The Favorite Game Read online

  2

  He stood on the lawn of the Allan Memorial, looking down at Montreal.

  Loonies have the best view in town.

  Here and there were clusters of people gathered on the expensive grass around wood furniture. It could have been a country club. The nurses gave it away. White and perfect, there was one on the circumference of every group, not quite joining the conversation, but in quiet control, like a moon.

  “Good evening, Mr. Breavman,” said the floor nurse. “Your mother will be glad to see you.”

  Was that reproach in her smile?

  He opened the door. The room was cool and dark. As soon as his mother saw him it began. He sat down. He didn’t bother saying hello this time.

  “… I want you to have the house, Lawrence, it’s for you so you’ll have a place for your head, you’ve got to protect yourself, they’ll take everything away, they have no heart, for me it’s the end of the story, what I did for everyone, and now I have to be with the crazy people, lying like a dog, the whole world outside, the whole world, I wouldn’t let a dog lie this way, I should be in a hospital, is this a hospital? do they know about my feet, that I can’t walk? but my son is too busy, oh he’s a great man, too busy for his mother, a poet for the world, for the world …!”

  Here she began to shout. Nobody looked in.

  “… but for his mother he’s too busy, for his shiksa he’s got plenty of time, for her he doesn’t count minutes, after what they did to our people, I had to hide in the cellar on Easter, they chased us, what I went through, and to see a son, to see my son, a traitor to his people, I have to forget about everything, I have no son.…”

  She continued for an hour, staring at the ceiling as she ranted. When it was nine o’clock he said, “I’m not supposed to stay any longer, Mother.”

  She stopped suddenly and blinked.

  “Lawrence?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Are you taking care of yourself?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Are you eating enough?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “What did you eat today?”

  He mumbled a few words. He tried to make up a menu she’d approve. He could hardly speak, not that she could hear.

  “… never took a cent, it was everything for my son, fifteen years with a sick man, did I ask for diamonds like other women.…”

  He left her talking.

  There was a therapeutic dance going on outside. Nurses held by frightened patients. Recorded pop music, romantic fantasies even more ludicrous in this setting.

  When the swallows come back to Capistrano

  Behind the circle of soft light in which they moved rose the dark slope of Mount Royal. Below them flashed the whole commercial city.

  He watched the dancers and, as we do when confronted with the helpless, he heaped on them all the chaotic love he couldn’t put anywhere else. They lived in terror.

  He wished that one of the immaculate white women would walk him down the hill.

  3

  He saw Tamara almost every night of the two weeks he was in the city.

  She had abandoned her psychiatrist and espoused Art, which was less demanding and cheaper.

  “Let’s not learn a single new thing about one another, Tamara.”

  “Is that laziness or friendship?”

  “It’s love!”

  He staged a theatrical swoon.

  She lived in a curious little room on Fort Street, a street of dolls’ houses. There was a marble fireplace with carved torches and hearts, above it a narrow mirror surrounded by slender wood pillars and entablatures, a kind of brown Acropolis.

  “That mirror’s doing nobody any good up there.”

  They pried it out and arranged it beside the couch.

  The room had been partitioned flimsily by an economical landlady. Tamara’s third, because of the high ceiling, seemed to be standing on one end. She liked it because it felt so temporary.

  Tamara was a painter now, who did only self-portraits. There were canvases everywhere. The sole background for all the portraits was this room she lived in. There was paint under her fingernails.

  “Why do you only do yourself?”

  “Can you think of anyone more beautiful, charming, intelligent, sensitive, et cetera?”

  “You’re getting fat, Tamara.”

  “So I can paint my childhood.”

  Her hair was the same black, and she hadn’t cut it.

  They founded the Compassionate Philistines one night, and limited the membership to two. It was devoted to the adoration of the vulgar. They celebrated the fins of the new Cadillac, defended Hollywood and the Hit Parade, wall-to-wall carpets, Polynesian restaurants, affirmed their allegiance to the Affluent Society.

  Wallpaper roses were peeling from the grapevine moulding. The single piece of furniture was a small Salvation Army couch, over-stuffed and severely wounded. She supported herself as an artist’s model and ate only bananas, the theory of the week.

  The night before he left she had a surprise for him and all loyal Compassionate Philistines. She removed her bandanna. She had dyed her hair blonde in accordance with the aims of the organization.

  Good-bye, old Tamara, Breavman recorded for his biographers, may you flourish, you have a three-hundred-thousand-dollar mouth.

  4

  When would the old dialogue with Krantz resume?

  The lake was beautiful in the evening. Frogs went off like coiled springs.

  When would they sit beside the water like small figures in a misty scroll painting, and talk about their long exile? He wanted to tell him everything.

  Krantz lectured the counsellors on Indoor Games for Rainy Days. Krantz prepared a days-off schedule. Krantz set up a new buddy system for the waterfront and drilled the counsellors for two hours. Krantz carried a clip-board and a whistle around his neck.

  No crude bugle wakened them in the morning, but a recording on the PA of the first few bars of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto. Krantz’s idea. On the fifth morning of the pre-camp training programme which Krantz had instituted for the counsellors, Breavman knew that this particular piece of music had been ruined for him for life.

