Son of a Smaller Hero Page 15

  Noah remembered how long ago the two of them had used to go to the synagogue every Saturday morning. When the rabbi got up to speak Wolf and others had used to retire to the back room where they had gossiped about business and sports. “Speechs,” Wolf had used to say. Noah didn’t want to speak to Max. It wouldn’t help, he thought. But the pathos of his father’s demands unnerved him. “I’ll speak to him,” he said lamely.

  Wolf slapped him on the back timidly. They ordered more chocolate biscuits. “What’s it like with them?” Wolf asked. “You know …”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do they really go for the bottle that much?”

  “Some do, some don’t.”

  “Is it the real McCoy what they say about their wives? That you can – well, you know – play tiddlywinks with them?”

  Noah flushed. “No,” he said.

  “I’ve heard that some of them – now I’m not saying it’s true – I’m just telling you what I heard. That some of them are men who like men. Now you wouldn’t for the life of you find a Jew doing that. Hell, it’s no fun, anyway. What do you think?”

  “You’re right about it not being much fun, I guess. At least not for you or me, but …”

  “All right. Look at it from this angle. On New Year’s they drink to beat the band. We fast. It’s healthy to fast. It cleans out the system. Hey, you know why our dames wear two-piece bathing suits?”

  “No. Why?”

  “To separate the meat from the milk.…”

  Noah laughed. “Hey, what did the chief rabbi say when he went to visit the pope?”

  “Vus is neis, Pius?”

  “Gut Yontiv, pontiff.”

  They both laughed richly. Wolf nearly upset his Coke bottle. Noah coughed up his chocolate biscuit.

  “Sometimes everything is good, eh?” Wolf said quickly. “It would be good all the time if only people were nice to each other.…”

  Noah averted his eyes. A vast sadness overwhelmed him.

  “Anyway, it tuchos a long time. But as I was saying. I’m not against them. Paw, now, spits when one of their funerals pass. Me, I’m for every guy having an even break. They don’t like Paw, you know, but I’m well liked. Moore says I’m a good Jew.”

  “The hell with Moore,” Noah said sharply.

  Wolf hardened. He hadn’t understood.

  “How’s the Zeyda?” Noah asked desperately.

  But it was too late. Wolf’s suspicions had been aroused. He doesn’t like Moore because he’s a plain man, Wolf thought. Me, too. He has no respect for guys like us. If I were a partner in the business, if I had the money in that box, he would respect me. You bet he would. “You should visit Zeyda, you know. He’s got plenty of ashcay stored away. He keeps it in a box. He …” But Noah wasn’t listening. He was trying to think of a way to correct the sudden and unfortunate misunderstanding between them. He stared at Karl, who sat on the kitchen chair next to the Coca-Cola freezer, grinning absently.

  “Hey, you listening? You …”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “You’re too smart, Noah. You should have respect. You and Shloime. Do you know Paw threw Shloime out of the house? Shloime says he hates us. Me, too, he hates. He says he’ll get even. You – you think I don’t know about you and that femme? You think …”

  “Please let’s not quarrel, Daddy.”

  “Sure, sure. You run around all you want. Who gets blamed? Me, I get blamed. Ever since you’ve been a small pisher I’ve spent my time apologizing for you to others. You care? I could go to hell tomorrow as far as you’re concerned. Look at you. You’re no longer a Jew and you’ll never become one of them. So what are you? A nothing.…”

  Added to the guilt that he felt about his parents’ troubles was a slow creeping shift in his relationship with Miriam. He was restless, having been without any occupation for too long, and he began to resent her dependency on him. He had been amused, earlier, by the fetish that she had made of tidiness, but now that kind of thing increasingly got on his nerves. She was forever cleaning up after him – replacing books on shelves and wiping up ashes and collecting glasses and folding his trousers and sweeping under his chair – as if, in order to compensate for what outsiders thought an illicit relationship, she was going to keep the interior as clean and as well-ordered as she could. However, he didn’t consider the matter worth fighting about. So he let it go. But he was alarmed because his relationship with her – the petty anxieties and the duties – was beginning to duplicate his relationship with his mother.

