Joshua Then and Now (30 page)

Molly was going on compulsively about her work at the hospital, but nobody was listening.

The girls Joshua had known in high school, most of whom had worked as camp counselors in the Laurentians during the summer, had finally become their mothers, but with a crucial difference. They weren’t mere homemakers, their social consciences satisfied by the peddling of raffle tickets, venturing out only to organize a bazaar for the synagogue. The daughters had been educated and, consequently, were all into something. This one ran a candle boutique in the refurbished garage that was now the Galleria Shalom, and another opened a bookshop that sold only Canadiana. Izzy Singer’s wife sculpted. Pearl was a spokesperson for retarded children. Max’s wife worked for a nonprofit Eskimo cooperative. Hetty conducted classes on
TM
at the “Y.” With Molly, it was the palliative care unit. Death therapy.

Mountainous Molly, scourge of the Jewish General Hospital, strode through the halls, ferreting out the terminally ill in their most secret hiding places, terrifying them with her loving smile. She was there to help them accept the imminent corruption of the flesh graciously. Selflessly come to comfort those whose revels were ending, to make them ready for the big sleep that would round out their little lives. “It’s touching, you know, but what they fear most is identity-loss.” Death-therapy was, as she pointed out, a thankless chore, yet an incredibly moving experience. Life-enhancing. Which, Seymour was fond of adding, laughter moving him to tears as he told the story again and again, had begun very badly indeed for Molly.

With Lazar Bercovitch, when Molly had still been a novice death-watcher.

Entering Bercovitch’s private room, her smile beatific, Molly teased him, she called him
zeyda
. Seated on his bed, tilting it just a little, she held his mottled hand. She told him naughty jokes. She flirted. She tickled him. And only when the furrier’s heart had melted and, spluttering with laughter, he managed furtive squeezes of those pliant breasts, yielding as unbaked dough; only as he was wondering to what good luck did he owe this jolly fat lady’s visit,
did she stroke his white head and tell him, “Lazar, you are not a man to lie to yourself.”

Grasping her thighs now, amazed at this unexpected gift of willing flesh, he said, “Certainly not.”

“It isn’t what you think it is,” she cooed, taking his head to her bosom, “it’s cancer of the liver.”

Struggling, in fear of being smothered, the old man kicked his bony legs and protested, “I’m here for the prostate. What are you saying, you dirty whore?”

Her eyes brimming with tears of empathy, his snowy head locked in her ample arms, Molly told him that no man as loved as Lazar dies. The body goes, inevitably, but the spirit lives on. Lazar would endure in his family’s heart. The children would tell loving tales about him at the Passover table. So would the grandchildren. Their children’s children.

“You crazy bitch, may only stones drop from your womb. I’m going home on Friday.”

Molly beseeched him to confront the truth together with his family. Breaking free, spindly arms flailing, Lazar caught her on the forehead with a well-aimed ball of phlegm. “Help,” he hollered. “Help, help!”

Nurses, ready with a rebuke, came running, followed by an irate doctor. They spilled into the room to discover the old man raging, pelting a sobbing Molly with oranges and peaches from his bedside fruit bowl.

“Mrs. Kaplan, what are you doing here?”

“Whore. Cunt. Take her away.”

The doctor pulled Molly aside. “Bernstein,” he said, holding his head. “Bernstein, not Bercovitch.”

“Liars, you said it was the prostate.”

“I swear that’s all you’re being treated for, Mr. Bercovitch. You’re going home on Friday.”

“Like shit, I am. I want a second opinion. I want my son. I want my lawyer.”

Molly did not make the same mistake again, but as she haunted the corridors of the Jewish General, offering solace, old women barely managing to shuffle along, espying her first, found themselves propelled by a sudden burst of energy and flitted through the nearest door. Emaciated, hollow-eyed men threw salt over their shoulders. As Molly strode down the halls, chart in hand, her massive heart thundering with love, patients shivered under their bedclothes, breathing easy only after she had padded past, this unbidden angel of death.

Seymour, ashen-faced, rose from the table.

“Are you all right, darling?”

“Don’t get excited. I have to go to the toilet, that’s all.”

Conversation continued fitfully – the children, vacation plans, Margaret Trudeau’s shenanigans – as the phone rang on the wall immediately to the right of the bar. The bartender took it, nodded, and then whispered something to the television actress, who favored Joshua with a small, meaningful smile before she set her Gauloise down in an ashtray and got up to take the call.

