The Favourite Game

His father had an expensive heart doctor named Farley. He was around so much that they might have called him Uncle if they had been that sort of family. While his father was gasping under the oxygen-tent in the Royal Victoria, Doctor Farley kissed his mother in the hallway of their house. It was a gentle kiss to console an unhappy woman, between two people who had known each other through many crises.

Breavman wondered whether or not he’d better get the gun and finish him off.

Then who’d repair his father?

Not long ago Breavman watched his mother read the Star. She put down the paper and a Chekhovian smile of lost orchards softened her face. She had just read Farley’s obituary notice.

‘Such a handsome man.’ She seemed to be thinking of sad Joan Crawford movies. ‘He wanted me to marry him.’

‘Before or after my father died?’

‘Don’t be so foolish.’

His father was a tidy man, upturned his wife’s sewing basket when he thought it was getting messy, raged when his family’s slippers were not carefully lined under respective beds.

He was a fat man who laughed easily with everybody but his brothers.

He was so fat and his brothers were tall and thin and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, why should the fat one die, didn’t he have enough being fat and breathless, why not one of the handsome ones?

The gun proved he was once a warrior.

His brother’s pictures were in the papers in connection with the war effort. He gave his son his first book, The Romance of the King’s Army, a thick volume praising British regiments.

K-K-K-Katy, he sang when he could.

What he really loved was machinery. He would go miles to see a machine which cut a pipe this way instead of that. His family thought him a fool. He lent money to his friends and employees without question. He was given poetry books for his bar mitzvah. Breavman has the leather books now and startles at each uncut page.

‘And read these, too, Lawrence.’

How To Tell BirdsHow To Tell TreesHow To Tell InsectsHow To Tell Stones

He looked at his father in the crisp, white bed, always neat, still smelling of Vitalis. There was something sour inside the softening body, some enemy, some limpness of the heart.

He tore the books as his father weakened. He didn’t know why he hated the careful diagrams and coloured plates. We do. It was to scorn the world of detail, information, precision, all the false knowledge which cannot intrude on decay.

Breavman roamed his house waiting for a shot to ring out. That would teach them, the great successes, the eloquent speakers, the synagogue builders, all the grand brothers that walked ahead into public glory. He waited for the blast of a .38 which would clean the house and bring a terrible change. The gun was right beside the bed. He waited for his father to execute his heart.

‘Get me the medals out of the top drawer.’

Breavman brought them to the bed. The reds and golds of the ribbons ran into each other as in a watercolour. With some effort his father pinned them on Breavman’s sweater.

Breavman stood at attention ready to receive the farewell address.

‘Don’t you like them? You’re always looking at them.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Stop stretching yourself like a damn fool. They’re yours.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Well, go out and play with them. Tell your mother I don’t want to see anyone and that includes my famous brothers.’

Breavman went downstairs and unlocked the closet which held his father’s fishing equipment. He spent hours in wonder, putting the great salmon rods together, winding and unwinding the copper wire, handling the dangerous flies and hooks.

How could his father have wielded these beautiful, heavy weapons, that swollen body on the crisp, white bed?

Where was the body in rubber boots that waded up rivers?

12

Many years later, telling all this, Breavman interrupted himself:

‘Shell, how many men know of those little scars in your earlobes? How many besides me, the original archaeologist of earlobes?’

‘Not as many as you think.’

‘I don’t mean the two or three or fifty that kissed them with their everyday lips. But in your fantasies, how many did something impossible with their mouths?’

‘Lawrence, please, we’re lying here together. You’re trying to spoil the night somehow.’

‘I’d say battalions.’

She did not reply and her silence removed her body from him a little distance.

‘Tell me some more about Bertha, Krantz and Lisa.’

‘Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else.’

‘Then let’s be quiet together.’

‘I saw Lisa before that time in the garage. We must have been five or six.’

