Summer Accommodations: A Novel

by Sidney Hart

  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.

  “Mazel tov,”said Sally in a tone that made it sound to me more as though she meant, “that’s life” or “go figure.”

  The pace of the meal accelerated into the main course. It being Sunday night the choice of supper entrees was somewhat limited. The noon meal on Sunday was the big sirloin steak dinner, a dinner that people anticipated all week long as though meat was still being rationed and was hard to come by in 1956. Steak was in fact quite plentiful, if costly, but being served a steak dinner by a waiter in black tie and on tables spread with white linen did seem to make it taste better and engender a more luxurious experience. For the Braverman family it was a way to send off their guests with the feeling that they had been treated lavishly, feasted and indulged, and it was hoped that th
e memory of this extravagance would serve to lure them back again the following summer. With that goal set in motion, Sunday night, while the new crowd was still recovering from the trip through the Shawangunks and likely to be too exhausted to be focused on that meal, the usual fare included flanken, or boiled beef, a meal destined in large measure for the sous chef’s brown sauce, stuffed chicken breasts, broiled halibut, and garden vegetable dinner. The meals would then work their way towards more elaborate and expensive fare as the week progressed achieving a heightened excitement with prime ribs au jus on Saturday night and climaxing with the sirloin steak for Sunday dinner. It was the convention in the smaller hotels to set up daily menus Sunday to Saturday and to repeat them in rotation without variation. Sunday supper and clean-up ended for me at 9:45.

  Back in my room I turned the radio on and climbed up into my bed. I was exhausted. Doris Day was singing “Que Sera, Sera” and I was wondering if what would “sera” for me would be an endless summer of doing all of Sammy’s lifting and porting as well as my own cleaning up and bussing. That would lengthen my day at the expense of the little leisure time a busboy had, and I began feeling sorry for myself. Maybe Sammy’s regulars would be no more generous than anyone else? Who had worked with Sammy before and why wasn’t he eager for the job again? None of the other waiters in the dining room suggested he had worked his way up from that position; no one had said the money’s great, hang in. Maybe they all died of exhaustion before the end of the summer season. I was working my way towards teary eyes when Harlan came in and grimaced.

  “Would you mind if I changed that music, Mel?”

  “That’s okay,” I said, happy to have his company. The radio whined and rasped as Harlan steered the dial across a path of weak signals and then halted in the middle of an Elvis Presley song, “Heartbreak Hotel”. “Ugh” I groaned.

  “You don’t like Elvis? Learn to like him Melvin if you want the girls to like you. They love him. Loo-oove him,” he crooned. Then, positioning his hands on an imaginary guitar held in front of him at hip level, he curled his lips into a sneer, waggled his hips, and said “Bayba.”

  “I don’t like him and I don’t like that music. I like jazz.” I also liked the more conventional sounding ballads and themes: “Love is a Many Splendored Thing,” “Moonglow,” “The Poor People of Paris,” songs that seemed earnest and sincere about love. Elvis was about lust and that was something for darkness and secrecy, I believed, not bright lights and sound stages.

  “Jazz is good, but Elvis is better. All the little Miss Prissys melt their circle pins when they hear Elvis. He’s the bad boy every good girl would die to give herself to. You can’t say that for Count Basie or Stan Kenton, Melvin.”

  “There are some girls who wouldn’t waste a wink on him. He’s a goddamn truck driver.”

  “Pretty snotty stuff for a busboy, Mel. You watch, Elvis is going to bring about some big changes. It’s going to be motorcycle boots, not white bucks, leather jackets, not tweed sport coats and chesterfield overcoats, and lots of black.” Harlan looked very serious.

  “What makes you so sure that’s going to sweep the country? I know lots of guys who were wearing motorcycle boots and leather jackets three or four years ago. They didn’t start any trend.”

  “Those same guys were probably still filling up condoms with water and dropping them out of their bathroom windows.” We both laughed at that image—and its accuracy. “Elvis is the real thing. Elvis is animal magnetism, he’s passion, he’s a mutineer of the sexual order. Join him, don’t fight him. You might just as well fight the changing of the seasons.” Harlan said all of this in the calm and even voice of absolute conviction.

  “I suppose they really love him at Harvard.” I was fishing. I hadn’t seen anything with the Harvard name or colors among Harlan’s personal things so this made me a little suspicious of his attendance there. Had it been me, at the least I’d have worn a t-shirt with the school name or logo showing.

