The Collected Stories Read online

  The waiter, Larry Starker, a tall fellow with Nordic cheekbones and an icy gray stare, was considered dangerously handsome. In fact, he’d modeled for the covers of cheap paperbacks, appearing as a Teutonic barbarian about to molest a semi-naked female who lay at his feet, manacled, writhing in terror-pleasure. He’d also appeared chained to a post, watching the approach of a whip-queen in leather regalia. But the real Larry Starker, twenty-two years old, didn’t have a clue about exotic sex. He’d completed a year of dental school and hoped to have an office someday in Brighton Beach, where he’d grown up playing handball with the neighborhood guys. Like everyone else on the dining-room staff, he was working to make money for books and tuition.

  I was eighteen years old, Larry’s busboy. This was my first job in a good resort. The previous three summers, I’d worked in a schlock-house where, aside from heavy meals and a lake with a rowboat, there were few amenities, and the dining-room staff slept two to a bed. Husbands arrived on weekends, set a card table on the lawn, and played pinochle, ignoring the women and children they’d come to visit. My own family used to go to a place like that every summer, and my father was one of the men playing pinochle. He never once took me fishing or hunting, like an American dad, but then he never went fishing or hunting. The only place he ever took me was to the stonecutter’s, one Sunday afternoon, when he ordered his gravestone.

  As Larry’s busboy, I cleared away dishes, poured coffee, served desserts, then set the tables for the next meal. Between breakfast and lunch, we had an hour break and we all lay about dozing in the bunkhouse or sat on our narrow beds writing letters home. Between lunch and dinner, there was a two-and-a-half-hour break. Some of us slept through the afternoon heat, others spent the time reading, and others played cards, or handball, or basketball, or went swimming. After we worked dinner, nobody wanted to sleep. It was then about 9:00 p.m. We’d taken orders from strangers in the dining room, and chefs had screamed at us from behind a steam table. We should have been exhausted, but the nighttime air smelled good, the starry mountain skies were exhilarating, and we were young.

  As we showered and dressed, the fine strain of a flute came through the darkness. It meant the Latin dance band was playing. In clean shirts and sport jackets, we left the bunkhouse, hurrying toward the lights of the casino, where we danced the mambo. Our partners were the young brides. When that became depressing, we took off for another resort and danced with free women, governesses, chambermaids, or guests who were unmarried or whose husbands were in the city.

  There may have been waitresses in the Catskill resorts, but I never met one. Since women guests far outnumbered the men, waiters and busboys were universally hired to make up the shortage. At the honeymoon resort there was no shortage, but the dining-room staff was all men, anyway. I don’t know why. Maybe the atmosphere of newly married bliss forbade hanky-panky among the help.

  Latin music was the rage in the early fifties. You would hear the dining-room staff singing in Spanish: rumbas, mambos, cha-cha-chas. We understood the feeling in the words, not the words. We called Latin music “Jewish.” The wailing melodies were reminiscent of Hebraic and Arabic chanting, but we only meant the music was exciting to us. A fusion music, conflating Europe and Africa. In mambo, Spanish passion throbs to Nigerian syncopation. In Yiddish, the German, Hebrew, Spanish, Polish, and English words are assimilated to a culture and a system of sound. The fox-trot and lindy hop we called “American.” They had a touch of Nigeria, too, but compared to mambo or Yiddish, they felt like “Jingle Bells.”

  Handsome Larry Starker, with his straight dark-blond hair and long bones, danced the mambo as well as anyone at the Palladium in Manhattan, great hall of the conga drum, Machito, and Tito Puente. Other dancers made a space when Larry stepped onto the floor. The music welcomed him, horns became more brilliant, congas and timbales talked to his belly. He did no fancy steps, but in the least of his motions he was wonderful, displaying the woman who danced in his arms, turning her around and around for the world to see.

  Larry gave me 40 percent of his tips, the customary waiter-busboy split. On Sundays after lunch, guests checked out and tipped the waiter six dollars, and the busboy four. Sometimes they put money directly in my hand, but more often they gave it to Larry. We shoved the money into the pockets of our black sweaty trousers. Later, in the bunkhouse, each of us went off alone and pulled out sticky wads by the fistful, peeling away bills, counting as they fluttered to the bed. At the end of the summer, having worked ten-to-fourteen-hour days, sometimes seven days a week, I expected to make between eight and twelve hundred dollars.

