Why are they dancing to the music, Breavman wondered from the balcony, submitting to its dictation?
At the beginning of a tune they arranged themselves on the floor, obeyed the tempo, fast or slow. and when the tune was done they disintegrated into disorder again, like a battalion scattered by a land mine.
“What makes them listen, Krantz? Why don’t they rip the platform to pieces?”
“Let’s go down and get some women.”
“Soon.”
“What are you staring at?”
“I’m planning a catastrophe.”
They watched the dancers silently and they heard their parents talking.
The dancers were Catholics, French-Canadian, anti-Semitic, anti-Anglais, belligerent. They told the priest everything, they were scared by the Church, they knelt in wax-smelling musty shrines hung with abandoned dirty crutches and braces. Everyone of them worked for a Jewish manufacturer whom he hated and waited for revenge. They had bad teeth because they lived on Pepsi-Cola and Mae West chocolate cakes. The girls were either maids or factory help. Their dresses were too bright and you could see bra straps through the flimsy material. Frizzy hair and cheap perfume. They screwed like jack rabbits and at confession the priest forgave them. They were the mob. Give them a chance and they’d burn down the synagogue. Pepsies. Frogs. Fransoyzen.
Breavman and Krantz knew their parents were bigots so they attempted to reverse all their opinions. They did not quite succeed. They wanted to participate in the vitality but they felt there was something vaguely unclean in their fun, the pawing of girls, the guffaws, the goosing.
The girls might be beautiful but they all had false teeth.
“Krantz, I believe we’re the only two Jews in the place.”
“No, I saw some BTOS on the make a couple of minutes ago.”
“Well, we’re the only Westmount Jews around.”
“Bernie’s here.”
“O.K. Krantz. I’m the only Jew from Wellgreen Avenue. Do something with that.”
“O.K. Breavman, you’re the only Jew from Wellgreen Avenue at the Palais D’Or.”
“Distinctions are important.”
“Let’s get some women.”
At one of the doors in the main hall there was a knot of young people. They argued jovially in French, pushing one another, slapping back-sides, squirting Coke bottles.
The hunters approached the group and instantly modified its hilarity. The French boys stepped back slightly and Krantz and Breavman invited the girls they’d chosen. They spoke in French, fooling no one. The girls exchanged glances with each other and members of the party. One of the French boys magnanimously put his arm around the shoulder of the girl Breavman had asked and swept her to him, clapping Breavman on the back at the same time.
They danced stiffly. Her mouth was full of fillings. He knew he’d be able to smell her all night.
“Do you come here often, Yvette?”
“You know, once in a while, for fun.”
“Me too. Moi aussi.”
He told her he was in high school, that he didn’t work.
“You are Italian?”
“No.”
“English?”
“I’m Jewish.”
He didn’t tell her he was the only one from Wellgreen Avenue.
“My brothers work for Jew people.”
“Oh?”
“They are good to work for.”
The dance was unsatisfying. She was not attractive, but her racial mystery challenged investigation. He returned her to her friends. Krantz had finished his dance, too.
“What was she like, Krantz?”
“Don’t know. She couldn’t speak English.”
They hung around for a little while longer, drinking Orange Crush, leaning on the balcony rail to comment on the swaying mob below. The air was dense with smoke now. The band played either frantic jitterbug or slow fox trot, nothing between. After each dance the crowd hovered impatiently for the next one to begin.
It was late now. The wallflowers and the stag-line expected no miracles any more. They were lined along three walls watching the packed charged dancers with indifferent fixed stares. Some of the girls were collecting their coats and going home.
“Their new blouses were useless, Krantz.”
Seen from above, the movement on the floor had taken on a frantic quality. Soon the trumpeter would aim his horn into the smoke and give the last of Hoagy Carmichael and it would be all over. Every throb of the band had to be hoarded now against the end of the evening and the silence. Soak it through pressed cheeks and closed eyes in the dreamy tunes. In the boogie-woogie gather the nourishment like manna and knead it between the bodies drawing away and towards each other.
“Let’s get one more dance in, Breavman?”
“Same girls?”
“Might as well.”
Breavman leaned over the rail one more second and wished he were delivering a hysterical speech to the thick mob below.
… and you must listen, friends, strangers, I am binding the generations one to another, o, little people of numberless streets, bark, bark, hoot, blood, your long stairways are curling around my heart like a vine …
They went downstairs and found the girls with the same group. It was a mistake, they knew instantly. Yvette stepped forward as if to tell Breavman something but one of the boys pulled her back.
“You like the girls, eh?” he said, the swaggerer of the party. His smile was triumphant rather than friendly.
“Sure we like them. Anything wrong with that?”
“Where you live, you?”
Breavman and Krantz knew what they wanted to hear. Westmount is a collection of large stone houses and lush trees arranged on the top of the mountain especially to humiliate the underprivileged.
“Westmount,” they said with one voice.
“You have not the girls at Westmount, you?”
They had no chance to answer him. In the very last second before they fell backwards over the kneeling accomplices stationed behind them they detected a signalling of eyes. The ring-leader and a buddy stepped forward and shoved them. Breavman lost his balance and as he fell the stoolie behind him raised himself up to turn the fall into a flip. Breavman landed hard in a belly-flop, a couple of girls that he had crashed into squealing above him. He looked up to see Krantz on his feet, his left fist in someone’s face and his right cocked
