3

ON HIS RETURN TO MONTREAL, JAKE, TRYING TO salvage at least a splinter of satisfaction out of the New York fiasco, assumed – gleefully assumed – that he would be the root of more Hersh border trouble. Gleefully, because it gratified him to think that his inchoate political past might deprive his uncles and aunts of Miami. Like him, this winter even the most affluent Hershes might have to suffer sub-zero Montreal. Sniffles, blizzards, frostbitten toes. Then, only a week after his return, Cousin Jerry was held at the border, questioned, and allowed to continue on to New York. It wasn’t Jerry or Jake the immigration officers were worried about. It was another J. Hersh, Cousin Joey, and Jake’s uncles had known this all along. Uncle Jack, the most unswervingly orthodox of the Hershes, a myopic furrier whose revolutionary activities had been confined to a failed uprising against the too permissive apparat of the Shaar Zion synagogue, told Jake how he too had once been stopped at the border and questioned for two hours before being cleared. “I’ll bet,” he said, “you got smart with them. You make more trouble for yourself than anybody can ever make for you.”

“What have they got against Joey? A criminal charge?”

“He’s a communist, a roite.”

Jake, immersed in his own unpromising stare, shrugged the idea off with a deprecating laugh. That Cousin Joey had been a gambler, an actor, probably a gangster, once, all this Jake could dimly recall, but a communist?

Nonsense.

1937, Jake recalled, was the first time he had ever encountered his cousin Joey.

Joey had been eighteen, Jake only seven years old.

Hanna had delivered her progeny, Joey, Jenny, and Arty, to Uncle Abe’s cottage on the lake on a sweltering Sunday in summer that was, to begin with, a Sunday like any other. Jake and his cousins leaping shrieking off the raft, querulous aunts playing Mah Jong as they washed down liver knishes with Cokes, hefty uncles at the poker table under the shade of a maple tree, the women squealing, the men quaking with laughter, teenage cousins stomping to a boogie-woogie record, babies howling … when all at once there was an uncharacteristic stillness on the shore and Jake, curious, turned to look and saw Hanna and her three children Hanna, compared to his aunts, appeared shockingly thin. A black winter twig. Her two youngest children, amazingly pale for June, wore ill-fitting dark city clothes, but not Joey, who was the eldest.

Cousin Joey, standing apart from them, smiled scornfully. His black hair had been ruthlessly brushcut and he wore a discolored blue work shirt and faded dungarees, the uniform of the Boys’ Farm, the detention home for delinquents in Shawbridge. Jenny, her forehead encrusted with angry pimples, pointedly ignored the other teenagers. Arty, considerably younger, only three years older than Jake in fact, clung to Hanna, squinting against the sun. Uncle Abe led the sullen newcomers magnanimously from group to group and Jake noticed that his aunts and uncles recoiled stiffly, suspiciously and took to whispering among themselves as soon as Abe had passed. Hanna and her brood did not eat lunch with the others; they were fed in the kitchen.

“Who are they?” Jake asked his father on the drive back to the city.

“Your second cousins. Baruch’s bunch.”

“And who’s Baruch?”

Ignoring Jake’s question, he turned to Mrs. Hersh and said, “Abe’s Parker 51 is missing already. It’s a crazy idea, a mistake.”

But Jake’s mother cut him off and the two began to quarrel heatedly in Yiddish.

“Why is the boy’s head shaven?” Jake asked.

“You’ve heard of a de-icing? Well, he’s just had a de-licing.”

The new Hershes were shoveled into a cold-water flat on St. Urbain, one of Uncle Abe’s properties on the same block as Jake’s, and Cousin Joey, who was said to be sickly, did not go out to look for work. Instead he slept in late, obliged, as Dr. Katz put it, to stoke energy into the furnace of his body, enabling him to best resist the wintry blasts ahead. Joey usually slept in until noon and then he went out and no matter how late he ultimately came home, Hanna, it was reported, still waited at the kitchen table, her callused knobby feet soaking in a steaming basin, making a crochet tablecloth or knitting diamond socks for her most cherished radio comedian, ready to quiz Joey about aches and pains, the time and texture of his last bowel movement.

