“Just back to the room. To read.”
“Fred, it’s not a good idea.”
“Why?” Her father turned to her mother, and Alice saw that the discussion was now past her, again in the adult realm.
“You know why.” Her mother looked at her father, then said, “The ildren-chay.”
“I understand pig Latin,” said Alice, although she wasn’t sure what her mother meant.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Schenkman, “it’s so horrible. Two decades and no one caught. How can it just go on and on?”
“I have my theories,” said Mr. Schenkman. “I think it must be a hotel guest, someone who takes little hunting trips to the country, if you catch my meaning. In the city, you have cops everywhere. Here, there’s probably five police in the entire county.”
“Can we not discuss this right now?” said Alice’s mother.
“Discuss what?” said Alice.
Her mother sighed. “Do you know the way to the room?”
“Yes, definitely. Yes yes yes.”
“Straight back, then, and we’ll check on you in an hour. You’d better be ready for bed.”
Or what, Alice thought, but knew better than to say it. She walked slowly out of the dining room, her legs stiff from tensing them in sullen protest under the table, but as soon as the dining room disappeared behind her, she was running down the carpeted hallway with a feeling of joy in her heart so immense she felt like she might explode. Had she ever been this happy? An elderly couple gave her a reproving look as she flew by them down the hall, aimless in her revel. She jogged first past the pool, brightly lit in the early evening, overseen by a young lifeguard who stared dully over the rippling green water, then through the lobby and back, past the dining room, to the closed door of the auditorium. A sign warned, “Show in Progress, Do Not Enter,” so she did not, instead turning heel again and racing up the main staircase, past a family of five and a put-upon porter pushing the luggage cart behind them; past a sitting area with empty gilt-backed chairs, herself streaking by in the mirror; past doors and doors and doors and doors and doors and doors and doors.
The closed doors fired her imagination. She had decided she wanted to be an author, though she hadn’t written anything yet, besides some “creative free-writes,” as her teacher called them, in her fourth-grade class. But she loved books, and she loved picturing what might be happening just behind all those doors. Other people’s lives seemed so incredibly interesting, in contrast with her own life and the lives of her parents, which were dull, though very nice. That would be the great thing about being an author, she thought—you could have your dull, nice life while simultaneously occupying the lives of anyone you wanted. Cleopatra, for example. They had learned a little about Cleopatra in her class, and she had looked up more about her in the Encyclopedia Britannica during recess. Why had no one written about Cleopatra, she wondered? She would, when she got older.
She kept moving, charged with a sense of adventure, certain she was on the verge of discovering something she hadn’t seen yet. The hotel was massive, an unknowably huge labyrinth of rooms, corridors, passages, floors, and compartments—a world unto itself. She’d always loved secret places, perhaps because of the lack of secrets or privacy in her own life, a lack of which she had lately become aware. Her life contained no private spaces and no secrets she could immediately think of, besides getting in trouble earlier in the year for throwing a rock at a mean boy during recess, but that wasn’t the same kind of secret. Elise, for example, had real secrets—her body, on its own, constituted a mystery. Her sister’s entire life, for the last year or two, had become entirely, annoyingly private, a succession of whispered phone calls, shut doors, long bathroom ministrations, rendezvous. Alice’s existence, suddenly, felt immature and slightly ridiculous in its unadorned simplicity. She got up and ate her breakfast, went to school, came home, had a snack, maybe rode bikes with her friend across the street, watched TV and petted Banjo, ate dinner, described her tedious day in even more tedious detail, did her homework, watched more TV, went to bed. Lying there, the Plainview crickets sawing their nighttime plainsong, she felt the unspecial suburban landscape outside like a personal indictment.
