The Street by Mordecai Richler Read Free Book Online

grandmother’s name was seldom mentioned. Until one evening, after I’d had a fight with my sister, I said, “Why can’t I move into the back bedroom now?”
    My father glared at me. “Big-mouth.”
    “It’s empty, isn’t it?”
    The next afternoon my mother put on her best dress and coat and new spring hat.
    “Don’t go looking for trouble,” my father said.
    “It’s been a month. Maybe they’re not treating her right.”
    “They’re experts.”
    “Did you think I was never going to visit her? I’m not inhuman, you know.”
    “Alright, go.” But after she had gone my father stood by the window and said, “I was born lucky, and that’s it.”
    I sat on the outside stoop watching the cars go by. My father waited on the balcony above, cracking peanuts. It wassix o’clock, maybe later, when the ambulance slowed down and rocked to a stop right in front of our house. “I knew it,” my father said. “I was born with all the luck.”
    My mother got out first, her eyes red and swollen, and hurried upstairs to make my grandmother’s bed.
    “You’ll get sick again,” my father said.
    “I’m sorry, Sam, but what could I do? From the moment she saw me she cried and cried. It was terrible.”
    “They’re recognized experts there. They know how to take care of her better than you do.”
    “Experts? Expert murderers you mean. She’s got bedsores, Sam. Those dirty little Irish nurses they don’t change her linen often enough they hate her. She must have lost twenty pounds in there.”
    “Another month and you’ll be flat on your back again. I’ll write you a guarantee, if you want.”
    My father became a regular at Tansky’s again and, once more, I had to go in and kiss my grandmother in the morning. Amazingly, she had begun to look like a man. Little hairs had sprouted on her chin, she had grown a spiky grey moustache, and she was practically bald.
    Yet again my uncles and aunts sent five dollar bills, though erratically, to help pay for my grandmother’s support. Elderly people, former followers of my grandfather, came to inquire about the old lady’s health. They sat in the back bedroom with her, leaning on their canes, talking to themselves and rocking to and fro. “The Holy Shakers,” my father called them. I avoided the seamed, shrunken old men because they always wanted to pinch my cheeks or trick me with a dash of snuff and laugh when I sneezed. When the visit with my grandmother was over the old people would unfailingly sit in the kitchen with my mother for another hour, watching her make
lokshen
, slurping lemon tea out of a saucer. They would recall the sayings and books and charitable deeds of the late Zaddik.
    “At the funeral,” my mother never wearied of telling them, “they had to have six motorcycle policemen to control the crowds.”
    In the next two years there was no significant change in my grandmother’s condition, though fatigue, ill-temper, and even morbidity enveloped my mother again. She fought with her brothers and sisters and once, after a particularly bitter quarrel, I found her sitting with her head in her hands. “If, God forbid, I had a stroke,” she said, “would you send me to the Old People’s Home?”
    “Of course not.”
    “I hope that never in my life do I have to count on my children for anything.”
    The seventh summer of my grandmother’s illness she was supposed to die and we did not know from day to day when it would happen. I was often sent out to eat at an aunt’s or at my other grandmother’s house. I was hardly ever at home. In those days they let boys into the left-field bleachers of Delormier Downs free during the week and Duddy, Gas sometimes, Hershey, Stan, Arty and me spent many an afternoon at the ball park. The Montreal Royals, kingpin of the Dodger farm system, had a marvellous club at the time. There was Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Lou Ortiz, Red Durrett, Honest John Gabbard, and Kermit Kitman. Kitman was our hero. It used to