Summer Accommodations: A Novel (14 page)

Ron came into the staff quarters carrying the waiters' mail. “There's a manila envelope for you,” he said, at the table where the mail was usually dropped and spread out.

“If you don't mind, I'd like to look at it by myself.” I was convinced it was bad news, even though there were still some vestiges of hope buried in my pile of negative expectations. But they say bad things come in threes and I already had heard two.

“I'm going to know sooner or later so what difference does it make? Let me stay with you. Maybe I'll introduce you to Diana later and then she could be either your winner's medal or your consolation prize.” I said nothing. “Okay, either way I promise you you'll meet her later today, what do you say?”

Of all people I did not want Ron there when I read the letter. He had mocked my ambition and he would not comfort me if my worst expectations were realized. Nor for that matter, would he celebrate my success were I to be awarded admission. Harlan might understand, but he was off somewhere and wouldn't be available again until after lunch was served and cleaned up.

“I'd rather do this alone Ron. I'd just feel better opening the letter in privacy.”

“Diana, Di-AANNA,” he crooned. “She could play Marilyn Monroe to your Arthur Miller—hey, did you know they just got married? I heard it on the radio. The president of the debating society gets to screw the head cheerleader. Unbelievable! There's even hope for you, Melvin. So come on, let's see what the letter says.”

“No!” I took the envelope and walked out of the quarters. I shook the manila envelope and it seemed to contain very little. I shook the envelope several times as though I might divine the contents by its heft, but I was no more informed for the effort. A letter of rejection would be fairly thin, but then maybe the letter of acceptance would be no thicker; the full orientation packet might come under separate cover rather than with the congratulatory note. Sammy saw me walking away from the building and hurried over to me.

“Is that the letter from Columbia?” he asked eagerly, his eyes wide, his jaw agape.

“I want to open this up alone, Sammy, if you don't mind.” His shoulders slumped, but then he straightened them and smiled.

“You're pessimism craves palliation and pellucid perspective my young friend. Learn now, Melvin, that hope is the staff of life as much if not more than bread. All month long you have been waiting for that missive you are holding in your hand and all month you've been hopeful and excited. Now that it is here you look like the end of the world has come. Is there an atomic bomb in that envelope? A packet of plague germs? So what if you don't get into Columbia, you'll find something else to hope for and that will keep you going. It's what keeps us all going. That's what hope is for. Hope is to life what gasoline is to the automobile's engine, it's what keeps things running and moving. Open the letter.” The manila envelope had a fastener on the back which when opened allowed the letter from Columbia to slide out. My mother had either forgotten to moisten the glue or wanted me to have the answer as quickly as possible. I shook the letter just once, as though that might shake out any bad news, and then ripped the edge of the envelope from top to bottom. The letter was brief and kind, an obvious rejection from its first words which reminded me of the college's high degree of desirability and the quality of the thousands of applicants competing for the 750 places in the Freshman class. I did not cry or feel punched in the stomach. I felt defeated and I knew it would take some getting used to.

“It's a rejection Sammy.” Sammy grasped my shoulder in his hand and gave it a squeeze.

“There are worse things believe me, much worse. I'm sorry.” Then he left me standing in the parking lot. Alone, the sick feelings of loss and hurt began to overtake me quickly. My nose became stuffy and tears came to my eyes but I wouldn't let them flow. It would take some time to get over this. Sammy was right, eventually there would be something else to hope for but just what that would be was beyond perceiving at that moment.

Several days later, out of the blue, Ron said he would introduce me to Diana that afternoon if I was up to it. It occurred to me that Sammy must have said something to him about the letter of rejection because he was unusually soft spoken. I was surprised and somewhat excited by his offer. Diana had already become a regular subject for discussion in the dining room during set up. Everyone was interested in her but no one had been able to get her to go out with him. Ron wanted me to appreciate how lucky I was to be the one she was willing to meet. I couldn't tell if this was a generous act to distract me from my bad news or a ploy to establish an indebtedness to him.

“You've never seen her have you? She's a real knockout. I don't want to waste your time describing her so just believe me when I say you won t be disappointed.” If this was true, why wasn't Ron filling up her dance card, I thought but didn't ask.

