New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  By the time we reached Smith we were all three jiving and drinking beers.

  The following week I received an acceptance letter from Seattle, but that seemed a pipe dream. Once again I went to the Phi Psi room committee, hat in hand. They assigned me the large double on the first floor for fall, to be shared with a wide-eyed sophomore-to-be from Boston named Marty.

  The last visit with Lindy was agonizing. We were already planting a necessary distance between us and, as we strolled by the Smith boathouse holding hands, we argued about where our relationship was going. The time apart would be good, she said. Now that I was strong again I should build on my strength. “We can date new people and write each other as confidantes, wonderful intimate letters about our adventures.” Her jovial mood made me sulky. I accused her of tearing down what we had.

  She had brought me me a goodbye card with a quote she had hand-copied from painter Joan Miró: “Everywhere one finds the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists in staying at home and close to Nature. Nature who takes no account of our calamities.” As I read it, she added, “Remember that, dear, the next time you get stuck and I’m not around.”

  She said we would always be good friends but could never be more than that. I didn’t want such a limit, didn’t see any reason for a limit now that we were parting anyway.

  Fred had loaned me his mythical Rambler for the trip to Bradley, Hartford-Springfield’s airport, so I drove the forty-five minutes there. I kissed her quickly. Our goodbye passed without lingering—a girl with a suitcase merging into the crowd.

  Upon my arrival at Grossinger’s my father told me with a hint of sadistic fanfare, “You’ve been promoted to desk clerk.” I flashed him a cod-liver-oil look. Playing hotel was not in my plans, plus a visible front-office role afforded no loopholes for escape. After thinking about it for a day I told him I’d rather find my own job.

  He was momentarily speechless. “Okay,” he responded with a series of perturbed nods. “I’ll give you a week. If you don’t get something by then you’re washing dishes all summer.”

  That seemed a fair challenge. My main impasse, transportation, was quickly solved when Grandma Jennie offered to lend me her Lincoln Continental, the JG, for the summer. It was far too ostentatious a vehicle for a nineteen-year-old with radical visions and only three hundred miles under his belt, but there were no ready alternatives. I knew that my father gave her periodic grief about it; apparently she held her ground because, other than continually making me re-park it in a spot that existed only in his mind, he never interceded.

  Lindy was going to intern at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and I figured a newspaper was the most promising opportunity for me too. Setting off in my oversized white sedan, I turned east out of Ferndale onto Route 52 and drove fifteen miles to Ellenville, site of the Nevele. For the next three days I tried newspaper offices from there through Monticello, Liberty, and smaller villages, filling out employment forms that were probably in files discarded when computers took over thirty-five years later.

  Then I worked my way west on 52—the less populous direction out of Liberty along the Delaware River, across train tracks into Hortonville, past ramshackle farms and covered bridges. This was even less promising: no newspapers at all. On my last allotted day I came to the Pennsylvania border town of Callicoon, thirty miles from home. On its main street I saw a classic Norman Rockwell storefront: The Sullivan County Democrat. It seemed too mirage-like to be real, a façade I might have conjured as the state line imposed a fateful barrier. Compared to my cognitive map of Grossinger’s home county, Pennsylvania was as uncharted and remote as Wyoming, and my prospects were sliding fast, dishwashing on the horizon. I poked my head in far enough to glimpse an alcove dominated by hanging galleys and stacks of metal type.

  Its proprietor was a mountain of a man named Fred Stabbert. He extended a hand to the young stranger and, with a cordial bark, grilled him in the doorway, his bulk precluding further entry.

  He was succinct: he’d hire me once he determined I wasn’t running away from home. “The last place I need trouble from is Grossinger’s.” The Democrat was the one anti-hotel paper in a conservative Republican county, and it struck Fred as odd that the son of the owner of its largest resort should show up at his door looking for work.

  I was ecstatic. The twenty-two miles from Callicoon to the G. flew by like ten. Fred no doubt took pleasure in his phone call to Paul Grossinger that afternoon. I imagined their cagey exchange. My father said nothing initially, but at dinner that night he seemed genuinely pleased—though he added quixotically, “So you don’t want to go into the hotel business?”

