In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (19 page)

“This is exciting,” Adam said, slipping beside his mother in the last row, which was right in front of their bungalow.

Rosa was wearing one of her best dresses—a long beige sleeveless gown with a full-pleated bottom, a garment reserved for very special occasions. She was vastly overdressed—it was still summer, during the middle of the day, and hot—but nobody cared to notice. That’s because there was so much else that could not be ignored. She had been given to walking around the colony late at night, howling into the woods like an animal. And, of course, there was her uncontrollable fury. Fortunately, the refugees knew to take care of her son on the days when her anger was directed at him.

“All these people,” Adam continued.

Nursing his own two cards, Artie, who had become the closest thing that Adam now had to a father, sat next to him.

“I’d love to wallop a golf ball right into the middle of this place—that would get rid of everybody.”

“The more people, the larger the pot,” Rosa reminded him. She had instincts for these kinds of observations.

“Welcome to our end of the summer bingo tournament,” Hyman announced from the podium with bravado. “The grand prize of two hundred dollars goes to the first person who can fill an entire card.”

Rosa had waited all summer for this. She had a treasure trove of household trinkets to show for her preparation; now she was all geared up for the actual cash offerings.

“Mama, I have this card, right?” Adam asked.

“Don’t bother me, I’m trying to concentrate.”

She worked feverishly, tapping away at her cards.

“O twelve,” Hyman’s voiced screeched into the microphone.

“I six.”

“B thirty.”

Rosa blotted the appropriate boxes, scouring the rows for the letters and numbers that would win her the title and bounty she so coveted.

Minutes into the game, Artie offered, “I got nothing. Must be a bum card.”

“Shsh …” Rosa insisted.

They paid no attention to Adam, who was diligently filling in the boxes of his one card. He feared jinxing the outcome, so he kept the card to himself, hoping that neither Rosa nor Artie would notice the streak he was riding.

Some of the players had gotten up to walk around, moving slowly, mingling, drinking soda pop and eating sandwiches. A sharp, cool wind brushed over the colony, and a faint crackle of thunder echoed in the distance. Birds scattered from trees.

Adam slowly filled in the open spaces of his card—one at a time—as though he were working on a coloring book. Many of the other contestants appeared bored, tapping their fingers, waiting anxiously for a matching bingo ball to drop. Adam never noticed the collective frustration, or even the disappointment on his own mother’s face, so uncharacteristic an expression for her to have while caught up in a game of chance.

All but one number had been filled on his card when the rains came. The afternoon summer shower drenched everything. Fortunately the bingo balls, made of wood, could float. As for the cards, streaks of Magic Marker smudged them beyond recognition, making them all indistinguishable. Cohen’s Summer Cottages had been transformed into a finger-painting festival.

“This is the best my card is going to look,” Artie said. “We should go inside.”

“No!” Adam yelled.

“It’s raining,” Rosa said defeatedly. “We should go in. The game is over.” Arms reaching toward the sobbing heavens, “What is wrong with my life! What did I do to deserve all this?”

“I have one number to go!” Adam screamed.

“Come …” Artie said.

The rain fell harder. All who had gathered for the afternoon now ran for the cover of the forest, or huddled under the roof of a bungalow, trying to outlast the downpour. Adam remained seated, alone on the bench. He stared at his solitary card, trying to shield it from fading, preserving the record of his unrealized triumph. Deprived of victory at his mother’s favorite summer game.

“Bingo!”

“Bingo!”

“Bingo!”

A man with a thick, silver-speckled beard cried out for his prize, but no one responded.

It was fall in Sullivan County. Brown, red, and purple leaves looked vivid but fragile, about to surrender to the inescapable gravity that comes with autumn. Cohen’s Summer Cottages were empty. Not at all unusual for that time of year. Not a living soul ever stayed at the colony past Labor Day. The place looked entirely different, but it wasn’t the change in season that made it so.

It had been sold years before—the new name was not really important. The sign at the foot of the road had been replaced by something that had neither the wit, nor historical gumption, of
LEISURE MACHT FREI
.

He toured the barren grounds. The walking path was overrun with wild weeds and moss, the kind of unkempt, tangled growth that once colonized the former owner’s eyebrows. The visitor surveyed the green field. He looked in the direction of the shed, and found nothing. When he got tired, he rested his back against the sinuous spine of that same weeping willow. It was still standing. The swings were gone, as was the slide. The ground was strangely moist, as though the earth had wept, or had never quite gotten used to the change in the landscape.

Looking back toward the bungalow—his old bungalow, 7—he watched as his son stood on an overturned pail. The boy needed a lift to see inside.

“Hey Mory, what are you doing? You’ll fall down and hurt yourself! You might break your arm!”

The porch had been dismantled. The entrance was now supported by stilts. Plants uprooted. The entire place had been unearthed, barren, stripped of the emblems that once made it so familiar.

Slowly, Adam walked over to where his son was peering into the kitchen window, hands cupped along the side of his face like blinders.

“You see anything?”

“Not really. Just some old furniture moved up against the wall.”

Adam took out his camera and snapped a picture of the boy on the pail. There was a sheriff’s warning posted on the door.

AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY

“‘Authorized’?” Adam wondered. “If not me, who’s allowed in then?”

But without the porch, how could you even enter? And once inside, what could you expect to find?

The camera clicked; he took a picture of the front door with the sheriff’s sign on it. Ghosts, however, cannot be photographed. Those who he remembered would not sit still for a group picture. Only the sign would survive the eventual processing.

The colony had been transformed into a ghost town, which it had already been in a different way so many years before.

Mory turned around and jumped off the pail. Grabbing his father’s hand, he ran off into the lifeless field, leaves crackling underneath each heavy step.

“So this was the place?”

“Sure is.”

Looking up at the sky, hoping to pick up the sight of a brown paper kite, or a falling golf ball—some marking, something to pinch the senses and tweak the memories.

Some indication that the boy in the cast had once actually lived there.

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know.”

But he did.

“One number away from the jackpot, huh?”

“Yes. Never got the chance. Game called on account of rain.”

“Bummer. Where’s Krause’s?”

“Over there….”

Bungalow Colony Life

Irwin Richman

A
fter paying for accommodations, the most traumatic part of the summer for most adults was getting packed and traveling to the mountains. How families arrived varied with time and economics. The trip could be quite luxurious or a crowded and uncomfortable ordeal.

Joey Adams remembered an early mountain experience, a summer at Boxer’s Dairy Farm near Ellenville. Even more vivid were the memories of preparing for the trip. His family was to go to the country 15 June: “About the middle of May my father brought home the burlap sacks. Who had luggage?” They also borrowed valises. And “anyone who had a valise that closed without a rope was a millionaire.” When you went to a
kuchalein
, you took your clothes and everything needed for housekeeping, except furniture, right down “to pots, pans, dishes, silverware, hammocks, and toilet paper.” Joey’s mother carefully packed all of the household goods. “Pots and pans were expertly stashed between pillows and blankets so they wouldn’t rattle.” Among other essentials were “umbrellas and seven pairs of rubbers for the rain, fly swatters, … netting for the baby, [and] a jar of Vicks (just in case).” The filled burlap sacks were sent ahead by Railway Express.
¹

On departure day the family, laden with valises and boxes and paper bags, took the cheapest way to the mountains, the train. Getting to the train was an unpleasant adventure in itself: “We took the trolley from Brooklyn … to 42nd Street, then the 42nd Street cross-town to the Hudson River. There we grabbed the Weehawken Ferry,” a steamer, “which blackened your face and nostrils for a week.” Arriving at the New York, Ontario, and Western terminal, and not being able to afford a redcap, the family dragged their luggage down along the train to the Ellenville car. “Of course, the damn ropes always broke and nightgowns, bloomers, and hot water bottles were always lying all over the train.”
²

Once settled aboard the train, the family started to eat the food they’d brought along. Their mother always proclaimed that it was “better to die from hunger, than you should eat from a lunch counter. Poison they give you.” Along with many of her generation, like my grandparents, Adams’s mother believed “restaurateurs were on a par with thieves, robbers, and dope peddlers.” Lunch usually included canned salmon salad sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, and “whatever was left over … from the night before … clamped between two pieces of bread. Maybe cold, rubbery calves’ liver on rye ain’t exactly a taste sensation, but who could afford to waste food?”
³

After the long journey, which always took at least six hours, the family would be met at the local railroad station by the “farmer,” often with a horse-drawn wagon. The farmer was not necessarily there out of the goodness of his heart, rather he made sure you arrived at his place. His presence guaranteed you didn’t yield to the blandishments of other farmers, less fortunate, who, if they had vacancies, would even offer to give back your deposit money if only you’d stay at their place instead, at less money. “Farmers” had to be early and aggressive when meeting their tenants.

Buses were a bit more expensive, but they eventually helped drive the passenger trains out of existence. They were also more convenient in that they left from Brooklyn and the Bronx, as well as from Manhattan. But the trip along the poor roads of the time was long, and pre–World War II buses were often “smelly, gassy, cracking vehicles [that] had to detour hours out of their way.” Midway on the trip there was always a stop at “The Red Apple Rest or at [Orseck’s] 999,” where “the restaurants, the restrooms and lunchrooms usually looked like a battle scene in
Quo Vadis
.”
⁴

The best public transportation to the Catskills was via hack, which, while it was more expensive, promised portal-to-portal service. While the train cost under two dollars a person, the hack was upwards of five dollars well into the 1920s and 1930s. If you had a lot of luggage you might be assessed another dollar. The hack was a large sedan that had room for seven passengers and the driver. You paid a premium for a window seat; you paid a reduced rate for children if you kept them on your lap. Hackers promised door-to-door service. “And he kept his word, he went door-to-door to door-to-door until he picked up everyone.”
⁵
Luggage was packed in the trunk, tied to the hack’s sides, and lashed onto the top. Bungalow colony fares would take everything, “even ironing boards. It was like they were going to Europe.” Hackers were adept at packing. “We’d get the stuff into the car any way we could—hanging out of the trunks, tied on the roof rack with ropes. It took hours to get everything strapped in and ready to go.”
⁶