A smattering of applause.
“I live in New York . . .”
A few claps.
“Oh, you’ve heard of it?”
A puff of laughter.
“It’s not easy being married and . . . let’s face it . . . this good-looking in a city as engaging as New York. Some of you, I can tell, are also from New York.”
More applause.
“I’m not asking, though. I know a lot of guys come on stage and ask, ‘Where you from?’ I’m not gonna do that. I know what happens when you ask a New Yorker a question. I think we both know. They take over. You get one question with a New Yorker. That’s it. This is why you can’t interrogate a New Yorker. Could you imagine the Gestapo trying to interrogate a New Yorker?”
There was enough laughter from that one line—enough of an indicator to Lenny that all his intuitions were right, that he knew what no one else knew, and that this was going to work—that he plunged right into it.
“ ‘Names, names! Ve want ze names!’ ” Lenny yelled out in a horrible Nazi accent that may have been Yiddish.
“ ‘Names, names? You want names?’ ” Lenny answered as a loud, bold, self-confident New Yorker. “ ‘Alan Moskowitz! That’s a name! What a schmuck. He’s lucky he’s dead.’
“ ‘No, vait. Dats not vat ve mean.’
“ ‘And Alice Finkleman! There’s another name. The mouth on that woman. A snake, I’m telling you. You tell her a secret, you’ve told everyone. I remember a time when—’
“ ‘Um, no. I don’t tink you understand ze qvestion.’
“ ‘Don’t interrupt me, I’m just getting started!’ ”
Lenny interrupted his imaginary dialogue. “This could go on for hours. There they are. Schmitt and Schultz of the Gestapo are outnumbered and surrounded by this one New Yorker. At some point, Schmitt loses it.
“ ‘Enough! Stop! If you don’t stop, ve vill MAKE you stop. We haff vays to make you stop talking!’
“At which point, Schmitt leans over to Schultz and says, ‘Actually . . . ve don’t.’
“ ‘Vat do you mean, ve don’t?’
“ ‘Ve don’t. Ve put everything ve had into ways to make dem talk so ve could say, VE HAVE VAYS OF MAKING YOU TALK! And den, you know, ze budget ran out.’
“ ‘But za guy von’t shut up.’
“ ‘I know. Ve have a problem. Are you gonna tell ze commander? I know I’m not.’ ”
Lenny’s New Yorker interjects. “ ‘Excuse me. I can’t help but notice that you are becoming somewhat frustrated.’
“ ‘Ya. Zat’s true.’
“ ‘Perhaps I can help.’
“ ‘Vould you mind?’
“ ‘Not at all. If I understand you correctly, you want short and snappy answers to your questions. Perhaps if I ask you a few questions, you could give me some examples, maybe I’ll get it, and then we swap things around again.’
“ ‘Zat’s not a bad idea.’
“ ‘Let’s say I was to ask you the name of your commanding officer. You would say . . . what?’
“ ‘Colonel Augustus Humbolt.’
“ ‘That’s it? His name. Nothing else?’
“ ‘Ya. Ideally, ya. Ve have a lot of qvestions to get through.’
“ ‘Huh. OK, let’s try another one. What does he want the information for?’
“ ‘For ze invasion of Belgium.’
“ ‘And when’s that taking place?’
“ ‘O-five hundred hours next Thursday.’
“ ‘What are your force levels?’
“ ‘Six panzer divisions coming from ze northeast.’
“ ‘Any weaknesses in your defenses?’
“ ‘Two of ze divisions don’t have ammunition and we use some inflatable tanks to exaggerate our numbers. So, if you attack from ze south, you could vin.’
“ ‘I have to admit, these are good answers. Punchy, informative, helpful.’
“ ‘So, you start to get it?’
“ ‘Let me throw you a curveball. If someone wanted to assassinate Hitler on Thursday, say, around ten, how would he go about it?’
“ ‘Oh, zat’s easy. Breakfast at ze Kaiserhof in Berlin, third table from ze back by ze window. Pull up in your car, shoot him with a rifle, drive off, bing-bang-boom, it all over.’