  I’d have done a little better working with a waiter who didn’t have icy eyes and a face like a cliff above the North Sea, beaten by freezing winds. Larry spoke Yiddish and was fluent in the mambo, but he looked like an SS officer. Not a good way to look after World War II, especially in the Catskills, where the shadow of death, extending from millions of corpses in Europe, darkened the consciousness of surviving millions in New York.

  Comedians, called tummlers, who played the Catskills were even stranger in their effects than Larry. Masters of Jewish self-mockery, they filled casino theaters with a noise never previously heard in the human universe — to my ears, anyway — the happy shrieks of unghosted yiddim. “What does not destroy me makes me stronger,” says Nietzsche. We laughed. We danced the mambo. Because we weren’t dead, we lived.

  Entertainers came streaming up from the city — actors, magicians, hypnotists, jugglers, acrobats, impersonators, singers. But with or without entertainment, there was always dancing. After the dancing, we sometimes drove to a late-night Chinese restaurant called Corey’s, ate sweetand-sour spareribs, and listened to a small Latin band. Piano, bass, horn, congas, and a black-haired Latina in a tight red dress who played maracas and sang so beautifully you wanted to die at the table, lips shining with grease, cigarette forgotten, burning your fingers. She played maracas as she sang and danced, taking small steps, her shoulders level, hips subtly swaying to intimate the grandeurs and devastations of love. Pleasure was in the air, day and night.

  The newly married couple, Sheila and Morris Kahn, took meals in their honeymoon suite for two days after their embarrassment. Larry said, ironically, “I don’t expect them to tip big.” I thought they had checked out of the resort and we’d never see them again, but the evening of the third day, they returned to the dining room.

  Wearing a bright blue dress and high heels, Sheila looked neat, cool, and invulnerable. She took her seat, greeted everyone at the table, plucked her napkin out of the water glass, where I’d propped it up like a tall white iris, and placed it in her lap. But she didn’t make it past the soup. Larry set down her bowl. She stood up clutching the napkin and hurried away. Morris gaped after her, his ears like flames of shame, his cheeks pale. An urgent question struggled to shape his lips, then perished. The blue dress of happiness fled among the tables. Larry muttered, “I didn’t do anything,” and strode off to the kitchen to pick up the next course. I collected Sheila’s soup bowl, contents untasted, and put it out of sight.

  Morris lingered through the meal. I heard him talking, in a loud, officious voice, about Hitler. “According to my sources,” said Morris, “Hitler isn’t dead.” Nobody disagreed with his sources. The flight of Sheila, the only subject, wasn’t mentioned.

  Larry read one book all summer, which was about the mechanics and pathology of the human mouth. Otherwise, he was dedicated to Latin dancing and handball. He took on challengers at handball every week — lifeguards, tennis instructors, waiters, and bellhops — first — class players who often came from resorts miles away. Some referred to him as “the Nazi,” even to his face. Catskill resorts weren’t polite society, and conversation could be blunt and cruel. To call Larry a Nazi wasn’t fair, but he looked the way he looked. It had an alienating effect, despite his Yiddish, despite his being a Jew.

  The hard black rubber ball, banging the backboard, sounded like gunfire as Larry annihilated challenger
s. I didn’t root for Larry, because he always won anyway, and I felt sorry for the others. They wanted badly to beat him, as if more than a game and a couple of dollars were at stake. He knew what they felt, men with strength and speedy reflexes who had come from miles away to beat the Nazi. He beat them week after week.

  There was another great handball player, “Hairy Murray,” also known as “the maniac from Hackensack.” He worked the resort circuit as a tummler. He’d challenged Larry, and a date had been set for a game. The odds were usually around ten to one against the challenger, but against Hairy Murray there were no odds. People wanted to see these competitors in the flesh, the way people want to see horses before a race. I assumed Larry would win. He played like the God of Isaiah, an insatiable destroyer. Larry’s dancing wasn’t altogether different. He moved without a smile or the dopey rictus of ballroom professionals, his body seized by rhythms of the earth. I could live with his inhuman sublimity, and even his good looks, but I couldn’t think that I’d ever have Larry’s effect on a woman.

