The Street (12 page)

“Monks are Catholics, you jerk.”

Once poker palled on us, we began to frequent St. Catherine Street on Saturday nights, strutting up and down the neon-lit street in gangs, stopping here for a hot dog and there to play the pinball machines, but never forgetting our primary purpose, which was to taunt the girls as they came strolling past. We tried the Palais d’Or a couple of times, just to see what we could pick up. “Whatever you do,” Duddy warned us beforehand, “never give them your right name.” But most of the girls shrugged us off. “Send round your older brother, sonny.” So we began to go to Belmont Park, hoping to root out younger, more available girls. We danced to the music of Mark Kenny and His Western Gentlemen and at least had some fun in the horror houses and on the rides. We took to playing snooker a good deal.

“A poolroom bum,” my father said. “Is that why I’m educating you?”

Then I fell in love.

Zelda was an Outremont girl with a lovely golden head and long dark eyelashes. The night before our first date I consulted
The Art of Kissing
on
HOW TO KISS GIRLS WITH DIFFERENT SIZES OF MOUTHS
.

I took Zelda to a “Y” dance and afterwards, outside her house, I attempted to kiss her broad and generous lips.

“I thought,” Zelda said, withdrawing stiffly, “you were a more serious type.”

And so once more Duddy had to find me dates. One or another of his endless spill of girls always had a cousin with thick glasses – “She’s really lots of fun, you know,” – or a kid sister – “Honestly, with high heels she looks sixteen.”

M
ERVYN KAPLANSKY
stepped out of the rain on a dreary Saturday afternoon in August to inquire about our back bedroom.

“It’s twelve dollars a week,” my father said, “payable in advance.”

Mervyn set down forty-eight dollars on the table. Astonished, my father retreated a step. “What’s the rush-rush? Look around first. Maybe you won’t like it here.”

“You believe in electricity?”

There were no lights on in the house. “We’re not the kind to skimp,” my father said. “But we’re orthodox here. Today is
shabus.”

“No, no, no. Between people.”

“What are you? A wise-guy.”

“I do. And as soon as I came in here I felt the right vibrations. Hi, kid.” Mervyn grinned breezily at me, but the hand he mussed my hair with was shaking. “I’m going to love it here.”

My father watched, disconcerted but too intimidated to protest, as Mervyn sat down on the bed, bouncing a little to try the mattress. “Go get your mother right away,” he said to me.

Fortunately, she had just entered the room. I didn’t want to miss anything.

“Meet your new roomer,” Mervyn said, jumping up.

“Hold your horses.” My father hooked his thumbs in his suspenders. “What do you do for a living?” he asked.

“I’m a writer.”

“With what firm?”

“No, no, no. For myself. I’m a creative artist.”

My father could see at once that my mother was enraptured and so, reconciled to yet another defeat, he said, “Haven’t you any … things?”

“When Oscar Wilde entered the United States and they asked him if he had anything to declare, he said, ‘Only my genius.’ “

My father made a sour face.

“My things are at the station,” Mervyn said, swallowing hard. “May I bring them over?”

“Bring.”

Mervyn returned an hour or so later with his trunk, several suitcases, and an assortment of oddities that included a piece of driftwood, a wine bottle that had been made into a lamp base, a collection of pebbles, a twelve-inch-high replica of Rodin’s
The Thinker
, a bull-fight poster, a Karsh portrait of G.B.S., innumerable notebooks, a ball-point pen with a built-in flashlight, and a framed cheque for fourteen dollars and eighty-five cents from the
Family Herald & Weekly Star
.

“Feel free to borrow any of our books,” my mother said.

“Well, thanks. But I try not to read too much now that I’m a wordsmith myself. I’m afraid of being influenced, you see.”

Mervyn was a short, fat boy with curly black hair, warm wet eyes, and an engaging smile. I could see his underwear through the triangles of tension that ran from button to button down his shirt. The last button had probably burst off. It was gone. Mervyn, I figured, must have been at least twenty-three years old, but he looked much younger.

“Where did you say you were from?” my father asked.

