Later that night, after she’d tucked Isaac in and waited for the raspy snore to issue from his side of the divider, she crept across the kitchen’s complaining floorboards to the hall closet. She picked up armful after armful of stolen possessions and brought them downstairs. Half an hour of this silent labor saw everything transferred to a pile in the yard. She doused it with kerosene and watched everything burn: the shoes, the books, the socks and nylons and frillies, an Indian change purse marked with a branded symbol, a letter from someone’s daughter away in college, the Polaroid photo of the young woman smiling beneath the white tree, a pack of breath mints, a miniature boomerang, several different fishing lures hand-painted in primary colors, a pair of broken glasses, a pair of unbroken glasses, an old Life magazine with Igor Stravinsky on the cover, three different yarmulkes, and even a Torah. Even the stolen Torah, she burned.
“Mama?” Isaac stood behind her, his face made briefly visible by a licking flame. “What are you doing?”
She looked at the flames and found she had no reply.
He stood by her. “What are you burning?”
“Things I have stolen.”
“Why did you steal them?”
“Because of you, because I was afraid. But you’re better now. No more stealing, ever.”
The boy went back inside the house. When he returned, he threw the marbles he’d taken from the Gerson boy on the flames. Comet, sunburst, Indian blanket, galaxy: they popped and fizzed and turned black in the heat.
She went back to the Neversink for her check, though she’d vowed never to return. It had been a hollow vow; they had to eat. After three numb days of looking through newspapers for jobs and finding none, she found a message waiting for her from a Manhattan exchange. The desk clerk, Jacob, politely absented himself into the coffee shop to give her privacy.
“How horrible,” the woman’s voice boomed, in response to the news of her termination.
“Yes. I was reported.”
“How horrible,” she repeated. “Well, perhaps this is kismet. Mr. Gerson and I have just been discussing the need for a live-in nanny. I have so much to do and only so much time—” she went on, but the maid was only half listening, aware of herself as a guest watching might have been aware of her: a slight woman in her sweater and long skirt and cheap brown shoes, shoulders shaking, bent over the desk in a posture of utter submission.
And so, only a few weeks later, the maid and her son were installed in the guest room of the Eighty-Seventh Street apartment. Isaac continued thriving in his new school, devouring lessons with the hunger of a freed prisoner. Isaac’s mother, for her part, liked the Gerson children, and, in a quieter way, thrived herself. Though it was her job—even more so than being the maid had been her job—she never, to herself, became the nanny—instead, remaining Hannah. Hannah, backward and forward, pointed out the Gerson girl, who was clever, like her mother.
Kismet, Mrs. Gerson sometimes exclaimed in happy wonder, emphasizing the coincidence as though Hannah didn’t know she’d turned her in. Yes, very lucky said Hannah, as though Mrs. Gerson didn’t know she knew. Good night all, said Mr. Gerson, stepping out for the night, as though no one knew where he was going, as though he didn’t know whose bed Hannah would be sharing later.
And so they all built this strange new life together on a foundation of feigned ignorance, an arrangement that worked for all of them over the years. It was a lie so outrageous and transparent that, now and then, it seemed to Hannah almost like a kind of honesty. But she had only to unlock the little closet in her room, look at all the many things she’d stolen—chief among them the gleaming red brooch—and she knew it wasn’t so.
4. Joseph
1960
Hello, Hotel Neversink! Hello, lady and gentlemens!
Hello, Henry and Jeanie, I see you hiding back there. Earlier tonight, Jeanie saw me getting into the scotch backstage, and she made me swear not to work blue. Jeanie, I don’t just promise I won’t swear onstage: I fucking promise. I swear on our father’s grave. Jeanie’s going to beat the shit out of me by the time I’m done, folks, just you wait. Lovely woman, my sister, but she wears the pants around here—the pants, the suit, the jockstrap. Poor old Henry there just lies back and thinks of Albany. Sometimes I think Jeanie missed her calling not being born a Soviet prison warden. Jeanie, you know I love you, and I apologize for this. To all of you, I apologize in advance.