  “Depends on who you talk to. Some of the Cliffees are wild for him. Some of the Wellsley girls too I can assure you of that,” and he winked at me, a single, brisk wink without a leer or an elbow in my side to emphasize his point.

  “You really go to Harvard Harlan?”

  “You sound like you don’t believe I do.”

  This was unexpected and disarming. I had imagined if he did attend Harvard he gladly would have acknowledged that, and if he didn’t he might have become defensive, maybe even a little aggressive. That was how it worked where I grew up. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s … well, how come you don’t have any sweat shirts or t-shirts that say Harvard on them?”

  “That would really help my income, wouldn’t it. Do you think people would feel more or less generous tipping a waiter who happens to attend Harvard? You might be impressed, but many more would feel jealous or resentful. Somehow in their minds it’s the same as being rich, or privileged.”

  “Then what do you tell them when they ask you about school?”

  “I tell them I go to a little school outside of Boston and change the subject. Cambridge is outside of Boston so I’m not lying, and I deflect their attention with other ploys.”

  “Oh.”

  “Of course I’ve also considered saying I don’t go to college because I can’t afford it. That I’m here to save up the tuition for at least two years of school before I apply, but that may sound a bit too pathetic. I have to give it more thought.”

  “I would be so excited I would boast about it all the time,” I confessed. “You know, I’m trying to get into Columbia and I would tell everybody except I’m afraid that if I don’t get in I’ll look like a fool, you know, not good enough.”

  “It’s never wrong to try, to reach for something, to take a chance, and the people who would laugh at you for making that stretch don’t deserve to have your attention. Learn that one early, kiddo.” The radio was now playing “Why Do Fools Fall in Love”. I decided to repay Harlan for his advice on the spot, cued by the lyrics of love. “Harlan, you’re dating Heidi Braverman, right?” He nodded and a smirk appeared on his face. “What?”

  “Dating is not exactly the way I’d put it, but go on.”

  “The day I arrived here Sammy made a point of telling Ron to try to get you to stop seeing her. I thought you should know about it.”

  “Thanks. Ron hasn’t tried to do that yet but I know that he would if he thought it his business.” He frowned then and narrowed his eyes. “Ron doesn’t like me, that’s obvious. I don’t really know why, he doesn’t come right out with it, but it’s very clear how he feels. Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn. What’s between Heidi and me is between Heidi and me. She’s a big girl. Do you have a girl Melvin?”

  “Nobody special if that’s what you mean.”

  “Well then, maybe I can get Heidi to fix you up with one of the camp counselors.” Ron entered just as Harlan suggested that and he picked up immediately.

  “Looking for a girl Melvin? There are a few regulars up here that I can put you on to.” He looked at the radio and frowned. “Mind if I turn that off?” he asked, turning the radio off before either of us could answer. “I feel like reading.” He flopped onto his bunk and pulled a paperback out from under his pillow. “Rosie’s always ready and willing, and then there’s Diana. She’s quite a number.” He broke the spine of the book, flexing the pages back and forth a few times, and then fell silent. Harlan looked at me and shrugged. I raised my eyebrows and smiled sardonically. Neither of us was prepared to take Ron on.

  “Tell me about Diana,” I ventured.

  “You can’t get to Diana unless you start with Rosie. Those are the house rules.” He had kept the book in front of him when he spoke so I couldn’t tell if he was serious.

  “Okay, then tell me about Rosie.”

  Exasperated, Ron pulled the book away from his face and rested it on end against his chest. “There’s very little to tell. Rosie was put on earth to give virgins like you their fi
rst fuck. She has big tits and small brains. Her brassiere size is bigger than her I.Q. She’s probably nineteen years old now but she’s been doing the deed since she was twelve and is happy to oblige. Buy her a flower and she’ll blow you too. Anything else?”

  “Where is she?” I was both excited and disgusted by Ron’s offering. I desperately wanted to lose my virginity but I didn’t want it to be in a degrading way. It sounded like if Rosie was indeed real there would he no way to accomplish that goal. But on the other hand, I was determined to have the initiating sexual liaison and quickly. It would be like having my tonsils out, just something to get through and be done with, a once in a lifetime experience this being de-virginalized. “Where do I find Rosie?”