Joshua Then and Now Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR

  Joshua Then and Now

  “A rich, labyrinthian and always entertaining novel, bursting with life and moral energy.…”

  – Toronto Star

  “A rich, profound novel which stands as a rare reminder that one of the prime purposes of literature is pleasure.”

  – Canadian Forum

  “Richler is a real writer, which is rare.… Richler’s satire can be as lethal as Swift’s and his humor as subtle as Leacock’s.”

  – Maclean’s

  “An impressive literary achievement.”

  – Regina Leader Post

  “Immensely readable and richly comic, Joshua Then and Now is a well-crafted, prismatic novel.… Richler’s language is coarse, irreverent, direct, his insights true, his judgements precise.”

  – London Free Press

  “A comic, rambling romp through four decades of Canadian society with the always audacious Richler as guide.”

  – Kingston Whig-Standard

  “Brilliant.… Richler is mordantly ironic, wearily worldywise and truly cynical.… A mature, beautifully crafted, skillfully written novel.…”

  – Financial Post

  “Crackling with wit, guile, black humor and contempt.…”

  – Calgary Sun

  BOOKS BY MORDECAI RICHLER

  FICTION

  The Acrobats (1954)

  Son of a Smaller Hero (1955)

  A Choice of Enemies (1957)

  The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)

  The Incomparable Atuk (1963)

  Cocksure (1968)

  The Street (1969)

  St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971)

  Joshua Then and Now (1980)

  Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989)

  Barney’s Version (1997)

  FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975)

  Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur (1987)

  Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case (1995)

  HISTORY

  Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!:

  Requiem for a Divided Country (1992)

  This Year in Jerusalem (1994)

  TRAVEL

  Images of Spain (1977)

  ESSAYS

  Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports (1968)

  Shovelling Trouble (1972)

  Notes on an Endangered Species and Others (1974)

  The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays (1978)

  Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album (1984)

  Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions (1990)

  Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports, and Opinions (1998)

  On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It (2001)

  ANTHOLOGIES

  The Best of Modern Humour (1983)

  Writers on World War II (1991)

  Copyright © 1980 by Mordecai Richler

  This book was originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1980.

  First Emblem Editions publication 2001

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Richler, Mordecai, 1931-

  Joshua then and now

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-560-1

  I. Title.

  PS8535.138J67 2001 C813′.54 C2001-930018-2

  PR9199.3.R52J67 2001

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  Series logo design: Brian Bean

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  Lay your sleeping head, my love,

  Human on my faithless arm;

  Time and fevers burn away

  Individual beauty from

  Thoughtful children, and the grave

  Proves the child ephemeral:

  But in my arms till break of day

  Let the living creature lie,

  Mortal, guilty, but to me

  The entirely beautiful.

  W. H. AUDEN

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Five

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  ONE

  1

  LOOK AT ME NOW, JOSHUA THOUGHT.

  His right leg was no longer suspended by pulleys from a hospital ceiling, but it was still held in a cast, multiple fractures healing slowly at his age. There were no more tubes unwinding out of his nostrils or feeding him intravenously or draining his lungs. Lungs bubbling with blood whenever he took a breath. Yet he continued to brood about all the blood they had pumped into him. Twelve alien pints. It flooded his dreams, it polluted his waking hours. The odds were that some of the blood had been peddled to the hospital by winos or junkies. I’m bound to come down with hepatitis, he thought. Worse, maybe.

  Although his cracked ribs were on the mend, or so they assured him, it was still excruciating for him to cough. The cast wouldn’t come off his right arm until Thursday, but he could already wiggle the fingers of his right hand. There were places where he was free to scratch. If a magazine was mounted on his reading stand, he could turn the pages himself. But Time, no longer an abomination (excoriating Adlai, clapping hands for Senator Joseph McCarthy of blessed memory), wasn’t much fun any more either, now that it was informed by decency. More liberal pieties. Neither were there any more gratifyingly unjust wars to read about, where you could at least root for the downtrodden. Screw the downtrodden – muggers, the lot. The Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese, were interchangeable enigmas to him, and he didn’t much care who won that one. Or, come to think of it, which National Liberation Front came out on top in Botswana, or whatever they were calling t
hat chunk of uppity Africa this week. Good news: Bob Hope, he read, has announced that he wants to do a TV special in China. After the Long March, following the years deprivation, the ultimate Great Leap Forward. The William Morris Agency, Swifty Lazar, Sue Mengers, or whoever represented hope with a capital H, would soon be out there in the Middle Kingdom, negotiating points with Teng Hsiao-p’ing, proffering serendipity in living color for once-recalcitrant chinks. Imagine, in the absence of Virginia Mayo, this year’s Miss America disco-dancing out of the mouth of a cave in Yenan clad in a Halston original.

