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
