The Street (15 page)

“You wrote her such letters they still bring a blush to my face –”

“But they came back unopened.”

Molly’s father shrugged and Mervyn’s face turned grey as a pencil eraser.

“But you listen here,” Rosen said. “For Molly, if you don’t mind, it isn’t necessary for me to go begging.”

“Here she is,” somebody said.

The regulars moved in closer.

“Hi.” Molly smelled richly of Lily of the Valley. You could see the outlines of her bra through her sweater (both were in Midnight Black, from Susy’s Smart-Wear). Her tartan skirt was held together by an enormous gold-plated safety pin. “Hi, doll.” She rushed up to Mervyn and kissed him. “Maw just told me.” Molly turned to the others, her smile radiant. “Mr. Kaplansky has asked for my hand in matrimony. We are engaged.”

“Congratulations!” Rosen clapped Mervyn on the back. “The very best to you both.”

There were whoops of approval all around.

“When it comes to choosing a bedroom set you can’t go wrong with my son-in-law Lou.”

“I hope,” Takifman said sternly, “yours will be a kosher home.”

“Some of the biggest crooks in town only eat kosher and I don’t mind saying that straight to your face, Takifman.”

“He’s right, you know. And these days the most important thing with young couples is that they should be sexually compatible.”

Mervyn, surrounded by the men, looked over their heads for Molly. He spotted her trapped in another circle in the far corner of the room. Molly was eating a banana. She smiled at Mervyn, she winked.

“Don’t they make a lovely couple?”

“Twenty years ago they said the same thing about us. Does that answer your question?”

Mervyn was drinking heavily. He looked sick.

“Hey,” my father said, his glass spilling over, “tell me, Segal, what goes in hard and stiff and comes out soft and wet?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Chewing gum. It’s as old as the hills.”

“You watch out,” my father said. “You’re asking for it.”

“You know,” Miller said. “I could do with something to eat.”

My mother moved silently and tight-lipped among the guests collecting glasses just as soon as they were put down.

“I’ll tell you what,” Rosen said in a booming voice, “let’s all go over to my place for a decent feed and some schnapps.”

Our living room emptied more quickly than it had filled.

“Where’s your mother?” my father asked, puzzled.

I told him she was in the kitchen and we went to get her. “Come on,” my father said, “let’s go to the Rosens.”

“And who, may I ask, will clean up the mess you and your friends made here?”

“It won’t run away.”

“You have no pride.”

“Oh, please. Don’t start. Not today.”

“Drunkard.”

“Ray Milland, that’s me. Hey, what’s that coming out of the wall? A bat.”

“That poor innocent boy is being railroaded into a marriage he doesn’t want and you just stand there.”

“Couldn’t you enjoy yourself
just once?”

“You didn’t see his face how scared he was? I thought he’d faint.”

“Who ever got married he didn’t need a little push? Why, I remember when I was a young man –”

“You go, Sam. Do me a favour. Go to the Rosens’.”

My father sent me out of the room.

“I’m not,” he began, “well, I’m not always happy with you. Not day in and day out. I’m telling you straight.”

“When I needed you to speak up for me you couldn’t. Today courage comes in bottles. Do me a favour, Sam. Go.”

“I wasn’t going to go and leave you alone. I was going to stay. But if that’s how you feel.…”

My father returned to the living room to get his jacket. I jumped up.

“Where are
you
going?” he asked.

“To the party.”

“You stay here with your mother you have no consideration.”

“God damn it.”

“You heard me.” But my father paused for a moment at the door. Thumbs hooked in his suspenders, rocking to and fro on his heels, he raised his head so high his chin jutted out incongruously. “I wasn’t always your father. I was a young man once.”

“So?”

“Did you know,” he said, one eye half-shut, “that
LIVE
spelled backwards is
EVIL?”

I woke at three in the morning when I heard a chair crash in the living room; somebody fell, and this was followed by the sound of sobbing. It was Mervyn. Dizzy, wretched and bewildered. He sat on the floor with a glass in his hand. When he saw me coming he raised his glass. “The wordsmith’s bottled enemy,” he said, grinning.

“When you getting married?”

He laughed. I laughed too.

“I’m not getting married.”

“Wha’?”

“Sh.”

“But I thought you were crazy about Molly?”