Breavman stared at Shell and described Lisa’s sunny room, dense with expensive toys. Electric hobby-horse which rocked itself. Life-sized walking dolls. Nothing that didn’t squeak or light up when squeezed.

They hid in the shade of under-the-bed, their hands full of secrets and new smells, on the look-out for servants, watching the sun slide along the linoleum with the fairy tales cut in it.

The gigantic shoes of a housemaid paddled close by.

‘That’s lovely, Lawrence.’

‘But it’s a lie. It happened, but it’s a lie. Bertha’s Tree is a lie although she really fell out of it. That night after I fooled with my father’s fishing rods I sneaked into my parents’ room. They were both sleeping in their separate beds. There was a moon. They were both facing the ceiling and lying in the same position. I knew that if I shouted only one of them would wake up.’

‘Was that the night he died?’

‘It doesn’t matter how anything happens.’

He began to kiss her shoulders and face and although he was hurting her with his nails and teeth she didn’t protest.

‘Your body will never be familiar.’

13

After breakfast six men entered the house and set the coffin down in the living-room. It was surprisingly huge, made of dark-grained wood, brass-handled. There was snow on their clothes.

The room was suddenly more formal than Breavman had ever known it. His mother squinted.

They placed it on a stand and began to open the cabinet-like cover.

‘Close it, close it, we’re not in Russia!’

Breavman shut his eyes and waited for the click of the cover. But these men who make their living among the bereaved move noiselessly. They were gone when he opened his eyes.

‘Why did you make them close it, Mother?’

‘It’s enough as it is.’

The mirrors of the house were soaped, as if the glass had become victim to a strange indoor frost corresponding to the wide winter. His mother stayed alone in her room. Breavman sat stiffly on his bed and tried to fight his anger with a softer emotion.

The coffin was parallel to the chesterfield.

Whispering people began to congregate in the hall and on the balcony.

Breavman and his mother descended the stairs. The afternoon winter sun glimmered on his mother’s black stockings and gave to the mourners in the doorway a gold outline. He could see parked cars and dirty snow above their heads.

They stood closest, his uncles behind them. Friends and workers from the family factory thronged the hall, balcony, and path. His uncles, tall and solemn, touched his shoulders with their manicured hands.

But his mother was defeated. The coffin was open.

He was swaddled in silk, wrapped in a silvered prayer-shawl. His moustache bloomed fierce and black against his white face. He appeared annoyed, as if he were about to awaken, climb out of the offensively ornate box, and resume his sleep on the more comfortable chesterfield.

The cemetery was like an Alpine town, the stones like little sleeping houses. The diggers looked irreverently informal in their working clothes. A mat of artificial grass was spread over the heaps of exhumed frozen mud. The coffin went down in a system of pulleys.

Bagels and hard-boiled eggs, shapes of eternity, were served back at the house. His uncles joked with friends of the family. Breavman hated them. He looked under his great-uncle’s beard and asked him why he didn’t wear a tie.

He was the oldest son of the oldest son.

The family left last. Funerals are so neat. All they left behind were small gold-rimmed plates flecked with crumbs and caraway seeds.

The yards of lace curtain held some of the light of the small winter moon.

‘Did you look at him, Mother?’

‘Of course.’

‘He looked mad, didn’t he?’

‘Poor boy.’

‘And his moustache really black. As if it was done with an eyebrow pencil.’

‘It’s late, Lawrence…’

‘It’s late, all right. We’ll never see him again.’

‘I forbid you to use that voice to your mother.’

‘Why did you make them close it? Why did you? We could have seen him for a whole extra morning.’

‘Go to bed!’

‘Christ you, christ you, bastardess, witch!’ he improvised in a scream.

All night he heard his mother in the kitchen, weeping and eating.

14

Here is a colour photograph, largest picture on a wall of ancestors.