  Well, Krantz was busy. And there was this girl, Anne, who had followed him from England. Thank God she wasn’t beautiful. She was a modern dancer.

  After the organization was completed and the kids arrived, things would run smoothly and they would repair their old commentary on the universe.

  Krantz explained the American game of baseball.

  “If a guy catches a ball after it’s hit, the batter’s out.”

  “That sounds rational,” said Anne, and they hugged.

  He hoped the dialogue would begin soon, because there was nothing he liked about camp. Obscene. He felt it the minute he arrived. There is something obscene about a rich kids’ camp. Something so obvious it disgusts. It’s like an amusement park, like rows of elaborate pinball machines. He looked around at the playing fields, handball-courts, bunks, boats — receptacles to hold children for a summer, relieve parents. Gangrene in the family. Living rooms back in Montreal were stinking with twisted intimacy.

  He was glad that four hundred miles away Shell was waiting.

  The counsellors were on the dock, lying in the sun. Breavman surveyed the flesh. Soon it would all be brown, bronze would grow around the bra straps. Now they were city-white. How the pines must despise them!

  Breavman looked at a tall girl named Wanda. She was sitting at the far end of the dock, dangling her toes in the water. She had good legs and yellow hair but they didn’t whip him. She wasn’t quite in the great golden tradition. Wanda, you’re safe from Breavman.

  All the girls were very plain. And this was the joke. He knew what two months in that community would do. He’d be writing sonnets to all of them. These poems-to-be made him tired.

  The Laurentian sky was jammed with stars. Breavman, who didn’t know the names of constellations, judged confusion to be an a
spect of their beauty.

  “Counsellors’ meeting,” Krantz called up to the balcony.

  “Let’s not go, Krantz.”

  “Brilliant idea, except that I’m chairman.”

  As they walked to the Counsellors’ Lounge they were joined by Ed, a first-year law student at McGill.

  “First guy to make it with Wanda gets it,” Ed proposed. “I mean, it’s a matter of time. We’re all going to make her before the summer’s over, it happens every season, but this way one of us stands to collect.”

  Breavman hated that kind of young-buck talk. He wished he had the courage to smash his face. Maybe Krantz would do it. He was supposed to be a lover now.

  “I suppose you’re wondering how we can be certain when the first man claims the money.” Ed, the legalist, explained the silence of the other two. Breavman searched the silence for their old unity.

  “I think we can trust each other,” said Krantz. “Breavman?”

  Breavman called their attention to a falling star.

  “A contract of cosmic significance.”

  They agreed that five dollars each would make the pool worthwhile.

  What did you expect, Breavman, reunion on a windy hill, a knife ceremony and the exchange of blood?

  5

  The bus depot was a chaos of parents, children, fishing rods, tennis racquets, and bewildered dogs dragged to see their young masters away. Mothers who had been awaiting the great day for weeks were suddenly stricken with a certainty that their babies would starve without them. A special diet was pressed into Breavman’s hand along with a five-dollar bill.

  “I know you’ll look after him,” a woman shouted hurriedly, scanning the crowd meanwhile for someone else to bribe.

  Fifteen minutes before the scheduled departure Breavman sneaked into one of the empty waiting buses. He closed his eyes and listened to the confusion beyond the window. What was he doing with these people?

  “My name is Martin Stark. Capital S, small t, small a, small r, small k. No e.”

  Breavman wheeled around.

  In the seat behind him, sitting very stiffly, was a boy of about twelve years. His eyes were incredibly white, not naturally, but as if he were straining to show as much white as possible. This gave him an expression of having just seen a catastrophe.

  “Sometimes I spell it with an e and then I have to tear up the page and begin again.”

  He spoke in a monotone, but over-articulating each word as if it were an elocution lesson.

  “My name is Breavman. Capital B, small r, small e …”

  He had been warned about Martin, who was going to be one of his campers. According to Ed, Martin was half-nut, half-genius. His mother was supposed to be ashamed of him. At any rate she never came on Visiting Day. Today, Breavman learned from the boy, she had come an hour early and deposited him in the bus with the command not to stir. Thus she avoided meeting the other parents.

  “I’m your counsellor this summer, Martin.”

  Martin registered no reaction to this information. He continued to stare beyond Breavman with a kind of vacant, unchanging terror. He had a bony face and a great Caesar nose. Because he generally clenched his teeth when he wasn’t talking, the lines of his jaw were severely outlined.

  “What’s your favourite store?” asked Martin.

  “What’s yours?”

  “Dionne’s. What’s your favourite parking lot?”

  “I don’t know. What’s yours?”

  “Dionne’s Parking Lot.”

  The questions excited Martin because now he asked breathlessly, “How many windows are in the building Dionne’s is in?”

  “I don’t know, Martin. How many?”

  “In all the walls?”

  “Of course all the walls. What good would it do to know the number of windows in only one wall or even three walls?”

  Martin supplied a number triumphantly. Breavman idiotically promised himself he would check next time he was in town.

