Summer Accommodations: A Novel (5 page)

My brothers had gone directly to the kitchen upon their arrival and were talking to Rudy and Sammy when I appeared for lunch. My injured surprise was an opportunity for them to make jokes with their former compatriots.

“Look who's here, always the late comer.”

“Still haven't gotten your timing down right I see.” Private laughter was then shared among the four of them.

“Stop it, Jerry, you know how sensitive Melvin is about being late. So, little brother, did Rudy drag you into the meat locker yet?” They all laughed again in a knowing, insider way, like fraternity brothers with a newly recruited pledge.

“Why didn't you tell me you were coming up?” I asked, trying not to sound hurt and whiny.

“We wanted to surprise you. Sammy got us seats at his station and we were hoping that you wouldn't know we were here until you came into the dining room for lunch. We were going to tip you Mel, I swear, the whole three dollars for just one meal,” Jerry said. Laughter again, and back slapping as well among the initiated.

“Well, it's good to see you anyway,” I said grudgingly.

“Never start a sentence with ‘well' Melvin, don't you remember anything Mrs. Friedman taught you?” Steve chimed in.

“You know, I'm glad you two surprised me because sometimes I forget what a pain in the ass you can be,” I said, grabbing a plate from the pile in front of the sous chef.

“Come on Melvin you haven't got all day to stand around here and chit chat. Eat your lunch and get set up.” Sammy said. “If you waste my time I'll see to it that the only person you'll be fit to be working for is judge Crater, and ghosts are lousy tippers.”

While filling my plate on the food line I heard their laughter and the sound of their voices at play with Sammy's and once again experienced the vast space separating us, whatever it was comprised of; years, tastes, temperament, it had always been there, this vast chasm of differences. Often I thought it would always be there but, then, I'd assure myself I was being overly sensitive and revert to the hopeful admiration of my big brothers. As much as I liked watching them in action and admired and looked up to them, their remoteness always seemed like some kind of reproach, one I could not comprehend. It felt like something other than the big difference in our ages. But right then and there I knew I could no longer deny that the unbridgeable gap was real, and their sarcasm and insults, like the casual cruelty of some children, were meant as much to distance as to tease. Immediately, without effort, like a reflex, I thought of Harlan's friendliness, a welcoming full of promise. I could learn a great deal from him, his manner and style, his comfort and ease, his self-containment. He didn't seem to need anything from anybody. That would be just perfect, I thought, the antidote to my hero worship, unmindful I was simply replacing one idol with another.

At lunch some old timers among the staff welcomed Steve and Jerry with enthusiastic shoulder punches and handshakes (hugs had yet to become fashionable among men) some feinting, dodging, and dancing as if in a boxing ring, and a torrent of questions about how they were doing in school and what they were doing for ass. Steve did most of the talking, always the more voluble of the two, while Jerry looked wistfully around the dining room, the dreamy smile of reverie on his face.

“Heard any good jokes, Jerry?” Sammy asked, always looking to extend his repertoire.

“As a matter of fact I heard a great one just yesterday but I don't know if you'd be able to understand it.”

“Oy veh! Listen to this wise guy. So where's your drummer?” We all laughed because we knew the drummer was the comic's audible punctuation mark following a punchline. They ate lunch and did indeed insist upon my accepting a five dollar bill from them. Before they left Steve walked around the Studebaker with great ceremony, inspecting the fenders and doors, kicking the tires, peering at specks on the hood and running his fingers over the sideview mirror before smiling and nodding at me.

“You did very well. It'll only cost you five dollars for the wear and tear on the car,” he said, smiling and lifting the five Jerry had tucked into my shirt pocket. I thought it was just a joke, but he drove away without giving me back the money. That was my brother Steve for you.

When I went back into the dining room I asked Sammy why there was so much joking about judge Crater. I'd never heard him mentioned in relation to Braverman's by anyone in my family and my brothers hadn't prepared me for the constant reference so it was a surprise his name kept coming up.

“It's an inside joke, Melvin. We keep it amongst ourselves.”

“But why judge Crater, why not Kilroy or Harvey, the giant invisible rabbit?”

“The judge did like to come here during prohibition, they say, but that was before my time so I don't know if it's true or not, but what difference does it make? He's gone and we're not causing him any harm it's just a joke. Look, if we want to choose him as our ghost that's our business and that's all there is to it. Why are you so upset about the judge anyway?”

