The Street (4 page)

As badly as I wanted to identify with Hannay, two-fisted soldier of fortune, I couldn’t without betraying myself. My grandfather,
pace
Buchan, had gone in fear of being flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga, which was why we were in Canada. However, I owe to Buchan the image of my grandfather as a little white-faced Jew with an eye like a rattlesnake. It is an image I briefly responded to, alas, if only because Hannay, so obviously on the side of the good and the clean, accepted it without question.

In those days British and American influences still vied for our attention. We suffered split loyalties. I would have liked, for instance, to have seen Tommy Farr pulverize Joe Louis. We were enormously grateful when Donald Wolfit came to town with a shambles of a Shakespearian company and we applauded and stamped our feet for George Formby at the Forum. Our best-known writers, Leacock, Hugh MacLennan and Robertson Davies, were clearly within a British tradition. Our dentist took the
Illustrated London News
and we all read Beverly Baxter’s syrupy reports in
Macleans
about lords and ladies he had taken strawberries and champagne with.

Pea-soups were for turning the lights on and off on the sabbath and running elevators and cleaning out chimneys and furnaces. They were, it was rumoured, ridden with TB, rickets, and the syph. Their older women were for washing windows and waxing floors and the younger ones were for maids in the higher reaches of Outremont, working in factories, and making time with, if and when you had the chance. The French Canadians were our
Schwartzes
.

Zabitsky, a feared man, said, “It’s not very well known, but there’s a tunnel that runs from the nunnery to the priest-house. It isn’t there in case of an air-raid, either.”

Zabitsky also told us how an altar boy could make himself a bishop’s favourite, that a nun’s habit concealed pregnancy, and that there was a special orphanage for the priests’ bastards in St. Jerome.

To all this Shapiro said, “Well, snatch-erly,” my father agreed, and Segal, warming to the idea, suggested a new definition for bishopric.

But when I recall St. Urbain I do not think so much of the men as of my old companions there. The boys. Mostly, we just used to sit around on the outside staircases shooting the breeze.

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Freda.”

“Freda who?”

“Fre-da you. Five dollars for anyone else.”

Our hero was Ziggy ‘The Fireball’ Freed, who was signed on by a Dodger scout at the age of eighteen, and was shipped out for seasoning with a Class ‘D’ team in Texas. Ziggy lasted only a season. “You think they’d give a Hebe a chance to pitch out there?” he asked. “Sure, in the ninth inning, with the bases loaded and none out, and their home-run slugger coming up to the plate, the manager would shout, ‘Okay, Ziggy, it’s your ball game now.’ “

Our world was rigidly circumscribed. Outside, where they ate wormy pork, beat the wives for openers, didn’t care a little finger if the children grew up to be doctors, we seldom ventured, and then only fearfully. Our world, its prizes and punishments, was entirely Jewish. Inside, God would get us if we didn’t say our prayers. You ate the last scrap of meat on your plate because the children in Europe were starving. If you got it right on your bar-mitzvah who knows but the rich uncle might buy you a Parker 51 set.

In our world what we knew of the outside was it wasn’t a life-saver if it didn’t have a hole in it. If you ate plenty of carrots you would see better in the dark, like R.A.F. night-fighters. Every Thursday night on Station
CBM
Fibber McGee would open his marvellous closet. Joe was always gone for a Dow. Never before had so many owed so much to so few. V stood for Victory. Paul Lukas was watching out for us on the Rhine. The sure road to success was to buy cheap and sell dear. In real life Superman was only mild Clark Kent. A Roosevelt only comes along once in a lifetime. Scratch the best goy and you find the worst anti-Semite.

After school we sat on the steps and talked about everything from A to Z.

“Why is it Tarzan never shits?”

“What about Wonder Woman?”

“She’s a dame, you jerk. But there’s Tarzan in the jungle, week in and week out, and never once does he go to the toilet. It’s not true to life, that’s all.”

In summer we bought old car tubes from the garage for a nickel and took them to the beaches with us. We made scooters out of waste wood and roller skates stolen or picked up at a junk yard. Used horseshoes nicked from the French Canadian blacksmith served us for games of pitch-toss. A sock stuffed with sawdust was good enough for touch football. During the worst of the winter we built a chain of snow fortresses on St. Urbain and battled, one side against another, shouting, “Guadacanal!
Schweinhund!
Take that, you yellow devil!” With regular hockey sticks and pieces of coal and copies of
Macleans
for shin-pads we played right out on the streets, breaking up whenever a car wanted to pass.

