by Sidney Hart
3.
It was a Friday night and husbands were arriving for the weekend. Sammy never joked about his guests but many of the rest of us in the dining room enjoyed a laugh at the expense of a buffoon, a sad sack or a mystery guest. A mystery guest was usually a husband who had deposited his family on the previous Sunday and left without joining them for dinner. Ron always speculated they left hastily because they were screwing around in the city, Ivan thought they were racing back to a poker game, and I, the naïf, thought they were eager to get a jump on the coming work week so they could get ahead and leave earlier on the coming Friday to stay with their families for their final week of vacation. So, when Milly Goldfine told me her husband would be arriving that night and she wanted me to know a few things about him I figured this was my weekly mystery guest. She said her husband, Stan, was a war veteran who had been badly injured at Normandy. She didn’t wish to go into the details but he’d had a fusion of the bones in his neck because of an explosion that nearly tore his head off. He didn’t have many special needs but he did require being seated on her left side because the fusion permitted him to turn his head only to the right. Did I have any questions?
Mrs. Goldfine recounted all this in matter-of-fact conversational tones that must have evolved over years of the multiple tellings of the story. She stared at me through expressionless eyes awaiting my questions.
“No, I can’t think of any,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? Sorry you don’t have any questions or sorry he was wounded?” Her expression had not changed and she stood perfectly still in front of me, her hands hanging calmly at her sides.
“Both, I guess,” I said.
“You guess? Well the one thing my husband does not need or request is pity. Just make him comfortable on my left and that will be sufficient, okay?” She forced a strained smile. I nodded vigorously, feeling my face flush with embarrassment. Only later did I realize that this meeting had been her opportunity to vent some small share of her bitterness.
Stan Goldfine arrived in the dining room promptly at seven that evening. He came alone and went directly to Sammy. I could tell who he was because he seemed to have no neck at all. It was as though his head had been screwed into his shoulders like a light bulb. Sammy laughed at something he said and slapping the man on the back led him over to me.
“Melvin, this is Mr. Stanley Goldfine, Captain Stanley Gold-fine, the hero of Normandy. This is my busboy Melvin White.”
“Nice to meet you Mel,” he said extending his hand. “Are you Jerry White’s brother?”
“Yes I am, sir, and Steve’s too of course.”
“Of course. Mildred has told you about the seating arrangements?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. I won’t be any bother once that’s taken care of. And you don’t have to call me sir, Stan is fine.” I nodded, and smiled, and never called him anything the remainder of his stay. For the rest of that first night I tried not to stare at the war hero when in his vicinity. That a man’s body could be so mangled and still survive was difficult to grasp. And at Normandy! A tenuous beachhead with only medics in attendance, not even a field hospital, and all of them under intense, relentless gunfire from the Germans; this was a miracle.
In a matter of days I had grown accustomed to Stan Goldfine’s disfigurement and ceased to feel discomforted by it. “The Captain”, as he was called by his table mates with Sammy’s encouragement, became the darling of his table a charming raconteur and joke teller. He even abided Mrs. Moss, the woman seated to his left towards whom he could not turn, a woman suffused with the malodorous stench of stale body odor, as though some dreadful anxiety that dwelled within her exuded evil humors through her pores saturating her clothing leaving no escape or refuge from its presence. Moss seemed an especially fitting name for her because, in addition to her horribly snaggled teeth, as if that were not bad enough, her dentition seemed coated with a mossy covering that gave her smile an unpleasantness I heard others at the table remark upon when she was not present. Sammy, to his credit, never said a negative word about her, or for that matter, anyone,—with the exception of Abe Melman.
“Jesus, Sammy, what’s wrong with that Moss woman doesn’t her room come with a bath?”
“Be nice, Melvin, she’s a European. They rarely bathe, at least not in the United States. Who knows, maybe they got frightened on the crossing and keep away from water after that, I don’t know, but she’s not the first one to need a hot shower.”
Milly Goldfine seemed to soften as the week went on. She was a moderately attractive woman but she seemed to work at disguising any aspect of her allure. She wore dresses that seemed too large and billowed around her figure, baggy Bermuda shorts that made her legs appear stilt-like, and skirted bathing suits with broad spandex bands across the pelvis that you saw only when the skirt floated up in the swimming pool. Harlan and I were changing after the dinner meal when I asked if he had happened to notice the Goldfines at my tables. He smiled a knowing smile.
“What’s the smile for?”
“You mean ‘the hero of Normandy’ and his wife? She’s some looker when you get past the pinched quality of her personality and the awful wardrobe.” By the time we had this conversation I was aware of Harlan’s eye for the ladies and less convinced of his claim to be the unwilling object of female attention.