  I felt envy, a primitive feeling. Also a sin. But go not feel it. According to Melanie Klein, envy is among the foundation stones of Brain House. Nobody is free of it. I believed envy is the chief principle of life: what one man has, another lacks. Sam is smart; hence, you are stupid. Joey is tall; hence, you are a midget. Kill Sam and Joey, you are smart and tall. Such sublogical thoughts applied also to eating. The first two bites satisfy a person’s hunger. After that comes eating, which satisfies more than hunger. Seeing hundreds of people eat three times a day in the dining room brought to mind the Yiddish expression “Eating is nothing to sneeze at,” which is no joke. Guests looked serious in the dining room, as if they had come to eat what life denied them — power, brains, beauty, love, wealth — in the form of borscht, boiled beef, chopped liver, sour cream, etc. In the bunkhouse at night, falling asleep, I saw hundreds of faces geshtupt, like chewing machines in a factory that ingests dreams.

  I also saw Sheila’s light brown curly hair and her appealing face, with its pointy lips and small, sweet chin, and her nice figure, today called a “body.” Like a sculptor’s vision, it was nearly palpable, an image in my hands. I remembered her agony, too, how she stood up clutching her napkin, how she seemed transfigured, going from mere appealingness to divinity. She got to me, though she wasn’t my type, and I’d have felt nothing, maybe, if she hadn’t been deranged by Larry.

  The morning after she fled the dining room, Morris Kahn arrived for breakfast alone. He carried the Times. It was to suggest that he was an intelligent man, with interests beyond personal life. He opened the Times and began to read. Larry approached like a robot waiter, wordless. Not looking up, Morris said, “Scrambled eggs.”

  Larry spun away, returned with scrambled eggs.

  Morris said, “These eggs are cold.”

  Larry took away the eggs.

  Morris said, “Fuck eggs. Bring pancakes.”

  Larry quick-marched to the kitchen, reappeared with pancakes.

  Morris let them get cold, then ordered more.

  I stepped forward, took away cold pancakes.

  Larry set down warm pancakes.

  Morris read his newspaper, ate nothing. Larry’s white rayon shirt, gray with sweat, sucked his chest. Hair, pressing up against the rayon, was a dark scribble of lines.

  Morris, about thirty years old, maybe ten or twelve years older than Sheila, was almost completely bald, and he had a pink, youthful, placid face that showed no anguish. He ordered pancakes five times. He wanted to make a bad scene, but, like a round-headed dog, he was hopelessly affectionate and at a loss for an appropriate violence. Larry and I sped back and forth, rolling our eyes at each other as we passed, in opposite directions, through the swinging doors of the kitchen. At last Morris was content. He rose and walked out, the Times folded under his arm, like one who has completed important business and is at leisure to amble in the sunlight.

  That morning, he checked out of the resort with Sheila. At the desk, he left an envelope with Larry’s name scrawled across the front. It contained a thirty-five-dollar tip, much more than he’d have left if he’d stayed a week and never missed a meal. The tip was an apology. Had Morris been a Catskill gangster, Larry Starker would have disappeared, dumped in a mountain lake.

  In the following weeks, Larry received phone calls from the city, sometimes in the middle of the night. It was no secret who was calling. He stayed long on the phone and never discussed the calls. Sheila had spent only a few days at the resort, and if she and Larry had found moments to talk, nobody noticed. Lovers are sly, making do in circumstances less convenient than the buildings and grounds of a resort in the Catskills.

  One afternoon, in the break after lunch, I was lying in my bunk, groggy with fatigue and heat, unable to sleep or to sit up and finish reading The Stranger, in which Camus’s hero mysteriously murders an Arab, on a blindingly sunny beach in Algiers, and feels no remorse, feels hardly anything else, and has no convictions. A modern believer, I supposed, different from the traditional kind, like Saint Teresa, who draws conviction from feeling. I thought the book couldn’t have been written before the Holocaust.

  Larry was lying in the bed next to mine. I heard his voice: “What do you say?”

  “All right,” I answered, hearing my own voice, as I sprawled in stuporous languor after lunch, a dairy meal, which was always the hardest of the day. Guests had to sample everything. Busboy trays became mountains of dirty dishes. The dining room was too warm. The kitchen was hot, and the wooden floors were soft and slick, dangerous when rushing with a heavy tray on your shoulder. The chefs, boiling behind the steam counter, screamed at you for no reason. In the middle of the meal, the dishwasher cut himself on broken glass. He couldn’t stop working. More and more dishes were arriving, and there was blood everywhere.