  “You know I want to be a writer.”

  He agreed he knew that.

  I sent Lindy an account of these events and began work on Monday.

  For the first week at the Democrat, I sat at a desk proofreading county news and writing captions for photographs of car wrecks, retiring supervisors, and high-school swimming stars. Fred kept teasing that he was working me up to bigger things.

  I enjoyed the time there regardless, especially bag lunches with him, his sister, and the rest of the crew by Callicoon Creek, luxuriating in sun and breeze off the water, exchanging regular chitchat and repartees. I tried to bring everyone a dessert from the previous night’s meal at the Hotel. My boxes of cakes and cookies were much anticipated, the politics behind them discounted, their yummies promptly eulogized and devoured.

  Finally Fred dispatched me across the Delaware into Pennsylvania to cover a town meeting about snow removal. I mailed my front-page article to Lindy.

  Her job in Denver was comparable, except that she was an intern at a big-city daily. She proofread too and rewrote other people’s articles. Otherwise, she was sent to cover veterans’ meetings and hundredth birthdays. Her first letter detailed all that and then stated explicitly everything I most feared:

  You will unfortunately get to know me much better in letters. Unfortunately in that what I write in these always has and will be too truthful; whatever last trace of a gossamer mask there was is now off because we have started letters. They are the great disarmer; I’m stripped now because they are the first and last source of communication. Your letters I prize too much, perhaps even more than many of our conversations which were distorted by fear on both our parts. What will happen is that I will end up talking about you a lot more than you will about me in these letters, which fact is a fact and deserves to be wondered at. I think you’re interesting but I also think I’m interesting—but in the last ding dong ding dong of the world it will be you we’ll go down discussing because I am uncomfortable under the glare of the operating table light….

  I am not so secure that I don’t love love when I see a little of it flowing in my direction. I think I am horribly idealized in both your and Aunt Bunny’s eyes now, and probably to see me again in flesh and blood would wreck the beautiful image that has somehow been created. Connect now with the moments when you hated everything I said during the last times, as I do, but then always give the exquisite rationale that I do, that those angers were because I was leaving. All this makes me tiptoe and not count on a thing—people or you seem to be so changeable that I’ll be wary and fly back up my tree before eating out of your hand.

  I’m very ordinary. I go to work every day and am a cub reporter on a Scripps-Howard tabloid. I write crap well and they like it and me…. I see Steve as often as I can which is infrequently. I was in Aspen with him when you called, and there is no sense in playing games, leading you on, or worst of all, having you build images of me (too positive or too negative). I don’t want to be another Betsy; idealization is not flattering to me. Steve is the end of a long quest and search. I have perhaps found him prematurely because now no one else will ever really do in his role. You and he play different parts. I play a part to you which is not sufficient for you; you will need someone else to play the part that Steve plays in my life. The role is indefinable—it’s not exac
tly that of a lover but perhaps that of a stronger person. I’m too weak for you in the end, and you are too weak for me. This is maybe too much honesty, but I would rather knit alone than have any sham falsity. What you are is perhaps the closest friend I have and have ever had. I can’t depend on you but I can write you with this candidness and not be afraid of losing your friendship….

  I dread next fall in a way (and this will hurt you, but don’t let it) because we will either split or change. I dread having to face you because I will have to be freer than you let me be. If I can’t be as free as I want I’ll just fly from you, try to get away and out of your pocket. I’m only good when I’m free to study, grow, explore, and develop on my own and the only people who have ever held me have been those who let me fly. I’m nobody’s parent, wife, lover; only friend.

  Fred directed me to Ellenville to talk to a Japanese man who was saturating the Hudson and Delaware Valleys with cherry trees. I took down his tale: immigration to America, homesteading in rural New York, a vow to spread this gift from his homeland to his adopted country. I posed him in front of his orchard. My boss loved the story and decided I was more valuable hunting up human-interest features than proofreading. I was given free rein to come and go.