“I was. I am no longer.” Mervyn rose, he tottered over to the window.

“Have you ever looked up at the stars,” he said, “and felt how small and unimportant we are?”

It hadn’t occurred to me before.

“Nothing really matters. In terms of eternity our lives are shorter than a cigarette puff. Hey,” he said. “Hey!” He took out his pen with the built-in flashlight and wrote something in his notebook. “For a writer,” he said, “everything is grist to the mill. Nothing is humiliating.”

“But what about Molly?”

“She’s an insect. I told you the first time. All she wanted was my kudos. My fame … If you’re really going to become a wordsmith remember one thing. The world is full of ridicule while you struggle. But once you’ve made it the glamour girls will come crawling.”

He had begun to cry again. “Want me to sit with you for a while,” I said.

“No. Go to bed. Leave me alone.”

The next morning at breakfast my parents weren’t talking. My mother’s eyes were red and swollen and my father was in a forbidding mood. A telegram came for Mervyn.

“It’s from New York,” he said. “They want me right away. There’s an offer for my book from Hollywood and they need me.”

“You don’t say?”

Mervyn thrust the telegram at my father. “Here,” he said. “You read it.”

“Take it easy. All I said was …” But my father read the telegram all the same. “Son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “Hollywood.”

We helped Mervyn pack.

“Shall I get Molly?” my father asked.

“No. I’ll only be gone for a few days. I want to surprise her.”

We all went to the window to wave. Just before he got into the taxi Mervyn looked up at us, he looked for a long while, but he didn’t wave, and of course we never saw him again. A
few days later a bill came for the telegram. It had been sent from our house. “I’m not surprised,” my mother said.

My mother blamed the Rosens for Mervyn’s flight, while they held us responsible for what they called their daughter’s disgrace. My father put his pipes aside again and naturally he took a terrible ribbing at Tansky’s. About a month later five dollar bills began to arrive from Toronto. They came sporadically until Mervyn had paid up all his back rent. But he never answered any of my father’s letters.

B
LUMBERG
, our fourth-grade teacher, was a militant Zionist.

“How did we get arms in Eretz? Why, we bought them from the British. We’d pretend somebody was dead, fill a coffin with rifles, and bury it against … the right moment.”

If we responded to this tale of cunning with yawns or maybe two fingers held up to signify disbelief, it was not that we weren’t impressed. It was simply that Blumberg, a refugee from Poland, heaped a vengeful amount of homework on us and we thrived on putting him down. Blumberg fed us on frightening stories of anti-semitic outrages. Life would be sour for us. We were doomed to suffer the malice of the Gentiles. But I wasn’t scared because I had no intention of becoming a Jew like Blumberg, with a foolish accent, an eye for a bargain, and a habit, clearly unsanitary, of licking his thumb before turning a page of the
Aufbau
. I was a real Canadian and could understand people not liking Blumberg, maybe even finding him funny. So did I. Blumberg had lived in Palestine for a while and despised the British army. I didn’t. How could I?
In Which We Serve
was in its umpteenth week at the Orpheum. Cousins and uncles were with the Canadian army in Sussex, training for the invasion.

War. “Praise the Lord,” my father sang, demanding more baked beans, “and pass the ammunition.” My Cousin Jerry wore a Red Cross Blood Donor’s badge. I collected salvage.

The war meant if we ate plenty of carrots we would see better in the dark, like R.A.F. night fighters. V stood for Victory. Paul Lukas was watching out for us on the Rhine. Signs in all our cigar stores and delicatessens warned
chassids
, pressers, dry goods wholesalers, tailors, and
melamuds
against loose talk about troop movements. University students, my Cousin Jerry among them, went out west to harvest the wheat. My uncles, who bought two dogs to guard their junk yard, named them Adolf and Benito. Arty, Gas, Hershey, Duddy and I gave up collecting hockey cards for the duration and instead became experts on aircraft recognition. Come recess we were forever flashing cards with airplane silhouettes at each other. I learned to tell a Stuka from a Spitfire.

One of the first to enlist was killed almost immediately. Benjy Trachstein joined the R.C.A.F and the first time he went up with an instructor in a Harvard trainer the aeroplane broke apart, crashed on the outskirts of Montreal, and Benjy burned to death. Charred to the bone. At the funeral, my father said, “It’s kismet – fate. When your time comes, your time comes.”

