Joshua Then and Now (42 page)

“I figured,” he said, his eyes hot, and he asked Joshua if he had read about the incident in Dr. Jonathan Cole’s house.

Yes. The item in the
Gazette
had caught his eye at breakfast. According to the report, the author of
Your Kind, My Kind, Mankind
, had only discovered there was something screwy the morning after his return from Banff. Dr. Cole had been in Banff with his wife, the noted local composer, presenting a paper at an international medical conference. His mansion, a graystone, was high on Edgehill Road, its parquet floors protected by wall-to-wall carpets. The grand piano on which Bessie had composed
The Golan Heights Sonata
was a Steinway. Bessie’s stirring sonata had first been performed in honor of Moshe
Dayan, in town for an Emergency Bond Drive dinner. It was available, Bessie pointed out to the reporter, on records or sheets from Masada Music Inc., a nonprofit division of Catmore Holdings Company, an outfit whose name was derived from those of the two Cole children, Catherine and Mortimer.

McMaster filled in the juicy details that had not appeared in the
Gazette
story. The Coles, he said, had not discovered that anything was out of joint in their house until the morning after their return from the west. Jonathan and Bessie had come home late and gone upstairs to bed immediately. Bessie without flushing herself out with herbal tea, Jonathan eschewing his Water-Pic toothbrush for once. Standing on her medically balanced bathroom scale the next morning, Bessie was startled to discover that she had ostensibly gained five pounds, although she had certainly not overeaten in Banff. A considerably revived Jonathan emerged from the shower and then absently started to slip into the suit he usually wore to the office. The trousers didn’t fit. They were incredibly tight; he couldn’t button them. Baffled, Jonathan studied the suit carefully. Yes, it certainly was his office suit. He tried the jacket. It wouldn’t button properly. Jonathan stripped down again and then stepped on the bathroom scale. Amazingly, he seemed to have gained five pounds. Yet he had jogged every morning in Banff and his stomach was rock-hard as usual. Distressed, uneasy, he slipped into his dressing gown and wandered downstairs for breakfast. Bessie wasn’t in the kitchen. He found her sitting on the living room sofa, weeping.

“What’s ailing you?”

“Can’t you see, lummox?”

He couldn’t.

“The furniture.”

“Holy shit!”

Somebody had cunningly rearranged the living room furniture. Nothing was in its accustomed place. And yet – and yet – as they flew from place to place, they could find nothing missing. That the sterling
silver, however valuable, had not been taken was readily understandable: each piece of cutlery was boldly initialed “JC,” and therefore its ownership could have been easily established. But the interloper had not made off with Bessie’s furs, neither had he attempted to crack the wall safe. The hi-fi, the color-
TV
sets, the Nikons, the Bell-Howell film camera, the Cuisinart, anything else easily pawnable, were all in place. Not one piece of Eskimo whalebone sculpture had been disturbed. But, on closer inspection, the real act of vandalism, mindless vandalism, committed by the housebreaker became apparent. The A. Y. Jackson landscape, the pride of Dr. Cole’s collection, a picture he was fond of describing as serene, enjoyable beyond all his other possessions, had been defaced. Somebody had carefully removed the artist’s signature, probably with turpentine, and signed it with his own hand, “this copy by Hershl Sugarman.” Jonathan let out a terrifying cry. “Look at that,” he howled at his wife, “will you fucking look at that,” and he reminded her that he had been absolutely against Brenda visiting her family in Barbados while they were away.

“Fortunately,” Bessie said, trying to comfort him, “whoever it was didn’t actually damage the picture.”

The insurance claim adjuster who had been summoned to the house, McMaster continued, was sympathetic but in a quandary. Yes, he had to agree, there was possibly, just possibly, a decrease in value, but the case was so odd he would have to take it under advisement. After all, the Jackson had been authenticated and the painting itself had not been damaged.

“I suppose,” Joshua said, “this qualifies as one of your unusual break-ins.”

“Uh huh.”

“Do you think it was the same bunch that got into Pinsky’s wine cellar?”

“I figure they’re a bunch of kids, stoned out of their skulls, and when we catch ’em, they’ll turn out to come from good families,
connected people, and they’ll get off with suspended sentences. So what else is new?”

Shrugging, Joshua lighted a cigarette.

