by Vicki Delany
“Or to himself,” Rosemary said.
“I wish all our problems could be settled so easily.”
“I’m now short a dishwasher.”
“Rosemary,” I said. “I have complete and total trust in your ability to locate and hire a suitable replacement. I’m off now.”
I skipped down the steps. “Don’t wait up,” I called to Olivia.
“She won’t,” Aunt Tatiana called after me, “but I will.”
Winston barked his agreement.
Chapter 14
Jim Westenham drove a Plymouth Cranbrook Club Coupe, with a blue body and white roof and trunk.
“Nice car,” I said.
“Sadly not mine. It’s the paper’s pool car.”
“Your paper must be doing good business.”
“Good enough. Not good enough to let me keep it. They’re demanding I bring it back.”
“Can’t you tell them you’re after a story?”
“Chasing communists in the Catskills?”
“Maybe not that story,” I said.
He held the passenger door open for me, and I slipped into my seat. He’d dressed for the occasion in a smart charcoal suit of a lightweight summer fabric and a white shirt, with a blue striped tie and matching pocket handkerchief. The white shirt could have used the touch of an iron, and I smiled to myself, thinking of him stuck in a quickly tidied-up storage room.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“I asked the bellhop to recommend someplace nice, and he suggested the neighboring hotel. Not too far to go, and he said the restaurant’s the best in the entire area, so I called and made a reservation.”
“The neighboring hotel? You don’t mean Kennelwood? One of my employees said Kennelwood had the best restaurant in the entire area?”
“Is that a problem? We can try someplace else, if you’d rather.”
“No. No problem. I should probably see what makes it the so-called best in the area.”
Kennelwood Hotel is older, grander, flashier, and bigger than Haggerman’s. It’s the property next to ours, only a few minutes away by foot through the woods or by boat across the lake, but driving the winding roads takes twice the time.
The long sunset of a late June evening threw golden light through the trees lining the road as we drove up the hill. To my left I caught brief glimpses of the lake, blue and calm. We crested the hill and the complex came into view. Two buildings, each six stories tall, backed onto a pool about four times the size of ours. The lake spread out in front.
Jim drove up the sweeping driveway, lined with lampposts and trimmed bushes. A bellhop hurried to open my door while Jim tossed the keys to another. We walked up the grand staircase, and a third bellhop held the door for us with a slight bow.
“Fancy place,” Jim said.
I harrumphed.
The lobby was so big it had a fountain in the middle, with a huge chandelier hanging from the second-floor ceiling above it. The drapes on the long windows were gold, tied back with gold ropes and tassels, the chairs and couches upholstered in golden fabric. Six-feet-tall imitation marble statues of graceful long-limbed women were mounted on pedestals on either side of the long mahogany reception counter, and the ashtray stands dotted around the room were covered in gold gilt. Ornate was the word that came to mind. Ornate and lavish. And, to my eye, stiff and formal and unfriendly. I found the décor intimidating, rather than welcoming. Haggerman’s, I liked to think, was welcoming. Welcoming and friendly, offering our guests an extra touch of luxury, and a feeling of being cared for, that they wouldn’t get at home.
“Fin de siècle European decadence, badly imitated,” Jim mumbled to me.
I gave him a grin. “Precisely what I was thinking. At our place we want to give the feeling of an all-American homecoming. If your home’s a bit fancier and nicer than it actually is. And you have servants catering to your every wish all day long.”
“Don’t we all have that at our homes?” Jim said.
I tried not to stare as we followed the signs to the dining room. The maître d’ took Jim’s name, made a swift tick on the sheet in front of him with a flourish, and escorted us to our table. We were stuck in a dark corner, near the kitchen, but I didn’t mind, as it was a table for two. Most of the big hotels, including ours, had few if any small tables, and guests were expected to share if they weren’t part of a large group. Once we were seated, I studied everything, full of professional interest. The room was huge; it would probably seat something like five hundred people. Gold and brown floor-to-ceiling drapes along one wall were pulled closed, and the room was lit by wall sconces and multipoint chandeliers. The linens were clean and starched, the cutlery polished, the pickle tray on our table full, the waiters smartly dressed and decently groomed.
