Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [132]
The move from a seedy rooming-house on Dorchester to a squeaky-clean, all-mod-con flat on a tree-lined street in suburban Hampstead did not intimidate my father. He made himself at home at once. Within weeks his planned kitchen reeked of stale farts and White Owl cigars and Chinese takeout food mouldering on abandoned paper plates. No sitting-room chair was without its stack of magazines and newspapers (True Detective, The National Enquirer, The Police Gazette, Playboy)60, the magazine cover corners unfailingly ripped off, having served as makeshift toothpicks while he watched Perry Mason or Have Gun, Will Travel. His bed was perpetually unmade and orange peels and sunflower seeds and chunks of sour pickle and cigar butts filled ashtrays to the overflow. Empty rye and beer bottles rode every surface.
I adamantly refused The Second Mrs. Panofsky’s request to attach a lock to the kitchen door that opened on to an interior staircase to my father’s flat. Poor Izzy. The intrepid cop who had wrestled second-storey men to the ground, chased bank robbers down lanes, flattened drug dealers with his left hook, and cracked the skulls of muggers with his revolver butt feared The Second Mrs. P. as he had no lawbreaker. Only if he heard me moving about solo would Izzy mount the stairs tippytoe, open the kitchen door tentatively, and ask, “Is the coast clear, kid?”
“She’s out.”
Grabbing a glass, Izzy would make straight for the liquor cabinet in the dining room.
“Careful, Daddy. She marks the level of each bottle with a pencil.”
“Hey, you’re talking to a detective.”
“So these days I pour myself a single malt,” I said, looking him in the eye, “there’s no need to add water. It’s already been done for me.”
“It’s the new maid. Boy, is she ever a prude.”
“Goddamn it, Daddy, you haven’t —”
“I never laid a hand on her, I don’t care what she says.”
Izzy especially enjoyed Wednesdays, the night The Second Mrs. Panofsky went to visit her parents in order to avoid my weekly poker game. I would usually be joined by Marv Guttman, Sid Cooper, Jerry Feigelman, Hershey Stein, and Nate Gold. I remember one Wednesday in particular, the one where Irv Nussbaum filled in for the absent Nate Gold. Shuffling the cards, Irv beamed at Marv. “Well now, did you and Sylvia enjoy yourselves in Israel?”
“It’s unreal. We had a marvellous time. I tell you what they’re doing there …”
“What they’re doing there,” said Irv, addressing the group as he began to deal, “is costing untold millions, and this year everyone, and I mean everyone, is going to have to get behind the bond drive as never before.”
“It’s been a lousy year for us,” said Hershey.
“The worst,” said Jerry.
“And with the cost of materials today,” said Marv.
“And what,” asked Irv, “about the cost of fighting the fedayeen, or absorbing our brothers from Yemen?”
Inviting Irv had been a mistake, I realized too late, as within an hour the game began to falter, the guys watching, indignant, as Irv pulled over a cut-crystal bowl filled with chips and began to stack them in piles, according to colour. The chips weren’t his, but, on his insistence, represented ten per cent off the top of each pot, proceeds to the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Irv was a governor.
“He never rests,” said Hershey, glaring at Irv.
“Neither,” said Irv, “do our enemies.”
By ten o’clock the fun had leaked out of our game. And, after one more round, awfully early by our standards, the guys decided to pack it in, digging into the goodies I had set out on platters on a side table: smoked meat, salami, chopped liver, potato salad, sour pickles, bagels, and sliced kimmel bread. Counting the chips in the cut-crystal bowl once more, Irv announced, “We’ve collected three hundred and seventy-five dollars for the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. If we each chipped in another twenty bucks that would make five hundred even.”61
Which was when Izzy, lured by the promise of food and drink, burst into the dining room, grinning as he brandished his snub-nosed revolver. “Don’t anybody move,” he hollered, assuming his gunfighter