“It’s funny,” she said, turning to him. “A little girl.” He had never heard her talk so softly. “Did you see her? Like she was just some piece of cardboard that had been painted like a child. It’s too terrible,” she said. “To happen here? In the mountains? Just playing like that? All right, so a child is sick, it’s awful, but a little child gets sick and sometimes there’s nothing you can do and the child dies.” He was not sure she was talking to him. “But here, in the mountains where you come for fun, for it to happen here? It’s awful—terrible. A thing like that.” She looked directly at Preminger but he could not be certain that she saw him. “Did you see the mother? Did you see the fright in the woman’s eyes? Like, ‘No, it couldn’t be.’ I was there. The child wanted an ice cream and the mother told her that her lips were blue, she should come out. She looked around for a second, for a second, and when she turned around again…” Mrs. Frankel shrugged. “How long could she have been under—five seconds, ten? Is the pool an ocean, they had to search for her? No, it’s more important the lifeguard should be talking to his girl friends so when he hears the screaming he should look up and holler ‘What? What? Where? Where?’ Who’s to blame?” she asked him. “God? We’re not savages. Let’s fix the blame a little close to home.”
He shifted under her direct stare. She had recovered her stentorian coloratura and for this he was grateful. She was running true to form again and her elegy or whatever it had been was only a kind of interlude, as though the woman caught her breath not by ceasing to talk but by lowering her voice. However, her question still hung in the air. He didn’t want to answer it but that didn’t seem to make any difference to these people. At least, then, he could give his testimony on the side he believed in.
“All right, Mrs. Frankel,” he said. “What is it? All morning you’ve been hinting at some dark secret. Is it that the lifeguard wasn’t old enough?” His voice sounded louder than he had intended. He heard it as though he were listening to a recording he could not remember having made. “Is that what’s bothering you? Is that the little secret you’re determined to let everyone in on? Well, relax, it’s no secret. Everybody knows about it. It’s too bad, but even if the kid had been eighteen instead of sixteen the little girl would still have drowned.”
“The lifeguard was only sixteen?” the woman asked. It was impossible that she didn’t know. She must have guessed, must have suspected it. That had to be the reason for her outrage.
“The lifeguard was only sixteen?” she repeated. It was too much; he couldn’t be the one she learned it from. “Only sixteen?” she insisted.
“I don’t know how old he is,” he said, reneging. “That’s not the point. It was an accident. What difference does it make how old he is?” Only now was he conscious that the boy had not left them. He was standing about twenty feet away, listening. Preminger remembered seeing Bieberman stand in the same attitude just that morning, his head bowed low under the weight of his embarrassment, buffered from his enemies by the social director. He was waiting for Preminger to go on with the defense.
Blithely, however, he changed the subject. For no apparent reason he began to tell Mrs. Frankel of the walk he had just taken, of his vague plans for the future. She listened politely and even nodded in agreement once or twice to things he said. He remained with her in this way for about ten minutes, but when he started to leave he caught for a moment Mrs. Frankel’s angry stare. “It’s better we should all get out,” she said.
He lay beside Norma beyond the closed-in tennis court. He watched the moon’s chalk-silver disintegrate and drift icily to the lawn. They had not spoken for a quarter of an hour. He did not know whether she was asleep. The ground was damp. He could feel, beneath the blanket, the evening’s distillation like a kind of skin. He raised himself on one elbow and looked at Norma’s face. Her eyes were closed and he lay back down again and watched the sky.
The lawn was deserted; the exodus of late that afternoon had ended; the last cars from the city had gone back. He thought of Bieberman, alone beside the pool, and could still see the old man’s awful face as he waved at the departing guests, pretending it was only the natural end of their vacation that took them back.
He pulled a blade of grass from beside the blanket.
“The slob,” he said.
Norma stirred, made a small sound.
Preminger only half heard her. “He stood in the driveway and waved at them. He shook their hands and said he’d save their rooms. He even told the bellboy where to put everything.” He tore the grass in half and threw one piece away. “The slob. I was ashamed for him.”
