by Sidney Hart
“Jack? I thought his name was Melvin.” A look of wariness came across his face, the look of someone familiar with being baited and tricked and made mock of.
“It’s both, to some he’s Mel, to others he’s Jack, it’s a long story, don’t worry about it. What I want to know, Lenny, is if there was another building around here once, a building that used that well you showed to Jack.” Lenny stared at me suspiciously unable to shed his perplexity about my names.
“I never heard of somebody with two names before, Harlan.” He glared at me and said, “Are you making fun of me?”
“No Lenny, no I’m not, really I’m not, ask Sammy, he’ll tell you I sometimes use Jack for my name.” Invoking Sammy’s name seemed to reassure Lenny that he wasn’t the butt of a mean joke and he relaxed.
“There was another building here once but it burned down,” he said turning to Harlan. At that moment there was another crash inside the cabin behind Lenny and one of the dishwashers came stumbling down the steps holding a hand over his left eye. When he saw the three of us standing there he spat and raised his fists in a boxing stance, but when none of us reacted he turned and went back into the cabin. A month before I would have been frightened by his belligerent display but by that August I was not so easily threatened and it gave me pleasure to just stare back coldly at a man who had once seemed so menacing.
“Burned down, eh. Where exactly was it?”
“Come on Harlan I’ll show you,” and Lenny looked at Harlan as though his approval was the most important thing in the world to him at that moment. We followed Lenny to the infield size plot that stretched out to the side of his shack where he said, “it was right in here someplace. It was just a plain wooden building that burned to the ground. It didn’t have no foundation or nothing so there was nothing left after it burned. It was just a wooden building.”
“Was that where you lived when the building burned?” Harlan asked, gesturing at Lenny’s shack.
“Oh yeah. That’s the oldest building on the grounds,” he said proudly. “I grew up in that house.”
“So, that building that burned down, what was it used for? Was it a barn or a shed or something?” Looking at me Lenny grinned.
“No! That was a little gambling house.” And then, smiling broadly at me, he said, “It was surrounded by cicadas.” His diabolical laughter did not follow the reference this time.
“A gambling house,” Harlan said in an excited voice. “What kind of gambling, roulette? Craps? Cards?”
“Poker. They only played poker in there,” Lenny said, nodding his head to affirm his information, “and then it burned down. I tol …”
“Was that because of the judge?” Harlan asked, interrupting him brusquely. Lenny smiled and nodded again.
“Thanks Lenny I really appreciate your taking the time,” and then Harlan turned and strode away briskly without a word to me. I turned to Lenny and said, “Don’t say anything to Ron about this meeting, Lenny, okay?”
“Ron who?” Lenny said before bursting into hysterical laughter at his own joke. Then, after turning an imaginary key in an imaginary lock in his lips he said, “Don’t worry Mel, I’ll never tell. Hey! I made another poem.”
Ron was in his bed reading when I returned to the room.
“You’re a busy little beaver, where’ve you been? You don’t look like you’ve been in the sun, though.” He hadn’t even looked up at me or lowered his book.
“Around.”
“Around? What am I your mother? Answer my question for Christ’s sake, what’s all the mystery?”
“Well, if you really want to know I was talking to Lenny about the body in the well.”
“I didn’t give you permission to do that, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Hey, didn’t you include me in this Crater business? What are you saying, that now it only belongs to you?”
“Look, this is my deal. I’ve let you in on it but I don’t want you talking about it or telling anyone else about the judge. You start going to talk to Lenny and he’ll tell everybody what a great friend you are. Then you’ll have to account for why you are making friends with someone like Lenny and before you know it will all come out about the judge and that will be the end of our chance to make some money from this news.”
“Don’t get carried away, Ron. I won’t do it again, I just needed to hear this again for myself because it still sounds so crazy, that’s all.” If he thought I’d told Harlan about his secret he’d have killed me so I prayed that Lenny wouldn’t forget our deal. Spending time talking with Lenny could make you feel like you’d fallen down a rabbit hole and landed in Wonderland.
