4

Duddy didn’t go to see virgil the next morning. He put an advertisement in the Star began to interview girls to fill Yvette’s job. He hired the cutest one, but she left after a week because she couldn’t abide his language. He hired another one, a kid just out of school, began a desultory affair, and fired her when her period started eight days later. The third girl was highly experienced. She wanted desperately to put the office in order and went in for bullshit like interoffice memos (rockets, she called them) and asked Duddy so many questions he couldn’t answer that he fired her too. Four days of the week he was on the road, showing movies. He was not getting much sleep again and Lennie got him more benzedrine pills. Every Friday he sent Virgil his check and every Monday morning it was back on his desk, the envelope unopened. We’ll see, he thought. She’s proud, but they can’t hold out forever.

By the end of June the hotels had filled for the summer and Duddy’s playing schedule required him to be on the road all week. He kept Virgil’s sleeping bag in the back of the truck and slept in the fields and on the beaches to save money and hoping to catch pneumonia or be bitten by a snake. He’d go for days without shaving and was seldom seen in a clean shirt. If anyone remarked on his appearance he’d smirk and say something rude. He looked for fights everywhere and by mid-June he had already lost three clients. Even so his schedule was a grueling one, enough to keep two men busy, and there were times when he forgot to take a pill and fell asleep at the wheel. He drove recklessly too. The hell with it, he thought.

“You look like a bum,” Max said to him one day at Eddy’s.

“A big deal.”

“Business isn’t so hot? I knew you’d get your fingers burnt one day. I warned you.”

Reyburn did a surprisingly good job on the Hershorn wedding. His film was straightforward, exactly the sort of thing Duddy had wanted and never had from Friar. But now he found it boring. He missed the crazy angle shots and montages and outlandish commentary.

“What’s wrong?” Reyburn asked.

“Nothing.”

“Mr. Hershorn is delighted.”

“Mr. Hershorn doesn’t know his ass from his elbow.”

“Look here, Kravitz, I don’t think you’re happy with me. I’ve been offered something in Toronto, but —”

“Take it. Good-by.”

“You’re a funny kid. I don’t understand you.”

“I’m a comedian.”

It was crazy, he had the Camp Forest Land film coming up and he’d never find another cameraman in time. Duddy phoned Grossman and offered to return his advance.

“We’ve got a contract,” Grossman said. “I promised all the parents that the kids would be in the movies…”

“My heart bleeds, Grossman.”

“A contract is a contract.”

“Sue me,” he said, hanging up.

He refused to show movies at Rubin’s because he was afraid to see Linda again, but one night in Ste. Agathe he ran into Cuckoo.

“Hey,” Cuckoo said, “remember the old days, before you were a movie mogul? No time for your old pals now, eh?”

“I’m working day and night.”

“All work and no play. You know what they say? Hey, how would you like to see one of my new routines?”

Duddy went to Cuckoo’s room. He couldn’t get out of it.

“The band’s playing Yiddish music, but eerie. There’s a scream offstage. I come on in this leather jacket, see. I’m on a tricycle. I’m slouching. Did you see The Wild Ones?”

Duddy nodded.

“I’m on a tricycle, see. I’ve got a lollypop in my mouth and the number’s called ‘The Return of Moivyn Brandovitch or Mumbles the Macher.’ Wait till you hear the lyrics… ‘I’m a vild von from vay’ — What’sa matter? You dead?”

“Cuckoo, you’re never going to make it. You’re not good enough.”

Cuckoo staggered. He freed an imaginary dagger from his chest. “Et tu, Brute.”

“You’re going to be playing this lousy hotel for the rest of your life.”

“Boy, have you ever changed. I’ve heard stories, but —”

“What kind of stories?”

“Stories.”

Duddy grabbed him. “What kind of stories?”

“Yvette’s back in town, living with some guy in a wheelchair. They say you took them both for every cent they had.”

“You little bastard.”

“Irwin’s graduated, you know. He’s got his law degree and he’s been speaking to Yvette. It seems the guy never should have been allowed —”

Duddy shoved Cuckoo across the room. He collapsed on the floor there, shielding his face. “Don’t hit me on the nose,” he shrieked. “Whatever you do don’t touch my nose! The operation cost me —”

Duddy fled. That makes the second time this week I hit a guy, he thought, and he drove to Montreal that night, even though he had to be back in the mountains to show his first movie at two the next afternoon. Duddy got out his typewriter and made a pot of coffee. He wrote a long intricate letter to Hersh, saying how much he loved and missed Yvette, how Virgil’s accident was destroying him and the business was in ruins, and ending with how he saw no reason why he shouldn’t commit suicide. It was dawn by the time he finished. Duddy put the letter into an envelope addressed to Yvette and wrote another letter to her, this one shorter.

