The Hotel Neversink

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  “Goddamn you,” he said again to himself, Alice, Len, Jeanie, Asher, the Neversink, God Himself. And as he did—as though God had heard his blasphemy and responded in brisk, instant rebuke—the road disappeared.

  Where it had appeared to go straight was instead a large, flat snowdrift, and in the corner of his eye he saw the road sweep away, up and right. He swung the wheel, but too late, and the car skidded into a wall of snow. For a moment it seemed a surprisingly gentle stop, but then the chassis slammed something hard and Javits’s head slammed into the steering wheel. He sat for a few wondering seconds, nose dripping like a leaky faucet onto the vinyl of the seat between his legs. He cautiously stepped on the gas, and the tires whirred uselessly beneath him. The rearview mirror revealed a long white slope that vanished into distant groves of black pine. He’d jackknifed over the top of a sloping hill—not the edge of a cliff, but enough of an incline at the top that the tires had no purchase on the ground. Pulling out his phone, he was unsurprised to find no cell service here.

  Hot air from the vent stung his face as he considered his options. The smart thing, he knew, would be to just sit there until another car came along. He closed his eyes and rested his hot, thrumming head on the cool doorframe. Waiting. Since Hedda had died, he felt he’d been doing nothing but waiting. He’d stopped doing anything—stopped jogging, stopped fixing the house, stopped gardening, stopped corresponding with people, stopped cooking and cleaning, stopped doing anything besides drowsing in front of the TV, talking to Samara once a week and Charlie once a month. Just waiting—for the obvious, he supposed. The detective work and Alice and even the trip to Len’s had been the most excitement he’d had in years. Horrible as it had all been, he’d also felt horribly alive, horribly purposeful. Busy. Now, here he was, waiting again. Huddled against the door, he remembered the time when he was five and he’d wandered away from his mother in a Weehawken Woolworths. What had begun as a fugue of delighted escape quickly became a nightmare of abandonment, his dismay impelling him to hide in a dark corner behind a rack of discount coats. He could still feel those coats now, the itchy, cheap tweed pressed to his face, not bringing any comfort. Then, as now, he’d eventually had to pull himself together, get to his feet, go get help. Before he’d fully thought through this course of action, he’d pushed out the car door and was following his errant tire tracks back up to the road. The snow crunched, thick and wet beneath his old duck boots, and he pulled his hood over his head. Hunching forward, the blood dripped a dotted red line on the white ground. This pleased him, strangely—walking where the road should be, he seemed to be leaving a lane marker of his own devising. He felt strong. The temperature was in the low twenties, but after a lifetime spent upstate, this kind of weather barely registered with him. His wife had grown infirm, and many of their friends had retired to Arizona and Florida (a postcard had arrived the year before from Sander, improbably still alive somewhere down in the swamp where he’d improbably worked for the last two decades, at his daughter’s tropical-plant farm), but like a stringy old weed, Mr. Javits had somehow gotten hardier with age. Still, it was cold, maybe even high teens, he thought. The teens were when his face began to hurt, and his face was hurting. But then, he’d just hit it on something, hadn’t he? The car wreck, he remembered, and looked behind, but couldn’t see anything in the whiteness. Where was the car? His breath hung in the air in front of him, like an idea. He would walk to the nearest town, a place called Owananda, he knew, only three or four miles away. He’d been there when he was younger. He could remember a lunch counter there. Speckled Formica. Sparkling chunks of snow tumbled silently off the overhang of a small nearby bluff, and his mind felt like that, like it was sloughing something off, decades of habit and thought, like dead skin. He would get lunch in Onawanda if the lunch counter was open, then hire a tow truck and drive home, if he could. But he didn’t even want to go home, he realized. He was glad to be where he was, walking in the middle of the road, where the road should be. A bit of sunlight broke through the clouds, piercing his heart with a shard of derelict joy. To be walking on fresh snow and not a car around—he again felt like a boy, but not the cowering boy in Woolworths; a boy with a whole snow day ahead of him. But God, his head hurt. When he got to Wanadonda he would go to the lunch counter, clean up, and drive home. Back in time for dinner. His daughter had a science project at school he’d agreed to help her with, he remembered now. No, he thought, wait, but Len, he had to meet Len. Where was his car? Stanching his nose with the shoulder of his coat, he stabbed at buttons on his phone.

  Someone on the other end picked up. “Saul?”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Sander, you called me.”

  Sander, the name was familiar, but the person it referred to eluded him. Why was this Sander calling him? Play it cool, he thought. “Yes.”

  “How are you? My God, it’s been forever.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you okay, Saul?” Sander held the phone away from his ear and waited, but no answer came. “Saul?”

