The Street by Mordecai Richler Read Free Book Online Page B

happens is that he has an orgasm?”
    “A wha’?”
    “Skip it. I forgot you were still in kindergarten.”
    “Kiss my Royal Canadian –”
    “At the funeral, they’re going to open the coffin and throw dirt in her face. It’s supposed to be earth from Eretz. They open it and you’re going to have to look.”
    “Says you.”
    A little while after the lights had been turned out Rifka approached my bed, her head covered with a sheet and her arms raised high. “Bouyo-bouyo. Who’s that sleeping in my bed? Woo-woo.”
    My uncle who was in the theatre and my aunt from Toronto came to the funeral. My uncle, the rabbi, was there too.
    “As long as she was alive,” my mother said, “he couldn’t even send her five dollars a month. I don’t want him in the house, Sam. I can’t bear the sight of him.”
    “You’re upset,” Dr. Katzman said, “and you don’t know what you’re saying.”
    “Maybe you’d better give her a sedative,” the rabbi said.
    “Sam, will you speak up for once, please.”
    Flushed, eyes heated, my father stepped up to the rabbi. “I’ll tell you this straight to your face, Israel,” he said. “You’ve gone down in my estimation.”
    The rabbi smiled a little.
    “Year by year,” my father continued, his face burning a brighter red, “your stock has gone down with me.”
    My mother began to weep and she was led unwillingly to a bed. While my father tried his utmost to comfort her, as he muttered consoling things, Dr. Katzman plunged a needle into her arm. “There we are,” he said.
    I want to sit on the stoop outside with Duddy. My uncle, the rabbi, and Dr. Katzman stepped into the sun to light cigarettes.
    “I know exactly how you feel,” Dr. Katzman said. “There’s been a death in the family and the world seems indifferent to your loss. Your heart is broken and yet it’s a splendid summer day … a day made for love and laughter … and that must seem very cruel to you.”
    The rabbi nodded; he sighed.
    “Actually,” Dr. Katzman said, “it’s remarkable that she held out for so long.”
    “Remarkable?” the rabbi said. “It’s written that if a man has been married twice he will spend as much time with his first wife in heaven as he did on earth. My father, may he rest in peace, was married to his first wife for seven years and my mother, may she rest in peace, has managed to keep alive for seven years. Today in heaven she will be able to join my father, may he rest in peace.”
    Dr. Katzman shook his head. “It’s amazing,” he said. He told my uncle that he was writing a book based on his experiences as a healer. “The mysteries of the human heart.”
    “Yes.”
    “Astonishing.”
    My father hurried outside. “Dr. Katzman, please. It’s my wife. Maybe the injection wasn’t strong enough. She just doesn’t stop crying. It’s like a tap. Can you come in, please?”
    “Excuse me,” Dr. Katzman said to my uncle.
    “Of course.” My uncle turned to Duddy and me. “Well, boys,” he said, “what would you like to be when you grow up?”

THREE

The Red Menace
    “H OW,” TANSKY wanted to know, “could he have created the whole lousy world in seven lousy days when even in this modern scientific age it takes longer than that to build one lousy house? Answer me that, big-mouth.”
    Tansky, a dedicated communist, worked assiduously during elections for the Labour-Progressive candidates, canvasing for Fred Rose, and after his conviction in the Gouzenko case, nailing up posters for Mike Buhay. Buhay who, in his London days, had mixed with Clem Attlee and Morrison.
    “You heard what Maurice Hartt has to say about Buhay and your party. The Labour-Progressives, he says, are as much a party as Ex Lax is a chocolate.…”
    Hartt had also tripped up Buhay in the provincial legislature, asking him why he didn’t work for a living.
    “Because,” Buhay had replied, “I don’t want to do anything that would contribute to the capitalist system.”
    Then