He rolled the grass between his fingers. Feeling its sticky juice, he threw it away in disgust. “Even the social director. Did you hear him? ‘I’m sorry, Bieberman, but I’ve got to have people. I’ve got to have people, right?’ And Bieberman told him, ‘You’re a fine actor. You give a professional performance.’ It made me sick. And Mrs. Frankel didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. He gave himself away.”
“The poor thing,” Norma said. Her voice was low and cool, not sleepy at all. He turned to her and smiled”
“Bieberman?”
“I meant the little girl,” she said. Her voice was flat. He studied her pale face and the skin, which looked cooler and softer than he remembered ever having seen it. She seemed smaller somehow, and, in a way he did not mind, older. It’s the moon, he thought.
He touched her cheek with his fingers. “You would have gone with them, wouldn’t you?” he asked softly. “You would have gone with them if I hadn’t asked you to stay.” She didn’t answer. She turned her head and his hand dropped to the blanket. “You’ve done that twice today,” he said.
“Have I?”
He looked at her body. She lay straight back, her arms at her sides. He rolled toward her quickly and his arm fell across her breast. She tried to move away from him, but he grabbed her arms and pinned them to her sides and kissed her on the mouth. In a few minutes, he thought, my vacation begins. A nice abandoned Jewish girl in a nice abandoned Jewish hotel. She shook her head ferociously. His face fell on top of hers and he forced it with his weight toward the blanket. He felt her body stiffen, her arms go rigid. Then her arms shook in a rage against him and he was helpless to hold them at her sides. She was very strong, and with a sudden convulsive movement she threw him off. She sprang up quickly and stood looking down at him. She seemed unsure of herself.
“Get away from me,” he said.
“Richard…”
“Get away from me.”
“Richard, I didn’t want to go back.”
“Get away.”
“All right,” she said quietly. She turned and started away.
“There she goes,” he called after her. “Don’t touch her, she’s in mourning.” His anger rose in him. “Hey, come back, I’ve got an idea. We’ll have a lynching. We’ll string the kid up to the diving board and hang Bieberman from a beach umbrella.”
She was moving from him quickly, back to the hotel. He got up and ran after her. He put out his hand to stop her but she eluded him and he saw himself stumble forward, his empty hand reaching toward her. He recovered his balance and walked along a little behind her, talking to her. He felt like a peddler haggling, but he couldn’t help himself. “The drowning loused things up, didn’t it? It killed a stranger, but nobody around here knows from strangers.” She broke into a run. From the way she ran he could tell she was crying. He ran after her, hearing her sobbing. “Let’s blame someone. The lifeguard. Bieberman. Me. You want to know what to blame? Blame cramps and lousy Australian crawl.” As he approached the hotel Preminger halted. Norma walked into the hotel and Preminger slumped on the steps. He clapped his palms together nervously in raged applause. That kid, that lousy kid, he thought. He thought of his tantrum as of a disease which recurs despite its cure.
When the world had quieted again he knew that he was not alone. He realized that he had been aware of someone on the porch when he turned from Norma
and let her go inside. He looked around and saw in the shadows about twenty feet away the silhouette of a man propped against the side of the porch. In the dark he could not make out his face.
“Bieberman?”
The man came toward him from the dark recesses of the porch. He walked slowly, perhaps uncertainly, and when he passed in front of the hotel entrance he was caught in the light slanting down from the interior like a gangplank secured to the building.
“Ah, Preminger.” The voice was deep and mocking.
“Mr. Bieberman,” he said softly.
The man stayed within the light. Preminger rose and joined him there nervously. “It’s about time for bed,” he said. “I was just going up.”
“Sure,” Bieberman said. “So this will be your last night with us, hah, Preminger?”
Preminger looked at him, feeling himself, as they stood together within the close quarters of the light, somehow under attack. “I hadn’t planned for it to be.”
