The Resort (9 page)

There was suddenly a splash of fear in the young woman’s eyes. She nodded her head quickly, as if not speaking words might keep her safe.

“It was in the fish mousse, wasn’t it?” Clete had taken one small bite. But he’d eaten hamburgers. “What is it?”

The young woman bit her lip and started for the door. Margaret put her hand on the woman’s arm. “What is it?”

“From the farm,” the woman said, a catch in her throat. “Please let me go.”

The young woman’s eyes, a beautiful dark brown, had deep circles under them.

“How long have you been here?”

She said, “More than four months. Please don’t ask me any more.”

“Four months! Was anyone with you?”

The young woman was silent.

Margaret took the young woman’s hands. “Please tell me.”

“My husband.”

“Yes.”

“And my child. A boy.”

It seemed to Margaret that the young woman was on the verge of tears.

“I haven’t seen children here,” Margaret said.

“They remove them to the nursery,” the young woman said.

“During the day?” Margaret asked.

The young woman looked frightened. “I must go.”

“When did you last see your child?”

“When we arrived. Four months ago.”

Margaret put her arms around the woman. “Oh my dear. I’m sorry.”

The door to the ladies’ room opened. An orange-and-blue-uniformed young woman came in. “Lesbian conduct is not permitted here,” she said.

Margaret dropped her arms from around the young woman and approached the staff member. “Where is this woman’s child?” asked Margaret.

The staff member glared at the young woman. “You’ve been talking. Out.”

The young woman seemed terribly frightened. She glanced at Margaret, then swiftly left.

“You, too,” the staff member said.

“Just hold your horses,” Margaret said and went into a booth. She could see the staff member’s feet just outside the booth, waiting. When Margaret was finished, she came out of the booth, washed, and left the room. The staff member was following her.

When Margaret resumed her place beside Henry, the staff member said to Clete, “You’d better keep an eye on her, Clete. She’s trouble.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Clete said to Margaret as the staff member left. Margaret looked around the dining room, trying to spot the dark-haired woman, whose name she did not know. There she was, eating at a small table all by herself. Where was her husband?

To Clete, Margaret said, “Where are the young children?”

“There are no children, Dr. Brown.”

“What about the nursery?”

“There is no nursery,” Clete said. “Oh, by the way, your husband and I were just exchanging notes about New York and California.”

“Clete’s never been out of California,” Henry said.

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” Clete said. “California’s a big and varied place. I like it here. And the people. I don’t mean movie Jews or students, people with real values about the world. There was this one couple who were like a mother and father to me, not just talkers and doers, people with ideas to put into practice, and they taught me a lot more about life than I ever learned in high school.”

“Who were these people?” Henry asked. He thought it a good idea to keep Clete talking, but wondered why Margaret was sitting as if carved out of stone.

Clete’s eyes glistened. “Mr. and Mrs. Clifford. They had more than a dozen of us on their ranch, fed us, gave us horses to ride, taught us what we had to know. Mr. Clifford it was who had the connections and the money to get things started. That’s why this place is named after him. Cliffhaven. Now, Mr. Brown, while we’re having our coffee, tell me about you.”

This is insane, thought Henry. This is the United States. We don’t have things like this here. But at the same time he felt no anger, as if the problem was an abstract one or concerned other people.

He doesn’t realize about the food, thought Margaret.

*

For a long time Henry had put out of his mind what had happened to him at Fort Benning, Georgia, toward the very end of the war. They were housed in two barracks, the officer candidates in his company. On the bottom floor of the first barrack were the trainees whose last names started with Acker and ended with Fielding. Opposite his bunk, across the aisle, lived a tall, slightly pockmarked boy from southern Illinois named Cooper who, one night, brought a clip of live M-l ammo into the barracks and, without the stimulus of alcohol, stood up on his bunk while everybody was cleaning their weapons, shoved the live clip into his rifle, and looking straight at Henry, announced at the top of his voice, “The only mistake Hitler made was he didn’t kill all the fucking Jews.”

They were bedded in alphabetical order. The bunk to Henry’s right was the province of a young man named Brownell, who had admitted to Henry during one of their late-night chats that, before the army, he’d never met a Jew. It was Brownell who slowly got off his bunk and strode across the aisle. Suddenly he grabbed Cooper’s rifle away from him, pulled the bolt back, unloaded the M-l, threw the empty weapon on Cooper’s bunk, and said so he could be heard by everyone who was staring, “That’s not a toy,” and that was that.

Except the next day Henry had, with some trepidation, sought out his platoon leader, a certain lieutenant from Virginia, and told the officer about what had happened the night before.

“Why are you telling me this?” the officer had said.

“Cooper just could have shot somebody.”

“He broke the rules, bringing live ammo into quarters,” the officer said. “If you and he and Brownell want to make an issue of it, I can tell you none of you is going to get your bars two weeks from now. If I were you, soldier, I’d just forget you came to see me.”

Two weeks later to the day, Cooper and Brownell and Henry Brown were all made officers and gentlemen by act of Congress, second lieutenants of infantry in the Army of the United States.

*

“Hey there,” Clete said, “you’re daydreaming. I asked you to tell me about yourself.”

Henry stood up, got behind Margaret’s chair so she could rise easily, then walked with her through the dining room toward the door. Some of the guests pretended not to watch. Others couldn’t keep their gaze from the familiar spectacle of a first-nighter’s behavior.

Clete followed along, ten or fifteen feet behind them, not hurrying.