  On that first Wednesday that he drove into Montreal to visit his mother Noah bought a French grammar and a dictionary and on his return to Ste. Adele he began to spend his mornings studying. He fixed up one of the bedrooms as his study. She was not allowed to sweep or tidy up in that room, but unfortunately he felt himself without privacy even there. He was always conscious of her waiting in the next room. Bored.

  He felt intimidated in bed at night. He knew that eventually she was going to turn to him and say: “What are you thinking about?” And in chill anticipation of that question he found himself thinking what he could say that he was thinking about. Then he was ashamed. It’s all in my head, he thought. He turned to her tenderly, but for the first time since they had met that tenderness was simulated. Loving was becoming his responsibility.

  “I was snubbed again in the village today. Somebody must have told Mrs. Callahan that we aren’t married. I think her daughter is one of Theo’s students.”

  “Surely you don’t let things like that worry you?”

  “Noah, I’m a woman. Whenever I go into a store I keep my left hand in my pocket. That’s where my ring should be.…”

  “But Miriam, love, I’ll marry you gladly.”

  “Would you? Do you realize that when I’m forty you’ll still be in your twenties?”

  “Twenty-nine. Perhaps we should leave Ste. Adele. I could get a job in Montreal.”

  “Driving a cab? Noah, you’re a child. Besides, don’t think it would be that easy for us to get an apartment.”

  “Divorce Theo and we’ll get married.”

  “Before I divorce him I’d like to know if you have any ambitions beyond driving a taxi.”

  “Yes. I’d like to be a partner in my father’s business.”

  Miriam felt isolated.

  On that first Wednesday when she had driven to Montreal with Noah she had phoned friend after friend, only to be snubbed by some and reproved by others. So that she had been forced to realize, with a suddenness that was jarring, that she was no longer Mrs. Hall, the professor’s attractive wife, who was welcomed at faculty teas, garden parties, and in the homes of Montreal’s bright young people. All those trappings that had become her identity had been washed away with Theo and for the sake of love. Pop! Her security, all that she had striven for, had burst like a balloon. Miriam was terrified.

  Her first love affair had been with Chuck Adams. She remembered that the bedroom had been full of books. He was brilliant. She had been told that. His unfinished manuscript had been piled neatly on the table, beside the liqueur cabinet. She had undressed with her back towards him.

  “Would you like a drink first?” he had asked drunkenly.

  “No. But you go ahead.” Then she had touched his chest with her hand. “Men are so warm,” she had said. And Chuck had laughed an abrupt, affable laugh and had put down his drink. “Please try not to hurt me,” she had said. “I …”

  “I’ll be easy.”

  “Would you like another drink first?” she had asked quickly.

  “After, maybe.”

  He had been the first to awaken. Big and muscular, he had jumped out of bed and grinned into the mirror. “What a stud! Look into that mirror. They should make me a YWCA secretary. God, think of all the women I’ll never lay! I’m weak, Miriam. The easiest make in Montreal. Be a good girl and scratch my back, eh?”

  “If you show me where you keep your things in the kitchen I’ll make breakfast.”


  He had noticed the chill in her voice, and they had gotten through breakfast with some embarrassment.

  “C’mon, Miriam. Be a sport. Hell,” he had said. “This is 1940. All we did was have a turn in the sack.”

  She had given him her phone number and the name of the place where she had been employed for the summer. She had waited five days. A week had passed. Two weeks. But Chuck hadn’t phoned. She had known all about him. That he had had affairs with the others, for instance. Marg had pretended not to like him. “Son of the rich, you know. Bit of a snob.” But Miriam had been drawn to him. Why didn’t he call? Wasn’t she attractive enough?

