The Hotel Neversink

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  As he drove, Seth talked about the positive influence this sojourn, as he called it, could have on his play. The city had been strangling him and he hadn’t even known it. Manhattan, when you got down to it, was a dull place, full of dull people who were interested only in themselves. Himself included—it was affecting his work, as he referred to it. Suse didn’t say much—Seth didn’t need much encouragement—instead focusing her attention on the passing landscape as it shifted subtly from a piney urban verge to a three-lane suburban stretch with manicured Bermuda grass dividers, then to a hilly two-lane.

  Having momentarily tired of talking about himself, Seth lit a cigarette and said, “So, your father.”

  “So, him.”

  “What’s his story now?”

  “I don’t know. Is ‘divorced and depressed’ a story?”

  “That’s everyone’s father’s story.”

  “Everyone I know.”

  “What does he do, now that the hotel’s closed?”

  “He’s been selling stuff off, the last few years. Memorabilia, kitchen appliances, art. He sold the banister last year to a boutique hotel in Beacon.”

  “That’s all? How long can he live on that?”

  “Well, there’s still family money,” she said uncertainly. “And we own the golf course and club there. It’s still in operation. I think that’s mostly what he does now.”

  “He’s a golfer?”

  They crested a hill, hairpinning around a corner on the sudden edge of a cliff face that lacked guardrails, Seth seemingly unfamiliar with the meaning of yellow caution signs. Susannah clutched the car’s overhead handle, wondering just how bad an idea this trip would turn out to be. “I don’t think he’s ever golfed a day in his life.”

  “How marvelously sad.”

  Her father wasn’t marvelously sad, though—he was just sad. They had left him behind in Liberty when Suse was thirteen, and that was the Len Sikorsky who still held sway in her mind—the version of her father with a still mostly full head of hair and furred forearms bulging with sinewy muscle. He could do forty push-ups with her little brother, Noah, sitting on his back. And he hadn’t just been physically strong—the father in her head was quick with a smile and a corny joke, and handier than any man she’d encountered since. (He’d provided a formative model of masculine know-how that tended to make the proudly helpless artistes in her sphere—routinely confounded, as they were, by flat tires or continuously flushing toilets—wholly undesirable to her.) The man who greeted them in front of the old cottage was not that man. This man was both skinnier and fatter, with hunched, pigeony shoulders and spindly limbs framing a pregnant gut. This man wore baggy chinos and a SUNY Binghamton sweatshirt and looked like he hadn’t slept in two days, with his bloodhound eye bags and sparse, wiry hair shocked up at angles.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” he said, and they hugged. He smelled good, though, like soap, not sweat and beer, as she’d expected. He shook Seth’s hand, grabbed her suitcase, and lugged it into the house. They followed, sharing a nervous glance.

  The cottage was clean enough, yet cramped and dismal. The shades were drawn, or maybe it was the vine that had been allowed to creep all over the exterior of the windows. Boxes were stacked up here and there according to an unknowable grouping logic. It looked like a place someone was in the process of moving into or out of, it was impossible to tell which, but in either case not a place where a person was currently living—a dim purgatory that gelled perfectly with Susannah’s sense of her father over the past few years. Len said, “You can stay in your old room, Suse. Seth, you can stay in Noah’s, just down the hall there.”

  “Actually,” Seth said, “I was wondering if it might be possible to stay in the hotel, at least for a little while.”

  “You’re not serious,” said Suse and her father, more or less together.

  “It’s just you’ve told me so much about it,” he said to her. Then to her father: “I’d like to know what it was like to stay in such a famous historical site.” Seth went on in this buttering-up mode for a bit, and Suse watched her father’s tense, battered face soften with pleasure.

  “I don’t know.” He looked at Suse. She shrugged. He said, “I’m not sure it’s safe.”

  Seth said, “You mean structurally, or that there could be a maniac in there?”

  Len looked slightly offended. “I’m pretty sure the coast is clear.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, I meant the building’s falling apart.”

