Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [120]
“I’m talking, you’re listening, sort of. You haven’t even put down your book.”
“There. It’s down. Now what?”
“Oh, go to hell, why don’t you?”
I had hoped for some solitude here, but, after I was charged, cars used to park outside, and people would get out to stare at the murderer’s house. Powerboats would cut their outboards offshore, and bastards would stand up to snap photographs. But in the early days of my second marriage, I did, in fact, manage the occasional escape from my wife.
“Darling, I don’t think you want to come up this weekend. The black flies are at their worst. Never mind the mosquitoes after this rain. You go to the Silverman wedding. Make my apologies, and I’ll get Benoit to come to attend to the leaky roof.”
My father, recently obliged to retire from the Montreal police force, intruded on the odd weekend. “I could get a job in security somewheres with my top-notch experience, but those chazerim took away my gun licence.”
“Why did they do that?”
“Why? Why? Because my name is Panofsky, that’s why.”
So Izzy phoned the high-ranking officer in the Quebec Provincial Police who had once been his driver. “Weeks went by and I couldn’t get him on the phone. But finally I swung it, eh? Finally I knew how to get him, you know. I had a girlfriend call up, you see, I made her say she’s the operator, long distance from Los Angeles, and human curiosity, you know, you’re not expecting it, well he answered. I said, listen, you goddamn horse’s ass, you know if I call the Pope, I says, I can get him quicker than you. Oh, he says, Panofsky, you know, I’m busy. I says don’t give me that horseshit, you weren’t busy when I knew you. I says I don’t want no favours. But look, every greaseball in town’s got a permit, and I’m looking for a job in security and I’d feel naked without a gun. So he comes through for me. So now it’s okay, I kept two revolvers, my favourites. I got a snub-nose, beautiful, and a Tiger. I got that and I got two automatics, and I’m leaving one here for you in the drawer of your bedside table, eh?”
“What in the hell for?”
“Somebody breaks in, you’re in the middle of nowheres here, you fucken air-condition him.”
Most weekends, rather than endure my silence, The Second Mrs. Panofsky would invite her parents out, or other undesirables. So, in self-defence, I established some summer rituals. I would disappear for an hour or two with my snorkel and flippers, plunging into the lake and swimming underwater, searching for schools of perch. Protesting that I never got any exercise and was putting on too much flab, every Saturday morning, rain or shine, I filled my backpack with a couple of salami sandwiches, some fruit, a bottle of Macallan, a Thermos of coffee, a book, and set out in my spruce58 canoe, a latter-day voyageur, for the mountain on the opposite shore, belting out “Mair-zy Doats” or “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don’t Want to Leave the Congo …”
The mountain, still listed on the map as Eagle Head in those days, has long since been renamed Mont Groulx, after the rabidly racist Abbé Lionel Groulx, who is such a hero to the separatists here. Climbing to a clearing on the top, I would settle into the shade of the little lean-to I had built, wash down my lunch with Macallans, and read until I fell asleep.
On my return to the cottage, usually nicely sodden, I sometimes managed to avoid the dinner party, as well as the games of charades or Scrabble that followed, pleading a headache. Because joining the family at the table I would inevitably quarrel with my father-in-law, who would announce, for example, that Richard Nixon had done himself credit in his kitchen debate with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow.
“Daddy would like to put you up for membership at Elmridge.”
“Why, that’s awfully good of him, but the gesture would be wasted on me. I don’t golf.”
“Frankly speaking,” said my mother-in-law, “it’s the social connections you could make there, seeing as you never enjoyed the advantages we take for granted. Mr. Bernard’s son is a member and so is Harvey Schwartz.”