St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler Page A

– it’s not like me. I made such a – such a fool of myself today,” and fitfully, between tearful outbursts, she told him what had happened.
    Jake touched her cheek. “I was going through my desk yesterday,” he said, “and I found a snapshot of you taken maybe ten years ago. You were twenty, I guess. Standing under an elm tree, wearing a summery dress and brushing your hair out of your eyes. You looked absolutely achingly beautiful and I hated you for it, because I didn’t know what man you were smiling for, and what you had to look so pleased about before you met me. Now I know.” He kissed her. “Please try to get some sleep, the baby’s bound to have you up half the night.”
    Jake slipped past his mother’s door, down the stairs, and into the living room, where he poured himself another brandy. Wrong place, wrong time. Young too late, old too soon was, as Jake had come to understand it, the plaintive story of his American generation. Conceived in the depression, but never to taste its bitterness firsthand, they had actually contrived to sail through the Spanish Civil War, World War II , the holocaust, Hiroshima, the Israeli War of Independence, McCarthyism, Korea, and, latterly, Vietnam and thedrug culture, with impunity. Always the wrong age. Ever observers, never participants. The whirlwind elsewhere.
    As Franco strutted into Madrid, a conqueror, Jake and his friends sat on the St. Urbain Street stoop and mourned the benching of Lou Gehrig, their first hint of mortality. The invasion of Poland was photographs they pasted into the opening pages of World War II scrapbooks, coming in a season they cherished for
The Wizard of Oz
. Unlike their elder brothers, they could only conjecture about how they would have reacted in battle. They collected aluminum pots for Spitfires and waited impatiently for the war’s end so that Billy Conn could get his second chance. The holocaust was when their parents prospered on the black market and they first learned the pleasures of masturbation. If, as secure and snotty ten-year-olds, they mocked those cousins and uncles who were too prudent to enlist, then it was an apprenticeship appropriate to encroaching middle age, when they were to exhort younger men to burn their draft cards. From pint-size needlers, callow fans in the wartime bleachers, they had matured to moral coaches, the instigators of petitions, without ever having been tried on the field themselves. The times had not used but compromised them. Too young to have marched into gunfire in Europe, they were also too old and embarrassed, too fat, to wear the flag as underwear.
    â€œWhen they tote up our contribution,” Luke once said, “all that can be claimed for us is that we took ‘fuck’ out of the oral tradition and wrote it plain.” In lieu of
Iskra, Screw
. After Trotsky, Girodias-in-exile. “And sooner or later we will put it on stage, where you can win applause as well as pleasure from the act.”
    As it seemed to Jake that his generation was now being squeezed between two raging and carnivorous ones, the old and resentful have-everythings and the young know-nothings, the insurance brokers defending themselves against the fire-raisers, it followed inevitably that, once having stumbled, he would be judged by one when accused by the other. Ingrid would sing, Mr. Justice Beal would pronounce.
    What he couldn’t satisfactorily explain to Nancy was that he was more exhilarated than depressed by the trial because at last the issues had been joined. Joined, after a fashion. From the beginning, he had expected the outer, brutalized world to intrude on their little one, inflated with love but ultimately self-serving and cocooned by money. The times were depraved. Tenderness in one house, he had come to fear, was no more possible, without corruption, than socialism in a single country. And so, from the earliest, halcyon days with Nancy, he had