The Hotel Neversink

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  I ran, too, not stopping to explain myself to the wide-eyed maid, even to remove my jacket. Of course, I was thinking of the missing children around town, especially the child that had vanished here so many years before. Jonah: the months of vain questions and searching that followed, the years of sorrow—especially for Jeanie—every time his name was mentioned by a guest or newspaper article. At times, I felt—though I never would have said so—it was as if he’d never disappeared at all.

  Across the grass I dashed, down the hill, feeling the way the child had looked, as though he were helplessly falling into the trees. At the tree line I snagged my foot on a grasping root and fell hard, nearly dashing out my brains on a tree stump only inches away. I rose, dirty and disheveled, my wrist in considerable pain, although I could barely feel it, so frightened I was for the child who had entered this dark realm before me, of whom there was now no trace. There were only the trees, a blanket of wet leaves, skittering animals, and the ragged feel of my voice in my throat as I stumbled forward calling hello, hello? Little boy? Hello! The farther into the forest I moved, the louder my shouts became.

  In a dark copse, I stopped to catch my breath. I was surrounded by several very old, large trees, and a pervasive smell of earthy decay. As I paused, hands on knees, listening for the child, I became aware of a sickly yellow light that seemed to be coming from the trees, from the darkness, from myself. Once more I ran, though not now in pursuit but escape, escaping a presence that was just behind me, a mere fingertip away.

  I don’t know how long I ran through those woods, but at a certain point, I became aware of another voice calling from a distance. It was, I realized, Jeanie. The indigo sky permitted me just enough light to make my way back through the tree line, where I found three workmen and my wife, holding a lantern.

  “What on earth, Henry,” she said.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “No, one of the workers saw you go in. What were you thinking?”

  I explained what I’d seen, described the little boy as best I could: small, fragile, dark hair flying behind him. But when a report was sent through the hotel, no word came back of any missing child. And the next morning, over tea, a local policeman—Chief Bates, a mere officer when he’d helped with Jonah—assured Jeanie and Mr. Javits and me that no alerts had been filed, either in Liberty or any of the surrounding towns.

  When the policeman left, Javits stretched and said, “Well, I guess that’s that.”

  “Except that I saw a boy.”

  “So, he sees a boy,” said Javits to Jeanie. “Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. The eye can play funny tricks that time of day. And anyway, if there was a boy, he went back home, so there’s no problem in the end.”

  Eager, I knew, to get on with a hard day of reading the sports section and napping, Javits rose, taking his teacup with him up the stairs to his office. Jeanie sat with me after he left, looking at me strangely.

  “What happened?” she said.

  “I told you, I saw a child.”

  “There was no child.”

  “This we now know.”

  “How to explain it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Months later, I still do not. Unbeknownst to Jeanie, I met several times with an Albany psychologist, but he offered no answers. Perhaps there are no answers. Or perhaps there are, and it is as with the man I still feel standing behind me sometimes. It is not that I sense him too late. It is that I know better than to turn around before he is gone.

  6. Lenny

  1966

  Leonard “Lenny” Sikorsky picked the yellow note off the front desk register: L, please get 308 ready by four, he managed to decipher—his father’s meticulous, tortured script almost painful to look at. It was a reminder that the Fellmans were arriving that afternoon. An unnecessary reminder, as he had been anticipating the return of Rachel Fellman, and Rachel Fellman’s breasts, for several months. At that very moment, the Fellman family—Dr. Fellman, and Mrs. Fellman, and Rachel Fellman and her breasts—were all riding the Hudson Line up from Manhattan and would be sheltered that night by the Neversink’s new slate roof. Len had expended quite a bit of emotional and sexual energy thinking about Rachel and her breasts since the last time she’d been there, when he’d kissed her and touched them at night by the pool as it glowed a soft green, like the marquee for a porno theater he’d seen the year before on a trip down to New York with a couple of friends, local guys. They’d stayed in a Times Square flophouse and the marquee had flashed all night outside their window, as though to remind them of all the easy city trim they’d talked big about scoring on the drive down and hadn’t, instead sitting in a shy little line at McSorley’s, drinking their tourists’ steins of bitter. Birds on a wire, some joker had laughed in their direction. The name of the movie had been Brigitte in Paris. Brigitte in Paris, over and over.