“Thanks Ron, I really appreciate this. Does she live here on the grounds somewhere?”

“After lunch, Mel, drop it for now. And if you want me to go through with this, drop the Jack shit too, okay? If you want to be Jack go back to Rosie, Diana's expecting a Mel.”

I was much calmer at lunch than I had been during dinner the night I was to meet Rosie. Perhaps this was evidence of a growing maturity. Bernie Abramowitz went from table to table trying to cheer the sad, encourage the disheartened, and kibbitz with every man, woman and child in the dining room.

“Bingo this afternoon in the recreation hall. You card players come too, I'll give you a Bingo card like you wouldn't believe!” he babbled, a desperate smile stretched across his face, perspiration, like a strand of fresh water pearls, beading over his upper lip. The big card players, men who were easily identified by the smell of cigar smoke that followed them wherever they went even when their cigars didn't, stared contemptuously at Bernie but said nothing. Sammy shooed him away from our station while rolling his eyes and mugging for the benefit of the elect at his tables who grinned with the knowing appreciation of insiders. After lunch Ron brought me to Diana.

She lived a little more than a mile down the road and across the state highway that separated the hotel from its little lake. Ron was unwilling to use his car for what he considered to be short distances so we walked through the misty rain.

“When she asks you where you go to school tell her you don't. Say that you're signing up with the Marines after Labor Day. Signing up, not joining, hear me?”

“Is that why she's not sleeping with you? Did you tell her you were a Joe College?” I was feeling excited and willing to take risks, like provoking Ron.

“That's one reason. Listen, this Marine business is not something that everybody knows. It would be a mistake to let it get out. If a whole platoon of waiters turns up as Marine recruits your chance of keeping a hold on her is probably zero, understand? This is something that she told me one night when she was very drunk and very sad. She almost threw herself in front of my car back there on the road last August and I kind of helped her through her crisis. It was with some musician from Swan Lake, a piano player I think. You know the horn player-heart breaker is such a cliche that at first I almost didn't understand why she was so upset. Love is love I guess. Anyway, she's a little strange but stay with it and see where she wants to take you.”

There was music playing as we neared the porch that stretched around her house in an uninterrupted band like the brim of a hat.

“Blueberry Hill”, I said to Ron, who frowned at my excess; since we all knew the song, naming it was unnecessary.

“Diana? Diana are you in there? It's me, Ron, I brought somebody to meet you.” There was a loud crash of glass breaking and a girl called out “shit!” in exasperation. Then the door to the house opened up and a tall, thin girl with an olive complexion and long, shiny black hair came out onto the porch.

“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me just then Ron.” Her arms had the wiry sinews of an athlete and her small breasts looked as round and hard as Macintosh apples. She seemed to emit an intense and immediate sense of excitement, a tension beyond the fervid sexual urgency that attractive women evoke in men. I knew immediately that I wanted to be with her, maybe forever.

“Diana this is Mel, the fella I was telling you about.” She studied me impassively, her face revealing nothing of what she was thinking. She looked me over, up and down, and then fixed her eyes on mine and locked in like a gunner on a target.

“You're going to be a Marine?” she asked, without either irony or disbelief. I had the good sense to just nod my head very slowly and keep my eyes stuck fast to hers. She smiled. “My father was a Marine,
is
a Marine,” she quickly corrected herself. She continued in a soft and velvety voice. “My father says you only say was when a Marine is dead.” Then I smiled. Her telephone rang and she went back inside to answer it.

“What do you think?” Ron asked.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you. She's unbelievable.”

“I have to go,” she said reappearing in the doorway. “I'll look for you Mel, Mel, right?” I nodded again. “I'll find you, don't worry, we'll see each other soon.” She smiled at Ron, winked, then waved and shut the door to her house.

