Why was it my only virtue?
Looking back I wonder if maybe she knew who would be telling this tale today.
8
ANTIPODES
I went to Grossinger’s every major holiday and for the week before and after Chipinaw. My clearest memory is of the arrival, Richard Towers converted to his alter ego on the spot. I bounded from the car and raced down the road. Every tree and sign, even the dust I kicked up was special—it was Grossinger’s! My sneakers tore along the dirt twice as fast as anywhere else. I looked for Aunt Bunny at the house. If she wasn’t there, I sought her at the pool and beauty salon. When I glimpsed her, I felt waves of hope and well-being. The mere fact of her existence comforted me. She had such good spirit and an instinct for fun while, at the same time, she was the most serious and insightful adult I knew.
She liked to tell me silly things that happened when I was away, like a commotion she caused at a dinner party: “I shouted, ‘Throw Mr. Cats in the basement, or he’ll fight with the dog.’”
That was our cat’s name but, unknown to her, she had a guest that evening named Katz.
“He was standing there holding his drink. He said, ‘Please, don’t send me to the basement. I won’t fight with the dog.’” She did an imitation of him cringing, hands on her hips.
I remember once she came into a gathering with an aerosol can and I thought she was after bugs, but she began spraying pine air-freshener directly at Uncle Paul’s butt because he was farting silently. “I might as well,” she told her startled guests, “go to the source.”
I loved to monopolize her for conversations as she moved across her busy life. I kept her company in the kitchen, at the hairdresser, in the garden, even at the bar while she drank gin-and-tonics. She listened to whatever I had to say: Hardy Boys plots, my dreams, Dr. Fabian’s comments, my fears, stuff from school and camp. She not only heard it all but shared her life with an intimacy that would have been unthinkable from my mother. She was more than a parent; she was my best friend.
I continued my exploration of the Hotel’s lobbies and underground passageways, every bungalow, office, plaza, tunnel, and path, until I knew the entire iconography. It was more than being impressed by famous scenery. I was Grossinger’s.
One evening Aunt Bunny invited Yankee pitchers Johnny Kucks and Tom Sturdivant and their wives to sit with us at our table in the Terrace Room. At the show’s conclusion a crowd was blocking the door. The players were in a hurry to get back to their baby-sitter, so I led us out a fire exit, up onto the roof, and across buildings on platform steps.
“Great route, kid,” Kucks said.
“I live here,” Aunt Bunny remarked, “and I didn’t even know these stairs existed.”
An ordinary day began in the dining room with waiter Jack Gallagher, the old Marine vet with the Popeye face who, in season, would go over each last Yankee game, adding his complaints about managerial strategy (as if Casey Stengel were a madman or in cahoots with crooks and gamblers). He also growled good-naturedly about the mess left by any of us kids from the last meal, usually deposited after he had cleaned up and retired to his room for siesta.
On the way to Jack’s station I would pick up all four morning papers. Usually I arrived so early that they were tied in steel bands by the service desk: Daily News, Daily Mirror, New York Times, Herald Tribune. I turned the bundles over in the lobby in high suspense to trace line scores as far as the innings went in rural editions, extracting single copies by a series of tugs. If there was a leftover New York Post, World Telegram, or Journal American, I grabbed that too. Hard to believe, but there were seven New York dailies then, four morning, three evening. When necessary, Jack provided the final score with a recap. He would be in street clothes and suspenders, enjoying his own breakfast, so I’d wait on myself.
In the walk-in pantry refrigerator I’d mix boysenberries, raspberries, blueberries, peaches—whatever was available in the serving vats—and put them on Rice Krispies, Corn Kix, All Bran, or Cheerios. Dozens of each brand were stacked in single-serving boxes in the far corner of the dairy section, waiters converging there at hit-and-run speeds. Sometimes a new kind appeared like Frosted Flakes or Special K.
Then I’d petition waffles at the grill and occasionally sample a lunch dessert while waving hi to the bakers. My sense of entitlement was implicit, but I tried not to be a brat; I was diligently courteous and respectful. In summer I’d cut a giant slab of watermelon and, after the meal, walk alongside pansy-and-geranium beds, spraying seeds and smelling the scented air. This was my territory! A voice inside continually reminded me how incredible it all was, to get to be Richie Grossinger, blasting it at evocations from Bill-Dave and P.S. 6 who knew me as Richie Towers: “Look at this, Freddie Meyers, Andy Pfeiffer, Phil Wohlstetter!”
