Us denizens of the five boroughs referred to the Catskills as “upstate,” but that was just another manifestation of our warped view of the universe. What do you expect? There are still a sizable number of lower-Manhattanites who consider Chelsea a northern suburb, Brooklyn another country, and Yonkers a distant planet. What they thought of the rest of the world, who can say? Potsdam, up on the Canadian border—now, that’s upstate. Buffalo and Rochester to the northwest, they’re upstate. In truth, the Catskills, a low mountain range only an hour or two north of the city, was actually downstate.
During the thirties, forties, and fifties, the Catskills had flourished as a summer-vacation spot for New York City’s lower- and middle-class populations. With its rich green valleys, numerous lakes, waterfalls, and scenic vistas, the Catskills offered a nearby escape from the sweltering city streets. The Catskills also offered something else: a place for individual ethnic groups to get relief from the pressures of the melting pot and associate in peace with their own. The Irish and Italians had their own enclaves in the mountains, but the Catskills would always be most closely associated with the Jews.
The Borscht Belt was a series of hotels that had sprung up in the Catskills over the years to service a vibrant Jewish clientele. The Concord, Grossinger’s, Kutshers, Brown’s were the big-name places that every Jewish kid knew. Unlimited quantities of bland kosher food, shuffleboard, goofy rituals like cross-dressing mock weddings, endless sessions of Simon Says, amateur talent shows, dance contests, and a house band with a trumpet player that shtupped every lonely skirt in residence—these were just some of the goodies you got for your money. But above all else, what defined the Catskills were the comedians who played the hotel ballrooms: Myron Cohen, Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, Henny Youngman, Don Rickles, Stiller and Meara, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, David Brenner. All had cut their teeth doing the rounds.
Now don’t get me wrong, the Catskills, like any other resort area had a pecking order. Not every hotel was so grand and gaudy. There were second- and third-rung hotels with second- and third-rung comedians. The food was a little blander, the portions smaller, the trumpet player a little less frisky. Never mind the bottom feeders like the motels, boarding houses, and bungalow colonies.
As a kid, I’d spent a few weeks during a few summers in the Catskills. Only once had we ever stayed at a top-notch hotel. I think I was seven or eight. Miriam, my baby sister, was just that, a baby sister. My dad, a supervisor for a big supermarket chain, had won a week at the Concord as a bonus for surpassing his quarterly projections. It was all right, I guess. There were other kids my age to play with, a pool, and lots of crappy food. Aaron, Miriam, and I were too young to see the shows, but my mom finished third in a beautiful-legs contest, and my parents won a cha-cha dance-off. I inherited that dance trophy. Katy put it up in the living room when we bought our house. What I remember most about that week in the mountains was that my parents were happy. It was perhaps the only full week in my life when my parents seemed weightless.
We returned sporadically to the scene of the crime, but it was never the same. And with each return, the quality of the accommodations dropped a rung. My dad changed jobs; once, twice. Then he bought his own store. There was less money. There wasn’t enough money. There was none. Then we stopped coming. Happiness was no longer part of the equation, and weightlessness was beyond my parents’ escape velocity. Eventually, they were ground into dust by the tonnage of their own failures and other unseen forces of the universe.
But it was more than just my parents’ balance sheet that had changed. The Catskills themselves had started to slide into the pit. Two things doomed the Borscht Belt: fast, reliable air travel and dependable, affordable air-conditioning. Who wanted to play seven days of shuffleboard when you could fly to Vegas for a week for the same money? Who needed to pack a hot car full of kids and in-laws to feel cool mountain air when cool air was available at the flip of a switch? And the dynamics had changed. Baby boomers were less ethnic, less traditional, more restless. By the mid-seventies, some of the big hotels had gone the way of Yiddish theater. Some hung on, but the clientele was much older, the lavish shows with first-rate talent were no more.
