The Seduction of Water

by Carol Goodman

  “Credibility?” I ask. She nods.

  I can just imagine the Rosenbergs of Great Neck. Principled people who pay their nanny’s insurance (just in case they decide to run for public office) and restrict their children’s sweets and TV.

  I pat Mrs. Rivera’s work-roughened hand. “Maybe I can get you another job,” I tell her.

  I try my aunt Sophie once more before leaving for Rip Van Winkle on Thursday. I’ve been trying her all week. Ever since I had the idea of getting Mrs. Rivera a job at the hotel I’ve felt better about the whole memoir thing. Not that it makes that much sense, but the idea that my plans to spend the summer at the hotel—quizzing my aunt and older staff members and regular hotel guests who knew my mother and ransacking the premises for a lost manuscript—might also enable me to keep Mrs. Rivera from being deported back to Mexico makes the whole thing seem a little less mercenary. Still, it all depends on Aunt Sophie’s go-ahead and suddenly, just when I finally want to take her up on the job she’s been pushing on me for years, she’s unavailable. Janine, the hotel operator, sounded embarrassed the last time I called and I’m beginning to wonder if my aunt is avoiding my call.

  “She was just here a minute ago,” Ramon tells me Thursday morning. “She has been like a whirling dervish all week but will not say why. We all suspect an important dignitary is due at the hotel . . . should I have her call you back?”

  I tell Ramon that I’ll be gone most of the day, but that she should call me tonight. All the way up to Grand Central I wonder if what Ramon said was just idle gossip. An important dignitary? At the Hotel Equinox? Maybe a hundred years ago. Presidents have stayed at the hotel, movie stars, baseball players, a Mafia don—whom my father pointed out to me strolling in the rose garden—and once, my aunt claims, a Russian princess. But those days are long gone. The hotel’s dwindling clientele, these last twenty years, has been a motley assembly of émigrés, musicians, watercolorists, bird-watchers, and, mostly, the now elderly grandchildren of families who used to summer at the hotel and still retain a nostalgia for those halcyon days.

  The only person my aunt could be taking so much trouble for would be a prospective buyer.

  The idea makes me pause in the middle of Grand Central Station so abruptly that commuters flooding up the platform ramps and heading for the street bump into me. I move into the shelter of the information kiosk and stare up at the blue-green barrel vault far above me as if trying to read my future in the constellations painted there. My future. The hotel’s future. Of course a buyer would be a good thing. But what if the buyer wants to tear the hotel down and start all over again? It could take years to rebuild—years that the hotel would be closed. No job for me or Mrs. Rivera—not to mention my aunt and Joseph or Janine, who must be well into her seventies by now.

  I look at my watch and see I’m still early for my train to Rip Van Winkle. I usually take a bus to Grand Central (subways make me feel claustrophobic) but this morning I’d felt expansive—still floating on the promise of my meeting with Hedda Wolfe—and splurged on a cab.

  “I think I could sell your memoir whether you find your mother’s third book or not,” she said, “but if we could bring out your mother’s third book at the same time I think I could get you a very nice advance indeed.”

  A very nice advance indeed. I didn’t have an exact monetary value to attach to Hedda Wolfe’s idea of a nice advance but I had a feeling it was more than I had ever dared hope for. Not that the money was the most important thing. For years I’ve sent my stories out to little magazines, attended workshops and writing groups, gone to readings and seminars, revolving in the margins of New York’s literary life like so many others. And still the idea of being a published author has remained as distant as one of the tiny glittering lightbulbs dotting the painted ceiling above me. If I can’t spend the summer at the hotel, if I can’t find the manuscript of my mother’s third book, that’s what my dreams will remain, a faint and distant dream.

