The Hotel Neversink

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  And her: When the children began disappearing, what had she thought? Maybe she knew, maybe nothing. Maybe like Javits, like himself and Rachel and everyone else—like the police who refused to dig too deep out of respect for the great Jeanie Sikorsky—she’d put it out of her mind, preferring to think it was all either a coincidence or curse. Whatever the case, it had been right there in front of her, but she’d turned away from the truth, the one time her grace had faltered. She couldn’t destroy this thing her father had built. It turned out she’d left that to her son.

  He climbed the staircase to look down at the Great Hall. Once, when he was a boy, he’d stood there and indulged himself in a grandiose moment of pleasure, knowing one day this would all be his. In his youth he’d been a presumptive magnate; in his adulthood he’d been a struggling businessman; in his later years, he’d settled for the role of caretaker, keeping alive, if nothing else, the memory of happy success, a great family’s heyday. Well, that was all over now. It had been over even then, he just hadn’t known it—getting the news had been the work of a lifetime.

  He dropped the box, poured the last of the gasoline in, and dropped a match. Flames licked greedily up the rags he held to the fire. He tossed a rag into the nearest pool of gasoline and the fire spread with a quiet, sinister evenness. Through the rooms he went, touching the floor with the burning rags, dropping them here and there, trailing the fire as he walked. The Great Hall was ablaze behind him—the dining room, the lobby, the ballroom, the lounge. Standing there watching the fire consume his family’s legacy, he saw, for the first time in his long life, who he really was. He was the one to clean things up. He was a janitor. History’s janitor.

  His work finished, he stepped through a broken window, feeling the cold on his exposed chest, smelling faint smoke. Hearing the distant sirens as he cleared the snow off the car, and seeing the fire engine barrel along Main Street as he drove down Neversink Hill for the last time. For lack of anywhere else to go, he turned north onto 17, into a great line of cars stalled in the storm. Stuck there, just off the exit, he could see the line of heads in front of him craned sideways, watching the black smoke billow off that high white peak. It curled and puffed against the dome of the snowy sky, like someone sending signals, a frantic code, although who was out there to receive it, if anyone, he couldn’t imagine.

  In the opposite direction, Alice drove back to New York, past an endless line of stopped cars in the northbound lane. Gray-white sludge and dead trees blurred by her window, and she was glad to know she would not have to return here again—the image of Len, slumped in his mangy bathrobe on the diving board like a sick old dog, would stay with her for a long time. He was a genuinely kind, befuddled man, an animal caught in the snare of their family history, and she didn’t want to hurt him. But in the end, she didn’t care—she couldn’t. The story needed to be told, and after years of fending off her editor with outlines and chapters, dribs and drabs, she was almost done. All that was left was to hammer out the last chapter.

  She clicked the flashlight on and off as she drove. On and off, on and off, she worked through the material in her mind. She’d let Jeanie, Len’s mother, speak last. She was, after all, at the heart of the story, the alpha and the omega. In her image, the Neversink had become great, then ruined. Alice didn’t know every last detail, but Javits had given her enough information—birth records and court documents and financial statements and a water-stained journal—to know the truth. And regardless, she thought, putting the flashlight down and both hands on the wheel, it was her story now.

  An Ending

  I took him back in the end. Of course I did—in the end, what else could I do?

  Driving away, I told myself not to look back and then immediately looked back to see his hamper on the hospital’s stone steps—the image haunted me every night for the next two years, as did the question of what had happened. Had a nurse or patient found him, brought him inside? Had they, for some unknown reason, been closed that fateful day? Had he frozen during the night, been taken by someone? I did not care what my father said, how it helped the family. It was a sin, a grave sin that I had committed, casting my brother away, and for what?

  For money, that was all. Money, and the pride that money brings.

  So, shortly after we opened the Neversink, I began to visit Abraham. I’d inquired discreetly at the hospital, bribed a bored clerk with a ten-dollar bill. He pulled a file from a gray-green cabinet and told me the Sussex Boys Home. Steven Andrews, his government name—I went there and found him. He was three, dark-haired and dark-eyed and unusually thin, as though having already cast off his babyhood; similarly, and in contrast with the howling torment of his first year, he was nearly mute. It took him a month to say anything to me, and nearly a year to learn my name. Jinji, he called me.

  They all did, the children at the home. I volunteered there, on and off, for many years, bringing gifts for them all, but really for Abraham: little candies and marbles, tin soldiers and books to read, though Abe had difficulty with words. My hope, each time I visited, was to find him gone, taken by a kind local family, but each time he was still there—a bit older, a bit more silent and morose, increasingly ignored by the staff and the other children. He began to spend almost all his time in a little nook off the main hall, a place I came to think of as his room. There, he had his toys, a blanket, little nonsense odds and ends of materials he’d collected around the grounds. Sometimes things that needed throwing away—a dead baby bird, for instance, its translucent feathers delicately fanned, a tiny drop of ruby blood on its beak.

