Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [196]
77 It was the Sirens.
78 Flaubert.
79 Eric Ambler, author of The Mask of Dimitrios (1939); U.S.A., A Coffin for Dimitrios.
80 It was not until 1928 that women were declared “persons” by the Supreme Court of Canada.
81 My father has confused two Italian-American filmmakers, the novelist and screenwriter Mario Puzo, and the director Martin Scorsese. Puzo wrote the Godfather films and Scorsese directed Raging Bull, among other films.
82 Grand Old Man.
83 Or Stanley Street, this page.
84 The Tour Eiffel, according to my father. this page.
85 I was born six months after my parents’ marriage.
86 I fear that by this juncture my father’s memory was unreliable, even somewhat scrambled, and that pages of this manuscript were put together in a haphazard fashion. The referendum was on October 30, 1995, but what follows happened a year or so later.
87 Three days.
88 A paraphrase of W. H. Auden’s lines:
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children …
89 Actually it was called Burnside until 1966.
90 Ontario.
Afterword
by Michael Panofsky
1
AT 10:28 A.M., on September 24, 1996, a surveyor and two lumberjacks, employed by Drummondville Pulp & Paper, stumbled on scattered human remains in a clearing near the crest of Mont Groulx: a skull, a severed spinal cord, a pelvis, a femur, cracked ribs, and broken tibias. The Provincial Police were summoned, and the bones were collected and delivered to a pathologist at the Notre-Dame Hospital in Montreal. Dr. Roger Giroux declared that these were the remains of a Caucasian male, thirty-something years old, who had died of unknown causes thirty to forty years ago. He speculated that the cracked ribs, severed spine, and broken tibias could be attributed to the fact that the unknown male had been severely beaten with a blunt instrument, or had fallen from a considerable height. But a more likely possibility, he ventured, alluding to the teeth marks, was that coyotes, or other animals, had cracked the bones, trying to get at the marrow. The story, reported in the Gazette, caught the attention of a retired Sûreté du Québec detective, Sean O’Hearne. On his insistence, an old file was opened, and a New York dentist was flown in to examine the skull. Shortly thereafter, it was confirmed that these were the remains of Bernard Moscovitch, who had disappeared in the vicinity on June 7, 1960. A triumphant O’Hearne was interviewed by the Gazette and La Presse, and appeared on several local TV shows, as did my father’s second wife, always with a framed photograph of Mr. Moscovitch on her lap. “He pledged undying love to me,” she said. Accounts of my father’s trial in St-Jérôme were resurrected under the rubric DID JUSTICE TRIUMPH? or THE AVENGING BONES. My father’s defence lawyer, John Hughes-McNoughton, entrapped at Dink’s (a bar, on Crescent Street, in Montreal), dismissed one reporter, saying, “Credo quia impossibile,” and another, who confronted him with the renewed charges, saying no more than, “Argumentum ex silentio,” before waving him away. An enterprising ’Allô Police photographer managed to slip into the King David Nursing Home to snap a picture of my father being spoon-fed roast brisket by Solange. I flew in from London, Kate from Toronto, and Saul was driven in from New York by a young woman called Linda. We met at the cottage in the Laurentians where we had once been such a happy family, to cope with the revelation that Barney had lied and was a murderer after all. Kate, naturally, disputed the irrefutable evidence.
“Boogie was drunk, and he could have wandered up there, had a bad fall, broken both his legs, and died of starvation. How dare you both be so quick to blame Daddy when he can’t even answer to his name any more?”
“Kate, you’re not the only one who is upset here. Be reasonable, please.”
“Sure, reasonable. Daddy was a homicidal maniac. Obvious, eh? He shot Boogie, dragged him to that mountaintop, and broke his legs with a shovel.”
“I’m not saying that’s how it —”
“There wasn’t any evidence of even a shallow grave