Barney's Version (59 page)

“ … it comes right after where the hotel is …”

“Which hotel?”

“That's right.”

“I'm taking you to a hospital.”

“
No
.”

“ … you know where the bookshop is on the corner?”

“If you feel like you're going to be sick, for Christ's sake, not here, let me know, and I'll pull up to the curb.”

“I'm not going to be sick.”

“There's always a silver lining, eh?”

“ … it's where they serve drinks I want …”

“A bar?”

“Of course a bar. I'm not stupid, you know.”

“This has to be my lucky day,” he said, pulling over. “You got a wallet on you, maybe with a card with your home address, I'll take you there.”

“I know where I live.”

“Tell me, then. I won't squeal.”

“ … it would be close enough to where I'm going if you drop me on that street with a saint in its name.”

“Oh, that's a big help in fucking Montreal.”

“ … Catherine. On the corner, please.”

“Which corner?
”

Shit shit shit. “ … on the corner right after the religious street …”

“Religious street?”

“Not rabbi, or mullah. Catholic.”

“Cardinal?”

“Bishop.”

“Hey, this is fun. You want the corner of St. Catherine and Crescent. Right?”

“Right. I'm going to Dink's.”

Hughes-McNoughton was lying in wait for me there. “Are you okay, Barney?”

“I know my own name, if you don't mind.”

“Of course you do. Bring him a coffee, Betty.”

“Scotch.”

“Sure. But a coffee first.”

I waited until my hand had stopped trembling before I drank the coffee. Hughes-McNoughton lit my Montecristo for me. “Feel better now?”

“I want you to do the paperwork so that I can give power of attorney to my children.”

“You don't need a lawyer for that, a notary will do the trick. But what's the hurry?”

“Never mind.”

“Let me tell you a story, if only to validate my role as
advocatus diaboli
. When I was a young and inexperienced lawyer, still trusting in human nature, I had a client, a nice old Jew in the
shmata
trade, who decided to sign over his flourishing business to his two sons in order to avoid estate duties. I did the dirty deed. We drank champagne together — the old boy, his two sons, me. When the old boy turned up at his office in the factory the next morning, his two sons told him he wasn't to come in any more. He was through there. So be careful as you go, Barney.”

“Very amusing, but my children aren't like that.”

I couldn't handle more than one Scotch in my state. Strolling back to my apartment, still feeling somewhat unwell, wary of when my next memory failure would strike, I thought, so much unfinished business. Miriam, Miriam, my heart's desire. My children, my children. Mike has no idea how much I love him. I fear Kate's marriage won't last. And what will become of Saul?

When Saul was no more than eight or nine years old, I might send him upstairs to my bedroom to fetch a sweater or a script I needed. A half-hour could go by and still he wouldn't have returned, and I knew he had passed a bookcase, pulled out a book, and was now lying on his stomach somewhere, reading. When he was absorbed in
A History of the Kings of England
, Saul brought conversation at our dinner table to a full stop one night, complaining, “If Daddy was the King, then after he died Mike would inherit the throne and get to
rule the empire, and I would just be the duke of something or other.”

Only ten years old at the time and my second-born son already grasped that he had been delivered into an unjust world.

Oh my oh my, if I were an angel of the Lord, I would mark the doors of each of my children's homes with an X, so that plague and misfortune would pass over them. Alas, I lack the qualifications. So when there was still world and time enough I fretted. I nagged. I corrected. I got everything wrong.

Damn damn damn.

Following the death of his wife, Sam Johnson wrote to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, “I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wilds of life, without any certain direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on a world to which I have little relation.”

But my wife wasn't dead, merely absent. Temporarily absent. And I had to talk to her. She's in that city in Ontario, I thought. Not Ottawa. The city with the Prince Arthur dining room, remember? Yes. I'm not totally wacko yet. I can even remember how to strain spaghetti. It's with that thingamajig I keep in a kitchen drawer. There are Seven Dwarfs, who cares what they're called? Lillian Kraft didn't write
The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt
. Or
Suit
. Whichever. It was Mary McCarthy. I picked up the phone, started to dial — stopped — and began to curse. I couldn't remember Miriam's number.