  Next year maybe Sonny and Cher would come to us direct from Auschwitz, singing “The Way We Were” before the open doors of a reconstructed crematorium.

  The bandages had been peeled from his shaven skull, cracks having knitted together again. Doctors no longer surrounded his bed with solicitude, their expressions grave, whispering to each other, frowning over charts, even as they asked him his name, what day of the week it was, or the ages of his children. Alex, eighteen; Susy, fourteen; Teddy, ten. I will be no more of a dolt, he thought, than I was before. Small satisfaction. But at least he was through with the bedpan. If he was helped out of bed, taking it poco a poco, he was now able to go to the toilet himself.

  Only last Tuesday, Joshua’s bed had been wheeled surreptitiously into an elevator; he was loaded into an ambulance idling at a rear door of the Montreal General and sped across the Champlain Bridge, down the familiar Route 10, autoroute des cantons de l’est, to their cottage on Lake Memphremagog. Bliss. Cranked into a sitting position, he could now actually see the lake through the window, rather than sour septuagenarians shuffling down a hospital hall to file a good bowel movement, as if that were proof against a carcinoma. Although the ice had broken up only a week earlier, swollen sails were already skittering across the bay. There were also men in small boats anchored off the far point – most of them bona fide fishermen casting for perch, but others equipped with telephoto lenses, casting for Joshua Shapiro, Esquire. A few had come from as far as Fleet Street to wait him out at the Hatley Inn, where they insisted on smoked salmon for breakfast, complaining loudly about its stringiness, having already stuffed hotel bath towels into the bottoms of their suitcases.

  The birds were back. In the early morning hours, before anybody else in the cottage had risen, he watched the lake’s sole surviving loon wheeling over the water, diving for sunfish and smelts. Once he saw an early golden finch swooping between the budding birch trees. In the evening, there were the robins feeding on water spiders. He couldn’t see Susy and Teddy on the dock below – even if he strained, they were beyond his line of vision – but he could hear Susy squealing each time Teddy hooked a perch, and he blessed them.

  He was getting better. No doubt about it. One morning, with Reuben’s support, he even managed to hobble as far as his upstairs study, fighting dizziness, trying to gather reassurance from the familiar artifacts. The framed boxing, hockey, and baseball photographs. Cassius Clay, as he was then, gloating over a prone Sonny Liston. Al Weill sitting with a puffy-eyed, bandaged Rocky Marciano after the Walcott fight. A beetle-browed Maurice “The Rocket” Richard in full flight. Koufax throwing. And then, in the place of honor, his most cherished possession. The poster.

  MADRID WILL BE THE TOMB OF FASCISM

  ¡No pasarán!

  Every house a fortress, every street a trench, every neighborhood a wall of iron and combatants …

  Emulate Petrograd! 7 November on the Manzanares must be as glorious as on the Neva!

  WIVES –

  TOMORROW PREPARE TO TAKE YOUR HUSBAND’S

  LUNCH TO THE TRENCHES, NOT THE FACTORY

  VIVA MADRID WITHOUT A GOVERNMENT

  From his study window, he had a clear view of the Trimble estate across the bay. The shuttered boathouse, with the Grew 212 secured inside; the Tanzer bobbing at anchor, its sails still stored in the padlocked cabin. Because of the sheltering pines he couldn’t quite make out the incomparable tennis court or the rock garden which used to be floodlit at night, but there was the mansion itself, its windows hooded. He knew the French-Canadian pine antiques, the outsized custom-built sofas with the down pillows, the snooker table with the claw legs; everything lay temporarily under sheets. What he didn’t know was whether Trimble was going to put the estate up for sale – his act of contrition – or, more likely, would defiantly reopen the house on Victoria Day weekend, obliging Jane to confront the old bunch.… The hell with the Trimbles, he had enough problems of his own.

  Two old men, Reuben and the senator, guarded against intruders. The senator enjoyed rocking on the front porch, reading the latest Travis McGee, a fly swatter on one side, a bottle of Chablis riding in an ice bucket on the other. A shotgun resting on his lap. Reuben – wizened now, his hands flecked with liver spots, but still sporting a straw boater at a jaunty angle – was here, there, and everywhere when he wasn’t contemplating the morning line in the Daily Racing Form. Reuben watched over the children on the lake and read to them from his dog-eared Bible before tucking them in at night. He scoured the woods for interlopers and patrolled the dirt road that led to the cottage.