  He’d snuck in to see it the next evening, having spent the day moping around midtown in a hungover funk and finally ditching the other two in the hotel room with a twelver of Old Milwaukee. Buying the ticket felt like a criminal act, and he’d been amazed no sirens sounded when he pushed through the red theater door. The place was small, dark, and smelt of bleach. The film, when it clattered and whirred to life, told the tale of a young American woman on vacation getting fucked by a series of Frenchmen—you could tell they were French because they wore striped shirts and, in one case, a beret. Len found himself bored, and realized he’d much preferred the buildup (thinking about seeing it, peeling away from his friends, skulking around Times Square, buying the ticket, and the four minutes of plot before Brigitte’s clothes came off) to the fucking itself, the flickering pricks circling the juddering cunt.

  Rachel’s cunt—he fingered the dirty word naughtily, having only recently been exposed to it in a bootleg Lenny Bruce album—would also be arriving with her and her breasts. But this was too much to expect or even contemplate while manning reception. He had to think of other things, anything but Rachel. Oh God. A family of four pushed through the front door and approached the front desk, but Len remained seated—having determined it was better to seem rude than expose the grotesque bulge in his slacks. He greeted them, signed them into the guest registry, swiveled in his chair to grab their key (fortunately a first-floor room, hanging within reach), said if there was anything he could do to make their stay more comfortable to just call down. Hopefully by that point, he’d be able to stand again.

  He ran through his standard mental list of unsexy thoughts, but each time Rachel inserted herself: standing bored in left field, there was Rachel playing third in front of him, naked; picturing his grandmother, recently deceased, wrapped in a ratty shawl, there was Rachel smiling in her place. Finally, he resorted to thinking about reports of the latest vanished child, though these abductions had simply become part of the background here over the course of his young life.

  Not that young: twenty-three years, which should have been enough time to outgrow this sort of adolescent nonsense. He’d recently attended the wedding of one of the Times Square trio, and sometime, perhaps not too long from now, he would be expected to assume the daily management of the hotel. He needed to grow up.

  But growing up here in Liberty, especially under the auspices of the Neversink and the great Jeanie Sikorsky, was part of the reason he hadn’t grown up, hadn’t seen Times Square until he was twenty-one, was capable of stirring his own member by thinking dirty words. He was not only a rube, but a pampered, sheltered rube, a provincial scion. The Hotel Neversink was its own little kingdom, quaint and wholesome and lagging some fifteen years behind the culture of an area that was itself already ten years behind. The great capitalized happenings of the decade—San Francisco and Dylan and the Beatles, and the ongoing military intervention in Vietnam—were like words you heard spoken through the hotel’s walls. You could make them out but they were muffled and vague, meaningless. Apparently there was a sexual revolution under way, but not around here, not that Len could see. Here, it w
as matrons in one-piece swimsuits and generous portions of rich Eastern European food that put you to sleep by eight o’clock. There were lots of children, so presumably sex was being had by the guests, or had been at some point, but it was difficult, not to mention somewhat unpleasant, to imagine, not that he didn’t try.

  He himself was not a virgin, though that was a matter of considerable parsing, a sexual exegesis he had conducted since the event, almost two years earlier. He had been down at the Liberty Lounge, a place verboten by the Sikorsky elders and therefore irresistible, with one of the Times Square friends and two girls. The girls were from some other upstate hamlet, in for the weekend for a reason he had forgotten immediately upon hearing it. A cousin’s wedding, a great-uncle’s funeral. He’d lied about who he was, both to protect the family name and to avoid possible antisemitic frigidity. There had been lots of beer and poorly played pool, and then they were back at his friend’s apartment, a little second-floor place off the main drag, above a consignment store. They had shared one more beer and listened to a record; then the friend had peeled off with the prettier of the two, leaving Len and the girl—the Girl, as he thought of her now, since, to his great ongoing embarrassment, he could not remember her name—alone.