  “Listen, I might, uh, need some help here.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t find my car. It’s okay, though.”

  “But where are you?”

  “I’m sitting down, right now, resting up. I’ve decided I won’t tell Len.”

  “Len? Tell Len what?”

  “Wait, who is this?”

  “Sander Levin. You called me. Hello?”

  “Sorry,” Javits sighed. “I have to go.”

  Sander looked pleadingly around the room with an instinct to ask his daughter for help—as he still did several times a day after several months—but she wasn’t there, of course. Help—his need for it, and her inability to give it to him—was why she’d put him here, at Grovebrook Downes, or as one of the resident wags called it, Brokedown Grove. Louisa visited three times a week, but otherwise it was just him and the nurse who checked on him twice a day. Just him sitting in this room that refused to become an actual place.

  It was as though his mind simply couldn’t absorb the concrete fact of one more new home. Or maybe it was that he was almost certain to die here, and some obscure part of him could not accept that truth. Whatever it was, this place—a large central room with a kitchen on one wall, bedroom adjoining, and bathroom with bolted steel rails—refused to coalesce into something that felt real. At best, his impression of it was the same as the impression of a weary traveler after a long day’s drive checking into a roadside motel; in his exhaustion, this traveler might briefly register the generic details—the TV, the floral bedspread, the cups wrapped in plastic, the chipped cream of the counter, the useless table and chairs—in the few moments before he closed his eyes and fell asleep; likewise did Sander’s mind rebel against any real impression, any particularity, of his new, and almost certainly final, apartment.

  He pressed the red button on his phone—the flip cell Louisa had bought him years before—feeling unmoored by the call, already plagued by the sense that he’d imagined it. What had Javits—if it had been Javits—said about Len? Where had he been calling from? The words swirled in his mind, but perhaps that was how they’d sounded. He rose uncertainly, grabbing his cane from where it lay beside him on the couch. One of the worst things about getting old was this feeling of uncertainty, never fully trusting yourself. The last time he’d driven—it must have been five years earlier—he would peer left down a clear road for thirty seconds before turning, convinced he was somehow missing an oncoming semi.

  Outside the window of his room, the mild March breeze rustled through a line of azalea bushes. He sometimes went out front and sat on one of the benches, the wrought-iron engraved in the middle with GBD, for the name of the complex. It was nice here, or nice enough, but it wasn’t a real place to him. The strange part was, his memories didn’t feel real, either. His childhood; the camps; the decades in Liberty working at the Neversink; even these last twenty-odd years, living near Louisa and her hus
band, helping with their flower nursery and the grandchildren, then moving in with them the last few. Although particular memories felt sharp and clear, these epochs seemed like other lifetimes. His past and present he saw through smoked glass, and his future did not exist. He was a man out of time.

  His thumb moved toward the recent calls list, to his daughter’s number, then hovered over the green call button. He didn’t want to unduly trouble her or her husband, Ken, who seemed to keep a private list of every call, need, errand, minor request, or inconvenience his father-in-law’s continued existence saddled him with. Instead, he scrolled down the list and stopped on the number marked RACHEL S—for Sendak, not Sikorsky, married to some doctor with a West Village practice, like her father. They’d talked a few months earlier, when she’d called to wish him happy birthday, whichever birthday it was. She was the only one he’d kept up with over the years.

  She answered on the third ring. “Sander, hello!”

  “Hello, my darling.”

  “How are you?”

  Rachel half listened to Sander as she walked through Washington Square to meet up with Elena for lunch. The calls had become less frequent over time, but proportionately more difficult. He seemed increasingly out of sorts, as he did right now, relaying some strange story about Saul Javits. Something about Javits saying something about Len. Rachel was distracted by the drink she was late for, during which Elena—her oldest friend—would be discussing the newly discovered fact of her husband’s long-running affair. They would split a bottle of white wine, and by the second glass, Elena would be sobbing into a cloth napkin. Bill, Elena’s husband, was what? Sixty-six? Ridiculous. It never ended.

  Though, of course, it did—the spectral voice on the other end was proof enough of that. Some part of Rachel was galvanized by the fact that, at her age, people were still sneaking around, cheating on each other. She hailed a cab on the eastern side of the park, told the driver the address.

  “I’ll call Len,” she told Sander, and they said their good-byes.

  As the buildings of the West Thirties fanned unremarkably by, the twin concerns of Len and Elena melded in her mind. A long time ago, she herself had considered infidelity, had considered cuckolding Len. As punishment, probably, for marooning her in Liberty with his beavering kindness and his false, foolish hopes about the hotel; in other words, for being exactly the man she’d known she was marrying. It had been her fault, and this had become clear when she’d met Eli, a new internist in her father’s practice. Over the last two decades of her marriage to Eli, she had not once been tempted to cheat on him; though this constancy, she admitted to herself, was perhaps owed to worrying about Eli cheating on her. She didn’t think he ever had, but he was a doctor, tall and good-looking, with thick gray hair and laughing eyes. He certainly could have, and maybe he was smart enough to have done so and not told her.

