by Philip Roth
“Labor Day weekend!” my father announces brightly as I swing into the lot next to the service entrance of the “main building.” Aside from the parking lot, which has been resurfaced, and the tumescent pink the buildings have all been painted, little else seems to have been changed as yet, except of course for the hotel’s name. In charge now are a worried fellow only a little older than myself and his youngish, charmless second wife. I met them briefly on the afternoon in June when I came down with Claire to conduct my own nostalgic tour. But there is no nostalgia for the good old days in these two, no more than those clutching at the debris in a swollen stream are able to feel for the golden age of the birch-bark canoe. When my father, having sized up the situation, asks how come no full house for the holiday—a phenomenon utterly unknown to him, as he quickly makes only too clear—the wife goes more bulldoggish even than before, and the husband, a hefty boyish type with pale eyes and pocked skin and a dazed, friendly expression—a nice, well-meaning fellow whose creditors, however, are probably not that impressed by plans extending into the twenty-first century—explains that they have not as yet been able to fix an “image” in the public mind. “You see,” he says uncertainly, “right now we’re still modernizing the kitchen—”
The wife interrupts to set the record straight: young people are put off because they think it is a hotel for the older generation (for which, it would seem from her tone, my father is to blame), and the family crowd is frightened away because the fellow to whom my father sold out—and who couldn’t pay his bills by August of his first and only summer as proprietor—was nothing but a “two-bit Hugh Hefner” who tried to build a clientele out of “riffraff, and worse.”
“Number one,” says my father before I can grab an arm and steer him away, “the biggest mistake was to change the name, to take thirty years of good will and wipe it right off the map. Paint outside whatever color you want, though what was wrong with a nice clean white I don’t understand—but if that’s your taste, that’s your taste. But the point is, does Niagara Falls change its name? Not if they want the tourist trade they don’t,” The wife has to laugh in his face, or so she says: “I have to laugh in your face.” “You what? Why?” my outraged father replies. “Because you can’t call a hotel the Hungarian Royale in this day and age and expect the line to form on the right, you know.” “No, no,” says the husband, trying to soften her words, and meanwhile working two Maalox tablets out of their silver wrapping, “the problem is, Janet, we are caught between life-styles, and that is what we have to iron out. I’m sure, as soon as we finish up with the kitchen—” “My friend, forget about the kitchen,” says my father, turning noticeably away from the wife and toward someone with whom a human being can at least have a decent conversation; “do yourself a favor and change back the name. That is half of what you paid for. Why do you want to use in the name a word like ‘ski’ anyway? Stay open all winter if you think there’s something in it—but why use a word that can only scare away the kind of people who make a place like this a going proposition?” The wife: “I have news for you. Nobody wants today to take a vacation in a place that sounds like a mausoleum.” Period. “Oh,” says my father, revving up his sarcasm, “oh, the past dies these days, does it?” And launches into a solemn, disjointed philosophical monologue about the integral relationship of past, present, and future, as though a man who has survived to sixty-six must know whereof he speaks, is obliged to be sagacious with those who follow after—especially when they seem to look upon him as the begetter of their woes.
I wait to intercede, or call an ambulance. From seeing his life’s work mismanaged so by this deadbeat husband and his dour little wife, will my overwrought father burst into tears, or keel over, a corpse? The one—once again—seems no less possible to me than the other.
Why am I convinced that during the course of this weekend he is going to die, that by Monday I will be a parentless son?
He is still going strong—still going a little crazy—when we climb into the car to head home. “How did I know he was going to turn out to be a hippie?” “Who’s that?” I ask. “That guy who bought us out after we lost Mother. You think I would have sold to a hippie, out of my own free will? The man was a fifty-year-old man. So what if he had long hair? What am I, a hard-hat, that I hold something like that against him? And what the hell did she mean by ‘riffraff’ anyway? She didn’t mean what I think she meant, did she? Or did she?” I say, “She only meant that they are going under fast and it hurts. Look, she is obviously a sour little pain in the ass, but failing is still failing.” “Yeah, but why blame me? I gave these people the last of the golden geese, I gave them a good solid tradition and a loyal clientele that all they had to do was stick to what was there. That was all, Davey! ‘Ski!’ That’s all my customers have to hear, and they run like hell. Ah, some people, they can start a hotel in the Sahara and make a go of it, and others can start in the best of circumstances and they lose everything.” “That’s true,” I say. “Now I look back in wonder that I myself could ever accomplish so much. A nobody like me, from nowhere! I started out, Claire, I was a short-order cook. My hair was black then, like his, and thick too, if you can believe it—”
Beside him Mr. Barbatnik’s sleeping head is twisted to one side, as though he has been garrotted. Claire, however—amiable, tolerant, generous, and willing Claire—continues to smile and to nod yes-yes-yes as she follows the story of our inn and how it flourished under the loving care of this industrious, gracious, shrewd, slave-driving, and dynamic nobody. Is there a man alive, I wonder, who has led a more exemplary life? Is there an ounce of anything that he has withheld in the performance of his duties? Of what then does he believe himself to be so culpable? My derelictions, my sins? Oh, if only he would cut the summation short, the jury would announce “Innocent as a babe!” without even retiring from the courtroom.
