by Sidney Hart
Thursday morning of that week Paula Hirsch and Stella Meyers arrived at their table with Mrs. Hirsch in a state of agitation. They clearly had been in deep conversation before arriving and Stella was comforting a distraught Paula.
“You’ll find it I’m sure, don’t worry, honey. These things always turn up when you least expect them to.”
“But I’ve looked everywhere, every drawer, every closet. Bernie will be so upset. It was a gift for our fifteenth wedding anniversary and he was so proud of himself for buying it for me because it was so expensive. What am I going to do?” she wailed. Stella rubbed her back and tsked-tsked.
“After breakfast we’ll go back to your room together and I’ll go through everything again myself. Don’t worry, we’ll find that bracelet.”
As the other guests arrived at their table they offered their concern for the anguished Paula whose mascara ran down her cheeks in dark rivulets.
“I never should have …” She broke off in mid-sentence and stared at the table.
“Did you check under the bed? You know those catches are very iffy even on expensive jewelry. It might have fallen off you as you were undressing and just gotten kicked under the bed. You’d be amazed at what you find there sometimes.” Mrs. Hirsch wore a strained smile that seemed to beg the fates for mercy.
“I can’t eat, I’m too upset. Melvin, be a dear and just pour me some coffee.” She looked up at me and then scanned the dining room with the frightened look of a hunted fugitive. I got the coffee pot and started to pour. “That waiter in the back, do you know him?” She nodded in Harlan’s direction.
“Harlan? We’re roommates. He’s a great guy.”
“Is he?” she said in the wan voice of one who might have a crush on him like so many other women did while passing through the resort hotel.
“Yes, he’s my best friend here,” I added gratuitously.
“That’s nice,” she said abruptly and with a series of rapid sips she finished her coffee, rose, leaned forward steeply to allow her breasts to spill outward towards gravity’s irresistible force, and blew me a goodbye kiss.
“I’ll bet jewelry isn’t the only thing they’ll find under her bed,” Solly Stein offered sardonically after she and Stella Hirsch had left. “The way she dresses it’s almost like she’s not wearing any clothes at all.” Mrs. Stein whispered something to him and he frowned. Spying me watching them he raised his hand in the air and said, “How about another glass of grapefruit juice, a big one, Melvin.”
The guests filed in for dinner at seven P.M. and dispersed throughout the dining room. There were always late stragglers but by seven-fifteen everyone was eating his melon or drinking her cold juice and thinking of the soup and the salad. I had just unloaded a tray of salads at my serving stand when Sammy let out a loud whoop that silenced everyone in the dining room. And there at the room’s entrance, one hand on Sandy Stein’s lectern, the other resting akimbo on his hip, stood an enormous man with facial features of equally egregious proportions. Thick lips the color of calf’s liver, a long, wide nose ending in a hooked bulb, and large, close set eyes that were slightly crossed to boot. His wavy, oily hair, parted just above his left ear, was swept across his pate to cover his baldness but rather than lying flat it crossed in an arc, like a ramp, revealing the sun-spotted skin beneath. A smile stretched his mouth sideways making deep lines in his cheeks.
“Bernstein!” Sammy hollered joyously. “Bernstein, you son of a gun!” Daintily, nimbly, Bernstein danced down the room’s center aisle on tiptoes carrying his bloat as lightly as if he were a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. He was as graceful and poised as Zero Mostel and I thought that at any second he might burst into song. Intercepting him with a hug Sammy found himself suddenly in the tango position, Bernstein’s immense face pressed cheek to cheek against his. Titters of laughter sprang up around the dining room, though some seemed less than appreciative of this display.
“DUM dum dum dum. …, ba da de da da, DUM,” he crooned in a resonant basso profundo, guiding Sammy to our serving stand where Bernstein released him and roared with laughter.. “You should see the look on your face Sammy boy, it’s priceless, priceless.” Sammy beamed. “And who is this?” he said approaching me.
“Bernstein I want you to meet my busboy, Melvin White.” Bernstein narrowed his eyes and stared intently at me.
“Yes, yes, he’s definitely Jerry White’s little brother. And Steve? How is Steve doing?”
“Jerry and Steve are both fine sir,” I said respectfully.
“Sir!?? The name is Bernstein, not mister Bernstein, and certainly not sir. Glad to meet you,” he said seizing my hand and pumping it vigorously. “So, how do you like working for Sammy? You do all the work and he does all the shmoozing, right?” he said, looking at Sammy whose face was still aglow with delight. “Don’t answer that. He’ll give you a luch in kup. …” and continued on for another minute in Yiddish. Sammy took Bernstein by the arm and led him to his seat at the window table where he introduced him to the other guests. I cleared the melon rinds and the empty juice glasses from the tables and began to serve the salads. Bernstein’s table suddenly exploded with laughter and when I looked over to see why there was Sammy off of his feet and cradled like a baby in Bernstein’s arms. “Melvin, have you got room in that bus box for this drek?”