Having climbed to the fourth floor, she was disappointed. On her way up, she’d imagined a secret tunnel leading out to a rooftop esplanade, a hidden garden on the roof, with a bright fireman’s pole plunged back down through the heart of the hotel. Instead, it was all just more guest rooms. There was an interesting closet near the stairwell, but it proved to be full of towels and cleaning supplies. Poisoned cleaning supplies, perhaps? No, she thought, don’t be stupid, just the dumb stuff your mother keeps under the kitchen sink. Poisonous, yes, but boringly poisonous, not skull-and-crossbones poisonous. She walked back downstairs in a growing mood of discontent. What if there really wasn’t anything to see; what if there were no secrets? This was a terrible thought. If the adult world was just what it seemed, that is, a series of boring transactions and conversations, then there wasn’t any point in getting older. The only thing that made it seem palatable was the intimation she got now and then that there was a vast, interlocking web of things beneath the surface, as if a blanket had been thrown over an unspeakable, writhing tumult. But maybe the hotel was just a hotel, New Jersey was just New Jersey, her sister was just an unhappy teenager.
On the second floor, she decided to play a game, make a bet of sorts: she would knock on one of the doors at random, and if an old woman came to the door, it would be a good witch in disguise. She would tell Alice where she should go next, in code, and this would lead her to something interesting. At the first door, she knocked and stood with her heart pounding, but no one answered. At the second, no one did, either. But at the third, she thrilled as the door opened to reveal an older woman. Maybe not old-old, exactly—not her grandmother’s age—but old enough. Wrinkly.
“Yes,” the woman said.
“My name’s Alice.”
The woman smiled the smile of a good witch. “Hello, Alice.”
“Hi.” She stood there, waiting for the information.
“Can I help you with something? Are you lost?”
“Do you have something to tell me?”
The woman leaned out of the door and looked up and down the hall. “Where are your parents, little girl?”
“They’re still at dinner.”
“Do they know where you are?”
“I’m supposed to be back in our room at eight thirty.”
“I see. Why don’t you go there now?”
“I’m bored,” she admitted.
The woman paused, thinking. “I have an idea. Why don’t you go down to the coffee shop and put a lemonade on our tab? Mrs. Moskowitz, room 208.”
“Will I find the next clue there?”
The woman looked at her with irritation and mild concern. “Clue? No, just lemonade, I believe. Go on down there now.”
Walking away, Alice tried to convince herself that the good witch was being sneaky, had secretly given her a clue, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like an annoyed woman had told her to go away. As she padded back down the carpet, she ran her fingers on the walls and felt her mood deflate further. The walls were the same cream color as their house—as her school, now that she thought about it. Everywhere was that color; the only exception, the only place where fun things really happened, was in books. At the end of the hall she went into their room, but felt too antsy for bed, so she grabbed her novel—A Wrinkle in Time—and went obediently down to the coffee shop.
There was only one other person there, an older man with a newspaper. No one behind the counter. She climbed onto one of the high vinyl stools, pinioned the book on the hard linoleum, and had just found her page when a man’s voice said, “Alice?”
She looked up, surprised to see Len, the hotel manager, on whom she’d had a crush since she could remember. He had curly hair, and big arms, and a gentle way about him that put her at ease, like a big, friendly dog. “Hi.”
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“Where are your parents?”
Why did everyone always ask this? “Dinner. Can I have a lemonade? Put it on Mrs. Moskowitz’s tab, room 208.”
“Sure,” he said, with a look of amusement, as he pulled a pitcher from the fridge behind him. He filled a glass with ice, poured the lemonade, and set it in front of her. “On the house. What are you reading there?”
“A Wrinkle in Time.”
“Never heard of it. Good stuff?”
“It’s great.”
“I don’t get much time to read these days, unfortunately.”
Len busied himself cleaning something, and Alice addressed herself to the book once more. Then, with all the force of a good narrative turn, it struck her: Len was the clue. The good witch had known he’d be down here.
“Do you have a clue for me?” she said.
He turned. “Excuse me?”
“A clue. For where I should go next.” She suddenly felt childish and stupid, but continued. “I’m on a search.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Something interesting.”
He looked at her, at her book, then another smile creased his handsome face. “Yes, I do.” He cast a quick glance at the man at the end of the counter, making sure he wasn’t eavesdropping, then he leaned in. She strained up to hear his words, and felt goosebumps sprout on her neck when he whispered, “There’s a door.”
“A door?”
“A magic door.”
“Where is it?”
