The talking in the other room had momentarily stopped. Then someone summed things up and a pleased voice agreed. A pact had been made. A door opened and the social director walked out, whistling, into the corridor.
In a little while he heard others in the corridor. Those would be the guests going to breakfast. He felt again a joy in his extravagance, and smiled at the idea of trying to be extravagant at Bieberman’s (he thought of the shuffleboard court and the crack in the cement that snaked like a wayward S past the barely legible numbers where the paint had faded, of the frayed seams on the tennis nets and the rust on the chains that supported them, of the stucco main building that must always have looked obsolete, out of place in those green, rich mountains). It was a little like trying to be extravagant at Coney Island. Some places, he knew, commanded high prices for shabbiness; here you expected a discount.
He had seen the expressions on the guests’ faces as they descended from the hotel station wagon. They came, traitors to their causes, doubtful, suspicious of their chances, their hearts split by some hope for change, some unlooked-for shift of fortune. Later they joked about it. What could you expect, they asked, from a mountain that had no Bronx, no Brooklyn on top of it? As for himself, he knew why he had come. He had heard the stories — comfortably illicit — of bored, hot mamas, people’s eager aunts, office girls in virginity’s extremis.
In the army he had known a boy named Phil, an amateur confidence man itching to turn pro, who, like a mystic, looked to the mountains. He remembered a conversation they’d had, sitting in the PX one night during basic training, solacing themselves with near-beer. Phil asked what he was going to do when he got out. He had to tell him he didn’t know, and Phil looked doubtful for a moment. He could not understand how something so important had not been prepared for. Preminger asked him the same question, expecting to hear some pathetic little tale about night school, but Phil surprised him, reciting an elaborate plan he had worked out. All he needed was a Cadillac.
“A Cadillac?” he said. “Where would you get the money?”
“Listen to him. What do you think, I was always in the army?”
“What did you do before?”
“What did I do? I was a bellboy. In the mountains. In the mountains a bellboy is good for fifteen, sixteen hundred a season. If he makes book, add another five.”
“You made book?”
“Not my own. I was an agent, sort of, for a guy. I was Bellboy five seasons. I was saving for the car, you understand. Well, now I’ve got enough. I’ve got enough for a wardrobe too. When you have a white Caddy convertible with black upholstery and gold fittings, you don’t drive it in blue jeans. I must have about a thousand bucks just for the wardrobe part. When I get out I pick up my car and go back to the mountains. There must be a hundred hotels up there. All I do is just drive around until I see some girl who looks like she might be good for a couple of bucks. I’ll pick her up. I’ll make a big thing of it, do you follow me? We’ll drive around with the top down to all the nice hotels, Grossinger’s and the Concord, where all the bellboys know me, and we’ll eat a nice lunch, and we make a date for the evening. Then when I pick her up that night we go out to the hotels again — they’ve got all this free entertainment in the mountains — but the whole time I’m with her I’m hanging back like, quiet, very sad. She’s got to ask what’s up, right? Well, I’ll brush it off,but all the time I’ll be getting more miserable, and she’ll be all over me with questions about what’s wrong, is it something she did, something she said — So finally I’ll say, ‘Look, dear, I didn’t want to ruin your evening, but I see I’ll have to tell you. It’s the Cadillac. I’ve got just one payment to make on it and it’s ours. Well, I’m broke this month. I lent money to a guy and I dropped a couple hundred on a nag last week. I missed the payment. They called me up today, they’re going to repossess if they don’t get the payment tomorrow. Hell, I wouldn’t care, honey, but I like you and I know what a kick it gives you to ride in it.’ Now you know yourself, a girl on vacation, she’s got to have a few bucks in the suitcase, am I right? Sooner or later she’s got to say, ‘Maybe I could lend you some money toward it. How much do you need?’ I tell her that it’s crazy, she doesn’t even know me, and anyway that I’d need about sixty bucks. Well, don’t you see, she’s so relieved it’s not more she knocks herself out to get the dough to me. She’s thinking I’m in to her for sixty bucks, we’re practically engaged or something. The thing is, to close the deal, I’ve got to be able to make her. That’s my insurance she won’t try to find me later on. These girls make a big thing out of their reputation, and I could ruin her. It’s easy. That’s the whole setup. The next day I go to a new hotel. If I’m lucky it’s good for the whole season. And then, in the winter, there’s Miami.”
