Joshua Then and Now (28 page)

Pauline remained unconvinced. Kevin, for his part, avoided her, even their brief phone conversations abrasive.

“How,” she wanted to know, “can you afford to buy a Porsche?”

“Why,” he shot right back, “are you always prepared to believe the worst of me?”

Pauline went to Ottawa to have lunch with the senator.

“Kevin’s back,” she said.

“I do read the financial pages, you know.”

“Couldn’t you see him?”

“I rather suspect,” he said, “that he knows where to find me,” and he immediately changed the subject.

When Joshua ran into Trimble late one afternoon on Crescent Street, and they ducked into The Troika together for drinks, it was immediately clear that his black mood had passed as swiftly as the summer. “Joshua, old son, we both misjudged Kevin badly. He’s a remarkable chap. A late bloomer, certainly, but all he needed was a push. Somebody willing to show confidence in him.”

“Come on,” Joshua said, “you’re the one who’s running that fund. He’s only window dressing.”

“The hell he is. He makes every bleeding decision on his own. I bless the day he came back here.”

“Do you now?”

“Yes, and business is only the half of it. He’s got me out on the golf course a couple of afternoons a week, imagine that, and Jane is looking ten years younger. I only hope the others realize how much he’s doing to prove himself. It’s important to him.”

Joshua shrugged.

“Those Westmount wankers, if they had to do business in London and New York, like I do, they’d find out soon enough that they’re strictly third-division. They haven’t got what it takes. Fortunately for them, they can believe this little provincial backwater is society. But we’ve been around. We know different, don’t we, old son?”

“Yes, we do,” he said, “but that hardly explains why you continue to play the fool for them.”

“I don’t get the drift,” he said, hardening.

Joshua paused to light a cigarette. “You’re no more British than I am, Jack.”

Trimble didn’t blanch. He laughed. He slapped his knee. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“You were born right here, old son.”

“I was born in Putney. I didn’t settle here until ’forty-nine. Everybody knows that.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not about to spill the beans.”

“The beans. There are no beans. You bloody imbecile. You little hack. What you mean to say is, you are not about to risk spreading slanderous stories about your betters, because you know damn well you’d be hearing from my solicitors.”

“Lawyers.”

“Yes,” he said. “And, oh, something else,” he added with a thin smile. “Your brother-in-law is giving me tennis lessons.” And he stomped out of The Troika.

Joshua, feeling crummy, lingered at the bar, ordering another drink. He hadn’t wanted to threaten Trimble, even obliquely. He disliked himself for it. But there was Pauline to consider, and the senator, and if there was going to be any trouble, it was best Trimble knew beforehand that he had something on him. Some muscle. And yet – and yet – the more he pondered it, ordering yet another drink, the more it seemed to him that if anybody was going to play dirty, it was most likely to be Kevin. The pusillanimous brother-in-law he was now lumbered with. So he quit the bar angry with Pauline for obliging him to hammer Trimble.

The night of the dinner party on the lake, when a turbulent Trimble had first announced his surprising association with Kevin, Joshua and Pauline had sat up talking until dawn, drinking on the tilting wraparound porch.

“What you see,” she said, “is a pathetic, broken-down athlete, a forty-one-year-old boy, certainly not bright by your standards. Or Murdoch’s. Or even Seymour’s. But he was such a beautiful boy, Josh. So naturally graceful. A faun. Every head turned when he passed. He was a favorite of the gods, or so it seemed once. If I haven’t told you about him before, it’s really because of my father and you. It’s surprising, but you get along so well now, you really do. I don’t want to spoil that for either of you. In a certain sense you have
become the son he wanted, and I just couldn’t bear for you to think badly of him now.”

“Why should I?” he asked, interested.

“Because Kevin is the son he destroyed.”

As he started to protest, she held up her hands. “I know. Don’t start. I’ve heard you on the subject before. We can’t blame everything on our parents.
We
are responsible for what we become. And God help us all if Alex doesn’t turn out just right, because you’re a hard man, Joshua Shapiro, oh yes you are.”

“We were talking about Kevin,” he said evenly.

“You didn’t like that?”

“No.”