  “We’ll be careful. It would really be an honor.”

  “Dad,” said Suse. “If you’re not comfortable—”

  Len said, “It really is a historical site, though I don’t know if the building will be granted that status by the National Registry. I’ve looked into it. At any rate, you’re welcome to camp out there for a day or two. I can set the two of you up in a clean room with fresh linens. Though, of course, there’s no water or electricity. You can use the bathroom here.”

  “Would you mind,” said Seth, “if I wandered around the hotel now?”

  “Be my guest,” said Len, wincing at the inadvertency.

  Len put Seth in the large corner room of the main building—the Presidential Suite, so-called, since Harry Truman had twice occupied it. It was a huge room, with art deco frieze work and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the strip of forest separating the hotel from the sloping green of hole two. They lit candles and drank margaritas Seth had mixed in one of Len’s plastic pitchers. Seth had invited him up to join them and talk, but Len begged off, saying he had work to do—a blatant lie, Susannah knew: he had looked pained even crossing the threshold of his grandparents’ empire. In contrast to her father’s masochistic desire to preserve the place as a historic landmark, she found herself looking forward to it being razed, expunged from memory.

  Seth rose and stretched, saying, “Can you show me where they found the body?”

  “What—now?”

  “Why not now?”

  “It’s dark, and I’d have to take you down to the basement.”

  “Sounds spookalicious.”

  “Seth.”

  “Come on, we’ll take candles. It’ll be like Nancy Drew or something.”

  Knowing how futile it was to try to talk Seth out of a bad idea, Susannah grabbed a candle and led him down the hall. She didn’t want to admit it, but part of her reluctance was simple fright. The flame guttered as they walked down the hall, illuminating peeling wallpaper and a ceiling with brown water damage, like the flesh of rotten fruit. In the stairwell she heard skittering, or imagined she heard skittering, and she certainly smelled something, a pervasive note of earthy decay. It struck her that this was a place they did not belong in now, a place where people should not go.

  Echoing her thoughts when they reached the basement, Seth said, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate, am I right?”

  The basement walls, unadorned limestone brick, were wet with black condensation—in the candlelight, it didn’t not look like the walls were sweating blood. Their wary footsteps were amplified by the slate floor, a ticking that seemed to grow louder until they stopped outside the room where Alice had been trapped and the boy’s remains had been found. “In here,” Susannah pointed.

  It was a tiled room, built in theory to butcher and hang livestock in the kashrut manner, a project that had faded with the death of Susannah’s grandfather, Asher, since no one else had a burning desire to raise animals on the premises. Instead, it had been used as a de facto dry-storage room, by the hotel and by the murderer, who’d stuffed the boy’s body into a cubby meant for cured meats and masked the smell with cleaning supplies.

  “Boo,” shouted Seth behind her, and despite the predictability of it, Susannah yelped.

  “Goddamn it, Seth.”

  “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. This is amazing, though.”

  “Let’s go,” she said, and Seth didn’t argue. They ticked back down the hall, at a pace that felt deliberately mea
sured, as though in conscious refutation of a desire to bolt breakneck up the stairs. On the first floor, they passed through the cavernous ballroom, far too big for their meager candles. The darkness seemed like a sentient thing, hungrily eating the light.

  Seth said, “I can see why lots of people think it’s haunted here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you?”

  The shredded stage curtain flapped in a draft coming from somewhere. “No, not the way you mean.”

  “What way then?”

  “You met my father.”

  “Very poetic.” They started up the stairs to the second floor. “Maybe you should be the writer.”

  “Maybe so,” she said. “But anyway, no, I don’t believe in ghosts.” But why then, she thought, had she hastened so to escape the basement? Had she felt, or imagined feeling, a cool alien wind on her skin? Had her father felt it, in here by himself, slowly cleaning out his legacy a box at a time? The ghost of his grandfather, their family—haunting her father as he haunted her now.