  Len, she’d never worried about—that was the thing, you wanted to worry about someone, just a little. She called him and got the voicemail. What had Sander been talking about? It only now occurred to her that he may have been calling for an actual reason. She called Susannah.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “No one says hello anymore?”

  “It says who’s calling on the phone. You don’t have to pretend like you don’t know who it is.” Susannah had been sitting at her desk, watching the snow and wondering why she’d come in to work. Force of habit, she supposed. And she wanted to check in on Len, make sure he had everything he needed during what was shaping up to be a real blizzard. She worried about him, as she knew he worried about her. Thirty-seven and still single, although she had an idea that Andy was going to propose soon. Len didn’t love the idea of her marrying a goy, but that was a different story.

  She listened as her mother detailed a strange phone call, Sander needing help in some way—or was it something about Saul Javits? It was unclear. The clock over her desk read 1:45. “Okay, Mom,” she said, putting on her heavy coat for the 200-yard walk to the cottage. “I’ll run next door and let Dad know.”

  Outside it had gotten even colder, and she hugged the pleated down to herself like a fond memory of summer. Every year, she’d thought, this will be the last winter, and every year winter came around again. Besides her love life, Len worried about her being unhappy in Liberty, stuck in this podunk town with her fancy education. In fact, she wasn’t unhappy. True, if you’d told her younger self that in two decades she’d be working for her father and dating a man who had a nineteen-year-old daughter, she would have jumped off a bridge. But what did her younger self know? Though she did sometimes feel she was wasting her life, she suspected she’d feel that way elsewhere too, and without the familiar comforts of home.

  The yellow front light of the cottage burned over a beard of snow. She knocked. She knocked again. The car was here, but no one seemed to be home. Her call went to voicemail. She peeked around the side but saw no one there, just the turntable spinning with the arm disengaged, a cup of tea in its saucer on the couch. Looked like he’d left in a hurry—maybe Javits had picked him up, hence the call? She pushed away from the window and trudged back up the drive, toward the empty clubhouse. She’d check back again later.

  From a window in the Neversink, Len watched her go. His good girl—she could never find out the things he’d found out this morning, as he’d gone through the files Javits had left, the box of files beside him on the ground. It was all there. It covered everything.

  He wandered down the hall to the natatorium, everything still and quiet, the windows dampened by the surrounding white. It felt like an old cathedral, a place of former worship abandoned by the old gods and surrendered to the elements. He climbed onto the old concrete diving board and sat, the cold reaching through his thin pajama bottoms. His mind, he realized, was curiously blank, his thoughts dull and sluggish as he found the number on his recent call list.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Meet me at the hotel. Come in through one of the broken windows at the side.”

  There was a pause. “Okay.”

  An hour passed—maybe two, he couldn’t say—and eventually she climbed in through the window, looking like the author picture on her last dust jacket. Wearing black, with dark hair and large, alert eyes. They seemed to take in the whole scene as she moved through the room: the rotting hotel, its bathrobed owner splay-legged on the diving board. “Len?” she said, with a look of concern.

  “Hi, Alice.” He knew he looked insane, but he didn’t move. What did it matter?

  “What’s going on?”

  “You know what’s going on. You talked to Javits.”

  “Yes, I did. This was all news to you?”

  He laughed. “I’m a fool, what can I say?”

  Overhead, a single pigeon beat its wings against the high rafters and Alice looked up at it. “I’m sorry,” she sighed.

  “Don’t write this book.”

  “Len, it’s almost finished. This is just the last part.”

  “I’m begging you. All that’s left are people’s good memories of this place and my mother. Please don’t take that away.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” she said, her pitiless expression almost as horrible as anything he’d seen today. “I came here today to see if you knew. And to tell you if you didn’t. People should know the truth about this place. People should know what happened.”

  “Please. We’re family.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, pausing at the window. “Good luck to you.” And with that, she disappeared back into the world.

  Len rose and went back down the hall to where he’d earlier set his supplies: two full gas cans, a clutch of rags, and a box of wooden oven matches. In the grand ballroom, a rat skittered into a hole beneath the stage, fleeing the smell of gasoline. Len wiped his face with his shoulder, eyes tearing further from the fumes. How long had it been obvious? Had it ever? Should it have been? Should he have known better or was he destined to be the stooge, an unlucky heir of a
cursed fortune?