The Street (6 page)

“Of course not.”

“I hope that never in my life do I have to count on my children for anything.”

The seventh summer of my grandmother’s illness she was supposed to die and we did not know from day to day when it would happen. I was often sent out to eat at an aunt’s or at my other grandmother’s house. I was hardly ever at home. In those days they let boys into the left-field bleachers of Delormier Downs free during the week and Duddy, Gas sometimes, Hershey, Stan, Arty and me spent many an afternoon at the ball park. The Montreal Royals, kingpin of the Dodger farm system, had a marvellous club at the time. There was Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Lou Ortiz, Red Durrett, Honest John Gabbard, and Kermit Kitman. Kitman was our hero. It used to give us a charge to watch that crafty little Jew, one of ours, running around out there with all those tall dumb southern crackers. “Hey, Kitman,” we would yell, “Hey, shmo-head, if your father knew you played ball on
shabus –
” Kitman, alas, was all field and no hit. He never made the majors. “There goes Kermit Kitman,” we would holler, after he had gone down swinging again, “the first Jewish strike-out king of the International League.” This we promptly followed up by bellowing choice imprecations in Yiddish.

It was after one of these games, on a Friday afternoon, that I came home to find a crowd gathered in front of our house.

“That’s the grandson,” somebody said.

A knot of old people stood staring at our front door from across the street. A taxi pulled up and my aunt hurried out, hiding her face in her hands.

“After so many years,” a woman said.

“And probably next year they’ll discover a cure. Isn’t that always the case?”

The flat was clotted. Uncles and aunts from my father’s side of the family, strangers, Dr. Katzman, neighbours, were all milling around and talking in hushed voices. My father was in the kitchen, getting out the apricot brandy. “Your grandmother’s dead,” he said.

“Where’s Maw?”

“In the bedroom with … You’d better not go in.”

“I want to see her.”

My mother wore a black shawl and glared down at a knot of handkerchief clutched in a fist that had been cracked by washing soda. “Don’t come in here,” she said.

Several bearded round-shouldered men in shiny black coats surrounded the bed. I couldn’t see my grandmother.

“Your grandmother’s dead.”

“Daddy told me.”

“Go wash your face and comb your hair.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to get your own supper.”

“Sure.”

“One minute. The
baba
left some jewellery. The necklace is for Rifka and the ring is for your wife.”

“Who’s getting married?”

“Better go and wash your face. Remember behind the ears, please.”

Telegrams were sent, the obligatory long distance calls were made, and all through the evening relatives and neighbours
and old followers of the Zaddik poured into the house. Finally, the man from the funeral parlour arrived.

“There goes the only Jewish businessman in town,” Segal said, “who wishes all his customers were German.”

“This is no time for jokes.”

“Listen, life goes on.”

My Cousin Jerry had begun to affect a cigarette holder. “Soon the religious mumbo-jumbo starts,” he said to me.

“Wha’?”

“Everybody is going to be sickeningly sentimental.”

The next day was the sabbath and so, according to law, my grandmother couldn’t be buried until Sunday. She would have to lie on the floor all night. Two grizzly women in white came to move and wash the body and a professional mourner arrived to sit up and pray for her. “I don’t trust his face,” my mother said. “He’ll fall asleep.”

“He won’t fall asleep.”

“You watch him, Sam.”

“A fat lot of good prayers will do her now. Alright! Okay! I’ll watch him.”

My father was in a fury with Segal.

“The way he goes after the apricot brandy you’d think he never saw a bottle in his life before.”

Rifka and I were sent to bed, but we couldn’t sleep. My aunt was sobbing over the body in the living room; there was the old man praying, coughing and spitting into his handkerchief whenever he woke; and the hushed voices and whimpering from the kitchen, where my father and mother sat. Rifka allowed me a few drags off her cigarette.

“Well,
pisherke
, this is our last night together. Tomorrow you can take over the back room.”

“Are you crazy?”

“You always wanted it for yourself, didn’t you?”

“She died in there, but.”

“So?”

“I couldn’t sleep in there now.”

“Good night and happy dreams.”

“Hey, let’s talk some more.”

“Did you know,” Rifka said, “that when they hang a man the last thing that happens is that he has an orgasm?”

