Just One Catch (3 page)

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“HE TURNED OVER
on his back and stared at the ceiling, feeling unhappy, wanting something and not knowing just what it was,” Heller wrote, fiddling with the piece he'd begun on Corsica. He returned to it, now and then, between banging out memos and press releases for Goodfellow Field. At night, in his bunk, he'd lie awake, listening to music on the local radio station, KGKL, wishing instead to catch a one-act drama, the kind he'd loved in the evenings as a kid in Coney Island.

Sometimes, on a day pass, he'd ride up a wide, dusty street into downtown San Angelo with some of his comrades, going to the Texas Theater for a Frank Sinatra or Dorothy Lamour movie, or to watch the town's fidgety women shop for Vegetable Compound. Heller recalled himself as a “boyish and ravenous satyr” at this time in his life, but “in depth of experience still almost a virgin.”

Teenaged girls and boys milled in front of the Cactus Hotel. Inside the hotel's glamorous Crystal Ballroom, an armed forces recruiting film,
Baptism of Fire,
played regularly. As Heller passed the unsure youngsters, excited and confused about their futures, and as he observed servicemen, home from their tours, hoping to shut their pasts behind them with the purchase of an engagement ring, he considered how far he had come in a short time: Just a few years ago, he'd been as aimless, but as gung ho for a fight, as these boys in front of the Cactus, and now he was a man about to be married, maybe, and embarked upon a career just as soon as he received his discharge.

In the short story he'd been working on, he had the young husband say to his wife, “I married you because it was part of the dream … [t]he sugar and tinsel dream of life.” It was, he says, “the thing to do.” On some level, Heller may have been as skeptical of the “
Reader's Digest
beautiful panorama of a beautiful life” as his fictional husband, but in another sense, he
did
believe it was the thing to do (if nothing else, as a way of channeling his sexual urges), just as he both pitied and understood the naïveté of the teens in front of the Cactus, who dreamed the glory but could not imagine the reality of a baptism of fire.

In January 1945, when he'd received his orders to vacate Corsica, he was flown to Naples along with Tom Sloan, another bombardier from his group, who was also scheduled to return to the States (throughout the flight, Heller kept his fingers crossed, on both hands, for safety and luck). Sloan was married, with a one-year-old at home, and had never been tempted, like his buddy here, to sleep with prostitutes or other available women on R & R trips to Cairo and Rome. On the flight to Naples, Heller was impressed with Sloan's eagerness to return to wedded bliss.

When offered transport home by air or sea, Heller chose to sail back with several thousand other boys on a troopship, the former SS
America.
The ship sailed alone, without naval escort. Heller spent most of the ten days at sea trying to sleep in the cabin—outfitted with two tiers of bunk beds—he shared with six others. The ship docked at Boston; from there, he took a train to Atlantic City for his medical exam, routine processing, and reassignment.

On furlough, he returned to his family apartment in Coney Island as something of a glamorous war hero. The role—for it did feel like an act—embarrassed him. “I don't want to sit in a room filled with people who are all beaming at me as if I were some marvelous mechanical toy, and play the modest hero. I don't want to tell anybody what it was like and smile shyly as they tell me how wonderful I am,” the husband informs his wife in the story he'd been writing. He was thinking of calling it “I Don't Love You Any More.”

The weather in Coney Island was gray and oppressive. Not even a hot dog from Nathan's could cheer him up. While he had been overseas, Luna Park, one of the area's great amusement centers, had burned down, leaving smoke and char. Few of his old friends were around. Some were still overseas; in the last couple of years, many had gotten married, and most of the others were planning to marry. It was the thing to do.

Heller went to movies by himself, walked around town (he had not yet learned to drive), and generally moped, realizing with a shock that he missed the military, where he had been kept plenty busy. His brother Lee, fourteen years his senior, told him to get off his rear and take a vacation: Why not go to Grossinger's, a famous resort hotel in the Catskills, well known not only as a place of fun and relaxation but as a place for men to meet women? Heller had never heard of it. Lee kept insisting, telling him he could afford it. The family had been saving the allotments from his Air Corps pay, which he'd sent home every month. When his kid brother stalled some more, Lee made the arrangements, reserving him a spot on a van that would leave from Brooklyn and eventually twist along mountain roads on the old Route 17, up the Wurtsboro Hills, to the city of Liberty. It'll be great, Lee said. As a war hero, you'll be fawned over. Look at you, look how tan you are from all that Mediterranean sun.