“Planned?” The old man laughed. “The girl will be going in the morning. What will there be to keep you? The food?” He laughed again. “You’ll leave tomorrow. But I thank you for staying the extra day. It will make me a rich man, and I can go myself to a hotel.” He noticed the bottle in Bieberman’s hand. The old man followed his glance and looked up, smiling broadly. “Schnapps,” he said, holding up the bottle. “A little schnapps. I’ve been sitting here on my porch and I’m on a deck chair on the Queen Mary, which in honor of my first voyage over is keeping a kosher kitchen. The only thing wrong is that once in a while someone falls overboard and it upsets me. If we weren’t three days out, I would call my wife she should swim up from the city and we would go back.’
Preminger smiled and Bieberman offered him the bottle. He took it and, unconsciously wiping off the neck, began to drink.
“I guess I will be going,” he said.
“I guess you will.”
“I shouldn’t be here,” Preminger said. “It was supposed to be a lark. I didn’t come slumming, don’t think that. But it didn’t work out. I guess I just wanted to fool around.”
“Yeah,” Bieberman said. “I know you guys. You’ve got a suitcase filled with contraceptives. Fooey.”
“I just wanted to fool around,” Preminger repeated.
“Nobody fools. Never,” Bieberman said.
“You said it,” Preminger said.
Bieberman went back into the dark wing of the porch. Preminger followed him. “I don’t want you to think I’m leaving for the same reason as the others. I don’t blame you.” The old man didn’t answer. “I really don’t,” he said.
Preminger almost lost him in the shadows. “A boy who likes to fool around doesn’t blame me,” the old man said.
Preminger paused. “Well,” he said lamely, “good night.” He went toward the door.
“Preminger, tell me, you’re an educated person,” Bieberman said suddenly. “Do you really think they could sue me?”
He turned back to Bieberman. “I don’t see how,” he said.
“But the lifeguard—the boy. If I knew he was a boy? If I knew he was sixteen? If they could prove that, couldn’t they sue?”
“How could they find that out?” Preminger said uncomfortably.
“Well, I wouldn’t tell them. I wouldn’t run an ad in the Times, but if they knew it, could they sue me?”
“I suppose they could try, I don’t know. I’m no lawyer. I don’t see how they could find you responsible.”
“My guests did.”
“They’ll forget.”
“Ah,” the old man said.
“Next year your place will be full again.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” he said sadly.
“Wait a minute, it wasn’t your fault.”
“It made them sick,” Bieberman said so softly Preminger thought he was talking to himself. “All they could do was get away. Some of the women couldn’t even look at me. Sure, that’s why the Catskills and Miami Beach and Las Vegas and all those places are so important. That’s why a man named Bieberman can have his name written across a hotel, and on towels.” Preminger couldn’t follow him. “I mean, what the hell,” he said, suddenly talking to Preminger again. “Does Spinoza get his name written on towels?”
“Why don’t you come inside?” Preminger said, offering him his arm.
“When a little girl drowns in such a place where nobody must drown, where you pay good money just to keep everybody on top of the water, it’s a terrible thing. I understand that. You’re not safe anywhere,” Bieberman said. “Not anywhere. You go to a football game and all of a sudden the man on the loudspeaker calls for a doctor it’s an emergency. Not during a holiday, you think. You think so? You think not during a holiday? You think so? In a forest even, by yourself, one day you notice how the deer are diseased or how the rivers are dried up—something.”
“Come on inside, Mr. Bieberman,” he said.
“Preminger, listen to me. Do me a favor, yeah? Tomorrow when you get back to the city, maybe you could call up those people and tell them what the lifeguard told you. You’re the only one who knew about it.”
The old man lighted a cigarette. He could see the glowing tip pulsating softly as Bieberman spoke. He tried to see his face but it was too dark.
“You’re crazy,” Preminger said finally.
“I’m responsible,” he said sadly. “I just don’t have the nerve.”
“Well, I’m not responsible,” Preminger said.
