The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (27 page)

“Yeah. Where do I get it?”

“The land will have to wait.”

“When do you start on the Farber wedding?” Duddy asked Mr. Friar.

“I was supposed to start yesterday but they won’t give me any more film on credit.”

“Jeez.”

“The chap’s going round with the bill tomorrow afternoon. We owe him rather a lot, actually.”

“Listen to me, Friar. You’ve got lots of other footage on Bobby. Can anything be done to save this movie in the editing? I don’t care if it only lasts twenty minutes.”

“It would take a genius.”

“That’s the spirit,” Duddy said.

“Duddy,” Yvette said, “you’re going too far this time. You can’t show this film. Nobody will ever give you another job.”

“Ver gerharget
. Now you listen to me, Friar. Make me some of those dopy montages. Anything. I don’t care if you have to stay up night and day but I want this movie put into shape, you hear. Now when can you have it for me?”

“Two weeks, perhaps.”

“Ten days. I’m going to stick with you. I’m not going to let you out of my sight.”

Duddy drove back to the office with Yvette.

“The two-fifty advance,” he said, “we spent. Friar blew the other five hundred. Where would I get the money to refund Seigal? Let Friar work on it and I’ll give the whole thing to Seigal for fifteen hundred. That way we’ll get something back at least.”

“He’ll never make that film any good. You’re making a mistake, Duddy.”

“Oh, will you shettup, please. You’re giving me a headache.”

Yvette stopped the car. “I’m getting out right here,” she said.

“All right, I’m sorry. I beg your pardon. Tonight I’ll buy you some flowers. Come on. Let’s get to the office.”

They owed the film supply company nine hundred dollars. Another payment was due on the car and there were the office and apartment rentals to be settled. His bank account was overdrawn a hundred and sixty-seven dollars. Duddy seized on the phone bill. “Who,” he shouted, “called Ste. Agathe three times last week?”

“My brother’s sick. One call was to the notary.”

“It’s cheaper after six o’clock or didn’t you know that?” Duddy
sent out for coffee. “When do they start the heating in this building,” he shouted, giving the radiator a swift kick, “on January first?”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to get that land, Yvette. I have to take each bit of it as it comes. Do you realize how prices will skyrocket when they find out we’re after the whole lake? What are you looking at?”

“You. I’m wondering how long you can keep this up before you fall flat on your face.”

“That reminds me.” He phoned Lennie. “Hey, you know those pills you told me some of the guys take before exams? Yeah, benzedrine. Can you get me some tonight? I’ll pick them up on my way home. Thanks.” Next Duddy phoned Mr. Calder.

“He’s in Washington,” Edgar said. “He won’t be back for at least a week.”

Duddy hung up. “That’s a bad break,” he said. He picked up the receiver again and replaced it. No, he thought, Cohen won’t give me anything in advance without definite word. “Will you stop staring at me, please.”

“Would your Uncle Benjy lend you any money?”

“I’d drop dead before I gave him the pleasure.”

The coffee arrived. “Charge it,” Duddy said. “Listen, Yvette, when the guy comes about the bill tomorrow I’m in Washington. I’m there with Hugh Thomas Calder. You can’t say about what. Hush-hush. But you
can
say I’m thinking of getting my film direct from Toronto. O.K.?”

“I’ll try it,” she said.

“Forty-five hundred dollars. Jeez. Hey, maybe if I mentioned Calder’s name the bank manager …”

There was a knock at the door. Duddy leaped out of his seat. “A parking ticket,” he shouted. “I knew it. How many times did I tell you not to let me park in a one-hour zone?”

“Take it easy, Duddy. You mustn’t get so excited.”

Yvette opened the door.

“Hiya.”

A skinny young man with a crew cut and a long lopsided face, his hands stuffed into the pockets of an old army wind-breaker like a child’s into jam jars, smiled ecstatically at Duddy. “Long time no see,” he said.

Duddy gave Yvette a baffled look. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

“Everything’s O.K.,” the long, loose-boned man said. “Getting ’em over the border was a breeze.”

“It was …?”

“You’re not happy to see me,” the man said and, all at once, his expression was so melancholy that Duddy feared the flesh would melt and the bones collapse with a rattle to the floor.

“Oh, no! No!” Duddy flung his arms in the air. “It can’t be. It’s Virgil.”

Virgil nodded, he beamed, ducking his head as if to avoid an affectionate slap.

Duddy looked at Yvette and groaned. “How did you ever find me?” he asked.