“We’re boring you,” Barbara said, appealing to Joshua.

“Oh, not at all,” and he pitched into the flagging conversation with simulated vigor, as he watched the girl on the phone smile, nod, burst into spontaneous giggles, frown, protest, nod again, and finally hang up. Her manner distressed, pensive, she paid for her glass of kir, left it unfinished on the bar, and drifted out of the room, failing to acknowledge Joshua as she passed. Relieved, he became more attentive to the ladies as Seymour bounded back to the table.

Barbara glanced at her watch and announced that she had to pick up Lenore at ballet.

“Did you bring the car?” Seymour asked Molly abruptly.

“Yes,” she said, immediately scooping up her handbag. The clasp was broken. The bulging velvet bag was bound together with an elastic. A Roberta. Set him back $450. God Almighty.

“I have a couple of things to discuss with my friend here. Why don’t you drive Barbara home? I won’t be long.”

Seymour, glowering, waited until the ladies had gathered their parcels together and left, and then he said, “I never would have suspected you of being so childish.”

“I’m sorry, Seymour.”

“I know that Max must be in on this, that impotent prick, and of course Bobby. But Bobby hates me.”

“What are you talking about? He’s been your friend for years.”

“Bobby loathes me.”

“Why?”

“Because I know certain things about him.”

“Like what?”

Seymour wouldn’t say.

“Come on.”

“He goes to Eaton’s basement shirt sales. He reads condensed books. Anyway, I’m not surprised at them. But I would have expected more from you.”

“Oh, come on. It was a joke.”

“Some joke,” Seymour said evenly. “Ha ha ha. You involved my innocent wife in this mindless prank, and that’s unforgivable.”

“She didn’t suspect a thing.”

“I admit to having certain weaknesses, human weaknesses, but I never involve my wife and children in my escapades. My utterly joyless escapades. My wife and children come first with me.” Leaning closer, he added, “Do you know how many times I have alienated old friends, defending you and the shit you write?”

“I have no interest in the views of your dim-witted friends.”

“You are a childish, inconsiderate, condescending, snobbish son of a bitch. May you live to suffer writer’s block.”

With that, Seymour shoved his chair back from the table and stomped out of the bar. Stunned, Joshua ordered a double Scotch, and it was only after he called for the waiter that he realized he had been left with the bill for the bottle of Mumm’s.

There were two bars in the Ritz-Carlton. The Maritime, in the basement, which Joshua favored because of its comparative privacy, and the much more modish Café de Paris on the ground floor. Embarrassed, contrite, Joshua ascended the steps to the ground floor and paused at the newsstand to pick up some magazines. As he passed the entrance to the Café de Paris, he just caught a glimpse of Seymour, an ingratiating, sweet-talking Seymour, huddled together with the television actress at a table in the corner.

Seymour, Seymour.

He would be telling her that he had once seen her perform at the Centaur Theatre, and that he had never dreamt that he would be so fortunate as to meet her. He would say that he had also seen her play Masha on
CBC-TV
and, though he had seen
The Three Sisters
done in the West End and on Broadway, he had never known an actress to invest the role with such purity of soul. Such incandescence. Accidentally brushing against her leg under the table, he would allow that he had friends who put tax-shelter money into films and that she must meet them, and they would go to The Troika for dinner and then continue on to her apartment in the Cartier, where he would pronounce her not only gifted and intelligent, but also beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Unzipping here, unhooking there, licking, sucking, he would say that had she not been born Canadian, had she come from New York, she would now certainly be a star of international repute. Then he would open his satchel and invite her to step into his first gift. The come-on. A pair of low-cal, peppermint-flavored candy panties. Eating them off her, he would suddenly excuse himself and rush into the toilet to spray his erection with Long John. For endurance. Then he would return, beaming, and, one hand on his satchel, ask her what she liked best. Don’t be shy.

D
AMN. MAKING IBIZA HIS BASE, HE HAD COME TO SPAIN
to look at battlefields, talk to survivors, learn what he could about the Spanish Civil War. Instead, he was discovering that he was Jewish. Something anybody could have told him. Ruminating on these matters, as he was out hiking one afternoon, in the ochre hills rising behind San Antonio, Joshua stumbled on a campfire smoldering in a clearing. Curious, he stepped closer.

“Don’t move! Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Joshua froze.

“Now turn around. Nice and easy.”