Four months after they had settled on St. Urbain, the snows came, the earth froze, bedsheets hung stiff as glass on the backyard clothesline, and Joey left home. He said to Hanna, “Going to Tansky’s for a Coke. Back for supper,” and he was gone.

Max Kravitz saw Joey at Tansky’s. “He tried to borrow a sawski from me and I said no.” Saying no to Joey was St. Urbain Street policy since Uncle Abe had ordained that he was no better, potentially worse, than Baruch, Joey’s father. So it was no when Joey wanted to buy a guitar and no again, when Hanna sought money so that Joey could have a motorcycle. Uncle Abe wrote off the rent for the flat on St. Urbain, he saw to the doctor’s bills, which were considerable, but he would not sanction frivolities.

Joey left home in December 1937 and though the police, the Baron de Hirsch Institute, and finally the seediest of private detectives, one of the Boy Wonder’s contacts, tried to find him, he was not heard from again until the autumn of 1938, when he sent Hanna a postcard from Toulouse, France. Europe! Where did he get the money? There were those on St. Urbain who were scathingly quick to point out that a neighborhood garage had been held up a day before Joey disappeared. Others (remembering Baruch, perhaps) felt that he had most likely signed on a ship. There was another postcard in the summer of 1939 and this one had a Mexico City postmark on it.

“He’s not so dumb,” Sugarman said. “He wasn’t going to be called up.”

“Fair is fair. Who would take such a sickly boy in the army?” Jake’s father said.

From the day of Joey’s departure Hanna never doubted that he would come back. In the spring, she assured the neighbors, glaring venomously at them, when the lilac tree in the back yard would be in bloom, but spring came and came again without Joey. Instead in January 1940 there was a tall man with empty gray eyes standing on Hanna’s doorstep. “I’m looking,” he said, his smile made to chill, “for Joseph Hersh also known as Jesse Hope.” The man explained he was an R.C.M.P. inspector.

“What’s he done?” Hanna demanded.

“There’s no charge against him. Just want to have a little chat.”

“You’re not the only one.”

Hanna squatted on her balcony or stood by the front parlor window every afternoon, rising involuntarily if an unfamiliar car slowed down. When she had to leave the flat empty, Hanna jammed a note in the door, saying which neighbor had the key. Frosty nights she raked the streets for Joey, hawking Gazettes downtown, in front of the Loew’s, outside Dinty Moore’s, at the Forum after a hockey game. “Gzet! Gzet!” Hanna was a knotted bony woman, all jutting angles, her face as creased as old brown wrapping paper, the same color, too, with heated black eyes and a wart turned like a screw in her hooked nose. On blue-cold winter nights she wore a man’s leather cap with ear flaps, a woolen scarf wound around and around her skinny chicken’s neck, and over all the sweaters she pulled a red Canadiens hockey sweater. A leather purse was strapped to Hanna’s waist, the fingers of her woolen gloves scissored out the easier to give change. She wore sheep-lined air force boors. “GZET! GZET!”

Hanna sought out the crazy, discredited Lubiner Rabbi, whose study was crammed with palmistry charts and phrenology tables, and kissed the fringes of his talith, offering money, a bundle, beseeching him to contrive prayers for Joey’s return. But his Jewish necromancy failed her. So Hanna climbed the concrete steps to St. Joseph’s Oratory, raking each one on her knees, imploring Jesus for help, Jesus Christ, but he failed her too, which hardly surprised her. Then Hanna began going to the railroad stations to watch the troop trains come and go, searching among the soldiers for Joey, with the upshot that one Christmas morning a picture that showed Hanna, thrusting through a group of soldiers, seemingly toward a loved one, appeared in a full-page advertisement in the Star. There was a luminous cross on top of the page, the picture itself was framed in mistletoe, and below there was a line drawing of a battle-weary soldier reading a letter. The caption read,