“I can’t tell you, that’s the thing. It moves around. You have to find it.” She stared up at him, and he wagged his head at her solemnly. Then, breaking the spell, he straightened and said, “What time are your parents done with dinner?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Make sure you’re done with the search by then, okay?”
“Okay.” She drained her lemonade and rose, the sugar amplifying her excitement as she exited the coffee shop. How could she have doubted there was more than meets the eye? You just had to be receptive, open to the world, and it would bestow these discoveries on you, these adventures. She walked slowly back across what her parents reverently called the Great Hall, scanning the enormous room. Sofas, paintings, shelves with books and knickknacks, lots of people moving to and from the ballroom and lounge, up and down the big stairs that curved up to the floors above. A gilt-edged clock ticking on the wall in a nearby alcove told her she had only fifteen minutes before her hour of freedom was up, fifteen minutes to find the magic door. For a moment, she despaired: the Neversink was so big, it would be impossible.
Then she saw it. A small metal door below the grand staircase. It was half-hidden in the shadows and set obliquely to the main sitting room, so that you had to be walking toward the stairs and looking carefully to see it. Her heart quickened—this was the door, without question. But did she dare enter? There were so many guests around, plus bellhops and maids scurrying this way and that. She stopped and opened her book, pretending to read as she stood—just a strange, bookish girl, nothing to see there, pay her no mind, as she edged into the darkness under the stairs.
Still, she paused. She didn’t want to get into trouble, and she was about to give up the pretense of following the clue, when she thought about the book in her hands. What would the story be like if Meg and Charles Wallace and Calvin didn’t enter the tesseract? If they were too afraid? They would never have had any adventures, never have rescued Mr. Murry from IT. There wouldn’t have been a story at all. With a sharp intake of breath, as though to clear any sensible argument from her mind, Alice pulled the handle and ducked in, shutting the door quickly behind her.
A small wooden staircase led downward. The lights were on, but they were low and yellow, and she had a feeling of being underwater. The basement hall’s floor was tile, and the walls were stone, the foundation of the building. She had the feeling of being privy to an enormous secret—the thing below the surface she’d sensed and sought after. It was here, down here.
But now that she’d followed the witch’s clue, what next? There was no more down. What there was was more doors, a line of them down the hall, terminating with a large exit at the very end, a hundred or so yards away. The lights flickered overhead, seemingly responsive to her thoughts. Which door should she pick? The first ones, to her left and right, were locked. The third, to her left, was also locked. A tiny shard of disappointment lanced the fun of the moment, and she saw herself as she probably was—a bored little girl playing make-believe.
But the lights above her flashed, and the door on the right opened. She stood before it, peering into the darkness as her eyes made sense of the shapes. Shelves piled with all manner of cans and bottles, though she couldn’t see what they contained. Dozens, hundreds of them, all filled with magic potions, she thought, poisons and serums and elixirs. She entered, and the door, heavier than she’d realized, closed behind her. The small square window let in a little light, but not enough, and she reached around on the wall, trying and failing to find a light switch.
Did something move in the corner of the room? Surely not. She pulled on the door handle, but it seemed to have locked behind her. She steeled herself and looked again at the corner, resolving to wait for her eyes to adjust, refusing the trick of fear and darkness that was making her see a man. A gray, faceless man, looking at her. Then there was a clicking sound, and light. A light radiating from the man who couldn’t be there, who was there in the corner smiling at her. As hard as she’d wished before for the hidden to be real, she now wished it was all make-believe, wished the man away, but instead he drew nearer, and at last she screamed.
A custodian in search of an errant mop handle discovered her in the morning, sixteen hours later. A pair of paramedics carried her upstairs, emerging into the almost intolerable aboveground light, to the sound of her mother’s sobs. She’d been examined by a doctor called to the hotel, who touched the necklace of purple bruises around her throat and said it was a miracle she’d survived. Groys nes, he’d repeated, over and over. She’d overheard him talking to the police. There had been another body down there—the remains of a child who’d been less lucky than she had. Her attacker must have thought she was dead, she overheard one policeman say to another. They asked her a few questions about the man, took down what she could remember, thanked her, and gave her father a business card. The hotel detective, Mr. Javits, didn’t ask her anything, just seemed relieved she was okay—over and over he said what a brave little girl she was.
