Madagascar

by Steven Schwartz

  I run upstairs and lock myself in his bedroom. I call Claire.

  “He wants to sleep with her,” I hiss into the phone.

  “Adam? Is that you? Where are you?”

  I cannot believe how my heart has begun palpitating. “I can’t allow this.”

  “Victoria and your father?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes. It’s crazy. He’s crazy. He wants me to witness all this, make me an accomplice, prove to the world he’s finally captured her. This ultimate expression of his megalomania!” I motion downstairs, as if Claire can see me. “He can’t do this. It’s against the law.”

  “He’s forcing her?”

  “Against the law of nature.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Upstairs. I’ve locked the bedroom door.” From below I hear my father calling me.

  “Adam, you can’t stop them.”

  “Claire, this is my father we’re talking about. He’s about to defile this poor woman. For God’s sake, she’s been in a nursing home for twenty years! She doesn’t even know what’s happening to her! She can’t take care of herself. It’s cruelty.”

  “Does he love her?”

  “What’s that have to do with it?”

  “Does he?”

  “Claire, the question is utterly inappropriate here.”

  “Is it?”

  Neither of us speaks for a while. I play with the switch at the base of the nightstand lamp, an antique, the one item I’ve left unpacked because I want to take it back with me. I consider knocking the whole thing over, the delirious sound the brass shade will make. Claire says, “All right then, are you coming home tomorrow like you promised?”

  “Do you realize the situation that’s developed here tonight? I can’t just let him destroy her like this. He has no compunction, no awareness of what he’s doing. It will kill her.”

  “Adam…”

  “What?”

  “I want you back.”

  I put the phone against my shoulder. Downstairs I hear music. The piano. A snappy tune marches up the stairs, twirls and descends.

  “I want to know something,” Claire says. A high C pings over and over, like a knife tapping crystal. A music lesson? “Are you going to be the same kind of father?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Never around. Never here for your child.”

  “Of course not,” I say, but a shiver goes through my body.

  “Because if you are…” Claire starts to cry. “Because if you are, I want to know about it now. I have to know.”

  I think about Claire’s parents, divorced after thirty years, her mother saying to us on a visit from California, “I was Sleeping Beauty—in reverse. He kissed me and I fell asleep for thirty years.”

  “We’re going to be fine,” I say.

  “Don’t tell me that. It’s not true. And you can’t promise me anyway. You’re not even here now.”

  “I didn’t have a choice, Claire.”

  “Why did you wait until I was too pregnant to fly before you went? Were you trying to get away from us? Is it that you’re scared of being a father?”

  “Claire, look,” I say, but I’m not sure what I want her to see. That I’ve pleased no one by coming here? That my father married the wrong woman? That my mother died trying to find love in this house? That my father, demonic in his obsession, is about to fuck the lights out of the dead, rotting past?

  “I’ll be home tomorrow. I promise.”

  “But do you want to come home?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I want to hear you say it, Adam.”

  “I want to come home. I want to see you. I love you.”

  “You love our baby?”

  “I’m crazy about our baby.”

  “How do I know? Can’t you tell me something that will make me believe you?”

  I’m lost.

  “Adam?”

  “I’m yours,” I say, simple enough. “That’s what love is.” I shake my head, unable to believe I’m quoting my father. “I’m yours.”

  I sit for a moment after I get off the phone. Under the green felt bottom of the brass lamp I’ve placed a photograph for safekeeping. I pick up the picture and study it: my mother kneeling beside me, her arms wrapped around me. Her eyes are dark brown—clear of illness. The side of her face is crushed against mine; she hangs on with a passion to have me unfairly in her arms forever. I am six years old and missing my front teeth, toothlessly ecstatic to be in her embrace, so that now, looking at the child pulled toward her in desperate love, I feel the lock on my heart break, and silently I cry out for her.

