The Hotel Neversink

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  I once saw my father make a salesman cry. We were now living in New York, in a Hell’s Kitchen tenement filled with other immigrants, many of them Jews, shaken from their European motherlands like water off a soaked dog. No one had any money in our building. No one had any money in Hell’s Kitchen. Who knew what the young salesman had done to be assigned this fallow territory? Probably just being young, a crime in itself.

  I wasn’t so young by then, fifteen or sixteen—barely younger than the spooked boy who stood at the door in a cheap flannel suit, clutching a black display bag.

  “Yes?” said my father. I watched from the doorway behind him, fearing for the boy. We had just sat down to dinner, always a sacred time for my father after working his twelve-hour shift, no matter how lean the meals: a little fish, cabbage, a thin-sliced apple drizzled with honey if the week had been a good one.

  “Is the lady of the house in?”

  “We are dining.”

  “Sir,” said the salesman, “I will make this quick.”

  “Please.”

  He launched into a rehearsed speech, barely taking a breath between words, his eyes focused on the wall behind my father’s head, where an ornamental plate of my grandmother’s hung from a nail. Even at fifteen, I could see the boy was not cut out for this work. “How tired are you, sir, of buying cheap vacuum cleaners for your wife that break after only a few uses? Well, be tired no more, because the Galaxi-CO 900 is here!” The boy clumsily pulled a flailing octopus of tubes out of the case, which he set at his feet. He plugged parts into other parts as he droned his script, no more thinking about the meaning of his words than the dog that barked downstairs day and night. “The Galaxi-CO 900 picks dirt up off any surface: carpet, rug, shag, tile, linoleum, wood, you name it. Its five cleaning attachments will grab particles from even the toughest-to-reach places. Plus, the Galaxi-CO 900 is guaranteed for a lifetime—that’s right, a lifetime. Whose lifetime, you ask? Your lifetime. Fifty, sixty, seventy years—it will keep cleaning your carpets. The key is a patented, unbreakable polymer, from which the component pieces are molded—”

  “Unbreakable, you say.” My father had not moved or said a word throughout the demonstration. I’d shifted to the left, where I could see his face. He was curiously calm, looking at the rowdy machine at his feet, its sweating master bent over it smiling up at him.

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “May I?” I looked back at my mother and my brother. It occurs to me now how many of my memories of my father take this form—watching him on a kind of stage in front of me. But perhaps I am seeing him the way he felt—the golden son who’d struggled into his early middle age, forever watched by his family, who still expected him to make good and become rich; though, of course, no one expected this, only himself. And me, secretly. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I had begun by this point to believe he would do some great thing. Paradoxically—like the wide-eyed disciple of some tent revivalist promising a rapture that never came—the longer I saw him strive and fail, the heavier the bags under his eyes grew, the more I believed in his belief.

  My father took the main vacuum attachment in his hands and, never taking his eyes from the poor salesman, flexed the tube. The boy stood in wonder, mouth open but lacking any words for what he was watching. My father was not a large man, but he was tough from a lifetime of brutal work, and he had the hidden strength of anger, a deep, plashing reservoir of it fed daily by the sweat he poured at the dry cleaners. His arms shook with the strain, veins popping out on the sides of his high forehead, until, with a crack like our old musket’s report, the advanced polymer snapped into two pieces. He handed them back to the salesman and said, “Not unbreakable.”

  He walked back inside, but I remained. The boy held the pieces and sobbed lightly to himself. He would have to pay for it, I knew. I told him to stay there, and I went to my bedroom, retrieving a dollar I’d put away from my new job cleaning apartments on the Upper West Side. The money was hidden in a library book I’d borrowed, Little Women.

  “Thank you,” he said. “It’s not enough, but thank you.”

  “It’s all I have,” I said, closing the door. “Go away.”

  My parents’ third child, Abraham, was unexpected. We were still living in the city at the time, but it was in our last apartment, the sweltering basement of a Garment District tenement. My father was in his forties and my mother must have been close to that. From the start, her pregnancy was not seen as a happy development. My father’s two previous failed business ventures—a restaurant featuring my mother’s cooking (burst water pipes), and a neighborhood dairy (anthrax epidemic)—had sapped our savings, but Joseph and I were both finally of an age when we could contribute to the family income. Our meager earnings were beginning to accrue, and our father had just begun again to dream of an opportunity that might be seized—of something beyond our tiny apartment and the dry cleaners, of something besides wracked muscles and a spasming back and nightly chemical headaches. To start over at their ages with a new, pink baby may have been something of a miracle, but it was not a mazel.

  I remember my mother pacing around the apartment, heavy with child in the summer heat, sweating and fanning herself with one of Joseph’s comic books. She could not get comfortable, and so she walked an endless circle, wearing a flat tread into the already flattened carpeting. At night, I could hear her moaning through the thin partition my father had erected between our rooms.

  On a humid evening, June or July, we whispered in the thick air. Where, I asked Joseph, would the baby go?

  “There’s a garbage chute just down the hall.”

  “For shame.”

  “I’m joking.”

  “Still.”

  “It’s easier for you, Jean. You’re sixteen, you can move out now if you want.”