Heller put on his green winter flight jacket, with its thick fur collar and his silver first lieutenant's bar, and boarded the van. His fellow passengers stared at him admiringly.

Grossinger's had begun as a private seven-room farmhouse in 1914 and developed over the years, along with hundreds of other hotels in the area, into a Jewish resort catering to thousands of guests at any given time. Acreage in the Catskill Mountains, just under a hundred miles northwest of New York City, had been cultivated by Eastern European immigrants, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Jews had not been allowed to own land in Russia; for those who came to the United States, buying property was an assertion of identity and freedom. Many of the families who settled in the Catskills knew the basics of raising livestock from the work they had done in Russia. Other families came from European ghettos. The area was remote enough that it provided an enclave for preserving culture: The music, food, and language of old-world shtetls flourished here, along with urban rhythms underpinning rural necessities.

In time, financial need forced many of the farmers to use their land for alternative businesses. Opening up their kitchens, barns, and small lakes to travelers proved lucrative and increasingly popular. Jewish laborers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, discovering the novelty of having a little spending money in their pockets for the first time in their lives, and looking for a pleasant escape during the hottest days of summer, took to the mountains in bigger and bigger numbers. This was a new phenomenon: vacations for the working class. An individual earning, say, thirty dollars a week could stay at Grossinger's for five days, sharing a “country” cabin with two others, for around $39.50. By the mid-1940s, the Catskills were known as “the Jewish Alps,” and the hotel resorts had become destination points for people of all classes—lower, middle, and upper, with more and more celebrities to boot—looking to play.

The “mountains had everything,” said Sam Levenson, a resort entertainer, “girls, bedbugs, handball, chicken … milk hot from the hot cow, swimming in a pool about the same size as in the picture postcard, and nature—manure at [your] window.” Joyce Wadler, an essayist who called herself a “survivor” of Catskill retreats, wrote, “This is what it was like, in the Borscht Belt [so called because of the endless servings of the beet soup, topped with sour cream, in resort kitchens]: full of noise, full of Jews, and the jokes grew on trees.”

Heller had never given much conscious thought to Judaism, but his family
was
Jewish. This was another role he could play with confidence. It was the off-season when he arrived at Grossinger's. Skiing, ice-skating, basketball, and dancing were the popular weekly activities. He had never skated, but he was blessed with strength and good physical coordination, and he learned quickly. Besides, he knew he cut a striking figure in his flight jacket. He was also a novice dancer, but buoyed by the attention his evening attire brought him—his officer's dress with wings and the silver oak-leaf clusters he had earned for completing his missions—he moved smoothly across the ballroom's wooden floor as the “orchestra” (consisting of no more than five or six musicians) blatted out rumbas.

Lee had been right. Heller was enjoying himself, but he was sorry there were not dances on Friday nights also. As an observant Jewish business, Grossinger's staged no entertainment on the Sabbath. Within a few years, to stay competitive with non-Jewish resorts, the hotel owners would begin to conduct a weekly
shtar m'chirah,
a sale to a “Shabbos goy” for twenty-four hours, for the sum of one dollar. If the
goy
put on a show, no religious rules would be broken. At sundown every Saturday, he sold the hotel and its eight hundred acres back to its Jewish owners.

But this deal was not in place in 1945. Instead, there was a Friday-night lecture by a rabbi. Heller sneaked into the woods to smoke a cigarette—also forbidden on the Sabbath.

Heller gorged himself with food. He had never eaten like this, with such a flavorful array set before him, and he didn't know when he'd have the opportunity to eat this way again. Where would he be assigned? How long would he have to wait for his discharge? Pot cheese, jumbo potatoes, cold fish, boiled chicken, chow mein, challah rolls, eggs and onions, the plentiful borscht, and blintzes folded as carefully as an American flag at twilight.