  “Then get up.”

  “Doing it,” I said.

  I’d agreed to play handball, surprised and flattered by Larry’s invitation, never before offered, but my body got up reluctantly, lifting from the clutch of mud. I followed him out of the bunkhouse. He’d brought a ball and two gloves. “You lefty or righty?” he asked. I mumbled, “Righty,” as if not sure. He said, “Here. Take both gloves.” He didn’t really need them, since he could hit killers with his iron-hard, naked hands. In the glare and stillness, the ball boomed off the backboard. As we warmed up, my body returned to itself. I hit a few good shots, then said, “I’m ready.” We played one game. Larry beat me by eighteen points. It felt like an insult. He’d slammed the ball unnecessarily on every play. My palms were burning and swollen. Walking back to the bunkhouse, he said, “Sheila Kahn has a sister. Adele. Would you like a date with her? They live in Riverdale.”

  “Too far.”

  “I’m talking about later, in the city. Not now, not in the Catskills, moron. She’s seventeen, goes to Barnard, a chemistry major. Sheila says Adele is pretty. You and Adele. Me and Sheila. A double date.”

  “Double-shmubble. I don’t have wheels, and I don’t want to sit in the subway for an hour and a half to meet a chemist.”

  “Ever hear of Glock Brothers Manufacturing?”

  “No. Go alone.”

  “I’ll pick you up on my way from Brooklyn. You never heard of Glock Manufacturing?”

  “You think, if I go with you, it will be easier to face Sheila’s parents. Since you ruined her life.”

  Larry said, “Don’t hock mir a chinek,” which means, “Don’t bang me a teakettle,” or, without the Yiddish compression, “Don’t bug me with empty chatter.” He continued: “You don’t know shit. You’ll never get anywhere.”

  “Fuck you. I don’t like to be used.”

  “Sheila’s father is Herschel Glock.”

  “Fuck him, too.”

  “Glock Manufacturing makes airplane parts for Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. Her father owns the company.”

  “So he’s a rich man. So his daughters are rich girls. Big deal.”

  “I can’t
talk to you.”

  “You want to talk to me? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  To go out with Sheila’s sister would have been kicks, but Larry let me score only three points and used me like a dog to retrieve the ball for him so he could hit it again too hard and fast for me. Besides, I had no car and didn’t want charity. Who knows what the date would cost? Maybe twenty bucks. It took a week, serving a married couple, to make fifteen. I planned to go alone the next day to the courts and slam the ball till the pain was unbearable. It was near the end of the season, not enough time to improve much, and I’d never beat Larry anyway. But if I could win five points, I’d say I twisted my ankle, and quit in the middle of the game, and never play him again. He wouldn’t know for sure if he could beat me. The sunlight was unbearable. And I was too mixed up with feeling to know what I wanted, but I could refuse to go out with Sheila’s sister. That was a powerful response, disappointing to Larry and hurtful to me, because I wanted to go with Sheila’s sister. In the bunkhouse we flopped on our beds, two feet apart, and lay shining with sweat. I reviewed the game in memory, making myself more depressed and angry. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t relax. Larry said, “Is it raining?”

  “It’s the sunniest day on record,” I said, and my hurt feelings grabbed my voice. “You want to know something, Larry. We’re different. We don’t look like each other. We don’t think like each other. We don’t nothing like each other. It’s a miracle that we can even speak and understand what’s said, either in English or Yiddish.”

  He groaned.

  I glanced at him and saw eyes without pupils, showing only whites. A horrible face, as if he were tortured by my remarks or he’d remembered something extremely important that he hadn’t done.

  I sat up, saying, “You’re making me sick, you freak,” then realized he couldn’t hear me. He was foaming at the corners of his mouth, and his body was thrashing like a live wire. Foam pinkish with blood streamed down his chin. I shouted for help. Nobody came. I heard voices in the next room. I ran into the next room. A bed was strewn with dollars and quarters and playing cards. Two guys sat on the adjacent bed to the left, facing three on the bed to the right. Nobody noticed me until I brought both fists down on the cards and dollars. Quarters flew up in the air. I shouted, “Larry is having a fit.”