“ ‘You guys are real professionals, I got to hand it to you.’ ”
The audience was hysterical. Lenny was prancing across the stage, his hands twitching around the microphone, his arms waving. Sometimes he crouched low like a predator and other times he hopped like a bunny. A man in the middle of the dining room started pounding the table with the flat of his palm in an effort to dislodge the cherry he’d accidentally swallowed. Everyone started pounding their tables too.
When the set was over, Lenny waved and walked offstage like Joe Louis after beating the crap out of James J. Braddock for the boxing heavyweight title back in 1937. But Sheldon knew that Lenny, like Joe Louis, still had something to prove. Joe Louis, as everyone knew, wanted a rematch with Max Schmeling, the German boxer. Sheldon was pretty sure that Lenny didn’t know who or what he wanted to beat, but whatever it was, it was something powerful and impossible to see, a headwind of some kind. For the first time, Sheldon considered that maybe telling jokes wasn’t the defensive move he had thought it was. Maybe it was a brave and new way to attack in a world gone mad.
Sheldon sat with a beer and watched the show. He’d never ordered a beer before or tasted one, but the freedom of the night demanded celebration. It turned out that he hated the taste. It had a nice color, though.
* * *
Lenny circled around and caught up to Sheldon when the set was over.
The boys hugged.
“You should call the cops,” Lenny said. “I’m a murderer! I killed them. I slaughtered the whole place! It was a bloodbath! I’m ashamed of myself !” Lenny grabbed Sheldon’s beer and took a swallow and then spit it all over the table.
“What is that? Is that beer?”
“It’s beer.”
“It’s horrible.”
Lenny ordered a Coke. He was parched. He was hoarse. And—according to Mr. Whitaker, who started shouting at the same time the Coke arrived—he was also fired.
Lenny’s mouth opened, but Whitaker was fast with his finger. “Come with me,” he said, index finger tall and commanding. “Not here.”
Sheldon and Lenny—both of whom assumed Mr. Whitaker was making a joke—followed him past the tables and out past the bar to the front lobby. It was dark there and much quieter. From his pocket, Whitaker removed a five-dollar bill, handed it to Lenny, and said, “That’s that. You had your fun. Got a few laughs. Now go home.”
“Wait. You’re serious?” Lenny held the fiver as though it were a dead rat.
“You can’t do that act again,” said Whitaker.
“Why not?”
“Why not? Why not? Germans and Nazis? Interrogations? Assassinating Hitler, that’s why not. You can’t talk about Nazis in front of a bunch of Jews.”
“But you can talk about Jews in front of a bunch of Nazis?”
“That’s not the point.”
“It feels like it is.”
“This isn’t a news show! This is a comedy show. They don’t want to hear about death! No one’s here for commentary. You started with a joke about your wife. That was funny. A teenager pretending he’s got a wife he’s already sick of. You’re aging better than she is. OK. You can probably make a bit out of that.”
Lenny didn’t understand. He was holding his head and shaking it back and forth like he used to do in class when the pieces of an idea didn’t line up. God, he knew, had told the Jews that the world was a broken place and needed humanity’s help to set it right. To a Jew, this implied that God wasn’t pocketing a few of the pieces; the game wasn’t supposed to be rigged. There is an answer, there is a solution, there is a pattern. You just need to apply yourself. N
ot just the Jews. Everyone. We’re in this together. This is the faith. It also explains why we’re exasperated all the time. But lose that faith in coherence and things go Kafka pretty fast.
Somehow this had to make sense.
“But . . .” said Lenny, “they were laughing their brains out, Mr. Whitaker. They came here to laugh and they laughed. How can you tell me they don’t want to hear it when they already heard it and loved it, and I heard them hearing it and loving it?”
Whitaker wasn’t used to explaining things to kids who thought life was geometry. The only reason he was hanging in there with Lenny was because of the pain on the kid’s face, a pain that was altogether human and looked pleading. Lenny sincerely wanted to do right and didn’t understand what the hell was going on.
It wasn’t unreasonable.
“There are defamation laws,” Whitaker explained. “There are obscenity laws. There are political considerations. I got people I got to do business with. I got people in the audience who might not be New Yorkers and might even come from German stock. You’re sixteen. You don’t know these things yet.”