  His favorite possession was a flashlight I brought him when he was eight, a strange old military thing that some guest or other had left at the hotel. After letting it sit in the lost and found closet for a month, I brought it to Abraham. He was fascinated by it, clipping it to his shirt, clicking it on and off, on and off. When I made ready to leave, he followed, as he often did. I knelt and said, “Steven, just remember. Whenever you feel sad, turn this light on and remember that I will always be there. Remember you are not alone.”

  But he was—as alone as alone could be. Once, I asked a caseworker there why Steven had no friends. She said he was quiet, too quiet, and had trouble carrying on conversations with the other children. Attempting connection, he became frustrated and angry, and turned further inward. I asked a sweet child named Edgar why Steven had no friends, and Edgar said, “He scares us.”

  “Why?” I said. “He’s just a little boy.”

  “There’s something wrong with him,” said Edgar, and he said no more.

  As I married and had my children, I felt Abe’s absence as a constant ache, as painful as if I had given Leonard or Ezra over to the state to spend their days in that gray prison, with its hard tile floor and rows of beds under dull, yellowy light that spilled from the caged bulbs like urine. Part of the pain was the solitary nature of it—I simply could tell no one: not Henry, not Joseph, not Mother, and certainly not Father. There was no confiding our terrible crime in anyone, especially not when the hotel was thriving. So much in our business depended on word-of-mouth, on reputation. I worked so hard to make us worth the trust of our customers, our purveyors, our artisans, our employees. The Sikorsky name meant something: it was an assurance of quality, dependability, and more than that, an essential goodness. If word had gotten out of Abraham’s abandonment, we would have been finished—it all would have ended as quickly as it began, and my parents would have died, perhaps deservedly, of mortal shame.

  By the time he became an adolescent, I began to despair for him. He would not be adopted, could not fend for himself. What would happen when he turned eighteen? He would be kicked out into the wilderness like a dog, left to wander, to starve and die alone somewhere in bewilderment at his life’s brutality. Or—if he was very lucky—he’d be allowed to stay on as a permanent ward of the state, perhaps given a proper closet to live in, pushing a broom back and forth, despised by generation after generation of boys like him, a sym
bol of their worst potential future. I could continue visiting, continue bringing my little gifts, my flowers and sweaters and toys and candies, but I could not bring him what he really needed: a life outside the home and a sense of real family.

  Finally, in 1943, when he was fifteen, I adopted him. It took a little doing—some money spread around to secure silence, a few forms signed and notarized by a lawyer three towns over, clandestine trips to prepare for his homecoming. On a brisk April morning, I went in, found him in his nook, and led him out to the car. He couldn’t believe what I was telling him, that he was free, and the joy on his face was worth the years of torment, every mile we drove back to Liberty rebuking the same miles we’d driven fifteen years before.

  On this journey, I explained that I would continue visiting him, taking care of him, but he must never mention me. If he did, I told him—and it broke my heart to make this threat, though it wasn’t really a threat, simply the reality of the circumstance—he would have to go back to the home. “Do you understand, Steven?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I installed Abe in a house I’d found for him, and quietly looked around for work he could do that he might enjoy. I had Michael, the Neversink’s maintenance man, privately instruct him in various forms of handiwork. Michael would report back weekly on Abe’s progress—he was, it turned out, especially fond of and good at painting. He was not so good at plumbing or woodwork. Occasionally, when Michael had a big project, he would bring Abe—Steven—to the hotel to help him. Now and then, I would see my brother, hanging wallpaper, say, or handing tools up to Michael as he fixed a faulty sconce.

  Michael became my sole confidante, and he was a good one—quiet himself, unrelated to the family, and utterly loyal. He looked in on Abraham when I couldn’t, made sure he had groceries and was staying safe. He fixed things around Abe’s house and kept my brother company when he was feeling lonely. Though Abraham enjoyed being alone and was good at entertaining himself—too good, I came to fear.

  When the first boy disappeared, like so many other people at the hotel I worried it was a visitor, a guest from the city come to despoil our little Eden. It was not hard to see how, with its ceaseless flow of anonymous visitors and its sprawling grounds, the Neversink could prove an attractive hunting ground for a sick person so inclined. Saul Javits and I talked openly about this possibility, and we made ourselves vigilant to any strangeness, any untoward behavior. But when the next child disappeared in the woods near Liberty, then another two a few years after that, some small part of me began to suspect Abe.

  No, suspect is not the right word—this thought was too isolated within me, a kernel of doubt buried beneath a heap of blankets, layers of faith and love and all the unexamined confidence that routine and responsibility bring. But did I watch him a bit closer when I visited? Did I ask him what he’d been doing, where he’d been? Did I linger in his bathroom, cast a long look into his bedroom as I passed in the hall? Perhaps. Perhaps it was simply the atmosphere of the time—long gray days of doubt, passing strangers on the street and worrying a little to oneself. Is it you? Is it you? Saul Javits spoke against this, the danger of becoming paranoid, of doubting those closest to you. The worst crime this person can wreak, he said more than once, is to turn us against each other. We must have faith in the goodness of this place, in ourselves.

  In my rational mind, I worried about Abe, living alone with a killer or killers somewhere in the town. I worried that people might think it was him, though he seemed to be liked well enough, both by Michael and by the townsfolk whose houses he painted, whose rooms he wallpapered, whose gutters and fences he mended. Once, I sat with him and asked, had he heard of the children disappearing?