  He had finally called, and they had spent a fine long weekend together in the Laurentians. But after that he hadn’t called again.

  She had not yet been twenty. But there had been something hopeful and wild, a kind of craving in her eyes, that had drawn men to her easily.

  Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.

  “Round heels. Any fool can see that that kid could never get enough,” Collins had said at lunch one day in Mother Martin’s, popping a meat ball into his mouth. “Some priest’s probably going into her.”

  And in reply Jerry Selby had winked.

  Jerry Selby was the senior partner of Selby & Clark, an advertising firm that was going places. A week after he had hired Miriam, Jerry’s wife had passed through the office and frowned. “Don’t be silly, honey,” Jerry had said. “Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t. Never pays to monkey around in your own back yard. But that girl’s a selling point. Take old Collins, now …”

  Jerry had disgusted her. But he had paid her more than she had been worth. He was insistent. I’m weak, she had thought. I would like to drive down Queen Street in his Buick. Still, she had repelled his advances. She had been waiting for Chuck.

  Miriam had seen Chuck in the Cafe André that night.

  “I’m leaving the day after tomorrow. If it lasts, I’ll join the RCAF. I’m thinking of …”

  “Why haven’t you called?”

  “I’ve been busy. Hell. Be a sport, Miriam. Don’t …”

  “Will you write?”

  “Sure I’ll write.”

  “No you won’t.”

  “Miriam. Hell …”

  “Be a sport. Hell. Be a … Would you like my phone number for your friends? I’m a very good sport, Chuck. You tell your friends that.”

  “Look at Theo, there. He’s crazy about you. Why …”

  “I would like to take this beer bottle,” she had said. “Break it. And twist it into …”

  “Let’s go up to my place,” he had said thickly.

  “I was surprised you remembered my name that first night. I was scared, you know. I thought you would turn to me in bed and ask me my name.”

  “Listen, I didn’t make any promises. All we did was …”

  “… was have a turn in the sack.”

  “Yes. That’s all.”

  “You get up now, you scram, or I’ll break this beer bottle and do what I said.”

  She had not seen him again until after the war when she had visited him in the St. Mary’s Veteran’s Hospital. He had been very bitter about his crash and – once out in the hospital corridor – she had cried.

  She did see Jerry, though. “There’s nothing like it, baby,” Jerry had said. Many other men had followed, and she had acquired a reputation for being that kind of girl. Nobody had understood that all those men were being used in anger. That all that time she had been looking for the one man who could destroy her. Word had got back to Queen Street. She was wild. There had been some despair, and some gratification also, in that. They had been brought up on lines. They had been told, for instance, that there was God, but not that He was dead. They had been told that Canada was a free country but not that although only the leisured could afford freedom all men were free to die for it. They had accepted the lies that had been offered them like the wiser natives must have accepted shiny beads and bits of broken glass from the white traders, not because they had believed but because they had chosen not to quarrel.

  Pausing in the heat, Miriam remembered how the people of Queen Street had turned against her. A wild woman. Paul had said: “Of course you’re welcome. You’re my sister. Come around whenever you like. But phone first. I don’t want the kids to know.” Looking down a sweltering St. Catherine Street she saw only the tenements of Griffintown and heard nothing but the banging and clanging of machinery. A landscape made out of an arrangement of different-coloured beer-bottle tops loomed up before her. Her father dressed in his best suit and waving his fists and yelling, rushed towards the oncoming truck. All her nerves tingled. Noah, her lover, had led her out onto the sands and into the water, until, having gone so far that it was no longer possible to wade but necessary to swim, she turned around and saw that the shore was far, far away. What if Noah swam away from her?

  What about Theo? Was he having an affair? Being unfaithful? She was almost tempted to phone him. Perhaps he could help her?

