Free The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler

father.”
    “I’m the father. Sure I’m the father. But Benjy can’t – well, you know.”
    Uncle Benjy took pride in all of Lennie’s achievements. The medals, the scholarships, and ultimately his acceptance by the McGill University Faculty of Medicine. He paid the boy’s fees, gave him a weekly allowance, and was certainly prepared to set him up in practice when the time came.
    Uncle Benjy felt differently about Duddy, but it did not come out until the boy went to work for him. He did not like Duddy on sight,it’s true. The thin crafty face, the quick black eyes and the restlessness, the blackheads and the oily skin, the perpetual fidgeting, the grin so shrewd and knowing, all made a bad impression on Uncle Benjy. He was prepared to give Duddy a chance, however, but Duddy went and loused it up. Two weeks after he had been transferred to the cutting room he charged into Uncle Benjy’s office and told him, “That old geezer in the cutting room, Laroche, is swiping lengths of cloth. I saw him.”
    But Uncle Benjy looked at him with displeasure.
    “What’sa matter?”
    “I’m not interested.”
    “He’s stealing from you. Jeez, aren’t you gonna fire him?”
    “Next time you come in here with a story like that I’ll fire you.”
    Duddy leaped to his feet.
    “Wait.” Uncle Benjy could see that the boy’s eyes were full, but he could not stop himself. “In all my years in the trade I’ve never hired anyone to spy on the workers here.”
    “Why?”
    “What?”
    Duddy smiled thinly and his voice quieted. “Are you afraid that there are even more of them stealing?”
    “What?”
    “That maybe with all your loans and favors to them they still think you’re the boss like?”
    “Some kid. Some kid you are.”
    “Not like Lennie?”
    “You’re only here a week and already you may have got a girl in trouble. Two weeks in the cutting room and you come to me with this story about Laroche. Manny tells me you’ve been selling the girls underwear and stuff you get from some mail order house. Is that true?”
    “How did you make all your money, Uncle Benjy? Tell me that.”
    “Some kid.”
    “Sure. Why not?”
    “I don’t like squealers. Try to remember that.”
    “Why don’t you fire me, Uncle Benjy?”
    “I’m not going to fire you because it would hurt your grandfather.”
    “Is that so?”
    “You’re some kid, Duddy, some kid, but this much you ought to know. If you ever do anything to hurt your grandfather I’ll break every bone in your body beginning with the little fingers.”
    “How come you care so much? You never even go to visit him any more.”
    Uncle Benjy pushed his chair back from his desk. “I think you’d better get back to work,” he said.
    Uncle Benjy, Duddy figured, had humiliated him, and he would remember that.
    “When the Boy Wonder,” Max had once told him, “loses his temper he could eat bread and it would come out toasted. That’s the size of it.”
    Duddy liked to think that his anger was made of the same hot stuff. He liked to think, in fact, that point for point he was a lot like the Boy Wonder before he had made his name. Duddy had seen him stepping outside the synagogue on Yom Kippur once, before his personal trouble, and left and right men had waved heartily or turned pale and the women had followed him with their eyes. The Boy Wonder was no atheist, like Uncle Benjy. Even, as Max had once explained to him, if Yom Kippur fell on the same day as the Kentucky Derby and a heavyweight champion fight together the Boy Wonder would place no bets. Max knew because, even though he was a taxi driver, he was an intimate of the Boy Wonder and one day he would introduce Duddy to him.
    “Not yet. Next year maybe. When you’re ready.”
    But it was a promise all the same.
    Meanwhile Duddy worked on the weekends and each summer (though never for Uncle Benjy again), and he continued to putmoney in the bank. For Duddy had never forgotten that his grandfather had said, “A