Free The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler Page B

thing you attach to a wagon and it turns. We’ve got this business called electricity too now. You press a button, see, and … 
this is modern times.”
    “He doesn’t wear a hat and he can’t speak Yiddish.”
    “Neither could Chopin.”
    “Who?”
    “Skip it. Never mind. Look, there’s the speaker.”
    Captain John Edgar Tate, author
(Canada, Land of Contrasts)
, famous broadcaster and lecturer, journalist, explorer (first white man to paddle and chart all the tributaries of the Peace River), world traveler and proud descendant of a family of United Empire Loyalists, clutched the speaker’s rostrum like a ship’s prow, cleared his throat fiercely and looked down from under graying beetle brows at his audience of small skeptical round-shouldered men, women with too much rouge, and children, some restless and yawning and others inclined to pick their noses – looked down and stroked a puffy redcheek and measured and realized too late that he had brought the wrong speech with him. But he did not falter. He spoke feelingly of the Red Indian and the first British and French-Canadian settlers who came to the country; and he talked about Jacques Cartier, La Salle, and General Wolfe.
    “You see that red nose he’s got? That comes from too much Johnnie Walker.”
    “Louder.
Louder, please.”
    “Why couldn’t they have invited one of our own to speak?”
    “Who, for instance?”
    “Dr. Rosen, there’s a speaker for you. To hear him talk about cancer …”
    Captain John Edgar Tate shifted his attention to the present age, the wide world today’s graduates would have to contend with, and after some dark warnings about the communist threat, he concluded, “Don’t drop the ball. Because if you drop the ball you’re passing it to Uncle Joe.”
    There was some mild applause.
    “In Japan when a man gets up to speak he has to hold ice cubes in his hands, and he can only speak for as long as he can hold them. That’s for me.”
    “I’ll tell you, Sydney, this speaker –”
    “Don’t tell me.
I know
, Paw. He doesn’t wear a hat.”
    “Oh, am I ever dying for a cold drink.”
    “How’s about some watermelon instead, Harry? Ice-cold.”
    “Hoo-haw. Don’t speak.”
    At last the graduates were called up to get their diplomas. First came small squinting Hersh (he had come second in the province and won a scholarship to McGill), and behind him came Mendelsohn’s boy, another scholarship winner, and Rita Bloom, who had come fifth in the province.
    “My boy’s in the minors,” Brown said. “He probably doesn’t get his diploma until three in the morning.”
    Shmul Berger was awarded the Ida Berg Scholarship.
    “It’s a gyp. He should have been disqualified.”
    Shmul’s father, Rabbi Isaac Berger, was supposed to have a photographic memory. They said he could stick a pin through any volume of the Talmud and, given the number of the page it had come out on, tell you the exact word it had punctured.
    “That’s the last of the prize winners. Main event now.”
    “About time.”
    One by one to milder and milder applause the boys and girls stepped up to shake the hand of Leonard Bush, M.A., and take their diplomas.
    “There he is!”
    Duddy Kravitz was the four-hundred-and-tenth boy to be handed his diploma. He had graduated third class with failures in history and Algebra II. He accepted his diploma with a thin smile, turned sharply away from Mr. MacPherson’s empty seat on the platform, and walked away on squeaky black shoes.
    Max Kravitz clapped loudly. “Atta boy, Duddy. Atta boy.”
    “Sh,” Lennie said.
    Uncle Benjy turned to his father and the old man looked at the floor.
    “Atta boy,” Max said.

11
    D UDDY FOUND THE LAND HE WANTED QUITE BY ACCIDENT .
    That summer, the year he graduated from F.F.H.S., he went to work as a waiter in a hotel in the Laurentian mountains. Rubin’s Hotel Lac des Sables was in Ste. Agathe des Monts, and of all the waiters taken on for the summer, only Duddy