Although, really, what am I apologizing to you for? You people have it good. No matter how it goes here tonight, you put your coats on and go home after this, maybe give the dog a kick, right? Meanwhile, I’m on to the next gig with a damp tux and bum ticker. My name’s Joey Sikorsky, I’ll be here all my life. Who needs it? I’m still young. Yeah, laugh it up. I’ve been playing the Catskills for twenty years now, folks, and I think tonight’s my last show. I think I’m done, I just can’t do this shit anymore. What’s the point? What’s the point?
I’ll be honest with you folks, I haven’t been feeling too well lately. My wife left me for a dentist. A goddamned dentist. That poor guy—he’ll find out soon enough that pleasing her in the sack is like pulling teeth. That life with Joyce Sikorsky is no laughing gas. Ba dum bum. But seriously, our marriage was loveless and barren.
I miss her though, that’s the crazy part. Every day for the last twenty years I’m praying the woman gets hit by lightning, then she hitches up with Isaac Mengele, DDS, and here I am, crying myself to sleep, waking up with my head in the oven, sitting around in my underwear drinking scotch for breakfast. Not that I didn’t do that before, but at least there was someone there to tell me what a pig I am.
But no, now she’s headed up to Vermont, where the good doctor is setting up his new practice. Vermont, what’s that? What kind of a self-respecting Jew moves to Vermont? Good riddance. I hope they fall off the side of a fucking mountain, get run over by goyim joyriding in a snowmobile. Sander, can I get a little more antisuicide juice up here? Is it a problem if you think of scotch as “antisuicide juice”?
But God help me, I miss her, I really do. I just don’t have it in me to meet anyone else; the fire’s gone out. I meet women on the road once in a while, but it’s like Groucho’s line about any club that would have him, you know? So true. Last week, I met this woman after a gig in Philly. I thought maybe an elk had wandered in, mistaken the flop sweat for a salt lick. Handsome woman, old Hollywood glamour—the eyes of Vivien Leigh and the mustache of Clark Gable. She wanted to take me home, but I said no thanks. I’m looking for a nice Jewish girl, not . . . not whatever the hell you are . . . Sander, help me out, I’m dying up here.
I’ll have a seat, if none of you mind. Jean, you there? Anyone? I can’t see. These goddamned lights are killing me.
Hey, you’re not stupid. You know she didn’t leave me for a dentist. She did leave me, but it didn’t happen recently. I’m going to be totally honest here. She left me two years ago. Nineteen months, two weeks, three days, but who’s counting? There’s not a joke in it, or maybe there is and I just don’t see it. Breaking new ground tonight—hey, I know you paid for a comedy act, but tonight you’re getting something different. This comedy business is no laughing matter.
I’d been in a mental hospital in Connecticut for about three months, and when I got out, Joyce had gone. Twenty-five years we were together. We met in 1935, when I’d just moved to the city, just gotten started doing comedy and was answering phones at her father’s insurance business. She said I was the funniest guy she’d ever met, and I said yeah, but you grew up Orthodox in Brooklyn Heights, what do you know from funny? We got married quick and had a daughter, who’s at Boston University now. Her tuition’s half the reason I’m still doing this shit. I’ve got a son, too, but he’s a dummy, thank God. The only college he’s getting into is clown college. He can major in Seltzer Administration. Fitting into a Tiny Car 101. You know what he got on his SATs? Mustard. Sweet kid, but his mother’s going to have to burn down the high school to get him out of ninth grade, b
a dum bum.
So I came home from the hospital and she was gone, ba dum bum. She left me a really nice note; I should’ve brought it. I’d been in that place—it’s called Rockhaven—for almost four months, because I’d tried to kill myself. I think she was afraid I’d try again. Either that or kill her father, since he’s the reason I took those sleeping pills in the first place.
What happened was, I got into some gambling debt a while back that Joyce didn’t know about, and the goon squad finally came after me. These guys, they don’t break your arm or anything like that, they fucking bore you to death. You open the door to get the paper or the milk, there they are, two guys that look like tax attorneys saying where’s the money, Joey. You go to a Dodgers game, they’re in the seats behind you saying pay us our money, Joey. You go down on your wife, and one of them pokes his head out, saying the money, the money.
