by Sidney Hart
“He hangs them there to tell us that he did something so terrible he can never hope to return to a conventional life. He doesn’t even have to say what it was that he did, he just makes it clear that he is outcast. Maybe that’s why we haven’t asked him what he’s doing here point blank, it’s just too terrifying to know the whole story of his exile from middle class society.”
Indeed, like a character in one of Aesop’s fables, Abe Melman’s life seemed to bear the weight of the moral consequences of a mistaken choice. But what was his mistake? I was beginning to appreciate Sammy’s relentless disparaging of him. He was a nerve- wracking puzzle, an enigmatic but no less intensely felt object lesson whose very ambiguity and mystery screamed out at all of us: BEWARE! THIS COULD BE YOU. But how? What misstep could send you plummeting downhill to end up flat on your ass like Abe? It was most likely a criminal act, I thought. A fall this steep had to be the consequence of a crime. But what crime? Abe did not seem capable of violence and when provoked by Sammy he seemed even more leaden and immobilized, surely not someone capable of being physically dangerous. And that failure to react, to stick up for himself and lash back at Sammy could be infuriating and make you want to hurt him too. It was unseemly for a man to be so pathetically passive and for me, this man in particular, as old as my father, better educated than my father, yet unquestionably an utter failure. The great promise of education had been broken in Abe’s case. He just didn’t belong in this place.
Nor was I alone in trying to figure out what Abe was doing at Braverman’s. Ron and Ivan Goldman and I sat around one humid afternoon discussing it and on that day was born the “What’s With Abe?” game, a game Ron and I would play, but only twice in the course of that summer.
“He’s in hiding, that’s all there is to it,” Ivan said. “Look, you come here, you make a few thousand dollars, you don’t have to give anyone your social security number or file a withholding tax, you’re anonymous.” Ivan chopped at the air with his huge right hand to emphasize each of his points. “I don’t know what he did, but it probably was something illegal having to do with his being a lawyer. He’s trying to stay out of jail.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Ron objected, “that just doesn’t feel right. Why would he hang his law degree in his room and leave it in plain view if he was trying to be inconspicuous? No, it’s about a lost love, a broken heart or a broken promise. It wrecked him.” Ron sounded sad just imagining the scenario.
“Well I think he did something that disgraced him, either with a woman he was working for as a lawyer or just with a woman. Look, short of murdering someone how long will your conscience punish you like this for?” No one had suggested murder. I looked over at Ron knowing that I couldn’t refer to Lenny’s story of a shooting but wondering if it could be true after all, and if Abe might have been party to it.
“Murder’s too wild,” Ivan said. “Does Abe look like someone who could do something like that? He’s much more likely an embezzler or a cash skimmer kind of crook.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, again looking at Ron, trying to convey my suspicion with facial contortions and grimaces.
“Well, I’m gonna shoot some foul shots,” Ivan said, “I can’t take all this sitting around, it makes me nuts.”
“In this heat?” we both said.
“Heat, shmeat, it’s all in the touch. Heat don’t bother me.” When he left I closed the door and beckoned to Ron to come closer. “Do you think Abe could have had something to do with this Crater shooting that Lenny was talking about?” I whispered.
“Oh, so now you’re interested in Lenny’s story?” He jutted his jaw and arched an eyebrow. “Maybe, there’s always a possibility. But you said yourself Abe doesn’t seem the kind of man who’d be violent. I can’t figure it out.” He turned the radio on, the same kind of temporizing diversion that lighting a cigarette usually provided, but when “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” was what he reaped for his effort Ron snapped the radio off, grumbling something about Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Vic Damone. Left unchecked Ron would be likely to launch into a polemic about slum music and the decline of the romantic love song. I intervened immediately.
“But not at all seriously, folks, why is he here?” I ventured, attempting to get Ron to play. “Really, this is a question of some magnitude, Ronald. For me it comes right after ‘what became of the dinosaurs?’” Ron craned his neck and looked up at me and a smile slowly appeared on his face.