  When I go downstairs I see my father at the piano playing a song I know from childhood, the words about a young man who pulls the moon along on a string so the tide will rush out and he can dance at the bottom of the sea with his lover. On the couch, with her arms at her sides, is Victoria, and for a moment I think she is dead. My father gets up from the bench and goes over to her. His lips touch her ravaged cheek, caress the back of her neck, move up to the bony protrusion at the base of her skull. I see the brainstem quiver with life under their warmth. He strokes her hair, then looks up at me and tells me with his eyes to mourn us all.

  Summer of Love

  The radio stations were calling 1967 the Summer of Love, but my father informed me it was to be a summer of work, and made arrangements for me to be a waiter at my Aunt Letty’s hotel in the Catskills. The lodge was near Liberty, New York, between the more famous resorts of Grossinger’s and Brown’s. After I flew from Ohio, where we lived and where I would be starting college in the fall, I took the bus from the Port Authority up to Liberty and then a cab from there to Aunt Letty’s place, Hy-Sa-Na Lodge.

  The hotel’s driveway was a mile-long gravel road overhung with trees. The cab bumped along the single lane that narrowed with tall weeds brushing the windows and doors, until we came to a three-story lodge. Patio tables, their blue and white umbrellas folded, lined a veranda that ran along three sides of the hotel. The hotel, my father told me, warning me not to expect too much, had been a fashionable resort in its heyday, the forties and fifties, with “Broadway Entertainment” and dancing, but over time, and with Letty’s husband, my Uncle Bumin, dying years ago, the place had deteriorated.

  I paid for my cab and went up the steps. The screen door had holes in it, and I saw that the paint on the walls was peeling. Fat pigeons cooed and dropped their feathers into crooked gutters. Aunt Letty stood behind the front desk, her hand shaking as she wrote. She had Parkinson’s disease. I had not seen her since I was five, when she came out for my mother’s funeral. She had kept me company, helped me color pictures of dinosaurs and whales and played quiet games with me while mourners came to our house to sit shivah. I was told my mother would be “in heaven missing me.” Sadness collected in empty spaces I never knew existed in our house—places that I came to understand are always reserved for such grief.

  “Ivan!” Aunt Letty said, looking up. “You’re here!”

  We hugged each other and Aunt Letty asked me did I want something to eat, a glass of milk, some tea? No, I said, I was fine. It was just nice to be here.

  “I hope you won’t be too lonely up here, Ivan.”

  “Are there any other waiters?” I had come a week early; the season officially opened on Memorial Day.

  “Two,” Aunt Letty said. “They’ll come soon. One is from Massachusetts, and the other is a young man from Long Island. Both seem such nice gentlemen. The young man from Long Island wrote me a long letter about his military background and training. He sounded very responsible.”

  It didn’t sound good to me. I’d gone on a chartered bus to Washington to march against the war, and I’d turned down a scholarship to Purdue University because R.O.T.C. was required.

  “What military school is he from?”

  “West Point, I believe.”

  “West Point!” Even I could be impressed by West Point.

  “Ivan, I don’t kn
ow if your father told you, but many of our guests are older here. I hope this won’t bother you.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Some are very old.”

  “I like being around older people, Aunt Letty.”

  “Good. You’ll let me know if there’s anything you need. I want you to be happy up here. I so loved your mother. She was my favorite cousin when we were children.”

  “Yes,” I said. “She thought a lot of you, too,” although I didn’t know this for sure. I was used to making up a personality for my mother since she had died when I was so young.

  Aunt Letty smiled. Her teeth were square, conspicuously false.

  “I try to keep up the place, Ivan, but it’s so hard by myself. And we just don’t have the funds that we used to.” Her voice rose nervously when she said funds. “I don’t think we can go on for too long the way things are now. We have our regulars but less and less come back every summer. And now, the young people, with their new ways, the long hair and all this trouble about the war and the riots in the cities, who understands any of this?” I sat and listened politely and then Aunt Letty said, “I’m rambling, Ivan. Please don’t let me do that. Come, I’ll show you where you will sleep, darling.”

