The Inn at Lake Devine (20 page)

He said, “I didn’t break out in any rashes, but I could have.”

I said, “If I had known, I would have called you back immediately.”

He wasn’t ready to call a truce, but he didn’t take his hands away. Pipes carrying hot water knocked inside a wall. A radiator hissed. Finally Kris asked, “Why did you leave like that? How do you think it made me feel?”

I said I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure what had or hadn’t happened on Christmas night. Maybe I had misunderstood; maybe I’d been standing under mistletoe and had misinterpreted his near-kiss. Because nothing was said afterward, was it? Not that night or in the morning.

“Because it was obvious—”

“The message I got was, You were welcome here, Natalie, until things got personal.”

Kris said, “Bullshit. Not from me, you didn’t. Not from Nelson, either, or my father, and certainly not from the Fifes.”

I raised my eyebrows to elicit the unspoken name.

“It would be helpful,” he said, “if you could differentiate between me and my mother.”

I said I did. I knew from the first moment I arrived that he was my ally—

“Ally! Is that like buddy? Because we all know what that means.”

I said, “Give me a break here. I’m thrilled to see you. Maybe I haven’t said that yet.” My hands were lying on his, lightly, clinically. I inched them forward to stroke the soft skin at his wrists.

He looked stumped, as if trying to decipher an impenetrable clue. “What does this mean?” he asked, staring at our hands.

I said, “I’ll go with you.”

T
here was the awkward matter of the extra night. Linette Feldman was expecting the Berry brothers for the weekend, and this was Thursday. One constraint, I explained, was that I was meeting my future boss at three at a restaurant-supply store.

“Can you put it off until next week?”

I said, “What is it that you do for a living, anyway?”

“Night manager. The Inn at Lake Devine.”

“There’s no such job.”

He shrugged. “They feed me and don’t rent out my bed, so I do what needs to be done. Nelson was supposed to be general manager someday, but that got screwed up when he went into teaching. So I’m the crown prince until they decide if Gretel’s better suited to the family business.”

“How is Gretel?” I asked.

We were on our second pink grapefruit, my only provision. He said, “She’s the same.” He sprinkled sugar from my landlord’s bowl onto another half and asked, “What are your other constraints?”

I said, “Do you know if it’s expensive?”

“Nelson is Linette’s guest,” he said, “and you’ll be mine.”

“Is this a date?” I asked.

He looked dismayed at having to revisit what had already been settled. I jumped in to explain I meant Nelson—Nelson and this Feldman friend. Was this invitation purely a professional courtesy?

“Nelson would say that …”

“But?”

“He’s very lonely.”

“And he likes her?”

“Sure.” He smiled, which I took to mean, I know that’s how you women view these things, that Nelson should be a little bit in love before he finds solace in Linette Feldman. My own reading
brought on a new, troubling thought: that Nelson, under the easy-Jewish-girl doctrine, was going to the Catskills for a nonbinding fling.

I asked, “Is he ready to start dating again?”

“It’s crossed my mind.”

“Do you think it’s crossed his?”

Kris said, “He’d never talk about another woman right now. We didn’t discuss it in any detail except to say, ‘I’ll try to get Natalie to come. You and Linette can catch up.’ ”

“And that felt okay to him?”

“Guys don’t discuss things,” Kris said.

F
rom Mr. Zinler’s phone I called Hilda Simone to reschedule, and the Halcyon for particulars. “I’ll give you Reservations,” said the hotel operator. A new voice said, “This is Honey. May I help you?” Absolutely, she crowed. Rooms galore. When was I thinking of?

“Tonight.”

“We have a three-day March Doldrums Weekend package.”

I said, “Can we take it one night at a time?”

“You can’t
not
love it here,” she said. “I guarantee you’ll be signing up for more.”

I asked what their rates were.

“Forty-two to fifty-nine dollars a person, double occupancy.”

I asked, “Do any rooms have two beds?”

“You name it, we’ve got it!”