Dear Miss Durelle,

It appears my secretary sent a letter for you to Mr. Hersh. Since I wrote you both at the same time Mr. Hersh’s letter must have gone into your envelope by mistake. Please don’t open it. The letter to Mr. Hersh is personal & confidential. I would appreciate it if you would return it to my office at your convenience. I hope you are well. I’m keeping very busy.

DUDDY

He mailed the long letter in the morning and held the shorter one back for a day, but both of them were returned to his office unopened.

At ten-thirty Monday morning the phone rang. It was Max. “Your Uncle Benjy died at three o’clock this morning,” he said. “He passed away in his sleep. He didn’t suffer.”

Everyone from the factory came to the funeral and so did lots of buyers and competitors and old comrades. Duddy drove in the car that followed immediately behind the hearse with his grandfather, his father, his brother, and Auntie Ida.

“We’re a small family,” Lennie said.

“But we stick together,” Max said. “We’re loyal.”

Duddy took his grandfather’s hand and held it between his own.

“He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds,” Simcha said.

Ida looked out of the window. Duddy could make out the stays beneath her black silk dress and he imagined the raw marked flesh underneath.

“It’s about time either you or Lennie got hitched,” Max said. “Paw here would like to see some grandchildren…”

“Shettup,” Duddy said.

“He waited by the window for you day after day,” Ida said.

“I came whenever I could,” Lennie said.

“She means Duddel,” Simcha said.

“Gwan,” Max said. “He never had time for Duddy. Lennie was his favorite.”

“There’s a letter he left for you,” Ida said. “I’ve got it at home.”

“Sure thing,” Duddy said. They drove in silence.

“He had his faults,” Max said.

Nobody answered.

“A better brother I couldn’t have had. I’m just saying he had his faults.”

They finally turned onto the gravel road leading to the cemetery.

“I’ve got faults too,” Max said. “I recognize it.”

Simcha watched without tears when they lowered the coffin into the earth. But when Duddy freed his hand from his grandfather’s he saw that the palm was cut and bleeding and he wrapped a handkerchief round it. “Zeyda?”

The old man was muttering something in Hebrew. A prayer.

“Where’s my mother’s stone?”

He pointed it out. Lennie was already standing there.

“He did so much for me, you know,” Lennie said. “But I was always frightened of Uncle Benjy. There was something about him…”

“Easy. Take it easy, Lennie.”

“Towards the end, you know, I had a feeling he was making fun of me.”

“He loved you like a son. Everybody knows that. Let’s go, eh?” But Duddy lingered to take a last look at his mother’s stone. “We’re supposed to come here once a year, aren’t we? This year let’s try. We could come together.”

Duddy went home. They had heard about his uncle’s death in the mountains so they didn’t expect him with the movies, but his clients were annoyed because he didn’t even bother to phone.

I’ll get into bed, he thought, and never get out, not unless somebody comes for me. But nobody came and the heat made his head ache. He dreamt again about somebody else’s bulldozers clearing his land. He saw himself horribly mutilated in a road accident. Yvette came to the hospital, but it was too late. The doctors led her away. “He kept calling for someone,” they said. “A girl named Yvette. He’s left everything he owned in her name.” Go ahead, cry your heart out, you lousy bitch. another dream he was an old man of forty, toothless, bald, a drunk, and he stopped at a big rich house to ask for a cup of coffee. Yvette answered the door wearing a mink coat. She recognized him and sank to her knees, but Duddy wouldn’t stay; he freed himself from her embrace and limped away. “I’ve got the mark of Cain on me,” he told her. He woke with a cry of anguish. His bed floated like a raft amid a wash of orange peels, last week’s newspapers, cigarette butts, sticky glasses, and watery ice cube trays. As the piercing sun sought him through a haze and a vulture circled predatorily, the sea lifted him onto an island. “Where does the white man come from?” a girl asked. “I think he’s dying,” her brother observed. “Bring me to your head man,” Duddy said. “Capishe?” handsome, a scornful multimillionaire presiding over a banquet table, he heard whispering in the background.

“But why didn’t he ever marry?”

“They say that when he was very young…”

Sometimes the phone rang and twice the door.

“Yvette?”

Anxiously she ripped open the telegram.

THE WAR DEPARTMENT REGRETS TO INFORM YOU THAT DUDLEY KRAVITZ FELL WHILE LEADING HIS MEN OUT OF A TRAP IN KOREA. STOP. HE HAS BEEN AWARDED THE VICTORIA CROSS. STOP. HE ASKED THAT THE MEDAL BE SENT TO YOU. STOP.

THE PRIME MINISTER

There were broads, an endless spill of beauty queens for him and Friar, the merry movie-makers, as they wandered from country to country, but at the Academy Award dinner there were those who saw through his mask of forced gaiety “He hates all women so, poor devil.”