When we grew a little older, however, our big thrill was to watch Molly go by.

Almost everything came to a stop on St. Urbain when Molly turned the corner at six-oh-five on her way home from Susy’s Smart Wear, where she typed letters and invoices and
occasionally modelled garments for out-of-town buyers. The boys in the Laurier Billiard Academy would be drawn to the window, still holding their cues.

“Here she comes. Right on the dot.”

“Hey, Molly. Molly, my darling. How would you like to try this for supper?”

High stiletto heels, long slender legs, and a swinging of hips. Lefty groans. “You shoulda been here yesterday.”

“Wha’?”

“There was a breeze. She wears a black slip with itsy-bitsy frills.”

Eyes crossed, tongue protruding, pool cue squeezed between his thighs, Jerry pretends to pull himself off.

“Hey,” Morty says, “I’ll bet you guys have no idea why they put saltpetre in your cigs in the army.”

Down the street she drifts, trailing Lily of the Valley.

“You ever heard of this stuff called Spanish Fly? I’m not saying I believe it but Lou swears –”

“Aw, go home and squeeze your pimples out. It’s the bull.”

Across the street, toward Myerson’s.

“Yeow! Take care, doll. Don’t take chances with it.”

Cars gearing down, windows rolling open.

“Here, pussy. Nice pussy.”

“You dirty bastard,” Myerson says, “take your hands out of your pocket.”

“All right.”

Past Best Grade Fruit.

“You see this pineapple?”

“I dare you.”

Molly stops – considers – stoops. A stocking seam is straightened.

“You know, Bernie, I’d give a year of my life – well maybe not a year, but –”

“The line forms at the right.”

Tickety-tap, tickety-tap, she goes, bottom swaying.

Myrna raises an eyebrow. “If I was willing to wear a skirt as tight as that –”

“It’s asking? It’s
begging
for it,” Gitel says.

“– I could have all the boys I wanted to.”

At the Triangle Taxi Stand, Max Kravitz twists his cap around. “Up periscope,” he says, raising his arms to adjust the imaginary instrument.

“Longitude zero,” Korber says, “latitude 38-29-38. She carries twin stacks.”

“Ach, so. A destroyer. Ready torpedoes.”

“Ready torpedoes, men.”

“Ready torpedoes,” is shouted down the queue of waiting drivers. Cooper, the last man, calls hack, “If you ask me all periscopes are already up and all torpedoes –”

“FIRE!”

A pause.

“Nu?”

“She’s going down.”

“Heil Hitler!”

Into Tansky’s for a package of Sen-Sen, ten filter-tips, the latest issue of
Silver Screen
. Takifman adjusts his tie and Segal drops a mottled hand to make sure he’s buttoned.

“If I was her father,” Takifman says, “I’d turn her over for a good spanking before I let her go out on the streets like that.”

“Me too,” Segal agrees with appetite.

St. Urbain, we felt, was inviolable. Among us we numbered the rank-one scholars in the province, gifted artists, medical students, and everywhere you looked decent, God-fearing people. It was a little embarrassing admittedly, when Mrs. Boxer, the
meshugena
, wandered the streets in her nightgown singing Jesus Loves Me. Our landlords, by and large, were rotten types. Polacks, Bulgarians, and other trash were beginning to move in here and there. When that sweet young man from
CHFD’S
“Vox Pop” asked Ginsburg, didn’t he think
Canada ought to have a flag of her own, he shouldn’t have come back with, you do what you like,
we
already have a flag. Not on the radio, anyway. Sugarman’s boy, Stanley, it’s true, had had to do six months at St. Vincent de Paul for buying stolen goods, but all the time he was there he refused to eat non-kosher food. We had our faults on St. Urbain, but nobody could find anything truly important to criticize.

Then one black, thundering day there was an article about our street in
Time
magazine. For several years we had been electing communists to represent us at Ottawa and in the provincial legislature. Our M.P. was arrested. An atomic spy.
Time
, investigating the man’s background in depth, described St. Urbain, our St. Urbain, as the Hell’s Kitchen of Montreal. It brought up old election scandals and strikes and went into the housing question and concluded that this was the climate in which communism flourished.