2.
When Heidi Braverman introduced me to Sarah I had assumed that she had done so at Harlan’s instigation and because I was so smitten with Sarah I showered Harlan with undeserved gratitude. Harlan, for his part, never rejected or disowned responsibility for our pairing and smiled modestly when I gushed with thanks. “Really, Jack, stop it,” he would protest, averting his eyes and lowering his head. But I was so grateful for Sarah it mattered less how she had come into my life than that she had come at all. There had been girls before her, girls with reputations, girls I had lusted after, girlfriends and girls like Ellen that I just enjoyed as friends but Sarah, Sarah connected me to emotional landscapes within myself I had never known existed; heights of elation and of such expansiveness that I felt suffused with a royal sense of grandeur. Walking through the kitchen, a bus box piled high with the debris of the noon meal on my shoulder, I smiled beneficently at the haggard dishwashers. They no longer frightened me; for it was as though I alone had known love and could feel only pity for everyone else in the world who had never been so charmed. And just as her affection could raise me to such dizzying heights her withdrawal from my ardent cravings would drop me to unplumbable depths of desolation and wretchedness. She was, in short, my first love. With Sarah the feeling that life was elsewhere, something distant and out of reach, something to aspire to vanished. I was alive.
We met regularly in the evening when our work was done. Some times Sarah would come to the dining room after the dinner meal had been served, the guests and waiters had left, and we busboys were cleaning up our stations. She’d sit at one of my tables while I dusted the seats of the chairs, swept the floor, and then dried my silverware. When it was time to stack the chairs on the tabletops so the floors could be washed and buffed, Sarah would spend time chatting with some of the other busboys. I felt proud of her and happy that we were seen as a loving pair. No one made fun of me or teased her in the crass and salacious way that we all were capable of. It was an acknowledged fact that Sarah and I were very much in love and that our love was of the kind that cynics and romantics alike might envy—what, after all, is a cynic but a romantic who has experienced a painful disappointment. I felt her love’s presence like a panoply of protection from all that was harsh in the world and, like all first loves, I would never know another like it.
“Ready?” I asked as she said goodnight to Stanley Nussbaum, Ron’s busboy.
“Ready!” she said, standing on tiptoes and kissing my cheek. Stan smiled and nodded at her and then at me and then resumed sweeping the floor.
“What would you like to do tonight?” I said taking her hand.
“I definitely don’t want to see the talent show at the casino,” she said, referring to the program designed to delude guests into believing that one of them might be the next Eddie Fisher or Sid Caesar.
“Then why don’t you get your blanket and meet me down at the dock in about half an hour. I have to shower and get cleaned up.” I pulled her close to me, pressed my body hard against hers and then surprised her with a tender, gentle kiss. She smiled up at me when I moved away, arched an eyebrow, winked and pulled me close to her again.
“Just what do you have in mind, Mr. White, some mischief?”
“How could you think such a thing,” I said, feigning injury. “I have absolutely nothing but t
he most noble of intentions, miss.”
“Oh, what a shame,” she said, pushing me away and then appropriating the injured posture for herself. Looking back over our shoulders we smiled at each other as we parted.
Back in my room I hummed happily as I loaded fresh batteries into my portable radio and then laid out a change of clothes. Harlan was off with Heidi and Ron, I assumed, was with Martha but when I walked into the shower room Ron came up behind me and grabbed hold of my arm.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Don’t tell me, Lenny knows where Captain Kidd’s treasure is buried.”
“I’m serious, come back to the room for a minute.” He was tense and very strained. I followed him back to our room and when we were inside he shut the door, put his index finger across his lips when I started to speak, and then turned his radio on. “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford was playing and Ron turned up the volume and motioned me to sit on his bed.
“Somebody robbed me today and I think it was Harlan,” he said. “I keep my cash hidden in a tobacco can. I empty out the tobacco, put the rolled up cash in the bottom of the can and then replace the tobacco.”
