6

OH GOD! OH MONTREAL!

Stranded. Some three weeks after his abortive trip to New York, Jake was still stuck in Montreal. Unemployed, without prospects. Jenny had made good her escape eight long years ago, in 1943, but not me, he thought, coming out of the System, having survived another triple bill. Abysmally depressed, with nothing to do and nowhere to go, when he saw Gas. Towering, plump Gas Berger, of all people, sailing purposefully down St. Catherine Street, shoulders dug manfully into the wind, carrying a pigskin briefcase.

“Knock, knock,” Jake said.

“Who’s there?” Gas replied, heaving with laughter.

Gas bounced a punch off Jake’s shoulder and Jake reached up and yanked Gas’s buttercup ears rapturously, and they retired to the Tour Eiffel to drink together. Emerging from the dark two hours later to squint into the unsparing autumn sunlight, they bought a bottle of whisky, some delicatessen, and took a taxi to Arty’s rooming house near McGill University.

Arty, who was being put through dentistry school by Uncle Abe, had returned to Montreal years ago. “Well,” he exclaimed, “will you look who’s here!”

Jake, Gas, and Arty settled down on the carpet with their smoked meat sandwiches and curling French fried potatoes and whisky. It was an absolutely marvelous afternoon, maybe one of the most enjoyable of Jake’s life. No longer boys they were but, mercifully, not yet full-grown men either, envy-ridden, harassed by mortgages and calorie intake and child education. Everything was still possible. Nobody had yet looked at himself maturely and settled for the workable marriage or the tolerable job. In the years to come expectations would contract, success or failure would divide them. But that glorious afternoon in Arty’s rooming house they were overcome with regard for each other. They talked about the incomparable time and place they had shared. They argued about John Foster Dulles, tartar, Jackie Robinson, sharp practices in real estate, foreign cars, Johnny Greco’s second fight with Beau Jack, the claims made in toothpaste advertisements, Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain Street, and, ultimately, Joey.

“Was he in the rackets,” Gas asked, “or was that horseshit?”

“I never found out for sure, but I’ll tell you one thing. Last year, you know, in New York, I was watching an old Western on TV, Randolph Scott rounding up a posse, and who in the hell jumps on one of the horses but Joey. My big brother Joey riding with Randolph Scott, for Chrissake!”

“Where is he now?” Jake asked.

Arty’s gaiety faltered, he put down his sandwich. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask Jenny.”

Who had married a radio writer in Toronto, her dreams fulfilled, and was presently visiting Montreal in her office as CBC script editor.

“How is she?”

“The same. Difficult.”

If Jake hadn’t seen Jenny for years, it was only because once she had put Montreal behind her she had resolutely proclaimed she wanted nothing further to do with the Hershes, even Jake, which was not exactly true. For Jenny flaunted her Gentile husband at visitors to Toronto and demanded to know what the bigoted Hershes were saying of her marriage. And as she began to circulate among the anointed, suddenly on first-name terms with Toronto’s conclave of writers, directors, and actors, she relayed messages to Montreal, aimed like poisoned arrows at the Hershes, to signal the celebrated company she kept. Alas, Uncle Abe was not impressed. Neither was Uncle Jack. All Jenny’s vengeful attempts to dazzle were unavailing. Her world was alien to the Hershes.

“Of course I’ll see you,” she said when Jake phoned. “If you’re not scared of being contaminated?”

“What?” Jake demanded, irritated.

“I should have thought I was verboten to any Hersh. A fallen woman.”

So the next afternoon, he sat in Jenny’s room at the Laurentian Hotel, where she poured him what she called a gin-and-It.

Wearing too much eye shadow, her wet glistening lips too jarringly red, Jenny remained an immensely attractive woman, volatile as ever, her black eyes smoldering. She told Jake that she was bitterly disappointed in how Arty had turned out. Studying dentistry. “The predictable ghetto syndrome. Anyway I suppose he’s … content.”

“And you?” Jake asked, surprised to find himself annoyed for Arty’s sake.

“Well, at least I haven’t been sucked into the gilded ghetto. Working out my sexual frustrations by organizing bazaars. Like your precious cousin Sandra. I’m doing meaningful work. And how’s dear Doris?”

“The same, I suppose. I hardly ever see her.”

“She’s frigid, you know. Her husband phones me when he’s in Toronto. I suppose he’s heard about the important people who come to our parties. Or that I’m hot stuff. Anyway I told him it’s a call girl he needed. I don’t service B’nai B’rith brothers out of town. Especially, I told him, somebody who looked to me like he was no good at it. ‘I’m sorry, darling, if I came too quickly.’ You should have seen his face. I thought he’d turn gray on the spot.”

They sat together stiffly, Jake uneasy because he could hear somebody, a man, singing in the shower.

“You’re a puritan,” Jenny said. “A real Hersh. And you weren’t supposed to be here for another half hour.”

Leaping up, Jake said, “I’ll come back later.”

“Come tomorrow. We’ll have breakfast together.”

Jake sat seething in a leather armchair in the lobby until Duddy emerged from the elevator. “You son-of-a-bitch,” he said.

“Jealous?” Duddy asked, smirking.

“Duddy, do me a favor. Lay off her.”

Duddy smiled spitefully, reaching up to remove an imaginary hair from between his teeth, wiggled his eyebrows, released the hair delicately and watched it drift to the carpet. “Her husband,” he said pityingly, “can only go seven innings.”

Jake discovered what Duddy was after when he joined Jenny for breakfast the following morning and she declared that she was willing to rescue him from the Hershes. She would buy him an air ticket and help him get into television in Toronto. They traveled on the same flight.

“Duddy feels he’s stagnating,” Jenny said, “and so he’s thinking of making a fresh start in Toronto.”

“Don’t get entangled with him. He only wants to use you.”

“And you?” Jenny asked.