Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [97]
As things turned out, he was right to object to his daughter marrying such a scamp, but he did not intervene, for fear of losing her entirely. Summoning me into his library, he said, “I can’t pretend this match delights me. You come from no family, you have no education, and you are engaged in a vulgar business. But once the two of you are wed it will be contingent upon my good wife and me to accept you as one of our own, if only for the sake of our beloved daughter.”
“Why, you couldn’t have put it more graciously,” I said.
“Be that as it may, I do have one request. My good wife, as you know, was one of the first Jewish women to graduate from McGill. Class of ’22. She is a past president of Hadassah and has had her name entered in the mayor’s Golden Book. She has been commended by our prime minister for the work she did with British children who were evacuated here during the last global conflict —”
Yes, but only after he had written to the prime minister’s office, pleading for that letter of appreciation, which was now framed and hung in their living room.
“— She is a most fastidious lady, and I would be grateful if, in the future, you would refrain from garnishing your conversation with expletives at our dining-room table. Surely this is not too large an imposition to impose on your good self.”
With hindsight, there were things to be said in the old boy’s favour. He had served in the Tank Corps during the Second World War, a captain twice mentioned in dispatches. Look at it this way. The sour truth is that many people whom liberals like me poke fun at — army colonels, dim private-school boys, suburban golfers, banal-tongued mediocrities, tiresome stuffed shirts — were the ones who went to war in 1939 and saved Western civilization, while Auden, ostensibly an anti-Fascist commando, fled to America when the barbarians were at the gate.40
My father-in-law’s business reputation was impeccable. He was a constant husband, and a loving father to The Second Mrs. Panofsky. Stricken with cancer only a year after we married, he behaved with dignity during his last wasting months, as stoic as any of the G. A. Henty heroes he so admired. Unfortunately, my relationship with both Mr. and Mrs. Mock WASP got off to a rocky start. There was, for instance, my first meeting with my future mother-in-law, a lunch à trois in the Ritz Gardens, arranged by my apprehensive bride who coached me for hours the night before. “You are not to order more than one drink at the table before lunch.”
“Right.”
“And, whatever you do, no whistling at the table. Absolutely no whistling at the table. She can’t stand it.”
“But I’ve never whistled at the table in my life.”
Things started badly, Mrs. Mock WASP disapproving of our table. “I should have had my husband make the reservation,” she said.
It was an effort to begin with, the conversation halting, Mrs. Mock WASP infuriating me by demanding answers to direct questions about my family background, my past, my health, and my prospects, before I eased us into safer territory: the death of Cecil B. DeMille, how enjoyable Cary Grant was in North by Northwest, and the coming Bolshoi Ballet tour. In fact, my behaviour was four-star exemplary until she told me how she had adored Exodus, by Leon Uris, and, all at once, I began to whistle “Dixie.”
“He’s whistling at the table.”
“Who?” I asked.
“You.”
“But I never. Shit, was I?”
“He didn’t mean to, Mother.”
“I apologize,” I said, but when the coffee came I was so nervous I found myself suddenly whistling “Lipstick on Your Collar,” one of that year’s hit numbers, stopping abruptly. “I don’t know what’s got into me.”
“I would like to contribute my share of the bill,” said my future mother-in-law, rising from the table.
“Barney wouldn’t hear of it.”
“We come here often. They know us. My husband always tips twelve and a half per-cent.”
Next there came the dreaded day I was obliged to introduce my father to my future in-laws. My mother was already out of it by this time (not that she was ever deeply into it), wasting in a nursing