Sometimes I think it was my fate to catch things gone to seed. Coney Island, the world’s playground during my parents’ generation, was a wretched ghost town by the time my friends and I were old enough to go there on our own. The Dodgers moved to L.A. the year my dad promised to take me to a World Series game. Brooklyn itself had taken a sour turn during my watch. By 1957, the Dodgers weren’t the only ones fleeing the County of Kings. Why should the Catskills have been any different?
But in the mid-sixties, though the seeds of its ruin had been sewn, the Catskills was still the place a lot of city kids went to gain some work experience while getting away. Even Aaron had done it for a summer—working as a waiter at a second-rate Borscht Belt hotel. That’s what Karen and Andrea were doing that fateful summer, working at the eminently forgettable Fir Grove Hotel in the little burg of Old Rotterdam, New York.
Though it wasn’t quite slavery, it wasn’t exactly fair pay for a fair day’s work either. You did receive a nominal weekly paycheck, but anything resembling real money came from tips. Your meals and room and board were free. That the food was leftovers from the paying guests’ meals was a given. Oh, and that free room and board … True, the barracks at Auschwitz were worse. And not all the hotels housed their summer staffs in cramped, overcrowded firetraps like the one in which the girls had perished. No, some were more substandard. I guess if you survived it, like Aaron had, you could look back at the experience with a smile.
I wasn’t smiling when I pulled up to Old Rotterdam Town Hall. My knee had been annoyingly correct about the snow, and the drive up along old Route 17 had been a slip-sliding adventure. Downstate New Yorkers, myself included, are great drivers until you introduce any of the various incarnations of wet weather into the mix.
Old Rotterdam, according to my AAA guide, had been established in 1698 as a fur-trading outpost. Baruch Rotterdam had immigrated first from Poland to Holland and then to the New World. Though his original surname was now an irretrievable artifact of history, it was widely held that he had taken on the name Rotterdam to honor his adopted country.
Town Hall was a hideous, nearly windowless concrete pillbox that looked like the prison from a Bauhaus acid trip. The place was as inviting as a sarcophagus. The thing of it was, it probably cost a fortune, whereas almost every house and business I passed on my way through town seemed weather-beaten and dirty even beneath the lie of whitest snow. I just knew its guts were going to be all hunks of prefab cement and acoustic tile.
What I was still trying to divine, however, as I hobbled in from out of the snow, was what I was doing here. It was silly, really. In New York City, the last place you’d start looking for anything or anyone would be City Hall. You might start at the morgue, the local precinct, the hospital, but never City Hall. Christ, on seven out of ten days, you wouldn’t even find the mayor there. I suppose there was a part of me, in spite of lots of experience to the contrary, that wanted to believe that America outside of the Big Apple was Leave It to Beaver land. Though my depressing drive through town had pretty much shot that fantasy all to hell.
In the end, I figured, I was here because it was someplace to start. With Marina Conseco and later with Patrick, there were obvious starting lines. Marina had vanished in Coney Island, Patrick at Pooty’s Bar in TriBeCa. But even if I’d known exactly where to start, I still didn’t know what I was starting. At least with Marina and Patrick, it was clear what—or, rather, for whom—I was looking.
“I want to hire you to find my sister,” is what Arthur Rosen had said. Yeah, well, maybe in my next life. Maybe he had meant it figuratively. You know, he wanted me to track down people who had gone to school with her or worked with her that last summer, people who had survived the fire. Could he have wanted me to find her in their memories? I believed that for about ten seconds. It
simply didn’t jibe with the strange man’s demeanor. He hadn’t spent a decade and a half hiring lawyers, detectives, butchers, and bakers just to create a happy-family scrapbook.
Obviously Arthur felt something was wrong, but what exactly? What had produced such hopelessness in Arthur Rosen that he had chosen Thanksgiving Eve 1981 to end his life? He had had fifteen, sixteen years of hopeless nights from which to choose. Guilty as I felt for turning him down, not even I believed my rejection was the sole determining factor in his death.