“But what an appetite! The comings and going from his house in one night. Jeez.”

A crowd gathered round the grizzled old lush who had expired on the Bowery pavement. Flies filled his battered face.

“Any identification?”

“Nothing in his pockets, except this.”

A faded photograph of Yvette.

“Let’s get him down to the morgue quick. He’s beginning to stink.”

On Fifth Avenue the hearse passed a Rolls-Royce going in the opposite direction. Inside, Hugh Thomas Calder pressed a french-kiss on Yvette.

“Why are you crying, my sweet?”

“I don’t know. I felt a chill just now.”

Aunt Ida’s face loomed so large he had to avoid the hairy ear again. “It’s psychosomatic,” she said. “He’s no cripple. It’s the only way he could get Yvette from you.”

“Wha’?”

“He’s got a whang that makes yours look like a mosquito bite. She’s crazy about him.”

A leering Mr. MacPherson waited round every corner. “You’ll go far, Kravitz. I told you you’d go far.” He tried to run, he wept for trying so hard, but his legs wouldn’t work.

At home Irwin waited with a briefcase on his lap. “We’ll expect you in court first thing tomorrow morning.”

“But —”

Even a white wig failed to disguise the judge’s red fussy face. Mr. MacPherson’s laughter squirted across the court room.

“Please!”

Duddy woke with a shriek. He staggered out of bed, tripping over a pitcher and spilling stale orange juice on the floor. He sat down at the kitchen table and filled a bowl with corn flakes. He poured the milk without looking and realized too late that it had curdled. Duddy knocked over the bowl with his fist and started for the bedroom again. He stepped into the spilt orange juice and for hours afterwards in bed he couldn’t get his toes unstuck. He wept bitterly before he sank into a stupor again. I ought to get up, he thought, but he kept putting it off. I’d do it, he thought, if I could just get up and get out of here. But he’d have to brush his teeth, wash, wipe up the orange juice, clean out the fridge, do the dishes, shop — shave, don’t forget shave — the office, and all for what? He fell asleep again and dreamt he saw Yvette in bed with another man. It could have been Bernie Altman, he wasn’t sure, but she was certainly enjoying it. Duddy woke with a bone and pulled the sheet over his head. His toes were stuck together again. He sat up in bed, rummaged around for some empty cigarette boxes, and stuffed silver paper between his toes. I’d still get up, he thought, and do everything, but there’s no toilet paper. Next time he woke the room was dark and outside it was raining hard. The thunder and lightning excited him, but after the storm the heat seemed more oppressive. I’ll wait here, he thought, until somebody comes with good news. But nobody came and when he woke again it was dawn. There was a mosquito in the room. Sliding his arm stealthily under the sheet, he reached down for a newspaper, but orange juice had seeped through all the papers within reach. They were stuck to the floor. Duddy pulled his pillow over his head and began to concoct a delightful dream about Linda and himself going out horseback riding and getting caught in a storm. He got to the part where they take refuge in the barn quickly enough — and he was interrupted by the discovery that now his fingers were sticking together. Duddy tried wiping them on the sheets, he licked one finger dry with infinite care, but afterwards his fingers still tended to stick together. His feet had begun to ache too. The silver paper had formed into hard balls and was cutting into the tender flesh. His mouth tasted stickily of stale orange juice. I was just going to get out of bed too, he thought, but I’m not going to get up just because of the orange juice. If I get up it will be because I want to get up. He fell asleep again, but he couldn’t wangle his way back into the barn with Linda. That dream was lost. He lived through what he could remember of The Maltese Falcon, the part of Bogart. But when he got to the point where the police come to wake him up he could no longer remember the name of the actor who played the nasty cop. Regis Toomey was one, but the other… Duddy could see his face so clearly and he could remember him from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon umpteen other movies, but he couldn’t remember his name that prevented him from continuing with the Falcon story. Five times he got to the point where the cops come to wake him up, once he almost had the name, and three times he tried to substitute other actors for whosits, but it didn’t work. He woke again around noon, freed the silver paper pellets from his aching toes, and dozed off and dreamt that he had brushed his teeth, washed, wiped up the orange juice, cleaned the fridge, done the dishes — and woke to discover that he was still in bed and had to go to the toilet something terrible. He slept only fitfully now — two, three minutes at a time — and woke again from a dream that he had, indeed, gone to the toilet. He had a headache. He leaped out of bed and ran to the toilet. Quickly he urinated, soaked a towel in warm water, grabbed it, and got back into bed. He washed his sticky hand and both feet and triumphantly pulled the sheet over his head again when there came a pounding at the door. Go away, he thought. F– off. But the pounding persisted and he got out of bed to answer the door, stepping into the orange juice again. It was a registered letter for him. A large, serious-looking envelope.

“They’re suing me,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“What time is it, kid?”

“One-thirty-two approximately.”