  She was a big girl, tall and with a look of having been attached by her big toe to an air pump and inflated. Even her hair was large—auburn curls that gathered in piles like the leaves Michael raked together on the front lawn of the hotel. She laughed a great deal at Len’s lame stories and jokes, exposing a set of teeth as white and wholesome as jugs of milk in a grocery-store aisle, but there was a brittleness to her manner that made him uneasy. He sensed she was overcoming her uncertainty about this evening with a kind of forced jollity, and though he wanted desperately to lose his cherry, he also wanted to tell her hey, it’s all right. We can just sit here and play records.

  But then she was undressing, had her blouse off, was on him, heavy and white and soft. Dion’s voice issued from the turntable, slightly warped and drunkenly under speed. I open up my shirt and show ’em Rosie on my chest. She smelled of yeast and chemical lemon—she had mentioned something about cleaning houses for a summer living—and had her hand down his pants, rubbing him with great zest as though assailing an especially tenacious patch of shower mold. Still, her technique was effective, and for a moment she looked down at her handiwork with something like surprise before returning to her rubbing, her buffing. A clotted heat rose up his body as she lay back, pulled her skirt up around her midsection and pulled her underwear down, far enough. That it was finally happening, and with a redheaded shiksa at that, was nearly unbelievable, as were the two words she spoke in a hoarse voice, her first sincere sentiment of the evening.

  “I’m wet.”

  He was hard, he was ready. But his pants were wrapped around his legs like a tourniquet, and he could not seem to pull them off. With a brutal yank, they finally released their grip, but detaching them had detached him from the proceedings. For a moment, he seemed to be looking on at this messy tableau with his mother. She cast a sideways look of familiar, leveling disappointment, and it was as though a twanging wire taut inside of him had suddenly been snipped.

  He felt himself soften as he plunged toward the girl with a desperation at horrible odds with desire. With his pants still garroting his calves he lowered himself, and she maneuvered him in, approximately. As she did, his thoughts turned toward the time—though, probably, it had been in his mind all night—this had happened before, with a friend from yeshiva school named Rita Meyer, a fun, friendly, somewhat naughty girl whom he probably should have married, who’d gotten naked with him one night in room 324 during a high school dance held at the Neversink. He’d lain helplessly in bed, his pale penis beached on the shore of his leg like a mollusk. Rita had feigned sleep, little reproving snores that mimicked the disgust he felt for himself, for ruining what could have been such a frolic, their young, naked bodies instead withdrawn to each side of the bed in a parody of old marriage.

  The redhead bucked and sighed, and it was over. He courteously excused himself and walked home in the late autumn wind, desolate and determined not to think about what had just happened, only to spend the next eighteen months dwelling on it. He uncontrollably dwelt on the shame, an affectionate regret toward that big girl and her forgotten name. But also: Did it count? Like the old rebbe who stayed for weekend retreats, drinking tea in the sunroom, engaged in endless obscurantist debate over one minor Talmudic detail or another, what his father scornfully called pilpul—he’d settled on yes, a technical, qualified yes. A momentary breach. Though he wasn’t sure. Irritating to now be unable to rid himself of an erection, to have to surreptitiously tuck it up into his waistband as he rose. He had to go prepare the Fellmans’ suite as his mother had asked. He pushed the cart in front of him, feeling indecent as he passed grandmothers and children, nodding good morning, hello.

  The maid had already turned down the room—one of the three biggest in the hotel—but special touches were expected. Dr. Fellman had performed emergency surgery on his mother when she’d gone down to the city with a burst appendix she’d thought was gas, and he’d also diagnosed Len’s Uncle Joe’s melanoma early on. As such he was treated with the same respect as a visiting sports figure or dignitary. Better than that, actually—the Dutch ambassador to the UN, visiting the Catskills a couple of months earlier, had not received such attention. For instance, a vase of fresh-cut flowers—yellow irises and spires of lilac larkspur—from his mother’s personal garden. A note welcoming them to the hotel, already written by his mother. A selection of blintzes and sweet challah in a glass pastry pan set to warm in the window. A bottle of Latour on ice and a selection of library books handpicked by Henry for a perfect week of summer reading.

  Taking a last look at the room, something in him rebelled at its fussiness, and at his own. A breach, not a breach! What did it matter? He went back to the writing table, pulled the ballpoint pen from his pocket, and wrote a note—one sentence, divided into two lines, like a couplet—on the hotel stationery. This he tore off and read in the light streaming in through the window.