“Our ghost? Do we need a ghost? Who decided we need a ghost at Braverman's?”

“Melvin, it's just a joke, relax. You know what I think, I think you are much too serious for a young man. Why get so upset by a silly joke? Why take it so much to heart? This is going to be a long summer with plenty of heat and plenty of hard work and everybody needs a good joke to make the time pass in good spirits. It's something like a mascot just amongst our selves. Judge Crater is our mascot, our joke. Why, you believe in ghosts? You're afraid maybe he'll come after you in your bed at night? What is the problem, what is wrong with a little fooling around?” He was getting edgy.

“Sammy it's a question, not a problem. Jesus, talk about getting carried away.”

“Let's have some respect here, Melvin, remember you're working for me.”

“Understood, “ I said, with a smile and touching the finger tips of my right hand to my forehead, lips and chest in sequence I bowed a low bow topped off with a flourish, relieved when Sammy laughed heartily.

T
he summer season's regular guests began arriving towards the end of that first week, vacationers hopeful of avoiding the usual crush that took place on Sundays. Traveling up route 17, the long arduous path from New York City, most made their way into the country on Sunday afternoon each car a link in a steel chain that dragged slowly towards liberty, and Liberty, the last of the many towns they were headed for, the birthplace of the Jewish vacation resorts.

The road was a two lane affair that passed through the Shawangunk mountains before reaching the Catskills. The most daunting part of the ride involved negotiating the long and steep hill at Wurtshoro, a hill that was the vacationer's equivalent of the dragon that had to be slain in order to rescue a distressed damsel imprisoned in a tower. Radiators boiled over, geysers of steam erupted into the air, traffic stal1ed, horns blared, tempers exploded in competition with the radiators, cars were pushed on to the road's narrow shoulders, but the chain continued its slow, steady crawl languid as a snake in the sun. And when they arrived, the sodden vacationers, dripping with a hot perspiration, entered the broad drive and reception area of Braverman's with the exhausted relief of a desert caravan reaching an oasis.

Bernie Abramowitz, the resident tummler and social director, organizer of volley ball games and Simple Simon Says calesthenics, caromed from one newly arrived family to the next in a frenzy of welcoming.

“Bernie Abramowitz,” he shouted, while slapping backs, pumping hands and pinching cheeks, “Abramowitz, everything from A to Z!” The returning old timers knew the joke, but the perplexed newcomers had to have it explained.

“A—bramowit.—Z. get it?” Bernie had made a stab at being a comic in the manner of Danny Kaye but he lacked Kaye's good looks, intelligence, charm and comic brilliance. That aside, he couldn't comprehend why he'd had a problem establishing himself in the firmament of comedy. In the first weeks of the summer season each of us in the dining room would be taken aside individually to hear how antisemitism had destroyed his career in show business. That Kaye, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Jack Benny. Sid Caesar, Alan King and dozens of others had succeeded, because of or in spite of their Jewishness, was of no concern to Bernie. “It must have been my material,” he'd lament, “but who knew someone could hate gabardine that much. No, but seriously, and like all comics I'm basically a serious person, it was my Holy Family routine that was too much ahead of its time. Have I ever told you the routine?” I smiled and shook my head no for what would prove to be only the first of a thousand tellings. He was so pathetic in his eagerness to charm and amuse it was painful to be with him for any length of time.

“Hey! Look at me! I'm Joseph the forgotten man. What's with this ‘Jesus, Mary
and
Joseph.' I'm the goddamn Zeppo Marx of the Holy Family! Try to put yourself in my place. You marry this good looking girl, Mary, a kid but great tits, and the next thing you know, every time you try to lay a hand on her you get a headache like you wouldn't believe. What's this, I say to myself, am I the husband or am I the wife? Nobody told me what I was getting myself into. Nobody said, Hey Joe, God needs a beard, you want the job? Nobody said that. Look, I was a good lookin' fella, a punim like a movie star. I'd had more women than the Egyptians had locusts. Did I need this?” His monologue always ended there. I never knew if it was because he hadn't written more or if it was at that point he had to run for his life to get away from an irate mob. Lenny Bruce himself wouldn't have dared that routine in the 1950's.

