Joshua Then and Now Read Online Free PDF Page A

in
Boy’s Own Annual
. Or even in neighboring Outremont, beautiful Outremont, where his respectable relatives lived. The Leventhals. Who would have nothing to do with them.
    Because of him.
    Reuben Shapiro, hitching up his trousers and then fishing into his initialed cotton shorts to sort out his genitals. Whistling throughthat misshapen nose, broken more times than Joshua could count, as he knotted his hand-painted tie: sunset comes to Waikiki Beach. His father, his black curly hair heavy with Vitalis, his eyebrows disappearing into scarred bumpy tissue, smiled down tenderly at him. “Hey, Josh, how’s school?”
    His mother was in the bedroom, sobbing, the door closed behind her.
    “You doing good there?”
    “I’m doing well,” he countered in his prissiest manner.
    His father smiled and moved to the window that looked out on the back lane. There was nothing there. “What’s your favorite subject,” he asked, “grammar?”
    “Literature,” Joshua said, too dim to grasp that he was being teased. “What have you done to Mother?”
    He no longer said “Maw,” which he had come to consider crude.
    “Now listen here, Josh. You ever heard of a town called Cornwall?”
    “It’s just across the border in Ontario. Why is she crying like that?”
    “Now in this town of Cornwall on the main street there is, like, a bank.” His father glanced out of the window, cracking his knuckles. “It’s called the Royal Bank of Canada. Repeat that, please.”
    “The Royal Bank of Canada.”
    “In the Royal Bank of Canada which is on the main street of Cornwall just across the Ontario border they have, well, kinda boxes there. You know what I mean?”
    “Safety deposit boxes.”
    “Hey, yeah. Right. Well, well.” His father dug a long thin key out of his pocket. “This key fits one of those boxes in the Royal Bank of Canada which is on the main street of Cornwall just across the Ontario border. The number of the box is on the key.”
    “So?”
    “Take it. Hide it for me.”
    “Why?”
    A car slid to a stop in the lane. A man got out, put two fingers to his mouth and whistled. His father held up five fingers. “Well, yeah. Why? I’ve got to take a trip. Unexpected.”
    “Again?”
    His packed kitbag stood in the corner. Years before, he had used to lug that bag with him to Brockton, Three Rivers, Quebec City, Portland, and a couple of times even to Madison Square Garden.
    “I won’t be able to write. If I’m gone long and you run short here you are to go to Cornwall and open that box, but you mustn’t take, um, Mother with you.”
    “Why not?”
    Outside, the man whistled again.
    “People are nosey. They might be following her.”
    The man in the lane blew sharply on his horn. His father went to the window and held up one finger. And then, his eyes wet, anguished, he grabbed Joshua without warning and pressed his son to him. Joshua went rigid, resisting his embrace, flinching from a kiss that reeked of
V.O
. and Aqua Velva. “Yeah, right. Well, well. Goodbye,
yingele
,” and reaching for his kitbag, he retreated into the coal shed and down the winding stairs into the lane.
    The car his father rode off in had Michigan license plates. He didn’t sit beside the driver, but instead folded his jacket neatly and then climbed into the trunk.
    When the detectives arrived, only five minutes later, his mother wailed and pulled her hair. She denounced his father to them, saying he had deserted her, the drunken bastard, running off to Baltimore with another woman, leaving her without a penny. “I only hope you catch him,” she said cursing him again, “and teach him a good lesson this time.”
    Joshua watched. Bug-eyed. Amazed. He had never heard her say a bad word about his father before. But the detectives were unmoved by his mother’s plight. Perreault even shook his head, laughing. “You ought to go on the stage, Esther.”
    “Really?” she said, enthused, and she shot Joshua a dreamy look as if to say,