“Incredible! Unbelievable! God, I don't know what to say. She's the sexiest girl I've ever seen, she's …”

“Shut up. She's not deaf and she knows what she puts out. Get your mind off of her for a minute, damn it, and put it to work for me.” He had stopped in the road to glower at me. The misty rain coated his eyeglasses with little droplets that aggregated and then ran down the lenses in thin rivulets. “O.K. I need you to help me make some calls, write some letters, contact the New York press.” Seeing my perplexity he snorted and said, “About Judge Crater, shmuck, has Diana fried your brains already? We have to get them up here. Hey, I bring you to Diana and now you owe me, okay?” I nodded in agreement.

S
undays always began the same way. Anticipating our tips made us edgy. We'd all come to understand there was absolutely no way to know what to expect from people. That a guest might have been especially friendly or personable in no way assured you a good tip. This was as true for those to whom you had been accommodating and to whose peculiar idiosyncrasies you were finely tuned as it was for the gruff and irascible. The meanest bastard might surprise you with an act of astonishing generosity. Despite this knowledge some of the staff persisted in figuring their take over coffee before the dining room opened for breakfast. Toting up their expected tips, some with pads and pencils, some staring up at the fluorescent lights suspended from the ceiling, their jaws slightly agape as they did the arithmetic in their heads, this group of dining room staff resembled the habitues of a betting parlor during the racing season.

Usually, the tips had already been decided by the Friday preceding the weekend but were not handed out until the coffee had been served and the farewells and goodbyes exchanged between the guests who were leaving and those who were staying on. After the Lion's Convention the Braverman regulars at Sammy's station arrived and I learned that, unlike the other busboys, I could rely on them in most cases for a generous gratuity. Once in a great while one of the embittered victims of Sammy's snubbing would simply leave without tipping—“stiffing” was what we called that—but Sammy always made it up to me. When he found me cursing into the silverware drawer in my side-stand one of the first Sundays there he put his hand on my back and said, in a voice trembling with a travesty of outrage, “Which malignant, mountebank, miser has mocked and mistreated my meticulous minion?” He must have had that alliteration memorized for the occasion. I couldn't believe he was capable of stringing that necklace of words together spontaneously.

“Mr. Klein just walked. He made no effort to even say goodbye. He was busting my balls all week, he and that silly wife of his, and nothing that I did was ever good eno …” Before I could finish my rant Sammy tucked a ten dollar bill into my shirt pocket.

“Leave off the lamenting. Anytime you get stiffed just come to me and I'll make it up for you.”

“Sammy, that's very nice but it's not fair for you …”

“Melvin! I'll decide what is and isn't fair. It's no problem for me to give you a few dollars when a guest wants to punish you. I can see that you're a nice boy, not rude or snotty, so you don't deserve to be treated that way. I'll take care of you. That's all there is to it, end of story.”

It was hard not to like Sammy when he treated me that way. My take that Sunday with twenty of my thirty-two guests leaving, twelve of them two weekers, should have been about ninety dollars. I'll spare you the math. Just remember the going rate in those days for a busboy was three dollars per person per week. In fact I took in a little over a hundred dollars with another thirty-six still in the bank for the dozen two week guests still at my station.

But not everyone in the dining room was as lucky as I. Waiters who found themselves receiving empty envelopes, or a fist full of crumpled ones intermixed with strips of newspaper, would curse and shout to inform the entire dining room staff of their misfortune. One time Ivan Goldman, the immense and nimble All American basketball player, vaulted out of the dining room still clutching the envelope containing the green Monopoly money he had been given by a miserly guest who imagined that he was penalizing Ivan for his disappointing service. There must have been twenty waiters and busboys pressed against the bay window at my station watching when, with one hand, Ivan plucked a white-washed stone the size of a volley ball from the row of stones lining the driveway, held it out in front of him next to the windshield of the guest's car, and said, I swear he did, “Stand and Deliver!” I bet the cheers from the dining room staff were audible even inside the locked car. Ivan had a twenty dollar bill slipped through a narrow opening at the top of the driver's side window. Then, after replacing the stone carefully in its row Ivan ran alongside the car as it left, dodging and weaving, feinting and stopping, as though he might hurl himself in its path at any moment. I doubt if that family ever returned to Braverman's again.