“Nice place,” Jim said.
I had to admit it was.
“But you don’t like it,” he said.
“I like it fine. The owner hasn’t been all that welcoming to Olivia and me, that’s all.”
“His loss,” Jim said.
A waiter put typewritten menus in front of us and filled our water glasses. “Can I get you a drink? The bar’s open.”
Jim asked for bourbon on the rocks, and on a whim I ordered a grasshopper. I was having a night out. I was supposed to be having fun.
Jim had also been looking around, taking it all in. “Older crowd here than at your place. I don’t see a lot of young couples and not many teenagers. Plenty of grandparents, though.”
“That might be good for us, long term,” I said. “Families come back to the Catskills year after year, generation after generation, and they usually go to the same place out of habit. Many people still go to the hotels their great-grandparents went to back in the twenties, but some families are looking for a change. As the old people pass on or get too frail to make the trip, the younger ones try to find something new, something more suited to their age or their tastes. Hopefully, for some of them, that will be Haggerman’s.”
“It must be a hard life,” he said, “running a hotel.”
The waiter placed our drinks in front of us. “Ready to order?” he asked. He took our full order—juice to dessert—and wrote it carefully on his pad. All around us conversation buzzed, waiters shouted orders into the kitchen, glassware and cutlery tinkled, but I felt as though Jim and I were tucked into a little alcove all our own.
“I work a lot harder than I ever thought I would,” I said. “Pretty much all the time, come to think of it. But that only lasts a few months of the year. On the bright side, I get to live in this marvelous place, although I don’t get a lot of time to enjoy it in the spring and summer. I’d always lived in the city before coming here, Brooklyn first, then Manhattan after I was married. When Olivia inherited Haggerman’s and asked me to come with her and run it, I was horrified at the very idea of leaving the city. But it didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the mountains, the lakes, the woods. I’ve been here only two years, and I don’t think I can go back to the city.”
I took a sip of my drink, sweet and delicious, and realized Jim was smiling at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Am I talking about myself too much?”
“Not at all. I wouldn’t have invited you to have dinner with me if I didn’t want to hear what you have to say.”
“Most men like to talk about themselves.”
He roared with laughter. “Is that what women think? They’re probably right. I’m a newspaperman. Asking questions is what I have to do. Asking questions of”—he lifted his glass in a toast—“beautiful women is what I like to do.”
I dipped my head.
The waiter put our juices on the table. Orange juice for Jim and tomato cocktail for me.
“Looks watery to me,” Jim said, and I laughed.
“You and your mother live here year round?” he
asked.
“Yes, we do. Our house and the main building are winterized, and this year we’re planning to keep the hotel open in the winter. We’ll close all the cabins and the top floor of the hotel, and operate with reduced staff, of course. We’re going to try to attract guests for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s celebrations. Skiing and skating are becoming popular around here, so we’re hoping to take advantage of the wooded winter wonderland surroundings of our property. That’s the plan anyway.”
“Sounds like a good one.”
Our pickled beet salads arrived, along with bowls of clear consommé. Little noodles cut to look like letters of the alphabet floated in the soup.
I asked Jim about the newspaper business, and he talked about that with obvious pleasure. “Best job in the world for a curious guy like me,” he said.
For our main courses I had the Italian spaghetti, and Jim had ham with scalloped potatoes. I didn’t mention that the spaghetti served at Haggerman’s was far better than this. I hadn’t enjoyed my soup much either, and the bread roll had been slightly stale. The consommé was largely tasteless and, unlike here, my kitchen reserved alphabet noodles for the children’s dining room.
“How’s the ham?” I asked my companion.
“Good. Although I suppose I should say not as good as the ham at Haggerman’s.”
“Have you had the ham at Haggerman’s?”
