Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [159]
Taking me by the hand, she led me to my tractor parked in the back. “Remember you were going to pay Jean-Claude to cart it to the dump and buy a new one?”
“Yeah. So?”
She made me sit in the saddle and handed me the key, Blair smiling his modest “aw shucks” smile all the while. I turned the key, pumped the pedal, and the motor hummed.
“Blair worked on it all afternoon. He cleaned the spark plugs, changed the oil filter, and did God knows what else, and just listen to it now.”
“You must be careful not to flood it in the future, Mr. Panofsky.”
“Well, yeah. Thank you. But I really must go to the john now. Excuse me.”
Locking our bathroom door, I opened the cupboard under the sink and found my hair still in place on her diaphragm container. And there was no detectable weight loss in Miriam’s tube of vaginal jelly. But what if he had jumped her, and she didn’t use either, and I was now going to be the father of his child? Probably a vegetarian. Certainly a subscriber to Consumer Reports. No, no. Still troubled, but also more than somewhat guilt-ridden, I replaced the kitchen scale, lifted a bottle of champagne out of the kitchen fridge, and brought it to the dining-room table.
“What’s the occasion?” asked Miriam.
“The redemption of my tractor. Blair, I don’t know how we ever got on without you.”
With hindsight, I guess I shouldn’t have uncorked a second bottle, and a bottle of Châteauneuf to go with Miriam’s osso buco, and then the cognac. Refusing the cognac, Blair primly covered the proffered snifter with his hand. “Aw, come on,” I said.
“I hope I’m not failing a test of my masculinity,” he said. “The truth is I’d be sick if I had another drop to drink.”
Then, inevitably, he launched into his daily Vietnam sermon, excoriating Nixon, Kissinger, and Westmoreland. In no mood to acknowledge that I had no time for that bunch either, I said, “Sure it’s a dirty war, but Blair, don’t you feel just a wee bit guilty, a man of conscience like you, allowing this war to be fought largely by blacks and rednecks and working-class kids out of the inner cities while your middle-class ass is safe in Canada?”
“Do you think it’s my duty to be out there napalming babies?”
Miriam changed the subject, and then a real imbroglio threatened. Blair’s sister, it turned out, a storefront lawyer in Boston, also headed an organization that sought employment for the deaf, the blind, and the wheelchair-bound. Rather than allow that this was truly admirable, I protested, “Yeah, but they would be doing able-bodied men out of jobs. I can see it now. Our house is on fire and they can’t find it because they’re blind. Or I’m in intensive care, whimpering, ‘Help, help! Nurse, nurse! I’m dying.’ But she can’t hear me because she’s a deaf-mute.”
His last night with us, “Uncle” Blair built my enchanted kids a bonfire, and I sat on the porch fulminating, nursing a Rémy Martin and pulling on a Montecristo. Watching them out there on the shore, toasting hot dogs and marshmallows, I hoped that sparks would start a forest fire and that Blair, wanted as a pyromaniac in “The Fourth Reich,” would be led away in handcuffs. No such luck. Strumming on that bloody guitar of his, Blair was teaching my kids Woody Guthrie ballads (“This Land Is Your Land,” and other lefty daydreams), Miriam joining in. My family, the mishpocheh Panofsky, only two generations removed from the shtetl, transmogrified into an old Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. Shit. Shit. Shit.
Blair was gone before I came down for breakfast the next morning and that, I figured, would be the last I’d ever see of him. But then the postcards began to trickle in from Toronto, individual cards addressed to Mike and Saul, inviting them to become pen pals. Picking them up at the village post office, my first thought was to dump them in a rubbish bin, but I feared Miriam might find out. So I produced them at the dining-room table to cries of delight from my treacherous children. Quislings, both of them. And those of you too young to know who Quisling was can look