  I step out of the shade of the kiosk smack into a sheet of sunlight streaming through the three massive arched windows on the east wall of the terminal. It’s like taking a bath in light. As I make my way through the crowds I can’t make out the faces of the strangers heading toward me because their backs are to the sun. The light is so strong it acts almost like a fog, blurring the edges of the figures approaching me. I tilt my chin down, shading my eyes with my hand, and head toward my train, but I’m stopped by a dark figure blocking my way. I can’t make out his face, but I can see he’s a large man in a dark suit that gleams richly in the strong sunlight, like an animal’s fur. Cashmere, I think, or alpaca. The fabric makes you want to stroke it. The way the man stares at me—I assume he’s staring at me from the tilt of his head—is unsettling and I try to keep walking but when I try to move around him he lays two fingers on my elbow and turns to keep up with me. As soon as he’s facing the light I recognize him. It’s Harry Kron.

  “Ah, Miss Greenfeder,” he says, “I’ve been thinking about you.” He hardly seems surprised to run into me here in the middle of Grand Central Station. “What train are you taking?”

  “The eight fifty-three Metro-North,” I tell him.

  “Hm. Wait a moment.”

  We’ve reached the platform gate where my train is posted. He looks up at the listing of stops and nods his head.

  “I was going to take an express, but this will do . . .”

  “But I wouldn’t want to delay you . . .” I’m amazed that Phoebe Nix’s rich uncle would even take the train. Shouldn’t he be in a limousine behind tinted windows?

  “I love trains,” he says, as if reading my mind. “And the Hudson Line is one of my favorite routes. I can’t think of a better way of spending a spring morning than a train ride along the Hudson with a lovely, talented writer for company. Unless, of course, you have something else to occupy you for the trip.”

  I think of the ungraded essays in my book bag but it would be like telling a little boy you couldn’t take him to the circus because you had work to do.

  “I would love the company,” I say.

  “Ah, then, shall we?” Harry Kron waves a hand toward the sloping ramp as if escorting me onto a dance floor. He switches his briefcase to his right hand and tucks my hand under his left elbow and we descend into the bowels of Grand Central where the eight fifty-three is waiting for us. The train, running against the commute, is almost empty and we quickly find two seats facing each other, next to the window on the river side. He gives me the forward-facing seat and sits across from me. He’s so tall our knees nearly touch.

  “So,” he says when the train begins to move, “where are you heading this lovely spring morning?”

  I tell him about my job at the prison and he furrows his brow with concern.

  “But is that safe?”

  “There’s a guard in the hall at all times and all my students are from the medium-security prison.”

  “Well, then, small-time thieves and drug dealers. I can’t imagine it’s a productive outlet for your talents. I very much enjoyed, by the way, your essay in my niece’s magazine—which is more than I can say for most of the nonsense she publishes.”

  We’ve come out of the tunnel and emerged into sight of the river so I’m able to look modestly out toward the view while I thank him for the compliment.

  “You ought to be spending your time writing instead of wasting your talent on illiterate criminals.”

  I’m torn between indignation on behalf of my students—I think of Aidan and his beautiful rendition of Tam Lin—and gratitude for being considered talented. I settle for honesty.

  “I need the money,” I tell him.

  He scowls at the window and looks slightly embarrassed, as if I had just mentioned some shameful bodily function.

  “You must get a contract for this memoir of yours. Do you have an agent?”

  I tell him I do. “Hedda Wolfe,” I say.

  His eyes widen. “Really. Hedda.”

  “You know h
er?”

  “Oh, yes,” he answers. “We serve on many of the same boards. Surely she can secure you an advance so that you can work on your book in peace.”

  “Well, she says I need more than the first chapter and it would help if I could find my mother’s third book.”

  “She wrote a third book? I thought she only wrote the two.” Harry Kron snaps open his briefcase and, amazingly, extracts a paperback copy of my mother’s two novels—a one-volume edition reissued in the 1970s during the Tolkien craze. I remember that the cover illustration of a sexy redheaded mermaid enraged my father. “There are no mermaids in her books,” he’d ranted for days. “Did those people even bother to read her books?”

  “Maybe we’ll at least see some royalty checks,” my aunt had replied. And, in fact, the royalties from that edition paid for my college and first year of graduate school.

