Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [18]
I was often wakened in the early-morning hours by Hymie hollering into the phone at one or another of his former wives, apologizing for being late with an alimony payment, commiserating over an affair that had ended badly, or shouting at one of his sons, or his daughter in San Francisco. “What does she do?” I once asked him.
“Shop. Get pregnant. Marry, divorce. You’ve heard of serial killers? She’s a serial bride.”
Hymie’s children were a constant heartache and an endless financial drain. The son in Boston, a Wiccan, and proprietor of an occult bookshop, was writing the definitive book on astrology. When not contemplating the heavens, he was given to writing bad cheques on Earth, which Hymie had to make good. His other son, a wandering rock musician, was in and out of expensive detox clinics, and had a weakness for hitting the road in stolen sports cars which he inevitably smashed up. He could phone from a lock-up in Tulsa, or a hospital in Kansas City, or a lawyer’s office in Denver, to say there had been a misunderstanding. “But you mustn’t worry, Dad. I wasn’t hurt.”
Not yet a father myself, I deigned to lecture him. “If I ever have children,” I said, “once they reach the age of twenty-one, they’re on their own. There has to be a cut-off point.”
“The grave,” he said.
Hymie supported a shlemiel of a brother who was a Talmudic scholar, and his parents in Florida. Once, I found him weeping at the kitchen table at two a.m., surrounded by chequebooks, and scraps of paper on which he had made hurried calculations. “Anything I can do?” I asked.
“Yeah. Mind your own business. No, sit down. Do you realize that if I had a heart attack tomorrow, there would be twelve people out on the street, without a pot to piss in? Here. Read this.” It was a letter from his brother. He had finally caught up with one of Hymie’s movies on late-night television: prurient, obscene, meretricious, and an embarrassment to the family’s good name. If he must make such trash, couldn’t he use a pseudonym? “Do you know how much money he’s in to me for, that momzer? I even pay his daughter’s college fees.”
I was not good company. Far from it. Waking in a sweat at three a.m., convinced I was still wasting away in that slammer in St-Jérôme, denied bail, a life sentence my most likely prospect. Or dreaming that I was being weighed again by that somnolent jury of pig farmers, snow-plough men, and garage mechanics. Or, unable to sleep, grieving for Boogie, wondering if the divers had messed up, and if, against all odds, he was still tangled in the weeds. Or if his bloated body had surfaced in my absence. But an hour later my concern would yield to rage. He was alive, that bastard. I knew it in my bones. Then why hadn’t he shown up at my trial? Because he hadn’t heard about it. He was on one of his retreats in an ashram in India. Or he was in a heroin-induced stupor in a hotel in San Francisco. Or he was in that Trappist monastery on Big Sur, trying to kick, studying his list of the names of the dead. Any day now I would get one of his cryptic postcards. Like the one that once came from Acre:
In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
Judges, 17: 6.
The day after my release from prison, I had driven out to my cottage on the lake, jumped into my outboard, and covered every inch of the shoreline as well as the adjoining brooks. Detective-Sergeant O’Hearne had been waiting for me on my dock. “What are you doing here?” I’d demanded.
“Walking in the woods. You were born with