She’d been driven home in a car filled with terrified gratitude, as though her parents were afraid she’d be taken away again if they opened their mouths. They’d installed her in her bedroom, put a stack of books by the bed, and there she’d stayed, reading and writing, and eating food when her father brought it in on a tray. It was kind of great, actually—she could miss school if she wanted, the entire semester. Elise seemed a little jealous, even. You owe me, she told her sister with a laugh—no more trips to the Neversink!
But at night there were the stairs, the room, and the man in the corner. The queer light he cast all around him. His kind smile as he approached, the arms encircling her, and a darkness so consuming and total that even when she regained consciousness it was like she was dead. This she could not think about, could not talk about, even when her parents brought a therapist in to see her. This she would bury so deep it could never be unearthed. Each morning, the sun streamed in through her blinds to tell her she was safe, and she would finally sleep, knowing as she drowsed away that she would never go down, would remain above, always.
8. Mr. Javits
1975
When the redheaded lady showed up, Mr. Javits thought she was just another weirdo. There had been plenty already—weirdos—ever since that hot August in 1973, when little Alice Emmenthaler’s abduction had led police to the boy’s body. Jonah Schoenberg: stashed in a burlap sack, at first covered in vinegar to mask the smell, his bones hidden behind the shelves of dry storage for
twenty-five years. At this lurid news, like morning steam rising off the sloping lawn on the north side of the hotel, people seemed to rise out of the ground, materialize. Mr. Javits didn’t mind the regular guests and their natural curiosity, or the journalists and writers who came from the city to write a story. They were just doing a job, even if Mr. Javits happened to think it was a lousy job, although who was he to talk, being a hotel detective—a job his wife, Hedda, still could not entirely believe he held, and this after nearly thirty years of doing it. She’d always thought it was a stopgap, and frankly so had he, with his associate’s degree in journalism from CUNY Queens. In 1946, they’d moved to the valley for a year after college, a return-to-the-land kind of thing some people their age were doing after the war, and he’d become friendly with Henry Cohen, Jeanie’s husband. So when Henry had said the Neversink, in its boom period of fame and expansion, was hiring a hotel detective to handle all the stuff that came with it—drunken misbehavior and petty theft, mostly—Mr. Javits had said sure. Sounds like a lark, thinking of those old MGM comedies, screwball pictures with a hotel dick searching for, who was it, Bob Hope or somebody in drag hiding under a dessert cart. He fell into the job and thought he would fall right back out after that year, but then Hedda had gotten pregnant, and they’d bought a little house, and then she’d gotten pregnant again, and, and, and. At some point she’d wanted to move back to the city, but he was making seventy bucks a week by then, his salary steadily raised by good old Jeanie. What could he do to make seventy bucks a week, starting out, in the city, knocking on doors with his six-year-old journalism degree and his cheap tweed suit, leaving aside the fact that the money also went four times as far out here? Maybe some local rag would take him on for fifty, which would land them in some downtown hellhole they’d barely be able to afford the privilege of being murdered in. Was that what she wanted, for them and their babies to get murdered? To be raped by some randy beatnik out for a night of jazz and mayhem? In this manner, he browbeat and frightened Hedda into letting them stay in Liberty, into letting them live all these years in the very same house up on its quiet hill, with windows looking out on a land he unabashedly loved—the rivers! the glades! the fishing! the friendly souls! the sun slanting off a grass embankment like the ground itself was winking at your good fortune and your good sense in staying!—and it was ironic when the kid disappeared in 1950 and tawdry whispers of abduction and death blew through the hotel, a locale and business that seemed as wholesome and safe as a glass of milk squeezed directly from the cow’s teat. Having grown up during the twenties in an overstuffed tenement in Weehawken, with an immigrant mother making money however she could in the louche gin joint downstairs, their living room a de facto after-hours gentleman’s club with reeking patrons tilting through at all hours, Mr. Javits had developed a constitutional aversion to vice and a corresponding love of anything that spoke of nature, hard work, health, goodness. So these morbid curiosity-seekers, these weirdos, of whom he took the redheaded lady to be one more, who showed up at the Neversink, rankled him deeply. What did they want? To be close to