  “You see, your little essay inspired me to look up your mother’s work. I’m afraid I’d never read them.” He shakes his head and looks genuinely regretful. “I’m not usually a fan of science fiction—or do you call this fantasy?—but I found your mother’s books an exception. It’s quite fascinating how she’s taken these Old World legends and turned them into a fantasy world. These selkie creatures, for instance, who are searching for a lost necklace—where do you think she got that from?”

  “Well, the selkies are from an Irish folktale, but I’ve never been able to find a version of the story that involves a necklace. Of course the search for a lost piece of jewelry is a common archetypal quest motif—like the ring in Tolkien or the Grail in Arthurian legends . . .” I notice that Harry Kron’s eyes are glazing over as most people’s do when I start in with words like archetypal and motif. “Anyway, I’ve never been able to figure out the significance of the necklace—the net of tears, as it’s called. It’s supposed to be a gift from a mother to her daughter, but then it’s stolen by the evil king Connachar, and recovered by the hero Naoise in Book Two.”

  “Shouldn’t that be the end of the story?”

  “Unfortunately for Naoise—but fortunately for readers who like a sequel—the necklace brings nothing but trouble for him. By the end of Book Two, the selkie Deirdre knows she must find the necklace and destroy it. Presumably that’s what she’ll do in Book Three and that’s when we’d learn the significance of the necklace.”

  “And what makes you think there is a third book?”

  I tell him what Hedda Wolfe said. He looks out the window as I talk, more engrossed, I think, by the red cliffs of the Palisades and the hard blue glitter of the Hudson than by what I’m saying.

  “So my plan is to spend the summer up at the hotel looking for the book and talking to people who remember my mother.”

  “Are there many left?” he asks, stirring from his drowsy contemplation of the river. The rhythm of the train and the glare off the water have made me sleepy as well and I have to stifle a yawn while I answer him. “Oh, my aunt and the gardener, Joseph, and Janine, the telephone operator. Some of the regular guests maybe—but that will depend on how many come this summer.” I explain, then, about the hotel’s financial troubles and he perks up a bit. This is more up his alley than obscure mythological fantasy creatures. We talk about hotels for a bit and he becomes more and more animated, telling me about his favorite hotels in Europe, the Villa d’Este on Lake Como, the Hotel Hassler in Rome (“The first hotel I worked in after the war was in Rome, where I’d studied art before the war,” he tells me), the Ritz in London, the Hotel Charlotte in Nice. Many of the names are familiar to me from my father’s reminiscences of Europe after the war and I tell him which ones my father loved.

  “I think the Hotel Charlotte is where he met Joseph, our gardener,” I conclude. “He said it was how he got the idea of running a hotel, the time he spent in Europe at the end of the war.”

  “Ah yes,” Harry Kron says, his eyes lighting up, completely awake now. “For many of us the war opened our eyes to a whole new world. That might sound like a paradox—that good could come out of so much horror and destruction—but it’s true, or at least it was for me. It wasn’t for my brother Peter, Phoebe’s father; he spent a year in the Udine POW camp in northern Italy and then, after Mussolini died, he escaped and hid at a villa near Ferrara that belonged to an old friend of our family.”

  I’m remembering what Phoebe said about her father, how she painted him as the villain in her parents’ marriage. “Was he very traumatized by his experience in the camp?”

  “He would never say very much of it; he preferred to regale us with stories of the Countess Oriana’s wine cellars in which he hid for several months and hairbreadth escapes on Alpine passes. He treated it like a romantic adventure. I suppose ordinary civilian life seemed dull to him after the war; he was never able to settle down to anything, whereas the war pointed me toward my future. I had the great opportunity to serve as a Monuments officer.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We were in charge of protecting works of art and monuments of national artistic significance. I was recruited out of Cambridge because of the time I’d spent in Italy. I was instrumental in recovering a trove of Florentine treasures that had been removed from the Uffizi by the Nazis.”

  “That must have been gratifying.”