What had seemed awkward at home—playing up his soldier-boy status—was pleasant and rewarding here. No one knew him. He didn't have to explain himself, or worry that someone would accuse him of puffing himself up (“Nah, he ain't really nobody; that's just Joey”). He liked receiving the frank admiration of strangers, especially attractive young women, many of whom were here with their parents for the clear purpose of sussing out promising male prospects. Lee had told him everyone knew girls went to Grossinger's looking for marriage material.

Their eyes followed him as he strolled through the woods, or passed through the Main House, where the social director led guests through a game of Simon Says (“Simon says turn and hug the person next to you”), or as he stepped out on the ice in his skates while Irving Jaffe, a former three-time Olympic skating champion, now Grossinger's house pro, gave lessons in another part of the rink. Heller smiled as he watched the girls watch him. He'd circle the rink slowly; in the middle of the ice, some young lady or another would spin as swiftly as a storm, whipping up white vapor.

When a girl's mother or father thanked him for his service in the cause of freedom, he'd grin modestly and thank them in return. He felt as pleased—and amazed at the ease of it all—as he'd felt in school, as a kid, whenever teachers praised his writing ability. He was just doing what he'd been told, fulfilling his assignments. But it seemed that sometimes he was able to fulfill them a little better than others.

Every night at dinner, the hotel's mimeographed daily bulletin, the
Tattler
(the name suggesting childishness and indulgence, as well as titillation), announced special events or gala balls, which, all the guests knew, were occasions for singles to get together. There was, for example, the Champagne Hour, where wives could show off to their husbands the dance steps they'd learned in classes all week, or, more to the point, where those on their own might find a partner, on and off the dance floor. In the Catskills, the “air was redolent of grass, flowers, ozone, and sex,” wrote Abraham Cahan in his novel
The Rise of David Levinsky.
If, in the off-season, the smell of grass and flowers was replaced by the odor of burning pine and the sharp, moist no-scent of snow, the deeper trace of physical need and longing remained. Unmarried men and women in their thirties and forties did their best not to schlump around in despair and defeat. “I learned to spot a single woman,” Tania Grossinger wrote in her memoir about growing up at the hotel. A single woman “brought four or five suitcases up with her for a three-day weekend.… She borrowed her married sister['s] … mink stole and her girlfriend['s] … rhinestone earring, necklace, and bracelet set.… She hoped to find a man who would drive her back to the city and would not find the fact that she lived in the Bronx or Brooklyn GU (Geographically Undesirable). She changed her outfit a minimum of four times daily.… She really wasn't looking for someone to sleep with in the country. What she
was
looking for was someone to marry in the city.”

Then there were the parents of young women seeking to secure their daughters' futures. Men who went to Grossinger's were “good people”—not necessarily because they were financially secure, but because by going there they exhibited a desire for betterment and assimilation in the broadest, most flexible sense of the word—not turning away from Judaism, but integrating more fully into American culture. As Phil Brown, who also grew up in a Catskills resort, puts it, “[G]oods and entertainment that were previously unavailable to these largely immigrant people were now accessible” in places like Grossinger's. To partake of these luxuries “represented an acculturation to American life—the immigrant was no longer a greenhorn but a citizen of the New World.” To
take a vacation
suggested it was normal for a Jew to be a regular wage earner, an American. At the same time, the insular Jewish character of these resorts reinforced tribal solidarity. Simultaneously, one could wear and drop the mask of mainstream acceptability, or, perhaps more accurately, wear a mask of utter transparency.

Similarly, Heller's military uniform proclaimed his solid character. Is it any wonder he didn't have to ask anyone to dance? At Grossinger's, the girls weren't shy. “There was no time for subtle flirtations,” wrote Tania Grossinger. “The emphasis was on ‘now.' And if not ‘now,' at least ‘tomorrow.'” This was an attitude made even sharper, in the winter of 1945, by stories of mass killings that had leaked out of Europe during the course of the war, rumors recalled for everyone by Heller's dress. Don't stop moving, don't let go of each other, don't think about what lies beyond the trees, the mountains, and the cold, clear moonlight above us.