Lenny said nothing. Mr. Whitaker, looking at him, understood just how much the boy must be suffering to have actually shut up. It touched his heart.
“You got any other bits you’re working on?”
Lenny opened his hands. “I got this thing where this grown-up realizes his parents have been lying to him his whole life so he finally confronts them, and they say, ‘You started it.’ And he says, ‘How?’ and it turns out that it’s because they once asked him whether he pooed in his diaper and he said no, and from then on, it was war.”
“You can’t talk about poo.”
“It’s baby poo. It’s not obscene. It’s a parent and child bit. It’s about, you know, life. Everyday life.”
“You’re giving me poo and Nazis, kid.”
“Life and death, Mr. Whitaker! If I can’t make jokes about life and death, you’re not leaving me a lot of wiggle room. What am I supposed to do, make jokes about nothing?”
“Nothing would be good. There’s a future in nothing.”
“How do I tell jokes about nothing?”
“I don’t know. I’m only saying there’s a nut there to crack.”
“Wouldn’t something be better than nothing?”
“Not if it’s polio.”
Lenny was despondent.
Mr. Whitaker’s shoulders dropped. This was like yelling at a puppy for being too happy. You can do it, it’ll work, but no one comes out of it any better. Whitaker had been running comedians for a decade, and before that, he’d known vaudeville and before that, burlesque. Stamping out a tiny flame might be stamping out a forest fire. It also might be stamping out the stage lights that brighten up the whole world. It took the wisdom of Solomon to know how to handle a kid like this.
“Go think of something, come back, we’ll try again. Stay clear of the Nazis,” said Whitaker. “That’s all-around good advice.”
Everyone Comes to Grossinger’s
BACK AT THE HOTEL, as they settled into the new routines, Sheldon learned the names of all the guests by studying the register whereas Lenny learned them by asking and taking them to heart. This produced the same results. Ben Adelman taught the boys how to check the arrival times of guests and then go outside to meet and greet them. They would tip their hats, load the luggage onto the red-carpeted and brass-edged four-poster trolley, and help the guests check in with Miriam or whomever was working the desk.
With access to all the keys, Sheldon and Lenny would proceed to the rooms, unlock them, and carry in the bags that they’d arrange on the folding suitcase stands at the foot of the beds. They never opened or unpacked them, but they made every other effort to help the guests feel immediately welcome and relaxed from the moment they stepped into their home away from home.
Sheldon and Lenny would demonstrate the lights, explain the features of the room, and detail the hours of the services and amusements. They explained how to call for assistance. Each gratefully if silently received tips, shared his name, and said that if there was anything he could do to make their stay more comfortable the guests should ask for him personally and the need would be met.
It wasn’t a bad way to make a living.
Initially, Sheldon had been convinced they’d be discovered as frauds once Ben Adelman actually talked to Mel Friedman and found out that Lenny had fancy-talked his way into the job. But Mr. Friedman had come back in a very good mood from his trip because he’d been having sex with someone other than Mrs. Friedman, and when Ben Adelman saw Sheldon take his boss’s luggage in without incident, any suspicions he might have had were dispelled.
It was a Friday morning in mid-July—the peak of the peak season—when Sheldon was surveying the incoming clientele and saw a name on the registry. He closed his eyes and opened them again to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
“Miriam?” he said, calling her over so she could see it too.
It was 6:30 in the morning and quiet. Miriam had trimmed her hair into a series of waves and her hazel eyes smiled at him. Sheldon suspected that she had come to like him more than she did Lenny, perhaps because Sheldon was more taciturn and she believed that still waters ran deeper. Sheldon wasn’t so sure about that—having stepped in his own fair share of still and shallow puddles—but he liked her attention more than he wanted to admit to himself because he didn’t entirely know what to do with it. He didn’t want to escalate matters with her, though, until Lenny found someone else to love, and so far, it hadn’t been going well.
“Do we know them?” Sheldon asked, pointing at two names on the registry.
Miriam leaned over and put her cheek uncomfortably close to Sheldon’s. He could smell the hotel shampoo in her hair and the Ivory soap she preferred over Palmolive. She pushed back her hair and placed it behind her ear so their faces were extremely close together.
