In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (51 page)

It penetrated the old man’s mind very slowly that Marjorie was amazed to find him at the camp at all. “Vot? She didn’t tell you notting? How is it possible?”

“She didn’t, Uncle. Not a word. I swear I thought I was seeing a ghost for a minute.”

“A nice fat ghost, hah?” He shook his head. “So! For you it’s some disappointment, no? A fat old uncle you need around your neck, hah? Like a cholera, you need it. It’s too bad, Modgerie, I’m sorry—your mama is a smart vun—”

“Uncle, it doesn’t matter, really—”

“Listen, Modgerie, a mama remains a mama, she can’t help it. By her it’s still Friday night in the Bronx, the Uncle has to keep an eye on the baby. So vot? You think I spoil your fun, Modgerie? Have a good time, darling, vot do I know? I’m busy in the kitchen.”

She had been looking at his hands uneasily. Now she caught one as he made a gesture. “Uncle, what’s the matter? What are these?” There were several gaping little red wounds on his fat fingers. They were neither bleeding nor healing. They were like mouths, open, dry, and red.

With a laugh, Samson-Aaron pulled his hand away. “You vash dishes you get cut. Dishes break. Soap keeps vashing in the cuts, so they don’t heal, so vot? You lay off from vashing dishes they heal up.”

“I don’t like the look of them. Did you see the doctor?” Marjorie stared at the red gaps.

“Modgerie please, it’s notting.” He put both hands behind his back. “Don’t be like your mama, alvays questions.”

“I just don’t know if you ought to be doing this, Uncle.”

“Vot, I’ll disgrace you? Modgerie’s uncle is Sam the dishvasher? I von’t say a vord to nobody, depend on the Uncle.”

She threw her arm around his neck. “It’s not that. You’re—It’s hard, dirty work, you know—”

“So? I never vashed dishes? I vashed dishes in the Catskills, Modgerie, before you vere born. Vot is it? Caretaker, vatchman, that’s the jobs I don’t like. Jobs for old men, for cripples. I’m strong like a horse—Vait, I show you something.” He fumbled under his apron, brought out a tattered sweat-blackened wallet, and pulled a snapshot from it. “Did you see yet a picture of Geoffrey’s vife? Here, look at a doll, a sveetheart—”

Geoffrey had been married for six months. The picture showed him standing on the porch of a tiny house, in shirtsleeves, with his arm around a thin girl in flat shoes and a house dress. She was squinting into the sun, and her hair was pulled flat in a plain knot, so Marjorie could form no notion of her looks. Geoffrey, fatter and with much less hair, was grinning foolishly, his chest thrust out, a beer bottle in his hand.

“She’s lovely, Uncle. What’s her name?”

“Sylvia. Her father is a doctor in Albany, a big specialist. You know vot? She calls him Milton. Says it sounds more like him than Geoffrey, God bless her. A doll, hah?” He showed the black gap again in a happy grin, curiously like Geoffrey’s, and lowered his voice. “Modgerie, in October they have a baby already.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“You see vy I vash dishes maybe, Modgerie? Vy should I take money from Geoffrey ven he needs it? I send it back! Comes October I send
him
money. For the baby, a present. The baby should sleep in the finest crib money could buy. A crib from Samson-Aaron the gobbage pail. A good idea, hah?”

A voice roared from the rear of the dining hall. “Hey
Sam
, you fat old bastard, you drop dead or something?”

“Okay, okay—” yelled the Uncle. He chuckled. “That’s Paul, the other dish-vasher. A good feller, a Hungarian, plays good chess. So?” He caressed Marjorie’s cheek lightly. “I see you sometimes, Modgerie, hah? I got a secret, you don’t tell Mama, I don’t tell her your secrets. It’s a bargain? I see you sometimes ven nobody’s looking, I give you maybe a Hershey bar.” He ambled toward the kitchen, shouting, “Vot’s the matter, Paul, you vash a dish good and break your back?” He toiled up the stairs, his paunch shaking, waved at Marjorie from the top stair, and disappeared.

Marjorie marched straight to the public telephone booths in the main building across the hall from the office, and put in a call to her mother. The fishy fumes of the office paint brought tears to her eyes. In the next booth Mr. Greech was alternately growling and howling incomprehensibly at his secretary in New York. The operator told her that the circuits to New York were busy. She went out on the porch to escape the fumes while she waited. The afternoon had clouded over; a dank wind was lashing the oak trees, and there was a smell of rain in the air. Marjorie dropped dejectedly on the porch steps, her chin resting on her hands.

All magic was leaking out of South Wind, like air out of a punctured tire. She liked Samson-Aaron; no, she loved him, shabby old glutton though he was. But the injection into South Wind of a family face soured the very light of day. South Wind had been, in Marjorie’s visions, a new clear world, a world where a grimy Bronx childhood and a fumbling Hunter adolescence were forgotten dreams, a world where she could at last find herself and be herself—clean, fresh, alone, untrammelled by parents. In a word, it had been the world of Marjorie Morningstar. The shrinking of the camp’s glamor, her own lowly status, the mischance with the name, were bad enough. And here came the Uncle, dragging behind him the long chain of all the old rusty realities. She could feel the weight of that chain; she could feel the clamp, cold on her ankle, fixed there by the invisible far-stretching hand of her mother. It was unendurable.

“Rain again, for Christ’s sake!” grated Mr. Greech, making her jump. He stood directly behind her, scowling at the black sky, slapping the flashlight on his palm, looking fully as satanic as he had last year. Being on South Wind soil did something to Mr. Greech. “When in the name of hell am I going to get these buildings painted? Do you realize we’ve had rain for fourteen straight days?” He bellowed this last observation directly at Marjorie.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He looked at her with a blink, as though a stone had spoken. “What? What did you say?”