“You left me your card remember? ‘Dial
MOVIES
.’ I thought I’d come straight up, though.” He searched Duddy’s face for displeasure. “I find telephone conversations highly unsatisfactory.”

“Sure thing.”

“What’s going on, please?”

Duddy explained in a failing voice that he had met Virgil in New York when he had been there with Dingleman. He had told Virgil that he would pay him a hundred dollars each for his pinball machines any time he could get them over the border.

“Em, Virgil, did you bring all ten of them?”

Virgil grinned enthusiastically.

“A thousand dollars,” Yvette said.

“They’re worth three-fifty each new in the States. More here.”

“All you have to do is sell them,” Yvette said.

“Sure. That’s right,” Duddy said, excited. “All I have to do is sell them. Let’s say at – Well, we’ll discuss that later. Where are they, Virgil?”

They were hidden under a tarpaulin about twenty miles from the border.

“O.K. Let’s go. Come on, Yvette.”

“At this hour?”

“We’ll need two cars. I can pick up my father’s taxi.”

They picked up the Dodge on St. Urbain Street.

“O.K., Virgil, we’ll follow you.”

The morning’s snow had melted and frozen, the roads were slippery, and there was a high wind. Duddy didn’t have any tire chains and his heater didn’t work. Yvette did up the top button of his coat and snuggled close to him.

“I couldn’t tell you while he was there,” Duddy said, “but I think we can get two-fifty apiece for them from the hotels in Ste. Agathe.”

Yvette closed her eyes. She shivered. “That boy looks like a lunatic to me,” she said.

“I figure if we get them packed in the cars by two-thirty we can be in Ste. Agathe by six-seven o’clock.”

“You mean we’re going to drive all the way out to Ste. Agathe tonight?”

“Reach into my jacket pocket. Yeah, that one. Lennie got me the pills. Give me one, will you.”

Yvette stared at the bottle. There was no label. “I don’t want you to take one,” she said. “I’m afraid.”

“I should fall asleep at the wheel. Is that what you want?”

“Duddy, please, you mustn’t …”

“Heads up, guys. Here come the waterworks.”

“You won’t be happy until you kill yourself.”

“Gimme the pill, please. O.K., now listen. I’m not going to kill myself. But I’m going to get that land, see. All of it. It’s going to be mine.”

“Duddy, even if you ever did raise enough money for all the land … what then? The price of the land is nothing compared to how much money you’d need to develop it.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve thought of that. Just let me buy up all that land first. You wait, Yvette. You wait and see.”

“Oh, what’s the use?”

“Listen, can we stay at your place tonight? Virgil and I can sleep on the hall floor or something. Wha’?”

“I’d better take you to a hotel.”

“O.K. Skip it. You go to sleep.”

Yvette took a pill. “I’d better stay up,” she said. “Just in case.”

A
FTER COVERING A HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES, THE LAST
forty-five through heavy snow, they finally reached Ste. Agathe. Yvette got Duddy and Virgil a double room at the St. Vincent Hotel and muttered something about sleeping all day. Duddy, too tired to drive any more, put her in a taxi. One of his ears, he was sure, was frozen, and his eyes were bloodshot. There was a ringing inside his head.

“A bed,” he said, entering the room. He pulled off his trousers and flopped on it. “Good night, Virgil.”

“One minute. There’s something I ought to tell you.”

Duddy mumbled something inaudible through his pillow. Virgil shook him awake. “Mr. Kravitz,” he said.

“Mn?”

“I’m an epileptic.”

“Wha’?” Duddy rolled over on the bed and groaned. “Go away, Virgil. It’s not true.”

“I can’t help it. That’s the way I was born.”

Duddy sat up and rubbed his eyes. “You mean you’re really an epileptic?”

Virgil nodded. He grinned.

“Jeez.”
Ver gerharget
twice, he thought. All the world’s ranking crap artists, how do they find me? “You got a cigarette? Thanks. What happens … em … well, if you have a fit like?”

“Oh, don’t worry about a thing, Mr. Kravitz. I don’t make much noise.”

“You don’t?”

Virgil grinned.

“Well, there’s always a silver lining.”

“It’s not easy to be an epileptic. You’d be surprised how many people are prejudiced against us.”

“Listen, if you have a fit – I mean just in case. No offense, eh? Am I supposed to put a spoon down your mouth or … em …”

“Naw. Don’t worry about a thing. Sometimes I have fits in my sleep and I don’t even know about it until I wake up in the morning.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, then I can tell by looking in the mirror. My tongue gets cut.”

