Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [198]
“Then, I don’t know, maybe he shouldn’t have had the champagne. He began to mispronounce words. He had trouble dealing with his cutlery. Selecting a spoon when it was a fork he needed. Picking up a knife by the blade rather than the handle. An embarrassing change came over him, possibly prompted by frustration. His face darkened. Lowering his voice, he motioned me closer, and said Solange was forging cheques. She was swindling him. He was fearful she might force him to sign a will she had fabricated. She was a nymphomaniac who once yanked his apartment doorman into the elevator with her and raised her dress to show him she wasn’t wearing panties. The bill came and I could see that he was unable to add it up. Just sign it, I said, which made him laugh. Okay, he said, but I doubt if they’ll recognize my new signature. Hey, I still remember some things, he said. I once brought her here with her mother, and that old bitch said, ‘My husband always tips twelve and a half per cent.’
“Then his manner altered yet again. He was tender. Loving. Barney at his most adorable. And I realized that he had forgotten that I had ever left him, and obviously assumed we would now go home together, and maybe take in a movie tonight. Or read in bed, our legs tangled together. Or catch a late flight to New York, the way he used to pull surprises out of a hat. Oh, in those days he was so much fun, so unpredictable, so loving, and I thought what if I didn’t return to Toronto, and did go home with him? That’s when I went to the phone and called Solange and asked her to come at once. I got back to the table and he wasn’t there. Oh my God, where is he, I asked the waiter. Men’s room, he said. I waited outside the men’s room, and when he came out, shuffling, his smile goofy, I saw that his fly was still unzipped and his trousers were wet.”
While he was still enjoying some relatively good days, our father called in John Hughes-McNoughton and insisted on signing papers that granted power of attorney to his children. Totally Unnecessary Productions Ltd. was sold to The Amigos Three, in Toronto, for five million dollars in cash and another five million in shares of Amigos Three. According to his will, the proceeds from the sale, as well as all his other holdings, including a considerable stock portfolio, were to be split three ways: fifty per cent to his children, and twenty-five per cent each to Miriam and Solange. First, however, the estate would be responsible for a number of bequests:
Twenty-five thousand dollars for Benoît O’Neil, who had been caretaker of the cottage in the Laurentians for years.
Five hundred thousand dollars for Chantal Renault.
His two tickets in the reds in the new Molson Centre were to be maintained for five years, and left to Solange Renault.
The estate was obliged to settle John Hughes-McNoughton’s monthly bar bill at Dink’s for as long as he lived.
One hundred thousand dollars was to go to a Mrs. Flora Charnofsky in New York.
There was also a surprise, considering how often our father joked about shvartzers. A two-hundred-thousand-dollar trust fund was to be set up to establish a scholarship at McGill University for a black student who excelled in the arts — the aforesaid scholarship in memory of Ismail Ben Yussef, a.k.a. Cedric Richardson, who had died of cancer on November 18, 1995.
Five thousand dollars was to be set aside for a wake at Dink’s, to which all his friends were to be invited. No rabbi was to speak at his