“I didn’t.”

Thumbs hooked in his suspenders, rocking on his heels, my father waited.

“Toronto,” Mervyn said bitterly. “Toronto the Good. My father’s a bigtime insurance agent and my brothers are in ladies’ wear. They’re in the rat-race. All of them.”

“You’ll find that in this house,” my mother said, “we are not materialists.”

Mervyn slept in – or, as he put it, stocked the unconscious – until noon every day. He typed through the afternoon and then, depleted, slept some more, and usually typed again deep into the night. He was the first writer I had ever met and I worshipped him. So did my mother.

“Have you ever noticed his hands,” she said, and I thought she was going to lecture me about his chewed-up fingernails, but what she said was, “They’re artist’s hands. Your grandfather had hands like that.” If a neighbour dropped in for tea, my mother would whisper, “We’ll have to speak quietly,” and, indicating the tap-tap of the typewriter from the back bedroom, she’d add, “in there, Mervyn is creating.” My mother prepared special dishes for Mervyn. Soup, she felt, was especially nourishing. Fish was the best brain food. She discouraged chocolates and nuts because of Mervyn’s complexion, but she brought him coffee at all hours, and if a day passed with no sound coming from the back room my mother would be extremely upset. Eventually, she’d knock softly on Mervyn’s door. “Anything I can get you?” she’d ask.

“It’s no use. It just isn’t coming today. I go through periods like that, you know.”

Mervyn was writing a novel, his first, and it was about the struggles of our people in a hostile society. The novel’s title was, to begin with, a secret between Mervyn and my mother. Occasionally, he read excerpts to her. She made only one correction. “I wouldn’t say ‘whore’,” she said. “It isn’t nice, is it? Say ‘lady of easy virtue.’ ” The two of them began to go in for
literary discussions. “Shakespeare,” my mother would say, “Shakespeare knew everything.” And Mervyn, nodding, would reply, “But he stole all his plots. He was a plagiarist.” My mother told Mervyn about her father, the rabbi, and the books he had written in Yiddish. “At his funeral,” she told him, “they had to have six motorcycle policemen to control the crowds.” More than once my father came home from work to find the two of them still seated at the kitchen table, and his supper wasn’t ready or he had to eat a cold plate. Flushing, stammering apologies, Mervyn would flee to his room. He was, I think, the only man who was ever afraid of my father, and this my father found very heady stuff. He spoke gruffly, even profanely in Mervyn’s presence, and called him Moitle behind his back. But, when you come down to it, all my father had against Mervyn was the fact that my mother no longer baked potato kugel. (Starch was bad for Mervyn.) My father began to spend more of his time playing cards at Tansky’s Cigar & Soda, and when Mervyn fell behind with the rent, he threatened to take action.

“But you can’t trouble him now,” my mother said, “when he’s in the middle of his novel. He works so hard. He’s a genius maybe.”

“He’s peanuts, or what’s he doing here?”

I used to fetch Mervyn cigarettes and headache tablets from the drugstore round the corner. On some days when it wasn’t coming, the two of us would play casino and Mervyn, at his breezy best, used to wisecrack a lot. “What would you say,” he said, “if I told you I aim to out-Emile Zola?” Once he let me read one of his stories,
Was The Champ A Chump?
, that had been printed in magazines in Australia and South Africa. I told him that I wanted to be a writer too. “Kid,” he said, “a word from the wise. Never become a wordsmith. Digging ditches would be easier.”

From the day of his arrival Mervyn had always worked hard, but what with his money running low he was now so determined to get his novel done, that he seldom went out any
more. Not even for a stroll. My mother felt this was bad for his digestion. So she arranged a date with Molly Rosen. Molly, who lived only three doors down the street, was the best looker on St. Urbain, and my mother noticed that for weeks now Mervyn always happened to be standing by the window when it was time for Molly to pass on the way home from work. “Now you go out,” my mother said, “and enjoy. You’re still a youngster. The novel can wait for a day.”

“But what does Molly want with me?”

“She’s crazy to meet you. For weeks now she’s been asking questions.”

