Summer Accommodations: A Novel

by Sidney Hart

  “Do you think that’s a good idea dad?” Harlan gently challenged.

  “Read your pack, my boy. ‘L.S./M.F.T. Lucky Strike means fine tobacco.’ This fine tobacco isn’t hurting me, it’s the pneumonias I’ve been getting in that drafty house in Newburgh.” Harlan frowned. “Now, have you spoken to Jack about the ring?”

  “Not yet. I thought I’d get to that on the way back to the hotel. I didn’t want to overwhelm him, though just meeting you is probably an overwhelming experience in itself,” he said with a chuckle. I shrugged, but neither was paying any attention to me.

  “Well then, it was very nice to meet you Jack White. Harlan says you’re planning to become a doctor?”

  “I’m not sure about that.”

  “Well, what ever you do don’t become a lawyer. It’s a den of thievery and iniquity that they live in.” He took a long drag on the Lucky and went into another fit of coughing. “Those damned pneumonias,” he growled.

  “I’ll see you tonight dad,” Harlan said with a wave. Despite the muck the Judge had warned me about I approached him and extended my hand.

  “It was an honor to meet you sir,” I said. He looked at my hand, smiled, and grasped it in both of his.

  “The pleasure was all mine young man, my pleasure to meet you and my pleasure to recount my tortured tale of deception.”

  When we were back in his car Harlan lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and let the smoke out through his nose. I looked into my pack of Salems but did not withdraw one. Harlan tossed me a Lucky. I lit up, crumpled up my pack of Salems and threw it on the floorboards. My hands were shaking.

  “Now you know why I say judge Crater is not buried in that well. I have to say it again even though I know I can trust you, you must not say anything about your meeting or the fact that my father is still alive to anyone. There are still people out there who might want to find him.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me, Harlan, my lips are sealed,” I said, like a tough guy in the movies, and it was easy to do because none of the experiences I’d had that day felt real to me.

  “Now, you’re probably wondering about this ring we all kept referring to. Well, it’s a very special ring, a ring that my father got from his father. It had been in the family for many centuries. It dates all the way back to the Crusades …” I must have gasped because he stopped and turned towards me to ask if I was all right.

  “Yeah … yes, yes, fine. Boy! Are you ever full of surprises. And Ron is wondering about Harvard!” I laughed and he joined in and we must have laughed half the way back to the hotel. “Well, it’s true; the ring, the Crusader, my father the judge, all of it. This ring is very unusual and my father is very sentimental about it. It’s a gimmal ring, do you know what that means?”

  “I know alef, bas, gimmel, dalid, but not gimmel rings,” I said in a giddy voice.

  “Its s not Hebrew Jack. It’s a ring with a hinged part, or a ring with a hidden compartment. The ring has a picture of my great, great, God only knows how many greats there are, we’re talking about almost a thousand years, grandfather. And it’s somewhere here on the grounds of Braverman’s.”

  “I don’t understand. What’s it doing here on the hotel grounds?”

  “Remember what Lenny said about this being a road house once, a place of gaming and gambling, remember?” I nodded. “Well, this is where it gets a little touchy, Jack. My father did like to come here to gamble back during prohibition, as did many others I might add, and the night that Lenny told you about, with the gunshots and all, well … let’s just say there were gunshots. There had been a quarrel, an argument between … there was a fight.” He was very fidgety and a film of perspiration formed on his forehead and face. “There was a man from Chicago that night who had an incredible run of luck. He was on a streak that most poker players only dream about and he was getting cocky about it. My father had been losing most of the night and was running out of cash. And then, around midnight, he did something to spook the guy from Chicago. He took off his ring and opened the gimmaled setting of the stone to look at his ancestor’s portrait. He kissed the picture and laid the opened ring on the table asking his remote grandfather for good luck. Whether it was a coincidence or not no one will ever know, but suddenly the tide turned and my father began to win. By some time after one a.m. he was dead even with Lou, the man from Chicago, who had come with a big wad of bills wrapped around an empty shotgun shell secured with a rubber band. Lou got more and more upset as his luck changed and my father kept winning. The other poker players had been cleaned out and had quit; by 2 a.m. just the two of them were left. The man from Chicago was rattled. He asked for a single winner take all hand, seven card open, five card roll ‘em poker to be dealt by Ben Braverman. The betting was outrageous from the start. Before either one had more than one card open the guy from Chicago began to bet laying piles of cash in the center of the table. Every time another card was dealt Chicago Lou bet and answered every raise with ‘see you and raise you’ through the dealing of all four open cards. Then they each sorted through their hands, the four face up and the three face down cards, and each selected the five cards he would play. Then laying them face down in a pile they began turning them over one at a time, betting back and forth with each flip of a card. Every bet was again met with, ‘I see you and raise you’ until, finally, my father didn’t have enough cash to meet the last bet. He had a very good hand, most of it the cards that had been hidden from view during the open part of the game, and he was sure he could win if he could meet Lou’s bet. He picked up his golden piece of heritage, his Crusaders s ring, a ring that had been in his family for a thousand years, and he laid it on the pile of bills. His gimmal ring, the ring that he had worn proudly most of his adult life, this precious heirloom, was all that he had left to bet. The man from Chicago looked the ring over and refused to accept it as being of any value. Stunned, my father argued that it was in fact a rare ring, an heirloom of great value that by itself was worth many times more than the entire pile of money on the table. They went back and forth about it each one getting more heated as his turn arrived when, abruptly, the man from Chicago took the ring from the pile, scrutinized it closely while turning it around in his fingers, and then suddenly went to the window, pushed out the screen and flung the ring deep into the woods. ‘Fuck you and your goddamn ring, you lose.’ he said. That was when the shooting started.” Barely turning his head Harlan looked at me from the corners of his eyes. “Do I need to say anymore?”

