Rodney Whitaker: The Main

Moishe’s adoring sister used to bring up little things for him to eat when he was studying late. His father also supported his intellectual inclination, but he insisted that Moishe learn the family craft. As he used to say, “It doesn’t hurt a brilliant man to know a little something.”

When the Nazi repression began, the Rappaports did not flee. After all, they were Germans; the father had fought in the 1914 war, the grandfather in the Franco-Prussian; they had German friends and business associates. Germany, after all, was not a nation of animals.

Moishe alone survived. His parents died of malnutrition and disease in the ever-narrowing ghetto; and his sister, delicate, shy, unworldly, died in the camp.

He came to Montreal after two years in the anonymous cauldron of a displaced persons camp. Occasionally, and then only in casual illustration of some point of discussion, Moishe mentioned the concentration camp and the loss of his family. LaPointe never understood the tone of shame and culpability that crept into Moishe’s voice when he spoke of these experiences. He seemed ashamed of having undergone so dehumanizing a process; ashamed to have survived, when so many others did not.

Claude LaPointe sorts his cards into suits, taps the fan closed on the table, then spreads it again by pinching the cards between thumb and forefinger. He re-scans his hand, then closes it in front of him. He will not look at it again until after the bidding is over. He knows what he has, knows its value.

For the third time, Father Martin sorts his cards. The diamonds have a way of getting mixed up with the hearts. He pats the top of his thinning hair with his palm and looks at the cards mournfully; it is the kind of hand he dreads most. He doesn’t mind having terrible cards that no one could play well, and he rather enjoys having so strong a hand that not even he can misplay it. But these cards of middle power! Martin admits to being the worse cardplayer in North America. Should he fail to admit it, David would remind him.

When first he came to the Main, an idealistic young priest, Martin had affection for his church, nestled in a tight row of houses, literally a part of the street, a part of everyone’s life. But now he feels sorry for his church, and ashamed of it. Both sides have been denuded by the tearing down of row houses to make way for industrial expansion. Rubble fields flank it, exposing ugly surfaces never meant to be seen, revealing the outlines of houses that used to depend on the church for structural support, and used to defend it. And the projects he dreamed of never quite worked out; people kept changing before he could really get anything started. Now most of Father Martin’s flock are old Portuguese women who visit the church at all times of day, bent women with black shawls who light candles to prolong their prayers, then creep down the aisle on painful legs, their gnarled fingers gripping pew ends for support. Father Martin can speak only a few words of Portuguese. He can shrive, but he cannot console.

When he was a young man in seminary, he dared to dream of being a scholar, of writing incisive and illuminating apologetics that applied the principles of the faith to modern life and problems. He would sometimes wake up at night with a lucid perception of some knotty issue—a perception that was always just beyond the stretch of his memory the next morning. Although his mind teemed with ideas, he lacked the knack of setting his thoughts down clearly. Prior considerations and subsequent ramifications would invade his thinking and carry him off to the left or right of his main thesis, so he did not shine in seminary and was never considered for that post he so desired in a small college where he could study and write and teach. There was a joke in seminary: publish or parish.

But Father Martin’s mind still runs to ethics, to the nature of sin, to the proper uses of the gift of life; so, while being David’s bungling partner is mortifying, the conversations with Moishe make it worthwhile. And there is something right about that, too. A payment in humiliation for the opportunity to learn and to express oneself.

“Come on! Come on!” David says. “It’s your bid, Claude. Unless, of course, you and Moishe have decided to save face by throwing in your hands.”

“All right,” LaPointe says. “Fifteen.”

“Sixteen.” Father Martin says the word softly, then sucks air in through his teeth in an attempt to express the fact that he has a fair playing hand but no meld to speak of.

“Ah-ha!” David ejaculates.

Father Martin catches his breath. David is going to plunge after the bid, dragging the uncertain priest after him to a harrowingly narrow victory or a crushing defeat.

Moishe studies his cards, his gentle eyes seeming to pass over the number indifferently. He purses his lips and hums a soft ascending note. “Oh-h-h. Seventeen, I suppose.”

“Eighteen!” is David’s rapid reply.

Father Martin winces.

LaPointe taps the top of the face-down stack before him. “All right,” he says, “nineteen, then.”

“Pass,” says Father Martin dolefully.

“Pass,” says Moishe, looking at his partner slyly from behind his round glasses.

“Good!” David says. “Now let’s sort out the men from the sheep. Twenty-two!”

LaPointe shrugs and passes.

“Prepare to suffer, fools,” David says. He declares spades trump, but he has only a nine and a pinochle to meld.

Gingerly, apologetically, Father Martin produces a king and queen of hearts.

David stares at his partner, hurt and disbelief flooding his eyes. “That’s all?” he asks. “This is what you meld? One marriage?”

“I… I was bidding a playing band.”

LaPointe objects. “Why don’t you just show one another your hands and be done with it?”

Moishe sets down his cards and rises. “I’ll start the sandwiches.”

“Wait a minute!” David says. “Where are you going? The hand isn’t over!”

“You are going to play it out?” Moishe asks incredulously.

“Of course! Sit down!”

Moishe looks at LaPointe with operatic surprise. He spreads his arms and lifts his palms toward the ceiling.

Roaring out his aces in an aggressive style that scorns the effeminate trickery of the finesse, David takes the first four tricks. But when he tries to cross to his partner, he is cut off by LaPointe, who manages to finesse a ten from Father Martin, then sends the lead to Moishe, who finishes the assassination.

At one point, Father Martin plays a low club onto a diamond trick.

“What?” cried David. “You’re out of trump?”

“Aren’t clubs trump?”

David slumps over and softly bangs his forehead against the table top. “Why me?” he asks the oilcloth. “Why me?”

Too late, the lead returns to David, who slams down his last five cards, collecting impoverished and inadequate tricks.

He stares heavily at the tabletop for a few seconds, then he speaks in a low and controlled voice. “My dear Father Martin. I ask the following, not in anger, but in a spirit of humble curiosity. Please tell me. Why did you bid when you had nothing in your hand but SHIT!”

Moishe removes his glasses and lightly rubs the red dents on the bridge of his nose. “There was nothing Martin could have done to save you. You overbid your hand and you went set. That’s all there is to it.”

“Don’t tell me that! If he had come out with his ten earlier—”

“You would have won one more trick. Not enough to save you. You had two clubs left; I had the ace, Claude the ten. And if you had returned in diamonds—at that time you still had the queen—Martin would have had to trump it with his jack, and I would have overtrumped with the king.” Moishe continues to rub his nose.