“It never mattered to me,” she said. “I wasn’t bar mitzvahed like you.”
“Bat mitzvah,” he said. “If you’re a girl. And how do you know I even was?”
“Because I just know, that’s all. We didn’t look Jewish, and my father said, ‘Why create problems?’ Mother was from a Spanish background, they lived in Paris until the war, and her parents were dead by the time I was born. My father’s parents were Germans, they came in the early eighteen hundreds—I could have come out at the Autumn Ball if I’d wanted, could even join the DAR! Jack wanted it, but I refused. We fit in Tuxedo in most ways, and anyway, why bring it all up? The Jews were chased from England, then Spain and Portugal, and the places that haven’t chased them out have butchered them. Is it any wonder that many who could join just don’t want to belong to the club?”
“It isn’t a club,” he said. “Not everything is a club! That’s the whole damned point.” He could feel it now, the thinning of the air, the need to take shallower and shallower breaths. He stumbled out of bed and went for his suit jacket, but he couldn’t find it, couldn’t get to his inhaler. Crea got calmly out of bed and began to look, finally locating it as Robert had begun to wheeze. He was a portrait of confusion, an unsightly mess in the midst of her sangfroid.
When he’d recovered, and she’d made him a cup of tea, assuring him that she could, at least, boil water, they decided to stop fighting. Neither of them wanted to argue over religion—something that wouldn’t really be relevant to their daily lives. But was this about religion? He could not describe what, exactly, made him feel a divide between them, when their shared, if distant, heritage should have brought them together. Heritage, that was her word. So neat and compact, ignoring the sloppy crossover from blood to culture to religion and back again.
As Robert sipped his tea, he thought of Gwendolyn. Such memories always cost him—he tried hard to avoid thinking of her most of the time, but now he could not help it. He had not known her background until she came for Thanksgiving, and his family had insisted that something was there—he’d seen later, of course, that her father was a Jew, an English Jew with a goyishe name, but none of it had mattered to Robert. So why did Crea’s situation bother him? He could not figure it out. Unless the answer was simply that he did not love her, and he’d loved Gwendolyn, and so had been willing to accept anything that came along. Of course by the time he’d found out anything definitive about Gwendolyn’s origins she was gone. Maybe if he were not Stacia’s son, if he didn’t look the way he did, or have the last name and nose he did, or fight that twang of Jewish Northeast that came, occasionally and without his consent, into his vowels, maybe if he didn’t have all that which marked him so clearly as who he was, then he, too, would choose to leave well enough alone.
TWO WEEKS LATER, Robert’s summer internship at A, L and W ended, and he was called into Phillip Healey’s office. Thus far, only seven associates had received offers, less than half of the summer help, and only one offer in real estate—to Wilton Henry, whose mimicry had clearly done him no harm. The losers moped around the office, regaining face after several profligate long-distance phone calls at the firm’s expense, then picked up their final checks and left early.
Robert stood stiffly in front of Phillip Healey’s desk, his hands grasped together to keep them from shaking. Phillip put Robert quickly out of his misery. “We want you to come on board. In real estate.” Healey grinned, then stepped forward, enormous palm outstretched, adding that he was happy for him. “We had to make some tough decisions. In this climate, an offer is an act of faith.”
“I’m honored,” Robert said. What had been the criteria? He was never sure. But he had done his best. His personal life, he hoped, had not been a consideration. If anything, it would probably be a negative. But as Crea told him, he was one in a long line of boyfriends. For all Jack knew, he’d be gone from her life in a month or two. He had to treat this offer as separate from her, separate from Tuxedo and all of that. Otherwise, what had he gotten himself into? And yet, it was a job, a good job, in a time when jobs were damned hard to come by. As Healey’s expression implied, he was lucky to have this chance. Robert waited for further instructions, but none came. “When do I need to tell you?” he finally asked.
“Tell me what?” Healey replied.
“If I accept?”
“November, in writing,” he said. “This year all our offers have been accepted on the spot.” He paused. “We all, that is the hiring committee, assumed your experience was positive?”
