by Sol Stein
“Dr. Brown, we want you to think of this place as hospitable.”
“We are not going to stay here.”
“Yes, I know.” Clete glanced at the diners in the room. “They all said that in the beginning. Why don’t we order now?” He handed two menus across. Margaret refused hers.
“You have to eat,” Clete said. “You might as well take advantage of the circumstances. You’ll see how quickly time will pass.”
Henry now found Margaret’s hand under the table, patted it with a minimum of movement. They’d have to play out the string.
A trace of amusement wrinkled the corner of Clete’s mouth. There would come a time when they’d do without touching. “What would you like to start with?” he asked.
I have to think. I’m reacting emotionally. Margaret and I will have to use our heads to get us out of here.
“I can recommend the California avocados,” Clete said. “You can have them with shrimp filling, or neat with lemon. Why don’t I order them with the shrimp for all of us? That’ll set us up for the chef’s special. It’s a fish mousse, it comes with buttered asparagus.” Clete motioned to the waitress and ordered for them.
“While we’re waiting,” Clete said, “let me tell you about some of the other guests. That man you stopped to talk to? Which, by the way, you shouldn’t have done, right? He used to be a prize-winning composer, poor as a churchmouse, then went to Hollywood to do movie scores. We’re all corruptible, right?”
Henry didn’t answer.
“Dr. Brown,” Clete said, “we have four or five other doctors here. We’ve also got some actors. Way over in that corner, see, that’s—he played the lead in—”
“I recognize him,” Margaret said.
That’s right, Henry thought. Play along so he’ll let down his guard.
“Just in front of him,” Clete said, “that man with the prominent nose,” he tittered, “I guess there’re quite a few like that here, he’s from your part of the country—Pelham, I think. He owns a chain of groceries, small chain but lucrative.”
“How long has he been here?” Henry asked.
“I’m not allowed to answer questions like that. Sorry.”
“Hasn’t anyone come looking for him?” Margaret asked.
“We’re very selective in the people we invite here. None of your taxi drivers, you may have noticed, or mom-and-pop candy-store types. No Las Vegas types either. Middle class and up, people who will appreciate the environment.”
“I think you get people who can afford to stay in a place like this,” Henry said.
“And their kids who come looking for them,” Clete added as the appetizers arrived. “Teenagers, young twenties. Sometimes a brother or sister, but mostly younger people.”
Margaret tried to keep her hand from trembling as she squeezed lemon on the avocado. She glanced around.
“I know what you’re thinking, Dr. Brown,” Clete said.
Margaret tried to look at his eyes.
Clete avoided her gaze. To Henry he said, “Not many young people to be seen. They’re kept in a special building near the farm.”
“What farm?” Henry asked.
“You’ll know soon enough.” Clete put his fork down. “We’re not stupid here, Mr. Brown. You Jews sometimes think everybody else is stupid. Everything here is very carefully planned. Mr. Clifford is a genius. Just wait till someone comes looking for you.”
“He will!” Margaret said.
“You mean your son Stanley at Santa Cruz? Sure. You’ll be sorry if he comes looking. You’ll wish you’d had a kid who didn’t give a damn.”
“I don’t know what you do here,” Margaret said, “but whatever it is is inhuman.”
“You’ll have an opportunity to critique the program some weeks from now,” Clete said. “In the meantime, I suggest you eat. You’ll need the nourishment. Your second week is a dry week.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Easy, easy. No water. No liquids. Except for whatever moisture is naturally present in food. The third week, no food, but you’re back on water. It’s an interesting procedure devised by Dr. Goodson.”
Henry waited for the explanation.
“Please eat. I’m giving you good advice,” Clete said. “Dr. Goodson came here as a guest and has stayed on to conduct some experiments. We know people just don’t appreciate the things they’ve got, you know, the most fundamental things like food and water. Dr. Goodson’s findings show that after one week of liquid deprivation and one week of food deprivation, people appreciate both for the first time in their lives, isn’t that wonderful!”
“You need experiments to demonstrate something that obvious?” Margaret asked.
“To prove his thesis,” Clete said. “He’s a brilliant man. That’s him over there.”
Dr. Goodson, a gray-haired, small man was eating at a long table that accommodated more than a dozen people, all wearing orange armbands.
“Those are all trusties with him,” Clete said. “They have privileges denied to other guests.”
“Like what?”
“They’re allowed to work without supervision. They can wander around the grounds during daylight hours. We’ve got a terrific work project going right now down the southern end.”
“What kind of work?” Henry asked.
“Oh you’ll see, just as soon as your indoctrination period’s over. Your wife will probably work with Dr. Goodson.”
“I will not,” Margaret said.
Clete smiled. “Relax. The important thing is to accept. You’ll be happier here. Ah, there we are.”
The waitress arrived with the fish mousse.
“I really don’t think I can eat any more,” Henry said.
“Oh, it’s delicious,” Clete said, reaching his fork over to Margaret’s plate and taking a small amount. “You see,” he said, flourishing his fork, “it’s not poisoned.”
Clete, he noticed, was not served the mousse, but two hamburgers and a side of french fries.
“I’m not much on European-type food,” Clete said.
