Feb 27

Feb 27 God Might Forgive Gershwin Burr - Brian Prousky

God Might Forgive Gershwin Burr by Brian Prousky

Book excerpt

At age thirty, Gershwin Burr, a thief, wrote a poem for a woman he hardly knew but who would soon become his wife. It was the only poem he had ever written and the only poem he would ever write. No one but Gershwin would ever read it.

I hate

That your date

Is handsome and tall

In bed

It’s been said

He’s exceptionally dull

Appear

Back here

With him, beware

My heart

Torn apart

You won’t repair

He wrote the poem on a napkin in a restaurant. It was an embarrassment to him. Besides being childish, it suggested he was unattractive. Certainly, less attractive than the man his future wife was dating. As soon as he wrote the last word, he crumpled it up and put it in the ashtray on the table. The ashtray was round and red and had a picture of a sailor inside it. The sailor was smoking a pipe and there was a word in Spanish written across his stomach. The word was Contaminar. For the rest of his life, he would remember every word of that poem, even though he read it only once, and every detail of that restaurant, even though he never paid particular attention to the décor.

And he would remember every detail of that day, which is more explainable than his memory of the poem or the restaurant’s décor. It was an important day in his life. As important as the last day he spent with his father and the last day he spent with his mother and the day he proposed to Lilly and the day he got married and the day he committed his first crime and the day he got caught and all the days he slept with a woman who wasn’t his wife.

As he grew older, the things he forgot worried him a lot less than the things he remembered.

“The happiest people on earth are the ones who can’t remember anything,” he once said.

Gershwin said a lot of things like that, particularly when he had too much time on his hands.

The restaurant in which he wrote the poem was called Bentley’s Fish and Chips. It was located on Bloor Street, just north of the University of Toronto. It was a narrow space with ten wooden tables along one of the walls and six wooden chairs around each table. All of the wood was yellow and full of scratches but shined like it had just been waxed. Above the tables were six light fixtures shaped like seashells. At the front of the restaurant there was a glass window with fish painted on it and an open menu taped to it. Gershwin’s table had the usual stuff on it—an ashtray, a napkin dispenser, ketchup, mustard, vinegar, relish, and paper placemats with red checker borders and black and white advertisements for mouthwash and maple syrup. Next to the other wall, the cash register sat on top of a glass counter filled with chocolate bars and packages of cigarettes. The kitchen door was behind the counter. It had a small round window in it and half a rudder attached to it instead of a doorknob. At the rear of the restaurant there was a single washroom. All of the walls were covered in swirls of blue and white paint, probably meant to look like waves, and dozens of framed pictures of lighthouses hung in no particular order.

There was one waitress on duty, a heavy woman in a light pink uniform and white running shoes. She had small black veins crisscrossing the backs of her legs that reminded Gershwin of old bowling pins. The cook was in the kitchen. He had a thick beard and hairy arms. Gershwin caught a glimpse of him every time the waitress went through the door. The only other person in the restaurant was an old man seated behind the cash register reading a newspaper. Every few seconds the old man coughed and the newspaper fluttered. The old man’s hands were as small as a young child’s, but with a silver ring on every finger and one on each thumb. The rings looked like wedding bands. Gershwin wondered if he’d been married ten times. On the back of the newspaper there was a half-page ad for maple syrup, the same maple syrup that was advertised on the menus.

Two male students came into the restaurant, took off their coats, and sat facing each other at the table nearest the window. One of them was smoking a cigarette and the other was holding a wrench in front of his face like a microphone, talking or singing into it and laughing. The waitress walked over to their table, said a few words, and returned to where she’d been standing before they came in.

Gershwin believed that if you consciously try to forget something, you end up remembering it with greater clarity.

He was drinking a Coke, which the waitress had brought over fifteen minutes ago. She hadn’t returned to his table. It was obvious to her that he didn’t want to order any food until Lilly arrived.

He stared out the window at the front of the restaurant. Although there were fish painted on it, he could see people walk by: a woman with her face covered in a green scarf; two men in black robes, probably priests from St. Michael’s; a child with his arm raised in the air holding his mother’s hand; a group of teenage girls, all with the same tartan skirts sticking out from under their coats; and an older woman in a yellow hat. But no sign of Lilly, who was easy to spot in a bright red coat with black fur on the collar and around the end of each sleeve.

Later she would tell him that when she purchased the coat, it didn’t have any fur on it and that her mother had sewn it on.

“She used an old shawl she didn’t wear anymore.”

Gershwin had no idea what a shawl actually looked like, let alone one made of fur, though he was sure it was something that would only belong to a very old woman.

“That was thoughtful of her,” he said.

“It would have ended up in the garbage anyway.”

Lilly was one of the waitresses who worked at Bentley’s. Gershwin had been aware of her for only a week. He didn’t particularly like fish and chips, but he saw her through the storefront window while walking past it on Bloor Street and stopped and pretended to read the menu taped to the glass while secretly admiring her. The restaurant was filled with customers, but she was standing next to the counter staring in his direction. To Gershwin, it looked like her eyes were searching for something way beyond the street and even the city. He could have done jumping jacks or pounded on the glass and she wouldn’t have seen him. She had dark red hair, and her skin was freckled and the colour of ginger ale. Her legs were long and thin, maybe too thin, and made the bottom of her uniform look like a lampshade. She had small breasts and hips, a long neck, and long arms. But none of those things caught Gershwin’s attention as much as her eyes. Not because of what they were searching for, but because there were tears coming out of them, which she quickly wiped away with her sleeve.

When he was six years old and playing in his backyard, Gershwin saw his mother staring out the window, also wiping tears from her eyes.

Lilly worked evenings, from three p.m. to ten p.m. Besides her, there were two other waitresses, one who worked a short shift, from eleven a.m. to two p.m. and one who worked from noon until eight p.m. On Saturday, the waitress who worked the short shift worked the entire day, from eleven a.m. to ten p.m., while the other two worked from three p.m. to nine p.m., alternating weeks. The restaurant was closed on Sunday. There was wisdom in assigning the shifts in that there were always two waitresses on duty during high traffic hours. The restaurant also did some take-out business, particularly later in the evening, so it wasn’t unusual to see three or four male students standing impatiently at the counter.

“They’re all sleazy,” she would tell him. “If I didn’t need the job, I’d throw hot coffee on them.”

Lilly hated the take-out customers. The area between the counter and the tables was narrow and some of them deliberately rubbed against her as they squeezed past with food.