“A wha’?”

“Skip it. I forgot you were still in kindergarten.”

“Kiss my Royal Canadian –”

“At the funeral, they’re going to open the coffin and throw dirt in her face. It’s supposed to be earth from Eretz. They open it and you’re going to have to look.”

“Says you.”

A little while after the lights had been turned out Rifka approached my bed, her head covered with a sheet and her arms raised high. “Bouyo-bouyo. Who’s that sleeping in my bed? Woo-woo.”

My uncle who was in the theatre and my aunt from Toronto came to the funeral. My uncle, the rabbi, was there too.

“As long as she was alive,” my mother said, “he couldn’t even send her five dollars a month. I don’t want him in the house, Sam. I can’t bear the sight of him.”

“You’re upset,” Dr. Katzman said, “and you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Maybe you’d better give her a sedative,” the rabbi said.

“Sam, will you speak up for once, please.”

Flushed, eyes heated, my father stepped up to the rabbi. “I’ll tell you this straight to your face, Israel,” he said. “You’ve gone down in my estimation.”

The rabbi smiled a little.

“Year by year,” my father continued, his face burning a brighter red, “your stock has gone down with me.”

My mother began to weep and she was led unwillingly to a bed. While my father tried his utmost to comfort her, as he muttered consoling things, Dr. Katzman plunged a needle into her arm. “There we are,” he said.

I want to sit on the stoop outside with Duddy. My uncle, the rabbi, and Dr. Katzman stepped into the sun to light cigarettes.

“I know exactly how you feel,” Dr. Katzman said. “There’s been a death in the family and the world seems indifferent to your loss. Your heart is broken and yet it’s a splendid summer day … a day made for love and laughter … and that must seem very cruel to you.”

The rabbi nodded; he sighed.

“Actually,” Dr. Katzman said, “it’s remarkable that she held out for so long.”

“Remarkable?” the rabbi said. “It’s written that if a man has been married twice he will spend as much time with his first wife in heaven as he did on earth. My father, may he rest in peace, was married to his first wife for seven years and my mother, may she rest in peace, has managed to keep alive for seven years. Today in heaven she will be able to join my father, may he rest in peace.”

Dr. Katzman shook his head. “It’s amazing,” he said. He told my uncle that he was writing a book based on his experiences as a healer. “The mysteries of the human heart.”

“Yes.”

“Astonishing.”

My father hurried outside. “Dr. Katzman, please. It’s my wife. Maybe the injection wasn’t strong enough. She just doesn’t stop crying. It’s like a tap. Can you come in, please?”

“Excuse me,” Dr. Katzman said to my uncle.

“Of course.” My uncle turned to Duddy and me. “Well, boys,” he said, “what would you like to be when you grow up?”

“H
OW,” TANSKY
wanted to know, “could he have created the whole lousy world in seven lousy days when even in this modern scientific age it takes longer than that to build one lousy house? Answer me that, big-mouth.”

Tansky, a dedicated communist, worked assiduously during elections for the Labour-Progressive candidates, canvasing for Fred Rose, and after his conviction in the Gouzenko case, nailing up posters for Mike Buhay. Buhay who, in his London days, had mixed with Clem Attlee and Morrison.

“You heard what Maurice Hartt has to say about Buhay and your party. The Labour-Progressives, he says, are as much a party as Ex Lax is a chocolate.…”

Hartt had also tripped up Buhay in the provincial legislature, asking him why he didn’t work for a living.

“Because,” Buhay had replied, “I don’t want to do anything that would contribute to the capitalist system.”

Then why, Hartt retorted, does your wife work?

“Well,” Buhay said, “somebody in the family has to earn a living.”

The regulars were tolerant of Tansky’s communism, but unresponsive.

“If you ask me,” Segal said,
“all
politicians are dirty crooks.
Promise, promise, promise, that’s before elections. All they want to do is line their pockets.”

Not all the men were non-voters like Segal. The horse players and a majority of the gin rummy bunch unfailingly voted for the Liberal candidate.

“Aw, it just wouldn’t look good for our people to elect a commie again. You know what I mean?”