All right. O.K. Kevin, she explained, had once been all but overwhelmed with love and approval. Pauline had worshipped him. Stephen Andrew Hornby, who had always yearned for a son, wept with joy on the day he was born. But, above all, it had been their mother who had doted on him, taking him everywhere with her, even when he was a tot. To sit on Mackenzie King’s lap, to be introduced to the Governor-General. If she came home late from a party, her first stop was the nursery. One governess after another was found wanting. The Swiss one bullied him too much and another one, brought over from England, didn’t have quite the right accent. Kevin had hardly started school when their father began to read aloud to him every night, and to prepare him for the great things to come.

“And what about you?” Joshua asked, concerned.

“I was merely a girl.”

“Right right,” Joshua responded warmly, beginning to stroke her inner thigh.

But she moved away from him, absorbed in her story.

Every night, before dinner, Kevin was given a list of topics that were to be discussed at the table, and an hour to prepare himself for them in the library. Social justice. The British North America Act. The Magna Carta. His every response was applauded before their
father gently corrected his errors in logic, teaching him, he hoped, how to marshal his arguments for the parliamentary debates that were bound to come. Their mother bought him a pony. He had his own French tutor. And then, without warning, their family life began to come apart. Stephen Andrew Hornby, rather than getting the portfolio he was counting on, the job that Mackenzie King had promised him, was abruptly retired to the Senate. The bone-yard. Not, mind you, because he lacked the ability, but because political cunning called for a French Canadian to be put forward at the time. So he was no longer a presence, a prince. There was no longer a quickening when Stephen Andrew Hornby entered a room, or the bar in the Rideau Club. He became sour. Difficult. Younger men didn’t smile at his witticisms any more. And that’s when their mother, always a flirt, began to have her affairs, discreetly at first and then with a certain defiance. And now when the senator drifted into the Rideau he imagined the other men whispering, and he wondered which one, if not all of them, had been to bed with his wife. Rightly or wrongly, he began to suspect that darling Kevin had become his wife’s accomplice. Kevin would pretend that he and his mother had been together all afternoon, when the truth was he had been dropped off at a movie, while his mother romped elsewhere. Then there was the trip to Europe. A grand tour. Ostensibly, to further Kevin and Pauline’s education. They would listen to the debates in Westminster. Visit the Louvre. See the Vatican. But actually it was no more than an excuse for their mother to run wild. She had begun to drink a good deal by this time, and the more she drank, the less fastidious she became about her lovers. Pauline was now talking about gondoliers and croupiers and the kind of bronzed young horrors who sat at the bar of the Ruel or on the terrace of the Carlton in Cannes, waiting. She was terrified. They were often in the bedroom next to their mother’s in the hotel in Ville-Franche or St.-Paul-de-Vence or Antibes. Pauline would lie in bed with a pillow over her head, trying to shut out their love-making noises. But Kevin was enthralled. He
would hold an inverted glass to the wall, listening to them. “Oh boy,” he’d say, “are we ever going to have treats tomorrow. We can have anything we want tomorrow.” And when they got back from Europe, Pauline ran right into their father’s arms when he stepped on board the ship in Quebec City. But he took one look at Kevin and he went rigid. He knew. He took one look, and he understood he was no longer a towering figure in his son’s life. Instead, he was something pathetic. An old fool. A cuckold.

As before, topics were set for discussion at the dinner table. The Family Compact. Heredity. Property rights. But now Pauline was included and listened to with kindness. And once Kevin had made his case, his manner just a little too cocksure now, the senator would sit back with an ironical smile on his face and demolish it. Kevin would have appealed to their mother for help, but if she wasn’t out, she was indisposed. She seldom joined them at the dinner table any more. They were living in the Westmount house again, on Upper Lansdowne, the senator going to Ottawa for only a couple of days a week. And if he turned on Kevin in their mother’s presence, she would cry, but she made no protest. And one day she just packed her bags and was gone, leaving Kevin stranded. Loving postcards came for him from New Orleans, San Francisco, and even Cairo once. And if she was in town between planes and lovers, she would take them to lunch at the Ritz, spilling her drinks, tears running down her powdered cheeks, embarrassing Kevin and frightening Pauline. Now Pauline became Kevin’s only support. He began to lie, he began to cheat. He wasn’t awfully good at school, and so on the way home from Selwyn House he would doctor his report card. He was a natural athlete. Star of the hockey team. Unequaled in track and field. But their father simply didn’t give a damn any more.