“Do you … em … have these fits in your sleep very often?”

“A couple of times a week. They’re not very severe.”

“Is that so?”

“You know, Mr. Kravitz, life is no bowl of cherries for a guy like me.”

“You don’t say?”

“Who would take a chance on me as a waiter?”

How would you like to kiss my ass, Duddy thought.

“Or a driver?”

Jeez, Duddy thought, I’d better not let him drive the Dodge back to Montreal. A crack-up, that’s all I need.

“We’re a persecuted minority. Like the Jews and the Negroes.”

“Yes, I guess that
is
one way of looking at it.” Duddy lit another cigarette off his butt. Who can sleep anyway, he thought, with this one in the room. God help us.

“Only you have B’nai B’rith to fight for you and the Negroes have the
NAACP
. We have nobody. We’re all alone.”

“It’s a shame, Virgil. A real shame.”

“Even the queers are getting organized now. No offense –”

“What do you mean no offense?”

“Well, I don’t know you very well, Mr. Kravitz, and you did ask for a double room –”

“Just don’t get any stupid ideas,” Duddy said, pulling his blankets tighter around him.

“Anyway, like I was saying, even the queers now have organizations to fight for them.”

“Is that so?”

“You know, Mr. Kravitz, you’re a Jew and wherever you go other Jews will help you. I’m not speaking against that. I think it’s swell. Why, you could turn up tomorrow in Kansas City or Rome or – well maybe not Tokyo. But my point is other Jews there will lend a helping hand. You’re sort of international. With the fags it’s like that too. You know, they have their special little faggoty night clubs in every city. But epileptics? No. Nothing. A lot of them,
plenty
, won’t own up to it, that’s why. You think there’s shame attached to being an epileptic?”

“Certainly not.”

“Some of the greatest men in the world were epileptics.”

“No kidding?”

“Julius Caesar.”

“Yeah?”

“Jesus Christ, even. Dostoevski. Charlie Chaplin.”

“Charlie Chaplin is a Jew,” Duddy said snidely.

“A guy can be both, you know.”

“Jeez.”

“That’s why I started out in the pinball machine business in the Bronx, you know. Nobody would hire me so I had to go into business for myself.”

“Necessity is the mother of all invention,” Duddy said.

“Those are true words, but look where it got me. Even with the thousand dollars I’m getting from you I will have lost almost all my savings.”

“That’s show biz,” Duddy said. Cuckoo, he thought warmly. I’ll call him tomorrow. “Shouldn’t we try to get some sleep?” he asked.

“My life ambition, Mr. Kravitz, is to organize the epileptics of the world. I’d like to be their Sister Kenny.”

“That would be something, Virgil.”

Virgil’s voice took on the dimensions of a platform speaker. “Why aren’t we covered by the Fair Employment Act?” he demanded.

“Why don’t we get some sleep?”

“I like you, Mr. Kravitz. Do you like me?”

“Yeah, sure thing, Virgil.”

“Why?”

“Couldn’t I tell you in the morning?”

“You’re not just saying it, are you? You do like me.”

“I think you’re a prince of a fella.”

“Thanks. So many people are prejudiced against us, you know.”

“Good night, Virgie.”

“We’re going to be buddies. Real buddies. I can tell.”

Sure, Duddy thought. You bet. He got up and turned out the light.

“What does Yvette think of me? Be frank.”

“Jeez, Virgie. She didn’t say.”

“I like her. She’s got qualities.”

Duddy pretended to be snoring.

“I’ve got a theory about women, you know. Mr. Kravitz?”

“Mn?”

“I’ve got a theory about women. It always works too. There are three types of women. The Berthe type, the Mathilde type, and the –”

“Virgil?”

“Yeah?”

“I
would like to sleep now.
I
am very tired.
I
must be up in four hours.
I
am saying good night. Good night.”

Virgil leaped out of bed. “It’s almost light,” he said. “It’s snowing. I love snow.”

Duddy woke with a hacking cough at nine-thirty. The room was freezing. He stumbled over to the sink, splashed cold water on his face, and took another benzedrine pill.

“Good morning,” Virgil shouted. “A happy day in store, I hope.”

Duddy moaned.

“I want to see all the sights.”

Virgil leaned close to the mirror and stuck out his tongue. Duddy stared at him and remembered and suddenly froze. “Are you O.K.?”