But after a while, this other guy shows up with the two guys, and I figure okay, here’s the arm breaker. Looks like someone shaved a gorilla and fitted him for a leather jacket. One of the tax attorneys says okay, Joey, which one of these fingers do you fucking hate? Turns out he’s a finger-breaker, to start, anyway. I beg and plead, but it’s no good and Joyce’ll be home from grocery shopping soon, so I get it over with and poke out the little finger on my left hand. They lead me into the kitchen, where the gorilla slams a drawer on it. Here, look—the doctor reset it, but it’s still about ninety degrees. I told her I fell down the stairs three times in a row, and she believed me.
So I go to Joyce’s father for a secret loan. Her father is the kind of old Brooklyn Heights shark that gives Rudolf Hess a good name. I know I could get Joyce to ask and he’d give her whatever she needed, but I don’t want her to know, not just from guilt, but because it’s not her problem. She’s not the shtik drek who put a thousand bucks on a three-legged bag of dog food. Hat in hand go I to Hasidville.
Fathers, am I right? The absolute worst. I mean, I’m a father, I should know. Fathers are like that present you get on your birthday, a big box you’re all excited to unwrap, then you open it and inside is a wool sweater. Except with fathers, it takes eighteen years to unwrap it and inside is a bunch of dog turds. This goes for me and Jean, especially. Our father was the biggest piece of shit ever to walk the planet.
What are you giving me that look for, Jean? Speaking ill of the dead—our father who aren’t in heaven? It’s funny, I’m the one with the drinking problem, but it’s my sister who has the lousy memory. I got a name for you: Abraham.
Hey, Henry, where’s she going? Oy, I’ve done it now, huh.
Now that my sister’s gone, you want to hear a story about my father, the great man? When we lived in Poland, the crazy schmuck almost starved us to death. My mother had been going into town and begging for food, literally begging on the street, because he won’t abandon this frozen hill for some reason. Then one night, he goes totally nuts and kills our only animal, this mule that we loved. Right in front of us, makes us watch him slaughter the thing. A blood ritual, he says. Some kind of ritual, scaring the shit out of your kids and wife. I thought we were going to die. Meshuggener fell asleep in front of the fire with blood all over him. Well, at least he didn’t hit my mother that night.
The great Asher Sikorsky! Such bullshit. This whole joint is a palace of lies.
Anyway, where was I? Fathers. That’s the whole reason I had to borrow money in the first place, why I didn’t just borrow the money from Neversink, why I didn’t have a trust fund. I was twenty when I left here, and I tell my father, gay kaken ofn yahm, go shit in the fucking ocean, for the two non-Yids in the audience tonight. I didn’t even play here until after he died, couldn’t be in the same room as that miserable prick, even though I still feel like he’s here—like the hotel is him, this ugly golem that will never die. Well, I won’t have to worry about that after tonight, right, Henry?
I’m not asking Asher for a dime, so I go to Joyce’s father. And after about three hours of shaming me and yanking his side curls and asking God what he’d done to deserve such a son-in-law, the old man offers me the loan at 20 per. What can I do? I accept and pay off the tax attorneys when they come around again, then I call my agent and tell her to work me like a broke-dick dog. I’ll play anywhere—the Catskills, the Poconos, dinner theaters, Howard Johnson’s, bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, brisses, shivas. For three years I’m on the road, grinding it out to pay down the principal to Joyce’s old man. I must have played a thousand shows. You ever think you’ve got it bad, try doing an hour at the Weehawken Senior Center.
Finally I have a breakdown, just can’t do it anymore. My kids don’t recognize me when I come home, and after three years I’ve paid off a quarter of the debt. I know I’ll never crawl out from underneath this loan, so I tell Joyce what’s going on. I beg her to talk to her father, but she won’t. Shame on you, Joey, she says, and that’s the last thing she says to me for weeks. I can hear her in the other room, poisoning our children against me. Me in bed with my racing forms and milk of magnesia. So one day I take a bunch of her sleeping pills. I can’t even tell you what I was thinking—not that I wanted to die, exactly, just that I was so tired and I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t face Joyce or the kids, I couldn’t face her father, I couldn’t pay off the debt, I couldn’t work. Put on a stand-up routine? I couldn’t put on a pair of socks. I wanted to sleep for a while, like five years.