  The work was simple, organized by her father or old Javits, who still occasionally came by and helped out. They were given a task in the morning—collect all the copper bathroom fixtures, for example—then they broke for lunch, usually wilty pre-made egg- or chicken-salad sandwiches from the gas station at the bottom of the hill. After lunch, they resumed the first task, or else were delegated a second, and they stopped around five, at which time Seth would initiate a round of jerry-rigged cocktails that Len would sometimes partake in, though usually not.

  Suse was surprised by Seth. She’d assumed he would get bored after a few days and jump ship, a behavioral pattern she’d seen him exhibit with classes in college, art projects, internships, boyfriends, everything. Instead, he seemed both galvanized and relaxed by the work, and the hotel itself. In the evening, after cocktail hour, Seth liked to roam around the place, scribbling in his notebook. He was usually up before her in the morning, too, already showered at Len’s and set up in the kitchen, cup of coffee and Smith Corona—one of his many affectations—in front of him. It was more work than she’d ever seen him actually do.

  After a month, over an afternoon pitcher of the watery martinis with olive juice he’d thrown together, Seth revealed a page with two words typed in the middle: THE END.

  “Really.”

  “Really. I’ve blazed through it since we’ve been here.”

  “Well, congrats.”

  “Well, thank you. And I have a crazy idea I want to run by you.”

  “Oh God.” Seth’s last crazy idea had been for their apartment to go in together on an ounce of cocaine. That way, he’d explained, they’d have coke for parties, and people who wanted to do some would pay them money. So you want us to become drug dealers, Suse had said. No, no, he’d said, I just want to have drugs and charge people to do them.

  “Hear me out,” he said. “I want to put on the play, and I want to put it on here.”

  “Where?”

  “Here, at the Hotel Neversink.”

  “You’re joking.”

  He stood and detailed the plan: With the play finished, they would put up advertisements for local acting talent. A summer-stock kind of thing. After all, he said, wasn’t there a rich tradition of that around here? Weren’t the Catskills lousy with thespians? Anyway, he said, there were actors everywhere. In fact, he was thinking Susannah could take one of the leads, either Dante or Virgil. Wouldn’t that be fun? Hadn’t it been a long time since she’d gotten to act? Regardless, he had to do it here. He knew if he took it back to New York, the play would just languish in a desk drawer, never see the light of day. They’d rehearse over the next couple of months and put it on before they returned to the city.

  “Put it on where?”

  “Yes, if only,” he gestured down the hall, “there were an eight-hundred–capacity professional-grade theater located somewhere around here.”

  “The hotel is closed, Seth.”

  “So we reopen it. For a night.”

  “My father won’t like this.”

  “You’re right,” he said, tossing his drink back in one swallow. “Your father will love this.”

  Infuriatingly, Len did love it. He pretended not to, but his crow’s feet flexed with gratification as he imagined the building put to use again, filled with people.

  “A fitting tribute,” said Seth. “Give people a last night to really remember the joint by.”

  Len said, “Well, it is an intriguing idea. Let me think about it.”

  “Do. Meanwhile, your daughter and I will begin scouring this noble valley for our players.”

  “Dad,” said Suse, after Seth had gone back to the hotel to change clothes, “don’t feel like the answer has to be yes, here. Seth is full of great ideas, only most of them are terrible. I haven’t even read the play; it might be a joke.”

  “I think it sounds fun. I might even want to be in it. Dante, right? Maybe I could be one of the damned souls. Which circle would you put me in?”

  Looking at him—surrounded by the hotel’s multiplicative clutter, clad in tartan pajama bottoms and terry-cloth bathrobe, frowzy head surrounded by a solar system of dust motes in the old house’s muted daylight—the answer seemed obvious. “Well, the first circle.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “Limbo.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That’s the one for virtuous non-Christians,” she replied, lamely.

  “I think I caught your drift, Suse.”

  She settled into the ratty armchair in front of the TV and he remained standing, his face cast with its habitual mortified look. She said, “I’m sorry, Dad. But what’s the exit strategy here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This can’t be it, can it? You’re still young.”

