The Hotel Neversink

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  Thursday morning at five, Mr. Javits kissed sleeping Hedda and set out on his run, through the rutted marshland the most recent rains had left behind. Monsoon season, Hedda said, but it was always monsoon season around here. Where did all this water go? he wondered, picturing the swollen cascade behind their house and the shimmering gray stones. The road’s wet soil sucked at his shoes, and he thought, great, is this how it’s going to be all day today? It was raining now, he realized, little misting drops visible in the triangle of light his head lamp cast. Cold, too, and he swore to himself—goddamn this place. Goddamn it. The curse reverberated in his head, and when, a little farther down the hill, a muddy rut caught his left ankle and pitched him forward onto the ground, it felt like payback, blatant nekome. He got up and tried to keep running, but he’d twisted his ankle—sharp pain stabbed him with every step. He paused, unsure. He’d planned on doing his usual run, stopping at Lucy’s house around seven in the morning, then running back so he could make it to work by nine. He should, he knew, limp home and clean up and drive down to meet her instead, but something in him—punitive or plain stubborn or he didn’t know what—insisted on continuing, pushing forward. Perhaps she would drive him if he couldn’t make it back. He slowed his pace, in no special hurry to get to her house—content to walk through what felt like a corridor of singing, sawing insects, a twisting hole in the dark created by the beam coming from the lamp on his head—though get there he eventually did, just as gray dawn was breaking and the air was rising with a mineral musk from the new concrete sidewalk where town began. Her address was 200 Elmira Road: he checked three times on the damp piece of legal paper, and three times it assured him that yes, this was the place, one of the bedraggled homes in the poor part of town, a narrow, faded yellow thing, beside a house with a sagging trampoline. It was surprising, since Lucy had seemed fairly prosperous, and Mr. Javits felt somehow tricked, conned into coming down the hill before work, interrupting his run and hurting his ankle. It further occurred to him now that he may not even be able to run for several weeks, a dismal and infuriating prospect. Why the hell had he agreed to this? To meet with this weirdo? This weirdo with her crackpot theory and information the police had no interest in? Ridiculous. Seeing clearly how ridiculous the whole thing was, he turned on his good heel to start right back up the road, but a voice stalled his progress. “Good morning!” She had come onto the porch and was already greeting him with a cup of coffee, already thanking him for making it down, already asking about his ankle, already helping him up the stairs and into the house, already apologizing for the bedraggled state of the house, which had been brought about by her widowhood (cancer, she reminded him) and subsequent depression, though she found she was pulling out of it lately and that committing herself to the case (as she called it) had been a huge help mentally, already leading him through a cluttered living room, already showing him a broad oak desk on which sat the cumulative fruit of what she said was two years of investigation. The centerpiece was a large corkboard with a map of the Catskills pinned to it, and various thumbtacks planted here and there. She was pointing at it, and he was thinking how grief could drive people to do almost anything, just look at his own mother, whom he hadn’t seen for, God, how long was it? Five years now? In her old age she’d become a fanatic, a zealous Lubavitcher who obsessed over obscurantist Talmudic concerns and volunteered with a Mitzvah tank once a week. On his last visit he’d seen her working in it, distributing pamphlets to bemused Bergenites. He’d been incapable of squaring the gray, bobbing, beshawled head of the woman smiling hopefully at potential converts with the mother of his childhood, the housecoat that had smelled of perfumed booze as she walked him and his sister in a penitent silence to their elementary school. In the school bathroom, he would wash his hands over and over where she’d touched him, certain the other kids would smell it on him, looking at his own face in the warped mirror, hangdog and middle-aged at ten years old.

  Mr. Javits! Lucy was yelling at him. I have spent the last two years working on this. The least you could do is pay attention for a few minutes. Listen to me.