“Mr. Greech—pardon me, I hate to trouble you—it’s a small matter—”

“What, what?”

“My uncle—he’s washing dishes, I see.”

“Who? Oh yes, old Sam. Well, sure, he’d rather make twenty-five a week than nothing a week. So would I, by God, and it doesn’t look as though I will this season.”

“It’s just—well, it’s hard work.”

“Of course it is. That’s why I pay him.”

“He’s—well, he’s an old man—”

“What’s all this, now? See here, your mother told me he’s stronger than I am. He’s not chained in the kitchen. He jumped at the job. He seems to be thriving. In fact, the cook tells me he’s eating like ten men. I’m going to talk to him about that, by the way, I’m not running a hog-fattening farm in that kitchen. Now, what exactly are
you
fussing about? What’s eating
you
?” He thrust at her with the flashlight on each
you
.

She withered under his tone and his stare. “Well, I just thought—I don’t know—I suppose if it was his own idea …” She trailed off. Greech was walking away from her into the office.

In a few minutes the telephone call went through. As Marjorie waited, receiver in hand, to hear her mother’s voice, this thought flashed through her mind:
When I object to her sending the Uncle here without my knowledge she’ll say, “What’s the matter, are you planning to do something up there you don’t want us to know about?”
She was trying to think of a crushing answer when her mother came on the line. After assuring her that she was well and the camp was splendid, Marjorie said, “Quite a surprise you prepared for me!”

“What surprise?” said Mrs. Morgenstern blandly.

“Samson-Aaron.”

“Oh. The Uncle. Well, how is he?”

“Just fine.”

“That’s good. Give him my regards.”

After a little pause Marjorie said, “Don’t you think you might have told me he’d be here?”

“Didn’t I?”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“Well, that’s right, I guess it was the week when you were so busy with exams. Well, you have no objections to his being there, do you?”

“It’s a little late to be asking me that, I would say.”

“What’s the matter,” said Mrs. Morgenstern, “are you planning to do something up there that you wouldn’t want us to know about?”

“I’ve already done it,” said Marjorie. “I’ve been having an affair with Mr. Greech since March. How do you suppose I got the job?”

“Don’t be smart.”

“He’s washing dishes.”

“Who?”

“The Uncle.”

“What! No, he isn’t. He’s a caretaker.”

“Not any more. He makes money washing dishes. Wants to buy a nice present for his grandchild.”

There was a silence. Mrs. Morgenstern said, “Well, I can see that’s not too nice. Your uncle washing dishes. I’ll write him to go back to caretaker.”

“Let him alone! You’re hopeless, Mom.”

“What are you so touchy about? One of these days you’ll be glad the Uncle is there.”

“I’m sure that’s why you did it, Mom—to accommodate me.”

“What do you want of me, Marjorie? Why did you call? Do you want me to write him to come home? Say so, and I’ll do it, that’s all.”

Several seconds went by, while Marjorie weighed the neat impasse. It would have been hard for her under any circumstances to force the Uncle out of South Wind, once he was there. Now that she had seen his pride and pleasure in earning money, it was impossible. “Thank you, Mama, I don’t want anything. I thought you might be interested to know that he’s all right, and that I’m all right, and that everything couldn’t be lovelier.”

“It fills me with joy, dear.”

“Fine. Give my love to Papa.”

“I will. Goodbye. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Thanks, Mom, that gives me plenty of rope. ’Bye.”

Another round lost.

But once Marjorie became used to two unpleasant and very unwelcome facts: that she was still Marjorie Morgenstern, and that she was not likely to fascinate Noel Airman (at least not straight off), she perked up and began to enjoy South Wind. She hardly ever saw the Uncle; and if they did come on each other by accident they smiled and exchanged a few quick pleasant words, and that was all. It was still gratifying to look across the lake to Klabber’s camp on a fresh sunny morning, and to realize how far she had come in a year. It was fun rehearsing in the shows, even if she did nothing but kick her legs in a chorus of office girls. She began to find a certain arid pleasure in the office work. Keeping her desk clean and severe, getting her work done on time, drawing a grunt of praise from Greech for letters typed up swiftly and without errors—however petty, these things were satisfying.

Every day the look of the camp improved. The weather turned fine, too. By the first of July, after a week of continual sunshine, the fountain was flowing, the grass was velvet-neat, the buildings were dazzling white and gold, and the grounds were alive with noisy merry people in summer clothes of carnival colors. They were a helter-skelter group of ordinary young New Yorkers; a few girls spoke with comic Brooklyn and Bronx grotesqueness, and a few of the men were excessively crude, but most of them were just like the young people she had known all her life. They ate, danced, drank, and played at all the sports with great gusto. Gaiety and freedom were in the air. The food Greech fed them was a curious mélange of traditional Jewish delicacies—gefilte fish, stuffed neck, chopped chicken liver—and traditional Jewish abominations, like shellfish, bacon, and ham; the guests devoured the delicacies and the abominations with equal relish. Marjorie had to comb the bacon off her eggs for the first week or so, until the waiter became used to her old-fashioned ways.

If South Wind was Sodom, it seemed to be a cheerful, outdoors sort of Sodom, where tennis, golf, steak roasts, and rumbas had replaced more classic and scandalous debaucheries. Marjorie did notice a lot of necking in canoes and on the moonlit porch outside the social hall, but there was nothing startling in that. Perhaps terrible sins were being committed on the grounds; but so far as her eyes could pierce there was nothing really wrong at South Wind. All was jocund and fair to see. She lost her curiosity about the guests after the first week or so. They were a blur of similar faces; part of the background—like the lake, the trees, the clouds—to the real life that went on among the people of the staff.