Figuring Arthur Rosen hadn’t kept old copies of the Catskill Tribune to line the bottom of a birdcage delusion, I had hoped to find a starting point in the pages of one of the editions I’d “borrowed” from his room the night he’d hanged himself. Nothing doing. As far as I could tell, the only thing that tied the papers together was the masthead. In fact, I was more confused after reading through them than when I’d started. The papers were from different days, different months, different years. No two stories carried over from one paper to another. I could find no common theme. Even the reporters seemed to change from month to month. I guessed that was pretty common with small-town papers.
As it turned out, Town Hall wasn’t such a bad place to begin. Inside the predictably sterile lobby were the usual flags, plaques, and glass cases featuring displays of local elementary-school art. But all was not lost. There was this huge wooden signboard up on one wall listing all the current elected officials of Old Rotterdam and the surrounding county. You had to love politicians and their egos. The smaller the politician, the larger the sign. The damn signboard was bigger than the scoreboard at Shea. I wondered if it lit up when a local high-school kid hit a homer. I’m not complaining, mind you, because up there on the big board was a name I recognized from the wall in Arthur’s room.
Councilman at Large
RICHARD T. HAMMERLING
The logical thing to have done, I didn’t do, not immediately anyway. I didn’t rush up to the information desk to find the location of Councilman Hammerling’s office. I stood there instead, trying to formulate an approach to take with Hammerling. Somehow I didn’t think my presence would be well received if I barged into his office proclaiming I was the part owner of a Manhattan wine shop looking for a long-dead girl because her recently dead brother had said there was something wrong with a sixteen-year-old investigation. I guess I’m just funny that way. Yet, no matter how I tried to spin the words in my head, they always came out sounding rather ridiculous. I decided to take a more subtle approach and not divulge exactly what I was doing there.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the heavy woman at the information table apologized. “Dick—I mean Councilman Hammerling—is out of town for the weekend. I think he’s in Vermont skiing. You up from the city?”
“My Brooklyn accent’s showing, huh? Twenty years of diction lessons all to no avail.”
She stared at me, blankly and unsure. Sarcasm isn’t a universal language. That’s a thing most New Yorkers forget when they venture beyond the city limits. Most Americans don’t spend 80 percent of their waking hours constructing witty comebacks and snide remarks. Not everyone acts as if they’re onstage at the Improv or trying to outwit Groucho Marx or George Bernard Shaw. Most people say what needs to be said and shut up.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “just joking. Will Mr. Hammerling be back on Monday?”
“Sure will, Mr….”
“Prager, Moe Prager.”
“I can leave him a message if—”
“That won’t be necessary,” I assured her. “I’ll just come back Monday morning.”
She smiled sweetly. She had a pretty face that even all her added weight couldn’t disguise. She had sincere brown eyes, high cheekbones, plush lips, and a never-say-die smile.
“Okay, then,” she said, “enjoy your weekend. I hope you had a pleasant Thanksgiving.”
I thanked her, began walking out, and turned back. “Listen, I used to stay in a place up here when I was a kid. I think I might like to spend the night there for old times’ sake. The …” I snapped my fingers for effect. “The … the Fir Grove Hotel. That’s it!”
The smile ran away from her face. I could see she was struggling to find the words to tell me what I already knew.
“Fir Grove burnt down maybe sixteen, seventeen years ago.” She shook her head sadly. “Lotta folks died in the fire, teenagers mostly. Of course, I was just a kid back then, but I remember the fire.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. They didn’t rebuild, huh? Are there any other of the old-style hotels up there, by where the Fir Grove used to be?”
“On the other side of town, yeah, plenty.” She perked up, grabbing at a stack of brochures. “But up where the old Fir Grove was, no, nothing. No one up there now but the hayseeds and the Hasids.”
“Hayseeds and Hasids?” I repeated.
“You know, Hasids: the funny-dressed Jews in black clothes and beards. The women shave their heads and—” She cut herself off. Clamping a hand over her mouth, she clenched her entire body. She blushed red as a cherry cough drop, her eyes darting dizzyingly from side to side. “Oh, I didn’t mean to offend you.” Her voice cracked as she whispered through her meaty fingers. “That was a stupid thing to say. It’s just a local sort of joke—the hayseeds-and-Hasids thing. I forget myself sometimes. Oh God, I’m so embarrassed.”