  He listened. Over the next few minutes, she detailed her findings. Since 1950, when Jonah Schoenberg disappeared, there had been seven others, represented by the pushpins—yellow, red, green, blue, purple, orange, and white—clustered around Liberty and the hotel, itself represented by a red Monopoly hotel glued to the map. She described these disappearances, some of which Mr. Javits had heard of, some not. There was the local girl a few years back, who’d worked as a cashier at the grocery store. He remembered her, a small girl with ash-blonde hair parted directly down the middle, kept out of her face by a braided buckskin headband. But she’d been a hippie, and the town consensus had seemed to be that she’d taken a secret pilgrimage to the West Coast, or wherever things were happening. Anywhere but Liberty. Lucy went on for quite a while. She was fiercely animated, red with righteous energy, saying, Do you see? She pointed at a green Monopoly house in the middle of the pushpins. They’re all in a circle around where we are. It’s the same person! With the flourish of a stage magician saving their best trick for last, she tore the room’s curtains open, saying look, that white house way down the road, you see it? He saw it—a distant tumbledown hovel like all the other hovels around here, nothing special. Did you know, she said, that in 1947, a local girl was attacked at a Monticello train station? Guess when Mr. Andrews moved in? Guess! Mr. Javits couldn’t guess. 1947! And the cops won’t lift a finger, even though I’ve told them all of this. Well, said Mr. Javits, Are you sure they haven’t looked into it? Investigations take time. She said, They haven’t investigated anything for the last twenty years, why would they start now? She looked out the window as though gathering herself, then sighed and turned, saying, Mr. Javits, again, will you help me? And Mr. Javits said, Well now, look, I’m pretty sure the police have it well in hand, but he was stopped by Lucy’s bitter, accusing laugh as she drew the curtains. The worst part, she said—I mean besides the killer being allowed to walk the streets—was how the forces that be could make you doubt yourself, your own sanity. How it made you feel like the world was arrayed against you and how it put you in a state of constant paranoia, wondering whether the oversights of people in charge were due to incompetence or malice. Malice? said Mr. Javits. Or some combination thereof, she said, and she proceeded to say lots of other things, during which time he looked at the map. Rather than representing the places where children had vanished, the map seemed to him like it represented some sort of assault schematic, the plastic hotel piece surrounded by the ominous pins, like a small rank of invading armies on a general’s battle plan. A little spit collected on the right side of Lucy’s mouth as her voice crescendoed, but it was difficult to hear her. It was like she was underwater, or he was, just like when he’d been a boy in Weehawken, the furniture flying. And so he could hardly hear her at all when, after thanking her for the information and telling her he was going to talk to people and get back to her, he walked out with her still making sounds at the back of his head. The day outside was absolutely gorgeous—birds chirping and the sun stupidly placid over the eastern rim of the valley’s ridge. He waved back at Lucy, who was silent now, staring at him, and walked carefully through the yard to the road, his ankle yelping in protest with every step. But he really did have to leave, and he couldn’t have asked her for a ride, not after leaving so abruptly, but gosh it was such a nice day, and it would have been a shame not to walk anyway, but man did his ankle hurt, and that was okay because into every life doth a little rain fall, but was that the Bible or a pop song, and what did it matter if it was true? Truth: he thought of the map and the accusing pins, and he thought of her accusing look, and he said to himself, Now Saul, look, be reasonable, do you really think this woman, this weirdo, cracked the code after two decades of yourself and the police not turning anything up? I know you’re upset about the boy and all the weirdos he brought out, but is the answer to start listening to every kook who comes by the off
ice with a theory? Do you really want to increase the strain on Len and everyone, Jeanie especially? Jeanie who was presently lying ill in the cottage, too weak on some days to get up and even say hello to a single guest, a tradition of hospitality begun by her father, Asher, and continued by her until a few months ago? He did not. A serendipitous branch on the side of the road served as a walking stick that eased his passage up the hill, and he made it to work only a few minutes late, full of good feeling and esprit de corps, ready to keep the place clean and suitable for healthy family fun.