Preminger smiled, recalling Phil’s passion. It was a hell of an idea, and he would have to keep his eyes open for a white Cadillac convertible. But what was important was that somewhere in the outrageous plan there was sound, conservative thinking, the thinking of a man who knew his geography, who saw his symbols in the true white lights of a Cadillac’s headlamps. The plan could work. It was, in its monstrous way, feasible, and he cheered Phil on. And while he had not himself come for the money, of course, he hoped to shake down a little glory from the skies. He wanted, in short, to get laid in Jewish, to get laid and laid, to abandon himself. Abandon was a new thing in his life, however, and he was not as yet very good at it. All he could be sure of was that he approved of it.
Well, anyway, he thought, playing his pleasant morning game, I’m in a new place, and there’s Norma, at least.
Thinking of Norma, he felt some misgivings. It was too easy to make fun of her desperation. She was, after all, something like the last of her race — vacationing secretary, overripe vestal, the only girl in the whole damned family who had not walked down some flower-strewn aisle in The Bronx, amidst a glory going at four dollars a plate, toward the ultimate luck, a canopy of flowers, to plight what she might call her troth. Beauty is troth and troth beauty, that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know. And Norma, he thought, on the edge of age, having tried all the other ways, having gone alone to the dances in the gymnasium of the Hebrew school, having read and mastered the Journal of the American Medical Association for April so that she might hold intelligent conversation with the nephew of her mother’s friend, a perspiring intern at Bellevue, and having ceased to shave her underarms because of the pain, had abandoned herself to Bieberman’s and to him.
He stretched in bed. Under the sheet he moved his toes and watched the lumps, like suddenly shifting mountain ranges, change shape. The sun lay in strips across his chest. He got out of the sun-warmed bed, and slices of light from the Venetian blinds climbed up and across his body.
He began to dress but saw that his ground-level window was open. He moved up to it cautiously and started to pull the string on the Venetian blinds to slant the sunlight downward. Seeing some of the guests standing in a large group beside the empty swimming pool, he paused. He remembered the cryptic warnings of the social director and shivered lightly, recalling against his will the confused and angry scene which yesterday had sickened them all. Was that the new excitement he had awakened with, he wondered.
He had even known the child slightly; she and her mother had sat at the table next to his in the dining hall. He had once commented to Norma that she was a pretty little girl. Her death and her mother’s screams (the cupped hands rocking back and forth in front of her, incongruously like a gambler’s shaking dice) had frightened him. He had come up from the tennis court with his racket in his hand. In front of him were the sun-blistered backs of the guests. He pushed through, using his racket to make a place for himself. He stood at the inner edge of the circle, but seeing the girl’s blue face ringed by the wet yellow hair sticking to it, he backed off, thrusting his racket before his face, defending his eyes. The people pushing behind him would not let him through and helplessly he had to turn back, forced to watch as Mrs. Goldstone, the girl’s mother, asked each of them why it had happened, and then begged, and then accused, and then turned silently back to the girl to bend over her again and slap her. He heard her insanely calm voice scolding the dead girclass="underline" “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.” He watched the mother, squatting on her heels over the girl, obscene as someone defecating in the woods. She struggled hopelessly with the firemen who came to remove the girl, and after they had borne her off, her body jouncing grotesquely on the stretcher, he saw the mother try to hug the wet traces of the child’s body on the cement. When the others put out their hands and arms to comfort her, crowding about her, determined to make her recognize their sympathy, he looked away.