I said, All right, we’d do that, the forty-two-dollar room, please. What did that include?

“Three delicious meals,” said Honey. “Name?”

“Marx.”

Kris had drifted back from studying my landlord’s microwave oven, first on the block, and was paying careful attention.

“Mr. and Mrs.?” asked Honey.

Kris nodded to my raised eyebrows, not knowing what the question was. “Sure,” I said.

“Have you been here before?”

I said no, and asked for directions from Boston, which she rattled off as if she commuted daily.

I put my hand over the receiver and said, “It takes four to four and a half hours.”

Kris shrugged.

“We dress for dinner,” Honey advised.

“Ties and jackets?”

“It’s what we ask for, but truthfully? The maître d’ can give your husband a tie. It happens all the time.”

“He might need one,” I said. “Thanks. We’ll see you soon.”

“You’re all set, darling,” said Honey. “You won’t be sorry.”

I
packed a black dress, a purple dress, and a red flannel nightgown for sleeping one bed away from a man I’d still not kissed. Kris watched me from the Murphy bed, which he had pulled down, pushed back, and pulled down again as if analyzing its physics; watched me fold my nightgown, my chin anchoring it to my chest. When I looked up from the task, he was smiling.

“What?” I asked.

“Your nightgown. Good and sturdy.”

“I froze at your hotel,” I said. I packed my brown terry-cloth robe, a bulky sweater, a skirt, jeans, two turtleneck jerseys, and a half-dozen pairs of underwear in my overnight bag, having vowed during my Christmas vigil to overpack for all future trips.

“Toothbrush, toothpaste, all that stuff?” he asked.

“Got it. What about you?”

“Shaving kit’s in the car.”

He lifted my bulging bag like the experienced bellboy he was and asked if I could manage the rest. I said this was it, more or less. Just a pocketbook—I didn’t say it was valise-size, with shells glued on straw, a gift I’d never used from my Florida grandmother; I’d be right behind him in a sec. When he was out the door, I looked around and tried to conjure up the sorriest hours in my Lake
Devine garret. I added a paperback novel, my tube of ointment, a can of sour drops, my only lace bikini underpants, my purse-size vial of Je Reviens, and a pair of rag-wool socks.

Kris was gunning the blue VW Lake Devine bus. I walked to the passenger door and climbed in, squashing my straw bag to fit around my feet.

“Got everything?” he asked wryly.

I said, “We’ll find out,” adding, “Can’t be too different from the Inn at Lake Devine, right?”

He glanced over, then returned his eyes to the rearview mirror. “Was that a trick question?”

I said, “More like a joke.”

“The joke being?”

“The joke is that nothing could be further from the Inn at Lake Devine than a place in the Catskills owned by the Feldman family.”

He made a strangled sound. “Do you think there are any other subjects two people can discuss besides you’re Jewish and I’m not?”

I said, “Apparently not.”

“And why is that?”

I said, after searching for a weighty enough phrase, “Because of your family’s civil rights record.”

He finally backed down the driveway and braked at the end. “Oh yeah?” he replied, smiling. “Would you care to be more specific?”

I said, “The one outlined in a 1962 letter, signed by Ingrid Berry, saying, ‘
Gentiles only
.’ ”

He turned, startled.

I said, “I didn’t
think
you knew.”

“Your parents told you this?”

I said I had seen the letter with my own eyes, and it was unmistakable—the green sketch on the pebbly white stationery. I asked him the question I had asked myself several times over Christmas with each kind and enfolding act performed by a Berry
son. “Even if you had seen that letter, would it have meant anything? As a kid, would you have known what
Gentile
meant?”

He stared straight ahead and said, almost inaudibly, “I don’t know.”

I said, “C’mon. You wouldn’t have known. Let’s get going.”

He said, “You came with the Fifes, even after getting a letter like that?”

“I had to see it for myself.”

He backed the bus into the street, now swearing softly.

I asked after a few blocks, “Did you ever see the movie
Titanic
?”