“You are, Preminger.”
Preminger got up quickly. He walked across the darkened wing of the porch and came abruptly into the slanting yellow light. Bieberman called him and he turned around. “Preminger,” he said. “I mean it, tell them you heard me brag once how I saved a couple hundred bucks.” Preminger shook his head and started carefully down the steps, afraid he would stumble in the dark. “Preminger, I mean it,” Bieberman called.
He took the rest of the steps quickly, forgetting the danger. He discovered, surprised, he was going toward the empty pool. So many times now, after he had already made them, he had discovered the pointlessness of his gestures, his un-willed movements. Ah, I am abandoned, he thought, surrendering. He turned around. A light was on in Norma’s room. He could still hear Bieberman calling his name. He stood among the beach umbrellas on the wide dark lawn and listened to the old man’s desperate voice. “Preminger, Preminger.” It was as if he were hiding and the old man had been sent out to look for him. “Preminger, I mean it.”
All right, he thought, all right, damn it, all right. He would wait until the morning and then he would go to Norma’s room and apologize and they would go back to the city together and he might investigate some jobs and they might continue to see each other and, after a while, perhaps, he might ask her to marry him.
THE GUEST
On Sunday, Bertie walked into an apartment building in St. Louis, a city where, in the past, he had changed trains, waited for buses, or thought about Klaff, and where, more recently, truckers dropped him, or traveling salesmen stopped their Pontiacs downtown just long enough for him to reach into the back seat for his trumpet case and get out. In the hallway he stood before the brass mailboxed wall seeking the name of his friend, his friends’ friend really, and his friends’ friend’s wife. The girl had danced with him at parties in the college town, and one night—he imagined he must have been particularly pathetic, engagingly pathetic—she had kissed him. The man, of course, patronized him, asked him questions that would have been more vicious had they been less naïve. He remembered he rather enjoyed making his long, patient answers. Condescension always brought the truth out of him. It was more appealing than indifference at least, and more necessary to him now. He supposed he didn’t care for either of them, but he couldn’t go further. He had to rest or he would die.
He found the name on the mailbox—Mr. and Mrs. Richard Preminger—the girl’s identity, as he might have guessed, swallowed up in the husband’s. It was no way to treat women,
he thought gallantly.
He started up the stairs. Turning the corner at the second landing, he saw a man moving cautiously downward, burdened by boxes and suitcases and loose bags. Only as they passed each other did Bertie, through a momentary clearing in the boxes, recognize Richard Preminger.
“Old man, old man,” Bertie said.
“Just a minute,” Preminger said, forcing a package aside with his chin. Bertie stood, half a staircase above him, leaning against the wall. He grinned in the shadows, conscious of his ridiculous fedora, his eye patch rakishly black against the soft whiteness of his face. Black-suited, tiny, white-fleshed, he posed above Preminger, dapper as a scholarly waiter in a restaurant. He waited until he was recognized.
“Bertie? Bertie? Let me get rid of this stuff. Give me a hand, will you?” Preminger said.
“Sure,” Bertie said. “It’s on my family crest. One hand washing the other. Here, wait a minute.” He passed Preminger on the stairs and held the door for him. He followed him outside.
“Take the key from my pocket, Bertie, and open the trunk. It’s the blue convertible.”
Bertie put his hand in Preminger’s pocket. “You’ve got nice thighs,” he said. To irritate Preminger he pretended to try to force the house key into the trunk lock. Preminger stood impatiently behind him, balancing his heavy burdens. “I’ve been to Dallas, lived in a palace,” Bertie said over his shoulder. “There’s this great Eskimo who blows down there. Would you believe he’s cut the best side ever recorded of ‘Mood Indigo’?” Bertie shook the key ring as if it were a castanet.
Preminger dumped his load on the hood of the car and took the keys from Bertie. He opened the trunk and started to throw things into it. “Going somewhere?” Bertie asked.
“Vacation,” Preminger said.
“Oh,” Bertie said.
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