“Oh, yes,” Robert replied. “I certainly learned a great deal.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Down the shore
Robert’s last year of law school would start in three weeks, but in the interim he had meetings at the Law Review; Nan was gone, off to her clerkship, and though he hadn’t made editor, hadn’t even tried, his class would be in charge now, ordering around the underlings. He was back to his schizophrenic lifestyle, so familiar now as to be almost comforting: power and prestige at Law Review meetings by day, cabdriving by night. He had spent more than he’d intended that summer, and he would have to make it up. If he’d been more careful, if he had not tried so hard to keep up with Crea, he could have taken these last few weeks of summer off, but there was nothing he could do about that now. At least he’d used his salary to enjoy himself.
Not ready to give up his claim on the Upper West Side apartment, he would spend the next few weeks sleeping in his bedroom on Eighty-fifth Street, no matter how proprietary Barry had become about the place. Robert’s name was still on the lease — not that he intended to throw his brother out in the cold; rather, he just wanted to reclaim a little bit of what was his, mark his space again.
This was easier said than done, as now there was a third occupant of the apartment who was also marking his territory: Barry had gotten a dog, an English bull with a smashed-in face, enormous shoulders, and the breathing of a prizefighter. The dog was neurotic, having been rescued from starvation and God knows what else on the streets of Brooklyn, and he comforted himself by dragging his enormous balls across the wooden floors of the living room. But the dog was good-natured, despite what he’d suffered, and so Barry had named him Vishniak, after their father—a dubious honor, at best. Robert was determined not to let the presence of the slobbering, farting dog get in the way of his plans.
And with that, he would take a little break from Crea. He looked forward to the time away from her with a sense of relief. He was not always relaxed in her presence; then again, he was not a relaxed sort of person, not like Barry. If asked to choose between a night in his underwear watching TV and eating chips with his brother, or a night out with Crea, well, each had different attractions. But with Barry, Robert could be fully himself.
Robert had not yet told Crea of his job offer, though he suspected that she knew or, worse, that she’d had a hand in it. She always spent the last two weeks of August in Tuxedo. If Robert could, he might join her for a weekend at some point, as a sign of goodwill, but he did not communicate this intention. There had been no fight, no breach, only a strange feeling on his side that he needed time to regroup, and so he made no promises, gave no excuses as to why most of his August would be so full—too full for him to commit himself just yet.
Meanwhile, on that first weekend, he decided to go to Philadelphia. He had not seen his parents since Christmastime. Barry offered his car, and then himself as travel companion; Stacia and Vishniak would be pleased to see both sons at once. But then their mother had an idea—Cece was staying in Atlantic City all week, at the Deauville Hotel, and why didn’t they drive down and see her?
Robert was suspicious. The Vishniak family, and specifically their mother, did not go in for spontaneity. Spontaneity implied the last-minute, the emotional and frivolous, and, hence, the expensive. Yet here she was, on a Wednesday, suggesting a jaunty adventure for the weekend.
“Good idea,” he said cautiously. “I’ll make reservations at the Deauvil
le for two more rooms.”
“We’re not staying there. Cece can stay there; she got fancy in her old age. I’ll call one of the rooming houses.”
“Those days are over, Stacia. Are there even any rooming houses left? Let me pick up a couple of extra rooms at the Deauville for all of us, on my dime.” On his credit card, but it was the same thing. He would not go back to one of those places, if they even existed anymore.
“I’m not sleeping in a seventy-dollar-a-night hotel room when there’s no need. Forget it, mister.”
“Then you sleep on Virginia Avenue, or better yet, go to Oriental with the needle freaks and the whores, I don’t give a shit!” Robert yelled. “But Barry and I are staying at the Deauville.” He hung up the phone, and the situation remained unresolved.
AND SO IT WAS that on the first Friday in August 1977, the brothers Vishniak and the dog Vishniak set off in Barry’s old VW Bug, the front a different shade of blue than the back. In the trunk were two small overnight bags, one flannel dog bed, a box of doggy treats, three cans of beef-flavored Chuck Wagon, and a can opener. Vishniak the dog lay stretched out across the backseat on a towel, eating pieces of pastrami and coleslaw that Barry fed to him from his sandwich, until the animal passed out just as they were entering the New Jersey Turnpike.