“So you want to figure Abe out? Okay. We’ll play ‘What’s With Abe?’ Give me a minute. But then you have to be prepared to play ‘Who’s Harlan Hawthorne?’ at some time. I know that you’re smitten with that fraud, but I’ll find out who he is with you or without you.” That was a gratuitous remark so I let it pass unchallenged. “So, what’s with Abe,” he mused. Reaching under the bed and pulling out a Camel Ron lit up. “What’s with Abe, what’s with Abe, GOT IT!” He shifted in his bed. “Abraham Melman, lawyer extrordinaire, was hired by a woman to represent her in a lawsuit. This was not a difficult case. Her landlord had promised to give her a new refrigerator and a new stove when she moved in to her rent controlled apartment and now, five years and two leases later, nothing had been done. The woman was unmarried and this surprised Abe because she was very beautiful. For him beauty was the only qualification required for a woman to be eligible for marriage and her being single made him feel he had to protect her. And it made him angry at the landlord for taking advantage of an unprotected woman. Abe had a promising career, everybody told him that, and he had opened his office at the bottom of Manhattan near City Hall expecting to prosper because of that location. The woman, let’s call her Linda, took the subway down to Abe’s office and came all dressed up for their meetings. Abe began to think that she did this just for him, not understanding that she dressed up for the people on the street and the people on the train the way that women do.”
“Come on, you mean women dress up just for strangers?” I said in protest, incredulous.
“You didn’t know that? Well neither did Abe and that’s where the trouble began. He started thinking about Linda day and night. He talked to her in his mind, explaining what it felt like to shave in the morning, how his coffee tasted, everything. He included her in his life as though she was really a part of it. Sometimes what you wish for can feel so close, so much a reality you forget that it is only a dream. He took her into his bed at night and soon he was jacking off with her in mind. His obsession with her, and there’s no other way to describe it, this obsession became so real to him that he began to believe she was as eager for him as he was for her and that she wanted him to show her a sign of his interest. She’s a dignified and good person, he thought, so her signs will be subtle. One day, while giving her a pen to sign her complaint he tried to touch her fingers, but he fumbled the pen and it dropped on his desk spraying ink on the sleeve of her white blouse. She was very upset about the stain but tried to be polite to Abe; after all it was an accident. Flustered half out of his mind, Abe said that he could take care of the ink blot if she would just slip out of her blouse and let him rush it to a dry cleaner he knew on Chambers Street. He handed her his raincoat to show that he had nothing up his sleeve, only the most respectable of intentions. Linda hesitated. ‘Please, it’s the least that I can do to make it up to you,’ he begged, but still she refused. ‘The longer that you wait, the harder it will be to remove the ink stain,’ he insisted, and standing close to her, smelling her perfume, he reached for the button at the neck of her blouse. ‘Back off, jerk,’ Linda said, and she gave him a shove. Abe took this to mean that she wanted to touch him but was disguising her interest as a rejection. You should understand, Mel, that women do that almost as much as they dress up for strangers. Anyway, this is when all hell broke loose. Abe grabbed Linda, pulled her close against him and tried to kiss her on the mouth. She struggled and that excited Abe more so he put his hand on her boob and squeezed telling her how much he loved her. Linda, who had once been Sophie
Tucker’s assistant and knew how to handle guys when they got too pushy, jammed her knee up into Abe’s balls doubling him over and putting out his fire. The next day Abe got a call from another lawyer who said that he and Linda would see to it that Abe was disbarred and disgraced. The lawyer hung up the phone without waiting for Abe to say anything.
Panicked by the threat, already feeling disgraced, Abe knew that he had to get out of town. He called his cousin, Ben Braverman, and asked if he could put him up for a few days. A few days became a few weeks, and then a few months, and the only way that Abe could make it up to Ben was to work in the hotel and that’s what Abe Melman is doing in the mountains.”
“Good story, bad guess. Abe doesn’t care about women as far as I can tell. He doesn’t seem to care about anyone.”
‘Well, then you come up with a better story. But it has to he funny. I hate thinking about what might have actually happened to land him here in the borscht belt.”
3.
