Last Summer at the Golden Hotel

by Elyssa Friedland

  Despite doubling his normal pot allowance before bed, he still hadn’t been able to get to sleep. Conjectures of why the police had come to his house had swirled around his head, growing wilder as the hours ticked by. By midnight, he’d been sure it had something to do with tax evasion. A father in Zach’s high school class had gotten in trouble and had had to pay a massive fine to the IRS that necessitated the family selling their house and moving to an attached condo near the train station. He remembered when the mayor had made headlines for paying the family housekeeper off the books. How did they pay Marcia? By 2 a.m., Zach was wondering if his father could be part of an international spy ring. He desperately wanted to trade theories with Maddie, but his mother had been adamant. And whatever he told Maddie would get to Andrew; there was no more sibling trust he could count on. He could call Scott, but everyone in the family always made such a big deal about not bothering him while he studied. “Turn that down, Scott is taking a practice test,” his mother would bellow if he dared play music.

  “Mom, what are we going to do at the hotel?” Maddie asked as they passed through Tuxedo, site of the long-defunct Red Apple Rest. Before it had shuttered, their family would stop there for burgers and milkshakes. Now it was a McDonald’s. “Is it really up for sale?”

  His mother didn’t answer. She was fiddling with the radio, trying to get away from the fuzz. The stations on the approach to the Catskills were the worst. It was either talk radio, where people called in to complain about their gas bills, or oldies music.

  “Mom?” he repeated. He watched her head snap to attention.

  “Well, we’re going to have fun, for starters,” she said, trying way too hard to sound cheerful. It was the same voice she used when she coaxed him to study more. I’ll test you. We’ll make it fun, she’d say. “And there’s going to be a meeting with the Weingolds about the hotel. Probably a series of them. The hotel wasn’t put up for sale, but yes, an offer did come in.” Clearly defeated, she turned the radio off. Shaggy slumped in his seat, pawing at the seat belt.

  “Do you guys have any thoughts about it?” she asked, looking back at them for a beat. “I know you have so many memories there.”

  Even though they went for only a few weeks every August, Zach and his siblings had many happy memories of their own. Maybe not quite at the level of their mom, who would giddily point out to them all the nooks and crannies in which she’d used to secret herself with the Weingolds. But they had their share of fun. They would raid the kitchen at night, Maddie and Scott taking cookies, while Zach would drop whole sugar lumps onto his tongue until he had so much energy that he literally had to run up and down the stairs to burn it off. Zach had had his first kiss at the hotel. Scott had conquered his fear of crowds when their parents had made him present the Gold Rush plaque. Maddie had snuck into the salon and colored her hair orange with stolen hair dye, maybe her single act of rebellion ever.

  “Andrew says the Catskills are over,” Maddie said. Andrew says. And if Andrew said it was raining on a sunny day, would you walk around with an umbrella? Zach wouldn’t even mind his sister’s worship of her boyfriend if she wasn’t so dismissive of everything he had to say.

  “Are all the Weingolds coming?” Zach asked.

  “Oh my God, you are so into Phoebe Weingold,” Maddie said, flipping her head to smirk in his direction. “You were, like, gaping at her during Grandpa’s funeral. Honestly, when they handed you the shovel to put dirt on his grave, I thought you were going to fall into the hole because she was standing on the other side.”

  His cheeks burned. Had he been that obvious? It was just that seeing Phoebe had really taken him aback. For years, their two families had spent weeks at the hotel together, and Phoebe had never sparked much interest for him. She was a couple of years older and had spent most of her time flirting with the lifeguards. The last time he’d seen her before Grandpa Benny’s funeral, she couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. He’d been thirteen, had just suffered through the embarrassment of his bar mitzvah—why did getting up on stage to chant from the Torah and make a speech have to exactly correspond with the time when his voice was cracking and he had raging acne? She’d been awkward herself, flat-chested and also smeared with pimples. At the funeral, Zach had seen an entirely new person. Her tan skin glowed, and her hair, which she’d used to wear exclusively in a braided ponytail, was long, wavy, and the shiniest brown he had ever seen. From her tight black sweater, he could see her flatness had given way to perky, full boobs. He’d had to think about the Holocaust to cool his erection.