“Perhaps you’d better try eating something,” Margaret said to Henry.
The doctor is being sensible, Henry thought. Nourishment was necessary. Eat, eat was the refrain that sang in his head. Were Jewish mothers who pressed food on their children the harbingers of catastrophe? Did they think man was made like a camel so that he could store food for the uncertain future? Margaret wasn’t like that. She was practical. He had to be practical, too. Get the facts. Know your opponent.
“Tell me about yourself,” Henry said to Clete.
Clete looked up with the expression of a child just handed a present. “I’d love to.”
“If it’s not against the rules,” Henry said carefully.
“Oh no,” Clete said. “We’ve really got to get to know each other, don’t we? To start with—go on, you finish that marvelous fish mousse and I’ll talk. My father drove one of those sixteen-wheel interstate rigs, and he used to come home maybe once a week and say how awful Texas was or Illinois or someplace like that. My mother always told me he was lying, that he had a woman in most of those places and talked them down just so she’d think all he did on the road was drive the rig, eat, sleep, and think of her. My own opinion was that he didn’t think of her even when he was home. Sure, he’d shave, eat a tremendous meal, then take her into the bedroom, but if she was anyone else female and handy, he’d have taken anyone else into the bedroom. He got laid the way most people—gosh, Dr. Brown, I’m sorry, I forgot myself.”
“That’s all right,” Margaret said. “Go on.”
“He offered to take me on one of those trips when I was thirteen or so, but Mom said I couldn’t miss school for a week. I think she was worried about what I might see on the road. It’s a terrible place, when you think of it. I mean bus stops and diners and other truckers for company, and nothing to do all day but stare through the windshield. I couldn’t do it. I wanted to enjoy life. I used to go out t
o the beach with a group of boys—we started out doing this on weekends and ended up playing hooky sometimes so we wouldn’t have to wait for the weekend. People would park at the lot near the beach, and we’d offer to watch their cars for them for, you know, a quarter or a half-dollar, depending on what kind of car it was. I guess they figured it was worth it to have air in their tires when they finished at the beach. Well, as soon as we had, say, five dollars each, we’d forget our car-watching and go to some other part of the beach ourselves, sun a while on borrowed towels—we borrowed more towels!—and have chili or tacos for lunch, and then go hunting for snatch.”
Clete looked at Margaret to see how she would react.
She maintained her neutral expression, interest without commitment; Henry seemed to want to hear this story for some reason she didn’t yet understand.
“Our big thing was older women.”
“How old were you at the time?” Henry asked.
“Oh thirteen, maybe fourteen later on,” Clete said.
“How old were the older women?” Henry asked.
“Oh,” Clete said, laughing. “Everything. Seventeen or forty, it didn’t matter. You know those planes would come over the beach hauling some ad? Well, we had our own way of advertising. There’d be four or five of us, and we’d walk down the beach just where the sand meets the water so we’d attract the most attention, and, well, it’s hard to put this, we were all at attention in our bathing suits, and believe me people would notice. And you didn’t have to walk too long or too far before some chick would say something and you’d be going somewhere, sometimes one for each of us and sometimes we’d share. We learned something, which is there are a lot of women in California, some of them real good-looking, who want something different than a vibrator once in a while. Sometimes we’d get money, too, but that wasn’t it. We could make all we needed off of the car-watching.”
Clete took time out for a bite of hamburger.
“I thought surfboarding was the big thing in California.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Clete said, munching. “Excuse me,” he said, holding his napkin up to his mouth. “Shouldn’t talk while eating.”
When he finished he said, “Down around where I lived, south of L.A., you didn’t let good waves go by as virgins. We had to chip in for a surfboard at first, but after a time, we each had one, and one of the guys was sixteen and got himself a heap, and we strapped our surfboards to the roof—you should have seen us in a wind—and we went out to the beach to collect the dough, and the chicks, and the waves. We had some bad times with a truant officer, though, a real snitch. He told my mother a whole bunch of lies, like he gave her more dates that I was supposed to have missed school than I really did—I kept track, you know—and he said we were into dope, which we weren’t, not then anyway. Next time my father came home, my mother laid it on him how I was into a bad bunch, et cetera, et cetera, and he took off his two-inch belt. His pants were too wide for him, and he tried to strop me with one hand while holding up his pants with the other. Well, I just grabbed the belt and yanked it out of his hands and stropped him. You should have seen my mother yell.”
Clete looked to see how his story was going down. “Had to leave home after that,” Clete said. “No two ways about it. I came back later when my mother was out, shoved the stuff I wanted into a suitcase. I wasn’t going to be on my own bareass, excuse me.”
“I would estimate that to have been about eight years ago,” Henry said. “Am I right?”
“Close.”
“What have you been doing since?”
“I got chased a lot—cops, storekeepers who saw me lift something, you know. Worst was the creeps. Can I be frank?”
The waitress brought coffee and a moment’s surcease.
Clete watched the waitress leave. “They’ve got some mighty fine young women working here, I can tell you that. Oh yes, creeps. Well, you know there are types, men I mean, who cruise looking for boys on the loose. It’s not just California, I’m sure you’ve got people like that back home. Well, if you’re hung up for bread, you can close your eyes I suppose. Hell, if you close your eyes, how can you tell whoever’s down there is a man or a woman?”
