The Seduction of Water

by Carol Goodman

  “So I took the subway into Grand Central and I missed the train I’d meant to take. I had to wait another hour. I was too nervous to sit. I walked back and forth looking up at the ceiling, at those drawings of the constellations. You know what I thought? I thought I might as well be going there, to the Milky Way, to where all those stars were, to another planet as to someplace in upstate New York. I almost took the subway back to Coney Island.”

  My mother must not have known how unbearable this part of her story was to me. She was trying to show, I suppose, all the obstacles fate threw up between her and her eventual destination, but for me it was unimaginable. How could she not get on the train that took her to the Hotel Equinox? To my father. To me.

  “But I didn’t, of course; I took the train upstate. Oh, I almost changed my mind again when we had to change trains at Rip Van Winkle. Such a funny name, like a fairy tale, I thought, but not funny because it was also the name of a prison. The northbound train was delayed and when I saw the southbound train pulling in I almost crossed the tracks and took it back to the city.” Again she would pause. Tauntingly, I thought as a child, drawing out my panic. Later I would think it was funny that this stop was the one I got out at every week to teach at the prison. There were days when, after I’d taught my class, I’d come back to the station and feel an overwhelming urge to cross the narrow bridge spanning the tracks and wait on the other side for the northbound train. It seemed such heresy to leave this station southbound; as if by doing so I was rewriting my mother’s decision and so writing myself out of existence.

  Today, when we stop in Rip Van Winkle, I think of the woman who died on these tracks on June 21, 1949, and wonder if that’s why my mother always paused when she told me this story. Was she editing out the memory of that horrible death? Had she seen it? Did she know Rose McGlynn? As the train starts again, the thing that strikes me the most is that my mother might have witnessed that death and she still got on the northbound train—when the tracks had been cleared of Rose McGlynn’s body—and continued on her journey. I stare out the window at the river and the low blue mountains on the other side, straining for a glimpse of the hotel, but there’s a light haze today rising from the mountains and I miss it and before I’m quite expecting it the conductor calls my stop.

  When I get off the train I recognize the old caramel-colored Volvo station wagon that Joseph has driven and nursed along for so many years. I almost expect Joseph to get out of it and come limping across the parking lot (one of his legs was broken in the concentration camp and it didn’t set right) to wrest my luggage away from me, but I’m sure my aunt said that Joseph had gotten too old to drive. Still, I would be less surprised by the sight of ancient Joseph hopping spryly from the car than by the figure I do see walking around the car, heading toward me with a wide, mischievous grin.

  “What’s the matter, Prof, did you think the management would leave you stranded?” Aidan says, releasing my suitcases from my grip. He swings the smaller bag under one arm and carries the large bag in the same hand, leaving his right hand free to tip an imaginary cap at me.

  “I’m just surprised to see you doing car service—I thought you were bellhopping.” What I’m really surprised at is Joseph letting him drive the beloved and ancient Volvo.

  “That’s what I thought, but your aunt took one look at me and said I’d better help Joseph. Seems most of your bellboys are over sixty and arthritic or skinny college kids who’ve never worked with their hands a day in their lives. So I’ve been given the heavy lifting jobs, carting shrubbery back and forth until Joseph decides where he wants them, hauling wood for the new summerhouses, shoveling gravel for the garden paths . . . not that I’m complaining . . . Want the full chauffeured experience, mum?” he says opening the back door for me and presenting the Volvo’s cracked leather rear seat with a flourish of his gloved hands. “I’ve got a nice champagne chilling in the mini fridge and CNN on the porto-telly.”

  “No, thanks,” I say, opening the front passenger’s door for myself. “Champagne and TV make me carsick. I’ll ride in front. I am staff, you know.”

  “Management, Professor,” he says, getting into the driver’s seat. “And don’t you forget it.”

  “Barely. I’ll be lucky if my aunt doesn’t have me hauling gravel. Look, you might as well drop the Professor Greenfeder bit too. No one at the hotel has called me anything but Iris since I was two.”