Hanna carried Joey’s photograph everywhere and if anybody on St. Urbain or even in Outremont had visitors from New York or Toronto, if on a Sunday night a synagogue’s lights were on for a bar mitzvah or a wedding, then Hanna would come to the door, St. Urbain’s blight, scuttling from table to table, flashing the photograph, her manner truculent, accusatory. Asked to sit down she would immediately pounce on the whisky and begin to ramble about Joey. She would tell of the time his puny four-year-old body had been rough as sandpaper with ringworm and how it was touch and go for him with the scarlet fever. She recalled how once he had all but choked on a rusty nail. “And who would have thought he’d survive in the first place,” she’d say again and again. “God who watches so well over his Chosen People? Spike Jones? The cross-eyed chief rabbi of the London zoo? Dr. Goebbels? He was born in a freezing miner’s shanty in Yellowknife, with the help, if you can call it that, of a drunken Polack midwife while his father was out boozing somewhere. Too weak to cry. Only this big and blue as ink, my Joey. Who would have thought he’d live? Me. Only me.”

During the baseball season Hanna advertised in the Personal columns of major league cities and the week of the Kentucky Derby she always ran an ad in the Louisville Courier.

Increasingly hostile, she shoved Joey’s photograph under the noses of startled strangers in hotel lobbies or coming out of the air terminal or disembarking from boat trains. Finally she was the subject of a newspaper column, Mel West’s What’s What, in the Herald. “HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL, as the Bard sez. Missus Hanna Hersh, a longtime character on our Main Stem …” Uncle Abe summoned Hanna to his office in the Dominion Square Building, the offending newspaper column on his desk. “Feh,” he said.

“It’s my first-born son,” she said.

But not her only child. Less than a year after Joey disappeared Jenny had to quit Fletcher’s Field High to take a job. Jenny was given credit for contributing to the support of the family and raising Arty almost single-handed. People felt it certainly indicated quality that she continued with her studies at Wellington Night School, but they also agreed that Jenny was too sour. For now that her pimples had dried out she was really rather attractive, especially strolling home from work in a sweater on a summer evening, her handbag, groceries, and a Modern Library book in her arms, her bottom snug in its skirt as a watermelon in its skin, but there was not a boy on St. Urbain good enough for her. It was also rumored that Jenny came home disconcertingly late from night school and did not, some neighbors said, treat her mother with the respect to which Hanna was entitled.

Even Hanna.

“Gzet,” Hanna hollered on street corners, “Gzet” and without warning she would begin to sob or curse passersby obscenely.

Early one spring morning, when the lilac tree was in bloom, Hanna emptied the coffee tin in the kitchen of all the week’s food money, hurried to Rachel Market, and returned with a tongue for pickling, a fat goose, marrow bones, chicken livers, pickles, Bing cherries, imported grapes, and a pineapple. Singing to herself, she lit the stove. Jenny, off to work, was not so much disconcerted by the squandered money as terrified to see Hanna so elated, seemingly untouchable.

“Joey’s coming home today,” Hanna said.

“You heard from him?”

“Vas you dere, Charlie? A mother knows.”

Jenny returned from work to find the kitchen stove laden with simmering pots. A tray of sweet-smelling, crispy raisin buns came out of the oven and in went a honey cake. The dining room table was set, the fruit basket covered with a linen, napkin. Arty had been made to put on his High Holidays suit; his shoes had been polished. Hanna sniffed at Jenny. “Her best friends wouldn’t tell her,” she said, reeling back in a mock faint. “Use Lifebuoy.”