  “I am not,” he said.

  “You are, too,” Maddie said. “She seems vapid.”

  “Oh, yes. And Andrew is just the deepest. I love when he talks about his job working for his daddy like he’s Elon Musk.”

  “Shut up,” Maddie said, and elbowed him in the ribs. “Hoff Global is a major company.”

  “Ouch,” Zach said, clutching his side. “Not all of us have padding there.”

  “Mom, Zach just called me fat.”

  “Quiet down, both of you,” their mother said, twisting herself around to shoot them another warning look.

  “I was just curious. I hadn’t really spoken to her or Michael in years,” Zach deflected.

  Phoebe’s younger brother, Michael, was wicked smart, always with his nose in National Geographic and memorizing vocabulary words instead of playing Marco Polo with the rest of the hotel brats. The kid never removed his rash guard, even on a cloudy day. It was like he was literally hiding under layers. Maybe he’d changed, too. The Weingolds and the Glassers hadn’t overlapped at the hotel in ages.

  “Do you follow her stupid Instagram feed? Free2BPhoebe, I think it’s called,” Maddie said. “Like, who is stopping her from being Phoebe? What is that handle supposed to mean?”

  “Peter mentioned that she’s something of an accomplished photographer,” Aimee chimed in.

  “Um, if you call taking selfies and pictures of avocado toast photography, then sure,” Maddie said.

  Zach took offense on Phoebe’s behalf. She had one hundred and fifty thousand followers on Instagram, and he was pretty sure she got paid to wear certain things and take pictures of herself in them. It wasn’t like his sister had some unbelievable job. She was a real estate broker in Manhattan and spent most of her time trying to convince people that it was totally normal for a kitchen to double as a bedroom. If Phoebe could make money just for wearing a certain T-shirt and tagging a brand, he didn’t think his sister should be so judgy about it.

  “Phoebe’s an influencer,” Zach said. “It’s a real thing. And her pictures are good. I mean, I’ve only seen a few, but they’ve been good.” And by a few, he meant he’d studied every single post of hers until his eyes felt like they were going to bulge from their sockets.

  “The jobs of your generation,” Aimee mused. “I’ll never understand them. You guys know I worked at the hotel for a bit before I got married, right? Reservations, activities, human resources. And your father, he killed himself in medical school, then residency. I swear he never slept—” She broke off inexplicably, her voice faltering. “Anyway, yes, Phoebe and Michael are both coming, but not Peter or Greta.”

  “Have they realized Michael is, um—” Zach asked. At Grandpa Benny’s funeral, he’d worn a suit that looked like a straitjacket on him. A straight jacket. Ha! He wanted to share the joke out loud, but his mother was squeezing the steering wheel like Sandra Bullock in Speed, and Maddie was back to texting Andrew.

  “Let’s not gossip about the Weingolds, please,” his mother said. “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

  What the hell was that supposed to mean? Who was gay in their family? Scott wasn’t gay, though being in love with medical textbooks definitely counted as non-hetero. His mother’s cryptic message must relate to the police search, to the muffled fighting between his parents, to the reason his dad
was being left behind on Father’s Day weekend. But fuck if Zach could even guess at what was happening. And he wasn’t even stoned. Whatever their father had done, he needed his mom to let it go. He couldn’t imagine losing the Golden Hotel and his parents getting divorced in one summer.

  Defeated, he slipped his Beats back on and let the White Stripes lull him into a trance. He knew they were approaching the mountains when his ears started popping. Zach flicked his eyes open and stared out the window at the rolling foliage until he saw the wooden sign for the hotel, with its white-painted letters in a loopy script. Under the name were three carved green leaves, a logo his mother had designed that had been added to the welcome sign when she was a teenager. How long had the capital H in “Hotel” been missing? That seemed like something that should have been addressed. Was this an example of what Grandma Louise was referring to when she complained the hotel wasn’t being properly run?