Bernstein’s overwhelming presence so dominated everyone’s attention for the next two days that concern for Paula Hirsch’s missing jewelry vanished like the jewelry itself, while Sammy’s unalloyed joy in Bernstein’s company had him on the verge of grateful tears all weekend long.
2.
“Hi.” Heidi was wearing her artsy leotards and polo shirt outfit. “Almost done? I want to show you something.”
I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit that at eighteen everything a girl said to me was automatically taken as a double entendre, and I felt myself flush. If she saw it Heidi ignored my hopeful expectancy and began folding my napkins while I finished sweeping the floor.
“You like to read don’t you?”
“Sure,” I said. Harlan must have told her that. I had brought several books with me that summer and they were stacked up on my dresser. There was Dostoyevski’s “The Idiot” which I mistakenly had imagined might be a comic novel just from the title, a Modern Library edition of William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and “The Sound and the Fury”—another idiot book and J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” which I had read annually since the age of thirteen and would continue to read for many years after, that novel serving as a kind of plumb line which I used to measure my ascent from adolescence.
“My parents have this amazing library in our house and I thought you might want to take a look at it. You could borrow some of the books if you like, some of the ones that aren’t valuable that is.” I was quite stunned. It never would have occurred to me that the Bravermans could have a library let alone an “amazing” library. I had thought them a pre-literate people who signed their names with X’s, all of them except Heidi, the adoptee.
“Sure, that’d be great, but I have to shower and change if I’m going to come up to your house.”
“You don’t have to do that,” she said putting her hand on my arm. “They’re away in Monticello now and this will only take a few minutes. Besides, you’re cute in your bow tie.”
The Bravermans’ residence was at the edge of the property, a sprawling ranch style house with rhododendron bushes pressed up against its corners and a dense row of pink and white impatiens stretching the length of the house. In the front yard was a vegetable garden with tomato plants inside a perimeter of golden marigolds, and some peppers, string beans, and lettuce in nearby rows. We entered through the kitchen where Heidi had two tall glasses of lemonade already in wait and after handing one to me she said, “Bring your drink to the library there’s someone I want you to get to know better.”
“But I haven’t washed up,” I protested, hating the fact that I had been
tricked, misled by her promise of good books.
“I wanted to get you here and I didn’t want to make you feel nervous in advance. Come.” And she took my hand and led me through the doorway. It was indeed a library, a room of generous proportions filled with oak bookcases rising from the floor almost to the ceiling and every shelf filled with a neatly arranged row of books. There were shelves of non- fiction, shelves of fiction with sets of complete works—Twain, Dickens, Shakespeare, the Greek Tragedies—leather bound sets, William Faulkner novels with their original dust jackets, encyclopedias, everything you could imagine. I was awed.
“Surprised?” she asked with some amusement. My jaw must have gaped. Shocked would have been the better word.
“Your parents read all these books?”
“My mother mostly. There’s a new writer she likes very much. Have you ever heard of Saul Bellow?” I shook my head no. “She thinks he’s going to be a great one. She knew that Faulkner was great the first time she read his work. All of these books are replacements of the one’s she’s read,” she said waving her hand across the row of Faulkner’s novels. “She wanted to have them without their bindings broken or their pages stained in any way.” Reacting to my obvious puzzlement she said, “My mother is a tea drinker like no tea drinker you’ve ever known.” It was then that I noticed the girl that Heidi had brought me to meet. She had been sitting quietly near the door where we had entered the room and when we had walked past her to the shelves of books my attention had been focused on the prodigiousness of the collection. Heidi saw me nod and smile in the direction of the girl and herself smiled. “Jack I want you to meet Sarah Charnoff, Sarah this is Jack.” The girl rose and approached me and I met her with my right hand extended.
“Hello, I’ve heard so little about you,” I said sarcastically, my face turned towards Heidi, “but I’m happy to meet you.” I was nervous, but I was happy. A petite and pretty girl, she seemed completely at ease, open and comfortable. Like Heidi, she wore her dark brunette hair in a long ponytail and when she spoke to me she looked directly at me with hazel colored eyes that seemed to glint with green when she was amused.
“Well I’ve heard a few things about you so we’re not complete strangers. Have you heard from Columbia yet?”
“No,” I lied easily, “I’ve still got about one week left to pray. You wouldn’t have an extra set of phylacteries with you by any chance, would you?” I ventured, hoping that she wasn’t so orthodox or observant as to be offended by my Jewish joke. She laughed and I exhaled. We sipped our lemonade and browsed amongst the books, chatting agreeably, saying nothing that I can remember from this distance of time, but I do remember how immediately taken I was by Sarah. She became beautiful to me quickly, and her voice, already possessing the timbre of a woman’s voice, not a remnant of girlishness left behind in it, seemed as if always poised to dance on the edge of laughter.
When we were returning to the hotel grounds I said, “You walk like a dancer,” gambling that if she was a dancer she’d be pleased I’d noticed and if she wasn’t she’d be flattered that I’d mistaken her for one.