After unloading their luggage, the bellhops escorted the families to the registration desk, chatting up the wives and children, assessing the nubility of the teenaged daughters and the flirtatiousness of the married women in the process. Tired and bedraggled as they were, it heartened the bellhops to see these women revive with a little flattery and attention. Their whiny brats were always the cutest, their teenagers were assured of the great athletic program, and their husbands were completely ignored. While some of the bellhops were college students, most were hustlers who were looking for a buck anyway they could make it. They hung around the card room and fetched drinks and cigars for the gin rummy, pinochle and poker players compensating for crummy tips by short-changing the obviously timid and snaring any bills or change that landed accidentally on the carpeted floor. The women canasta players got little attention because women were lousy tippers. “Thank you dolling, and a pinch on the cheek is nothing to take to the bank,” they'd complain.

Table assignments in the dining room followed room assignments at the hotel. Stuart Stein, the Maitre d' who called himself “Sandy” in the summers, dispersed the guests according to a plan he had designed years before. The young singles were clustered to the rear of the dining room but dispersed among three different teams of waiters and busboys. The singles were notoriously cheap and often skipped out without tipping. The “young marrieds”, as they were called, couples without children, sat towards the front across the aisle from Sammy's station. The waiter assigned to them was usually a basketball player, often an All-American like Ivan Goldman, who was admired by the husbands and swooned over by the wives. Sammy, who was tolerant but cool towards these jocks, his celebrity being confined by place while theirs extended far beyond such local borders, was assigned the Braverman regulars, repeat vacationers who requested Sammy's station and were rewarded for their generous tips with seats by the windows overlooking the pool. The less generous or more querulous were given to Abe who rarely complained and accepted his lot stoically. Abe's tables abutted ours along the wall just down from the windows. Stuart took pride in his distributions, rewarding the more compliant and cooperative waiters with new guests who drove fancy cars, information the bell boys supplied, and punishing the trouble makers by assigning them the families that arrived in old wrecks loaded with children and grandparents, large families with little likelihood of proferring munificent gestures of appreciation. I wondered what kind of group Harlan would harvest. His station was located at the rear of the dining room diagonally across from me and from all the windows. Most likely he'd get the newer and less aggressive vacationers, perhaps newlyweds who only had eyes for each other anyway and couldn't care less about views.

Then there were the guests, especially the women guests. They came in all shapes and sizes, in all tones of the flesh from milk white to olive bronze. They had blonde hair, red hair, black hair, chestnut brown and champagne pink hair. They were obese and slovenly with tubular rolls of fat hanging like aprons over the waistbands of their pedal pushers and toreador pants, their bulging buttocks straining the seams of these too-tight garments. Or there were the friendly but plain ladies who looked like the mothers and sisters of my friends in the Bronx, non-descript, hardly worthy of a young man's notice, eliciting neither critical abuse nor lustful fantasies from the dining room staff. But then there were the shapely and gorgeous ones who seemed to find one another quickly and clustered together at poolside like members of an exotic harem; women with fiery red talon-like nails, luscious lips bathed in a creamy, cherry- red wet and glistening lipstick which they licked and caressed with the tips of their tongues; deep tans on their bodies which they oiled and basted by the hour as they lounged on their chaise lounges—the Catskill translation of chaise longue—and discussed their lives, their dreams, and what to do to keep a man reined in and grateful for any attention bestowed upon him. It was not as though they were as thoroughly cynical as this may sound. They truly believed in the virtues of their values and their experiences had rewarded them for staying close to that system which had guided their fortunes. Their husbands were always referred to as “decent and hard working” when they spoke of these men to the other women. But, occasionally, one of the beauties would tell of the dull accountant who was seen in a nightclub with a young showgirl, unmindful of his family's fight with the mosquitoes of Monticello, and they all the while feeling sorry for him for being trapped in the smoky, humid heat of New York City in the dog days of summer. Then the women would cluck their tongues and wag their heads in disapproval and the silent lamentation that seemed to say “Men” rippled through their assembly until another story was told.

