Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [76]
“I’m worried about Clara,” he says, watching me closely. But I decline the trap he is setting for me.
670 words today.
Paris, Nov. 21, 1952. Another letter from my father in which I discover three split infinitives, two dangling participles, as well as the usual lapse into pleonasms here and there. Mother has taken a turn for the worse and longs to see me before she expires, but I have no wish to endure her opprobrium. I cannot put my manuscript aside, or risk the angst that such a visit would entail. The quarrels. The migraines. And her inevitable attempt to extract a deathbed pledge from me to stay on in Montreal to look after my father, whose health is also failing. I doubt, given my father’s uxorious nature, that he will survive her for long. They were high-school sweethearts, having met, appropriately enough, at a Young Communist League picnic.
Nothing written today. Not a word.
16
My mood vile after Ms. Morgan had spurned my luncheon invitation and stormed out of my apartment, I attempted to calm my nerves by donning my straw boater, reaching for my silver-topped antique cane, and slipping into my tap-dance shoes. Accompanied by a King Oliver CD, I warmed up with some rhythm tap, managed a passable Shim Sham Shimmy and a neat Pulling the Trenches, but it failed to settle me down. I was in a state because the resoundingly silly but delectable Ms. Morgan was the recipient of a grant from The Clara Charnofsky Foundation for Wimyn, having been awarded $2,500 to help her complete her M.A. thesis, “On Wimyn as Victims in the Québécois Novel.”
Mea culpa yet again. Mea maxima culpa.
You see, it was Clara’s cousin, the highly thought of NYU professor, who would lovingly sort out her manuscripts and drawings and feed them to publishers and art dealers as they increased incrementally in value over the years. But he first insisted on seeing me in New York, an encounter I agreed to with dread, anticipating a difficult meeting with an academic drudge, prejudging, as I am wont to do. “You do realize,” Hymie Mintzbaum once said, coming off a session with one or another of his shrinks, “that it’s a defence mechanism. You’re convinced that anybody who meets you for the first time will consider you a shit, so you take preventive action. Relax, boychick. When they get to know you better they will realize that they were right. You are a shit.”
Norman Charnofsky turned out to be a gentle if naïve man, and a stranger to avarice. A gute neshuma, as my grandmother used to say. A good soul. A clear and present danger to himself and others. Having heard from his abominable uncle Chaim that I was a boozer, Norman thoughtfully suggested we get together in the lobby of the Algonquin, where I was staying, and immediately reinforced my preconceived prejudice against him by ordering a Perrier for himself. An unprepossessing little man he was, with pewter hair, thick glasses, a bulbous nose, his tie gravy-stained, and his corduroy suit salted with dandruff round the shoulders and worn thin at the knees. The ancient schoolboy’s satchel he set down beside him was overloaded to the point of bursting. “I should begin,” he said, “by thanking you for taking the time to see me, and apologizing for my uncle Chaim, who had no idea that the child Clara miscarried wasn’t yours, while you were too considerate to point that out to him.”
“So you’ve read her diaries.”
“Indeed I have.”
“Including the last entry about the dinner I failed to attend.”
“My uncle Chaim’s surprising visit to your flat couldn’t have been easy for either of you.”
I shrugged.
“Please don’t misunderstand me. I have an enormous regard for my uncle Chaim. He is an embittered man, yes, but with cause, and many have reason to be grateful to him. Myself foremost. Chaim was the first of the Charnofskys to come to America from Poland, and from the very beginning he denied himself, pinching pennies, and sending for relatives. If not for his devotion my parents would have remained in Lodz,