“I’ve taken dance but I’m not a dancer,” she said. I was still in that youthful phase during which I constructed imaginary conversations believing it possible to anticipate every possible answer to any question I might pose and then have a witty rejoinder prepared for every response making me sound like the new Oscar Wilde. I hadn’t anticipated Sarah’s reply. “Well, you walk like one,” I fumbled. “You know, with your toes pointed out.” She smiled and flipped an errant lock of hair off of her forehead, then ran her ponytail through the loop of her opposed right thumb and index finger, a nervous preening gesture, and then tossed her head again. “So,” I persisted awkwardly, “are you part of the social staff or something?” She was quite short, little more than five feet tall, but so pretty I didn’t mind stooping over a little to be closer to her face.
“No, I’m a counselor in the day camp with Heidi. I do art work and drama with the kids. I love kids. Kids just are as they are, no tricks, no guile. Working with them is so exciting.”
“If only their parents were as innocent. ‘Sweetie you wouldn’t mind giving me a few of those cherry Danish to take back for little Norman would you?’ wink, wink. Little Norman probably never got to see one of them.”
“It’s barely August, Jack, are you so cynical already?”
“Cynical or realistic? Anyway, you know how guys are. If a flock of birds lands in a field surrounded by girls, the girls would gape and ooh and aah at them. Land the flock in the same field but this time surround it with boys and it becomes a contest to see who can be the first one to hit a bird with a stone. So, need any stones thrown at anyone?”
“You’re funny. Well, it was nice meeting you. I have to get back to work.” She hesitated there in the path, smiling at me, and then extended her hand.
“Sarah can I see you tonight? Would you want to go down to the show or have a drink or something?”
“Sure, I’ll meet you there, near the stamper, O.K?”
We touched hands, a touch more than a shake, and parted. I was happy. This was not a vertiginous delirium or an erotic frenzy, this was just happy. She was, mundane and banal as these words still seem, a nice girl and I, awash in aspirations and pretensions, was only a nice boy.
3.
After working dinner I showered and went through my clothes to select an outfit for my date with Sarah. I chose a shirt with the fine blue and green plaid pattern of the Black Watch and a pair of khaki pants to be worn with my penny loafers, no pennies inserted. A nervous anticipation began to churn as I walked down the covered walkway to the casino, the hotel’s entertainment center where the Nick Henry band played dance music four nights a week. It was a Tuesday night, the night that Louisa and Alfredo Catalan put on their Latin dancing show with rumbas, sambas, mambos and cha-chas in quick succession. After performing what Nick Henry referred to as their “nimble numbers” they invaded the audience to cajole, coerce and even kidnap wary guests to come up on to the stage and learn these dances publicly. Since the risk of being chosen was shared equally by the guests, there was a good natured spirit to the evening and no one was allowed to feel humiliated for his ineptness. Louisa and Alfredo, a brother and sister team often mistaken for husband and wife, born Louise and Myron Kaplan—would you have taken mambo lessons from a man named Myron?—genially teased and tickled their subjects through the rhythmic footwork of the Latin dances. The members of the hotel staff were never selected for public instruction and it was clear to me that were I to end up feeling humiliated that night with Sarah it most likely would be by my own doing.
At the end of the covered walkway leading to the recreation hall guests showed their room keys to a member of the social staff who stamped the back of their right hand with an invisible ink that fluoresced when held under the beam of a special lamp. There was a different stamp for each night of the week and a different design series for each hotel in the region. It was the owners’ way of restricting access to their shows and keeping out gatecrashers. Sarah was already waiting for me by the little table the stamper used for his inkpad and guest list. She had perched herself on the edge of the table and was laughing with the tennis pro who had the stamping duty that night. She seemed so comfortable and at ease with herself that my own self- consciousness felt amplified in comparison, but when she looked up and saw me approaching she blushed. In that instant of her reaction my apprehension dissolved in the bath of color that had rushed to her face.
“Hi,” I said, sliding my hands into the pockets of my khakis.
“Hi. Do you know Dick?” she asked, looking from me to Dick Hersh the tennis pro. We nodded and smiled and said the usual things that people who have no interest in one another say when they’ve been introduced, and then I looked at Sarah and said, “Are you ready?”
“For the cha-cha or the mambo?” Dick Hersh stamped the backs of the hands of several guests who had come down the walkway but he
was clearly more focused on watching Sarah than on his stamping duties and I wanted to get her away from his scrutiny.
“No, let’s go over to the lake and take a walk.”
“That sounds much better,” she said with relief, and saying goodnight to Hersh we left.
“So, how did you end up at Braverman’s?”
“I met Heidi at school, Performing Arts.”
“Really! Well, since you’re not a dancer you must be an actress.”
“Well, that’s what I hope I am.”
“I’ve done some acting too. I played the title role in ‘Harvey’ last spring. I was a big success.”