Sammy had one or two guests who stayed for the season. This meant these people had money because The Hotel Braverman was not cheap. It also meant that I would have to keep alert to one of the infamous season guest tipping tricks I learned about in Fleischmans, the practice of advancing the day you tip by one day each week. For example, if at the end of the first week you tipped the staff on Sunday, the next week you would tip on Monday and the week after that on Tuesday and so on. In this way, over the course of eight weeks you successfully finesse one week of tips for your waiter and busboy. It would seem peculiar, to say the least, that one who could spend so much for a vacation in a resort hotel would still aspire to screw two college kids out of what is now called “chump change” but, not only are the rich not like you and me, they rarely are generous for generosity’s sake. Usually they expect some recognition or social compensation for their largesse. Some poor working slob, as my father would refer to the average working man, is much more likely to want to treat a busboy fairly, even ingratiate himself with him, than to stiff him.
Solly Schwartz was one of Sammy’s regulars and he seemed to me to have the potential to be trouble. Every morning Schwartz would be waiting just outside the curtained French doors to the dining room, pacing back and forth, checking his watch, peering at Stuart Stein through a gap in the curtains, impatient but always smiling. I could not imagine what it was that he envisioned to be waiting for him but whatever it was seemed to animate him with an attitude of buoyant expectation. A large part of it was appetite, to be sure, but there was something besides food on his mind. He always entered the dining room with the demeanor of a family’s favored child who expected an acknowledgement of his specialness with every appearance. Stuart Stein opened the French doors promptly at 7:15 and Schwartz would dash through, eyes wide, smile wider, and skitter down the center aisle as fast as a silverfish, spewing greetings to the bleary-eyed staff still setting their tables. No one bothered to respond.
“Good morning Melvin, what have we got today?” he asked, rubbing his palms together gleefully.
“The clap, I hope,” I muttered into my shoulder.
“What was that you said?” he asked, still eager. “Flapjacks?”
A glass of grapefruit juice, a standing order for breakfast, was already at his place and he lunged for it as though it might try to escape him if he didn’t trap it. He lifted the glass of juice from the table and held it up to the light scrutinizing the color and observing the bottom for sediment as though it were a glass of Chateau Margaux. Then, clutching the glass in his fingertips, he raised it to his lips suddenly, inverted it, and emptied the juice in a single gulp.
“Ahhh,” he said with contentment. What a schmuck, I thought. “So, what’s with these flapjacks Melvin, something special?”
“I was just kidding Mr. Schwartz. Why would a hotel known for its Jewish cooking want to make flapjacks?” His face sank. You’d have thought I’d just told him his kitten had died.
“Ohhh,” he lamented. “To tell you the truth Melvin I was getting a little tired of herring in cream sauce. The onions give me gas.”
“How about some eggs? Scrambled, fried, poached, hard medium or soft boiled, raw …”
“What are you a wiseguy?” he said irately. Stuart Stein’s ears pricked up like a deer’s at the snap of a twig and he started towards us. Seeing this, Sammy cut him off in the aisle and put a hand on Schwartz’s shoulder.
“Solly he’s only a kid kidding around, come on, relax. Over here Melvin, please.” He put his arm over my shoulder and led me to the serving stand where he pretended to search the silverware drawer. “Apologize to him. Say you’re sorry and look like you mean it. Do it!” he spat.
“Mr. Schwartz I was only kidding around with you. I apologize if I offended you. That was certainly not my intention.” I chose to look remorseful. I was learning to lie in so many different ways; I thought, this must be what they mean when they say “grow up”. The other guests trickled in slowly and Schwartz kept an eye on me to see if I was treating other people the way I had treated him. He stayed longer than usual and seemed to be in a sulk. Sammy wearied of trying to kid him out of his mood but I persisted in dancing attendance on his water goblet and coffee cup, refilling each one after every sip. I was not going to hide or cringe. I was smiling broadly much of the time and hating every second of contact. Then I tried a different tack.
“Mrs. Schwartz didn’t make it to breakfast this morning, is she unwell?” I asked, in the tone and vocabulary that might suggest that Schwartz was the Duke of Marlborough.
“She’s a little under the weather Melvin. Tell you what! Make me a tray for her and bring it back to the room this morning and we’ll be all squared away, all even-Steven.” His mood was revived.
