Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [121]
“Look what it’s done for Maxim Gold, and he doesn’t golf either. When he came over from Hungary as a boy, he could hardly speak a word of English.”
The odious Gold, incomparably rich now, ran a drug company, plasma its hottest seller. “Frankly speaking,” I said, “I would not want to belong to a club that has accepted the likes of Maxim Gold, who buys and sells blood for a profit. And furthermore,” I added, smiling my most gracious smile at my father-in-law, “I fail to understand grown men, otherwise mature, wasting an afternoon trying to hit a little white ball into a hole. It’s enough to make you despair of humankind, don’t you think?”
“He’s kidding you, Daddy.”
“Well now, I can take a jest as well as the next chap. But at least, out there in the fresh air —”
“Unpolluted by cigar smoke,” said my mother-in-law, fanning herself.
“— savouring what Mother Nature Bountiful has bestowed on us, we don’t indulge in fisticuffs as do the hooligans who play hockey. What say you to that, Barney?”
I am emotionally tied to this cottage, which resonates with so many memories. Take this one, for instance.
One summer night only two years ago, there I was, seated on my rocking-chair on the wraparound balcony. Pulling on a Montecristo, sipping cognac, I was luxuriating in the remembrance of family good times past, when I was disturbed by the crunching of tires on the gravel approach road. It’s Miriam, I thought, my heart leaping. Miriam come home. Then a Mercedes-Benz sports car jolted to a stop immediately before me, and out stumbled a GQ fashion plate, his smile tentative. A scrawny little old man, seemingly unaware of how ridiculous he looked. It was a distraught Norman Charnofsky, long since retired from NYU, what was left of his once pewter hair no longer to be seen. Norman was sporting a toupee. “Well I’ll be goddamned” was all I could manage.
“I came here because I want you to hear my side of the story. I feel I owe you that much.”
Poor, innocent, sweet-natured Norman, shrunken now but still unable to control his crying jags, as it turned out. His incongruous lounge-lizard outfit was redeemed by a gravy stain on his trousers.
“Before you start,” I said, “I want you to know that I’ve been in touch with your wife.” And then I invited him into the living room.
“You’ve been in touch with Flora. You think I don’t worry about her?”
Norman began by reminding me of our meeting at the Algonquin all those years ago, on the other side of the moon, when I signed over the rights to Clara’s work, which we had both considered to be without commercial value. But to Norman’s astonishment and mine, as Clara’s reputation soared, that coffee-table book of her ink drawings began to sell in the thousands year after year, and her widely translated The Virago’s Verse Book was reprinted again and again. The Clara Charnofsky Foundation, inaugurated as a loving but seemingly futile gesture, started to bank millions. To begin with, its office was that tiny den in Norman’s apartment where, seated under a bare lightbulb, he answered correspondence on his portable typewriter in the early-morning hours, maintaining scrupulous records of money spent on stationery, postage, typewriter ribbons, paper-clips, and carbon paper. Yes, carbon paper, if any of you out there are old enough to remember what that was. Why, in those days we not only used carbon paper, but when you phoned somebody you actually got an answer from a human being on the other end, not an answering machine with a ho ho ho message. In those olden times you didn’t have to be a space scientist to manage the gadget that flicked your TV on and off, that ridiculous thingamabob that now comes with twenty push buttons, God knows what for. Doctors made house calls. Rabbis were guys. Kids were raised by their moms instead of in child-care pens like piglets. Software meant haberdashery. There wasn’t a different dentist for gums, molars, fillings, and extractions — one nerd managed the lot. If a waiter spilled hot soup on your date, the manager