In our riding,
Time
ventured, the big battle was between Liberals and Communists. “Communist-voting Cartier riding, an anomaly in conservative Quebec, is heavily industrial. About 40 per cent of the voters are French Canadians. Communists make their appeal to the other 60 per cent, which includes Jewish, Ukrainian, Hungarian and Polish workers. Cartier also includes Montreal’s flophouse, red-light and underworld districts where votes go to the highest bidder.”

Well, yes, but …

The truth is Lou and some of the others voted Liberal because their sons, impecunious McGill students, were hired each time there was a federal, provincial or civic election, to go down to the cemeteries with notebooks and compile lists of all those who had died since the last census. Other students were paid to represent the dead at the polls, which, naturally enough, enraged Tansky.

“Let’s face it,” Sugarman said placatingly. “Most of them would have voted Liberal anyway.”

“It’s a typical corruption of the democratic process. So-called.”

“Look at it another way, then. In Russia there’s no problem.”

Tansky, the first of many communists I’ve known, was always extremely kind to me. When I came in on a message he slipped me a chocolate biscuit or maybe a piece of bubble gum. Only once did he demand that I commit myself politically.

“Awright,” he demanded heatedly, as I entered the store. “Ask the Hersh kid. He can tell us.”

“Gwan. What does he know?”

“Listen here,” Tansky said, “do you study Canadian history at your lousy school?”

“Sure.”

“Tell me what you know about the Riel rebellion?”

“We haven’t come to that part yet.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. Now tell me something else. What does it say in your book? That the Indians were lied to, cheated, and exploited left, right, and centre by lousy imperialist adventurers like Jacques Cartier or that the so-called noble explorers saved Canada from the savages?”

“It says that Jacques Cartier was a hero. LaSalle too. It says they were very brave against the Indians.”

“You see, at the age of eleven they’re already stuffing their heads with capitalist propaganda. I’ll bet there’s nothing in their lousy book about the fortunes those bringers-of-Christianity made on the fur market.”

Although I liked Tansky enormously, there were others, among them my uncles, who were hostile because he defiantly ate pork and remained open for business on Yom Kippur. Our family was orthodox, we disapproved of communists, but there was a certain confusion about who and what actually was red. To begin with, I was led to believe that a communist was somebody who wrung chicken’s necks rather than have them slaughtered according to the orthodox ritual. For when I saw Bernie Huberman’s mother doing just that to a chicken in her back yard I was given a straightforward explanation. “She’s a communist, a
roite.”

The family downstairs turned out to be communists too and I was warned not to speak to them. They moved in around one o’clock one May night while we sat in judgment on the balcony above, eating watermelon. I had been allowed to stay up late because of the heat wave.

“You see all those little boxes they’re moving in,” Segal whispered.

“Yeah,” my father responded eagerly.

“You notice how they’re all the same size?”

“Yeah?”

“You see how they’re all very heavy?”

“Yeah. So?”

“You wait,” Segal said, rocking in his chair. “You wait, Sam.”

The next night there was a distinct and persistent rumbling downstairs and every Wednesday a panel truck came to pick up small boxes.

“They’ve got a printing press,” my father would brag to visitors. “An underground newspaper.
Right downstairs from us.”

There were no self-confessed communists with me at parochial school, but once I graduated to Fletcher’s Field High there were plenty of them. Take Danny Feldman, for instance. Wiry, scornful Danny, who sat only two seats behind me in Room 41, was a paid-up, card-holding member of the Young Communist League, and so came in for lots of heckling from the rest of us. Danny retaliated by ridiculing our enthusiasm for the achievements of Maurice “Rocket” Richard, Johnny Greco, and even Jackie Robinson.

“He’s a nigger, but. I thought you stuck up for them?”

“The word is Negro. How would you like it if I called you a kike?”

“Eat shit.”

Sports was an idiotic distraction, Danny argued, a trick to take our minds off the exploitation of our working-class parents. Whether they were aware of it or not, Buddy O’Connor, Jerry Heffernan, and Pete Morin, the incomparable razzle-dazzle line, were capitalist lackeys.

Danny was adroit at bringing our teachers to the boil too. He wanted to know why our history text books made no mention of Spartacus and neglected to comment on the Allied attempt to overthrow the Russian revolution in 1919.