“What would you like, tea and toast and jam?”
“No no no no no. Two bagels, a big square of cream cheese, some lox, some onions and tomatoes, a fruit cup, coffee, sweet rolls and if there are any eclairs left over from last night bring two of those.” His request made it sound like the weather she was under was usually somewhere over Miami Beach. After cleaning up I told Stuart Stein what Solly Schwartz had requested and he called their room to verify it. Good old Sandy, always the trusting soul. I loaded the tray with all that Schwartz had asked for, certain he was likely to be the one to devour most of it, and mounted the stairs from the main lobby to the second floor where the Schwartzes were staying when a terrible commotion erupted at the front desk.
“I want that cleaning girl here right now! I want her room searched, her house searched if necessary and don’t give me any crap about her honesty, she stole my bracelet, goddammit!” The enraged woman had command not only of Belle’s attention but of everyone’s within earshot. I remained frozen on the staircase. Belle said something that was inaudible to me but the protesting woman reacted immediately, her sun-tanned cheeks darkening with the flush of her anger. She was a pretty woman even in her rage.
“That bracelet had rubies and pearls, for chrissakes, it’s a very valuable piece of jewelry. Of course she took it, who else would have easy access to my suite?” Mrs. Braverman emerged from the office behind the front desk and speaking softly to her, guided the irate guest from the public area and into the private room. I turned to continue up the stairs to the second floor and Diana, a cloud of cigarette smoke engulfing her as she exhaled, raced up the stairs after me.
“Where have you been?” she demanded.
“Working, where else would I be?” I answered defensively.
“Not just this morning. Where were you last night? I thought you were interested in seeing me.” Her face was pained and it appeared that she might cry. I lowered the tray to the floor to free my hands and approached her.
“I thought you said you’d find me. I didn’t want to crowd you. I really want to see you Diana. I’m glad you came here.” I tried to take her in my arms but she shrank from me.
“No, not here.” Her eyes widened and her mouth fell open. “I want to be with you so much,”
she said. And then she fled down the back stairs.
Flushed, my heart pounding, I lifted the breakfast tray and knocked on the Schwartzes door.
“Must be pretty heavy Melvin, you’re all perspired. Here, let me take it. Your breakfast is here Mildred,” he called out as he shut the door in my face. I muttered your welcome under my breath and raced to the rear stairway but she was already gone.
Back in the dining room cleaning up my station Diana was all that I could think about. She had seemed genuinely distressed that I wasn’t searching for her, pursuing her, craving her with more ardor. Imagine how that felt. No, don’t imagine, I’ll tell you how it felt: thrilling and dizzying as if in a delirium. The dining room was almost deserted and that was a relief because there was no one I wanted to talk to. All of my thoughts were focused on Diana and that evinced intense feelings of desire and expectation. I sorted the silver quickly, determined to go find her when my work was done. I had no sooner reached this conclusion than she appeared at the bay window with that pained expression of thwarted desire distorting her face. I dashed from the dining room but when I arrived outside the bay window she was nowhere to be seen. Now what the hell was I supposed to do? It was almost eleven o’clock and I would have to be back in the kitchen in half an hour. It was very likely that she was still somewhere on the grounds but where? We were barred from wearing our waiter’s outfits in the hotel lobby and the canteen, a combination snack bar and convenience store where we bought our sodas and cigarettes, and they seemed the likely places to search for her. I looked at my watch again, as though maybe time had agreed to stand still for me, but it hadn’t. We all do that don’t we? When we’re in a state of confusion we check our watch repeatedly as if some answer will appear on its face, as if time will tell. I took out my pack of Raleighs and lit up to think over where to go next. The morning’s mail likely would be waiting at the mail drop in the waiters’ quarters and maybe there’d be a letter from Columbia saying they’d changed their decision, but at that moment it was only Diana’s acceptance that mattered to me. I extinguished my cigarette, went back into the dining room, lit another Raleigh, then went out again this time leaving through the kitchen. When he saw me Rudy waved a chicken neck at me and laughed his brutish laugh.
