Summer Accommodations: A Novel (4 page)

I was flabbergasted. Sammy sounded completely insane to me.

“Keep your eyes straight ahead,” he called out to me again, “and remember, life is a one-way street.”

Back in the waiters' quarters we took turns in the shower, the usual nervous jokes about bending over for the dropped bar of soap being made each time one waiter or busboy left and a new one came. The male dread of the possibility of homosexuality was at its peak because we were mostly new to each other and still young enough to worry that we might be secretly queer. “Gay” was not in fashion then and the derogatory names used to separate us real guys from those of the other kind were homo, pansy, fairy, limpwrist, queer, fag, and faggot, the latter two having broader usage to also define mama's boys and those who could not reach the backboard from the foul line on a basketball court, or slide into third base on a diamond.

Ordinarily, after dinner the dining room staff was expected to show up at the casino or recreation hall and to dance with the daughters of the guests, but these guests had not brought their families with them. I hadn't given much thought to the evening and was just grabbing my towel and drying off when I saw that Bob Gelman had been in one of the other shower stalls. We waved to each other.

“These guys have no sense of humor,” Gelman complained coming out of the shower. “Do they actually believe the Lions are going to make Braverman's their vacation paradise? Haven't they ever heard about oil and water not mixing?” By then we were standing in the middle of the corridor that divided the waiters' quarters in half and Bob was declaiming to anyone who might listen to him.

“You always were a pain in the ass Gelman,” Sammy said, poking his head through his doorway. “Personally, I'm glad to be rid of you. Good riddance.”

“Fuck you, Sammy, who the hell wants to listen to anything you have to say. In five years everybody here, EVERYBODY, will be doing something useful, but you'll still be right here telling your stupid anecdotes to college boys who don't give a flying fuck about your stale old good times.” At that moment I felt a surge of guilt that demanded I accept some of the responsibility for this situation. After all, it had been my wink that triggered the Gelmanizing amongst the Lions.

“Cut it out Bob, calm down.” I pulled him into my room. “Why do you want to hurt Sammy? This is his whole life.” Ron snickered but Harlan, who was clipping his fingernails, looked up and smiled at me.

“Melvin, save the White righteousness for Yom Kippur. I don't like being lectured to by a kid.” Stung, but undeterred I persisted.

“C'mon Bob, forget about it, there are plenty of other places where you can get weekend work when you want it. It's just a job schlepping matzoh balls. No big deal.”

I spent the rest of that night keeping Bob company. We went down to see the show at the casino, an all purpose recreation hall where the entertainers performed and then the guests danced to the hotel band's music. We had a few drinks, Tom Collinses, gin mixed with what must have been the precursor of unsweetened Fresca, and then headed back to the waiters' quarters. As we passed by the main building we saw the Ford station wagon with the large rectangular signboard mounted along its roof. The message in bright blue letters said, “Jack Whitman for Better Lionism.”

“Oh boy, look at that. Do you see what I see?”

By that time of night my guilt had dissolved in the gin. I was feeling that Bob Gelman had been treated unfairly and that Stuart Stein was to blame for the debacle, not Bob, not me.

“Looky, looky,” I said. I was drunk.

“Come with me,” Bob said walking up the steps to the main entrance of the hotel. Normally timid, I fell in behind him and marched fearlessly into the lobby of the hotel like an apostle of temperance raiding a gin mill. Bob went directly to the registration desk where a woman, with hair of a red color so peculiar and unnatural as to make me wonder if she might be rotting from the inside out, was sorting through index cards. “Excuse me Belle, can you help me out?” The woman raised her head slowly and stared at him dully from under her heavy eyelids like a giant tortoise.

“Whaddaya want?” she asked in a raspy baritone.

“Some note paper, a blue pen, ballpoint is fine, and some Scotch tape please.”

“Whaddaya need it for?”

“I'm making a list. And checking it twice.” Leaning forward into the woman's face he asked in seductive tones, “Have you been naughty or nice?” and he chucked her under the chin with the side of his index finger. She blushed, pushed some paper and a pen at him, and then, with a smile whose sleaziness was a match for Gelrnan's voice, tore off two strips of tape and pasted them across Bob's mouth saying, “Don't be fresh,” but clearly meaning the opposite.