“At first she seemed to be pissed off all the time and I didn’t think of her as all that attractive but over the week I see she has a pretty face and a nice figure that she hides. Do you think she’s still upset about his wounds?”
“I know Sammy calls him ‘the hero of Normandy’ but that’s not the case.”
“He got his injury during the invasion. It was a horrible blood bath, a slaughter from what I’ve read, why do you think that’s not his story? I mean I wouldn’t have the nerve to ask him. You just don’t talk about things like that. And Sammy does call him ‘the hero of Normandy’.”
“Sammy has a tendency to dramatize, don’t you think? He likes to feel important and other peoples’ importance is one way for him to do that.”
“Maybe, but when he introduced the captain as ‘the hero of Normandy’, Captain Goldfine didn’t object.”
“Object? Who would object? There were so many skirmishes, so many battles, hey–they were all heroes, but the hero of Normandy? Not likely.”
“I don’t know why you won’t let him take some credit. He was there, he was seriously wounded, he came back in pieces.”
“Yes he was there, and yes he was wounded but that may be like the exam questions you get, you know, ‘true, true and unrelated’ that’s all I’m saying. Millie, Mrs. G., would tell you it has something to do with that. Hey, look at the time I’ve to get Heidi. See you later.” He was gone.
He had called her Millie, not his usual way to refer to guests he didn’t know. I wondered …
4.
I think I will never forget that fourth week of July 1956. It’s beginning marked the one month anniversary of my working in the dining room at Braverman’s, an achievement of no special significance in itself, but one I took pride in for several reasons— for one, surviving the hardship of being Sammy’s busboy. My guests’ tips that Sunday were remarkably generous, just as Sammy had had assured they would be, and brought me more than twice what one would have expected a busboy to earn for a week’s work. Things were proceeding in their usual monotonous, predictable way and then, bewilderingly, Thursday of that week everything seemed to come apart on a grand scale. We awoke to the news that there had been a terrible accident at sea. Radios were blaring in rooms up and down the hallway and it seemed to me Ron had his on extra-loud. The Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria and the Swedish liner Stockholm had collided in a dense fog forty-five miles south of Nantucket Island. There were many casualties reported but the fifty-two deaths that resulted had not yet been counted in the early morning hours of July 26th. I experienced a strange sense of alarm in response to this news, as though it
was an omen of some sort. Imagining what those passengers were enduring was shocking to me. Hours before they had been toasting each other with champagne and luxuriating in the fantasies of their glamorous trans-Atlantic cruise and then suddenly, a grinding crash had tipped their vessel into the dark waters of the sea. I remarked on this peculiar reaction to Ron and Harlan but neither offered anything about it save their own surprise. Why the accident should have affected me so strongly was curious. The only person I knew who had ever even gone on a cruise was my aunt Ceil of “the using bastards.” She went on Caribbean cruises in the winter and to the Concord hotel in the summer, her radar for unavailable married men being equally flawless on land and sea. It being July she was at the Concord so it could not have been concern for her that was discomfiting me. At breakfast some waiters and busboys talked about the fact that there were no guarantees of safety in life and that you could just as easily die falling in your bathtub as in a sports car and at least the sports car might get you laid. I felt no sense of relief from their philosophizing. Ron sat down nearby and shoved a Life Magazine in front of me. It was opened to “A Look At The World’s Week,” a pictorial section of the magazine, and one of the features was about fleets of tourists filling the sea out of New York harbor. The photograph showed a number of ships streaming towards the camera but not the Andrea Doria.
“So?”
“The biggest rush of transatlantic travelers in 25 years. That means the last time was just before Pearl Harbor. Maybe this is the bad sign, the omen you were talking about.” He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes.
“I don’t think I’m feeling spooked because of that. What does that have to do with anything anyway?” He shrugged and took his magazine and coffee to a different table. I lit a Kent regular and poured a glass of cold milk.
“What are you doing, you want to get sick?” Ivan Goldman asked. “That’s a combination guaranteed to give you cramps.”
“Bad breath yes, cramps I don’t know.” The unrelenting feeling of apprehension was unsettling. I crushed the pack of Kents and threw it into the garbage bin. This definitely was not going to be my brand.
“Let’s go to work everybody, come on,” Sammy called out. I hauled myself out of the chair, gathered four pitchers from their shelf and started filling them with tap water.
“Why so somber, sullen and saturnine Melvin?”
“I don’t know Sammy, it’s nothing.” I was torn. I wanted to tell him how I was feeling but doubted he could be of help. “Smile Melvin. It will make you feel better to smile. And if you’re really unhappy about something or someone you can smile and also say ‘asshole’ at the same time. Did you know that?” His face was right next to mine. “Try it. Smile and say ‘asshole’.” I forced a smile and said asshole. Aware that the smile never wavered and my lips never moved, I laughed. I tried it again and laughed even harder afterwards as though I had just mastered a magic trick that looked impossible but was actually ridiculously easy to perform.