Some days I would take the house bus to my father’s bowling alley in town and stay there for hours, rolling game after game, trying to beat my successive tallies. It was yummy and peaceful compared to playing against Jon. I liked the giant score-sheet pads with their rows of clean fat squares for one’s accumulating sum, codes for spares and strikes—the former (a slant) if you knocked all of them over with two shots, usually by a fortuitous ricochet; the latter (an “x”) if you got them down on one roll, that rare pin-exploding concussion.
I made individual trips to visit relatives in their separate cottages: Aunt Lottie and Uncle Louie, Jay’s grandparents; my father’s sister Aunt Elaine, her husband Uncle David, and their children, Susan and Mark; deaf Uncle Harry and Aunt Flo who ran an antique shop next door to us and shouted fitful syllables as they pantomimed a butter dish or china platter they were giving me for free to bring to my mother.
Doing my rounds of family and friends was the heart of my Grossinger’s ritual. The dour troublemaking kid from New York proved an amiable, cheerful sprite as he marched through lobbies smiling and waving. I prided myself on knowing everyone’s names—clerks in shops, veteran waiters and waitresses, bus drivers and members of the maintenance crew, Uncle Eli and his tennis pros, Uncle Abe and the athletic staff, all the lifeguards, chefs, bakers, even janitors and dishwashers. These were my people.
My main conversational buddy was Nat Fleischer, the staff hypnotist, a man who knew a great deal about symbols and dreams. In fact, he lectured on Sigmund Freud to assembled guests in the lobby. I’d watch him put volunteers into trances and instruct them to blurt out stupid remarks and kiss strangers. At meals he and I talked about psychotherapy and the strange case of Bridey Murphy who, in a hypnotic trance, had recalled a prior life in Ireland.
Nat liked to mimic Morey Bernstein’s technique. “He was an amateur, but he had the perfect cadence, the perfect style of repetition, just the right tone: ‘I will talk to you again. I will talk to you again in a little while. I will talk to you again in a little while. Meanwhile your mind will be going back, back, and back until it picks up a scene, until, oddly enough, you find yourself in some other scene, in some other place, in some other time, and when I talk to you again you will tell me about it. You will be able to talk to me about it and answer my questions. And now just rest and relax while these scenes come into your mind….’ What a routine! What a goddamn brilliant routine! The guy was an artist, a genius. No wonder something happened, but what the hell was it?”
The Mirror ran daily accounts of their scribe’s search through nineteenth-century Ireland for traces of the original Bridey Murphy, but they were unsuccessful, each day a fresh letdown or setback. By then I wondered if the link Dr. Fabian couldn’t find in me, the terrible thing that had happened, occurred in another place, another time too. I wanted the reporter to succeed, to prove that we had been other people once, had lived prior lifetimes that were unconscious now. It was such a spooky thing, much more mysterious and haunting than the secret in the attic or the sign of the twisted candles.
But Dr. Fabian had laughed off Bridey Murphy, and Nat shared his view. “I didn’t expect them to find her,” he confessed one morning as he offere
d me some of his lox on poppyseed rolls, “but then what did she see, Richard?” While he seemed unwilling to admit it could have been a past life, at least he knew it was something. He agreed with me that stuff like reincarnation was more interesting than the stunts in his show, but he said the guests would revolt if he talked about it: “I’d wake them from their dazed stupors for which they are paying good money. Your father would fire me. This is a Jewish resort hotel, not CCNY or Milton Erickson’s clinic.”
The director of daytime activities was Daddy’s much-maligned successor, Lou Goldstein; he ran not only Simon Says shows but general participation comedy in the lobby. I’d try to observe him surreptitiously for, if he glimpsed me spying, he’d always embarrass me. “There goes the owner,” he’d say, and everyone would turn around and look at me. “Don’t let him fool you. He’s a midget.”
I wrestled and ran with Boy, spent hours brushing and feeding him. Then one visit during fourth grade, I arrived with Joe to hear he was lost, had been missing for over a month. I went out searching the far reaches of the grounds, even into neighboring forest. Frank Hardy and Rick Brant wouldn’t fail at this. But, in the farthest parking lot at the bottom of a hill with garbage, I found only another dead dog, and the horror of that ended my hunt.
