Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [104]
“Bessie, would you care to dance?”
“Hold your horses, Doc. Shmul Mendelsohn. We used to call him ‘Grabby,’ because, well, do I have to draw a map?” asked my father, winking. “The peddler. Was he your old man?”
“I’m coming,” said Bessie.
Finally I was able to hoist my father out of his chair and propel him to the bar, where I immediately asked the bartender for the second-period scores.
“Geoffrion48 popped another one between Bower’s legs and then Bonin8 banged one in.”
“Hey, that has to be his tenth in the playoffs.”
“You got it. But when Doug Harvey went off for tripping, Pulford got one back. So now it’s five–two for the good guys.”
“I thought they’d all be snobby here,” said my father, “but they’re very friendly, it turns out. Boy, am I ever having a good time. What are you laughing at?”
“Come here,” I said, and I gave Izzy a hug. He wiggled his eyebrows, took my hand and pressed it against the service revolver he wore on his hip. The revolver that would eventually be my ruin. Almost. “I don’t go anywheres naked any more,” he said. “Somebody gives you trouble, you tell me, and I’ll fucken air-condition him.”
That settled, we laid our glasses on the bar, father and son, and demanded more sustenance. The bartender scratched the back of his head. He winced. “I’m afraid, sir, that your wife and father-in-law were just here and said neither of you was to have any more.”
My father dug out his wallet and flashed his badge at the bartender. “You’re talking to the law,” he said.
I leaned over and reached for the nearest bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and poured us both stiff drinks. “Where is that pompous bastard?” I asked.
“I’m having such a good time,” said my father. “Don’t embarrass me.”
I found my father-in-law pontificating at a table for eight. “ ‘Lord, what fools we mortals be,’ Shakespeare once wrote, and how right he was, the Bard of Avon. Here we are, gentlemen, gathered together in civil discourse, ruminating on the human condition, our brief passage in this world of woes, exchanging ideas, surrounded by family and old companions. Even as we sit here, consuming the fruits of the vine with commendable restraint, there are some seventeen thousand souls howling in their seats in the Forum, their tiny minds totally engaged by the progress of a little black rubber disc that is being passed up and down the ice, its possession disputed by men who have never read Tolstoy or listened to Beethoven. It’s enough to make you despair of humankind, don’t you think?”
“Excuse me. There must be some mistake,” I said. “The bartender says you instructed him not to serve my father or me anything more to drink.”
“It’s no mistake, young man. My daughter is in tears. On her wedding night. And your esteemed father, young man, has deeply upset the rabbi’s wife, and because of him my good friends the Mendelsohns have left early.”
“Dr. Mendelsohn’s father was a peddler who used to feel up the girls in whorehouses.”
“So say you. Mrs. Mendelsohn, I’ll have you know, is a Gursky. Somebody should take your father home before he tells more disgusting stories, or falls flat on his face.”
“If anybody takes my father home, I go with him.”
“How could you impose such — such — very well, I’ll say it — such hooligans on my family and friends? That young man there,” he said, pointing at McIver seated alone at a table, scribbling, “talks to my guests and then retires to make notes. And that one over there,” he said, indicating Boogie, “was found sitting at a dressing-table in the ladies’ powder room, sucking some substance into his nose with a straw. The ladies’ powder room, mark you.”
More reproaches followed, but I was no longer listening, for there was Miriam, besieged by admirers again, and I started toward her, beaming foolishly.