“Thanks Belle baby, you're a doll.” I thought I'd choke. Outside, Gelman scribbled boldly on the paper and then ripped the page in half. He tore each strip of tape into two pieces and affixed a piece to the top and bottom of each one of the papers. “Take this,” he said handing me one of the papers. “When I say ‘Go' slap this here,” he said pointing to a site on the signboard.

The next morning Ron woke me before my alarm clock had gone off. Standing in the middle of the room, right arm akimbo, left hand extended palm out in the direction of Harlan's cot, like Betty Furness bringing her audience's attention to the refrigerator of their dreams, he said, “Your buddy never made it home last night, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Ho.” I rubbed my eyes and squinted at the alarm clock for the time. “The question is this—did he spend the night under Heidi's covers, or was he planting his seed under someone else's bush?”

“What time is it?” The Tom Collinses of the previous night felt like they were sponsoring a Mambo festival in my head.

“It's Howdy Doody time of course, time to say howdy doody to Harlan and his cutie. Get up. We're going to Heidi's room.” The dim, early morning light of dawn was visible in the sky through the room's single window.

“Harlan is hardly my friend and I'm not going to look for him. And if it bothers you so much that he might be with Heidi take Sammy with you. I just want to sleep. I've got a headache.” “Up, up!” he said, pulling my covers from me. “Let's go. We can be at the main house in a minute if we hurry. Come on!”

“What is the matter with you?” I was as much startled by his bold intrusion as I was irritated by his aggressive removal of my bedclothes. It had been less than twenty-four hours since my arrival and it seemed that Ron was behaving as though he were my brother Steve, and I resented his presumptuousness.

“What's the matter Melvin, you scared?” This taunt, one that was time-honored on the city streets of my childhood, stirred the familiar stew of fear and anger in me. I was just about to respond when a loud noise in the corridor interrupted us. I looked at the clock again and with the blurriness cleared from my eyes saw it was only 5:10.

“Gelman you little shit where the fuck are you?” It was Moe Braverman, son of Ben, brother of Harold and Heidi, the family's enforcer. “Gelman, get the fuck out here!” he railed. I was pretty sure this was about the signboard Bob and I had tampered with, but did anyone else know that I had been a conspirator in that escapade? Moe continued to stomp through the corridor shouting for Gelman, occasionally banging open the door to one of the dormitory rooms and demanding to know if Gelman was in there.

“He's gone.” Abe Melman's deep and sorrowful voice carried the message to all listening. “I saw him carry his suitcase out early this morning.”

“Sonofabitch. If I ever get my hands on him there won't be enough left to mail home in an envelope with a three cent stamp on it.” Harlan entered our room wearing a pair of blue boxer shorts, a towel draped over his head, his dop kit under one arm. Droplets of water glistened on his torso. He went straight to the dresser under the window and set the kit down, then sat on his cot and began drying his hair with the towel. Ron looked at him and sneered.

“Where've you been?”

“Looks like I've been in the shower Ronald, wouldn't you say?” Harlan said good naturedly without a trace of defensiveness or irritation in his voice. Before Ron could speak Moe Braverman lurched into the room.

“White, weren't you with Gelman last night?” he asked suspiciously. My heart leapt up into my throat.

“I had some drinks with him,” I said struggling to keep my voice below the strangled falsetto range, “that's all.”

“Do you know what he did after that? Do you?” His voice swelled with outrage and he glowered at me from the side of my bed, his face level with mine. Dear God, I prayed, strike Belle dead, please.

“The little shit, he pasted Z's over the L's in Lionism. Now the sign says ‘Jack Whitman for Better Zionism.' Putz! Shmuck! Trumbenik! Bastard! They'll never come back here now.” He reeled over to Harlan's side of the room and turned back towards me. “Are you sure you don't know nothing about this?” He had just given me my freedom. I hadn't even been asked but knowing I was one of the upstanding White brothers Moe had granted me amnesty.