His father wears an English suit and all the English reticence that can be woven into cloth. A wine tie with a tiny, hard knot sprouts like a gargoyle. In his lapel a Canadian Legion pin, duller than jewellery. The double-chinned face glows with Victorian reason and decency, though the hazel eyes are a little too soft and staring, the mouth too full, Semitic, hurt.

The fierce moustache presides over the sensitive lips like a suspicious trustee.

The blood, which he died spitting, is invisible, but forms on the chin as Breavman studies the portrait.

He is one of the princes of Breavman’s private religion, double-natured and arbitrary. He is the persecuted brother, the near poet, the innocent of the machine toys, the sighing judge who listens but does not sentence.

Also he is heaving Authority, armoured with Divine Right, doing merciless violence to all that is weak, taboo, un-Breavmanlike.

As Breavman does him homage he wonders whether his father is just listening or whether he is stamping the seal on decrees.

Now he is settling more passively into his gold frame and his expression has become as distant as those in the older photographs. His clothes begin to appear dated and costume-like. He can rest. Breavman has inherited all his concerns.

The day after the funeral Breavman split open one of his father’s formal bow ties and sewed in a message. He buried it in the garden, under the snow beside the fence where in summer the neighbour’s lilies-of-the-valley infiltrate.

15

Lisa had straight black Cleopatra hair that bounced in sheaves off her shoulders when she ran or jumped. Her legs were long and well-formed, made beautiful by natural exercise. Her eyes were big, heavy-lidded, dreamy.

Breavman thought that perhaps she dreamed as he did, of intrigue and high deeds, but no, her wide eyes were roaming in imagination over the well-appointed house she was to govern, the brood she was to mother, the man she was to warm.

They grew tired of games in the field beside Bertha’s Tree. They did not want to squeeze under someone’s porch for Sardines. They did not want to limp through Hospital Tag. They did not want to draw the magic circle and sign it with a dot. Ildish-chay. Ets-lay o-gay, they whispered. They didn’t care who was It.

Better games of flesh, love, curiosity. They walked away from Run-Sheep-Run over to the park and sat on a bench near the pond where nurses gossip and children aim their toy boats.

He wanted to know everything about her. Was she allowed to listen to The Shadow (‘The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows, heheheheheheheh’)? Wasn’t Alan Young terrific? Especially the character with the flighty voice, ‘I’m hyah, I’m hyah, come gather rosebuds from my hair.’ Wasn’t the only decent part of the Charlie McCarthy programme when Mortimer Snerd came on? Could she get Gangbusters? Did she want to hear him imitate the Green Hornet’s car, driven by his faithful Filipino valet, Cato, or the Whistler? Wasn’t that a beautiful tune?

Had she ever been called a Dirty Jew?

They fell silent and the nurses and their blond babies reasserted their control of the universe.

And what was it like to have no father?

It made you more grown-up. You carved the chicken, you sat where he sat.

Lisa listened, and Breavman, for the first time, felt himself dignified, or rather, dramatized. His father’s death gave him a touch of mystery, contact with the unknown. He could speak with extra authority on God and Hell.

The nurses gathered their children and their boats and went away. The surface of the pond became smooth. The hands of the clock on the Chalet wound towards supper-time, but they kept on talking.

They squeezed hands, kissed once when the light was low enough, coming golden through the prickly bushes. Then they walked slowly home, not holding hands, but bumping against each other.

Breavman sat at the table trying to understand why he wasn’t hungry. His mother extolled the lamb chops.

16

Whenever they could they played their great game, the Soldier and the Whore. They played it in whatever room they could. He was on leave from the front and she was a whore of DeBullion Street.

Knock, knock, the door opened slowly.

They shook hands and he tickled her palm with his forefinger.

Thus they participated in that mysterious activity the accuracies of which the adults keep so coyly hidden with French words, with Yiddish words, with spelledout words; that veiled ritual about which night-club comedians construct their humour; that unapproachable knowledge which grownups guard to guarantee their authority.

