The Hotel Neversink

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  “Nothing. Give you a good checkup.”

  The truth was, the maid had no idea and she even suspected the trip was a bad idea. But staring at the note Mrs. Gerson had left her, in its swooping hand—a hand as outsized and lavish as its owner—she hadn’t felt she’d had a choice. The woman could still turn her in if she wanted; a guest’s complaint, particularly a charge of theft, knew no statute of limitations and would be investigated by the hotel detective, a young, talkative, balding man named Mr. Javits who occupied a permanent room in the maid’s personal mansion of fears. Further, looking at her son’s frail chest, the thin arms she could easily encircle with her hand as Mrs. Gerson had encircled her own, she knew he did need help. The doctor her mother had dug up was some elder in their country synagogue, a morose, half-blind graybeard who’d presented neither credentials nor, indeed, any evidence he knew what he was talking about. Polio, he said, would usually clear up and go away on its own. Plenty of bed rest and fluids. Now, nearly a half year of bed rest and fluids later, and having fallen behind in school, her son was still shuffling around in stained pajamas, eerily similar to her father shortly before his death. Mrs. Gerson may have been frightening, but all the same, perhaps she could help. Mitzvahs came in all forms.

  The train arrived as though summoned by the coughing spell that bent Isaac double. They only just made it to their appointment at Beth Israel, and the maid sat in the waiting room for two hours picking through magazines while Isaac was being examined. She put one in her bag, a Life magazine with Mickey Mantle on the cover, the pages so greasy and worn it didn’t even seem like stealing. Finally, she was ushered into a consultation room where her son sat slumped in a metal chair, exhausted. The doctor was a large, hale man, with a coxcomb of thinning red hair. He shook her hand and said, “Annette says you’re a friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m glad she got you in here. Your son needs some attention to repair the damage caused by the poliomyelitis virus. He’ll be all right, I think, but we need to do more tests, and he could use some physical therapy.”

  “When?”

  “If you could come down twice a month, that would be ideal. Probably over the next year or so.”

  “I don’t have the money.”

  The doctor smiled. “It’s taken care of. The Gersons are friends.”

  The Gersons’ apartment was in a large building several blocks west of Central Park. Neither the maid, nor her son, had ever ridden in an elevator, and they watched together in minor disbelief as the lighted numbers ticked upward. Mrs. Gerson greeted them after a single knock. The woman appeared smaller in her natural habitat than she had at the hotel—still huge, but somehow diminished. The cavernous apartment was filled with books—seemed, to the maid, to be overflowing with them. The husband was as benign in person as he’d been in the hotel hallway. He accepted the maid and her son’s shuffling presence with an amused tolerance that suggested his wife was forever doing mercurial things like inviting hotel staff over. He put their suitcase in the guest room, which contained a small bed and cot, then ushered them back into the large living room, where he sat reading in an armchair, his tan cardigan blending into the wallpaper. The muted sounds of the Gerson children came through the walls so softly as to almost seem imagined; in the maid’s little apartment back in Liberty, such privacy was unthinkable, and even bathroom noises trumpeted with force and immediacy. Mrs. Gerson asked if Isaac wanted to meet her children. When he said no, she smiled and took him by his thin shoulder, dispatching him reluctantly into the playroom, as she called it. The sounds became even more muted, then silent.

  In the playroom there was very little playing. The Gerson children seemed to regard Isaac as an annoying nuisance foisted upon them. The girl, like her father, sat reading in a slightly oversized chair. The boy was engrossed in his collection of marbles, which he pulled from a small velvet sack one by one and lined up in a floorboard crack, appraising them with the practiced eye of a Forty-Seventh Street jeweler. Isaac sat on the bed, looking at his hands, searching for something to say to them, some shared entry point.

  “Your family came to the hotel.”

  “Yes,” said the girl, without looking up.

  “My mother works there.”

  “She’s a maid,” said the boy. Isaac detected no judgment in the boy’s flat, factual tone.

  “Yes.”

  “We’re rich,” added the boy, unnecessarily.

  Isaac coughed and his chest tingled like a thousand hot pins pushed in. He said, “A boy disappeared there.”