“I told you, didn’t I?” Sammy beamed.
“Unbelievable, Sammy.”
Throughout breakfast I smiled agreeably at everyone. The talk at every table was about the cruise ship’s collision.
“Whaadaya talkin’ about! They do that for the insurance, it was no accident. More coffee over here, Melvin.” I poured Dr. Jake Wasserman his coffee and leaned in towards the table.
“Well, actually, Life magazine says it’s been the busiest year in the cruise ship industry in twenty five years. I don’t think that they’d risk lives with a full ship.”
“Who cares what you think, kid.”
“Jake! That’s no way to talk. He didn’t mean it, Melvin, he’s just upset about something else.” Sammy had never accepted my being Jack. He insisted upon calling me Melvin even after I’d introduced myself to my guests as Jack. I’d no sooner go into the kitchen for something than he’d begin explaining to them that Jack was not really my name, Melvin was, and for some meshuginah reason I was calling myself Jack. He told them he thought that it began after I hit my head on something in the kitchen and he was making it his business to bring me back to my senses. He said he hoped they would help out by calling me Melvin, not Jack.
“Apologize to Melvin, Jake.”
“Apologize to a busboy? Are you nuts Miriam?”
“Quite all right,” I said, playing at being David Niven, smiling and saying asshole under my breath. Heidi, alerted by Dr. Jake’s stentorian tone circled the tables in our vicinity and approached us. She smiled at me and rolled her eyes to show she understood what I was dealing with. Laying a hand on his shoulder she leaned into the group.
“Good morning everyone, how’s breakfast today?” They all smiled and gushed for the lovely Heidi, as much in appreciation for her presence as for the interruption of Dr. Jake’s rant.
“I thought I heard some quarreling at this table.” She curled her lower lip and waved a finger at the group to show them they had been naughty. “Now it is such a beautiful day, the pool is waiting, Bernie A has a “Simon Says” scheduled in a little while and you should all be thinking about enjoying your vacation, not arguing about cruises. Here you take a row boat on a lake, not an ocean liner, so what is there to be upset about?” The wives laughed to show their affection and Heidi threw them a kiss while going to a nearby table, winking at me as she passed.
“If they were making money hand over fist there’d be no accident, believe me,” Dr. Jake resumed, his tone lowered, his spirit chastened. “You should hit your head again Melvin, maybe it’d knock some sense into you.” The incident with Dr. Jake was annoying but not out of the range of the expectable in the work of a busboy. After he’d stuffed himself with enough herring to feed a large family of minks Dr.Jake, “the people’s podiatrist,” felt some embarrassment for his behavior and stuffed a five dollar bill into my shirt pocket.
“Don’t take it personally; I was hungry,” he said, patting me on the back as he left.
Work did nothing to distract me from my discomfort. I was not much inclined to premonitions or other mystical modes and I didn’t really believe that the Andrea Doria’s accident presaged anything of relevance to my life, but still there was the unrelenting sense of foreboding. Then the thought arrived without effort; Columbia did not accept me. I cleaned up the station quickly, sorted my silverware into the drawer of the serving stand, swept the floor, and inverted my water pitchers on a towel atop the stand. Then I raced back to the waiters’ quarters for the mail, but it hadn’t been delivered and still that feeling of dread clutched at my core. I went to the payphone and called Malcolm seeking the comforting sound of my best friend’s familiar voice. “I can’t talk,” he said when they got him to the phone, “all hell is breaking loose here. Dean Martin just broke up his partnership with Jerry Lewis, and listen to this,—it’s about where Jerry wanted to open their new movie. Jerry wants it to open here at Brown’s Hotel and Dean wants it in a big city. You know what the movie’s called?—’Pardners!’ Can you believe that? ‘Pardners.’ Gotta go.” This news added to my upset. It seemed that nothing could be counted on to be as you were led to expect it would be. Martin and Lewis were a team. Teams were marriages of the sort in which divorce was not an option, or so I wanted to think. The Marx brothers, the Ritz brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello—these guys just went on and on. I argued with myself that I was wrong, that I had no reason to be certain that I had been rejected but it did nothing to relieve my distress. It was then that I began learning an important lesson: there are times when even bad news is better than no news. With no information the mind is apt to wander off into the dark corners of the most frightening imaginings, though in this particular case there weren’t that many possibilities: YES … NO. Still, knowing which one confronted me would allow for either grieving or celebration and the release to move on to another challenge.
Ron came into the staff quarters carrying the waiters’ mail. “There’s a manila envelope for you,” he said, at the table w
here 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.
