Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [195]
Shit shit shit. “ … on the corner right after the religious street …”
“Religious street?”
“Not rabbi, or mullah. Catholic.”
“Cardinal?”
“Bishop.”
“Hey, this is fun. You want the corner of St. Catherine and Crescent. Right?”
“Right. I’m going to Dink’s.”
Hughes-McNoughton was lying in wait for me there. “Are you okay, Barney?”
“I know my own name, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course you do. Bring him a coffee, Betty.”
“Scotch.”
“Sure. But a coffee first.”
I waited until my hand had stopped trembling before I drank the coffee. Hughes-McNoughton lit my Montecristo for me. “Feel better now?”
“I want you to do the paperwork so that I can give power of attorney to my children.”
“You don’t need a lawyer for that, a notary will do the trick. But what’s the hurry?”
“Never mind.”
“Let me tell you a story, if only to validate my role as advocatus diaboli. When I was a young and inexperienced lawyer, still trusting in human nature, I had a client, a nice old Jew in the shmata trade, who decided to sign over his flourishing business to his two sons in order to avoid estate duties. I did the dirty deed. We drank champagne together — the old boy, his two sons, me. When the old boy turned up at his office in the factory the next morning, his two sons told him he wasn’t to come in any more. He was through there. So be careful as you go, Barney.”
“Very amusing, but my children aren’t like that.”
I couldn’t handle more than one Scotch in my state. Strolling back to my apartment, still feeling somewhat unwell, wary of when my next memory failure would strike, I thought, so much unfinished business. Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire. My children, my children. Mike has no idea how much I love him. I fear Kate’s marriage won’t last. And what will become of Saul?
When Saul was no more than eight or nine years old, I might send him upstairs to my bedroom to fetch a sweater or a script I needed. A half-hour could go by and still he wouldn’t have returned, and I knew he had passed a bookcase, pulled out a book, and was now lying on his stomach somewhere, reading. When he was absorbed in A History of the Kings of England, Saul brought conversation at our dinner table to a full stop one night, complaining, “If Daddy was the King, then after he died Mike would inherit the throne and get to rule the empire, and I would just be the duke of something or other.”
Only ten years old at the time and my second-born son already grasped that he had been delivered into an unjust world.
Oh my oh my, if I were an angel of the Lord, I would mark the doors of each of my children’s homes with an X, so that plague and misfortune would pass over them. Alas, I lack the qualifications. So when there was still world and time enough I fretted. I nagged. I corrected. I got everything wrong.
Damn damn damn.
Following the death of his wife, Sam Johnson wrote to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, “I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wilds of life, without any certain direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on a world to which I have little relation.”
But my wife wasn’t dead, merely absent. Temporarily absent. And I had to talk to her. She’s in that city in Ontario, I thought. Not Ottawa. The city with the Prince Arthur dining room, remember? Yes. I’m not totally wacko yet. I can even remember how to strain spaghetti. It’s with that thingamajig I keep in a kitchen drawer. There are Seven Dwarfs, who cares what they’re called? Lillian Kraft didn’t write The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt. Or Suit. Whichever. It was Mary McCarthy. I picked up the phone, started to dial — stopped — and began to curse. I couldn’t remember Miriam’s number.
70 Described as two sizes too small on this page.
71 Counter-clockwise.
72 I have been unable to trace this quote.
73 Norway.
74 Pierre Elliott Trudeau was still largely unknown in 1960. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year of Trudeaumania, and his election as prime minister.
75 Actually Louis MacNeice in “Bagpipe Music.”
76 It was the Financial Times, defunct