The Inn at Lake Devine (5 page)

It sounded more peaceful to me than anti-Semitic. Old Jewish people liked to sit in lawn chairs and stare out at the water, too.

For the remaining three weeks of camp, I employed all the tricks acquired at the knee of my sister, queen of brainwashers and cajolers.
I began my campaign by saying, “I wrote to my parents and asked them if they could make reservations for the same week you and your parents would be at the Inn.”

Robin began to sit with me at meals, copy my candy-bar choices at the camp store, squeeze next to me around the campfire. I gave her progress reports every few mail calls: “My mother’s checking with the Inn” or “They’re waiting to hear from Mrs. Berry.”

Weren’t older sisters and brothers a pain? I confided. My sister bossed me around, never let me play with her and her friends or talk in front of them. She had her driver’s license and wouldn’t take me places just for fun, ever, unless my parents made her.

“Me too,” said Robin. “Only it’s worse, because my parents don’t make Chip take me anywhere. They don’t trust his driving.”

“At least you don’t have to share a room with him while you’re on vacation,” I grumbled.

“That’s true,” Robin agreed.

“I have to share a
room
with Pammy.” I shook my head, my eyes closed, as if the prospect of her slovenliness and general discourtesy were too much to bear.

Robin pondered this, as I had intended: rooms, room assignments, roommates. I could see her silently counting beds in her single. Finally, she said, “If you’re there at the same time I am, maybe we could share a room and your sister could stay alone.”

I said, “My mother wouldn’t like it. She’d think I was imposing.”

“Why would you be imposing? My parents are paying for the room anyway.”

“True,” I said. I promised to write to my mother immediately and to propose such an arrangement, despite her known aversion to imposing.

“Tell her I’m afraid to sleep alone,” said Robin. “Which is kind of true. If I have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I go next door to my parents’ room so one of them can walk me
down the hall. And sometimes I can’t fall asleep because I’m nervous, so I make one of them sleep in my other twin bed.”

It was all the ammunition I needed: I’d position myself as a companion. A baby-sitter. I’d be so nice, so well mannered, so appreciative, and I’d perform several custodial duties that would free Mr. and Mrs. Fife from the burden of Robin. I’d be Heidi helping Clara in Düsseldorf: She’d get out of the wheelchair and I’d get to experience a holiday on the other side of the tracks.

It wasn’t that difficult to fake the rest: Soon I reported that there were no rooms at the Inn for us—my parents had made their inquiries far too late. Robin was bitterly disappointed. I reviewed the might-have-beens of our week-long partnership, the croquet and the sessions with Dippity-Do now evaporated. She thought it was her idea when she hit on the solution: “What if you came with us? I already told my parents that I was going to have a friend there.” She wrote immediately to her parents, and I wrote to mine, too, as soon as the Fifes formally invited me. I wrote, “Robin Fife, the girl from Farmington, Connecticut, has invited me to join her family on vacation in Vermont. She has two brothers who don’t play with her, so her parents want her to bring a friend. Can I go? Please?”

They didn’t think to ask right away the name of the Fifes’ lodging, because I was careful to focus on mission—Robin’s need for company and her bad sleeping habits—rather than setting. Our mothers spoke, and it wasn’t until the end of the exceedingly cordial conversation that Mrs. Fife pronounced the name of their destination.

My mother could hardly withdraw her permission then. What could she say?—“Uh-oh. They don’t like Jews there. Did Robin tell you we’re of the Jewish faith?” I was sure the reason she didn’t renege, besides the bad etiquette of it, was the crusading impulse running through the Marxes. We all wanted to cross the threshold as guests and not visitors, and maybe I, in my early-teen disguise, was best suited to be a spy in the house of Devine. It was our duty
to show that we—with the blood of Moses, Queen Esther, Leonard Bernstein, and Sid Caesar coursing through our veins—were the equal of any clientele. And if the Berrys still didn’t think so, wasn’t it our duty to set them straight?

I
’d like to say that my mother and I prepared for my week away with no eye toward outward appearances, no thought to what constituted high-quality Protestant summer clothes. We pressed and packed for days: Bermuda shorts and Villager shirts; a sleeveless shirtwaist dress of a muted plaid with a braided rope belt; a new Catalina bathing suit in blue jersey; a terry-cloth cover-up piped in pinpoint blue gingham; tops, shorts, and something then in fashion called a skort. New Keds and new Peds. A bathrobe of yellow seersucker, and two new pairs of baby dolls. A white cable-knit cardigan for cool evenings and a Radcliffe sweatshirt for cool days.