The farewell handshakes completed, the crumpled currency that had been pressed into my palm sorted and arranged by denomination, I sat down at one of my tables and lit up an L&M King.

“How'd you make out?” Ivan Goldman asked, sitting down next to me.

“Good, good. How about you?”

“Oh yeah, good. Melvin, can I ask you something?”

“Sure, what can I do for you?”

“That army guy with the funny neck, ‘The Captain' Sammy keeps calling him, was he easy to get along with? I mean, was he bitter, did he bust your balls?”

“Not at all, he was fine, why?”

“I don't know, it's creepy to see someone busted up like that. I played with a guy at Kansas who broke his neck in a game. He was a great rebound man, jumped like a kangaroo, but he got hit coming off the boards one day and landed upside down on his head and broke his neck. He never played again and he was mad as hell whenever you'd talk to him, bitter and mean. So, I just wondered, you know, was that soldier like that.” Harlan came up from the back of the dining room and joined us cigarette in hand.

“No, Stan was a good guy, friendly, funny, a gem.”

“You talking about ‘The Captain', Jack?” Harlan said.

“Yes.” Harlan snickered.

“What is it with you, Harlan? Any time I mention his name it's like you find him amusing. Don't you feel any respect or sympathy for this guy? He almost got killed winning the war. Maybe it means less to you because you wouldn't have ended up in a death camp like the rest of us Jews.” I disliked the mocking tones he used whenever he discussed Stanley Goldfine, ‘the hero of Normandy,' my hero of Normandy.

“Now that's uncalled for. It's got nothing to do with his fighting in the war but then neither does his injury.” He tamped out his cigarette in the saucer I was using for an ashtray and smiled. “Now here's what really happened.” He sat forward in his chair and became more serious. “I don't for a minute want to minimize or dismiss the enormous risk and horror of that invasion and beachhead. It was hell from what I've heard, but …” and then his smile returned, he lit a Lucky Strike and relaxed against the chair's backrest, “having survived that bloodbath and re-grouped with his unit, he and a few buddies decided to have some fun the night before they were to move in-land and battle the Nazis in France. One of them was a medic who had access to an ambulance—you know after the beach was secured all kinds of equipment started arriving—so they commandeered the ambulance and took off for a place where they heard there were some girls eager to show their gratitude to the Yankee liberators. It was while they were driving into this little town that they hit a land mine planted by the Germans as they were fleeing. The two other guys in the vehicle were killed but Captain Stan—who was only a lieutenant at the time—survived.” He stopped to take a deep draw on his cigarette and exhaled a smoke ring through pursed lips. “So, when I seem a little amused when Sammy insists on calling him ‘the hero of Normandy' understand it's because, in a way, it is humorous. I mean it's one thing to get caught cheating on your wife, but who would ever imagine you could get blown into the sky doing it?”

“How do you know this is true, who told you this?” I couldn't believe it was true; I didn't want to believe it was true.

“Millie Goldfine told me. Now you know why she's so pinched. She's screwed. She could never leave a war hero, she'd be outcast from her family, her friends, everyone. You see how admiring and sympathetic people are when they hear where he received his injuries; no one would forgive her if she left him. And she can never tell the truth of what happened because they both would be laughingstocks. She's screwed.”

“How did you get her to tell you this? Why did she pick you?” Ivan sounded wary.

“Women like talking to me,” Harlan said with a shrug, “I listen and they talk, it's that simple.”

“I bet you do more than listen,” Ivan said in a lascivious tone.

“Bet all you want but that's a losing bet. Ask Jack here, women just come to me, it's nothing I do, and I'm perfectly happy with Heidi. I don't need any land mines in my life.” Ivan snorted. It sounded more like disbelief than laughter. Harlan looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

“Jack?” he said.

“It's true, Ivan, women do flock to our friend Harlan. I've seen it a bunch of times. He's the honey that draws flies, or is it his fly that draws honeys,” I said, pointing at his crotch, weary of his self-proclaimed innocence, more doubtful now that it really was true.

“Jack!” Harlan said, as if injured by my joke, “some friend you are,” and he walked back to his part of the dining room.