  The day before yesterday two men in a red Mustang, a reporter and a photographer, had stopped Reuben on the road, mistaking him for a handyman. “Je m’excuse,” the reporter said, “je cherche la maison de Joshua Shapiro.”

  Reuben, letting his wrists hang limp, said, “You don’t look the type.”

  The reporter chuckled, appreciative, and explained that he represented the Montreal Gazette.

  “Well, son, it’s a good thing you stopped me,” Reuben said, pausing to take a sip of V.O. out of his hip flask before passing it on to the reporter.

  The reporter, determined to prove a good fellow, drank from the flask without wiping the neck. Retrieving it with a shaky hand, Reuben contrived to spill rye over his jacket. “Whoops. Sorry,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s O.K.,” the reporter replied tightly.

  “You’re on the wrong road.”

  “But we were told –” the photographer began.

  “Which is the right road?” the reporter asked.

  “I figure that’s worth ten bucks.”

  The reporter dug into his pocket for a ten-dollar bill, making a mental note to claim twenty from the office.

  “The Shapiro place is like a mile further down the main road. First right, and then take the turn-off second left right after the ‘Patates Frites.’ It’s a dirt road and you keep bearing left. Eventually you come to a sign that says ‘Road Closed, Bridge Under Repair,’ but they’re just trying to jew you. Remove the barrier and plow right through. Got that?”

  “Oh, is he ever bullshitting us,” the photographer said.

  “I know.”

  “That’s the house up there through the trees. I was here once before to photograph the senator.”

  Reuben unzipped his windbreaker to show that he was wearing a gun. “If you don’t turn around right now,” he said, “I’m going to shoot out your tires. Ping ping ping.”

  “We’ll be back with the police.”

  “Officer Orville Moon is the fella you want.”

  They found Moon flipping through a copy of Penthouse in Lapointe’s General Store.

  “Yessir,” Moon said, listening to the reporter’s story, “yes,” and he strolled back with them to the Mustang, waiting for the reporter to slip behind the wheel. “You the one who’s driving?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Because you stink to high heaven of alcoholic spirits,” he said, “and I’m going to have to book you.”

  The senator was waiting for Reuben on the porch, arthritic hand outstretched. “My share, please, partner.”

  “He was only good for a fiver,” Reuben said, handing him two-fifty.

  Reuben Shapiro was Joshua’s father and the senator, Stephen Andrew Hornby, his father-in-law. At night, after the children had gone to bed, Reuben strolled down to the gate, locked it, put out his BEWARE OF THE DOG/CHIEN MÉC
HANT sign, and set his trip wires on the way back to the cottage. Then he and the senator played gin rummy in the living room or had a Bible discussion or watched the Expos lose again on television. Every now and then Reuben took a turn round the property, checking out his wires. The first night they had been set too low and a raccoon had started all the pots and pans jingling, Reuben diving for his flashlight, the senator leaping for his shotgun.

  The reporters didn’t get anywhere asking questions in the village either, because the cottage had been in the senator’s family since he had been a boy himself and everybody for miles around remembered Pauline as a child. “Trout” they used to call her, because her fair skin was speckled with freckles. Now they felt sorry for Pauline and resented Joshua. I hardly blame them, Joshua thought.

  Joshua was allowed to read his mail now, although he suspected certain letters were still being withheld. Yesterday a real zinger had slipped through Reuben’s net. It was from the David and Jonathan Society, a newly formed group of young, caring, Jewish faggots. They wished him well, “Shalom, coming out is easier with friends,” and invited him to be a guest of honor at their Purim ball. To each his own Queen Esther. He was also now considered well enough to see the newspapers and magazines. On the whole, his colleagues had not dealt viciously with his case, delivering no more than he deserved, but he realized there was no way his TV contract could be renewed for next season. The hell with it. Meanwhile, as might have been expected, gay publications everywhere had sprung to his defense. The Body Politic, Canada’s very own journal for homophiles, had put him on its cover. A martyr. The Glad Day Bookshop, in Toronto, was moving the old paperback edition of his badly dated The Volunteers – an appreciation of the men who had fought with the International Brigades in Spain – faster than the latest Gore Vidal. Mandate, The International Magazine of Entertainment & Eros, had managed to get an interview with his mother, or, more likely, she had sought them out. Esther Shapiro, née Leventhal, but best known as Esty Blossom.