When I woke up, they were pumping my stomach, and after I got out of the hospital, Joyce signed some papers authorizing the authorities to put me in Rockhaven. A reasonable fear I would do harm to myself, or something. I was still so tired, I didn’t even complain, just got in the taxi and checked myself in.
I did the three months, colored everything in between the lines, took my meds, admitted to my troubling ideations, went to group meetings, mopped the halls when it was my turn, played chess with the doctor, got a clean bill of health, got released, and got the news I was single at forty-five. Put myself right back out on the circuit—what else am I gonna do? Better to stay busy, I thought, and anyway I still got a three-hundred-buck-a-month vig payable to that old cocksucker in Brooklyn, plus interest accrued in the loony bin.
But I can’t do it anymore, if that wasn’t obvious. I’m fresh out of jokes, and a comedian out of jokes is like a whore out of fucks. Somebody have a heart and put me out of my misery. Henry, I know you’d like to kill me right now—be my guest. Take my life, please.
Even better, I’ll take a header off the roof tonight, like the crazy goy who built this place. Or I could get lucky, run into the golem who keeps snatching up these little kids. Hey, at least someone is killing around here, am I right?
I’m sorry. I don’t feel so good. I’m so tired. Didn’t Churchill say why stand if you can sit, why sit if you can lie down? I’m going to lie down. Henry, go tell Jeanie I’m done here, the show is over, good night.
5. Henry
1963
The other day, I had the strangest feeling I was being watched. Jean had already gone over to the Neversink to eat an early breakfast before overseeing a new construction project in the north wing. I was getting dressed, putting on my tie, and all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I felt it before I noticed it—like realizing a drafty window has been chilling a room long after your hands have already grown cold. There was—had been—someone behind me, I was sure of it.
I turned and there was nothing, just the door and Jeanie’s vanity beside it. But as I ate breakfast and read the paper, the feeling remained, like the lingering odor of the food I’d prepared, something just on the edge of detection. In my office, balancing some old ledgers, there was a scratching at the window across the room—the kind of noise I would normally, without even thinking about it, ascribe to a stray branch rubbing against the glass, perhaps caused by the movement of a chipmunk or an unseen bird. But on this day, I had a horrible vision, strange to describe even after the fact, but so powerful that it made my heart dance a double mazurka in my che
st. It was this: a figure hanging beneath the window on some ledge or other, scratching his nails against the bottom of the glass.
This idea was so strong, the image so vivid, that I went outside to check, but of course there was nothing. I stood there on the sloping green, heart pounding, and my thoughts turned uncontrollably toward Jean’s brother Joey—Joey Shvetz, the name he took to distance himself from the family—whom I’d watched disintegrate on the main stage, and who’d subsequently been hospitalized again. It had been a terrible thing to behold, this clever man whose faculties were failing him. To never be able to trust one’s mind—worse, to regard oneself as a foe that, without constant monitoring, might do you harm—I could think of few worse things.
To steady my nerves, I strolled around the grounds, saying hello to various employees—Michael doing some landscaping, Sander Levin carrying in boxes of bar supplies—and a few young guests tossing around a football. It was a blustery fall day, the kind with the bright sun of late summer, but with a hint of winter on the breeze; the kind of day one likes to appreciate around here, before the cold really settles in and warmth exists only as a memory and promise. I found Jeanie where I’d thought she would be, talking to workmen beside the new construction. I did not tell her about my disquiet, but as I kissed her good-bye, I felt the scaffolding and its intricate hollows and shadows suspended overhead like an enormous skeleton.
The rest of the working day passed in a strange haze. I could not get the numbers to properly resolve—money was going to mysterious places, some project I hadn’t been informed of, though what else was new? My mind was dull, my thoughts like peering through clouded glass. At five, I gave up and went downstairs, ready to take a glass of wine with Sander down at the bar, when from the staircase window I saw a child run across the purplish shadows of the north lawn, directly into the woods.
The Hotel Neversink Page 6