The Fifes picked me up at our house in Newton on the Saturday morning of our departure. My parents invited them in for coffee and fruit, but they demurred gaily and said, “Next time! We don’t want to lose a minute.”

My father looked into the car and said, “No boys? I thought you had a couple of boys!” Pammy, who had sauntered out in her most fetching cutoffs and in bare feet, froze, then retreated at my father’s bald question.

Mr. Fife explained that Jeff and Donald Junior were driving up separately. My mother said, “I hope that your taking Natalie didn’t change your plans to that extent.”

“Not at all,” they said, graciously and adamantly. “We need two cars up there, with the suitcases and the boys’ long legs. This is grand.” The Fifes swiveled around to smile at me and Robin, and said, “Are we ready?”

My parents kissed me through my half-open window, and my mother mouthed, “Be good. Help out.”

“We’ll give you a call toward the middle of the week,” said my father.

“Don’t worry,” said the Fifes. “She’s going to have a wonderful week. We’ll take good care of her.”

My mother said weakly, “It’s just … she just got home from camp.”

“I know,” said Mrs. Fife. “I know exactly how you feel.”

My father put his arm around my mother’s shoulders and walked her back to the curb. They waved and smiled bravely. At least in my memory, I winked.

W
e sang in the car. Robin had taught her parents her favorite camp songs, and the Fifes were a family who could harmonize. I learned that Mr. Fife taught music and directed both the a cappella choir and glee club of a private school in West Hartford. After we exhausted our repertoire of camp songs, they asked if I knew any Gilbert and Sullivan. I said
I
didn’t, but please. For the next ninety minutes, except for a sherbet and bathroom stop at Howard Johnson’s, they sang the entire score of
H.M.S. Pinafore
. I smiled and nodded as if this were how my family occupied itself, too, on a long car trip. They awarded themselves an encore, “Edelweiss,” from their best Broadway outing ever,
The Sound of Music
. I began to worry about the week ahead—about the medleys, the rounds, the three-part harmonies, the low speed at which Mr. Fife drove and his reluctance to pass another living soul. They stopped to take photographs from scenic turnouts as if they’d never passed them before and would never return. Mr. Fife pulled into the breakdown lane when he spotted a car with its hood up. He jogged over to interview the unhappy driver, and jogged back to us, satisfied. “Radiator overheated,” he said, “but he’s carrying water. He’s just going to let it cool down a bit.” After a few minutes of driving in uncharacteristic silence, Mr. Fife expressed disappointment in himself:
He
didn’t carry water, but from this day
forth certainly would, especially on long trips, especially at these elevations.

As soon as we turned onto the dirt road that led to the Inn, everyone but me started counting down from sixty in another happy chorus. Mrs. Fife turned around to explain: They had figured out the previous summer that the drive from the main road to the parking lot took exactly one minute! I joined in at thirty-five, less enthusiastically, but smiling like a good guest. We would do it after every outing, every errand, over the next week. And hitting “One!” as we crossed the first inch of asphalt never failed to delight my host family.

B
efore I went, my parents and I had discussed whether or not I should announce myself as the daughter of the couple who had stopped by the previous summer to admire the property. We decided against full disclosure. We had posed as the Martins, and I was arriving as Natalie Marx. We’d look like liars. Besides, my mother assured me, adults like Mrs. Berry don’t notice children. If you look familiar, she’ll think she saw you once in a department store.

Mrs. Berry, with her gray-blond hair shortened to a Jackie Kennedy bouffant, greeted the Fifes the way paying guests would hope to be received on their fourteenth visit—warmly and on a first-name basis. And because I was there under the Fife banner, Mrs. Berry shook my hand and welcomed me with a short, cloying speech about how lucky I was to be there with the Inn’s absolute favorite family.… What was my name?

“Natalie Marx.”

“Marx,” she repeated.

“Like Groucho.”

Mrs. Berry laughed politely. The Fifes chuckled wholeheartedly.

“I love his show,” said Mrs. Berry. “He can be so … irreverent.”