  St. Catherine Street shook. Damp streaks poured down grey bank buildings. Cellophane ice decorated a hundred similar AIR CONDITIONED signs. She slipped in the nearest door. Fans whirred after her, waitresses swept past with wet patches under their armpits, and the stout ladies who sat in Murray’s Restaurant, fanning themselves with menus, paused to stare at her. All of them. Hold it, Miriam thought. Hold it. She concentrated on the window but St. Catherine Street, that had plenty of twitching neon and screeching horns and lots of people passing quickly and too much heat, had no help and offered no answers.

  From that day on each morning’s awakening was another ordeal. Another muffled shriek. She began to search for omens. If the milkman arrived before nine then the day would be good; if Noah didn’t finish his coffee at breakfast then the day would be foul. She seldom left the cottage without returning to see whether the door had been bolted, or prepared coffee without checking twice on whether the gas jets had been turned off. Everybody is talking about us, she thought. Noah, perhaps, doesn’t realize it. He doesn’t care about such things. But – why do I hound him? What am I trying to do to us? Isn’t this what I wanted? When he read at night Miriam watched him with hatred and love and envy. He was her world now. The time of beauty and the wild years too, Chuck and Theo, Paul, were all stale memories. She dipped into these memories the way other women dip into their knitting-bags, dropping a few stitches here and embroidering a bit there, but the suspicion that she had no identity of her own, no inner strength, frightened her. He has that quality, she thought, but he doesn’t know it yet. She recalled that her first impression had been that he was a ruthless man. He seemed to move from one experience to another assuredly, leaving what was no longer useful behind him without regret or sentiment. She suddenly realized that for as long as she had known him he had never lost his temper. Social injustice outraged Theo, not him. He had once told her that he wept occasionally. But she would have to see that to believe it.

  He began to play a part with her. But Miriam was astute. When he first began to bring her flowers and other gifts she started to suspect his feelings. She knew that Noah liked most things to be understood. She was torn between a fear of losing him and another fear, just as real, that warned her that she had better let go before it was too late. Once or twice she prayed. She went for long walks on the hills and got into the habit of sitting absently by the stream behind the cottage, her feet dangling in the water. She remembered that day she had gone to meet Marg at the Ritz, for that had been the first time that she had seen things through Noah’s eyes. Gradually he had possessed her completely. She felt that she no longer had any vision of her own. She started to dip more critically into her memories. Theo had obviously needed her, and that had given her a kind of dignity. She began to understand that there was a dichotomy in her approach to living. A part of her wanted the security that was Theo and another part of her – that had not been acquired – wanted love. She remembered that Noah ha
d once said that the decision that she had come to had been no decision at all. She had not chosen. She wanted love, but on the terms of security. I have ruined myself, she thought.

  One morning Noah found a letter on the dining-room table.

  “Dear Marg,

  Why don’t you come to visit us?

  Aren’t we old friends?

  You know that I’ve left Theo and am living with Noah up in Ste. Adele. I would like so much for you two to meet. Noah is younger than I am and a bit vague about his plans, but we love each other terribly much. I don’t know if and when we’ll get married. Getting a divorce is such a mess in Quebec. But he is the finest man that I have ever met and I’d be simply lost without him. I almost think that I’d commit suicide if he left me or …”

  He dropped the letter.

  It had been left on the table – casually – but opened and on the book that he was reading. He had no doubt that the letter, addressed to Marg, had been written for him and left there for him to read. Beating her, he thought, would have been kinder. He walked over to the window and saw her sitting – a bent and solitary figure – by the stream. A shudder ran through him. He wanted to rush out and embrace her, but he didn’t. He was too ashamed. He had stripped her, another and lovelier human being, and the sun was so fine in her hair. He slipped out of the back door and wandered down the dirt road.

  If he left her, the Adlers would be triumphant. They would say that an affair or marriage between a Jew and a Gentile was doomed from the beginning. But, on the other hand, he wasn’t going to marry Miriam to spite the Adlers. He did not want to hurt her, but neither did he wish to marry her for the sake of pity. What do I say now? he thought. What do you do with used people? Send them to the laundry like soiled shirts?