  The girl looked up from her book. “What?”

  “He did. From the hotel, a few years ago. And another one in town last year.” Pleasingly, he had their attention now. A disappeared child was interesting; children disappearing from a place where they went every year was fascinating. In extravagant and largely secondhand, or otherwise outright imagined, detail, Isaac went into a description of the search for the latest child—the distraught mother’s breakdown, the police combing the woods with bloodhounds pulling at leashes, random lie detector tests, and the warning at his school to not talk to strangers (which was true).

  The boy said, “Who do you think it is?”

  Isaac shrugged. An instinctive storyteller, he knew that, having grabbed their attention, it was now time to shut the flow of information down to a slow drip.

  “Come on,” said the girl.

  “Can you keep a secret?” The Gerson children nodded. Isaac looked toward the closed door and said, “It’s a ghost.”

  “Bull,” said the girl. “Ghosts aren’t real.”

  “I saw one, walking home last year.”

  “Bull,” she said with less conviction, leaning forward.

  So he told them about it: the time a year ago, walking to the Neversink from school, when he was still going to school, the light he’d seen in the woods near the hotel. A strange, yellow-orange light, like glimpsing something deep underwater—he’d approached to see what it was, and there, in the shadows of the trees, was a pale, unearthly figure: the ghost. His body seemed to be glowing, and in that light Isaac had seen the look in his eyes, the wave saying join me, the smile that was not a smile. Isaac retreated and the ghost took a step forward. Isaac stopped and the ghost stopped, as if imitating him. When he walked farther along the path, the ghost followed in the woods, keeping pace. At last, Isaac had broken into a run on his aching legs, and reached the hotel in an exhausted hobble. Panting at the top of the hill, he scanned the dark woods below and saw nothing. Had he imagined it? But then, as if in answer, a dull glow throbbed somewhere deep in the darkness—once, twice, and then it was gone.

  “Whoa,” said the Gerson girl. “Did you tell your mother?”

  “No. I wasn’t scared.”

  It was, of course, as the Gerson girl put it, bull. He’d been scared, but he hadn’t wanted to worry her even more than she was. And anyway, it was a different, better kind of scared than usual, this ghost-story kind of scared. Most of the scary things in his life were sad and real. His polio, the feeling of walking through a swimming pool at all times. The sorrow in his mother’s face, the look that told him everything was certainly not all right, no matter how many times she said it was.

  “Come on, tell us more,” said the boy. From the other room, Mrs. Gerson’s barking laughter erupted, and the children momentarily paused. This reminder of the adult world outside the walls amplified the playroom’s cozy secrecy.

  “I’ll tell you more,” whispered Isaac. “For a marble. That one.” He pointed at a big blue galaxy with sparkles in it. The Gerson boy shrugged and rolled it across the uneven floor to a crack by Isaac’s knee, where it seemed to sit and listen to its new owner speak.

  The Gerson woman poured them both another glass of whiskey, ignoring the maid’s demurral. It hurt her throat and tasted like burning dirt, but it dampened the strangeness of the evening, so she drank it down while doing her best to explain the doctor’s report. Mrs. Gerson nodded knowingl
y. “I was right,” she said, “he did need looking at.”

  “Yes. The doctor says he can get back to normal with good care.”

  “I’m so happy to hear that.” And she did seem happy. The husband had earlier excused himself to some get-together at a friend’s—he was vague on the subject. When he’d left, Mrs. Gerson had relaxed, become vociferous and mastering, and seemed to expand to her previous size. The maid was sitting by the woman on a large, hard settee, and a corner lamp lit the room soft and orange, like sunlight in autumn coming through the hotel’s windows as she cleaned. An opera record was playing, a little loud—Maria Callas, read the album cover.

  “Thank you,” she said, as the thick, smoky tendrils of the whiskey reached down deep into her legs, still sore from the week’s work. This woman from whom she’d tried to steal had been so kind to her. No one had ever been so kind.