  “I’m fifty-seven.”

  “Great-Uncle Joe lived to be almost ninety.”

  “I should move to Boca Raton, maybe? Buy a racehorse?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think hanging around here is doing you any favors.”

  As though casting around for some tiny measure of usefulness, Len lifted a box off the floor near the stairs and set it on another pile of boxes beside one of the old bookcases. When Susannah was a child, the lower shelf had been filled with reference books—almanacs, atlases, and, in particular, D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths. She’d spent many summer afternoons greedily poring over it, those bright pictures and wonderful, horrible fables.

  Len said, “Susannah, I don’t expect you to understand this, because you’re young and all you see is potential. So it seems like I’m wasting my life to you, and maybe I am. Maybe I’ve already wasted it. But you can’t understand what it’s like to have a place in the world, however small. What that means. Living here, running the golf course—that’s something. However small and depressing it may be to you, that’s something.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “And if you decide to cast me, I’d prefer to be in whatever circle pride is.”

  She thought for a moment “There’s not really one for it. It’s behind all the other sins. One through nine, take your pick.”

  “Nine, then. Put me down for nine.”

  By June, rehearsals for the play were up and rolling. The cast had been assembled from a motley group of regional actors, or “actors”—it took some stretching to make the appellation fit. Satan—“The Great Producer,” in Seth’s version—was played by a large landscaper named Dale who had once worked as a clown at children’s parties; it was okay, though, since the role’s main requirement was the willingness/ability to stand on one’s head for an hour straight. Len played Homeless Homer, wandering blind and befuddled on the shores of the Lethe, or in this case, the LA River. The plum part of Virgil Merkin was played by a reticent middle-aged paralegal named Virginia, who had actual acting experience in community theater, though this, she said, was by far her biggest role.

  Susannah was granted the role of Dontay, and despite
her initial doubts as to Seth’s talent, she was excited. The play was actually kind of good, a campy and sometimes legitimately funny reworking of the Inferno, with lots of Hollywood in-jokes and pop references. Still, it erred on the side of a certain respect for the original, a dark core of seriousness that surprised and pleased her. She’d been worried it would all just be a big joke to Seth, but he’d produced something with a gravity that belied his customary glib engagement with the world.

  By July, they were two weeks from opening night and running through the production without glitches, or many of them, anyway, from opening to close. Javits had overseen promotion for the event, and there had been a surprising amount of interest in local papers. The Hudson Valley Leader had done a feature, an ode to the late, lamented Neversink. This had, in turn, resulted in a Time Out New York piece, which had echoed into a quarter column in the Times Sunday Style section: “A Legendary Hotel Gets Its Curtain Call.” There was, as they say, a buzz, and Len had been met with a deluge of e-mails and phone calls inquiring after tickets. These questions were difficult to answer, as no one had expected much interest in the production, and ticket planning had not proceeded past asking a local boy to work the front door. Len hired an outside event company that quickly threw up a website and handled phone calls. Within three days, eight hundred tickets had been purchased, and Dontay Does LA was sold out.

  With this news, rehearsals suddenly became tense, and actorly egos emerged. Virginia complained to Suse that Dale wasn’t taking it seriously enough, that he was merely bellowing his lines without inflection; Dale responded that Virginia needed to learn how to project, and she stormed away in tears. Another cast member, Waldron, a sophomore at a yeshiva school in Poughkeepsie, claimed that Cerberus didn’t have enough lines. Enough lines, said Seth. You’re a fucking dog. Yeah, said Waldron, a dog with two heads, though.

  After rehearsal one night, they went down to the Liberty Lounge, a local spot at the bottom of Neversink Hill that advertised “Karaoke Wednesdays with DJ Matt” and “Official APA Action.” Seth was in an expansive mood, ordering shots for the cast members and positioning himself in a tall central seat against the wall; the cheap wood paneling reminded Suse of an unsupervised middle school friend’s basement where she’d gone to watch R-rated movies.