  “Yes,” he said. We sat in his living room. He turned the TV volume down, some ridiculous program playing. Strangely, I recall it was My Favorite Martian.

  “How does it make you feel, Steven?”

  “Bad. It is a bad thing.”

  “Yes. People in town are very worried.”

  “I know, they talk about it at the houses where I work.”

  I turned to him on the sofa. The TV’s light played off his black eyes as though they were made of glass. He was a handsome young man, tall and thin, unlike anyone in our family, with our blue eyes and limbs like alder stumps—I sometimes wondered if Mama had dallied, so unusual were his looks for the Sikorsky line. “You know you should not talk to children.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you understand why?”

  He turned from the television. “They might think it was me.”

  “Good,” I said, and we discussed it no more.

  The years went by; my children grew. Ezra went away to college and Lenny remained to help with the hotel. Those were, mostly, happy days. My Henry was still healthy, and the hotel was still in its prime—it seemed we were part of something that could never end, that was bigger than any of us, bigger even than my papa who had built the business, or Mr. Foley, who had built the building all those many years before. The celebrities and the money were nice, of course, but I never really cared about that. It was the feeling of being part of this great thing that touched, encompassed, so many lives. It was an honor to shake each familiar hand that came through the door, and it was an honor to make new friends—guests for life, as my father said.

  My Leonard seemed to feel this as well, becoming an expert on all manner of innkeeping know-how, and I grew older with the assurance, like a hand gently laid upon my back, that the next generation was poised to continue the tradition. Even when Henry died—felled mercifully in his garden by a heart attack—I could stand in our lonely cottage and look at the hotel and think, yes, whatever may come of all of us, this will continue.

  I held this close to me until little Alice was assaulted and the Schoenberg boy’s remains were found. Then, I knew; oh, I knew. I knew the Neversink was doomed. By the early 1970s, our profits were already declining, and we could not weather such a catastrophe. The short-term curiosity seekers would give way to empty rooms, a feeling of desolation, and the guests would scatter like animals before a storm. Even the sky seemed wicked that awful summer, a yellowy sky auguring sorrow and destruction. The air itself seemed to physically affect me, sap my energy and render me ill. Despite my doctor’s verdict—a blood disease, incurable, its slow progression leaving me perhaps a few years to live—I felt infected by evil, or by knowledge of evil.

  I knew it was Abraham. I do not know how I knew, but I knew. I lay in bed each night, shivering, seeing him out there in the world, the world I had released him into so many years before. During the day I gathered my strength, and I asked myself how could I know this? It could be anyone in town, anyone in the area, a long-standing guest, even. But somehow, I knew, and on a brisk day in April, I drove down the hill to his house.

  I had not been since the year before—before the boy was discovered and before I’d become sick. It seemed to have deteriorated in that time. Litter was strewn about the yard, the paint was blistered off in places, a board in the front steps skewed upward, unnailed. Abraham met me at the door. Despite the shape of the house, he looked the same as always, perhaps a little younger, even. He made me tea and we sat at his dining room table. An auto parts calendar on the wall was open to December, and one date was circled with red pen, annotated with initials.

  He drummed his fingers on the table, and I took a sip of my tea. There was an expectant feeling, as though neither of us knew quite how to proceed. “How has it been?” I said, finally.

  “Good,” he said.

  “How is your work?”

  “Good, yeah.” He seemed distracted.

  “Is it you?”

  “What, Jinji?”

  “Don’t lie to me. You must never lie to me.”

  “I would not.”

  “Is it you?”

  A car drove by somewhere outside in the slush. The smell of mint and slightly dirty water wafted up from my mug. He looked at me, and I at him. How much time pas
sed without him saying anything? I cannot say, though his silence was itself as clear an answer as he could have given. So I did the one thing that I thought might stop him: I told him who he was.

  He said, “I don’t believe you.”

  “It is the truth, Abraham.” At the sound of his real name, it was as though he were suddenly a baby again. Howling, howling away—tut tut, little chick!

  When he finally quieted, I said, “Never again, Abraham. Never again.”

  These days, I stay here in bed. I see Len and Saul daily, but mostly I am visited by my memories. I think about my childhood, that longest of winters that we somehow endured. I think of the good times here, try to remind myself that they happened, were not themselves lies. And I think about that long, hot day, so many years ago, the employees and townspeople joining together to search for Jonah. Standing before them on the staircase in the Great Hall, looking down and seeing the same expression of determined hope on each and every face—it sustained me at the time, but now the memory haunts me. For there was no hope; there never was. I know that now.

  There has not been another disappearance in the last two years, but daily I wake fearing the news of another child gone missing. I want to tell someone the truth—Leonard, most of all—but oh, I cannot. I cannot bear the shame. The truth will be spoken only after I am gone and the hotel is closed.

  Outside my window, the Hotel Neversink still stands, but for how long? It is all I have, and yet I see it and think God, please, tear it down. Raze it and burn it and water the ashes, that a field may yet grow in this wicked place.