“No, honestly,” I lied, “I didn't know.” I had lied honestly only once before, in grade school. My friend Malcolm and I had been belching to The Star Spangled Banner while our sixth grade classmates earnestly sang it when Mrs.Castleman, our music teacher, located our eructations and confronted us. Malcolm had a reputation as a trouble maker and a wise guy but I was the class spelling champion and all around goody-goody. “No, it wasn't me, honest,” I had lied, turning a deep crimson, and Malcolm, accustomed to making the trip to the principal's office, didn't rat me out. “It was my fault,” he said. Later that day, the war in Korea in progress and the recently ended world war shaping our play and our language, he said, “Forget it. When the grenade landed in our foxhole I jumped on it. Why should you die too?”

“If any of you ever see him around I want to know, got that?” Moe commanded, and he stormed out of the room. As soon as the door to the waiters' quarters slammed shut Ron burst into laughter. I exhaled with relief and couldn't wait to tell Malcolm, who was working on the social staff at Brown's Hotel, about my participation in the joke, but he'd be the only one in the Catskill mountains that I'd tell.

“So, Melvin, you have some balls after all,” Ron said, but I just rolled over and faced the wall.

“And as for you, Hawthorne, I'm not fooled by you for one minute. Shower my ass.” But Harlan kept his towel in motion across his body and said nothing in response. When Ron left the room for the shower I jumped down from my bed and collected my towel and dop kit.

“You were up pretty early Harlan,” I said.

“Early is the best time of day,” he said. “Just before daylight it's very peaceful. The crickets have quieted down and the birds have yet to begin chirping and the sky has the palest pale blue color, almost like slate. There are some stars still visible in the sky and the dew on the grass glistens and twinkles like little jewels spilled at your feet. It's a magical fairyland. I like that quiet time. I walk the grounds, I stare into the lake and begin the day in a state of calm.” His voice was indeed very calm, almost dreamy, nothing at all like Ron's, and it struck me then how odd this living arrangement was. We'd been lumped together without rhyme or reason like discards in a thrift shop. While there were commonalities I shared with each of them, there seemed to be nothing Ron and Harlan could call common ground. It was at that point on that morning I decided I was going to apprentice myself to Harlan and learn how to be in the world in his way.

“You should try it some time,” he said abruptly, as if coming back to the reality of Braverman's.

“Sure, I'll do that,” I said, politely. I'd have said yes to almost anything he might have asked of me just then; I was enthralled by his physical grace and verbal elegance. He was everything I had always wished to be.

Breakfast was quiet and easy. Harold had not attempted to introduce the Lions to the dietary delights of urban Jewry so there were no appetizing appetizers: no smoked white fish, no smoked Nova Scotia salmon, no pickled herring or lox. No Matjes herring, no herring in wine sauce, no herring with onions in cream sauce, no baked or fried herring. No Scotch kippers, no pickled salmon, no sardines, no anchovies. This would have been fine except there was also no bacon, no sausages, no ham. Bagels, like toy truck tires, sat piled in the bread baskets while busboys kept the bakers busy making white toast by the loaf. A grim silence took possession of the dining room. It was like study hail, only the occasional cough or shifting of chairs assured you that there was life there. The rest of Saturday's meals passed in similar waves of awkward unfamiliarity and painfully felt politeness. We knew there would be a thin crowd for Sunday breakfast and wondered what kind of tips we'd harvest. Since it was an experiment of sorts no one was too hopeful that the Lions would shower us with generosity. We were more or less resigned, too, to being the scapegoats for Harold's misguided efforts to attract the upstate gentiles, and for Bob Gelman's (and my) assault on Jack Whitman's signboard.

Still, by noon I had collected $12 in singles, two plastic ballpoint pens, a clip-on tie with a Lion's insignia, and a brief note wishing me success with my college quest. One man, it may even have been Jack Whitman himself, winked, pumped my hand while slipping me two dollars, and said, “Good luck with the distaff physiognomy.” I borrowed a dictionary from Sammy to translate the message and was surprised to learn that it was about the female anatomy. Jack Whitman was definitely my candidate for the Lions' presidency, but was Utica up to his vision?

4.

Steve and Jerry drove up to Braverman's Tuesday of that first week. Neither had called to tell me they were coming and I'd begun to imagine the Studebaker really was to be a surprise graduation gift from them and my parents. It was already five years old and not especially sleek as cars went in the mid-nineteen fifties so it didn't seem unreasonable to dream that I might be the beneficiary of the consumerism that was promoting cachet over utility to the new generation of prosperous Americans, but that Studebaker was not destined to be mine.