“I’ve never seen you smoking a pipe,” I protested.
“I don’t smoke a pipe you shmuck! I keep one around to chew on so that my can of Prince Albert looks like I might smoke.” He shook his head in frustration. “I like to keep a few hundred dollars on hand all the time. Somebody had to search through my things to find the money and that means it was either you or Harlan because nobody else comes into this room when we’re not here.” I was puzzled by Ron’s decision to do such a risky thing. It was the practice for every waiter and busboy to open a savings account in a local bank and bring the weekend’s tips for deposit on Monday, Tuesday the latest. No one kept large amounts of cash with him.
“Well it wasn’t me who took your money.”
“I know that. I’m not accusing you of robbing me. But that leaves your buddy Harlan and you know I’ve never trusted him.”
“That leaves the entire population of Braverman’s from old Ben Braverman to Lenny and all the guests in between! Why the hell do you have to blame …” I was becoming strident and Ron put his hand over my mouth to silence me.
“It wasn’t Lenny, or Ben, or a guest, and I don’t think it was anyone else from the dining room. It had to be Harlan.”
“Just because that’s what you want to think doesn’t make it true. You’ve had it in for Harlan since the day he got here. It was practically the first thing you said to me when I came, ‘I just don’t trust him’ you said, and you say it over and over.” My voice again became too loud in my passionate defense of the one person I admired and wished to emulate and again Ron had to put his hand over my mouth to silence me.
“Look, I don’t give a shit that you’re so gaga about Harlan. Fine, be impressed by that phony’s style if that’s how you want to be, but be careful. He’s a snake and he’s dangerous and you’ll end up being the one who gets hurt when you least expect it.” There really was no way to know who took Ron’s money. The doors to our rooms had very simple locks, the kind you don’t see much anymore, the kind that had a keyhole that truly was a hole. The key to open the lock was a cumbersome piece of metal with an oval grip at one end of a two inch long shaft and a tab at the other end to trip the lock. Somebody once had suggested putting hasps on all the doors and using padlocks for security, but Sammy foresaw that some wise guy could lock half the waiters in their rooms before dinner and the plan was scuttled. These old locks were probably not too hard to pick if you really wanted to, but there was so much traffic in and out of the waiters’ quarters it would have been very risky to try doing that. On the other hand we couldn’t lock our doors every time we went to the bathroom, or washed out our shirts in the shower, or just went into someone else’s room to talk. Anyone who was determined enough could rob you if that was what he wanted to do, and money was the one thing he could take that couldn’t be identified as belonging to you. So the notion that Harlan had to be the thief held little credence for me.
“Look, I’m sorry that you were robbed but I can’t believe that Harlan would do such a thing, that’s all. I mean, I know him, he just isn’t the type of a guy who would do that. Maybe you should give Belle your money to hold in the hotel safe.”
“Sure, so when I come asking for it she can say ‘what money?’ God, you’re still so trusting, Melvin. You’ll learn.”
I showered and dressed and was about to leave to meet Sarah at the waterfront when Abe Melman stopped me.
“I see that you’re struggling with what Ronald told you, Melvin. It’s the truth, someone here is robbing people of their money and jewelry. Harlan is one of the people that Ben Braverman suspects …”
“Not you too, for godsakes,” I protested, but Abe held up his right hand like a traffic cop and placed his left index finger across his lips, silencing me with an emphatic “Ssshhhh!” He steered me into his room and closed the door. Motioning to the wooden chair beside his bed he took me by the arm and said, “Sit for a minute. I know you want to meet your girlfriend Sarah, a beautiful girl and such a name, but sit for a minute,” he said, waving at the chair. I looked at my watch, sighed rudely, and sat down.
“I want to help you, Melvin. I know that you’ve been upset about so many things, the girls before Sarah, the college you wanted to go to, this Harlan character …”
“Help me? You’re going to help me? Help yourself, Abe, please help yourself a little before you try helping me,” I said, looking directly at his law degree.