Whirling, Joshua found himself confronted by Dr. Dr. Mueller, red-eyed drunk, pointing a Winchester rifle at his chest. Mueller was grizzled, unshaven, wearing a fringed leather jacket, jeans, chaps, and spurs, and tooled leather boots. “You should know better than to sneak up on a stranger’s campfire in these parts.”

“I wasn’t sneaking up on anybody.”

“You could have been a hostile,” he said, lowering his rifle, “a Cheyenne Dog Soldier.”

A charred pot was suspended from a tripod over the fire.

“Would you care for some goulash soup?” he asked.

“Why, sure. Yes. Mighty good of you.”

Dr. Dr. Mueller reached for a jug, crooked it expertly in his arm, drank, and passed it to Joshua. “This will help you wash it down.”

Joshua, taking advantage of Mueller’s drunken state, asked, “What did you do in the war, exactly?”

“I fought.”

“Where?”

“In the high country and on the plains. Wherever we found them. And you?”

“I was too young, remember?”

Rocking, Dr. Dr. Mueller said, “I feel for your people.”

“Oh, sure, and you helped as many as you could to escape.”

Grieving, Dr. Dr. Mueller remembered Tohopeka, Sharp Knife’s soldiers carving long strips of skin from the bodies to be dried and used for belts. “I remember when your people were many,” he said, “and they owned the land from the sunrise to the sunset.”

“Like hell they did.”

“I knew this country when their campfires twinkled at night like the stars of the fallen sky.”

“What’s that?”

But suddenly Dr. Dr. Mueller’s mood changed. His eyes swimming in truculence, he leaned against a flat rock and propped his arm in a wrestling position. “Come. Try me.”

“I’m not interested.”

“Of course.”

The following evening, clean-shaven, wearing his white linen suit, and biting on his ivory cigarette holder, Dr. Dr. Mueller stood at the bar in Don Pedro’s. “Are you a man or a mouse?” he called out to Joshua as he entered, and they played lie dice again.

Once more, Joshua asked, “What did you do in the war, exactly?”

“I fought.”

“Where?”

“Wherever they sent me.”

“But you don’t care for Jews?”

“I don’t care for anybody who has a yellow streak down his back,” he said, and then he went on to complain loudly about Spanish cuisine, saying it could not compare to the French. His French was fluent.

“I don’t understand,” Joshua said. “Why didn’t you buy a villa on the Côte d’Azur rather than here?”

“Because I am a wanted man in France.”

“Why?” Joshua demanded, his heart thumping.

“You know, Hitler was not impressed by the intelligence reports he got on the Canadian assault troops captured at Dieppe. One of your soldiers had never heard of Roosevelt, another, asked if he knew of any Germans, said, ‘Sure, General Rommel and Lili Marlene.’ ”

Parrying Joshua’s arguments about Nazi iniquity, he was fond of thrusting the siege of the Alazar at him. The cruel murder of Colonel Moscardó’s son by the republicans. To which Joshua would counter, “At least he had a name, not a number.”

The most direct approach to Dr. Dr. Mueller’s villa, which was nestled in an enviably lovely and secluded cove two miles beyond San Antonio, was to turn off the main road about a mile out, cut across a wasp-infested olive grove, and start up a craggy mountainside that finally flattened into a rump of bleached, guano-covered rock which overlooked his place. Again and again Joshua made the trip, skirting a crest with a commanding view of the barracks and training ground. Then, sheltering behind a rock, he could see a boldly painted teepee anchored in the sand, a handsome brown stallion secured to a stake nearby. He would watch Dr. Dr. Mueller at lunch or swimming or working on his manuscript under the shade of a lemon tree, consumed with loathing for him, but unable to act.

Then one day Joshua saw him emerge from his villa in chaps and spurs, wearing six-guns. Dr. Dr. Mueller strode slowly toward the sea – froze – whirled – drew – and fired at empties of Johnny Walker lined up on a table. Thrusting his six-guns back into their holsters, he snickered, yanked a pouch out of his breast pocket, and rolled
himself a cigarette. He shouted something in German, a protest, and drawing both guns again, retreated into his villa. Joshua waited. Maybe a half-hour later, Dr. Dr. Mueller sashayed through the French doors again, the very image of Marlene Dietrich in
Destry Rides Again
. He wore a blond wig, rouge, lipstick, false breasts under a black corset pinched at the waist, sheer black stockings, pink garters and slippers. Slapping imaginary groping hands away from his bosom, pouting, he drifted over to his typewriter and began to bang away at it, pausing only to dab his eyes occasionally with a black lace handkerchief.