Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [157]
“My father wouldn’t want me back in any event. He campaigned for Nixon last year.”
“What will you do here?”
“I hope to complete my post-grad studies in Toronto and then teach.”
“Were you at Columbia?”
“Princeton.”
“I want you to know if I were your age, and American, I would have been out there last year, Clean for Gene. I believe James Baldwin was right on when he called your country ‘The Fourth Reich.’ But one thing about the student occupation of Columbia bothered me. I read somewhere that a student shat in the top drawer of a dean’s desk. Now don’t get me wrong. I realize he was making an anti-fascist statement. But all the same, you know …”
“They sent in the p—the cops, lots of them in plainclothes, and beat the hell out of those students. More than a hundred ended up in the hospital.”
Mr. Mary Poppins ingratiated himself with our kids, teaching them goyishe stunts, like how to tie different sailors’ knots, how to coax a chipmunk to pluck a nut out of the palm of your hand, and how to tend to a flooded outboard motor, which I coped with by cursing and yanking the cord until it came off in my hands. Late one afternoon, rising from my nap, looking to pour myself a drink downstairs and maybe horse around with Mike and Saul (Kate wasn’t born yet), I discovered yet again that they were nowhere to be seen. “Blair took them strawberry picking,” said Miriam.
“You shouldn’t have allowed him to take them out unchaperoned. He could be a paedophile.”
“Barney, did you suggest to Blair that I thought he was gay?”
“On the contrary. I assured him you thought no such thing. He tends to distort matters.”
“You’re not jealous, are you?”
“Of that drip-dry lefty? Certainly not. Besides, I trust you implicitly.”
“Then if I were you, I’d stop baiting him. He’s far more intelligent than you think, but he’s too polite to be rude to you.”
“I feel invaded.”
“Because he’s so kind?”
“Intrusively so.”
Blair was contaminating my Yasnaya Polyana. Our ten lakeside acres. After crazy Clara, following the crap I went through with The Second Mrs. Panofsky, my trial and subsequent disgrace, the dipshit TV business I hated but that continued to earn me big bucks, Miriam was my winning lottery ticket. My redeemer. My MVP award. Imagine, if you can, the Boston Red Sox actually winning a World Series, or Danielle Steele taking the Nobel Prize, and you’ll have some idea of how I felt when Miriam agreed, against all odds, to marry me. But my epiphany was tainted by fear. Surely the gods on Olympus had taken down my number for remedial action.
— Get Panofsky. Crash his next Air Canada flight.
— Hmmm.
— Or what would you say to testicular cancer. Snip, snip. Off with his balls.
Having avoided Morty Herscovitch for years, I now went for annual check-ups, lest I be blindsided by lesions in my lungs. Hoping to placate a vengeful Jehovah, I became a big contributor to charities, tempted to wave my receipts heavenwards whenever we were threatened by thunder or lightning. I started to secretly fast on Yom Kippur. I expected my children to be born deaf and dumb, with no arms, or Down’s syndrome, and when this turned out not to be the case, it only served to heighten my forebodings. Something creepy-crawly was waiting for me out there. I knew it. I counted on it. Unknown to Miriam, I had five thousand dollars in cash socked away in a locked drawer. Money I would use to pay off drug-crazed burglars who could break into our place any night of the week.
Once school was out, I packed Miriam and the kids off to our cottage on the lake, and I would join them on weekends and sleep over on Tuesday nights. Driving out however late on a Tuesday or Friday night, I knew all the cottage lights would be blazing. Miriam would be waiting on the balcony, Saul snoozing in her arms and Mike playing with his Lego at her feet. They would all come running as I opened the car door,