  •

  A hundred yards up a dirt path, the old recreation hall once showcased the big bands and comedians who played the borscht belt. Now the building housed only bats and mice and an occasional opossum. Aunt Letty had offered me a private room in the main lodge, but I didn’t want special treatment, so I chose a room in the back of the recreation hall, one where other waiters in years past had carved their moment in history on the lodge’s walls: Lewis Goldberg ZBT, 1962; Mike Michaelson, Hofstra University, 1950; Miss Lucy Fishman and Mr. Barry Weinstein slept here, 1947. I moved the rickety card tables out of the room, swept the floor, covered the missing pane in the window with cardboard so the mosquitoes wouldn’t eat me alive, and set a clock up on a conga drum that I’d found behind the stage.

  During the day, dust would swirl in the light that streamed through the splintered rafters of the ballroom and cobwebs would glisten silver, but I could imagine the dances and shows and gala parties that had once taken place here, the orchestra on stage, the drummer swishing his brushes, the droll bassman, and then—a sudden change in tempo—the band leader puts aside his trumpet and beats a tattoo on this conga drum, while my mother and father and their friends do a steamy rhumba. I missed my own music now. The small radio I’d brought up got poor reception in the mountains and the two Beatles records I had gingerly transported had nowhere to be played. At night, I’d lie awake for a long time and listen to the bats in the ballroom, their wings flapping. I’d imagine their furry bodies and crinkled faces and red eyes and razor teeth—their sonar pinging off my head. Once, when I couldn’t stand it anymore and turned on the light to see, a group of ten or so swooped like a single large and reptilian wing from one end of the ballroom to the other—then shot back into the rafters. After that, I always left the light on and pulled the covers over my head to sleep. In the morning, with the bright sunshine, all would be quiet, the bats back in their holes, the mountains green and smelling of wild lilac and mint, the air cold and the grass dewy, the smoke rolling up from the kitchen’s chimney as I walked down the dirt path to eat breakfast.

  I was alone for a week, and during that time I helped Aunt Letty set up the dining room. I polished the silver, inventoried the dishes (meat and dairy plates—I had to learn about kosher service), separated the worn linens, filled salt and pepper shakers, and shampooed the carpet in the dining room. At the end of the week, Lester Malmar arrived. He threw his duffle bag down on the bed in the recreation hall’s long front room. He opened the bag, took out white cadet gloves, and placed them carefully on the room’s dresser. He was tall, with black curly hair, but I thought a little overweight for a West Point cadet. His legs were especially flabby, his skin pale under the hair. His sandals were held together with electrical tape.

  “Where you going to college?” he asked me.

  “Ohio University,” I said.

  “Major?”

  “Psychology.”

  “In Russia you’d be insane.”

  I realized, with a sinking feeling, that I’d have to go through the whole summer with Lester Malmar.

  “That’s what they call people over there who don’t believe in Marx’s little red book.”

  “Mao’s,” I corrected.

  Lester laid an attaché case on the bed, popped open the snaps and lifted the lid. Inside was a pistol.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not loaded. I keep the bullets separate. That’s one thing they teach us in weapons class—firearm safety. You want to do some target practice sometime? I’ll show you how to shoot.”

  “No thanks.”

  “There’s plenty of places around here.”

  “I hate guns.”

  “Suit yourself.” Then Lester flopped on the bed and laid the gun tenderly on his stomach. He lit a cigar, something else I detested.

  What saved me from Lester was Jeff showing up the next day. Jeff brought his stereo with him and a terrific collection of records. He wore rose-tinted granny glasses, a rope belt of bells, silver studs along the seams of his jeans, and baggy white shirts from Mexico with bright embroidery. His hair, wavy brown and parted in the middle, came over his ears, and with his dark lashes, brown eyes, and wide mouth he looked like a cross between George Harrison and Paul McCartney. It didn’t hurt the resemblance that he played guitar and sang in a band, and that his voice, deep and rich, could fill the entire recreation hall. The weekend after he moved in, he brought back a date from town and set a chair for the girl in the middle of the dance floor. On stage, he entertained her, a cappella, with Elvis, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis. His encore, to the wild applause of us all, had been Gerry and the Pacemakers’ “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying,” and he had crooned the song in such dulcet, plaintive, and heart-seizing notes that his date, a first date, leaped up at the end and shouted, “Marry me!”

