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By Root 598 0

and I sensed that I was for the long drop into nowhere. I saw my feet dangling and prayed that my bowels wouldn’t betray me during my last moments on earth. Mr. Justice Euclid Lazure, a slender, severe-looking man with dyed black hair, fierce bushy eyebrows, a hooked nose, and a slit of a mouth, had an interesting history. Like most thoughtful québécois de vieille souche who had come of age in the Second World War, he had flirted with fascism as a sensitive young Outremont fop. He had cut his intellectual teeth on the then-racist daily Le Devoir, as well as the Abbé Lionel-Adolphe Groulx’s rabidly anti-Semitic L’Action Nationale. He had been a member of the Ligue pour la Défense du Canada, a pride of French-Canadian patriots who pledged to fight like mad dogs were Canada attacked but declined to risk their arses in what they adjudged to be yet another British imperialist war. He had been among that merry throng that had marched down the Main in 1942, smashing plate-glass windows in Jewish shops and chanting, “Kill them! Kill them!” But he had since publicly regretted his youthful indiscretions. He told a journalist, “We had no idea of what was going on in 1942. We had not yet learned about the extermination camps.” But, as Hughes-McNoughton pointed out, there was an up side to that bastard’s sitting in judgment of me. Euclid’s missus had run off with a concert pianist. He enjoyed a well-earned reputation as a misogynist. In an earlier case, before sentencing a woman who had buried a kitchen knife in her husband’s heart, he said: “Women have climbed higher in the scale of virtue, higher than men, and I have always believed that. But people say, and I believe it, that when they fall, women reach a level of baseness that the most vile men could not reach.”

So I could hardly wait for my garrulous, shockingly unfaithful wife to testify.

“Poor Mr. Moscovitch,” she said, “was trembling and I only got into bed with him to keep him warm, because I have empathy for anybody in distress, regardless of race, colour, creed, or sexual proclivity. I am a tolerant person. People have commented on that quality in me. But, m’lord, we do have to draw the line somewhere. No offence to anybody in this courtroom, for I have the greatest respect for French Canadians. I adored our maid. But, speaking frankly, I think your people should give up the tradition of having all of a bride’s teeth extracted before her wedding. If you ask me, there are better gifts you could give a groom.

“Now only the dirty-minded could read anything sexual into my getting into bed with Mr. Moscovitch, although speaking as an attractive woman in her prime I do have my needs, and my husband hadn’t enjoyed his conjugal rights in months. Why, he even failed to consummate our union on our wedding night, the date of which he wanted to have changed because it conflicted with the Stanley Cup playoffs. Never mind the deposit my father had put down at the Temple, or that the invitations had gone out and more than one Gursky was coming. We’re friends of the family. Long-standing. There was no expense spared at our wedding. For my princess, my father used to say, only the best will do, which was why he bitterly opposed my marriage to Mr. Panofsky. He comes from another monde, my father said, and he was right, boy was he ever right, but I thought I could uplift Barney, you know, like a feminine Professor Higgins from Pygmalion, that play by the great Bernard Shaw. Maybe you saw the movie version with Leslie Howard, which must have earned him that part in Gone With the Wind. I absolutely adored the musical version, My Fair Lady, with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, and I’m not surprised it was such a big hit. I can remember when I left the theatre with my mother, the tunes still playing in my head, I said —”

The judge, suppressing a yawn, intervened: “You got into bed with Mr. Moscovitch …”

“To keep him warm. So help me God. I was wearing my pink satin nightgown with the lace fringe that I bought at Saks on my last trip to New York with my mother. We go shopping together the saleswomen