Months before, Atlantic City had accepted gambling. The shore of their childhood, the brothers knew, was coming to an end —or at least the outlines of what was left of that shore. Could that be the reason for their mother’s suggestion? Was Stacia getting sentimental on them? It seemed hardly possible. No, Barry said, their parents went to Atlantic City like homing pigeons because they didn’t know where else to go, because Atlantic City was the only place they’d ever gone when they wanted to get away.
They had to make one stop just outside Trenton. Once off the exit, Barry directed Robert along a series of narrow streets and past a junkyard, which dead-ended at a tiny, aluminum-sided single house with several old tires and some discarded baby furniture out front—the kind of place, Barry said, where the pervs on TV cop shows always took their underage hostages. This was where Victor Lampshade now lived, alone, editing pornography and the occasional barely B movie, when he could get any editing work at all.
In his sunny kitchen with its friendly layer of filth, Victor served the two old friends a beer, and they caught up briefly. Then they went back out to the driveway, where Barry and Robert traded their small car for Victor’s 1970 Buick station wagon and transferred dog, dog bed, and various bags into the larger vehicle. Then back onto the New Jersey Turnpike. Victor’s car made a series of squeaking and heaving noises as if it were alive, as if it could breathe and might expire on them at any moment. When they finally reached Disston Street, they double-parked and added to the car: one father, with foldable wheelchair and surprisingly lifelike prosthesis wearing a black shoe and white sock; one mother, with battered faux leather suitcase with duct-taped handle and bottom; a plastic Korvette’s shopping bag full of sandwiches and paper napkins; a warming tray; some plastic dishes; metal forks, spoons, and knives; an angel food cake; and two frying pans, which Robert did not argue over, despite the fact that he was not under any circumstances staying in a place with a kitchenette but would sleep in a regular hotel with clean towels supplied, where he could order off a menu and swim laps in a normal-size pool that did not border a major artery. All this he would have, he told himself, as he shoved a bag of bathing suits under a space in the front seat, if he had to kill her and climb over her dead body to get it. And then, slamming all doors, they got onto I-95, then across the Walt Whitman Bridge and into New Jersey again, heading for the Atlantic City Expressway.
In the glove compartment was Barry’s freezer bag of various concoctions, everything from Percoset and lorazepam to a high-test mixture of hash and marijuana—plus Victor, in addition to his generosity with the car, had left Barry a few quaaludes, either knowingly or by mistake. Robert did not question the need for such supplies, even with their parents in the car, even with the cops stationed notoriously along that particular stretch of the Garden State Parkway, for he knew that a man had to do what he had to do to get through a weekend with his aging parents.
And so they were off, but to where? Their poor father stretched across a rather narrow, bunklike back section, forced there by a need to elevate the bad leg, which was now the one that had not been amputated. He did not complain, even as Stacia, up front with Robert, argued the whole way, with Barry occasionally called on to chime in—Barry, who was getting more and more calm with each mile, so calm that Robert wondered if he’d be able to walk when they got there. Somewhere before the Atlantic City exit everyone took a break, and all that could be heard was the sound of Vishniak the man’s exhausted snoring, and then an attack of flatulence from Vishniak the dog, who, Robert snapped at his brother, really should not be fed any more goddamned pastrami, no matter how lean the deli guy sliced it.
THE DEAUVILLE HOTEL WAS then in its third reincarnation as a Sheraton, but before that it had been, going back as early as the turn of the nineteenth century, the Chelsea Hotel, then the Deauville Hotel-Motel, then the Deauville East, and the Deauville West, as well as the Deauville Motor Inn. Now it stretched out over both sides of Brighton Avenue, a machine with many parts, few of them built in the same year. In the front was an Olympic-size pool, and there was a dining hall and, Robert had heard, a skating rink. Only Cece ever stayed here, and then only in her later years, because her older sister Rachel stayed there. Rachel’s bill was paid for by her children—the infamous rich cousins—so it was important to Cece’s children and grandchildren that in old age she could enjoy some equally small comfort, although Stacia, for one, was loath to understand her mother’s need for such showy accommodations.