“You think that because I don’t practice law anymore there’s something wrong with me? I’ll do it again, don’t worry. This isn’t the time. I have a different responsibility right now, that’s all. Different but just as serious, maybe even more important. Definitely more important,” he added emphatically.
“Waiting tables?” I asked, my incredulity obvious.
“Don’t be foolish. And don’t imagine that doing simple work makes me a simple man. Please, don’t insult me.” I felt a guilty chill ripple through me and hung my head. “I am your friend Melvin, believe me, I only want to help you.”
“How are you going to help me Abe, explain that to me please.” I held myself back from again telling him to try helping himself first.
“You think that Harlan is going to help you? You think he’ll teach you how to be him? You don’t want to be him, believe me.”
“I never said that I wanted to be him Abe, that’s your idea.”
“You never had to say it, it was obvious. No offense intended, Melvin, I’m only saying what I can see with my own eyes. Harlan is someone that you admire very much, that’s very plain to see, but there’s something missing in him. I don’t know exactly what it is but when I look at him he reminds me of those Greek statues you see in a museum, the ones that are missing an arm or a leg or a nose, you know what I mean? Beautiful but broken, some piece is always missing. I look at Harlan and I see all of his fingers and toes are still attached, but in spite of that I always feel that there is something important missing.” Abe sighed and waved at the air as if shooing away a fly. “Meshuga, right? Crazy. But I can’t help it, that’s how I feel. So be careful Melvin, don’t be so trusting so fast. Take your time, watch him do a little bit of this, and then watch him do a little bit of that, and maybe then you’ll see the part that is missing.” He stared at his law school diploma when he finished but his face was impassive and without expression. Perhaps he had imagined himself delivering a stellar closing argument, a reasoned and compelling prosecution, but all that I was left with were feelings of anger and shame as if I had somehow been violated by his intrusion into my world.
“I have to get going Abe, Sarah is waiting for me.”
“Oiyoiyoiyoiyoi! You musn’t keep Sarah waiting, Melvin, apologize to her for me, tell her it was all my fault, such a beautiful girl” He shook his head and opened the door to his room to let me out. “Remember,
watch a little bit of this, a little bit of that …” I was out the door and out of the waiters’ quarters before he could finish his mantra.
3.
After the night of the Rosie Moldar fiasco I had been reluctant to use the old shed for meetings with Sarah. Not only did the memory of that escapade continue to haunt the physical space, the knowledge that other couples might again wander in while we were inside had kept me away. The dock area, while open and exposed, was still fairly private. Guests did not choose to come to look at the lake at night and most of the rest of the staff either went down to the casino for drinks or left the hotel grounds in their cars. The problem with the waterfront was the cold and damp of the August nights. Even in late July there was the sock-soaking dew of night but by August there were nights you could see the fog of your own breath. Sarah and I had resorted to spreading out the stacked cushions employed to provide softer seats in the rowboats and creating a cushioned area the size of a wrestling mat where we wrestled nightly after our first impassioned kiss. But the August cold and damp soon was infesting the pillows with an unpleasant clamminess and not very long afterwards they began to reek of mildew. It was Sarah who finally suggested that we retreat to the shed.
I had just lit a Viceroy and stuffed the Zippo in my back pocket abrading my wrist on the buckle of the belt back there. “Have you figured out what this belt across the back of these pants is for?” I said, fingering its buckle.
“It’s just a decoration,” Sarah said, amused by my consternation.
“I think there should be a zipper there rather than a belt. If you’re going to do something useless for decoration than it should he really useless. A belt makes you think that you should tighten it or loosen it or something.” She slipped her arm through mine and laughed. We were standing on the dock at the lake searching the moonless night sky for shooting stars.
“Tell you what. If you stop smoking I’ll sew a zipper on the back of your pants.” Sarah had been unhappy about my smoking from the start more because of its effects upon my breath than my health. The first murmurings that cigarettes could be hazardous to your health had not had a dramatic impact on the society of smokers in nineteen fifty-six.