Mervyn complained that he lacked a clean shirt, he pleaded a headache, but my mother said, “Don’t be afraid she won’t eat you.” All at once Mervyn’s tone changed. He tilted his head cockily. “Don’t wait up for me,” he said.

Mervyn came home early. “What happened?” I asked.

“I got bored.”

“With
Molly?”

“Molly’s an insect. Sex is highly over-estimated, you know. It also saps an artist’s creative energies.”

But when my mother came home from her Talmud Torah meeting and discovered that Mervyn had come home so early she felt that she had been personally affronted. Mrs. Rosen was summoned to tea.

“It’s a Saturday night,” she said, “she puts on her best dress, and that cheapskate where does he take her? To sit on the mountain. Do you know that she turned down three other boys, including Ready-to-Wear’s
only
son, because you made such a
gedille?”

“With dumb-bells like Ready-to-Wear she can have dates any night of the week. Mervyn’s a creative artist.”

“On a Saturday night to take a beautiful young thing to sit on the mountain. From those benches you can get piles.”

“Don’t be disgusting.”

“She’s got on her dancing shoes and you know what’s for him a date? To watch the people go by. He likes to make up stories about them he says. You mean it breaks his heart to part with a dollar.”

“To bring up your daughter to be a gold-digger. For shame.”

“All right. I wasn’t going to blab, but if that’s how you feel – modern men and women, he told her, experiment
before
marriage. And right there on the bench he tried dirty filthy things with her. He …”

“Don’t draw me no pictures. If I know your Molly he didn’t have to try so hard.”

“How dare you! She went out with him it was a favour for the marble cake recipe. The dirty piker he asked her to marry him he hasn’t even got a job. She laughed in his face.”

Mervyn denied that he had tried any funny stuff with Molly – he had too much respect for womankind, he said – but after my father heard that he had come home so early he no longer teased Mervyn when he stood by the window to watch Molly pass. He even resisted making wisecracks when Molly’s kid brother returned Mervyn’s thick letters unopened. Once, he tried to console Mervyn. “With a towel over the face,” he said gruffly, “one’s the same as another.”

Mervyn’s cheeks reddened. He coughed. And my father turned away, disgusted.

“Make no mistake,” Mervyn said with a sudden jaunty smile. “You’re talking to a boy who’s been around. We pen-pushers are notorious lechers.”

Mervyn soon fell behind with the rent again and my father began to complain.

“You can’t trouble him now,” my mother said. “He’s in agony. It isn’t coming today.”

“Yeah, sure. The trouble is there’s something coming to me.”

“Yesterday he read me a chapter from his book. It’s so beautiful you could die.” My mother told him that F.J. Kugelman,
the Montreal correspondent of
The Jewish Daily Forward
, had looked at the book. “He says Mervyn is a very deep writer.”

“Kugelman’s for the birds. If Mervyn’s such a big writer, let him make me out a cheque for the rent. That’s my kind of reading, you know.”

“Give him one week more. Something will come through for him, I’m sure.”

My father waited another week, counting off the days. “E-Day minus three today,” he’d say. “Anything come through for the genius?” Nothing, not one lousy dime, came through for Mervyn. In fact he had secretly borrowed from my mother for the postage to send his novel to a publisher in New York. “E-Day minus one today,” my father said. And then, irritated because he had yet to be asked what the E stood for, he added, “E for Eviction.”

On Friday my mother prepared an enormous potato kugel. But when my father came home, elated, the first thing he said was, “Where’s Mervyn?”

“Can’t you wait until after supper, even?”

Mervyn stepped softly into the kitchen. “You want me?” he asked.

My father slapped a magazine down on the table.
Liberty
. He opened it at a short story titled
A Doll for the Deacon
. “Mel Kane, Jr.,” he said, “isn’t that your literary handle?”

“His
nom-de-plume,”
my mother said.

“Then the story is yours.” My father clapped Mervyn on the back. “Why didn’t you tell me you were a writer? I thought you were a … well, a fruitcup. You know what I mean. A long-hair.”

“Let me see that,” my mother said.