Through the summers of the 1940s and 1950s, and into the early 1960s, Robert’s family had occupied one of the numerous three-story kosher rooming houses with a large basement that stretched between Atlantic and Pacific avenues, just blocks from the Boardwalk. Their place was called the Zelmar, a name with a very romantic ring to Robert at age eight or nine, sounding like a movie studio, or a nightclub, when really it was just the combined names of the owners, Zelda and Marvin. The place was divided up into tiny bedroomlike compartments along narrow hallways, with shared toilet facilities on each floor and a shared kitchen on the first floor with tables, all of them occupied by separate clans. Each summer, one woman or another would insult the group by claiming that food meant for her family had been stolen out of the communal refrigerator, or a pot now had to be rekoshered because someone, some mysterious ghost in the night, had taken liberties with a fry pan. The resulting feuds often lasted for decades.
In the midst of such chaos, only the children were content, as children will almost always be at the seashore. The women were so occupied by their squabbles that Robert and Barry and their many cousins could run around as they pleased, at least during the week. On weekends the men came down, exhausted, wanting only to sleep late, play poker in the basement or, alternately, lie on the beach in the sun, their faces covered by wet towels. Visitors, too, arrived on the weekends, and more people used the bathroom. Sometimes on Saturdays the bathrooms were so crowded that the boys had to pee into a plastic bucket or, once, in a hole in the floor, an innovation that caused more trouble than it was worth. Only on the weekends did Robert and his cousins sniff reluctantly at their limitations, aware that way too many people stayed here, that these people left strange clumps of hair in the shower drain and shiny rows of teeth on the sink, and that the hallways sometimes stank of adult decay, that bodies together tended to rot, and that this inconvenience, this communal bad mood, meant something, though they didn’t yet know the word for it, didn’t know that it meant they were poor.
When the Zelmar was sold, in the mid-1960s, Robert asked Cece about it, expecting lamentations and beating of her breast, but instead she’d told him that it was about time, that the Zelmar was a rattrap, and it had been no fun to go on v
acation with all her pots, pans, dishes, and sacks of flour and sugar, chained to the stove while others frolicked on the beach. Into her eighties now, Cece Kupferberg, almost blind and often confused, was liberated in a way her daughter Stacia would never be. The rooming house had been fine for Stacia then, more than fine with her mother doing much of the cooking and child care, and it was fine for Stacia now.
As a child, Robert had seen the Deauville as a signpost of luxury, a symbol devoid of symbolism to him then, a place where patrons could be at the ocean in only a few steps with a front-row seat to the goings-on of the Boardwalk and Convention Hall, and most of all, a place his large family could not afford to stay. Now, at almost thirty years of age, he knew that the Deauville was not just a Sheraton in New Jersey but the name of a resort in Northwest France, a once-posh place not far from Normandy. No, it was the place that Daisy and Tom Buchanan honeymooned; no, it was the basis, along with neighboring Trouville, for the mythical resort in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the series of books that Tracey had first told him to read back in freshman year, the translation of which he’d only had time to attempt with any energy as a cabdriver. He was not an invalid taking a bite of a tea cake, but the whole damned Boardwalk —the beach, with its Kohr’s ice cream stand, giant Mr. Peanut, and Fralinger’s saltwater taffy—all of it was his Madeleine.
After they parked the car, helped their mother out, then woke up their father and lowered him slowly and carefully into his wheelchair, Robert whispered to Barry to go and check them in, quickly and without ceremony, before their mother could make a fuss. Then he stood in silence with his parents in the parking lot of the Atlantic City Deauville, a funny-looking hybrid of too many renovations, encompassing far too many architectural styles, so many as to be not much of anything, just a nondescript, enormous Sheraton. No one said anything for several minutes; they still had no idea where they were sleeping. Then, anxious to get into the shade, Robert finally pulled out his last card. Lowering his voice, because his father sat in his wheelchair a few feet away, Robert asked Stacia how on earth she could do this to their father. “You can’t let him sleep in a decent bed, in a nice hotel, for maybe the first and last time?” He paused. “And what about Cece? How many more weekends do I have with her? Come on, let’s all stay together in style for once; let me do this. The old days are over. The Zelmar is gone.”
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