the aura of scandal or death? Or just something eventful—that was the charitable view. As a resident of this valley for nearly thirty years, Mr. Javits could grant there was not much going on, but still, there had to be something better to do than hang around a place where long ago a little boy was killed. Going blackberry picking, for example. The very thought of their succulent sweetness, especially baked into a pie or turned into jam, was enough to make Mr. Javits salivate like their basset hound, Alberta (Schweitzer), who, to be honest, was lately not doing so good, seemed to have something wrong with her eye and the lip that drooped beneath it, loosing a constant stream of gummy spit that pooled on the floor or ground, wherever she’d gotten tired and stopped moving. It had occurred to him recently that he was going to have to put Alberta out of her misery—take her behind the farmhouse, in the discreet local phrase—and so perhaps death, and resentment of death, was on his mind anyway, was concentrating his natural aversion. (Jeanie, for that matter, had gone a bit downhill since ceding daily control of the hotel to Len two years prior, and had declined on a steeper slope in the wake of the body’s exhumation, spending most of her time now in the cottage behind the hotel, sequestered and swaddled like a holy penitent, though the prospect of Jeanie’s death was so horrible that Mr. Javits couldn’t consider it for one conscious second.) But he hated these people because, whatever their motivations, their very presence brought an aura of seediness to a place he loved. They skulked about like hungry ravens, entering and pretending to be guests, jangling ersatz room keys, hoping to find their way into the basement, to look at the “secret room” the newspapers had already reported on ad nauseam. One man, a little weasel in a Yankees cap, Mr. Javits had to hustle out when he personally caught him sneaking down the stairs. You can’t go down there! he shouted at the man, and the man shouted back that he was going to his room, and Mr. Javits shouted back, your room is in the basement? Shame on you! Shame on you! He removed his navy coat with the hotel insignia on the breast and advanced on the man, and the man fled back through the lobby, casting a worried look over his shoulder. Though Mr. Javits was not by any means a hulking brute—was in fact on the shortish side, five feet seven as he told people, though really closer to five five and some very loose change—he was fit as a fiddle, the product of a lifelong fitness regime of his own devising. Every day, he did two hundred push-ups, one hundred sit-ups, and, most importantly, he ran eight miles at five o’clock in the morning. In the dark, he laced up his running shoes, put on his battery-powered head lamp, and jogged down their gravel driveway out onto old Route 117, a moribund logging road creased with ankle-breaking ruts and sudden, precipitous edges. Animals scuttered in the darkness at his downhill approach, the occasional owl hooting as he passed. Route 117 took him in a broad loop down the hill or small mountain where they lived—he’d never really been sure which it was—in a corkscrewing approach that bottomed out in the poorest stretch of Liberty. Here, the houses sat, wet and disheveled, like abandoned children left to play in the dirt, and he always shivered internally, brought to mind of his own childhood and a particular memory that often arose, of a man’s work shoes caked with mud beside the curled edge of the carpet on which Mr. Javits sat reading. Reading, but really letting his mind wander, something it seemed to do with increasing frequency as he’d become older and more aware of his surroundings. As he sat there, his thoughts moving from the book, to the teacher who’d lent it to him, to the classroom at school with its chalky blackboard and wainscoting of cursive letters, he became aware of a man’s feet standing before him. The man said something, but it was like Mr. Javits was underwater—although when he thought about it now, he couldn’t say whether that was how it had sounded at the time or how it sounded in his memory. And was there a difference? But he knew he never looked up at the man, embarrassed, even at his tender age—for himself, his sister, his mother down the dark hall, the man that stood before him, everyone. The man was putting on his work boots, and Mr. Javits saw how the socks were dirty, too, and wrinkled, with a hole on one ankle where the black hair peeped through, reminding Mr. Javits of the stitches his friend Reuben had gotten after catching an errant baseball with his right eyebrow. The ends of Reuben’s stitches were like the hair of a fly, something that had burrowed repulsively beneath the skin. Was fly hair even hair? Curiously, at that moment, a fly had alighted on the east-facing window, the window that looked out on the Orthodox church, with its golden turrets and blue dome like the abandoned egg of a giant robin, an egg incubated by resentment and loneliness that had grown monstrous. The fly writhed, and the man, he noticed, had stopped talking, and then Mr. Javits was dealt a colossal blow that upended the room. There, among the furniture hanging from the walls and ceiling, was the man’s face—a blond boy, hardly older than his cousin David, with thin whiskers and a native, rueful look hued red with anger. The man left and there the memory faded, a sepia shot of sagging chairs and cracked
