• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 444 0

In 1995, after a particularly zealous language inspector (or tongue-trooper, as they are known in the local argot) discovered boxes of unilingually labelled matzohs on display in a kosher grocery, the offending product was ordered withdrawn from the shelves. Such was the protest, however, that, in 1996, the Jewish community was offered special dispensation: unilingually labelled boxes of matzohs were declared legal for sixty days of the year. Old Irv Nussbaum was delighted by the ruling: “Listen here,” he said, “marijuana, cocaine, and heroin are banned here all year round, but, come Pesach, Jewish druggies are now a special case. Sixty days of the year we can munch matzohs without drawing the blinds or locking the doors. Please don’t think I’m meddling, but I know your father always hoped that your children would have a proper Jewish education. You want to treat them to a trip to Israel, I’d be glad to help with the arrangements.”

My father’s manuscript created problems for us. Kate was for publication, Saul argued for both revisions and cuts, and I vacillated, distressed by his gratuitously cruel remarks about Caroline. But the truth is, there was nothing to be done. Barney had already come to an arrangement with a publisher in Toronto, and a codicil in his will absolutely forbade any changes or cuts being made. It also stated, surprisingly, that I was to be responsible for seeing the manuscript through to publication. After protracted negotiations with the publisher, it was agreed that I could add footnotes, correcting the most egregious factual errors, a chore that obliged me to do a good deal of reading. I was also granted two other privileges. I was allowed to rewrite the incoherent, faltering chapters, dealing with Barney’s discovery that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s, after consultations with Solange and Drs. Mortimer Herscovitch and Jeffrey Singleton. I was also authorized to add this afterword, subject to the approval of Saul and Kate. But they were not pleased. We quarrelled.

“I’m clearly the writer here,” said a sullen Saul, “and I should be the one to handle the manuscript.”

“Saul, I’m not looking forward to this job. If he picked me, I have to accept that it was his ultimate putdown. Because, just as he wrote in that patronizing manner of his, I’m so punctilious. I could be counted on to correct his most glaring memory lapses.”

“I happen to know,” said Kate, “that many of his so-called errors, quotes attributed to the wrong author here and there, were actually traps baited just for you. He once told me, ‘I know how to make sure that Mike finally gets to read Gibbon, Auden, and lots of other writers. My system is foolproof.’ ”

“As it happens, in spite of what he thought, I had already read most of those people. But we have a problem.”

“Boogie?”

“Here we go again.”

“Kate, please. Don’t start. He was my father, too. But when he wrote again and again that he was still expecting Boogie to turn up one day, he was obviously lying.”

“Daddy did not murder Boogie.”

“Kate, we’re just going to have to come to terms with the fact that Daddy wasn’t all he pretended to be.”

“Saul, you’re not saying anything.”

“Shit. Shit. Shit. How could he do such a thing?”

“The answer is he didn’t.”

I put the question to John Hughes-McNoughton. “As a rule,” he said, “a lawyer doesn’t ask his client. The answer could be unhelpful. But Barney volunteered more than once that the story he told O’Hearne was the unvarnished truth.”

“Did you believe him?”

“A jury of twelve honourable men adjudged him innocent.”

“But now there is new and damning evidence. We have a right to know the truth.”

“The truth is he was your father.”

Our father, before he was reduced to a near-vegetable state, cast a large shadow. Kate’s husband, for instance, had always felt diminished in his presence, and did not enjoy his visits to Toronto. Barney’s pathetic condition, and Kate’s slow, reluctant acceptance of what he had done, not that she would ever acknowledge it, drew them closer together. But something within her broke and was badly in need