  “Most gratifying. I became friendly with a number of Americans and I decided that after the war I’d bring European culture back to America. You Americans discovered Europe after the war. Tastes in food, wine, and art were transformed. So many new possibilities. That’s what I saw when I came to New York . . . it’s not just that there was money all of a sudden, but what people were willing to spend it on . . . good food, wine, elegant hotels like the great hotels in Europe.”

  “So you bought your first hotel—the Crown Hotel in New York?”

  “Yes,” he smiles at me for remembering. “And your father too went into the hotel business.”

  I nod. Of course my father didn’t have the money to buy a hotel. Nor do I think he quite shared Harry Kron’s entrepreneurial vision. He saw life in a hotel more as a refuge, I think, a corner of peace after what he had seen in the war.

  “The country was reinventing itself,” Harry is saying. “And I thought, what better way than with travel and hotels. There is, in a beautiful hotel, the possibility of inventing oneself anew.”

  “Yes, my father said that too. He said vacations gave people the opportunity to be their best selves and that’s what a good hotel should bring out in people: their best selves.”

  Harry Kron smiles. “I would have liked to meet your father.”

  I nod, too close to tears suddenly to speak, and we both look out the window at the bright blue ribbon of river, our constant traveling companion. I realize from the terrain that we’re nearing my stop and then the conductor calls the name of the prison, which is also the name of the town.

  “Well,” I say, slinging the strap of my book bag over my shoulder, “the trip has never gone so fast for me. I really enjoyed your company.”

  “And I yours.”

  “Please don’t get up,” I say when I see him preparing to.

  He gets up anyway and opens the corridor door leading to the platform between cars and stands with me there while the train comes into the station. The outside door is open and I can see the rails flashing under us like the spokes of a wheel, blurring one into another. It makes me dizzy for a moment and Harry Kron puts his hand over mine on the handrail I’m grasping to steady me. I realize he must be a little unsteady himself because he grips my hand so hard I have to bite my lip not to call out. When the train finally stops I have to wrench my hand out from under his.

  “Well good-bye,” I say, walking down the iron steps. I turn when I’m on the platform. “Have a good trip . . .” I start to say, but the space between the cars is empty and I suddenly realize I never even asked where he was going.

  Chapter Eleven

  My class at Rip Van Winkle is three hours long. There’s not much point to giving br
eaks because none of us can go anyplace and so the session usually seems interminable. Today, though, they’re writing their final essays. I manage to finish grading all their previous assignments by the time they finish writing. I can’t dismiss them early—or let them go one at a time—so we’re stuck making small talk until the officer comes to escort us back across the courtyard. We talk about the movie version of Othello that I showed them last class—the one with Kenneth Branagh and Laurence Fishburne. It had been a challenge to get them through Shakespeare and I’d thought the movie would help. It had. They’d liked the crafty Iago, the sword fights, Laurence Fishburne’s regal bearing. What had unnerved me was that when Othello killed Desdemona they had cheered.

  “The bitch got what she deserved,” one of my students informs me today.

  “But she didn’t do anything—she wasn’t unfaithful,” I try to explain.

  My point falls on deaf ears. Desdemona’s innocence seems beside the point. Maybe because they’re used to such claims. I’m innocent, I didn’t do it doesn’t carry a whole lot of weight around here. Even Emilio Lara shrugs as if he agreed with Desdemona’s fate but is too much of a gentleman to say so. By the time the officer comes I feel dispirited and depressed. I realize as I’m checking out at the front gate that if I could grade their final exams and average their grades right now I wouldn’t have to come back here next week. Maybe it’s Harry Kron’s comments that have gotten to me—wasting my talent on illiterate criminals—or the discussion on Othello. Or maybe it’s that Aidan’s no longer in the class. I’m suddenly desperate to be through with this prison.

  I go to a coffee shop on Main Street and over a Greek omelet and several cups of coffee read my students’ finals, average their grades, and bubble in their grade reports. By the time I turn in the grades and walk back down to the station the sun is already beginning to approach the mountains on the other side of the river. I’ve spent the whole day here, but at least I feel a sense of completion—a rare thing for me.