  “Quit school?”

  “I’m just saying, you’re going to leave, and the baby will be here, and Papa will be even more tired and angry.”

  “I’m not leaving, don’t worry.”

  I had thought about leaving, in fact—of quitting school and moving far away. But as it turned out, a few months after my mother delivered Abe, my father delivered us to Liberty. With his scanty savings, a loan from our Uncle Moishe, and a promissory note to the seller set at outlandish interest, he’d bought a farmhouse in Liberty, sight unseen. The city was killing him, and in desperation, he’d thought we could go back to farming, perhaps re-create that winter in Silesia when we nearly starved to death. We packed our belongings into a truck and drove north on Route 17.

  As soon as we arrived, it was clear the mistake he’d made. The ground was rocky and ash dry, not farming soil. You might get some potatoes to take, but we knew it would be impossible to grow anything of substance. He was as desolate as the ground, and for three days I thought he might either commit suicide or walk off into the deep woods surrounding the barren farm, never to be seen or heard from again. What would we do? In my parents’ bedroom down the long and drafty hall, Abe wailed and sobbed, giving voice to our misery.

  It seems impossible, looking back, that a baby could cry without ceasing, but in my memory, he did. His cries were the soundtrack to our struggle that spring, as we sold our remaining possessions and searched high and low for any kind of employment. My mother found work cooking in a diner in Halstead, and my father did manual labor where he could. All the while, Abe bellowed relentlessly, his face a pink, contorted agony.

  My mother began to worry there was something wrong with him. Just colic, was the terse diagnosis of a local doctor whom I talked into a charity examination (though I believe it was Abe’s shrieks in the waiting room that got us into his office). Just colic, I told my mother with a hopeful smile, though I didn’t believe it myself. We put him in the back room of the house, thinking he might cry it out of himself, but he kept on, undeterred.

  I knew my parents considered him bad luck. Just when they’d been getting back on their feet again, along he comes, and with him the colossal, ho
wling error of the farm. It wasn’t fair, of course—our family had endured ten years of ill fortune before Abe came along—but I still knew they regarded him as a burden and a bad omen. A rabbi was summoned, and he lent credence to this belief. The boy, he said, was tum’ah, ritually impure. In his impurity, he’d brought our family to a state of tumei, as though we’d jointly contracted a fever.

  “What can we do?” asked my mother.

  “There is nothing to do,” said the rabbi, still in his long coat and fur collar, so deftly had he diagnosed Abe’s illness. “Endure it, and be flattered. After all, He does not test those He does not love.”

  Ironically, it was shortly after this that we had the stroke of luck that changed my family’s fortune forever, though it did not seem that Abe was credited with this good turn. It was in early June. A family of five who had come up from the city found themselves in trouble when all of the local hotels were booked. Our farm was visible on a hill near the main road, and they inquired, thinking we might be a summer lodge. We had never considered such a thing, but my parents eagerly agreed, and we worked quickly to make them comfortable—Joseph and I prepared the bedrooms, putting down clean sheets and turning around family photos. My father acted as a sort of impromptu concierge, asking where they were visiting while in Liberty, suggesting the best hiking and swimming spots as though he’d lived there his entire life rather than a few months. My mother turned what must have been the last of our household provisions into a memorable feast, an act of culinary generosity borne, I knew, of utter desperation. No terms of the stay had been negotiated. No agreement had been drawn up. If they had not felt satisfied, they might have turned and left, or departed the next day without paying us a dime.

  But how we ate that night!

  Sauerbraten with brown gravy, lokshen kugel, borscht with sour cream, buttery rolls, stuffed peppers and mushrooms, and fried artichokes! And for dessert, apple strudel drizzled with honey! It was as though my most extravagant childhood session of Restaurant had been wished into reality. The guests sat around the main table, stunned. They had never eaten such food, the father said. They would soon return, the mother said. They would tell others of the hospitality they’d stumbled onto here. Please do, said my father, with an anxious look—I knew he was wondering if they planned on paying, and how much. In the postprandial silence, Abe’s muffled cries were just audible from the root cellar, where he’d been stashed in a quilted basket. I went down and held him there in the dark. Tut, little chick, I said, perhaps our fortunes are changing.

  The next morning, they did pay, and paid well. It was more money than we’d even hoped: ten dollars—enough to last us the month. Not only that, but they returned in July and brought another family with them. And three more groups came in August, curious about the Sikorsky Inn, as it was becoming known.

  That was a heady year. My father brimmed with pride as we made improvements to the house, putting in an icebox and modern bathroom. My mother continued cooking and even hired a helper up from Monticello, a Polish émigré named Anja who spoke not a word of English. My brother arranged for various “entertainments,” put on at eight in the large living room, or outside in the barn when the weather was nice. He was an adequate juggler, very good at telling jokes, and he also had a knack for finding strange local “talent” to perform for free, including a former college gymnast who could twist her body like challah and an older gentleman who’d trained his terriers to somersault over each other’s backs. For my part, I did whatever was needed, whatever my father asked. Often this involved negotiating deals with companies, finding people who would fix things for cheap or for future payment. I came to know almost everyone in the greater Liberty area, developed friendships and trust, always paying our workers as quickly and fairly as possible. I oversaw operations of the Sikorsky Inn, and my father referred to me as the manager, although none of us had official titles. But I did know that I was the one he counted on to make things run as smoothly as possible.