Kevin now had to reconcile school, where masters and boys doted on him, and the lake in summer, where Jane wasn’t the only girl who swooned in his presence, with what had become their grim and unyielding house on Upper Lansdowne, where disapproval was all
but absolute. “Oh, and he was such a beautiful boy, Josh, he didn’t deserve to become a counter in my parents’ quarrel. He was hardly to blame for Mother’s infidelities. He deserved better of my father, much better. And just as my father seemed to be coming around, if only a little, my mother had her stroke, and died in a room in the Royal Vic with my father holding her hand. I have no idea what passed between them in that room, what he said or what she said, but he hardened against Kevin once more.”

Kevin and Pauline were now at McGill together. He was the leading man in just about everything the drama society did, and he played hockey well enough to interest professional scouts. He won the Quebec amateur golf championship and, together against the world, they took a mixed doubles tennis title. Kevin was also briefly prime minister of McGill’s mock parliament. Pauline wasn’t the only one who thought he would win the roses. All the prizes. She had no idea that he was already plagiarizing his English essays out of books by forgotten writers. Or that he seldom sat down to an exam without a crib sheet. Pauline thought he was wonderful, absolutely wonderful, and began to fight with their father about him. The senator would smile, but say nothing. Pauline hated him.

“Jane, Kevin, and I became inseparable. The Three Musketeers. I took it for granted they would marry – my brother, my best friend.” No, there would be a coronation. Older couples sent drinks to their table in the Ritz. They raised their glasses. Here’s to us, all of us, the right sort. The best this country has to offer. And, yes, there was an
MG
, his, bought with some money their mother had left him, and they drove everywhere in it. Their presence was sufficient to make the tackiest roadhouse modish. If they danced in a certain bar in Ste. Adèle, it immediately became the in place. Oh, there were things, little disturbances, but Pauline didn’t pay attention. He seemed to owe money everywhere. Somebody – not one of their set, certainly – once accused him of cheating in a bridge tournament. Crap. Envy. Pauline laughed it off.

Then, all too swiftly, Kevin was into law school, where their father was still a legend, and Kevin, just like the others, discovered the Jews. “What did we know about Jews? You have no idea how cocooned we were. What sheltered childhoods we led. We were the best. The brightest.
The chosen.”

“Hey, there.”

“Yes,” she said, her foot riding up to rest between his legs, “the chosen. With a country to inherit.”

And, suddenly, there were all those fierce, driving Jews, who didn’t play by their rules, each one hollering “me, me, me.” My God, they demanded space, lots of space, but they didn’t even know where their grandfathers came from. They interrupted you in mid-sentence. They grabbed seats in the front row in lecture rooms. They wore diamond socks. They didn’t give a shit about football. Clearly, no matter how dazzling their marks, they would never be accepted into the right law firms, but they could argue rings around most of the law professors and they were not going to be denied. They had already taken over the
McGill Daily
, raging at each other in the columns, arguing about beasties Kevin and Pauline had never heard of. Trotsky. Brecht. The Rosenbergs. With their stinging wit, they drove Kevin out of the mock parliament. “One of them, a good three inches shorter than I was, a young man who was doing postgraduate work in English lit, began to send me love letters suggesting intimacies I hadn’t even dreamed of yet.…

“Oh my, all those short, dark men with heated black eyes. The appetite. Jane and I used to joke about the need to wear another layer of panties, maybe even barbed wire. We used to giggle about being called
shiksas
. It was fun for us, but not for the boys. Kevin and the others, as hopeless as British grenadiers suddenly confronted by Indians in the underbrush, had their first intimation that just possibly they were not good enough to compete. Oh dear, oh dear, they say our fraternities were restricted. It was the only place we felt unthreatened. So up your ass, Joshua ben Reuben. We were scared.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“Try to understand, darling. As far as you and Seymour and Max are concerned, we had all the advantages and you didn’t. Our boring world, a make-believe ballroom, was already diminishing, and it was yours that was burgeoning. I was called a Westmount snob on campus. An anti-Semite. A racist. Horrified, I had a couple of Jewish boys to the next party at our house. What I mean to say is, I
invited
a couple. Four came. They made deprecating remarks about the tasteless food. They wanted to know if I fucked and if not, who did. One of them stepped right up to my father and asked him how much he had paid for our house.”