  I hoped I would meet someone, too, that summer. But there were no girls at the hotel. Aunt Letty had been right: all the guests were old, and canes were prominent. I had to remember to speak up when waiting on my people, and to make sure I saved a serving of pickled lox for Mrs. Shoenbaum, and that even if Mr. Edleman wanted a Danish not to give it to him (his fifty-year-old daughter had warned me) because he was a diabetic, and to always bring Mrs. Fine “a little hot water with lemon, please—hot, please, bubeleh, hot,” and to remember that Mr. Wallach had a “reaction” to the kosher dairy substitute for cream and so I was to empty out the kosher substitute and put in plain milk, though never to tell Mr. Wallach because he would die of a heart attack if he knew, and to Mr. Rosen give no salad because the roughage “makes my ulcer grab like a python.”

  At the end of the week, they would each call me over, on the porch or outside where they’d be walking slowly up and down the driveway, with their large sun hats, their white summer shoes, dark socks and plaid shorts. A five-dollar bill would be crushed into my hand. “So good you are,” they’d say, or “So you should go to college and be as good a doctor as a waiter,” or “Please, next time, a little hotter the water, hot, bubeleh.”

  One day in early July, Jeff and I walked down the road to the Brown’s Hotel. Brown’s was famous for Jerry Lewis—they’d named their nightclub after him—who had once worked at the resort as a busboy. Jeff had said, “Let’s go in the lounge for a drink.” I agreed, although it made me nervous. I had turned eighteen in April and only drank 3.2 beer in Ohio, which I knew was not sold around here. So I ordered what Jeff did, which was a shot of tequila. Although I remained perfectly composed on the outside, a flame like a gas derrick’s shot through my stomach.

  I turned in my chair to watch Jeff, who had gone over to the large windows that bordered the pool. He tapped on the glass at two girls outside in bikinis, motioning them to come inside. I panicked. I couldn’t believe he was doi
ng this to me.

  They told him to come outside instead.

  Jeff walked back to where I was sitting. “Let’s go talk to them,” he said.

  “Do you know them?”

  “No. Should I?”

  His voice had already dropped into that chocolatey, deep register he used for singing and talking to girls.

  “I can’t, Jeff.”

  “Why not?”

  He looked at me as if it would never occur to him that such a thing as shyness existed in the world. With his good looks, his bedroom eyes, his easy words, his light curls—what would he know about a choked voice, sweaty hands, a heartbeat loud as a cowbell? The girls weren’t going to be interested in me, serious, analytical, preoccupied with the war, not to mention skinny legs and the rash on them from some weeds we had tromped through on our way.

  “I can’t go out there.” I just couldn’t imagine how. The girls in their bikinis: the light catching the necklace in the taller girl’s cleavage, their slick, wet hair and golden shoulders, their eager hand signals to Jeff, their fingernails pink and sharp against the glass…how experienced they looked through the window. The tequila, rather than relaxing me, raced through my system and melted connective tissue, my will oozing out like sloppy airplane glue.

  “I’ll help you,” Jeff said. “I won’t leave you hanging.” He put his hand on my shoulder. Here was a leader, I thought, here was somebody who could get men up a hill into battle.

  “You talk with them by yourself. Really, it’s okay. I’m just not in the mood,” I lied.

  Jeff sat down next to me at the bar. He studied me for a minute, then said, “No big deal. There will be lots of other chances. You ready to go back?”

  “Yes,” I said, immensely grateful that he hadn’t taken my suggestion and left me.

  Although I’d had a girlfriend in Ohio, we had broken up before I left for Aunt Letty’s hotel. Elise thought making the separation official would be a good idea since we were going to different colleges anyway and she wanted to be free. We had slept together twice, near the end of the school year, but there was something too quiet and mechanical about it, as though we were taking turns touching each other rather than making love, all mixed up and wild. She’d held me in such a peculiar way, more as if to contain me than embrace me. I had been glad to be going away for the summer.