“Why did she tell him, Mel, ask yourself that, why would the woman give up her secret to him, if she stands to lose so much, why tell a stranger?”

“Maybe that's the only person you can tell, a stranger. There's no harm done that way, she gets it off her chest and leaves it in the mountains. I don't know. I hate to think that's what really happened. I'm still a little bit shocked.”

“Yeah, I don't know that I believe it either. I like to think there are real heroes too. “

I looked at the back of the dining room where Harlan was laughing with his busboy. Did all these women just come to him uninvited, or was there something he did to encourage them?

2.

To relieve myself of my obsession with Harlan I sometimes resorted to pondering the question of Abe Melman's presence in the hotel dining room. His proximity made it clear that he had experienced some form of personal tragedy, one that had inscribed visible signs of pain into his face. He was a loner, almost a recluse, and he had chosen work as a waiter because it gave him a good income without the complications of co-workers who would inquire into his personal affairs or witness his comings and goings. You didn't even need a social security number to work in the hotels because your paycheck was next to nothing after the deductions for room and board were taken off the top so, if it was the government you were hiding from, this was the place to be. Private though he was, he left the door to his room open often so that we could see his law degree from New York University and his bachelor's degree from City College. The walls were otherwise bare, no pictures, no photographs, no newspaper clippings, not even a calendar. Ron interpreted this as Abe's giving us a cautionary lesson.

“He hangs them there to tell us that he did something so terrible he can never hope to return to a conventional life. He doesn't even have to say what it was that he did, he just makes it clear that he is outcast. Maybe that's why we haven't asked him what he's doing here point blank, it's just too terrifying to know the whole story of his exile from middle class society.”

Indeed, like a character in one of Aesop's fables, Abe Melman's life seemed to bear the weight of the moral consequences of a mistaken choice. But what was his mistake? I was beginning to appreciate Sammy's relentless disparaging of him. He was a nerve- wracking puzzle, an enigmatic but no less intensely felt object lesson whose very ambiguity and mystery screamed out at all of us: BEWARE! THIS COULD BE YOU. But how? What misstep could send you plummeting downhill to end up flat on your ass like Abe? It was most likely a criminal act, I thought. A fall this steep had to be the consequence of a crime. But what crime? Abe did not seem capable of violence and when provoked by Sammy he seemed even more leaden and immobilized, surely not someone capable of being physically dangerous. And that failure to react, to stick up for himself and lash back at Sammy could be infuriating and make you want to hurt him too. It was unseemly for a man to be so pathetically passive and for me, this man in particular, as old as my father, better educated than my father, yet unquestionably an utter failure. The great promise of education had been broken in Abe's case. He just didn't belong in this place.

Nor was I alone in trying to figure out what Abe was doing at Braverman's. Ron and Ivan Goldman and I sat around one humid afternoon discussing it and on that day was born the “What's With Abe?” game, a game Ron and I would play, but only twice in the course of that summer.

“He's in hiding, that's all there is to it,” Ivan said. “Look, you come here, you make a few thousand dollars, you don't have to give anyone your social security number or file a withholding tax, you're anonymous.” Ivan chopped at the air with his huge right hand to emphasize each of his points. “I don't know what he did, but it probably was something illegal having to do with his being a lawyer. He's trying to stay out of jail.”

“No, I don't think so,” Ron objected, “that just doesn't feel right. Why would he hang his law degree in his room and leave it in plain view if he was trying to be inconspicuous? No, it's about a lost love, a broken heart or a broken promise. It wrecked him.” Ron sounded sad just imagining the scenario.

“Well I think he did something that disgraced him, either with a woman he was working for as a lawyer or just with a woman. Look, short of murdering someone how long will your conscience punish you like this for?” No one had suggested murder. I looked over at Ron knowing that I couldn't refer to Lenny's story of a shooting but wondering if it could be true after all, and if Abe might have been party to it.

“Murder's too wild,” Ivan said. “Does Abe look like someone who could do something like that? He's much more likely an embezzler or a cash skimmer kind of crook.”

“Yeah, you're right,” I said, again looking at Ron, trying to convey my suspicion with facial contortions and grimaces.