Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [147]
49 Toronto scored twice in the third period. Mahovlich, at 12:07, assisted by Harris and Ehman, and Olmstead, at 16:19, on a power play, assisted by Ehman.
50 My doubts about the chronology of these events were confirmed when I discovered that the hockey game, on April 9, 1959, ended at 10:29, but the overnight train to Toronto left at 10:25, which meant that it would have been impossible for my father to learn the final score and still have time to race to Windsor Station and board my mother’s train. However, when I confronted my mother with these troubling details, her lower lip began to tremble. “It’s true,” she said, “it’s true.” And then she began to sob, and I thought it insensitive to pursue the matter further.
I do not doubt my father’s veracity or my mother’s testimony, but I do believe Barney muddled things. Miriam probably left the Ritz at the end of the second period, at 9:41, and my father’s taxi was not tied up in Stanley Cup traffic until he returned from the Montreal West station. Another possibility is that the departure of the overnight train to Toronto was delayed. I have twice written to Canadian Pacific to ask for the departure time of the overnight train to Toronto, on April 9, 1959, but I am still waiting for a reply.
51 They are called Fruits of Islam.
52 Eugène Ionesco (1912–1994), Romanian-French dramatist of the Theatre of the Absurd, author of The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, and other plays.
53 Rhinoceros.
54 Described as “a tartan skirt” on this page.
55 The song was “Mair-zy Doats” on this page.
56 Glenn Close.
57 Fatal Attraction, co-starring Michael Douglas. Released in 1987 by Paramount. Its North American box-office gross was $156,645,693.
58 Cedar.
59 Monsieur Verdoux (Universal, 1947) was not Chaplin’s last film. His last one was A Countess from Hong Kong (Charles Chaplin, 1967), and it starred Marlon Brando.
60 Actually, the first issue of Playboy did not appear until December 1953.
61 $375 plus 6 times 20 actually equals $495.
62 On July 16, 1942, thousands of French police officers rounded up thirteen thousand Jews in Paris, invalids, pregnant women, and three thousand children among them. The Jews were locked into the winter Vélodrome without food or water to await deportation to an extermination camp. The round-up was part of an agreement Vichy’s Pierre Laval had made with the Nazis, who were hard put to cope with the transportation of so many Jews at one go.
63 Actually the quotation is from The Young Author, written when Dr. Johnson was twenty years old.
64 John Ogilby is long forgotten and so is Elkanah Settle, once the official “City Poet” of London.
65 Stephen Spender. Lines from “I think continually of those who are truly great,” p. 30, Collected Poems, 1928–1985. Random House, New York, 1986.
66 Srinagar.
67 Actually this observation was first and famously made by Truman Capote.
68 Dopey and Bashful.
69 Sloan Wilson.
3
Miriam
1960–
1
LIKE I SAID, it started out as a disaster. Jumpy as a teenager, counting the days to what I took to be my make-or-break lunch with Miriam, I decided to fly to Toronto the night before, checking into the Park Plaza, resolved not to stir from my room or drink a drop. But I couldn’t concentrate on the copy of Rabbit, Run that I’d brought with me. The New Republic’s account of Senator Kennedy’s triumph over Humphrey in the West Virginia primary did not thrill me — remembering that bastard Joe Kennedy, I was suspicious of the son. Neither could I get excited by that front-page photograph in The New York Times of an exultant Nikita Khrushchev displaying some debris from the demolished U-2 spy plane. Flinging book, magazines, and newspapers aside, I switched off my bedside lamp. But sleep wouldn’t come, and, inevitably, Mrs. Ogilvy materialized, running her tongue over her lips, beginning to unbutton that dress that was a size too small.70 “That will do you no good, you condescending imperialist slut,” I said. “I am not even