Free Joshua Then and Now by Mordecai Richler Page A

Afterwards they were tied to stakes, hoisted high, so that their loins might be reduced to ashes while the other half of their bodies remained intact. And so, my friend, Senator McCarthy should be looked on as comic relief. A puerile American variation on a European theme. And before he came along, your only heresy was to grovel to producers and write banal scripts for which you were most assuredly overpaid.”
    “Why, you creep,” Melrose began, “you crypto-fascist –”
    But Peabody was guffawing, delighted. “Why don’t you send me a story, Mr. Shapiro? I can’t promise to publish, but I will read it myself.”
    “Well now, I don’t write stories. I am a reporter. And what makes you think I’d want to be published in your pretentious little rich boy’s magazine in the first place?”
    One night much later, long after they had become friends and Joshua had become a regular at Peabody’s table in The Old Navy, joining him in jeering at the passing parade, he told him about his need to get to Spain. Peabody was charged with concern. He smiled his tender smile and said, “Try Ibiza.”
    “Ibiza?”
    “Ibiza,” he said.
    As Joshua recalled it, he yawned.
    Imagine.
    The lights had failed everywhere. Driving through the blackened village, the rain belting down, the streets awash, Joshua glanced at his dashboard clock. It was nearly 2 a.m. Shit, they can only be up to no good there. Those horny brokers and ad agency men with the slack, boozy faces, weekend John Waynes, utterly transmogrified once they held Canada Tire power saws in their hands. Or stood tall as Mr. Christian behind the masts of their Lasers. And their saucy, newly liberated wives running around braless, those steamy compost heaps they called vaginas sprayed with Misty or Oo La La!, taking themselves for sophisticates because they could now compare fucking notes as freely as their mothers had once compared strawberry shortcake recipes. What were they up to in the dark, those yahoos, and what did they want with Pauline?
    Parked outside the clubhouse, Joshua lighted a cigarette and counted nine other cars in the lot the next time lightning rocked the lake. Group grope, that’s what they were into. Westmount’s summer saturnalia. But the clubhouse was not in total darkness. Obviously, they had set out paraffin lamps here and there. Should I propel the Jeep right up the clubhouse stairs, bashing through the French doors? “Hey, remember the night that crazy Jew …”
    Bolting up the clubhouse stairs, Joshua opened the front door softly, slipping quietly inside, fully expecting to trip over copulating couples. Gentile jogger nuts mounting Geritol-fed harridans. From the bar, he heard the sound of music and clapping hands. Somebody must have had a transistor radio. Or maybe a cassette player. But as his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he grasped that only Mr. Harry James was blowing. “The Four O’Clock Jump.” Everybody was gathered round the swirling couple. Yes, yes, the Mixed DoublesChampions, Eastern Quebec Region, 1952. The wrong side of forty, both of them, and jitterbugging. His wife, his brother-in-law. Even as Joshua stood there, feverishly jealous, he could see that his barefoot wife, her hair flying, her long legs flashing, looked simply splendid. He also had to allow that Peter Pan, Esquire, could certainly cut a rug, as they used to say. Oh how graceful he appeared!
    Joshua slid behind the bar, which was unattended, and poured himself a walloping cognac. A voice came from behind, startling him. “Crack his nuts for him.”
    It was Trimble, his ordnance corps tie askew, his little eyes floating in malice.
    “You’re out of your gourd, Jack.”
    “Don’t count on it, old son,” he said thickly.
    Now, unfortunately, Joshua was cast in the light of one of the paraffin lamps and so his presence was no longer undetected, though Pauline was still unaware of it. And that’s when Kevin did the unforgivable. Something Joshua took for an