“Once, I don’t know how many years ago, maybe twenty, a couple of meatballs broke into old Judge Gilbert’s place on Argyle. You remember Gilbert – Mr. Community Pillar. Reform Club, Mount Royal, etc. etc. Only he had a weakness. A sweet tooth. He liked being blown by under-age hookers in his chambers, him sporting his wig and robes all the while. His missus, on the other hand, liked nothing but
CC
, a secret drinker – she could go through a bottle a day, maybe more. Never saw her she wasn’t pissola. Anyhoo, these meatballs broke in, made off with the family silver and hey, hey, lots of unexplained cash from the wall safe. We took them in the lane behind Wood Avenue. A couple of Pepsis, real mon-sewers out of St. Henri, shit-scared. One of them has a gun and gets me in the thigh – just this much higher and to the right, and you’re now looking at the first soprano in the choir at Saint James’ United. Anyhoo, there was better than twenty thousand, unexplained, in those long brown envelopes, which is to say every time we risk our necks, bringing in a couple of meatballs, the judge does a little business with Brother Colucci or whoever, and they are back on the street even before we are out of the hospital. So he comes to see me in the hospital, your Judge Gilbert, says he’s recommending me for a St. George’s Medal, and slips me two hundred bucks. Wow. Hot damn. Two months later I had me a little NB. My nervous breakdown. You had yours yet?”

“Not yet.”

“I wake up, I’m sweating. I go to sleep, I’m sweating. For ten days I don’t shit. I think I’m being followed everywhere. One day I’m supposed to be getting into my patrol car, I start to turn the door handle and I freeze right there. It takes my partner and another guy to uncurl my fist from the handle. And I can’t stop shaking. Aw, cops. Uneducated. On the take. Who cares what they go through? You been following Watergate? Sure you have. Well, lookit, now each
and every one of those fuckers comes out with his book. Best sellers. Movie rights. The works. But what happened to the honest cop who was responsible for them being caught in the first place? You never hear about him. Just a little nigger, lucky if he was taking home two-fifty a week, and he spots the tape on the door and blows the whistle. Now you and I know niggers and how lackadaisical they are about their work. Look at Willie Davis when we had him in the outfield here. If a ball was hit right at him, O.K., but he wasn’t going to chase after it under a hot sun. Like it was pussy or chitlins. No suh. But this little nigger, he blows the whistle, and maybe John Dean, now that he’s made his fortune, slips him two hundred bucks.” McMaster shrugged. “Hey, have you caught the new picture at the Pussycat yet?”

The Pussycat was a downtown porn cinema.

“No. Why?”

“Just asking,” McMaster said, smirking.

So he discovered
Office Party
was playing at the Pussycat. Among its featured players, Esty Blossom.

Shit shit shit. At an age when other Jewish mothers, sprouting moustaches, were past vice-presidents of
ORT
or delivering meals-on-wheels or convening fashion shows for the Hospital of Hope, his mother was up there on the big screen blowing men half her age.

Office Party
must have been made at least a year earlier, because now Esther was out of skin flicks, having graduated to women’s lib. The Movement. To begin with, Joshua heard that the harridans on the extreme edge of the movement had greeted his mother’s conversion with glee. Esther, the exploited one. The reformed sex-object. Obliged by coarse producers to cavort nude on screen for their profit until, betrayed by her body, she was cast aside. The girls were overjoyed. Salt of the earth, his mommy. Badly used for years by a punch-drunk husband, a hoodlum usually on the lam. Neglected by what they described in their magazine as her famous and affluent son, that vastly overrated sexist journalist and
TV
commentator, Joshua
Shapiro. Oh yes, they were congratulating themselves on their prize catch, this living metaphor for male chauvinist abuse, until the afternoon they took themselves to Ottawa to demonstrate for abortion-on-demand. Out there on Parliament Hill, all those truculent ladies without makeup or bras, their armpits defiantly hairy, placards held high, scorn in their eyes, Esther to the fore. Fighting Esther, charged with love for the cause and her new-found sisters. Alas, little did the sisters grasp that Esther was an experienced scene-stealer. A real pro. Only when the television cameras began to pan toward her did she whip out her placard from under her fringed poncho. The cameraman froze. Timorous but socially conscious
MP
’s who had grudgingly ventured out of the House to reason with the ladies stared, aghast. An alert
RCMP
constable started toward her, on the double. Esther, glorying in the attention, leaped up and down, brandishing her placard:

N
OW THAT THEY HAD CONVERTED TO CELSIUS, WAKING
on wintry mornings in Montreal, roused to the strident morning newscast by his digital clock radio, Joshua could no longer figure out how cold it was outside. The bouncy announcer, charged with cheer, cried out that it was two above, or nine below, but even though Teddy, the family mathematician, had explained the conversion formula to him again and again, he simply couldn’t be bothered. He preferred to stand by the open window and guess how insufferably cold it really was out there. The kids were finding him increasingly grumpy. What they didn’t grasp was that he was also becoming paranoid. Imagining that he was being followed on his nightly walks. Last night he even thought that he had seen McMaster.