Only he can’t. Into the early evening his plea streams forth unabated. First he follows Claire around the kitchen while she prepares the salad and the dessert. When she retires to shower and to change for dinner—and to rally her forces—he comes out to where I am preparing to cook the steak on the grill behind the house. “Hey, did I tell you who I got an invitation to his daughter’s wedding? You won’t guess in a million years. I had to go over to Hempstead to get her blender fixed for your aunt—you know, the jar there, the top—and who do you think owns the appliance store that services now for Waring? You’ll never guess, if you even remember him.” But I do. It is my conjurer. “Herbie Bratasky,” I say. “That’s right! Did I tell you already?” “No.” “But that’s who it was—and can you believe it, that skinny paskudnyak grew up into a person and he is doing terrific. He’s got Waring, he’s got G.E., and now, he tells me, he is getting himself in with some Japanese company, bigger even than Sony, to be the sole Long Island distributor. And the daughter is a little doll. He showed me her picture—and then out of the blue two days ago I get this beautiful invitation in the mail. I meant to bring it, damn it, but I guess I forgot because I was already packed.” Already packed two days ago. “I’ll send it,” he says; “you’ll get a real kick out of it. Look, I was thinking, it’s just a thought, but how would you and Claire like to come with me—to the wedding? That would be some surprise for Herbie.” “Well, let’s think about it. What does Herbie look like these days? What is he now, in his forties?” “Oh, he’s gotta be forty-five, forty-six, easy. But still a dynamo—and as sharp and good-looking as he was when he was a kid. He ain’t got a pound on him, and still with all his hair—in fact, so much, I thought maybe it was a rug. Maybe it was, come to think of it. And still with that tan. What do you think of that? Must use a lamp. And, Davey, he’s got a little boy, just like him, who plays drums! I told him about you, of course, and he says he already knew. He read about when you gave your speech at the school; he saw it in the Newsday calendar of what’s happening around the area. He said he told all his customers. So how do you like that? Herbie Bratasky. How did you know?”
“I took a guess.” “Well, you were right. You’re psychic, kiddo. Whew, that’s some beautiful piece of meat. What are you paying up here by the pound? Years ago, a sirloin cut like that—” And I want to enfold him in my arms, bring his unstoppable mouth to my chest, and say, “It’s okay, you’re here for good, you never have to leave.” But in fact we all must depart in something less than a hundred hours. And—until death do us part—the tremendous closeness and the tremendous distance between my father and myself will have to continue in the same perplexing proportions as have existed all our lives.
When Claire comes back down to the kitchen, he leaves me to watch the coals heat up, and goes into the house “to see how beautiful she looks.” “Calm down…” I call after him, but I might as well be asking a kid to calm down the first time he walks into Yankee Stadium.
My Yankee puts him to work shucking the corn. But of course you can shuck corn and still talk. On the cork bulletin board she has hung over the sink, Claire has tacked up, along with recipes out of the Times, some photographs just sent her from Martha’s Vineyard by Olivia. I hear them through the kitchen’s screen door discussing Olivia’s children.
Alone again, and with time yet before the steak goes on, I at last get around to opening the envelope forwarded to me from my box at the university, and carried around in my back pocket since we went into town hours ago to pick up the mail and our guests. I hadn’t bothered to open it, since it wasn’t the letter I have been expecting daily now, from the university press to which I submitted Man in a Shell, in its final revised version, upon our return from Europe. No, it is a letter from the Department of English at Texas Christian University, and it provides the first truly light moment of the day. Oh, Baumgarten, you are a droll and devilish fellow, all right.
Dear Professor Kepesh:
Mr. Ralph Baumgarten, a candidate for the position of Writer in Residence at Texas Christian University, has submitted your name as an individual who is familiar with his work. I am reluctant to impose on your busy schedule, but would be most grateful if you would send me, at your earliest convenience, a letter in which you set forth your views on his writing, his teaching, and on his moral character. You may be assured that your comments will be held in the very strictest confidence.
I am most grateful for your help.
Cordially yours,
John Fairbairn
Chairman
Dear Professor Fairbairn, Perhaps you would like my opinion of the wind as well, whose work I am also familiar with … I stick the letter back into my pocket and put on the steak. Dear Professor Fairbairn, I cannot help but believe that your students’ horizons will be enormously enlarged and their sense of life’s possibilities vastly enriched … And who next, I wonder. When I sit down at my place for dinner, will there be an extra plate at the table for Birgitta, or will she prefer to eat beside me, on her knees?