  I drove to small socialist hotels and bungalow colonies—diametric opposites of Grossinger’s—where I interviewed guests and staff. I met Kurt Shillberry, the most vocal opponent of the resorts’ tax breaks. He thought that establishments like Grossinger’s should pay for their share of County services at a rate in keeping with their revenue. Shifting restlessly on the couch, my father perused the published interview, then guffawed, “You’re a dreamer!” But at least he smiled.

  Fred heard about a community of black Jews called the Gheez living in the woods by Callicoon. He thought it might be too dangerous to investigate, but then he shouldn’t have mentioned it. I edged the Lincoln to the end of the last dirt road and walked a quarter mile to their encampment. They were delighted by a press visit and took me on tour of their huts and temple, all the time spieling gospel and Biblical history. They had a gigantic queen whom they carried on a litter, but I saw only pictures of her and the throne. Fred published most of my account, removing my exotica about Egypt.

  Next I picked another remotely situated institution, a boarding school called Summer Lane modelled after the radical Summer Hill schools of England. The director, a towering young minister, met me at the gate, then escorted me past clusters of suspiciously staring boys. Reverend George von Hillshimer was a Civil Rights activist who had been on the recent Freedom marches in the South. From his collar up he was a priest, but otherwise he was a charismatic gang leader, officiating over teens in leather jackets and bracelets, clusters of them dragging on cigarettes around low sheds. In the hour that followed, George proved capable of spontaneous oratory as well as bursts of startling ferocity, especially when something more untoward than tobacco caught his eye. He seemed more dangerous than the kids.

  For the remainder of July and August I left the newspaper office once a week at noon and drove back roads to Summer Lane to share sandwiches with Reverend George in his grove. We talked Lawrence and James Baldwin, and he read to me from his own political and philosophical writings. “It is crucial,” he admonished, “not to live a typical American adolescence, which is self-indulgent and conscienceless. Go through life as a hero. James Baldwin dreamed of ‘another country’ without prejudice and human-inflicted pain. Well, he knew—and we all know—it doesn’t exist. Your generation has to make it from scratch.”

  My clippings delighted Lindy. “I am of course jealous you get to range through far-out and meaningful territory. And they support you? I’m astonished.”

  Well, not always. I sent her my typewritten editorial about the presidential candidates in which I compared Lyndon Johnson to a man driven by a malign unconscious force, as the tides by the moon—the moon being Barry Goldwater, whose war-mongering had purportedly stampeded LBJ into sending troops to Vietnam. I closed: “It is nightfall in America!” Fred had refused to publish it.

  “You’re too damn radical for me, boy,” he said. “This stuff is downright depressing.”

  To the amusement of the staff, Fred and I engaged in ongoing ideological debates. Head of the county Civil Defense agency, he insisted that atomic bombs were no big deal. “It’s just one more weapon,” he informed me. “It’s been the same since the caveman. You invent a weapon; then someone finds the defense for it—so you build a bigger weapon. You can’t halt that parade. Atomic bomb’s just a big bomb, but it’s not more than a bomb.”

  I was glad it was only the Civil Defense (and the Democrat) that Fred oversaw; still his rhetoric frightened me. I feared instant holocaust if Goldwater were elected, and the fact that a union guy like Fred could support his position on armaments was disconcerting. Leo Marx had tried to convince us that the liberal tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Adlai Stevenson was America, its ascendance inevitable, but outside of Amherst and New York City I never seemed to encounter it.

  Driving country roads back and forth to Callicoon and newspaper assignments I visited sleepy antique shops and, on my salary, bought old jugs and lamps, which I used, along with props left over from Hotel banquets (including a plastic potted tree), to decorate my room. I created an informal shrine in which I hung Klee and Miró prints. I lay in my arbor, reading Olson and Nabokov and enjoying the sounds of Phi Psi: Bob Dylan, Jim Kweskin, Dave Van Ronk.