  “Not Miss Iris?”

  I shake my head. “My father didn’t want me turning into a hotel brat like Eloise at the Plaza.” Aidan cocks his head at me before starting the car. “Okay,” I admit, “it didn’t work. I still ended up a bit of a hotel brat.”

  Aidan grins. “Joseph calls you Miss Iris. To me at least. I think he’s making it clear you’re above my station.”

  “Oh please. Joseph’s just old-fashioned and . . . well, he sort of looked out for me after my mother died. He must think well of you to let you drive his Volvo.”

  “No choice. I’m the only one about who knows his way around a stick shift. No, I’m afraid your Joseph isn’t crazy about me. I think he’s trying to load me down with enough heavy work so I’ll quit or have a heart attack.”

  “I’m sorry, Aidan, I didn’t mean to get you such a miserable job.” What really bothers me is the idea that Joseph and Aidan don’t get along. Although he never spoke much, I’d always found it soothing just to be around Joseph, and after my mother was gone he’d let me help in the garden. We’d work the flower beds together in companionable silence and overhear all sorts of things the guests said among themselves without noticing us. Joseph never commented on these overheard conversations, but I’d know by a wink or a nod or a grimace what he thought of the guest and I came to trust his judgment about people. “Do you want me to speak to him?”

  “Nah, don’t bother, I think that would make it worse. I’m used to this kind of thing—I’ve had guards who had it out for me who could do me a lot more harm than an old, lame gardener can dish out.”

  I look over at Aidan—we’re crossing the Kaatskill Bridge and he’s looking straight ahead, concentrating on the narrow causeway—and see that flicker of shame that crosses his eyes whenever he talks about prison. Is this maybe what Joseph has picked up? It’s something I imagine that Joseph—after his experience in the concentration camps—might sense.

  “So is the place all aflutter at the new owner’s imminent arrival,” I say, trying to change the subject. “When’s he supposed to get here?”

  “Oh, you mean Sir Harry?”

  “Sir Harry?”

  “Didn’t you know? He was knighted by the queen for his war efforts. He saved some famous paintings from the Nazis and restored them to their rightful owners after the war.”

  “Really? I knew he was a Monuments officer in the war, but I didn’t know he’d been knighted.” What had Phoebe called him? A knight in shining armor? “He doesn’t really expect us to call him Sir Harry?” We’ve come to the crest of the bridge and I can see the blue hills of the Catskills receding before us like ripples in water, a narrow band of cloud separating the mountains from the river so they appear to be floating. Whenever I see them like this I remember that Washington Irving called them a “dismembered branch of the great Appalachian mountains.” They seem somehow transplanted from someplace else, exiled mountains floating in a foreign land. It’s what my mother called the mountains in her fantasy world: the Floating Mountains. And there, rising from a blue fold, are the white columns of the Hotel Equinox, like a Greek temple in Arcadia.

  “Nah, Mr. Kron. But down in the under cellars we serfs refer to him as Sir Harry. Gives the enterprise a touch of class, don’t you think?”

  We’re past the glimpse of Arcadia from the bridge and driving through the town of Kaatskill. I’d heard that some restaurants and antiques dealers had moved to downtown, but there are still more abandoned storefronts than occupied ones and most of the stores are the same sad and dusty gun shops and taxidermists that I remem
ber from my childhood. Hunting and fishing are still the region’s most profitable tourist draws. On the outskirts of town faded and peeling signs advertise hotels and resorts long out of business. We pass the Agway advertising deer feed and kerosene for home stoves. I’m looking for the little green-and-white sign, with its fringe of pine trees carved years ago by Joseph and painted by my mother, that is the Hotel Equinox’s only advertisement. But instead, as we turn off the county route onto the long private drive that climbs the mountain to the hotel, I see a new sign, cream with glossy purple lettering. THE NEWEST JEWEL IN THE CROWN . . . the sign reads, THE CROWN EQUINOX.