“We know him,” she said, giving Sheldon a smile and turning her head just slightly. “He comes up here every year with a different woman. He’s quite the playboy.”
“It says they’re married. He has a new wife every year?”
Miriam chuckled. “You’re so naive.”
“I don’t get it.”
“We don’t give rooms to mixed couples who aren’t married. It wouldn’t be kosher, so to speak. So, everyone looking for a romantic getaway says they’re married and afterward, we don’t pry. He comes up with a different Mrs. each summer. This time it’s”—she checked the register—“Mrs. Mirabelle De Marco.”
“Is that a popular name here? Mirabelle?”
“No. Sounds French. Very sophisticated.”
“We’re still pretending Europeans are sophisticated given current events?”
“They have croissants. And Paris.”
“A year ago last month, the Nazis were goose-stepping under that big arch thing they have. I have to assume they were eating the croissants.”
“What?”
“Never mind. What time do these lovebirds arrive? I want to greet them.”
* * *
Mr. Alan De Marco emerged from the driver’s side of a black Buick at ten minutes to ten with the air of a man who was here by invitation. He wore a panama hat and his complexion was healthy, even, and monied. He wore a white suit that shot the sun’s light back to it with a wink; he drew a deep breath when he closed the door, knowing his ship had now dropped anchor and that there was still time before lunch to win over the natives.
The man snapped at Sheldon, who sprang to attention and opened the passenger door for the woman inside.
Aunt Lucy’s yellow shoes pivoted into view, and the heels sank to the warm asphalt. Mirabelle emerged wearing a yellow sun hat that shielded her face from view, but the jig was up.
She didn’t see him, didn’t look at the bellhop. Instead, she held out her hand and Mr. De Marco, like one of Arthur’s knights, came round to claim it. Nineteen years old, Mirabelle was the perfect mode
l of French womanhood—as far as anyone there might know. Sheldon wouldn’t have been surprised if she had the accent down pat.
Sheldon pushed the trolley ahead of him across the driveway and brought it to rest by the knight that Sheldon had already christened Sir Lies-a-Lot.
De Marco didn’t bother to look at Sheldon as he signed a few papers for Miriam, who was at the front desk. Mirabelle still took no notice of her cousin. She was busy greeting an acquaintance who was as lavishly dressed as she was.
“Take the bags in,” De Marco said to Sheldon. “We know the way.”
“Yes, sir.”
That was as long as Sheldon could be silent; patience was not his greatest virtue: “Is there anything I can help you with, Mrs. De Marco?”
Mirabelle turned to the bellhop, and when she saw Sheldon—sneering at her with knowingness, with sarcasm, with power—her eyed widened and she turned instantly from predator to prey.
“No,” she said.
“Honeymoon?” Sheldon asked.
De Marco interrupted. “I beg your pardon?”
“It was noted in our register,” Sheldon said, without taking his eyes off Mirabelle, “that you and madam are here for your honeymoon. If there was an error, I apologize.”
“No, that’s fine. Yes, it’s our honeymoon. Isn’t it, dear?”
“Yes,” Mirabelle intoned in an unflattering and nasal B-flat.
“That’s WONDERFUL,” said Sheldon, with a shudder of glee. “You can’t imagine how thrilled we are that you chose to spend it here with us at Grossinger’s. Tickled, really.”
“OK, kid,” said Sir Lies-a-Lot. “Move the stuff in. We’ll be having drinks by the lake in an hour.”
“Of course, sir; yes, sir; right away, sir.” Sheldon loaded the fine leather suitcases onto the brass trolley and bowed like a manservant as Mirabelle narrowed her eyes and tightened her lips.
* * *
SHELDON HADN’T SPOKEN TO Mirabelle since her graduation last summer in 1940. Their falling-out had happened around Christmas of 1939, a few months after the war had started in Europe and six months after Abe had disappeared from the graduation party. After that Christmas, they barely spoke, and when Mirabelle moved out after graduation, they didn’t speak again. For the past year, Sheldon had been alone in that dreary house in Hartford with his few fair-weather friends and his library of books.
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 18