“Did you get a television?” asked Robin.

Mrs. Berry wagged her finger in the manner of a school principal who had no rapport with children. “With all there is to do here, young lady, would you want to stay in your room and watch television?” Ugh, I thought; she’s horrible on all counts. She looked to the Fifes for ratification; they continued to smile proudly and vacantly.

“The boys beat you to it,” Mrs. Berry announced to the adults.

Mr. and Mrs. Fife exchanged more looks of pride and disbelief. “When did they get here?” Mr. Fife asked.

Mrs. Berry said, “Close to an hour ago, before check-in time. They changed into their suits and flew down to the water.”

“They must have
flown
up the interstate,” chuckled Mr. Fife, the slowest male driver Connecticut had ever licensed.

“Let’s get into our suits, too,” said Robin.

I said, Great, I couldn’t wait to jump in.

“Girls, girls,” said her father with mock sternness. “Luggage! We’re old enough to carry our own bags. Robin?” He led us back down the white-pebbled path to the car, where he ceremoniously handed Robin an undersize piece of luggage and me a canvas beach tote. There was something deliberately good-fatherish and annoying about the way he did it: two hands on each bag, estimating its heft with a thoughtful frown before passing it on. I could see what was ahead: a week of Mr. Fife’s scientific teaching and fathering methods, ratcheted up a few notches for me.

I
soon figured out that the brothers, Jeff and Donald Junior/Chip, were the reason Mr. and Mrs. Fife took such pains to be Perfect Public Parents. Their sons were a walking cockfight. They were horrible together and dullards apart, partners in a kind of boy play I hadn’t seen in my all-girl life on Irving Circle. In the name of horseplay, they strangled each other in wrestling holds, and couldn’t walk within swinging distance of each other without grabbing and twisting whatever limb swung free. They found this
fun, giving it or taking it. In the lake they’d race, thrashing and grunting, with the loser then attempting to drown the winner. Separately, each could be civilized; but together, they were a two-man litter of puppies, nipping and yelping and rolling around on each other’s food.

When I brought up the subject one night—How can you stand them? Why do they have to crack every knuckle separately? Why don’t your parents do something?—Robin said her parents yelled at Jeff and Chip at home, and made them shake hands and go off to their separate rooms and cool down. But here, her parents needed a vacation. They dumped the two boys in one room, figuring they’d kill each other or get it out of their systems.

I said, “They can’t get it out of their systems. It’s hormones.”

“It is?”

“It’s teenage-boy hormones. Why do you think they’re always wrestling and rolling around on top of each other?”

Robin, wide-eyed, shook her head.

I told her it was like girls getting our periods: Boys got hormones. I asked her again: Why didn’t her parents
say
something? It looked to me that her brothers didn’t get yelled at or punished, no matter how much they horsed around and got the lifeguard angry.

“They’re showing off for the people on the dock and for you,” she stated calmly.

“For me?” I asked.

“That’s what Mrs. Berry said.”

I asked her when Mrs. Berry had offered this opinion.

“When you were swimming out to the raft and I stayed on the dock. She said to me, ‘I guess your brothers are showing off for your little friend.’ They were doing cannonballs from the raft trying to hit you.”

“And what did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything. I was shivering. And she was just walking down the dock to tell Nelson something.” Nelson Berry, the oldest of the three Berry children, was the exasperated lifeguard caught
between wanting to banish the Fife boys from the waterfront and needing to maintain good guest relations. Robin and I liked him.

I said, “Mrs. Berry doesn’t like me because I’m Jewish.”

“How does she know you’re Jewish?”

“She just knows.”

“What’s ‘Jewish’ again?” Robin asked.

“Jewish means you go to temple instead of church.”

“Oh,” said Robin.

“You know lots of Jewish people.”

“I do?”

“Janet in our bunk was Jewish. And Melody.”

“The counselor Melody?”

“Yup. And you know famous Jewish people,” I said: Sammy Davis, Jr. Lorne Green. Marilyn Monroe’s husband. Ed Sullivan’s wife.

“I think my senator was Jewish,” she said.

I couldn’t resist the opportunity, Robin being as much of a blank slate as she was. I said, “We’re God’s chosen people, so Mrs. Berry has no right not to like Jews. Especially now. The law says you have to like everybody equally if you own a hotel.”