Mrs. Trachstein went out of her mind and Benjy’s father, a grocer, became a withering reproach to everyone. “When is your black-marketeer of a son going to join up?” he asked one mother and to another he said, “How much did it cost you the doctor to keep your boy out of the army?”

We began to avoid Trachstein’s grocery, the excuse being he never washed his hands any more: it was enough to turn your stomach to take a pound of cheese from him or to eat a herring he had touched. It was also suspected that Trachstein was the one who had written those anonymous letters reporting other stores in the neighbourhood to the Wartime Prices
& Trade Board. The letters were a costly nuisance. An inspector always followed up because there could be twenty dollars or maybe even a case of whisky in it for him.

Benjy’s wasted death was brandished at any boy on the street hot-headed enough to want to enlist. Still, they volunteered. Some because they were politically conscious, others because boredom made them reckless. One Saturday morning Gordie Roth, a long fuzzy-haired boy with watery blue eyes, turned up at the Young Israel synagogue in an officer’s uniform. His father broke down and sobbed and shuffled out of the
shul
without a word to his son. Those who had elected to stay on at McGill, thereby gaining an exemption from military service, were insulted by Gordie’s gesture. It was one thing for a dental graduate to accept a commission in the medical corps, something else again for a boy to chuck law school for the infantry. Privately the boys said Gordie wasn’t such a hero, he had been bound to flunk out at McGill anyway. Garber’s boy, a psychology major, had plenty to say about the death-wish. But Fay Katz wrinkled her nose and laughed spitefully at him. “You know what that is down your back,” she said, “a yellow stripe.”

Mothers who had once bragged about their children’s health, making any childhood illness seem a shameful show of weakness, now cherished nothing in their young so greedily as flat feet, astigmatism, a heart murmur, or a nice little rupture. After a month in camp with the university army training corps my Cousin Jerry limped home with raw bleeding feet and jaundice. A Sergeant McCormick had called him a hard-assed kike.

“Why should we fight for them, the fascists,” my father said.

“The poor boy, what he’s been through,” my mother said.

Hershey had a brother overseas. Arty’s American cousin was in the marines. I was bitterly disappointed in Cousin Jerry and couldn’t look him in the eye.

One evening my father read us an item from the front page of the
Star
. A Luftwaffe pilot, shot down over London, had been
given a blood transfusion. “There you are, old chap,” the British doctor said. “Now you’ve got some good Jewish blood in you.” My father scratched his head thoughtfully before turning the page and I could see that he was immensely pleased.

Only Tansky, who ran the corner Cigar & Soda, questioned the integrity of the British war effort. Lots of ships were being sunk in the Battle of the Atlantic, true, but how many people knew that U-boat commanders never torpedoed a ship insured by Lloyd’s or that certain German factories were proof against air raids, because of interlocking British directorships?

If Tansky was concerned about capitalist treachery overseas the truth is French Canadians at home gave us much more cause for alarm. Duplessis’s
Union Nationale
Party had circulated a pamphlet that showed a coarse old Jew, nose long and mis-shapen as a carrot, retreating into the night with sacks of gold. The caption suggested that Ikey ought to go back to Palestine. Mr. Blumberg, our fourth-grade teacher, agreed. “There’s only one place for a Jew. Eretz. But you boys are too soft. You know nothing about what it is to be a Jew.”

Our parochial school principal was a Zionist of a different order. His affinities were literary. Ahad Ha’am, Bialik, Buber. But I managed to graduate to F.F.H.S. uncontaminated. In fact I doubt that I ever would have become a Zionist if not for Irving.

Irving, who was in my classroom at F.F.H.S., ignored me for months. Then, on the day our report cards came out, he joined me by the lockers, bouncing a mock punch off my shoulder. “Congrats,” he said.

I looked baffled.

“Well, you’re rank two, aren’cha?”

Irving represented everything I admired. He wore a blazer with
IRV
printed in gold letters across his broad back and there was a hockey crest sewn over his heart. He had fought in the Golden Gloves for the Y.M.H.A. and he was high scorer
on our school basketball team. Whenever Irving began to dribble shiftily down the court the girls would squeal, leap up, and shout,