Their game forbade talking dirty or roughhouse. They had no knowledge of the sordid aspect of brothels, and who knows if there is one? They thought of them as some sort of pleasure palace, places denied them as arbitrarily as Montreal movie theatres.

Whores were ideal women just as soldiers were ideal men.

‘Pay me now?’

‘Here’s all my money, beautiful baby.’

17

Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder. Flowers once the size of pine trees, return to clay pots. Even terror diminishes. The giants and giantesses of the nursery shrink to crabby teachers and human fathers. Breavman forgot everything he learned from Lisa’s small body.

Oh, how their lives had emptied from the time they crawled out from under the bed and stood up on their hind legs!

Now they longed for knowledge but undressing was a sin. Therefore they were an easy touch for the postcards, pornographic magazines, home-made erotica peddled in school cloakrooms. They became connoisseurs of sculpture and painting. They knew all the books in the library which had the best, most revealing reproductions.

What did bodies look like?

Lisa’s mother presented her with a careful book and they searched it in vain for straight information. There were phrases like ‘the temple of the human body,’ which may be true, but where was it, with its hair and creases? They wanted clear pictures, not a blank page with a dot in the centre and a breathless caption: ‘Just think! the male sperm is 1,000 times smaller than this.’

So they wore light clothing. He had a pair of green shorts which she loved for their thinness. She had a yellow dress which he preferred. This situation gave birth to Lisa’s great lyric exclamation:

‘You wear your green silk pants tomorrow; I’ll wear my yellow dress, so it’ll be better.’

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

He was about to send for a volume advertised in a confession magazine which promised to arrive in a plain, brown wrapper, when, in one of the periodic searches through the maid’s drawers, he found the viewer.

It was made in France and contained a two-foot strip of film. You held it to the light and turned the little round knob and you saw everything.

Let us praise this film, which has disappeared with the maid into the Canadian wilderness.

It was titled in English, with beguiling simplicity, ‘Thirty Ways to Screw.’ The scenes were nothing like the pornographic movies Breavman later witnessed and attacked, of naked, jumpy men and women acting out the contrived, sordid plots.

The actors were handsome humans, happy in their film career. They were not the scrawny, guilty, desperately gay cast-offs who perform for gentlemen’s smokers. There were no lecherous smiles for the camera, no winking and lip-licking, no abuse of the female organ with cigarettes and beer bottles, no ingenious unnatural arrangement of bodies.

Each frame glowed with tenderness and passionate delight.

This tiny strip of celluloid shown widely in Canadian theatres might revitalize the tedious marriages which are reported to abound in our country.

Where are you, working girl with supreme device? The National Film Board hath need of you. Are you growing old in Winnipeg?

The film ended with a demonstration of the grand, democratic, universal practice of physical love. There were Indian couples represented, Chinese, Negro, Arabian, all without their national costumes on.

Come back, maid, strike a blow for World Federalism.

They pointed the viewer to the window and solemnly traded it back and forth.

They knew it would be like this.

The window gave over the slope of Murray Park, across the commercial city, down to the Saint Lawrence, American mountains in the distance. When it wasn’t his turn Breavman took in the prospect. Why was anybody working?

They were two children hugging in a window, breathless with wisdom.

They could not rush to it then and there. They weren’t safe from intrusion. Not only that, children have a highly developed sense of ritual and formality. This was important. They had to decide whether they were in love. Because if there was one thing the pictures showed, you had to be in love. They thought they were but they would give themselves a week just to make sure.

They hugged again in what they thought would be among their last fully clothed embraces.

How can Breavman have regrets? It was Nature herself who intervened.

Three days before Thursday, maid’s day off, they met in their special place, the bench beside the pond in the park. Lisa was shy but determined to be straight and honest, as was her nature.

‘I can’t do it with you.’

‘Aren’t your parents going away?’

‘It’s not that. Last night I got the Curse.’

She touched his hand with pride.

‘Oh.’

‘Know what I mean?’