I hear from the kitchen that Claire and my father have got around finally to discussing her parents. “But why?” I hear him ask. From his tone I can tell that whatever the question, the answer is not unknown to him, but rather, wholly incompatible with his own passionate meliorism. Claire replies, “Because they probably never belonged together in the first place.” “But two beautiful daughters; they themselves college-educated people; the two of them with excellent executive positions. I don’t get it. And the drinking: why? Where does it get you? With all due respect, it seems to me stupid. I myself of course never had the advantages of an education. If I had—but I didn’t, and that was that. But my mother, let me tell you, I just have to remember her to get a good feeling about the whole world. What a woman! Ma, I would say to her, what are you doing on the floor again? Larry and I will give you the money, you’ll get somebody else in to wash the floors. But no—”
It is during dinner that, at last, in Chekhov’s phrase, the angel of silence passes over him. But only to be followed quickly by the shade of melancholia. Is he teetering now at the brink of tears, having spoken and spoken and spoken and still not having quite said it? Is he at last about to break down and cry—or am I ascribing to him the mood claiming me? Why should I feel as though I have lost a bloody battle when clearly I have won?
We eat again on the screened-in porch, where, during the days previous, I have been making every effort, with pen and pad, to speak my it. Beeswax candles are burning invisibly down in the antique pewter holders; the bayberry candles, arrived by mail from the Vineyard, drip wax threads onto the table. Candles burn everywhere you look—Claire has a passion for them on the porch at night; they are probably her only extravagance. Earlier, when she went around from holder to holder with a book of matches, my father—already at the table with the napkin drawn through his belt—had begun to recite for her the names of the Catskill hotels that had tragically burned to the ground in the last twenty years. Whereupon she had assured him that she would be careful. Still, when a breeze moves lightly over the porch, and the flames all flicker, he looks around to check that nothing has caught fire.
Now we hear the first of the ripe apples dropping onto the grass in the orchard just beyond the house. We hear the hoot of “our” owl—so Claire identifies for our guests this creature we have never seen, and whose home is up in “our” woods. If we are all silent long enough, she tells the two old men—as though they are two children—the deer may come down from the woods to graze around the apple trees. Dazzle has been cautioned about barking and scaring them away. The dog pants a little at the sound of his name from her lips. He is eleven and has been hers since she was a fourteen-year-old high school girl, her dearest pal ever since the year Olivia went off to college, the closest thing to her, until me. Within a few seconds Dazzle is peacefully asleep, and once again there is only the spirited September finale by the tree toads and the crickets, most popular of all the soft summer songs ever heard.
I cannot take my eyes from her face tonight. Between the Old Master etchings of the two pouched and creased and candlelit old men, Claire’s face seems, more than ever, so apple-smooth, apple-small, apple-shiny, apple-plain, apple-fresh … never more artless and untainted … never before so … Yes, and to what am I willfully blinding myself that in time must set us apart? Why continue to cast this spell over myself, wherein nothing is permitted to sift through except what pleases me? Is there not something a little dubious and dreamy about all this gentle, tender adoration? What will happen when the rest of Claire obtrudes? What happens if no “rest of her” is there! And what of the rest of me? How long will that be sold a bill of goods? How much longer before I’ve had a bellyful of wholesome innocence—how long before the lovely blandness of a life with Claire begins to cloy, to pall, and I am out there once again, mourning what I’ve lost and looking for my way!
And with doubts so long suppressed voiced at last—and in deafening unison—the emotions under whose somber portentousness I have been living out this day forge themselves into something as palpable and awful as a spike. Only an interim, I think, and as though I have in fact been stabbed and the strength is gushing out of me, I feel myself about to tumble from my chair. Only an interim. Never to know anything durable. Nothing except my unrelinquishable memories of the discontinuous and the provisional; nothing except this ever-lengthening saga of all that did not work …
To be sure, to be sure, Claire is still with me, directly across the table, saying something to my father and Mr. Barbatnik about the planets she will show them later, brilliant tonight among the distant constellations. With her hair pinned up, exposing the vulnerable vertebrae that support the stalk of her slender neck, and in her pale caftan, with its embroidered edging, sewn together early in the summer on the machine, and lending a tiny regal air to her overpowering simplicity, she looks to me more precious than ever, more than ever before like my true wife, my unborn offspring’s mother … yet I am already bereft of my strength and my hope and my contentment. Though we will go ahead, as planned, and rent the house to use on weekends and school vacations, I am certain that i
n only a matter of time—that’s all it seems to take, just time—what we have together will gradually disappear, and the man now holding in his hand a spoonful of her orange custard will give way to Herbie’s pupil, Birgitta’s accomplice, Helen’s suitor, yes, to Baumgarten’s sidekick and defender, to the would-be wayward son and all he hungers for. Or, if not that, the would-be what? When this too is gone in its turn, what then?