspecting matron wandered in and asked for Taylor Caldwell’s
Dear and Glorious Physician
, he would explode, “This is a bookshop, madame, not a shit-bin. You want shit, shop at Burton’s. Go.” But he would thrust Kafka on certain students, giving it away, saying they needed it. He was enjoying himself in the bookshop, but he couldn’t earn a living there. He was married now and in three years he would be thirty. Imagine, he said, thirty. “My father pops into the shop once a week and says, ‘So, enough of this foolishness. Who did I build the business for if not for you?’ ”

“What are you going to do?”

“Molly’s great, you know. I’m really serious about this marriage. She says I can do whatever I want.”

“And you?”

“I’m weak, Josh. I really hate being without money. But knitwear? With an M.A. in English lit?”

Lennie Fisher floated from group to group, urging everybody to get into Xerox now.

Max Birenbaum, whose wife was expecting again within a week, started each time the phone rang. “If it’s for me, I’m right here.”

Bobby Gross, prospering as a lawyer, was thinking of buying a house in Westmount.

“You go right ahead,” Max said, “but I’ll never step in there. Count on it.”

“You make that a promise,” Bobby said, “and I’ll buy.”

Then, arms around each other, Max and Bobby sang “Hail, Comrade Stalin,” followed by “A Company Union Is a No Good Union.”

A squinting, tight-lipped Eli Seligson drove Joshua into a corner to tell him that he had read his article on the Aldermaston march in
Esquire
and, so far as he was concerned, it was sentimental, left-wing horseshit. “The others may be impressed, but not me. You know what your problem is? You think you’re too good for us.”

“Eli, baby, I
am
too good for you.”

“Boy, are you ever a
putz
. Is it true that you’re coming back to live here?”

“Yes. Next year, probably.”

“And you’re writing a book about the Spanish Civil War, of all things?”

“Yes.”

“So what?”

AI Roth, who was in real estate, advised all of them, no matter where they lived, to stop burning money on rent. He enjoined them to get out of their apartments and buy houses right now. “Borrow, if you haven’t got the cash. You can’t go wrong. Especially in Montreal.”