  As the business grew larger and larger and our time grew scarcer and scarcer, this responsibility also included looking after Abe. My father had become icy toward him, would leave the boy howling for hours in his crib without paying him the least attention. My mother seemed to lack maternal feeling—she would hold him at times, but only for a few moments before setting him down again. It seemed that to my parents, Abe had gone from being bad luck to being an emblem of our former misery, one that threatened to pull them back to misfortune from a very new and precarious prosperity. The fears had a practical source as well—after all, guests came to the inn for relaxation and pleasure, not to be confronted with a sick, screaming child.

  In December, when the house was completely free of guests, I spent most of my money calling a doctor down from Albany. He removed his hat and scarf and spent an hour examining Abe, turning the child over, poking and prodding with a resolute look through the ever-mounting noise. Finally, he summoned my parents and me into the living room and said, “He has spinal stenosis. It’s causing him great pain, hence the crying.” He explained the condition over the next few minutes.

  “But what shall we do?” said my mother, echoing her question last time.

  “There are operations that can be done. But they are expensive and not guaranteed to work. I can refer you to a specialist.” He wrote a name and number down on a small sheet of paper he pulled from his black leather satchel.

  “How much,” said my father.

  The doctor looked at him with unmistakable distaste. Or perhaps it seemed unmistakable to me because I felt it as well. It would cost what it cost! The doctor said, “Well, I’m not an expert. But several hundred, certainly. Maybe more, including medication and surgical braces, that kind of thing.”

  “A thousand? Two?”

  The doctor shrugged and closed his satchel. I thanked him at the door, and he nodded gravely, as though acknowledging what Abe was up against. After the doctor left, there was a great deal of crying and consternation, and not just on Abe’s part. My mother stared darkly down at the crib. Looking at her, I became frightened. My parents believed in dybbuks, in curses and omens and hauntings. And they grew up in a time when crippled babies were often carried off into the woods. So I was not surprised the next day when my father asked me, over tea, to take the boy to the state hospital a county over and leave him.

  “No,” I said. I suppose, looking back, that I was—am—soft compared to my parents, just as my children are compared to me.

  “Jinya, you must. I cannot, your mother will not.”

  “Then do not.”

  “The boy must go. He is a curse.”

  “He is not a curse,” I said loudly, almost yelling. I cannot remember ever raising my voice to my father, before or after. More quietly, I added, “He is a sick little boy.”

  “Jean. I believe the rabbi’s verdict is correct. But, okay, even if the boy is not a curse, he is beyond our helping. Perhaps he is not beyond the state’s help.”

  “Please, Papa. We have money, we can make more. Do not give him up. It is a sin.”

  “Helping your family can never be a sin. We cannot let Abraham ruin us. It is what must be done.”

  So I went. In the car—an old Ford my father had recently acquired from a local farmer—Abe lay beside me on a blanket. Out the window, he stared with a dark and level gaze at the pine trees, the gray sky, a burst of swallows rising into the air like smoke. For the first time in weeks he was silent, and it almost seemed that, having been exiled from the family, he was finally satisfied. At last, I thought, at last you shush. I thought, too, about what my father had not said, could not say—that two thousand dollars was too much to spend on a child he hadn’t wanted in the first place. That if Abraham was the price he had to pay to ensure the Sikorsky Inn continued flourishing and expanding, so be it.

  I knew it was a sin, but I did as my father asked, leaving the boy in a hamper on the steps of the county hospital. I taped a note to the blanket, explaining his condition. I k
issed him once and drove away.

  My father bought Foley House three years later, in 1931, and renamed it the Hotel Neversink. Over the next two decades, the business thrived to a degree that I think surprised even him. Nineteen forty-two marked the first year with a million dollars in profit, and still we continued growing. Professional athletes, entertainers, heads of state have lain their heads on our pillows. The Presidential Suite was renamed as such after Mr. Truman came for a visit. He signed the guestbook, took tea in the library, ate my mother’s loshen kugel with gusto. He assured us he would return.

  Three years ago, my father told me he was entrusting the Neversink to me. As his health declined, I had taken over daily operations, had even begun making financial decisions with his tacit approval. For instance, I had been the one to recognize the guests’ desire for a golf course, to expense the endeavor with our accountant, to determine it was in our long-term benefit, to hire the contractor and oversee the project, which continues today outside my office window. My brother Joseph moved to New York many years ago to pursue his comedy career, though we still often see him, on his tours through the Catskills. Nonetheless, it took me a little by surprise when my father made it official.

  “Jinya,” he said, “this is yours.” We were sitting in the dayroom, an obscure little nook on the far side of the wraparound porch, his favorite place in the hotel. He wore a tartan blanket over his frail legs, which made him look a bit like General Sternwood in The Big Sleep, a film that had come out the year before, finally making its way to the Liberty Odeon.