“No. But I’m sure it’s good. You have an expressive face, Elizabeth. I see you studying your food, everything around us, making comparisons. Tell me about your late husband,” he said suddenly. “I’d like to hear about him. If you want to talk about it. Was he killed in the war?”
Jim had ordered a bottle of wine to go with our dinner, and I grabbed for my glass. I took a breath. “I don’t talk about it. About him.”
“I’m sorry,” Jim said. “The grief must still be fresh.” He bent his head over his plate and scooped up the last forkful of potatoes, to give me a moment’s privacy.
I never talk about Ronald Grady. Not to Olivia. Not to Velvet. Not to Aunt Tatiana. Especially not to them.
I didn’t tell anyone I wasn’t grieving his death.
I was glad of it and consumed by guilt because I was glad.
I’d married too young and far too quickly. I’d been nineteen; Ron was twenty-five. I’d known him not much more than a month before our quick registry-office wedding. It was wartime, 1944, and all around us couples were rushing for the altar before the man was shipped out. Olivia didn’t approve, and she told me so.
“Marry in haste, repent at leisure,” she said as she helped me adjust the small veil on the beige hat I wore to be married in. Aunt Tatiana said nothing, but she watched me dressing for my wedding through her dark Russian eyes, and she did not smile. Velvet, in contrast, had thought it all sooooo romantic and called me the luckiest woman on earth. Ron was dreadfully handsome in his uniform, with bottomless brown eyes and a mustache like Clark Gable’s.
Olivia and my father had married when they were both eighteen, also in a rush of young love. It hadn’t lasted long. As she zoomed toward the big time on Broadway, his career as a jazz musician remained stranded in smoky clubs with below-street entrances. It hadn’t been an angry or bitter divorce. They simply realized they were on different life paths and walked away from each other. I was handed over to Aunt Tatiana and Uncle Rudolph to raise, my mother hit the stage and the screen, and my father continued to be a regular presence in my life. Picnics at the zoo, trips to art galleries or museums or just the local park. Some months, I saw more of him than of my mother. I’m still in touch with him, and I’m hoping he’ll come for a visit in the off-season. I know Olivia would welcome him.
I hadn’t feared a quick, impulsive marriage because I’d seen how, when love ended, my parents continued to be fond of each other, but I’d been wrong.
Ron Grady had been a charmer. He’d certainly charmed me, straight to bed and then to the altar when he got word that his unit would soon be needed in Europe. We’d had one month of married life. One month of him not coming home until the sun touched the horizon, of drunken rages, of smelling of cheap perfume with lipstick stains on his collar. One month of my own wages disappearing from my purse and him telling me I was too stupid to keep track of how much I was spending.
He’d never hit me, but he was quick to fly into a rage and throw things around, glassware, cutlery, a pretty little china statue my grandmother had given me on my twelfth birthday. The blows, I feared, were coming.
I said nothing to the women who loved me—Olivia, Tatiana, Velvet. I was too ashamed.
And then he was gone. Ten months later the telegram arrived. He’d died on the twelfth of May. The war in Europe had been over for five days. I’d gone out that night, and for the first time in my life—and hopefully the last—I’d gotten falling-down drunk.
Not because I was grieving but out of sheer relief that he wouldn’t be coming home. Once his mother, a hollow-eyed, hard-faced, bitter woman, realized her son had not left me pregnant, I never heard from her again. I burned our wedding photograph and kept only his last name and my cheap wedding ring as a memento of what had been a dreadful mistake.
A few months later one of Ron’s “buddies” paid a call to me. He brought his wife and clearly both of them had stopped at more than one bar on the way. The buddy told me Ron died in a bar brawl. He and another guy had gotten into a fight over a German woman, and Ron had fallen and hit his head. When his wife went to the bathroom, Ron’s “buddy” told me if I needed a man to “support me,” he’d be happy to help.
Wink.
“Elizabeth Grady!” A voice boomed above my shoulder, pulling me out of my memories. “Isn’t this an unexpected pleasure.” Jerome Kennelwood, nattily dressed in a single-breasted tuxedo with a narrow black bow tie and a thin line of pocket handkerchief.