plaster. He supposed that was why he ran in this direction, through town—to remind himself of where he came from, and that he was not there any longer. Even at fifty, making a comfortable living at the Neversink—still working for Jeanie, doing security and whatever other little odd jobs popped up that needed doing around the place, the important thing being to always stay busy—he still feared, and sometimes he imagined he felt, disorder and poverty exerting a gravitational pull on him and his family. And there was a perverse satisfaction, a sick thrill, in running by these houses daily, similar to picking off a painful scab. Passing out of the poor side of town, he jogged through the small park where, in the summer, the homeless lay with rusted hibachis hovering over them like sentinels of sleep in the stillness of near-morning, then around the town center—the gas station, the lending library, the post office, the dentist’s with the white colonnades in front made to look like toothbrushes, which always made Mr. Javits chuckle. What kind of a person would make their front porch up to look like toothbrushes? Well, a dentist, obviously. What kind of person becomes a dentist? What kind of person becomes a hotel detective, for that matter? (Head of hotel security, a title change conferred long ago, but still.) Why do people do anything? Why did that boy get killed so long ago, and why the other children in the area, and why had the girl been attacked, why? It would have been better if the boy’s body had never been found. Well, it would have been even better if the boy had never been killed, obviously, and especially never killed on Mr. Javits’s watch, so to speak. He didn’t exactly feel responsible or guilty, because, after all, he was one man, and it was an enormously busy hotel by 1950, with hundreds of guests coming in and out daily, and you couldn’t expect him to keep an eye on every single one of them. This, anyway, was what Jeanie had told him the second day after the boy had disappeared, when he’d collapsed, weeping, in a chair in the corner of her small office, grief- and guilt-stricken in equal measure, imagining his own boy, Charlie, being abducted, and worse. Little, blameless Charlie—the fear felt by a child who was loved and cared for would be worse for its fresh horror, a new thing with no precursor; the dawning of this fear would be worse, it seemed to Mr. Javits, than whatever real pain could be inflicted. The night before, he’d lain in bed sweating through a series of night terrors in which he was intermittently Jonah, Charlie, the murderer, or just himself looking on, helpless, and he hadn’t been able to tell whether he’d been asleep or just thinking. Then he’d gone to work to be interviewed by the police, and to be screamed at by the mother of the boy, who had called him incompetent and worse. He wept against the wall in Jeanie’s office, having tendered his resignation. But Jeanie, he would never forget, leaned over him and put her hands on his shoulders, and told him, Saul, you’re one man. The parents couldn’t stop it, the police couldn’t stop it—neither could I, and neither could you. God, she said, could have stopped it, but He didn’t stop it either, and we must believe there is a purpose. She hadn’t hired him to prevent robberies or anticipate abductions, just to keep a kind of order and morality to the place, and he’d done a fine job in that so far. Her face, at that moment, had looked holy to him, cherubic and red-cheeked, a countenance of elemental goodness, the sun shining down on him. He’d continued weeping, but the reason had changed, though he didn’t say so at the time, from guilt to a bottomless gratitude that he worked for someone so pure of heart, a woman he would have killed for. A woman he had come to think of as his real mother, though he knew he had a real mother already, an old drunken nafka. But life, he felt, had led him down this mysterious path, led a city boy into the woods and far country to a job he had no particular interest in or aptitude at, all so he could, among these dense groves of pine and alder, these thickets of stinging nettles, find his mother, who held him there to her large chest, rocking him, telling him to put it out of his head. And he had, more or less, for twenty years, until the little girl was assaulted, and the cops found the little boy’s body, and the weirdos started showing up, among them the redheaded woman whose name was Lucy.
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