  I’ve been waiting so long

  for you to come back and fuck me.

  It was insane, of course, and he began to wad it up. But a combined sense-memory of his strivings with the redhead and Rita, and the little agonies of those failures in memory since, stopped him. He was fussy and timid and polite, had always been so, would become more so with every passing day, month, year. What about the sexual revolution, what about his own wild youth? He feared he was his father’s son—poor Henry Cohen, a student librarian at Stony Brook when he met Jeanie, overmastered by his wife and her family to such an extent that he’d let the children keep the Sikorsky name. Boldness was needed, even if it backfired, even if Rachel was repulsed by his chutzpah and wanted nothing more to do with him. Better that than being a good little boy, nervous and willing but unable. He put the note under Rachel’s pillow, and he knew it would be Rachel’s pillow, because Mr. and Mrs. Fellman always took the master suite, leaving the smaller room, and bed, to Rachel.

  As he plumped the pillow, he looked at his reflection in the window. He was just twenty-three, his head thick with woolly brown hair, his arms corded with muscle from cutting firewood, repairing leaks, doing whatever needed doing around the hotel. He had the olive complexion of his father’s Sephardic line, but the blue European eyes of his mother’s father, Asher. Asher, who had died when Len was five—he barely remembered him, but he did remember being led into the sickroom, standing by the deathbed and holding the great man’s hand. Those still-bright eyes had struggled open, and in their pale depths he saw himself. He came from a bold line, he thought; it was his birthright. And also, there was a reasonably good chance she wouldn’t even notice the note. Leave it to fate.

  Outside the window, over the headboard of the small bed, the pool was an emerald square flashing in the midday sun like a movie screen. Brigitte in Paris. He checked
the room once more and locked the door behind him, satisfied with his work.

  Dinner that evening was interminable, with everyone obliged, as usual, to listen to Dr. Fellman’s stories about his work—long, indecipherable tales with a vaguely moral point hovering about them, like an aimless d’var torah that made you feel guilty for half listening if you found other things more interesting, like, say, the leg of the girl sitting beside you. In the longest story, a young man had come to the office complaining of abdominal pains, and in the process of several examinations and an X-ray—this was slowly revealed throughout the fish course—Dr. Fellman determined that the young man had been swallowing bits of his mother’s makeup. He shook his head at this thought, as if it explained something essential about the state of the current generation. Mrs. Fellman didn’t say much, peering darkly over a wineglass at her prattling spouse.

  After dinner that evening, Jeanie and Henry squired the Fellmans to a late comedy show, and Len’s older brother, Ezra, home from grad school for a rare visit, vanished as usual, leaving Len with Rachel in what was known as the parlor. Often, in the evening, the parlor was a lively place full of guests drinking tea before bed, talking or playing cards. But the hotel was underbooked this weekend, late in August when people were getting back to work, when New York was finally beginning to release the heat it had trapped over the summer in a million-billion tons of blacktop and glass. Two old men in the corner played euchre, one puffing now and then with what was either excitement or exasperation, it was impossible to tell.

  Rachel was, of course, beautiful, more beautiful than he’d remembered. Although sitting next to her at dinner, stealing glances now and then, he’d been overwhelmed not by her beauty but by her herness, her Rachelness; and something else, closer to smell than any other sensory impression, but more like a continuous vibration or ripple passing through clear water, the intimation of a large thing approaching. Her breasts, it had been reconfirmed, really were unbelievable, though her new, shorter haircut obscurely bothered him. He liked her as she’d been when he first saw her, only fifteen and with her long hair wild, tousled from an open window on the car ride over from the station. This memory of first seeing her as she’d stood in reception—he’d been running fresh towels to the natatorium—had already attained a soft golden burnish in his mind, like a daguerreotyped portrait from ye olden tymes. He lived in a state of constant yearning for the last time he saw her, whether it was five months, five days, five minutes. Even when she was there—even when she was sitting by him, laughing, taking sips from a china teacup—he felt a thick-throated sentimentality, an instant nostalgia for every passing moment.