  “The Crown Equinox? He renamed it? My aunt didn’t tell me.”

  “He renames everything that’s his,” Aidan says taking a curve a bit too fast, “like God.”

  I take a deep breath and the smell of pine instantly calms me down. Of course the hotel would be renamed. What does it matter? What matters is that the hotel is still here. I roll down the window all the way to inhale more of the warm resiny smell. Through the dense stands of trees I catch the flash of water, the stream coming down from the falls. We’re the only car on the road and except for the sound of the Volvo’s engine and the flowing water there’s silence—a quiet I remember as peculiar to these woods as if the dark dense stand of pines absorbed all sounds.

  “The pines look dry,” I say, anxious to divert the conversation from Harry Kron’s alterations—after all, he can’t change the woods, or the mountain, or the falls. “We had such a rainy spring.”

  “That’s what I thought when I got up here, but apparently we got all the rain in the city and they didn’t. Joseph says it’s to do with the rain shadow . . .”

  “The mountain draws down the clouds but it rains on the other side of the mountain. The east side. I never quite got that.”

  Aidan shakes his head and grins. “Me neither, but I learned pretty quick you might as well question a statue as ask Joseph what he means by something.”

  “And Joseph thinks it’s going to be a dry summer?”

  “Worst drought in fifty-one years, he predicts. But at least the lack of rain should be good for business. No one wants to spend money for a hotel room way up in the country and then sit inside and watch it rain.”

  I nod, even though Aidan is concentrating too hard on the twisting, steep road to see me. It’s true, I think, guests hate the rain. It’s not their problem if the water level in the cisterns is low or the pine needles in the forest are dry as tinder. All they care about is good hiking weather and dry tennis courts, clear sunrises to paint and sunsets to decorate the windows of the lounge while they sip their aperitifs. It’s only when we’re on the final approach to the hotel that I take in fully what Aidan said. The worst drought in fifty-one years. It’s exactly what I read in the paper at the library, about the summer my mother arrived here, only then it had been forty-one years since the last drought. It makes me anxious to arrive at the hotel, to make sure it really is still standing, and that it hasn’t been destroyed by a fire while Aidan and I have made our way up the mountain.

  Of course it hasn’t. As we round the last curve in the road the hotel appears, cool and white on its ridge above the Hudson Valley, its slender Corinthian columns echoing the encircling white pines. No wonder. The wood for the hotel was hewn right on this spot and carved into these columns by local craftsmen. It’s almost as if the northern white pines had sprouted a crown of tropical foliage. “If you look closely,” Joseph once told me, hoisting me up on his shoulders and pointing to the carved capitals, “you can see they mixed acorns and pines boughs in among the Greek frippery. And here, at the base”—he swung me down to the ground and lowered himself slowly to his knees—“if you feel under the paint . . .” He held his large, rough hand over my small one until I could feel the pattern carved in the wood.

  “An arrow!” I said, proud to find this secret mark. “But what’s it for?”

  “Mark of the British Crown,” he said, pointing toward the woods surrounding the hotel. “You’ll find it on some of the oldest trees in the forest. They were meant for the ship masts for the British navy.”

  It’s what the hotel looks like to me now. A white ship floating on a sea of blue sky—the ghost of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon perhaps—hovering above the Hudson, waiting for the right tide to take it home.

  “Look who’s waiting for you,” Aidan says as we enter the circular drive. “He couldn’t stand not coming for you himself.”

  “I think it’s the Volvo he hates to let out of his sight,” I say, but truly I am touched to see Joseph standing in the flower bed framed in the arch of one of his summerhouses, watching our progress along the circular drive. He stands so still, in fact, that for a moment I have the unnerving sensation that he’s a statue, that he’s become an ornament in his own garden, but then he lifts one hand, retrieves a folded red bandanna from his shirt pocket, and passes it over his face. It’s as if the cloth releases the deep creases around his eyes and mouth. He doesn’t so much as smile—I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Joseph smile—as he relaxes his face, looking toward me with the softness he usually reserves for tree roots and tulip bulbs.