Miltys Stackel was my best adult friend. He was perhaps six-foot-ten and two-hundred-and-seventy-five pounds. He had come to the mountains as a barnstorming basketball star and settled at Grossinger’s as proprietor of the combination drugstore/coffee shop we called the canteen—a miniature Jessie’s Jip Joint with soda fountains, ice-cream bins, and an adjacent TV room.
Milty was a pushover—the source of candy bars, toys, games, sports magazines, comics, and sundry beguiling items. It was all free; family members just put their signature on a dollar-size charge slip that Milty tore from a pad. Michael and I used to joke that he drank two milkshakes for every one he sold—and these were not ordinary shakes; he would fling scoops of butter pecan, vanilla, coffee, strawberry, peach, and whatever else we requested into a silver canister before locking it onto the beater. Even Bluto couldn’t have sucked that mortar through a straw.
Not only did Milty not object to our raiding his larder, he encouraged us to dig into fresh stacks of every imaginable comic while he was still unpacking them from manufacturers’ cartons. He saved dozens of Heckle and Jeckle for his personal stash because he adored those daffy crows, black birds with wide eyes and gigantic beaks. A flip through his archive showed them as dentist and patient, hot-dog vendor and customer, twin waiters (one holding the other up by the feet as he took the order), bookends with sombreros, golfers playing with brooms and placing an 18th-hole marker over a garbage can.
Upon petition for a half hour at a time Milty would leave his post and toss me fly balls on the lawn. Back and forth I’d go, diving on the grass, asking him to put them just over my head, to the left, to the right, high in the air. My side ached, my heart thumped, my legs were wobbly, but I kept pushing—one more catch—one more … my mind and body primed for either a fling to the side or a dash and plummet backward. I missed plenty and had to chase balls into bushes and across the road, but the great plays more than made up for those—a treasure in the tip of the webbing as I dove or jumped, then tumbled and held on. It was ecstasy, just me and that white stitched pellet, the tug of interrupted zing, proof of a perfectly timed leap or plunge on a planet of grass and sky.
“Don’t you ever quit?” he’d say. “You’re running and I’m beat.” Finally, I’d give myself permission to collapse into the sweet throb of my own heart, the cool shade.
After I got a box camera I badgered Milty for free film and developing. Then I trooped the Hotel grounds looking for compositions to shoot: bluish shelves of fungi, sky through leaves, reflections on puddles. For one whole roll I set coconut-covered marshmallow puffs next to hydrangeas that resembled them in color and shape—I wanted to show my stepfather I could make ads too.
In the winter, snow piled up atop wrinkled red berries on bushes, turning them into cherry ice-cream sundaes, so I shot different angles of those. Then I took pictures of dripping icicles against the blue. When a roll was done, twelve exposures, I’d tighten and glue the strip at the end so stray light didn’t get in; then I’d bring the spool to the canteen. Milty would drop it into an envelope on which he scribbled my name, then set the packet in a stack of others like it for the lab’s delivery man.
I eagerly awaited the return of the fat package with its glossy relics of my compositions. It was always a surprise—what shots came out just as I expected (or even better), which ones lost pizzazz in transposition to a flat surface, which showed an inadvertent blur or light leak. One unintentionally blurred garden view made such a nice rainbow that it was my favorite on the roll. After that, I began lying on my belly, lens up against a dandelion or buttercup so that the bloated orange or yellow transferred its flavor to a meadow of wild flowers beyond.
I even photographed big Milty from down low, aiming straight up into a distortion of his basset-hound face.
In fifth grade I made a Mars scrapbook and wanted to get my own picture of the planet, however faint and blurry, so I went out on a December night when the red dot sparked as bright as I had ever seen it. Milty came along with the longest flashlight he could find (five batteries). Although I told him it wouldn’t help, he insisted on shining it up in the sky while I held lens open on time exposure. “A little more light” he said, “couldn’t hurt.”
A couple of times a winter Irv Jaffee, a former Olympic speed skater, put on a fox costume and whizzed along the ice with dollar bills, fives, tens, and twenties pinned to his fur. Kids had to chase him around the rink and try to get near enough pull off a president as he feinted and swirled. I never nabbed a single one, as the gold medalist zigzagged and spun through our grasps, though I came tantalizingly close, fingers glancing off paper.