‘Sure.’

He hadn’t the remotest idea.

‘But it would still be O.K., wouldn’t it?’

‘But now I can have babies. Mummy told me about everything last night. She had it all ready for me, too, napkins, a belt of my own, everything.’

‘No guff?’

What was she talking about? The Curse sounded like a celestial intrusion on his pleasure.

‘She told me about all the stuff, just like the camera.’

‘Did you tell her about the camera?’

Nothing, the world, nobody could be trusted.

‘She promised not to tell anyone.’

‘It was a secret.’

‘Don’t be sad. We had a long talk. I told her about us, too. You see, I’ve got to act like a lady now. Girls have to act older than boys.’

‘Who’s sad?’

She leaned back in the bench and took his hand.

‘But aren’t you happy for me?’ she laughed, ‘that I got the Curse? I have it right now!’

18

Soon she was deep in the rites of young womanhood. She came back from camp half a head taller than Breavman, with breasts that disturbed even bulky sweaters.

‘Hiya, Lisa.’

‘Hello, Lawrence.’

She was meeting her mother downtown, she was flying to New York for clothes. She was dressed with that kind of austerity which can make any thirteen-yearold a poignant beauty. None of the uglifying extravagance to which Westmount Jews and Gentiles are currently devoted.

Good-bye.

He watched her grow away from him, not with sadness but with wonder. At fifteen she was a grand lady who wore traces of lipstick and was allowed an occasional cigarette.

He sat in their old window and saw the older boys call for her in their fathers’ cars. He marvelled that he had ever kissed the mouth that now mastered cigarettes. Seeing her ushered into these long cars by young men with white scarves, seeing her sitting like a duchess in a carriage while they closed the door and walked briskly in front of the machine and climbed importantly into the driver’s seat, he had to convince himself that he had ever had a part in that beauty and grace.

Hey, you forgot one of your little fragrances on my thumb.

19

Fur gloves in the sun-room.

Certain years the sun-room, which was no more than an enclosed balcony attached to the back of the house, was used to store some of the winter clothes.

Breavman, Krantz and Philip came into this room for no particular reason. They looked out of the windows at the park and the tennis players.

There was the regular sound of balls hit back and forth and the hysterical sound of a house fly battering a window pane.

Breavman’s father was dead, Krantz’s was away most of the time, but Philip’s was strict. He did not let Philip wear his hair with a big pompadour in front. He had to slick it down to his scalp with some nineteenth-century hair tonic.

That historic afternoon Philip looked around and what did he spy but a pair of fur gloves.

He pulled on one of them, sat himself down on a pile of blankets.

Breavman and Krantz, who were perceptive children, understood that the fur glove was not an integral part of the practice.

They all agreed it smelt like Javel water. Philip washed it down the sink.

‘Catholics think it’s a sin,’ he instructed.

20

Breavman and Shell were beside the lake. The evening mist was piling up along the opposite shore like dunes of sand. They lay in a double sleeping bag beside the fire, which was built of driftwood they had gathered that afternoon. He wanted to tell her everything.

‘I still do.’

‘Me too,’ she said.

‘I read that Rousseau did right to the end of his life. I guess a certain kind of creative person is like that. He works all day to discipline his imagination so it’s there he’s most at home. No real corporeal woman can give him the pleasure of his own creations. Shell, don’t let me scare you with what I’m saying.’

‘But doesn’t it separate us completely?’

They held hands tightly and watched the stars in the dark part of the sky; where the moon was bright they were obliterated. She told him she loved him.

A loon went insane in the middle of the lake.

21

After that distinguished summer of yellow dresses and green pants Lisa and Breavman rarely met. But once, during the following winter, they wrestled in the snow.

That episode has a circumference for Breavman, a kind of black-edged picture frame separating it from what he remembers of her.

It was after Hebrew school. They found themselves starting home together. They cut up through the park. There was almost a full moon and it silvered the snow.