“Tuesday?”

“Thursday, buster. Where have you been?”

The letter was from his Aunt Ida. Inside, in another large envelope, was the letter from his Uncle Benjy. Duddy laid it on the palm of his hand, trying it for weight. It’s not a letter, he thought, it’s a goddam book. He flung it onto the pinball machine and turned on the shower. He drank cup after cup of black coffee and finally he went to the office. “Any calls, doll?”

Creditors, canceled orders, indignant clients. Hugh Thomas Calder had called twice.

“Get him on the line for me, please.”

Mr. Calder wanted to know why Duddy hadn’t called in such a long time. He suggested that they have dinner together that night. “Can do,” Duddy said. He went to Mr. Calder’s house and they dined alone there.

“You’re not in a very talkative mood tonight,” Mr. Calder said.

“What do you want from me, Mr. Calder?”

“I enjoy your company.”

“Come off it. I amuse you. That’s what you mean.”

“You’re a friend of mine. I take a fatherly interest in you.”

“Yeah,” Duddy said, “then how come you never introduce me to any of your other friends?”

“They might not understand you.”

“You mean I might try to make a deal with them like I did with you over the scrap and that would embarrass you. I’m a little Jewish pusherke.

Mr. Calder didn’t answer.

“If I was a white man I wouldn’t say that. You guys never say what’s on your mind. It’s not — well, polite. Right?”

“You’re acting like a young man on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”

“Bullshit.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Would you excuse me if I went home? I don’t feel well.”

But Duddy couldn’t sit at home. The apartment was too depressing and he did not feel up to reading Uncle Benjy’s letter. He went to the office and looked at his bills. The sum they added up to was terrifying. Duddy unlocked the desk and took out the map of Lac St. Pierre. He found Yvette’s first letter and the photographs of the lake. I’d like to see the day she ever got a job as a photographer, he thought. Boy. He sat there chewing on a pencil and trying to think of somebody he’d like to see. Bernie Altman was out of town, Hersh wasn’t home. Duddy went to a bar around the corner. I wonder, he thought, if — objectively speaking — I could be blamed for the death of MacPherson’s wife? I never even met her. He drove down to Waverly Street and parked outside Hersh’s house. An hour, two hours, passed before he showed up.

“Hersh!”

“Hi, Duddy, how are you?”

Duddy began to cry.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Get in, please.”

They drove to the nearest bar.

“How’s Yvette these days?” Hersh asked.

“Aw. We’re through, you know. We’ve had it.”

“That’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear it.”

“They’re a dime a dozen. Don’t you get involved. Take my advice.”

“I’m sailing for Europe next Wednesday.”

Duddy’s eyes filled. He had to blow his nose. “I must be becoming an old lady,” he said. “This afternoon I heard somebody say that the Dodgers’ lead had been cut to half a game and I burst into tears. Hey, did you ever see The Maltese Falcon?”

“Yeah.”

Duddy asked him if he could remember the name of the guy who had played the other cop. Regis Toomey was one.

“Ward Bond.”

“Ward Bond! That’s it. Ward Bond.”

“Are you going to cry again?”

“Naw. I’m awright. Honest. Listen, there’s something I want to ask you. I — About MacPherson. It’s true, I made the phone call. His wife died, you know.”

“Look, we were kids then. How were you to know —”

“We used to phone them all the time, didn’t we? All the guys did. You never phoned.”

“I was something of a sissy in those days.”

“Next Wednesday. Jeez. Will you write me, Hersh?”

“Sure.”

“Aw, you’ll never write me.”

“Sure I will. I promise.”

“You’re my only friend.”

“You don’t look so hot, Duddy. Maybe you ought to see a doctor.”

“How was I to know that his wife would answer the phone?” he asked, his voice breaking.

“Let’s go for a walk.”

“You’ll never write me,” Duddy said. “You’ll forget all about me.”

“Come on, Duddy. Let’s get out of here.”

“If I had known that his wife was going to get out of bed to answer the phone,” Duddy said, “I never would have — Let me send you money when you’re in Paris. Let me help you.”

“I’m your friend, Duddy. You don’t have to give me money.”

“I’m going to write you every week. Even if you don’t answer my letters.”

“You’ve got to calm down, Duddy. You’ve been working too hard.”

He gave Hersh a lift home. “I’m going to come and see you there,” Duddy said. “I can go to Paris too.”

“Sure. Why not?”

“You’d be embarrassed to see me there. All your friends in Paris will be intelligent. Artists like.”

“Duddy. Listen, Duddy —”

But Duddy stepped on the gas and drove off.

“Duddy!”

Hersh pursued him for thirty or forty feet before he gave up. Duddy skidded around the corner, turned into St. Urbain Street and parked the car. He rested with his forehead pressed against the steering wheel and stared at the clutch.