Joshua Then and Now Read Online Free PDF Page B

now your old man is taking me back to your joint for a lecture, like, and after he’s finished straightening me out I’m going upstairs to screw the ass off your maid.”
    “You’re not invited to my bar-mitzvah when I have it. My mother said.”
    “I’ll bet you can’t even shoot jism yet.”
    Back in the house, Uncle Harvey led him into his study. He was about to speak when a flushed Aunt Fanny summoned him out into the hall. Joshua could hear them through the closed door.
    “Last time he stayed here, he went through every drawer in the house when we were out.”
    “He’s not staying here.”
    “I didn’t dare take a bath without stuffing the keyhole with Kleenex.”
    Uncle Harvey joined Joshua in the study again. His manner solemn, he asked, “What would you like to be when you grow up?”
    “Rich and famous and popular with girls.”
    “And do you think you can achieve such ambitions by stealing or through hard work?”
    “Hard work.”
    “I would like you to go to high school. And when you’re finished, provided you keep out of trouble, I will pay to send you to a good trade school.”
    “Geez. Would fur-trapping be considered like a trade?”
    “I was thinking of plumbing, maybe. It’s a very good business,” he said, sighing. “Meanwhile, you might just see more of Sheldon. I want him to be an example to you.”
    “I don’t want to get him into trouble, but when I stayed here that time he used to go through all his mother’s drawers when you wereout, trying on things. Yeah, now I remember, and when I told him he shouldn’t do that he called me very bad names I can’t repeat, and now,” Joshua, said, summoning up tears, “he says I can’t come to his bar-mitzvah when he has it.”
    “Why, of course you can.”
    Hotch hotcha.
    “I would like you to think of me as your friend,” Uncle Harvey said.
    Joshua grinned, appreciative. “And, listen here,” he said, “you can count on me too.”
    “Life is a river we poor mortals sail on. Now you can drift with the current, ending up in the weeds of malcontent with the rest of the flotsam. Or, my dear Joshua, you can paddle your own canoe right through the storms of temptation into the ocean of plenty.”
    “Outremont,” he ventured.
    “Well, possibly,” Uncle Harvey said, far from displeased. “But that would mean hard work. It means avoiding the undertow. It means that you’ve got to start paddling right now. Stroke, stroke, stroke. Do you understand?”
    “Yeah, sure. May I ask a question?”
    “Surely.”
    “When you said I would be invited to the bar-mitzvah, did you mean just for the
kiddush
in the synagogue or for the sit-down dinner as well?”
    “Both.”
    If there was a family quarrel, Uncle Harvey lost. Joshua was not invited to Sheldon’s bar-mitzvah. But he used to be sent his old clothes, which his mother altered for him, and when they were both teenagers he ran into Sheldon one day in the old Classic Bookshop and discovered that his cousin was not allowed to buy second-hand books. Because of germs. By that time Joshua was deep into books about the Spanish Civil War. Anything, absolutely anything, about the struggle.
    “Don’t tell me you’re reading Koestler?” Sheldon asked, sneaking a glance at his Penguin.
    “If I have any trouble with the big words, I’ll give you a buzz.”
    Joshua saw him again at a McGill dance. Then, only five years ago, Sheldon had phoned out of nowhere to say how closely he had followed his surprising career, how he had tried to phone him in London once, how proud the Leventhals were, never mind what some people said – and to ask Pauline and him out to dinner. They were, Joshua insisted to Pauline, obliged to go.
    “We are most certainly not obliged to go,” she said, “but you’re still enough of a boy to want to stick it to him.”
    “You should have heard his voice on the phone. Oozing envy. I love it.”
    “Vengeance is the Lord’s, not yours, Joshua.”
    “Dress classy.