The men also came in all shapes and sizes, if they came at all. Many were happy to toil in the city all week long and settle for weekend visits. Some families stayed for the whole season in the cottages located along the small lake across the state road from the hotel's main buildings. They were entitled access to the hotel's facilities, the swimming pool, tennis courts, shows and dances at the recreation hall, but they cooked their own meals and did their own laundry. Husbands might spend a week or two on holiday and then come for weekends, but the wives and children were there by themselves most of the time. It was always rumored that many of those women were lonely, horny and available. And many of their husbands looked as though they weren't particularly happy to be in the company of their wives and children when they were together which seemed to lend credence to the tales of the women's sexual availability. I fantasized about some of them but guiltily because it was as though I was invading someone else's domain. It's not as though I thought of women as property, it was just that they belonged to someone else. Wasn't that the way the songs of those days expressed love? “You belong to me, I belong to you.” Whether single or married I had been instructed women were either seduced or misled but never voluntarily pursued illicit relationships. This victimology was my mother's teaching which stemmed from the experience of her sister, my aunt Ceil, who had a long series of broken hearted romances with married men, “the using bastards” as they were called by my father. But, since losing my virginity had been one of my goals for that summer, that there were sexually experienced, horny women potentially available for pleasure was both exciting and daunting.

2.

The first meal served to the full complement of newly arrived vacationers was Sunday supper and it bore very little of the burden of the hotel's reputation as an eat-all-you-can-eat, stuff-it-in, wrap-the-rest-in-a-napkin-and-take-it-back-to-your-room, medium sized hotel with a kitchen reputed to be worthy of the Concord or Grossinger's. Whether or not it deserved this reputation was never something the dining room staff concerned itself with. We were fed leftovers buried in a brown gravy sauce that overpowered the flavor of any meat immersed in it. Even garlic couldn't defeat it and this unappetizing fare fostered something called “scoffing” a term meaning eating on the sneak. It originated with the British Merchant Marine in the 1800's and some romantic must have felt it suited the crew manning the dining rooms of the Catskills because it took root there quickly and was understood by everyone who ever set foot in a hotel kitchen. Scoffing was elevated to an art form by the quick handed basketball players brought up to play in the hotel basketball league. Ben and the other owners might have wanted to field good teams in the Friday night basketball circuit but they weren't about to serve then prime ribs for their efforts. So an extra steak might come out for a guest who did not appear for dinner, or one who was delegated the reputation of consummate glutton by the waiter who then brought extra portions out to his side stand where they were partaken of quickly and furtively, as if by hyenas, between trips to the kitchen. More commonly, breakfast lox and dinner desserts were consumed in a single swallow on the fly with one's back to Stuart Stein who was responsible to intercept and interdict such activity. I can't remember his ever succeeding but his conviction that it was happening all around him all the time made him testy and wary with the waiters and busboys. And this finicky punctiliousness served, in turn, to make it a contest within the staff to scoff in full view of everyone in your area without being seen by Sandy Stein. Sammy, who expressed no opinion about the practice, actually demonstrated a remarkable facility with it on occasion just to show he was still one of the boys, which left Stuart Stein alone in a position of miserable isolation in his own dining room. To me he was little more than an usher showing people to their seats. As Sammy's busboy I was under his protection and therefore relatively immune to the maitre d's nit picking.

Sammy's station was full that first Sunday. Most of his guests were returning veterans of Braverman's and there was an aura of reunion complete with handshakes, hugs, reminiscences, and the recounting of personal news. People were curious about me and when Sammy told them I was the younger brother of Jerry and Steve White he also added that I was planning to be a doctor just like Jerry. I was so busy carting out tray loads of food that I hardly spoke to anyone. As he had explained, Sammy took the diners' orders, communicated them to the kitchen and then sent me to fetch them. It required two trips to deliver the load of juices, sliced melons, orange and grapefruit sections, and grapefruit halves for our thirty two guests. I had no sooner deposited the second tray on the side stand when Sammy whispered to me that it was time to refill the bread baskets and water goblets, check the glass boats of olives, radishes, celery sticks, and carrot slices, and top up the pickle dish. That accomplished I then began to bring out tray loads of hot soup, cold soup, salads, dishes of salad dressing, and more baskets of bread and rolls while Sammy passed out the food and regaled his clients with anecdotes, jokes, personal vignettes, and bits of gossip.

“Sally, did I tell you that Esther Gaussman got married?”

“NO!” expostulated Sally, obviously stunned by this news.

“In Miami Beach. A widower. Murray Fiedelman. A jeweler,” he said in a peculiar telegraphic staccato.