Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [71]
TO NONE WILL WE SELL, TO NONE
DENY OR DELAY, RIGHT OR JUSTICE.
Clause 40, Magna Carta, 1215.
Inevitably, I run into The Second Mrs. Panofsky from time to time. Once I caught sight of her in the lingerie department of Holt Renfrew, where I like to browse. On another occasion, at the takeout counter in The Brown Derby, where she was loading up on sufficient quantities of kishka, roast brisket, chopped liver, and potato salad to feed a bar mitzvah party, but which I knew was for herself alone. Most recently, I encountered her in the Ritz dining room, where, to jump ahead in my story, I had taken Ms. Morgan to dinner, if only to continue our discussion of those committed, possibly not irretrievably, to the Sapphic persuasion. The Second Mrs. Panofsky was with her cousin, the notary, and his wife. Her own plate wiped clean of gravy with chunks of bread, she now picked up her fork and began to spear morsels of meat and potatoes off their plates. She glared at us, of course, taking note of the bottle of Dom Perignon floating in a bucket at our tableside. Their bill settled, she contrived to pass by our table, where she stopped, smiled menacingly at Ms. Morgan, then turned to me and inquired, “And how are your grandchildren these days?”
“Don’t look back,” I said, “or you might turn into a pillar of salt.”
The Second Mrs. Panofsky, while never svelte, even as a bride, but once pleasingly zaftig to give her her due, had taken long ago to alleviating her continuing sorrow at the table. Out of necessity, she now wears tentlike caftans to accommodate a girth that would do credit to a sumo wrestler. She walks with difficulty, breathing hard, favouring a cane. She puts me in mind of Garrick’s description of Sam Johnson’s Tetty at fifty: “ … very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastic in her dress, and affected in both her speech and general behaviour.” I’m told she has few friends left, but does enjoy an intimate relationship with her TV set. I like to visualize her in the Hampstead mansion I paid for, supine on the sofa, devouring Belgian chocolates out of a bucket as she watches one soap opera or another, dozing before she settles into dinner, using a shovel rather than a knife and fork, and then sinking to the sofa again before her TV set.
At breakfast, I dutifully went through The Gazette and The Globe and Mail, doing my best to keep up with the comedy we’re living through in Canada’s one and only “distinct society.”
Such is the panic here these days that those prescient, young, middle-class Jewish couples who decamped to Toronto in the eighties, escaping not only endless tribal hassle but also overbearing, intrusive parents, are now at risk. Many of them are getting urgent phone calls from their ageing mamas and papas. “Herky, I know she isn’t crazy about us, your wonderful wife, the shopper, but thank God you have that spare bedroom, because we’re moving in next Wednesday until we can find an apartment in your neighbourhood. Remember, Mama can’t stand rock music, you’ll have to speak to your children, God bless them, and if you must smoke while we’re there, it will have to be on the back porch. But we won’t get in anybody’s way. Herky, are you there? Herky, say something.”
The latest opinion polls indicating a dead heat in the referendum, Dink’s now reverberates with whistling-past-the-graveyard banter. One of the regulars, Cy Tepperman, a clothing manufacturer, anticipating a boycott of his goods in the rest of Canada, has said, “I’m seriously thinking of having ‘Made in Ontario’ labels sewn into my jeans, just in case those bastards win.” The Gazette columnist Zack Keeler can be counted on, as usual, for puerile jokes. “Have you heard that the Newfies are for the Yes side? They think it will take two and a half hours less to drive to Ontario if Quebec separates.”
Ms. Morgan, of “Dykes on Mikes,” told me on the morning of her