  Nonetheless, he found himself, at four the next morning, limping around the grounds outside the cottage, girding himself to meet with Jeanie in a few hours, when the sun rose and the day began, although his day had begun hours earlier, had never really stopped since he’d met with Lucy. The meeting hovered in his mind like a bad smell that would not go away, a persistent stench indicating something unseen and rotten. The map and the pins, and her following him out yelling Children don’t just disappear and Why won’t you do your goddamned job? Mr. Javits had tried his best to let the day’s demands and the flow of his attention lead him away from those words, but, like a stray, starving dog, they seemed to follow him wherever he went, nipping at his heels, constantly reminding him of their presence. His lunch—which he always took early and lingered over and never failed to appreciate, tasted bland, even slightly rancid. Perhaps the sour cream had turned. He secretly dumped the plate in his office trash, where Natalya, the head cook, would not see and take offense. Outside his window, the branch was bobbing as though a large bird had just been there and taken flight at the sight of him. He peered up into the sky, but there was nothing, just a few wispy clouds in the air, again looking like the trace of something that had recently fled without his detection. His detection, ha! If the redheaded woman, if Lucy, was correct, he’d thought, sitting at his old oak desk, worn smooth by decades of agreeable contact with his elbows (as he read the sports column, ate a midday snack, snoozed), he was responsible for the deaths of several children. She hadn’t said this, of course. Maybe she hadn’t even thought it. But the implication was clear to him. If he’d failed to do his job—worse, if, on some level, he hadn’t wanted to do his job—he was culpable. Culpable: one of those odd words you’ve seen and heard a thousand times without really noticing or thinking about, then suddenly they become strange to you, implausible. That night, at home, he’d looked up the word culpable in their dictionary, which he couldn’t remember ever cracking, and saw that it shared a root with culprit, which he’d never noticed. Capable of being—as good as—the culprit. He was culpable, able to culp. As they’d eaten dinner (alone—their daughter, Samara, was out with friends, a sickening thought with the culprit, the real culprit, out there in the night), Hedda had asked what was wrong, and he’d said nothing, nothing. She’d prattled on, as she did, talking about Charlie’s upcoming visit, about the shiksa girlfriend he might bring. Could Saul imagine? He couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t imagine anything, it seemed. Had he ever imagined anything, ever looked past what was there in front of him at any moment, ever looked for what wasn’t there? Ever detected anything? It didn’t seem so. He was the tabletop dulled by unseen elbows, the branch quivering seconds after that invisible bird took flight. He plead an upset stomach, which was not hard to do since he had one, and went upstairs to bed, hearing the faint sound of the music Hedda was listening to as she cleaned up, the new Carole King record already played to scratchy bits. It’s too late baby, now it’s too late. Something inside has died. I feel like a fool. He swallowed one of his wife’s sleeping tablets, which she’d been prescribed during a bad spell of the flu two years ago. Not expecting it to have any effect, he woke in the middle of the night, shaking from a dream he couldn’t remember, one more unseen thing. He found he’d been crying, and he got up to wash his face. The clock in the hall read 1:45, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep again—if you could call what he’d gotten sleep—and so he put his shoes and work clothes in a bag and went for a drive. It was the kind of night you can tell is cloudy even though it’s perfectly dark—even without gazing up and seeing no stars, there was something about the texture and the coolness of the air, like a shroud hung over the sky up there, the perfect, secret sky that is always there whether you can see it or not. He thought of his mother and he was crying again, and, Jesus, how long had it been since he’d cried? A long time, maybe since that day when he’d cried in Jeanie’s office. His thoughts seemed to spiral like the car, the old Plymouth, as it went around and around the hill or mountain, down to the bottom where the poor people lived—Lucy, goddamn her and her Mr. Andrews—past the post office and the park and the dentist’s with the toothbrush portico. He drove past the entrance to the Neversink and past the Liberty Lounge—its door was open, just releasing its babbling rabble into the night, like a mouth disgorging the contents of its guts into the gutter, where they belonged. A boy stood out front who could have been the blond boy from his childhood, black hair peeping through his dirty socks, presently lighting a cigarette with a perplexed look that seemed to ask how it was possible that he’d been transported from the home of Sara Javits in Weehawken, New Jersey, in 1933, to outside a bar in upstate New York in 1975, and Mr. Javits wondered the same thing as he