The offending magazine was passed from hand to hand.

“What’s ‘squalor’?”

“Shmutz.”

“We’re dirty? In my house you could eat off the floor.”

“We’re not poor. I can walk into any delicatessen in town, you name it, and order whatever my little heart desires.”

“In our house there’s always plenty for
shabbus
. I should show you my butcher’s bills you’d die.”

“This write-up’s crazy. An insult.”

“Slander, you mean. We ought to get Lubin to take the case.”

“Ignoramus. You don’t bring in ambulance-chasers to fight a case like this. You need one of theirs, a big-shot.”

“What about Rosenberg? He’s a K.C.”

“Yeah, and everybody knows exactly how he got it. We would need a goy.”

Takifman brooded over the magazine, pinching his lips. Finally, he said: “A Jew is never poor.”

“Oh, here he comes. Takifman, the fanatic. Okay, we’ve got the Torah. You try it for collateral at the Bank of Canada.”

“For shame,” Takifman said, appalled.

“Listen here,
Time
is a magazine of current affairs. The Torah is an old story. They are discussing here economics.”

“The Torah is nothing to laugh.”

“But you are, Takifman.”

“A Jew is never poor,” Takifman insisted. “Broke? Sometimes. Going through hard times? Maybe. In a strange country? Always. But poor, never.”

Tansky threw his dishrag on the counter. “We are the same as everybody else,” he shouted.

“What the hell!”

“Now listen, you listen here, with Chief Rabbi Takifman I don’t agree, but the same –”

“You know what, Tansky. You can stuff that where the monkey put his fingers.”

Sugarman finished reading the article. “What are you all so excited about?” he asked. “Can’t you see this magazine is full of advertisements?”

Everybody turned to look at him.

“According to my son, and he ought to know, these magazines are all under the heel of the big advertisers. They say whatever the advertisers want.”

“So you mean it’s the advertisers who say we’re poor and dirty?”

“You win the sixty-four dollars.”

“Why
, smart-guy?”

“Why? Did I say I know everything? All I said was that according to my son it is the advertisers who –”

“Jews and artists are never poor,” Takifman persisted. “How could they be?”

“We are the same as everybody else,” Tansky shouted. “Idiots!”

“A Jew is never poor. It would be impossible.”

D
R. KATZMAN
discovered the gangrene on one of his monthly visits. “She won’t last a month,” he said.

He said the same the second month, the third and the fourth, and now she lay dying in the heat of the back bedroom.

“God in heaven,” my mother said, “what’s she holding on for?”

The summer my grandmother was supposed to die we did not chip in with the Greenbaums to take a cottage in the Laurentians. My grandmother, already bed-ridden for seven years, could not be moved again. The doctor came twice a week. The only thing was to stay in the city and wait for her to die or, as my mother said, pass away. It was a hot summer, her bedroom was just behind the kitchen, and when we sat down to eat we could smell her. The dressings on my grandmother’s left leg had to be changed several times a day and, according to Dr. Katzman, any day might be her last in this world. “It’s in the hands of the Almighty,” he said.

“It won’t be long now,” my father said, “and she’ll be better off, if you know what I mean?”

A nurse came every day from the Royal Victorian Order. She arrived punctually at noon and at five to twelve I’d join the rest of the boys under the outside staircase to peek up her dress as she climbed to our second-storey flat. Miss Bailey
favoured absolutely beguiling pink panties, edged with lace, and that was better than waiting under the stairs for Cousin Bessie, for instance, who wore enormous cotton bloomers, rain or shine.

I was sent out to play as often as possible, because my mother felt it was not good for me to see somebody dying. Usually, I would just roam the scorched streets. There was Duddy, Gas sometimes, Hershey, Stan, Arty and me.

“Before your grandmaw kicks off,” Duddy said, “she’s going to roll her eyes and gurgle. That’s what they call the death-rattle.”

“Aw, you know everything.
Putz.”

“I read it, you jerk,” Duddy said, whacking me one, “in Perry Mason.”

Home again I would usually find my mother sour and spent. Sometimes she wept.

“She’s dying by inches,” she said to my father one stifling night, “and none of them ever come to see her. Oh, such children,” she added, going on to curse them vehemently in Yiddish.