Out-of-doors, Henry trod on the crunching white gravel as if he were wearing sneakers with very soft soles. He knew what he was doing. He was leaving.

Margaret had to walk quickly to catch up to him. “It’s something in the food,” she whispered, but Henry wasn’t really paying attention.

“It’s their method of control,” she said.

When they came to the road going down, Henry turned left, walking a bit faster. “Come on,” he said to Margaret, who was having trouble with those shoes that weren’t meant for fast walking.

Behind them Clete picked up his pace, but only enough to stay the same distance behind the couple.

It was very dark on that road.

“I can’t walk this fast downhill,” she said to Henry.

Henry slowed a bit, glancing behind him to see if Clete was closing the space between them. Clete seemed in no hurry, as if Henry were doing nothing unexpected.

Around the first bend Henry saw the object across the road, then, squinting, made out a camper parked sideways on the road. On its roof sat four orange T-shirted young men, all Clete’s age more or less, their legs dangling. Only one of them wore a holster. It was that one who said, “Mr. Brown, would you and your wife please return to your room. Clete will show you the way.”

Henry looked up at their faces. You really couldn’t tell the difference between them and any other American kids their age.

“I know the way,” Henry said. He took Margaret by the arm and started back uphill, passing Clete.

Clete waved a casual greeting to the four atop the camper, then turned to follow the Browns to the door of their room.

Inside, their sudden privacy seemed a godsend. Then they heard Clete lock the deadbolt from outside.

5

I shouldn’t have gone walking off down the road like that,” Henry said. His head felt a bit strange.

“If I hadn’t had these absurd shoes on,” Margaret said, “we could have gone through the brush.”

“There are steep drops in places, didn’t you see? At night it would be hazardous unless we had a light. And if we carried a light, they’d find us.”

“What about the mountain lions?”

“I’m sure Clete just dropped that one to scare us.”

“We must get out of here, Henry.”

He didn’t answer.

“You heard me,” she said softly. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” he said.

It was then she told him about the dark-haired young woman in the bathroom.

“Clete said there wasn’t any nursery.”

“Maybe there is,” Margaret said. “Maybe he was just saying that to put off further questions.”

“Don’t be naïve,” Henry said.

Had she been?

They were both startled by a sharp rap on the door. An unfamiliar male voice said, “Lights out in twenty minutes.”

“Like summer camp,” Margaret said.

“Like jail,” Henry said.

“I thought,” Margaret said, “they kept the light
on
all night in jails.”

“Maybe you’re right. Let’s get our stuff sorted away before we’re in the dark.”

“We don’t have to obey,” Margaret said. “We can keep the light on as long as we feel like it.”

It’s not that she’s an optimist, Henry thought, she has just never been a Jew. “They may turn the electricity off from some central place,” he said.

“How long is it since we were eating?” she asked. “An hour?”

“About that.”

“Don’t you feel odd in any way?”

“I don’t feel sick.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Well,” Henry said, sitting down on the edge of the bed, “I was thinking that I hadn’t had a drink before dinner and…”

“And?” She sat down in the one armchair, facing the bed.

“Well,” he said with a half-laugh, “I guess I feel as if I’d had more than one drink before dinner and wine during.”

“It was the fish mousse,” Margaret said. “I’m almost certain.”

“What was wrong with it?”

“It had a stronger flavor than it should have. And it was a tiny bit grittier.”

“Maybe it’s the way they prepare it,” Henry said.

“It’s what they put in it.”

“What do you mean?”

“If it were a chemical—there are dozens of things they could use—it wouldn’t change the texture. It’s probably THC.”

Henry looked blank.

“The upper leaves and flowers of marijuana, where the resin is.”

“You mean we’ve been eating marijuana?” Henry laughed. “I don’t believe it.”

“Just a touch in the food will do it,” said Margaret.

“Do what?”

“It takes longer than smoking to have an effect. An hour is just about right for the high to start. And it lasts a lot longer when eaten. Four, five, six, sometimes ten hours.”

Henry, who now with certainty was feeling something he had always related to alcohol, couldn’t keep from laughing. “You mean after an adult lifetime of abstaining from the pleasure of the young, I’ve now had it in a three-star restaurant? Terrific. What would they do that for? Make you think the meal was great?”

“I doubt it,” Margaret said. “If everyone feels euphoric most of the time, I suspect it’s easier to keep them in line.”

Henry let his right eyelid droop, in an attempt to lend a stern expression to his face. “How do you know so much about it?”

“I run into it all the time in my practice,” Margaret said.

“Ever tried it?”

She remembered him saying that even alcohol was not usual for Jews in the generation that had preceded his. Perhaps a shot of whisky neat at bar mitzvahs and weddings, but as a predinner habit, never. It was contact with the Gentile world that had corrupted the original puritans.

“Once,” she said. “An eighteen-year-old, daughter of someone who’s been my patient forever, came to see me, nervous as hell, thinking she was pregnant. I told her she wasn’t. I said I’d send her urine out for a test, just to be sure. She was so relieved, she took a handmade cigarette—at least that’s what I thought it was for a moment—out of her bag and lit it. It was only when the twisted paper at the end burned off and I could smell the smoke that I knew it wasn’t tobacco. She thanked me effusively, as if she had been pregnant and I, by merely talking, had undone the harm. She offered me the thing, called it a joint. How could I refuse? I took a puff and coughed. When she realized I had never smoked, she showed me how, letting the smoke sort of roll down your esophagus, then breathing in deeply, and holding the smoke way down as long as you can.”