Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [200]
His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than ostentation.1
And from A. J. Liebling, on the boxing trainer Charlie Goldman, a.k.a. the Professor:
“I never married,” the Professor says. “I always live à la carte.”2
“Like Zack,” he wrote underneath.
I am the beneficiary of Barney’s gift for money-making. Alas, it is an attribute he always deplored in himself, which is why, I suppose, I was his least favourite of the children, the one who bore the brunt of his sarcasm. His rush to judgment. In spite of what he has written, Caroline and I have sat through Don Giovanni more than once. As my footnotes amply testify, I have also read the Iliad, Swift, Dr. Johnson, and others. But if I happen to believe that this exclusionary Eurocentric pantheon has to be revised, and enlarged, and if I also find merit in Mapplethorpe, Helen Chadwick, and Damien Hirst, surely this is my prerogative. I cannot deny my resentments. Even so, I try to fly over to see Barney once every six weeks. Possibly, I suffer least from his altered state, because the truth is we never did communicate.
Barney does not lack for other, more regular visitors. Solange is there just about every day to bathe and help him crayon colouring books. Old drinking companions from Dink’s pass through often: a disreputable lawyer called John Hughes-McNoughton, an alcoholic journalist named Zack, and others. Only after I was sent a severe letter from a hospital administrator did I learn that a certain Ms. Morgan came by once a week to masturbate him. A sprightly old man, Irv Nussbaum, pops in often with a bag of bagels or long strings of karnatzel from Schwartz’s Delicatessen. “Your father,” he once said to me, “was one of your real wild Jews. A bonditt. A mazik. A devil. I could have sworn he was out of Odessa.”
On Barney’s most recent birthday, he surprised us by responding to his name with an impish grin. We brought balloons, funny hats, noise-makers, and a chocolate cake. Miriam and Solange, conspiring together, had what seemed like an inspired idea. They hired a tap-dancer to perform for him. A gleeful Barney clapped hands and sang bits of a song for us:
Mair-zy Doats and Do-zy Doats and lid-dle lam-zy div-ey A kid-dle-y div-ey too, would-n’t you?
But Barney stumbled and fell, and wet himself when he tried to emulate Mr. Chuckle’s steps, and Miriam, Solange, and Kate fled into the hall and fell into one another’s arms.
I remember another moment of recognition, as it were. A letter came for my father from California. It was incomprehensible to me, but not to my father, who read it and wept copiously. It read:
Mother explained that the letter was from Hymie Mintzbaum, who had suffered a bad stroke some years earlier. In London, back in 1961, she said, Hymie had taken her to lunch and said that she simply had to marry Barney. “Only you can save that bastard,” he had said.
To digress briefly, as Barney was so fond of saying, all my recent trips to Montreal have been depressing. This, not only because of our father’s condition, but also in recognition of what has become of the city I grew up in. When I got out the phone book, hoping to get in touch with old friends who had been to McGill with me, I discovered that all but two or three had moved to Toronto, Vancouver, or New York, rather than endure the burgeoning tribalism. Of course, looked at from abroad, what was happening in Quebec seemed risible. There are actually grown men out here, officers of the Commission de Protection de la Langue Française, who go out with tape measures every day to ensure that the English-language lettering on outdoor commercial signs is half the size of, and in no brighter colour, than the French.