Once, when he could readily have agreed that thirty was old, it had been his life’s ambition to write something that would last. A page. A paragraph. A sentence, even. Now aged forty-seven and counting, as sportswriters were fond of saying, he stood tall for his morning piss and noticed, much to his chagrin, that looking down he couldn’t quite see his very own penis. It was hidden below his obtruding belly. He resolved to diet. His new ambition, as serious as the earlier one, was to be so flat of stomach come his forty-eighth birthday that he would be able to look down in the morning and see it. Good morning, big boy.

It was just after 7 a.m. Joshua heard doors slam, feet pounding up and down the stairs, as Teddy searched for his gym shoes and Susy rattled the bathroom door, pleading with Alex to come out of the shower. Alex would have already brought in the
Gazette
and had his first phone call of the day. He will prepare his lunch, exactly to his taste, and forget it on the kitchen counter. Getting out of bed, Joshua reflected that, all things considered, he was glad to be a family man. Everything would be perfect, he thought, if only Pauline were here.

“… among those awarded the Order of Canada today,” the radio newscaster announced in a booming voice, “was Montreal tycoon Isaac Singer.…”

Izzy Singer, O.C. Imagine; Izzy had at last squeezed a booby prize out of all that frenetic effort. Joshua laughed aloud, remembering.

1967. The Grey Cup game. A game Joshua had covered for
Sports Illustrated
, cleverly combining the assignment with an Annual Day of the Mackenzie King Memorial Society, a reunion he all but ruined for everybody, having impetuously invited Izzy Singer to join them.

In those days, of course, Izzy no longer drove his battered Ford V-8 down St. Urbain, chasing after the ice-truck, peddling refrigerators. A millionaire since 1960, Izzy was by that time a veritable merchant prince. He rode herd over shopping centers he owned in Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver. Condominiums in Florida. A fast-food chain that ran from sea to sea. Office towers in Toronto, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Oil leases in the Northwest Territories. Forests in the Maritimes. Mineral rights in northern British Columbia. The option on seas of prairie grain. And much more, a sprawling empire he bestrode not as a proud colossus but like a worried ant.

Izzy, Izzy.

Joshua had nothing in common with him but Room 42,
FFHS
, and a memory that would not allow him to despise Izzy as did Seymour and the others. At Izzy’s twelfth birthday party his mother had insisted that he play the violin for the boys, who sat there smirking, waiting to see what fumble-fingers, who couldn’t even make the class
softball team, could do. Izzy stood there – pale, thin, trembling – playing some gypsy air scratchily. His mother beaming, his aunts bubbling, until their pride was betrayed by a stream of hot piss darkening Izzy’s trousers, spreading in a tell-tale puddle round his shiny new pair of shoes.

And then in 1967, out of nowhere it seemed, Izzy invited him to lunch at Ruby Foo’s, a roadhouse that served sickly sweet liberal Jewish Chinese food, his notion of heaven. “Even with all my accountants dreaming up things, those shmocks,” he said, “I’m paying five thousand dollars a week tax. That’s two hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year. I’ve had drinks with your father-in-law at the Rideau Club. Nice guy.”

A compact, bristling little man, an arctic owl, with large shell-rimmed glasses and blank brown eyes, Izzy knew enough to wear a Savile Row suit, shirts that had been tailored for him on Jermyn Street, and shoes made especially to fit his tiny feet. Ostensibly, the perfect prosperity package. But his onyx cufflinks were just a mite too large, and the initials woven into the breast pocket of his shirt too prominent. Izzy, of St. Urbain born, was still pissing in his pants as he played. He now also suffered from a most disconcerting facial twitch, his right cheek doing an all-but-perpetual dance. “I haven’t got any friends here any more,” he said. “I can’t afford it. I’m invited to a party, the minute I come through the door, somebody has come round offering me a deal. They phone me at home too, before I’ve even brushed my teeth. You need a good dentist? Hershorn. The best. Tell him I sent you, you won’t have to wait three weeks for an appointment. Really, Joshua, you ought to have them capped, all those spaces between look bad. Especially on
TV
. Hey, we really made something of ourselves, you and me. You and I. Which?”