  “Come here,” said Mrs. Gerson. She took the maid’s hand and drew her over next to her. She encircled the maid’s small waist and pulled her down onto her lap. The maid fit comfortably there. It reminded her of before she’d become large with Isaac, reading in her father’s overstuffed easy chair—a time when everything was easy, happy, and simple. The woman stroked her head. The maid became aware, after a time, that the woman was stroking other parts of her: her back, her leg, the side of her breast through the wool tunic. The combination of her feelings at this moment—shame, fear, comfort at the huge embrace, and alarm at the woman’s falconing hands—created such a potent mix as to be paralytic, and so she stiffened and sat, and waited for whatever was happening to finish happening, for Mrs. Gerson to release her and make clear what would happen next.

  Mrs. Gerson ran her fingers over the maid’s reclined body as though she were some kind of musical instrument with an infinity of taut and twanging strings. And she did seem to sing out in musical response along with the scratched record, a quiet virtuoso aria with quick runs, basso grunts of protest ascending to shocked soprano squeals, all with her dark eyes shut tight. Mrs. Gerson put her hand on the maid’s crotch and began rubbing in a circular motion. The maid cried out in revulsed pleasure for the woman to stop, ah please stop, but Mrs. Gerson did not stop.

  Finally, hearing his mother’s distressed moans, Isaac padded out half-asleep and stood swaying on the creaky hardwood floor. The maid twisted toward her son. Mrs. Gerson set the maid back on the couch like a piece of furniture that needed rearranging, then, with great dignity, rose and disappeared down the hallway.

  Twice a month, they made the trip to New York, and twice a month, the episodes, as the maid thought of them, with Mrs. Gerson occurred. She loathed the woman’s touch and afterward felt physically ill, but Isaac was improving quickly, and a few minutes of unpleasantness with Mrs. Gerson seemed a small price to pay. Also, the fact that she was submitting to this treatment in order to, in turn, facilitate her son’s treatment seemed to expiate the inherent sin, as well as (she hoped) the odd and uncontrollable shivers of pleasure she sometimes felt. Early on, she managed to avoid these episodes by excusing herself to bed early, but the next day Mrs. Gerson would be hostile and distant, and she feared the disappearance of the woman’s largesse.

  Mrs. Gerson never mentioned the episodes, and the fact that she didn’t helped cordon them off in the maid’s mind—they seemed unconnected to anything else. And the fact was, despite herself, she liked Mrs. Gerson. The woman was funny and bold, said what was on her mind, and seemed genuinely interested in her and Isaac’s welfare. If she was simply using the maid for deviant pleasure, holding her hostage by way of her son’s health, as the maid, lying in her own small bed after a trip to the city, sometimes felt was the case, then why all the extra kindnesses? Why take them shopping at Bloomingdale’s? Why send her home with a book, entitled Mrs. Dalloway, that Mrs. Gerson wanted to discuss the next time they came up? Was it simply guilt? It didn’t seem so—the woman confided in the maid, asking for her opinion about things like a new sweater she’d bought, wallpaper she was picking out to brighten the stuffy oak of the dining room.

  Mrs. Gerson’s motives were irrelevant, though, considered next to Isaac’s miraculous improvement. The maid watched proudly from their window as he played ball in their yard with two of the neighborhood boys, flagging a little at times, limping a bit, but keeping up. Traveling down to his April checkup, patches of weeds and blooming wildflowers pushed through the gray snow, and post-examination, the doctor said maybe one more visit over the summer. The boy was almost normal, according to benchmarks.

  “How wonderful,” said Mrs. Gerson, when the maid reported these developments. They were sitting at the dining room table, a bottle of wine between them. As usual, Mr. Gerson had politely excused himself after dinner. Mrs. Gerson wore a red dress with long sleeves, her blonde hair held back by a polka dot headband. She looked disconcertingly like a little girl, an impression magnified by her unusually bashful manner. “I suppose this means you won’t be visiting anymore.”

  “Well,” said the maid. “The doctor wants to see him in June.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Mrs. Gerson drank her wine, and the maid saw she was holding back tears. “We can visit.”

  “No, that’s okay.” She put the glass down and looked around the apartment. “Have I ever told you,” she said, “that everything here is Bert’s?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, everything you see. Including me, really. He’s quite a wealthy man. His family owns the supermarket chain. He’s rich now; when his father dies, he’ll be incredibly rich. The children will never need to work, probably to their detriment.”