Finally Hanna had to go and pick up her Gazette’s. “If he comes before I get back,” she said, “you and Arty are not to ask any dumb questions, understand? Not why did you go and where have you been? You pour him a snort from the bottle of Chivas Regal and say I’ll be home soon.” Then, as they both looked frightened, she added, as she tied her change purse to her waist, “Hi-ho Silver!”, and pounding herself on the behind, bellowing, she galloped out of the house.

The soup simmered on the stove for two days. The goose dried out and charred. The raisin buns hardened.

“Couldn’t we at least rent out his room?” Jenny asked.

“Night school,” Hanna said, “you think I don’t know what goes on there? You’re peddling your ass.”

Radio aggravated the bad feeling between Hanna and Jenny. Hanna had always been a fan, but following Joey’s departure she and the radio had become inseparable. Hanna’s favorite was Bob Hope. “That Bobby,” she’d say, “you can die from him, the things he says.” Autographed pictures of Hope, Joe Penner, the Mad Russian, Phil Harris, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and Jack Benny hung on the wall. Sunday night radio was the sore that festered. Jenny, on what was often her one free night, wanted to listen to thought-provoking Canadian Broadcasting Corporation dramas, but Hanna wouldn’t hear of it. Especially if on another station W. C. Fields might be visiting Mortimer Snerd. “If you’d only try,” Jenny pleaded, “just once.”

So Hanna tried. That night, as it happened, there was an uplifting play on by one of Canada’s most liberal-minded writers. It was about a lovely sensitive blind girl, who was being courted by an intelligent man with a basso voice. We know the man throbs with love for the blind girl but we are also led to believe there is something fishy about him. The man raises money for an operation for the girl, but when the surgery is successful and we know she will see again, he is discovered packing in his room. Why? He wants to spare the girl. He’s a Negro.

Hanna sighed, rolling her eyes. “Where there’s life there’s hope, and wherever there’s Hope, there’s usually Crosby,” she said, diving for the dial.

“If you only realized,” Jenny said, “what this play has to say about the world today.”

“Oh, you, Miss Hotzenklotz. You make me sick. Why don’t you go into your room and study up on Walt Disney’s dog?”

“For your information, it just so happens that Plato was one of the foremost philosophers of all time.”

If there was a thorny week between Hanna and Jenny it usually drew first blood when the intractable old lady turned up her radio very, very loud while her daughter, who had completed her high school requirements and immediately gone on to university-level courses, was studying. Jenny would retaliate by stealing a tube and Hanna’s next tactic was to crumble matzohs over her daughter’s bed sheets. Then Jenny would bring home an unplucked chicken for Friday, necessitating a loathsome job for Hanna, and Hanna would mix Russian oil into Jenny’s portion of borscht. “Tonight,” she’d say, “it’s bombs away.”

One balmy spring afternoon in 1943, when the lilac tree was in bloom in the back yard, Joey walked right into the house, as casually as if he had only just returned from Tansky’s. Hanna melted, moaning, into his arms.

“Well, to what do we owe this honor?” Jenny asked, terrified.

A fire-engine red MG sportscar was parked outside.

Windows whacked open. Neighbors came out to stand on their balconies. Arty, Duddy, Gas, and Jake gathered around the car, overcome with awe. There were stickers on the windshield. FLORIDA, the Citrus Stare. NEW ORLEANS, Mardi Gras City. GRAND CANYON. COLORADO, LAS VEGAS, TOMBSTONE, CHICAGO, GEORGIA. There was the dust of the desert on the car and the windshield was splattered with bugs and rain. The remains of a dead sparrow were impaled on the grille. The license plate was Californian. Two soft leather suitcases and a kitbag were strapped to a rack mounted on the rear of the car. So was a guitar. The name Jesse Hope was embossed in gold on one of the suitcases and another was plastered with still more stickers, exotic labels from hotels in Spain, France, the United Stares, and Mexico.

Duddy Kravitz, bolder than the rest, tried to flick open the glove compartment. It was locked. “That’s where he keeps his gat,” Duddy said.