Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [66]
“Oh, he’s always touching her at the table. It makes me want to puke.”
“Darling, I know how you feel, but you mustn’t do anything to hurt your mother. Besides, Blair has always been good to you and the boys. Obviously he was incapable of having children of his own, which could have something to do with it. Touching her where at the table?”
“Oh, you know. Holding her hand. Stroking her arm. Kissing her cheek when he gets up to refill her wine glass. Icky stuff like that.”
“Now I’m going to tell you something, but you must never repeat it. Poor Blair is one of those men who has always felt insecure about his masculinity, and that’s why he feels obliged to make public displays of his affection for your mother.”
“I suppose Mom complained to Saul, who was always her pet —”
“I think he reminds her of me, when I was still young enough for her.”
“— and he blabbed to you. Oh, I’m so angry with Saul. We had words.”
“Saul adores you. He insists I come to New York again soon. How about that?”
“You come to see us first. Please, Daddy. Gavin will take you to a hockey game.”
“The Maple Leafs?”
“You ought to hire him to handle your taxes, he’s such a whiz, and he wouldn’t charge you. What will you do if the separatists win the referendum?”
“They won’t. So there’s no need for you to worry.”
“Oh, you can be so condescending. When we were kids you could talk politics with the boys for hours, but never with me.”
“That’s not true.”
“ ‘There’s no need for you to worry.’ I’m not stupid, you know.”
“Of course you’re not. All I meant is that you’ve probably got enough problems of your own to cope with.”
Kate taught Eng. lit. at a school for gifted children, and one night a week she helped immigrants with their English in a church basement. She was constantly badgering me to finance a film about the mother of all Canadian suffragettes, the admirable Nellie McClung.
“Soon it will be Christmas and we’ll be expected for dinner at Mom’s. A tree and a menorah lamp. Mike and Caroline will fly over with the kids, and Saul will be there, and he and Mike will start shoving it to each other the minute they come through the door. Last year I couldn’t stop crying. I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you too, Kate.”
“We used to be some family. I can’t forgive Mom for leaving you.”
“But it’s my fault that I lost her.”
“I’m going to hang up now. Before I start to blubber.”
The tension between Miriam and Kate had almost always been there, smouldering. I couldn’t understand it. After all, it was Miriam, not me, who had read stories to Kate every night, taught her how to read, and took her to all those museums and on theatrical binges in New York. My parental role had largely been confined to providing a good life, teasing the kids at the table, leaving Miriam to settle disputes, and, oh yes, putting together those libraries after I had consulted Miriam. “When a child is born,” I once explained to the kids, “some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you’re going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent.”
Late one afternoon when Kate was in her last year at Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s, she came home to discover a harassed Miriam, one eye on the kitchen clock, preparing two ducks for the oven. Perfectionist that Miriam was, she was plucking the last, barely visible, feather needles with an eyebrow tweezer. There were pots steaming on every gas jet. Bread waiting to be baked. Wine glasses, just out of the dishwasher, were lined up to be inspected against the light and to be washed again if necessary. A mound of strawberries in a glass bowl had yet to be hulled. A sullen Kate went directly to the fridge, pulled out a yogurt, cleared a space for herself at the counter, and sat down to read Middlemarch where she had left off the day before.
“Kate, you could be a good goose and remove the stalks from those berries for me and then plump