Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [72]
“I could take you to lunch.”
“You’re old enough to be my grandfather.”
“Next question, please.”
“Had the baby Clara miscarried been born white, would you still have abandoned her?”
“Divorced her, you mean. Well now, that’s an interesting question. I might have been foolish enough to think it was mine.”
“But you are deeply prejudiced against Afro-Americans.”
“The hell I am.”
“I have been in touch with Ismail ben Yussef, whom you knew under his slave name, Cedric Richardson, and he claims you have taken to sending him abusive letters.”
“I’m willing to swear on the heads of my grandchildren that he’s lying.”
She reached into a folder and passed me a Xerox of a letter, which was an appeal on behalf of something called The Elders of Zion Foundation to establish mugging fellowships for black brothers. “This is absolutely disgraceful,” I said. “It’s in the worst possible taste.”
“But isn’t that your signature at the bottom of the page?”
“No.”
She sighed heavily.
“For years now Terry McIver — that racist — that misogynist — has been sending people abusive letters and signing my name to them.”
“Come off it.”
“And if you want respectable men not to stare at your charming bosom, why don’t you wear a bra, so that your nipples don’t protrude. It’s disconcerting, to say the least.”
“Now look here, Mr. Panofsky, I’ve already been pinched or grabbed by enough men tripping on penis power, so cut out the funny stuff right now. The reason why gay women frighten you is because you are terrified of what this would mean to the quote, normal, unquote patriarchal, authoritarian system based on women’s submission to men.”
“I don’t mean to pry,” I said, “but what do your parents think about your being a lesbian?”
“I prefer to think of myself as a humansexual.”
“Then we have something in common.”
“Did you agree to this interview just to poke fun at me?”
“Why don’t we continue this discussion at lunch?”
“You can go straight to hell,” she said, gathering her things together. “If not for you, Clara would be alive today. Terry McIver told me that.”
14
Paris 1952. Grudgingly surfacing from yet another vodka stupor only a few days after Clara’s death, unsure of my whereabouts, it seemed that I was being summoned by something between a scratching and a knocking at my door, wherever it was. Go away, I thought. But the knocker persisted. Boogie again, perhaps. Or Yossel. My well-intentioned nurses. Go away, I thought, turning to the wall.
“Mr. Panofsky. Mr. Panofsky, please,” pleaded a voice unfamiliar to me. A supplicant’s voice.
“Fuck off, whoever you are. I’m not well.”
“Please,” came the whiny voice again. “I will stand here until you open the door.”
Five p.m. I rose from the sofa, broken springs twanging, stumbled into the bathroom, and splashed cold water on my face. Maybe it was somebody who wanted to take the apartment off my hands. I had advertised it in the International Herald-Tribune. So I hastily gathered up soiled laundry, empty bottles, and plates with uneaten frankfurters or egg remnants on them, and dumped them into the nearest drawer. Careful not to trip over packed cartons containing her things, I opened the door to a small, tubby stranger, with a salt-and-pepper Van Dyke beard, wearing horn-rimmed glasses that magnified his sad brown spaniel’s eyes. I took him to be in his early fifties. He wore a woollen winter coat with a Persian lamb collar and a homburg, which he promptly removed to reveal a black yarmulke fastened to his flowing grey hair with a bobby pin. His coat was unbuttoned and I saw that the fat of his tie had been neatly rent with scissors. “What do you want here?” I asked.
“What do I want here? But I’m Charnofsky,” he said. “Chaim Charnofsky,” he repeated, as if that explained everything.
Charnofsky? Her first husband. I shook my pounding head, trying, unavailingly, to clear it of the jackhammer within. “The art teacher?” I asked, baffled.