“Relax. Relax. It’s okay. No offense taken. If I gave myself a nickel every time an embarrassing thing came out of my mouth, I’d’a made myself a rich man by now. Forget it. Look, I’m the one who should be ashamed,” I confessed. “I knew about the fire at the Fir Grove. I’m up here doing research on the demise of the Borscht Belt and I thought you might let something interesting slip.”
That did the trick. Her body unclenched.
“Take me for a drink later and I’ll let something interesting slip.”
I held up my left hand and wriggled my ring finger. “Sorry, terminally married.”
“Hey, Moe, I’ve seen last call too many times to fret details like wedding bands. Besides, maybe I could really help you with the research. Sitting in this chair, I know everything about everything in this town.”
I winked. “Maybe you can help, but first you gotta pass a little test.”
She was intrigued. “What kind of test?”
“Remember when I asked about a hotel to stay in?”
“Yeah,” she purred.
“Which one of the hotels on the other side of town would still have some old-timers on the staff. You know, people who’ve worked up here since you were a—”
“The Swan Song Hotel and Resort,” she stopped me. “Here.” She dealt me a brochure out of the handful she had originally pulled out of the rack.
“Did I hear you right, the Swan Song?” I asked, even as I read the name. “That’s an odd name.”
“It is?” she wondered, that blank stare returning.
“Never mind. Listen, I’m sorry, but what’s your name?”
“Molly,” she said, “Molly Treat.”
I winked again. “You certainly are. I’ll hold you to that drink.”
“I’ll be here.”
I didn’t doubt it.
The place was exactly what I expected. Just like all the other buildings in Old Rotterdam, excepting, of course, hideous Town Hall, the buildings that made up the Swan Song Hotel and, Resort were well on their way to disintegration. The chill and mask of snow only seemed to heighten the sense of despair. Huge icicles hung off neglected fascia boards. Soffits were missing everywhere, and windows throughout the campus were covered by plastic sheets and plywood. Although the top layer of snow presented the eye with the illusion that the long, twisty driveway up to the main house was paved smooth as an airport runway, my tires and shock absorbers told a different tale.
The main house, a beast of building, had probably once been a beautiful study in Victorian asymmetry. But, like many of the structures of that era, it had had its turrets and porches, its intricate spindles and fish-sca
le shingles stripped away and replaced with an incongruent hodgepodge of stucco, aluminum siding, and fake brick. One vestige of the original building remained: a curvy porch extended from one side of the front entrance around the right side of the big house. Even in the dying light I could see it was sagging terribly. The numerous missing spindles from its rails gave it the look of a jack-o’-lantern’s mouth. Before getting out of the car, I popped the dome light on and studied the brochure Molly Treat had given me. Clearly, the pictures for the brochure had been taken a very long time ago. A very long time indeed.
A bent little man patrolled the front desk, his bald head and crooked back barely visible above the mahogany counter. There was a big old-fashioned bell atop the counter, but, like the rest of the room, the bell hadn’t been polished in recent history.
“You Prager?” the gnome asked as I approached. “Molly gave a call from the town, said you might be coming. I’m Sam Gutterman, the proprietor of this lovely establishment. The brochure says Swan Song Hotel and Resort. Considering the age and health of our guests, it’s more like the Swan Song Hospice and Last Resort.”
I was laughing by the time I shook Gutterman’s hand. It felt good to laugh again. His grip was surprisingly firm. In spite of his sparkly blue eyes and white smile, I figured him for his mid-seventies.
“I’m Prager. And you should have been a comedian.”
“Anybody ever tell you you got a flare for the self-evident?” Gutterman wagged his finger at me. “What, you think I owned this palace my whole life? I used to be Sudden Sam Gutterman, Blue Boy of the Borscht Belt. You shouldn’t know from it! I used more four-letter words than Webster’s Unabridged! You know what one wise-guy critic once wrote?”
Redemption Street Page 5