  Before he could ask, Maddie said, “’Ello, welcom’ to the Golden ’Otel! We got mutton and lager for yas.” Zach sometimes forgot how funny his sister could be when she took the stick out of her ass. He felt a trace of excitement for the week ahead, and not just because he would be in close proximity to Phoebe.

  “Look, I think that’s Peter’s car,” Aimee said, pointing out the window. A Land Rover with a Harvard bumper sticker on the back was pulling into the driveway of the hotel at the same time, approaching from the opposite direction. The driveway leading to the main building was a semicircle surrounding a stone fountain with two entrances off the main road that converged into one superlong road lined with tall elm trees. It was majestic, like driving into a fairy tale.

  Zach peered into the passenger seat, where Phoebe had her bare feet up on the dash. He could make out bright blue polish on her toes. He checked his phone covertly, looking at Free2BPhoebe’s feed. Under a picture of the Golden Hotel, a black-and-white one from the 1960s that she must have dug up from the internet, she’d written: “Retro week begins. Stay tuned for pics of me chillin in the skilz old-school style.” Normally Zach would roll his eyes at that sort of thing, the silly hashtagging and overuse of emojis so beloved by his friends, but when Phoebe did it, it was adorable. He found basically everything she posted appealing, whether it was snaps of her visit to an ice cream museum, a live clip of her getting another tattoo, or her sampling organic beers. Not that he ever commented or liked her posts. She probably wouldn’t notice if he did, anyway. Her last post, a close-up of her latte where the barista had made a music note design with the foam, had garnered 1,700 likes and 400 comments.

  “Is Dad going to come up if he feels better?” Maddie asked. She’d already asked their mom the same question at the rest stop an hour ago.

  “No, he will not. There’d be no point. I don’t think he’s that invested in what happens to the Golden.”

  “Isn’t that where you met?” Maddie asked. She got this droopy look in her eyes. “He was a bellman, and you tripped over a suitcase because he’d left it in the driveway, right?”

  Their mother nodded absentmindedly. At this point they were already at the front entrance. Maddie tapped Zach and made the universal sign for crazy, a swirling pointer finger by her ear. Zach shrugged. Maybe he should tell his sister about the police. He wasn’t equipped to deal with problems of this magnitude on his own. But he also didn’t want his mom to be angry with him for disobeying her. God, he was such a little kid still. It didn’t help his manhood that he was crammed into the back seat of the family car and had asked his mom to stop for snacks twice on the ride.

  A valet dressed in a maroon vest and pants with a braided gold detail approached their car. Grandpa Benny used to say that he and Amos had scoured every fabric store on the Lower East Side to get enough gold thread from the bargain bins to detail the uniforms. “Makes the guests feel like they’re arriving at a palace when they see all that gold,” he’d said. By the looks of the hotel now, its welcome mat faded and torn, the stone façade crumbling, it was more like a visit to a haunted house.

  “Good afternoon, Aimee, Maddie, Zach,” the valet said, bending toward the rolled-down passenger side window. “Oh!” he said, startled when Shaggy reached out his head and licked him.

  “Otto still works here?” Zach whispered. “Isn’t he like a hundred and six by now?”

  “Shush,” Aimee said, but Zach noticed a little smile creep across her face. Otto had to have been old when she was a kid at the hotel. He thought he remembered a story about her and the Weingold boys playing tricks on him, pretending guests were identical twins and that he was sending bags to the wrong rooms.

  “Hello, Otto,” she said, stepping out of the car and giving him a hug. “Why don’t you let us carry our own bags?”

  Otto didn’t object.

  “We’re so excited to have you and the Weingolds in house at the same time,” Otto said. “It sure has been a while.”

  In the distance, Zach saw Phoebe snapping photos of a flopped-over white flower in a small garden bed to the side of the hotel’s front door.

  Two minutes later, he checked Instagram.

  “Oh, the cycle of life,” she had captioned the photo. It already had sixty-five likes.