The fox was followed by a Lou Goldstein–narrated ice show culminating with championship barrel-jumping—a speed skater building up momentum and then leaping over fifteen or sixteen cylinders in a row, landing with a screech and spray of snow to great applause. I was wide-eyed and proud.
Often I stopped at Joy Cottage for an hour or so to keep Grandma company. I was an attentive audience for tales of her odyssey: how she came to America a poor girl, studied hard, learned English, and became God’s custodian of the land. She taught her life as if a proverb of a Biblical character rising above hardship. It was tedious and redundant, but I liked listening politely. I remembered that it was an honor just to be there, and a rare chance to represent my mother well.
Although the contrast between our upbringings couldn’t have been more definitive, Grandma Jennie imbued me with a sense of deeper affinity, as if we were two unique members of the Grossinger family. “Our success should have bred vision and generosity among our own,” she lamented; “instead it has bred envy and greed. You have suffered like me, so you understand this.”
Near the end of each stay she splurged anew on gifts for me, Jonny, and Debby. I got a blue and white Magnavox record-player with sequins on the case, then a tape recorder. Jonny got a set of battery-operated motor cars. Debby got the thing she wanted most—a full cowboy suit with a hat, a holster, and two pistols. Even Bridey was rewarded with a set of jeweled brooches.
“If they try to hurt you,” Grandma proclaimed, “we will still shower them with kindness.”
During one visit my offhand comment about the Yankees led Grandma to recall a treasure she had kept for years and she summoned the maid to go to her safe for it. Wrapped in a piece of pink velvet in a box, it was a baseball autographed by dozens of famous old-time players, including Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. She displayed it, rewrapped it, and then handed it to me. “Save this for your children. They can remember me by it.”
I returned to New York with these wonders, time and again surpassing everyone’s hopes, which should have made my homecomings welcome events. It didn’t. Though appreciated, the larges
s was regarded with suspicion, my mother adopting a familiar wryly querying tone as if to say, “What’s all this?” when surely she knew. They could never quite acknowledge me as their benefactor because they believed they deserved what I seemed to have acquired without earning, not only the merchandise but the prestige that went with it—Daddy and Mommy because they had made Grossinger’s what it was (and Grandma was only using me as their messenger), Jonny because he was the real champion.
In New York I became Richard Towers again. His life was beads strung on a thread: bittersweet days at P.S. 6, Phil and our gang at Bill-Dave, sessions with Dr. Fabian, hardball with Jonny and Bob in the Park. It was walks around the reservoir, me pushing Debby in a stroller; dinners at Grandma Sally’s apartment after she and Uncle Tom moved back to New York—Grandma demanding strict manners and polite speech, Jon and I enraging her (and embarrassing our mother) by goofing off, Grandma calling us “insolent” and “impudent,” so we made up an insolent, impudent ballad about her. It was seders on the Lower East Side with Daddy’s sisters and their husbands and cousins during which our mother, as much an outsider as us, flashed Jonny and me snickers of contempt for the clannish performance, as we were compelled to recitations of Ma nisthtana ha-laila ha-zel …” and then had to find the dumb matzoh. It was daydream planets and outer-space adventures (I never enacted the spaceship fantasy at Grossinger’s. It didn’t belong there). It was epic battles between Jon and me followed by brittle reconciliations; long Monopoly afternoons while rain beat on the window … buying the light blue of Connecticut and red of Kentucky and putting houses and hotels on them.
Stormy days were especially cozy with their myriad lush layers, drips and splashy tires leaving wet aliases on the sidewalk—the City double with melting colors, as my forehead pressed foggy spots on cold window glass. And time oozed past, molecule by molecule.
Phil’s father took us to a batting cage in Long Island. A mechanical arm slowly climbed to the top of its arc, then snapped forward, flinging a zip of a pitch. We had chosen “slow,” but only fastballs hissed by, the pellet sailing above my bat every time. Then, like Little Johnny Strikeout, I got the knack. We batted toward long nets with hits marked on them. Saying that we should go for swatting one out of Yankee Stadium, a feat never accomplished even by Mickey Mantle, Phil launched shots into the “home run” twice. I hit a double.
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