“I think we ought to go to our room now, Clete,” Margaret said.
“You don’t like what I told you?”
“It’s a pathetic story, Clete. I’m sorry you had to live such a life.”
The truth was she felt light-headed, relaxed, compared to the way she had felt at the beginning of the meal.
It hadn’t been Clete’s story.
Could it have been something in the food? She glanced over at Henry. His eyes looked the way he always looked after he’d had two or three drinks quickly at a boring cocktail party. But they’d had nothing to drink.
“I need to use the washroom,” she said to Clete.
“It’s over there,” Clete said. He didn’t like Margaret. She looked down on him, just the way Jews did. She had no right.
There were two women in the ladies’ room, a dark-haired pretty woman in her thirties, and a graying woman of Margaret’s age.
“I’m Dr. Brown,” she said to both of them. “We just arrived.”
The older woman walked right past Margaret and left the bathroom.
“She’s afraid,” the younger woman said.
“I hadn’t said anything.”
“Newcomers always try to ask questions.”
“Is there anything they put in the food?”
There was suddenly a splash of fear in the young woman’s eyes. She nodded her head quickly, as if not speaking words might keep her safe.
“It was in the fish mousse, wasn’t it?” Clete had taken one small bite. But he’d eaten hamburgers. “What is it?”
The young woman bit her lip and started for the door. Margaret put her hand on the woman’s arm. “What is it?”
“From the farm,” the woman said, a catch in her throat. “Please let me go.”
The young woman’s eyes, a beautiful dark brown, had deep circles under them.
“How long have you been here?”
She said, “More than four months. Please don’t ask me any more.”
“Four months! Was anyone with you?”
The young woman was silent.
Margaret took the young woman’s hands. “Please tell me.”
“My husband.”
“Yes.”
“And my child. A boy.”
It seemed to Margaret that the young woman was on the verge of tears.
“I haven’t seen children here,” Margaret said.
“They remove them to the nursery,” the young woman said.
“During the day?” Margaret asked.
The young woman looked frightened. “I must go.”
“When did you last see your child?”
“When we arrived. Four months ago.”
Margaret put her arms around the woman. “Oh my dear. I’m sorry.”
The door to the ladies’ room opened. An orange-and-blue-uniformed young woman came in. “Lesbian conduct is not permitted here,” she said.
Margaret dropped her arms from around the young woman and approached the staff member. “Where is this woman’s child?” asked Margaret.
The staff member glared at the young woman. “You’ve been talking. Out.”
The young woman seemed terribly frightened. She glanced at Margaret, then swiftly left.
“You, too,” the staff member said.
“Just hold your horses,” Margaret said and went into a booth. She could see the staff member’s feet just outside the booth, waiting. When Margaret was finished, she came out of the booth, washed, and left the room. The staff member was following her.
When Margaret resumed her place beside Henry, the staff member said to Clete, “You’d better keep an eye on her, Clete. She’s trouble.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Clete said to Margaret as the staff member left. Margaret looked around the dining room, trying to spot the
dark-haired woman, whose name she did not know. There she was, eating at a small table all by herself. Where was her husband?
To Clete, Margaret said, “Where are the young children?”
“There are no children, Dr. Brown.”
“What about the nursery?”
“There is no nursery,” Clete said. “Oh, by the way, your husband and I were just exchanging notes about New York and California.”
“Clete’s never been out of California,” Henry said.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” Clete said. “California’s a big and varied place. I like it here. And the people. I don’t mean movie Jews or students, people with real values about the world. There was this one couple who were like a mother and father to me, not just talkers and doers, people with ideas to put into practice, and they taught me a lot more about life than I ever learned in high school.”
“Who were these people?” Henry asked. He thought it a good idea to keep Clete talking, but wondered why Margaret was sitting as if carved out of stone.
Clete’s eyes glistened. “Mr. and Mrs. Clifford. They had more than a dozen of us on their ranch, fed us, gave us horses to ride, taught us what we had to know. Mr. Clifford it was who had the connections and the money to get things started. That’s why this place is named after him. Cliffhaven. Now, Mr. Brown, while we’re having our coffee, tell me about you.”
This is insane, thought Henry. This is the United States. We don’t have things like this here. But at the same time he felt no anger, as if the problem was an abstract one or concerned other people.
He doesn’t realize about the food, thought Margaret.
*
For a long time Henry had put out of his mind what had happened to him at Fort Benning, Georgia, toward the very end of the war. They were housed in two barracks, the officer candidates in his company. On the bottom floor of the first barrack were the trainees whose last names started with Acker and ended with Fielding. Opposite his bunk, across the aisle, lived a tall, slightly pockmarked boy from southern Illinois named Cooper who, one night, brought a clip of live M-l ammo into the barracks and, without the stimulus of alcohol, stood up on his bunk while everybody was cleaning their weapons, shoved the live clip into his rifle, and looking straight at Henry, announced at the top of his voice, “The only mistake Hitler made was he didn’t kill all the fucking Jews.”
