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the priest-house. It isn’t there in case of an air-raid, either.”
    Zabitsky also told us how an altar boy could make himself a bishop’s favourite, that a nun’s habit concealed pregnancy, and that there was a special orphanage for the priests’ bastards in St. Jerome.
    To all this Shapiro said, “Well, snatch-erly,” my father agreed, and Segal, warming to the idea, suggested a new definition for bishopric.
    But when I recall St. Urbain I do not think so much of the men as of my old companions there. The boys. Mostly, we just used to sit around on the outside staircases shooting the breeze.
    “Knock, knock.”
    “Who’s there?”
    “Freda.”
    “Freda who?”
    “Fre-da you. Five dollars for anyone else.”
    Our hero was Ziggy ‘The Fireball’ Freed, who was signed on by a Dodger scout at the age of eighteen, and was shipped out for seasoning with a Class ‘D’ team in Texas. Ziggy lasted only a season. “You think they’d give a Hebe a chance to pitch out there?” he asked. “Sure, in the ninth inning, with the bases loaded and none out, and their home-run slugger coming up to the plate, the manager would shout, ‘Okay, Ziggy, it’s your ball game now.’ “
    Our world was rigidly circumscribed. Outside, where they ate wormy pork, beat the wives for openers, didn’t care a little finger if the children grew up to be doctors, we seldom ventured, and then only fearfully. Our world, its prizes and punishments, was entirely Jewish. Inside, God would get us if we didn’t say our prayers. You ate the last scrap of meat on your plate because the children in Europe were starving. If you got it right on your bar-mitzvah who knows but the rich uncle might buy you a Parker 51 set.
    In our world what we knew of the outside was it wasn’t a life-saver if it didn’t have a hole in it. If you ate plenty of carrots you would see better in the dark, like R.A.F. night-fighters. Every Thursday night on Station CBM Fibber McGee would open his marvellous closet. Joe was always gone for a Dow. Never before had so many owed so much to so few. V stood for Victory. Paul Lukas was watching out for us on the Rhine. The sure road to success was to buy cheap and sell dear. In real life Superman was only mild Clark Kent. A Roosevelt only comes along once in a lifetime. Scratch the best goy and you find the worst anti-Semite.
    After school we sat on the steps and talked about everything from A to Z.
    “Why is it Tarzan never shits?”
    “What about Wonder Woman?”
    “She’s a dame, you jerk. But there’s Tarzan in the jungle, week in and week out, and never once does he go to the toilet. It’s not true to life, that’s all.”
    In summer we bought old car tubes from the garage for a nickel and took them to the beaches with us. We made scooters out of waste wood and roller skates stolen or picked up at a junk yard. Used horseshoes nicked from the French Canadian blacksmith served us for games of pitch-toss. A sock stuffed with sawdust was good enough for touch football. During the worst of the winter we built a chain of snow fortresses on St. Urbain and battled, one side against another, shouting, “Guadacanal!
Schweinhund!
Take that, you yellow devil!” With regular hockey sticks and pieces of coal and copies of
Macleans
for shin-pads we played right out on the streets, breaking up whenever a car wanted to pass.
    When we grew a little older, however, our big thrill was to watch Molly go by.
    Almost everything came to a stop on St. Urbain when Molly turned the corner at six-oh-five on her way home from Susy’s Smart Wear, where she typed letters and invoices andoccasionally modelled garments for out-of-town buyers. The boys in the Laurier Billiard Academy would be drawn to the window, still holding their cues.
    “Here she comes. Right on the dot.”
    “Hey, Molly. Molly, my darling. How would you like to try this for supper?”
    High stiletto heels, long slender legs, and a swinging of hips. Lefty groans. “You