juddered along the old logging road that went up the back way to the Hotel Neversink. It seemed he’d never made any decisions, never really thought anything through, had just allowed himself to be swept along by the ceaseless flow of life. He parked the car atop a small ridge with a gully on one side and on the other an expanse of trees that the distant hotel loomed over. The moon broke momentarily through a thin spot in the cloud cover, casting dull gray plates on the grass at Mr. Javits’s feet—they floated around him like the ghosts people said haunted the Neversink, like the strange, fuzzed memories that Lucy had jarred free and that had been haunting him all day. The tall man: Mr. Javits kept returning to a time when—it must have been around 1960, a sunny day in the fall with the wind blowing leaves around in little calico whirlwinds—he had gone outside for some air. He’d walked out one of the rear exits, and there, shadowed by the hotel’s western eave, a man in a hat had stood watching the lawn. Had he been tall? Yes, Mr. Javits thought, he had. The lawn was brightly lit by the late sun, and Mr. Javits could see children playing there. Maybe, he’d thought, it was a father fondly watching his son or daughter, but something had been strange about it, something off, and Mr. Javits had watched the dark figure for a few seconds, possibly half a minute. Nothing incriminating there, but then he’d approached to get a good look at the man, and in doing so had snapped a fallen branch on the ground, blown down in a recent rainstorm. The man had fled. Wait, he’d cried, but he’d turned the corner and there had been no one. Had Mr. Javits gone to Jeanie? He couldn’t remember now; it was as though a black curtain had been lowered over the whole affair, or maybe it was just that it had carried so little real significance at the time. But thinking back on it now, Mr. Javits had the unshakable feeling he’d seen the tall man at other times throughout the years—standing in the library, sitting in the dining room, coming down the stairs, strolling the grounds. Once, when he’d gone to visit Henry in the cottage, this same foggy figure had walked right past him without a word, not even a nod at Mr. Javits’s polite hello. Strange, he’d probably thought at the time, but then, people were strange. Like everything else, he’d paid it little attention. The gray plates at his feet shifted, the ghosts danced around him as he considered what he had to do. He would have to tell Jeanie what that Lucy woman had said, and he would have to finally do the job she’d hired him for: ask questions, go through employee records, dig things up, detect. He would stand before this woman he loved, and he would tell her there may have been an ongoing connection between the Neversink and the children. And they would both know the implication: if he discovered something damning, it would mean the end of the hotel. He drove to the Neversink, parked, and walked to the cottage and paced for a very long time, waiting for the sun
to rise, for Jeanie to wake up and take her morning tea. But the sun, it seemed, would never rise again. And as he paced, his bad ankle twanging every now and again, he was reminded of another time, back in Weehawken, when he was twelve or thirteen, out late doing something or other, playing inept baseball with some local kids or fruitlessly courting a girl from his school, maybe, someone even poorer and lowlier than he was, and he’d come back to the apartment only to find he’d lost his key. There was no call box on their building. He’d stood outside the doors, looking up, locating their window, his mother’s room, the bright wedge of light that burned out into the eternal city dusk, and he’d imagined her up there—a different her: one making dinner for them, one who had a normal job, one he could be proud of, one he could love. He’d stood there imagining this version of her until it almost seemed real, like he would go inside for a hot meal and help with his homework and a kiss on his forehead when he lay down to sleep, and this reverie had lasted until a drunk staggered out and Mr. Javits had slipped in behind. It seemed to him now that he’d wished that woman into existence—that she lay sleeping in the house he now lurked outside of like a burglar, a thief of happiness. This, thought Mr. Javits—Jeanie, the Neversink, his love for this place—this was real. Lucy’s story? Another theory. Everyone had one, and, like he’d always said, the paranoia it caused was the really dangerous thing. The fact that it could have made him worry Jeanie in her sickroom, fill her head with his sick fears, this was the real shame of it all. But the tall man. Ach, he needed to clear his head. And so he sat in the front seat and thumbed on his running shoes, double-knotting the left one tight. He put on his head lamp and jogged down the hill, slick with night dew, past the hotel and down to the gravel access road, ignoring the shrill note of pain in his ankle that sang out with every step, running faster and faster, ignoring what was behind him and what was in front of him, ignoring it all, knowing that right now, as always, the important thing was simply to run, to keep running, to keep running, on and on and on.