Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [146]
Boogie’s body had not yet floated to the surface, and a police motor boat launched at Merkin’s Point, and covering the shoreline, could find nothing.
“Maybe he’s tangled in weeds somewhere,” I said.
“No.”
Late the next afternoon the provincials were back, accompanied by a detective. “My name’s Sean O’Hearne,” said the detective. “I think we should have a little chat.”
Boogie plunging into the lake was the last I ever saw of him. I’m willing to swear on the heads of my grandchildren that was exactly how it happened, but he’d disappeared more than once before, and I have never given up hope. Not a day passes when I don’t think there will be a postcard from Tashkent or Nome or Addis Ababa. Or, still better, that he will sneak up behind me at Dink’s and say, “Boo.”
Enough is enough. Boogie would be seventy-one years old now — no, seventy-two — and I can’t understand why he won’t appear to clear my name once and for all.
34 The Weizmann Institute in Rehovot.
35 It’s veal marrow.
36 Actually, “Itsy-Bitsy” was a hit in 1960.
37 Actually, “downsizing” didn’t enter the language until September 1975, when U.S. News & World Report informed its readers, “ ‘Longer, lower, wider’ is out. ‘Small, smaller, smallest’ is in. Detroit’s engineers call the current trend ‘downsizing.’ ” Six years later, when the recession struck in 1981, and companies began to lay off workers by the thousands, “downsizing” made the leap to its current meaning.
38 Ibiza.
39 Actually, this letter from Boogie was written in 1957 and mailed from New York, not Taiwan, after Boogie had been to his first rock ‘n’ roll concert.
40 As I was going through my father’s manuscript, limiting myself to correcting facts and filling in names, places, or dates, where memory had failed him, I also happened to be reading Peter Vansittart’s memoir of post–World War II London, In the Fifties (John Murray, London, 1995), and came upon the following passage on this page:
In 1938, a mildewed colonel about whom we gibed that he had lost one leg at Mons, another at Ypres, a third on the Marne, and the last of his wits on the Somme, had barked at me: “Your Mr. Auden’s no great lover of Herr Hitler, but will he be joining me to fight the bugger?” Many whom Auden derided — colonels, retarded public school boys, suburban golfers, trite-tongued mediocrities, romantic but goofy stuffed shirts — saved Western civilization. My vision of Auden as anti-Fascist commando could not be maintained when, with the barbarians at the gate, he departed to America.
I can’t add plagiarism to the many sins my father has to answer for. Rather, I prefer to think Kate was right when she insisted that this had to be an innocent error. “No doubt,” she said, “shuffling through his index cards, Daddy mistakenly took a thought of Vansittart’s that he had transcribed for one of his own.”
41 Chico. But there was also a fourth brother, Zeppo, who appeared in many of the films.
42 In Scotland, an advocate, or, following recent legislation, a solicitor-advocate, would have pleaded her case.
43 “Pepsi” is pejorative. Slang for French Canadians, who were reputed to drink Pepsi-Colas for breakfast.
44 Backstrom scored at 4:12, assisted by Geoffrion and Moore.
45 Actually, it was Ezio Pinza in South Pacific, which ran four years nine months on Broadway.
46 Geoffrion scored at 13:42, assisted by Backstrom and Harvey.
47 Johnson scored at 16:26, assisted by Backstrom.
7,8 Actually, it was Pulford who scored first, at 4:27, assists Armstrong and Brewer. Bonin scored at 9:56, assisted