Kris said no.

“Clifton Webb plays this rich guy who can’t get a ticket because they’re booked solid. He goes over to a line of immigrants waiting to board, flashes his wallet, and offers one guy a fortune to take his place in steerage. The guy says to his wife in broken English, ‘I take another boat. I meet you in America.’ As soon as they’re on open water, Clifton Webb comes upstairs, easy as you please. A steward says, ‘You’re not allowed up here,’ and Clifton Webb, in these beautiful clothes, says regally, ‘I’ll try to behave myself,’ and walks right past him.”

“Did he get caught?” Kris asked.

“Of course not. He was this upper-crust guy married to Barbara Stanwyck and she had a stateroom, so he was all set.”

“Until they hit the iceberg.”

“True. But the part that stayed with me was his gliding up the stairs and past the rope barrier, and how cool he was.”

Kris said, “So?”

“I wanted to see what went on at a place that didn’t let Jews in.” I motioned
go
; the light had turned green.

He drove absentmindedly, creeping, then speeding. I asked if he wanted me to drive, and he said, “No. Sorry. Am I doing that badly?”

I read the next three steps from Honey’s directions in Honey’s voice, concluding with, “You’re all set, dawling.”

Kris smiled gratefully. Thinking we had moved on, he said, “We should be there by five-thirty.”

Another minute went by before I asked, “In all these years, you never noticed there weren’t any Jews at your hotel?”

Kris said, “I didn’t! I’m sorry, but I didn’t know. Unlike you, I don’t know what religion people are from fifty yards away. I’ll take full responsibility for the letter, okay? You can sue me as soon as we get to the Catskills.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said. “I don’t even blame your father. He was unbelievably kind to me when I was there.”

“Just my mother.”

“She sent the letter. I’m assuming she wrote it and meant it.”

Kris said, “She never talked about it.”

“You never heard your mother say anything anti-Semitic?”

“Look,” said Kris. “I’ve heard stuff from people that would make you sick, stuff they say when they assume there’re no Jews around. Which happens to be the case pretty much of the time in Gilbert, Vermont. My mother has said a lot of things that I wouldn’t care to repeat, not all of them anti-Semitic.”

I tried to cajole some offensive phrases out of him, but he wouldn’t budge. He turned on the radio and drummed on the steering wheel to tune me out. After a few minutes I said, “Mass Pike coming up.”

“You haven’t changed your mind about this weekend? Even though we’ve been fighting since the second I arrived?”

“Fighting?” I said. “This isn’t fighting. This is a stimulating discussion.”

He swore softly, and for a moment I thought it was road-related—trouble merging into the right-hand lane. I checked over my right shoulder, and heard him ask, “Then why do I feel like son of Hitler?”

“Hardly,” I scoffed, Miss Magnanimous. “I told you I’m not blaming you for what your mother says or does. I can differentiate.”

He made the turn off Route 128, then said, “ ‘Not blaming you’ is like a million miles from what I was hoping to accomplish by coming down here, Natalie. I wasn’t looking for clearance on being a bigot.”

It was, I knew, another declaration. As we pulled up to the tollbooth I put my rashy left hand on his. He must have been waiting for the first sign of affection or conciliation, because it was then, with the window open and the turnpike employee holding out our ticket, that Kris said, “Natalie, what if I’m in love with you?”

“With me?” I said. “Really?”

The car behind us honked. I barked, “Boston driver!”

“Ticket,” said the toll taker.

“I’m waiting for directions,” Kris told him, taking the ticket, and to me: “Something concrete. Something that would reassure a guy in agony.”

I said, “Go. It’s okay. I mean, how can I think with this racket behind us?”

The bus bucked and almost stalled coming out of neutral, but it recovered and we were off.

I
 realized, as soon as we crossed into Sullivan County and saw the first splashy billboard, that the correct name of our destination was the Halseeyon. A two-lane highway and Honey’s directions took us to Halseeyon Way, a long, baronial driveway bordered by privet hedges.