  We pull up under the porte cochere and a uniformed bellhop—a skinny, pimply kid who looks about sixteen—reaches to open my door, but I’ve already slid out the driver’s side behind Aidan so I can greet Joseph first. There’s a little cluster around the entrance and I have the feeling that once I go in that way my job as manager will have really started. For just a moment I want to be the hotel brat again.

  “Shayna maidela,” Joseph says hoarsely as I reach up to kiss his lined cheek. Pretty girl. It’s what he always called my mother. “You look more like your mother every day.”

  I shake my head. I know I’ll never be as beautiful as my mother, but I’m always grateful for Joseph’s lie. It’s a lie he tells for himself, I think, as he pulls out the square of red cloth and passes it over his face again, as much as for me. So he can see my mother back here again.

  “You, though, really do look just exactly the same.” This is actually true. Joseph looked ancient, I imagine, from the day he set foot in this hotel. “And look at your roses,” I say waving my arms at the spray of deep red climbers trained over the arch of the summerhouse, knowing that Joseph will be more comfortable with praise for his flowers than for his own person.

  “It’s a wonder they’re doing this well without rain. I’ve been handwatering them from the lake every day.”

  “You’re hauling water up from the lake?”

  “Oh, I’ve had a hand.” Joseph cocks his thumb over his shoulder at Aidan who has come up behind him carrying my suitcases. Behind Joseph’s back Aidan rolls his eyes and mouths, “Thirty buckets a day he has me bring up.”

  “What about the pump from the lake, doesn’t that still work?” This had been one of my father’s inventions, a hydraulic pump that drew water from the lake to supply the hotel with water for the gardens and, most important, in case of fire. Drinking water had always been supplied by a spring near the hotel, but even in wet summers it didn’t give enough water for the gardens and it would never have been enough to douse a fire.

  “Your Mr. Kron has shut it down for repairs.”

  “He’s not my Mr. Kron,” I say defensively, although in truth I had been proud of delivering the hotel’s savior.

  Aidan has come around by my side and is inspecting the roses climbing over the arch. Joseph cranes around and looks at the Volvo standing with the driver’s-side door still open. I think he’s looking for signs of wear in his precious car, but then he looks back at Aidan and me, scowling. “Where’s your man, then? Wasn’t he coming up with you?”

  “Oh, Jack?” I remember now that when we’d come up last summer Jack had followed Joseph around the whole time asking him gardening questions. “He couldn’t come. He was awarded a residency at an artists’ colony. A prestigious one . . .” I falter under Joseph’s stare and, I notice, Aidan’s raised eyebrows.
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br />   “Yaddo?” Joseph asks. “MacDowell?” I shake my head, amused that Joseph has picked up the names of these institutions from listening in on painters’ conversations, and name the somewhat less renowned colony that Jack has gone to.

  Joseph flaps a large, callused hand in the air. “He would have done as well to come here and paint. Keep you company.” Joseph glares at Aidan and suddenly I realize what he’s worried about. He thinks there’s something going on between me and Aidan. And here we are, standing together under the arch of one of his chuppas—Brier Rose, this one’s called—on the exact same spot where my mother and father were married. I take a step out of the shelter of the arch, but Aidan happens to step with me and our shoulders bump together.

  “Well,” Aidan says, “I’ll be getting Iris’s bags upstairs.”

  Even though I’ve told him to use my first name it takes me by surprise to hear him say it.

  “There’s bellhops for that,” Joseph says turning toward the front door. “I’ve got some work for you.”

  While Joseph’s back is turned Aidan nimbly plucks a rose from the bower and palms it behind his back so Joseph won’t see. Then he winks at me. I’m trying to keep a straight face as we walk past Joseph.