  Chapter Four

  Amos

  It was a funny thing to feel grateful for macular degeneration, a condition that made Amos feel like he was seeing everything through layers of cellophane, but as he watched his grandchildren pull into the driveway, followed by Aimee and two of her kids, he was happy that his vision wasn’t sharp. He felt almost surprised when Peter’s Land Rover and Aimee’s car stopped at the main entrance of the hotel. He was half expecting them to step on the gas and blaze right through the front doors, bulldozing his life’s work before they even sat down to a family meeting. And was that a goddamn dog he saw, getting pulled on a leash by Maddie?

  He wondered if Louise was watching this scene from her cottage window and thinking the same thing. He would ask her later at dinner, once she eventually made her way to the table. His partner’s wife loved to make an entrance. He couldn’t remember ever sitting down to a meal where she wasn’t the last to arrive, sauntering toward their table with a sashay in her hips. Benny would look at her admiringly, never seeming to tire of her luster. Amos himself wouldn’t have known what to do with a woman like that. Fanny was just right for him. A sturdy, dependable, behind-the-scenes kind of gal, content to feed and clothe her family and cheer them on from the sidelines. It niggled him every now and then that Louise dropped so many comments about her and Benny being the “public faces” of the hotel, but Amos wasn’t delusional enough to deny she was right. She just didn’t need to say it so often and make Fanny feel less than. Besides, a younger Fanny had hardly been a shrinking violet when the lights were out. Far from it. Heat rose to his face at the memories.

  Fanny was noticeably glum because Peter wasn’t coming. Amos was, too, but he was hardly surprised. Their older son—older than Brian by six minutes, but it might as well have been six years—had never taken much interest in the hotel. As a teenager, his favorite movie had been Wall Street. He’d even slicked his hair like Gordon Gekko. Now he was managing partner of a major law firm in Manhattan, possibly headed toward becoming the first person in history to say on their deathbed they wished they’d spent more time at the office.

  Amos was surprised that Greta hadn’t come along with the children. When money was concerned, his daughter-in-law was typically all ears. At family meals, when Amos and Brian would side-chat about mundane items, like which porter needed to go and whether they should change meat suppliers, Greta rarely lifted her gaze. But if they mentioned the taxes going up due to increased land value, her fork would clatter to her plate. “You said the land is worth how much? Does that include the additional acres with the hiking trails?” And Brian, saint that he was, would patiently answer her questions, while Peter was off in another room on one of his endless conference calls.


  It had to be the “medical procedure” Peter had referenced keeping her away. Greta was surely having something lifted or tucked. The woman had more stitches in her body than a needlepoint blanket. Now the poor thing was probably fretting from her hospital bed that she had to leave the fate of the hotel to her children and the Goldmans. He still remembered overhearing Greta’s grandmother, a pushy bungalow gal fond of sneaking into the shows by thrusting her bosom at the bouncer, pushing her to chat up Peter. “Brian’s cuter,” Greta had protested. “Brian’s going nowhere,” Lillian Bauman had responded. Amos had never told Fanny what he’d overheard. She was fiercely protective of the boys and wouldn’t have been as capable of overlooking the slight. Besides, Amos wanted to encourage Peter receiving the attention of a young lady. Greta was one of the more attractive single gals, with an endearingly crooked nose and an elfin chin that suited her petite frame and yellow curls perfectly. Early into their marriage, both of those imperfect features had been corrected with Peter’s sizable earnings. At the time, Greta had been just what Peter needed to divert his puppy dog worship of Aimee, who couldn’t seem to take her eyes off Brian. That was never going to happen, Fanny and Amos knew with certainty. Their younger son gave most of the girls at the hotel whiplash when he came into a room. They worried one day he’d give somebody’s daughter more than a stiff neck. And Louise Goldman wasn’t taking a Weingold for a son-in-law. So from both ends, that was a nonstarter.

  “They’re here?” came Fanny’s voice. She rolled up to where he was standing at the window. The wheelchair was new, and Amos was still getting used to the ambient sounds of their coexistence. The motorized hum of her chair startled him when he heard the approach. Before Fanny’s stroke took the feeling from her legs, she had padded around in terry cloth slippers that made a pleasing swoosh when they rubbed against their carpeted bedroom. A sound that for years made him reach for a Viagra.