Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [98]
In preparation for the visit of Mr. and Mrs. Mock WASP to my house, I drew a “W” with a ballpoint on my right hand, a reminder not to whistle. I purchased appropriate books and left them lying about: the latest Harry Golden, a biography of Herzl, the new Herman Wouk, a photo book on Israel. I bought a chocolate cake at Aux Délices. Filled the fruit bowl. Hid the liquor. Unpacked a box of hideous china cups and saucers I had acquired only that morning and set five places with linen napkins. I vacuumed. Plumped up the sofa cushions. And anticipating that her mother would find an excuse to look into my bedroom, I checked it out inch by inch for hairs that did not belong to me. Then I brushed my teeth for the third time, hoping to kill the Scotch smell. Mr. and Mrs. Mock WASP, as well as their daughter, were already seated in the living room when my father finally arrived. Izzy was impeccably dressed in the clothes I had chosen for him at Holt Renfrew, but, as a small act of rebellion, he had added a touch distinctively his own. He was wearing his snappy soft felt fedora with that ridiculous, multicoloured brush in the brim large enough to serve as a duster. He also reeked of Old Spice and was in a mood to reminisce about his old days on the beat in Chinatown. “We was young fellers, pretty smart, and we soon learned us a few words of China. We watched from the rooftops when they made their trades. Then you could tell if they was smoking, because they always hung wet blankets on the street, due to the smell. Barney, would you pour me a Scotch, please,” he said, pushing away his teacup.
“I don’t know if I have any,” I hissed, glaring at him.
“Yeah, and there’s no coal in Newcastle,” he said, pronouncing the “t,”
“or snow in the Yukon.”
So I fetched him a bottle and a glass.
“What about you? Aren’t you drinking this afternoon?”
“No.”
“L’chaim,” said Izzy, belting one down, my own throat dry. “There was girls involved, you know. Oh yes, it was — Christ — now you take the average French-Canadian family, I don’t know about today but years ago they had ten or fifteen kids, so you know, they had nothing to eat, so they used to send the girls down there and one would bring another and you come in, you raid some place, you know, and you found four–five Chinamen with four–five girls, Christ, they’d even give them dope, you know. There was a lot of opium then. I’m talking 1932, when, you know, our entire detective force had only one automobile, a two-seater Ford.” Izzy paused to slap his knee. “If we catch us two crooks, you know, we’d just throw them across the hood and put the handcuffs on, and vroom-vroom, off we go. They’d be laying there like deer, you know, when you go hunting, they just lay on the hood.”
“But the engine was under it,” said my future bride. “Wasn’t it hot?”
“We weren’t going very far. Just to headquarters. And anyways I didn’t feel it,” said Izzy, chuckling. “They was on there.”
“On second thought,” I said, not daring to look at my future in-laws, “I just might have a wee drink myself.” And I reached for the bottle.
“Are you sure, darling?”
“I feel a cold coming on.”
Izzy now cleared his throat, and shot a wad of snot into one of my new linen napkins. Bull’s-eye. I sneaked a glance at my future mother-in-law, attracted by her rattling teacup.
“We’d arrest a guy, we’d take him downstairs to open him up, if you know what I mean?”
“You weren’t gratuitously violent with