  “I always thought you had the money.”

  “Yes, people think that, but I don’t have anything. My family is as poor as yours.”

  They sat in thick silence broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall, and outside, the distant sound of traffic, the intimation of other people’s lives. Mrs. Gerson said, “People wonder why me, and I used to wonder that myself, when we met. I was on scholarship at Radcliffe while he was at Harvard. He could have had anyone, and he always knew I liked girls better.”

  “He knows?”

  “Oh yes,” she said dismissively, as though the question was stupid. “It’s an arrangement, like all marriages. I gave him the children. I raise them, I take care of his affairs, in all senses. Bert just wants things to be easy. He always wanted a mother more than a wife.”

  The maid didn’t know what to say. She looked at her knee, covered in dark, worn hose, now covered by the woman’s broad hand. Mrs. Gerson said, “The thing with wives is they can leave. Mothers can’t.” She embraced the maid, and for the first time, kissed her full on the mouth, a deliberate and probing kiss, as though the woman were trying to extract information from some secret recess.

  “I love you,” she said.

  The maid rose from her seat, went to the guest room and roused Isaac. He put on his clothes sleepily, but without too much resistance. The maid tossed all their clothes into their broken suitcase and fastened it shut with a piece of string tied to the handle. Mrs. Gerson remained where she’d been sitting, at the table, watching them as they left. The elevator expelled them into the lobby, the nodding doorman held the heavy oak and brass open, and the city night gathered them both into its cool embrace as they moved toward the train station. They would not be back in June, or ever.

  But a month later, Mrs. Sikorsky called the maid into her office, a small room on the second floor near the cleaning supply closet. It wasn’t where you would expect the owner of a thriving resort to work—a nook lit by one small window and dominated by an iron-green file cabinet that occupied half the space—but it was where she’d always worked, from the beginning, and her stubborn occupation of the room was taken by all the staff as a symbol of her humble diligence. The maid had been there only once, when she’d been hired years earlier—Mrs. Sikorsky, she remembered vividly, had shared tea with her from a silver samovar, and a plate of sugar cookies, asking aft
er their shared relatives in Wrocław. She was a friendly woman with ash-blonde hair framing a face as habitually open as the fields that surrounded her hotel. This made her demeanor all the more frightening when she brusquely waved the maid in. It took the maid a moment to notice, beside the file cabinet, Mr. Javits. He tapped a pen against his foot and looked at the maid mildly, and she knew what was about to happen.

  “You are being let go, Hannah.”

  “Why?”

  “Why, she asks,” said Mrs. Sikorsky, casting a sideways look at Mr. Javits. “A guest said you took something from their room.”

  “But what?” She was shaking. She hadn’t stolen anything since Mrs. Gerson’s brooch.

  “Never mind that. It corresponds with a couple of other incidents. The shoes, for example.”

  Mr. Javits said, “I made some calls, Hannah. A pattern has been established. We knew someone was taking things for a while, but we didn’t have corroborating proof until now.”

  “But my son.” Jeanie looked at her, and Hannah tried one last, desperate ploy that made her ill as she spoke the words. “We are family.”

  Jeanie said, “And I consider everyone here family.” She shook her head. “I’ve never fired anyone before. Even if you stole from me, I would not have fired you. But from the guests—” Here she trailed off, the thought too much to contemplate. “Come back in three days and pick up your severance check, which I hope you know you’re lucky to get.” And with a wave of her hand, the maid was dismissed.

  On the walk home, down uneven gravel shoulders, the sun burned the top of her head like the heat of her own shame. She thought about striking out, somewhere far enough away that they wouldn’t hear about this. Then she thought about Isaac at school, doing well—his teacher said he might skip a grade, even with the school he’d missed—playing with the other kids until dark every day. Outside their apartment, she picked up Isaac’s baseball from the grass—the unblemished white surface now tan and tattered. She thought about seeing if her mother would take him in, but balked at the idea. She heard Mrs. Gerson’s voice in her mind: A wife can leave; a mother can’t.