Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [39]
Miriam, convinced that Saul had blown it, was horrified. And Maître Hughes-McNoughton and I, fearful that all our efforts had been in vain, exchanged despairing glances. While Mr. Justice Savard tried to restore order, there was nothing for me to do but flee the court for a much-needed smoke.
Within minutes a smiling Miriam emerged, followed by a disappointed Saul, who was promptly embraced by Mike and Kate. “He’s got a suspended sentence,” said Miriam, “providing that he is responsible for no further outrages, and lives at home. There is also a fine to be paid.”
Only then did I catch a glimpse of the good Bishop Sylvain Gaston Savard approaching, bearing a portfolio filled with architects’ plans and builders’ estimates, his smile large.
7
Story in this morning’s Gazette about the former cafeteria manager at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, who was awarded $400,000 after the jury heard that his boss had called him an “old fart.” The cafeteria manager, who was a stripling at the time, a mere fifty-four-year-old, claimed that his boss regularly made age-related remarks to him, including, “Check out Jim’s grey hair”; “How are you doing, old man?”; and “Here comes the old man, get out the wheelchair.”
Alas, just like Jim, I’m running out of road. Yesterday, released into a downpour from the torture chamber of the man who manipulates my back once my sciatica becomes intolerable, I couldn’t find a taxi. So I boarded a Sherbrooke Street bus. Jam-packed. No seats available. But sitting right before me there was a fetching young woman, mini-skirted, legs crossed. I immediately began to undress her in my mind’s eye, undoing zippers and snaps tantalizingly slowly. She must have been psychic, for, lo and behold, unless she was suffering from a nervous tic, she was giving me the eye. Actually smiling at old Barney Panofsky, making my ageing heart skip a beat. I smiled right back at her. Leaping up, she said, “Now why don’t you sit down, sir?”
“I am perfectly capable of standing,” I said, poking her back into her seat.
“Well,” she said, “serves me right for being considerate in this day and age.”
Onwards. At the risk of offending my neighbours, maybe even inviting a lawsuit like Jim’s boss, that age-ist boor, the truth is that the building I call home in downtown Montreal is actually a rich old fart’s castle. There’s no moat or drawbridge, but, all the same, it could easily qualify as a fortress for besieged Anglophone septuagenarians who tiptoe about in terror of our separatist provincial premier, whose school nickname was “The Weasel.” Most of my neighbours have unloaded their Westmount family mansions and shifted their stock portfolios to Toronto for safekeeping, as they wait for the Québécois pure laine (that is to say, racially pure Francophones) to vote in a second referendum on independence of a sort, yes or no, for this provincial backwater called Quebec.
Our building was recently disposed of by the Teitelbaums, sold retail to a new bunch out of Hong Kong, their suitcases laden with cash. It’s called The Lord Byng Manor, after Viscount Byng, the British general who led thousands of Canadians to their slaughter in the battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917, and later went on to become one of our governors general. The Hong Kong bunch, fingers to the wind, want to rename our stately pile of granite Le Château Dollard Des Ormeaux, in honour of an early hero of New France. Dollard Des Ormeaux is said by some to have sacrificed himself and his sixteen young companions to save Ville-Marie, as Montreal was known in 1660, in a battle with a band of three hundred Iroquois at the Long Sault. Or, conversely, he was a fur trader with his eye on the main chance, who came to a deserved bad end when his raiding party was ambushed. In any event, my neighbours are outraged by this insult to their Anglophone heritage, and a petition is circulating to protest the proposed