  “Change or lose me,” Lindy had warned. Since she had gone back to Steve I did not feel disloyal noticing a pretty waitress at a station near the family section. She was a heavy-boned girl with an Eastern European face. Casting subterfuge glances her way, I tried to discern if she was really as attractive as I thought she was. She was—her appeal gave no ground. A riveting actress with rolling hips and a pouty stare, she lugged trays more fully loaded than most of the men, delivering fancy chow from her platters with a sulky, imperial demeanor. She was charismatic, impossible not to look at.

  We seemed to catch each other’s eye more than I was willing to admit, telling myself those self-conscious smiles were part of her routine act, not for my benefit. Then one night in early July after the dining room had closed and she was cleaning her station, I approached cautiously until she looked up, a twinge (perhaps) of “Finally!” in her moue.

  My role at Grossinger’s had become totally ambivalent to me. Whereas once I took my identity from being the owner’s son, now I was embarrassed by ruling-family privilege and tried to downplay my affiliation. Yet it was part of the courage I drew on in approaching her—that, plus pure beguilement and the reckoning in Lindy’s letter.

  Her name was Jean, nickname Smokey. Polish Catholic, from Pennsylvania, she was working for her college tuition and despised the Hotel and its guests (as was evident to anyone with half a brain).

  “Yes,” she said, she’d love to go out to dinner, “off the grounds presumably.”

  Through July, Smokey and I saw each other regularly, supping at local inns, going to movies, exploring backroads, listening to records in my room. After two such dates I kissed her while dancing and she kissed me back. Then we stopped dancing and lay on the bed making out.

  We hiked to a meadow on the edge of the woods and wound together in the grass. Her dress was shiny over her large butt and hips, her perfume pepperminty. I was encouraged by her sighs and rough hugs, but she broke off, jumped to her feet with a hearty laugh, and brushed away the weeds.

  Schuy had gone with his family to their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard to race his sailboat. He was working with his Psi U buddy Larry in a restaurant as a dishwasher:

  Thanks for your two letters and I’m sorry I didn’t write before. It sounds to me like the best thing about this Jean is that this all gives you a chance to get Lindy in some kind of perspective—get some of your power back, speaking ‘Davidwise’—which turns out to be the same problem I have here. The first day on the job I saw this interesting and thin attractiv
e girl—after a day made an Axis-like remark to her about how the people around seemed all to be so affected by the bureaucracy and so forth, took her out to coffee, etc. All was nice—she turned out to be a Smith grad who writes poetry, hated Smith, didn’t date Amherst, is earning money to go to Europe, and anyway I really like her.

  Her name is Dona, and I’m kind of relieved to be going out with someone with such a derivative name, like in the song, “I Had a Girl, and Donna Was Her Name”—you know, the embarrassing mushy one. I have been dating her a lot. I can’t stand her being a waitress right there and me washing dishes. I don’t understand what my position with her is, and what I’m trying to do is make her change her mind about her being 22 and graduated and me being 21 and (I lied) a senior—and I really do think she is 22 (and I’m not really 21), but I don’t think it should make such a difference. Anyway, I’m trying to act tough—you know, the way Axis does—to try (I guess) to shake her up. But I’m pretty weak about it. I guess I’ve been seeing her quite a bit. A week ago we had this big moment at a party, and it was “I do love you, but I’m not in love with you; I want you to be a friend, even though I know how ridiculous that sounds.”

  I have been sailing every day now for three or four days, since I got the boat in the water. In the first race I did well till we got lost in the fog and had to be towed in. Larry is my crew, and we are living together in this little sort of shed-garage apartment. There’s a bunk for you if you want to come visit….

  Coaxing a few days off from the Democrat, I drove the Thruway north past Albany to the Mass Pike, then veered south of Boston. Beach towns to my left, I caught sudden quaffs of salt air, found the Terminal, parked, and caught a ferry.

  Larry met me at the dock, and we went straight to the fabled restaurant. When I saw Dona I fell in love with her too. She was a brown-haired, sun-tanned Jersey girl with a 1920s style reminiscent of a co-ed strutting the Charleston, Schuy poked his head out of the kitchen in his dishwasher’s costume and greeted me clownishly.