  “No,” I said, but that was not what I thought. For the first time that day I had the feeling that asking me to believe this story was asking too much. There were too many fantastic acts and incidents cobbled together for me to believe they all were true. “For twenty-five years that ring has lain somewhere out there in the grass waiting for me to come here and reclaim it. And for twenty-five years my father has been without his heritage, his patrimony. When I go out early in the morning before shaving and showering for the breakfast meal, that gimmal ring is what I’ve been searching for. I owe you some thanks. You showed me where the well for the old roadhouse is. The ring is somewhere in the field between that old well and the handymen’s shack. Will you help me to look for it?”

  “Help you how? You mean get up early in the morning and go out looking for the ring in the weeds?”

  “If you imagine you can do it any other time of day that you like and still be discreet, that would be all right with me too.” He sounded sarcastic.

  “You’re really serious, aren’t you. You’re really expecting me to look for this ring.” Surprise and annoyance outweighed what flattery I might have attributed to Harlan’s request. He was asking for a lot and taking it for granted that I’d comply.

  “Why do you think I came to Braverman’s, Jack, to wait tables? You have been asking me that question one way or another all summer long and when I finally put the truth out on the table in front of you, you balk. Look,” his voice was suddenly both soothing and contrite, “I
did not intend for one minute that you feel taken for granted. I hoped that you, being my friend, would want to help. I came here to find the gimmal ring. It means everything to my father and, as you saw today, he’s a very sick man, maybe a dying man, and this ring is all that he talks about to my mother. ‘Do you think Harlan can find that ring Helene? Does Harlan know where to look Helene?’ It’s an obsession.” Despite my doubts I still found myself eager to please Harlan. Raised with Ripley’s “Believe it or Not,” stranger things than his story had proved to be true and my disbelief began to evaporate as soon as we drove through the iron gate of the hotel entrance. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’d like you to accept the role of decoy. If we both go scratching around in the field before dawn someone will see us and his suspicions might be aroused. Then, even if they don’t know why they’re doing it, dishwashers and handymen will start searching the ground for an imagined treasure. I would hate it if one of them actually finds the ring before I do.” He lit another Lucky when we pulled up in his parking place. “If you were to poke around elsewhere, say near the main building, no, that would be too conspicuous. Back near the Braverman’s residence, yeah, that’s far enough away and out of the sight of everyone,” He paused, and with the fingers of his right hand gesticulating in the air, his eyes squinting, his lips moving around unvoiced words, he calculated the consequences of this proposal before turning to me and speaking. “Yes, that’ll do it. You’ll go foraging around the Braverman’s house. I’ll tell Heidi that you and I are out looking for my lost ID bracelet so if she or anyone else in her family spots you there she’ll know that you are helping me and will explain it to her family.”

  “But you won’t be there with me,” I argued.

  “Of course not. Heidi and I have been all over the grounds here so there are lots of places to be looking for the bracelet. It would be foolish for us both to be searching in the same place.” There was a compelling logic to his argument.

  “Okay, I’ll help.”

  “Good. We’ll get started with this in the morning,” he said crushing his butt in the ashtray. “Want another Lucky, Jack?”

  “Sure,” I said, feeling conspiratorial.

  “Keep the pack,” he said, winking and dropping it in my lap.

  We returned to our room separately with Harlan going first and I following him a few minutes later. I knew if Ron were to see me with a pack of Lucky’s he’d accuse me of trying to copy Harlan so I put them back into Harlan’s car and went to the snack bar to buy a pack of Chesterfield’s, the third brand of short, unfiltered cigarettes. Regardless of the brand I showed up with rising early and disappearing from the room would be a sure sign that Harlan and I were up to something and Ron would never let that pass unremarked. And how would we explain it to him if it went on for too many mornings, we hadn’t considered that. And with summer waning sunrise was later every morning sending us out in a dim light. I would have to bring all of this up with Harlan before we enacted his plan. Ron’s suspiciousness had become worse since his money was stolen and he rarely spoke directly to Harlan; he communicated with him by thinking out loud for my benefit.

  “I wonder how a guy can live with himself knowing that he’s taken something valuable that doesn’t belong to him, something that another person has earned and sweated for. What do you think, Mel, could there be such a person who could feel no guilt or shame in the presence of his victim? Who, besides a Nazi, who would be capable of such behavior, I ask you?” There was nothing I could say to answer him in Harlan’s presence and when we were alone he would sneer at me for suggesting that he stop asking me his hypothetical questions. Sneaking out in the morning would be the only way to get out of the room without arousing Ron’s suspicion. Still, it would be risky. Ron would think it had something to do with judge Crater, but he wouldn’t have the remotest idea how close to the truth he was. I’d have to trust my ability to be stealthy, something I developed to sabotage my older, stronger brothers. Fortunately, Ron snored like a sawmill so a little bit of noise would probably never wake him.