Afterword
by Michael Panofsky

A
T
10:28
A.M
., on September 24, 1996, a surveyor and two lumberjacks, employed by Drummondville Pulp & Paper, stumbled on scattered human remains in a clearing near the crest of Mont Groulx: a skull, a severed spinal cord, a pelvis, a femur, cracked ribs, and broken tibias. The Provincial Police were summoned, and the bones were collected and delivered to a pathologist at the Notre-Dame Hospital in Montreal. Dr. Roger Giroux declared that these were the remains of a Caucasian male, thirty-something years old, who had died of unknown causes thirty to forty years ago. He speculated that the cracked ribs, severed spine, and broken tibias could be attributed to the fact that the unknown male had been severely beaten with a blunt instrument, or had fallen from a considerable height. But a more likely possibility, he ventured, alluding to the teeth marks, was that coyotes, or other animals, had cracked the bones, trying to get at the marrow. The story, reported in the
Gazette
, caught the attention of a retired Sûreté du Québec detective, Sean O'Hearne. On his insistence, an old file was opened, and a New York dentist was flown in to examine the skull. Shortly thereafter, it was confirmed that these were the remains of Bernard Moscovitch, who had disappeared in the
vicinity on June 7, 1960. A triumphant O'Hearne was interviewed by the
Gazette
and
La Presse
, and appeared on several local
TV
shows, as did my father's second wife, always with a framed photograph of Mr. Moscovitch on her lap. “He pledged undying love to me,” she said. Accounts of my father's trial in St-Jérôme were resurrected under the rubric DID JUSTICE TRIUMPH? or THE AVENGING BONES. My father's defence lawyer, John Hughes-McNoughton, entrapped at Dink's (a bar, on Crescent Street, in Montreal), dismissed one reporter, saying, “
Credo quia impossibile
,” and another, who confronted him with the renewed charges, saying no more than, “
Argumentum ex silentio
,” before waving him away. An enterprising
'Allô Police
photographer managed to slip into the King David Nursing Home to snap a picture of my father being spoon-fed roast brisket by Solange. I flew in from London, Kate from Toronto, and Saul was driven in from New York by a young woman called Linda. We met at the cottage in the Laurentians where we had once been such a happy family, to cope with the revelation that Barney had lied and was a murderer after all. Kate, naturally, disputed the irrefutable evidence.

“Boogie was drunk, and he could have wandered up there, had a bad fall, broken both his legs, and died of starvation. How dare you both be so quick to blame Daddy when he can't even answer to his name any more?”

“Kate, you're not the only one who is upset here. Be reasonable, please.”

“Sure, reasonable. Daddy was a homicidal maniac. Obvious, eh? He shot Boogie, dragged him to that mountaintop, and broke his legs with a shovel.”

“I'm not saying that's how it —”

“There wasn't any evidence of even a shallow grave having been dug. Do you think Daddy would have just left him there for the animals to pick over?”

“What if there wasn't time?”

“In all these years.”

“The remains were found not far from where Daddy used to have that lean-to he once told us about. They found broken glass nearby. From a bottle of Scotch.”

“So what?”

“Kate, we know how you feel, but —”

“They were both drunk. He could have killed him accidentally. I'll give you that much.”

“He never stinted on any of us, and we owe him the benefit of the doubt. So you believe what you want, but if I live to be a hundred, I'll still know he was innocent. Furthermore, I happen to know that he never gave up the idea that Boogie was alive somewhere, and would turn up one day.”

“Well, he has now, hasn't he?”

We had gathered at the cottage to come to a decision about Barney's incomplete manuscript, which we had all read; and also to salvage whatever mementos that appealed to us, and to close the cottage, which we had already put up for sale. The omens weren't encouraging. The real-estate agent said, “The day after the referendum, I had calls from forty-two people out here wanting to sell their properties, and I have yet to see an offer for any one of them.”

This wasn't our first family conclave, or our second, since we had learned that Barney was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. At the time, Saul had reminded us that our grandmother had also been stricken, so we were all at risk.

For starters, said Saul, we shouldn't use underarm deodorants that have a zinc base, or cook in aluminum pots, which are also suspect. A subscriber to both
The Lancet
and
The New England Journal of Medicine
, he went on to point out that nicotine had recently been adjudged a brain stimulant, and that smokers were less likely to be afflicted.

“Only because they die of lung cancer first,” said Kate, “so you can put that cigar out right now.”

“Period?”

“Period,” said Kate, falling into Saul's arms, sobbing brokenly.

The Alzheimer diagnosis had been confirmed four months earlier, at a meeting in the offices of Totally Unnecessary Productions, on April 18, 1996, with Dr. Mortimer Herscovitch, and two specialists in attendance, as well as Solange and Chantal Renault, and of course Kate, Saul, and me. Saul went on to Toronto by train to tell Miriam.
Reduced to weeping by the news, she phoned Barney as soon as she could trust her voice, and asked if she could come to see him.

“I don't think I could handle it.”

“Please, Barney.”

“No.”

But he started to shave again every morning, cut back on his alcohol and cigar intake, and jumped whenever the phone or the doorbell rang. Solange phoned Miriam. “Come as soon as you can,” she said.