Jim leapt to his feet.
“Bobby,” Jerome said to the waiter who’d just brought our desserts. “Do you know who you’re serving here?”
“No, sir. Mr. Kennelwood, sir. Should I?” Bobby peered at me. I tried to smile.
“None other than Liz Grady. The little girl who’s trying to make a go of Haggerman’s.”
Bobby looked highly disappointed. He’d been expecting a movie star at the least.
“The lady who’s doing a good job of it,” Jim said.
“My name is Elizabeth,” I said. Never, never, never Liz, or even worse, Lizzie. Ron had called me that. I didn’t like it, even then, but Ron had never much cared what I thought.
“Bring Liz and her friend another bottle of wine, Bobby. Get something better than that plonk. And be quick about it.”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Kennelwood, sir.” The waiter scurried away. I noticed the other waiters suddenly giving our table a wide berth.
“Time will tell, eh?” Jerome said to Jim. He turned to me. His tuxedo might have been expensive, but he’d lost a lot of weight since buying it. His eyes were watery, his thin hair greasy, he’d missed a couple of patches when shaving, and the cuffs of his white shirt showed traces of ground-in dirt. He’d suffered a heart attack over the winter, I remembered.
His smile was as fake as his overly large teeth. “I heard you had an unfortunate accident at Haggerman’s the other day. Although from what the police and the paper have to say, it might not have been an accident. Did you know the guy was a communist?”
“I—”
“Communist?” Jim said in a voice designed to carry. “You mean there are communists here? At this hotel?”
Jerome’s eyes narrowed. He looked at Jim. “Enjoy your dinner.” He walked away, and Jim dropped back into his chair.
“I see what you mean. Not nice.” He nodded to the dish of rainbow sherbet in front of me. “Do you want to leave?”
“Be run out of town, you mean? No. I’ll enjoy the rest of my meal. Although I don’t
think I want any more wine.”
“I’ll ask the waiter not to uncork the bottle. If Kennelwood’s paying for it, we might as well take it with us. Provided it’s a good bottle, that is. Not like the first one we got.”
Over our desserts and coffee we chatted about life in the Catskills.
“Place is a gold mine,” Jim said. “Every second person, maybe every person, in the five boroughs wants nothing but to get out of the city in the heat of the summer. And here you are a couple of hours away by car or train, with woods, lakes, and cooling mountain breezes. It can only go from strength to strength. The Catskills is the place to be, Elizabeth.”
“My mother and I hope so.” I’d be fine, although not happy, if Haggerman’s failed and I had to go back to the city and find a bookkeeping job, but Olivia had nothing else to fall back on. I lifted my napkin off my lap, touched it to my lips, and excused myself. Jim stood politely.
The dining room was emptying out. I’d read the bulletin board when we came in to see that none other than the comedian Milton Berle would be performing tonight. Even Olivia’s contacts weren’t enough to get us Berle, and his fees were far out of our price range. Perhaps naively, I hoped that when people like Charlie Simmonds hit the big time, they’d remember the places that had given them their start.
Then again, probably all Charlie Simmonds would remember about Haggerman’s was that he’d been told he couldn’t leave as he was under suspicion for murdering a guest.
The ladies’ room was full as diners tidied themselves up. I took my earrings off and gave my earlobes a nice rub. Those green glass earrings were lovely, but they were heavy and they pinched. Two gray-haired women at the mirrors next to me chatted.
“I tell you, Dorothy, I’m disappointed. Highly disappointed.”
“What’s happened now?”
“As you know, I like to get an early start on the day. First in the pool, every morning, even before I go into breakfast.” She shook her head. “Standards around here are slipping, Dorothy. The pool hadn’t been cleaned when I got there this morning. There were bugs—big nasty flies—floating on the surface of the water.” She shuddered. “And glasses, dirty, empty glasses, still on the poolside tables. Tonight, my bread roll was completely stale. It wasn’t fit to feed to a pack of starving birds.”