  “How many cars were in the Dionne’s Parking Lot last Thursday?”

  “Tell me.”

  Fifty campers invaded the bus. There was much scrambling and bargaining for seats and Breavman’s rapport with the boy was lost. Martin sat calmly through the ride, mumbling to himself. Breavman learned later that he liked to give himself four-figure numbers to multiply together.

  On the way north Breavman asked him, “Do you like the countryside?”

  “After I investigate it.”

  6

  Three hundred jaws make a lot of noise chewing together. The benches were always too far from or close to the table and needed complicated co-operative action to adjust. He almost slapped a camper for blowing bubbles in his glass of milk.

  After the meal Breavman and Ed performed, Breavman pumping out intricate chords that he knew were lost and Ed ruining the high registers of his harmonica to rise above the general mess-hall din.

  Breavman, who always wanted to hear Handel playing in his head, beat the wire strings of a borrowed guitar. He had no callouses to resist the bite of the strings on the fingers of his left hand.

  His campers and Ed’s shared a bunkhouse, and the counsellors had a partitioned area to themselves in the same wood building. They had between them decided on a policy of rigorous discipline for the first few days. Then they would ease off and be nice guys. After a stern talk the boys went to bed efficiently, except for Martin, who took half an hour to urinate. Ed told them to keep quiet in the morning no matter what time they got up.

  The counsellors lay on their cots, the atmosphere of strict control hanging heavy. Martin’s queer clipped voice rang out.

  “Can I make number two before line-up?

  “Yes, Martin.”

  “Can I clean my nose?”

  “If it isn’t a noisy operation.”

  “Can I write my brother?”

  Ed leaned over and whispered to Breavman, “He has no brother.”

  When they were asleep he ran to the kitchen, where there was a telephone. He phoned Shell in New York. He wanted her voice to obliterate the day. He wanted to hear her say the word “darling.” He had phoned her half a dozen times from the city and he owed a huge bill.

  He gave nothing to her and waited, reading over and over the Telephone Company’s printed instructions on how to dial a number. An interior voice was screaming: It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

  Shell told him how much she loved Joseph Conrad.

  They said good-bye softly, both of them knowing the three minutes had failed.

  He wrote for two hours, describing the day in detail. The black-fly bites on his arm disturbed him and he put that down. His Indian jacket was too hot but he didn’t feel like taking it off. He put that down.

  7

  Martin fascinated him. He reckoned that he had misinterpreted Martin’s expression. It was not vacant terror but general wonder. He was that rarest creature, a blissful mad-child. The other children understood his election and treated him with a kind of bemused awe.

  One afternoon they entertained themselves by encircling Martin and firing large numbers at him to multiply.

  He rocked back and forth, like a man at prayer, his eyes closed. He beat his thighs with open palms as he thought, like an awkward bird trying to leave the ground, and made a buzzing sound as though his mind were machinery.

  “Em-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m …”

  “Look at him go!”

  “Em-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m …”

  “C’mon, Martin boy!”

  “Eighty-one thousand, nine hundred and eighteen.” he announced, opening his eyes. The boys cheered and hugged him.

  Then he caught sight of a small pine tree. He stopped dead, stared, and walked out of the circle. Breavman followed him.

  “Are you okay?

  “Oh yes. I believe I’d better count these.”

  Until supper he amused himself by discovering how many needles there were on an average pine tree.

  Krantz was annoyed when he
discovered what Breavman’s afternoon activity was.

  “That isn’t what Mrs. Stark pays her money for.”

  “No?”

  It was incredible that they should have put themselves into a position where one could castigate the other.

  “Not to have her son used as a side-show freak.”

  “What does she pay her money for?”

  “Come off it, Breavman. You know it wasn’t healthy. She wants the kid to be like everyone else — integrated, inconspicuous. It’s hard enough on her as it is.”

  “Okay, we’ll force him into baseball.”

  “Infractions of the regulations will be severely disciplined, Herr Breavman.”

  8

  A horse-shoe of hills rose behind the bunks. On one of the hills there was an amphitheatre with wooden benches and stage. It was used for plays, singsongs, and on Sabbath as a House of Prayer.

  How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob,

  and thy dwelling place, O Israel …

  They sang in Hebrew, their voices mingling with the sunlight. It was fragrant there, the pines high, blasted, and black. The camp was assembled in white clothes.

  That’s how we are beautiful, he thought, that’s the only time — when we sing. Storm troopers, band of crusaders, gang of stinking slaves, righteous citizens — only tolerable when their voices ring in unison. Any imperfect song hints at the ideal theme.

  Ed told a wonderful Sholem Aleichem story about a young boy who wanted to play the fiddle but was forbidden to by his Orthodox parents. For a minute Breavman thought he would overdo it, but no, he swayed and danced under his imaginary fiddle and everyone believed him.

  The same Ed who bet with a girl’s body.

  Breavman sat thinking that he could never do as well, never be so calm and magical. And that’s what he wanted to be: the gentle hero the folk come to love, the man who talks to animals, the Baal Shem Tov who carried children piggy-back.