The Professor of Desire (28 page)

Centered within the arabesque design that is embossed in silver and serves as a border to the album's funereal cover are three lines, which my father points out to us, word by word, with his index finger. We all read the words in silence—all except him.

FIRST EDITION STERLING SILVER PROOF SET MINTED FOR THE PERSONAL COLLECTION OF PROFESSOR DAVID KEPESH

I don't know what to say. I say, “This must have cost an awful lot. It's really something.”

“Isn't it? But, no, the cost don't hurt, not the way they set it up. You just collect one medal a month, to begin with. You start off with
Romeo and Juliet
—wait'll I show Claire
Romeo and Juliet
—and you work your way up from there, till you've got them all. I've been saving for you all this time. The only one who knew was Mr. Barbatnik. Look, Claire, come here, you gotta look up close—”

It is a while before they can locate the medallion depicting
Romeo and Juliet,
for in its designated slot in the lower left-hand corner of the page labeled “Tragedies” it seems he has placed
Two Gentlemen from Verona.
“Where the hell is
Romeo and Juliet?
” he asks. The four of us are able to discover it finally under “Histories” in the slot marked
The Life and Death of King John.
“But then where did I put
The Life and Death of King John?
” he asks. “I thought I got 'em all in right, Sol.” he says to Mr. Barbatnik, frowning. “I thought we checked.” Mr. Barbatnik nods—they did. “Anyway,” says my father, “the point is—what was the point? Oh, the
back.
Here, I want Claire to read what it says on the back, so everyone can hear. Read this, dear.”

Claire reads aloud the inscription: “‘… and a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.'
Romeo and Juliet,
Act Two, Scene Two.”

“Isn't that something?” he says to her.

“Yes.”

“And he can take it to school, too, you see. That's what's so useful. It's something not just for the home, but that he can have ten and twenty years from now to show his classes. And just like yours, it is sterling silver, and something that I guarantee will keep abreast of the inflation, and long after paper money is as good as worthless. Where will you put it?” This last asked of Claire, not me.

“For now,” she says, “on the coffee table, so people can see. Come into the living room, everybody; well put it there.”

“Wonderful,” says my father. “Only remember, don't let your company take the medals out, unless they put on the gloves.”

Lunch is served on the screened-in porch. The recipe for the cold beet soup Claire found in
Russian Cooking,
one of her dozen or so manuals in a Time-Life series on “Foods of the World” shelved neatly between the radio—whose dial seems set to play only Bach—and the wall hung with two of her sister's calm watercolors of the ocean and the dunes. The cucumber and yogurt salad, heavily flavored with crushed garlic and fresh mint from the herb garden just beyond the screen door, is out of the same set, the volume on the cuisine of the Middle East. The cold roast chicken seasoned with rosemary is a longstanding recipe of her own.

“My God,” says my father, “what a spread!” “Excellent,” says Mr. Barbatnik. “Gentlemen, thank you,” says Claire, “but I'll bet you've had better.” “Not even in Lvov, when my mother was cooking,” says Mr. Barbatnik, “have I tasted such a wonderful borscht.” Says Claire, smiling, “I suspect that's a little extravagant, but thank you, again.” “Listen, my dear girl,” says my father, “if I had you in the kitchen, I'd still be in my old line. And you'd get more than you get being a schoolteacher, believe me. A good chef, even in the old days, even in the middle of the Depression—”

But in the end Claire's biggest hit is not the exotic Eastern dishes which, in her Clairish way, she has tried today for the first time in the hope of making everybody—herself included—feel instantaneously at home together, but the hearty iced tea she brews with mint leaves and orange rinds according to her grandmother's recipe. My father cannot seem to get enough, cannot stop praising it to the skies, not after he has learned over the blueberries that Claire takes the bus to Schenectady every month to visit this ninety-year-old woman from whom she learned everything she knows about preparing a meal and growing a garden, and probably about raising a child too. Yes, it looks from the girl as though his renegade son has decided to go straight, and in a very big way.

After lunch I suggest to the two men that they might like to rest until the heat has abated somewhat and we can go for a little walk along the road. Absolutely not. What am I even talking about? As soon as we digest our food, my father says, we must drive over to the hotel. This surprises me, as it surprised me a little at lunch to hear him speak so easily about his “old line.” Since moving to Long Island a year and a half ago, he has shown no interest whatsoever in seeing what two successive owners have made of his hotel, barely hanging on now as the Royal Ski and Summer Lodge. I had thought he would be just as happy staying away, but in fact he is boiling over again with enthusiasm, and after a visit to the toilet, is pacing the porch, waiting for Mr. Barbatnik to awaken from the little snooze he is enjoying in my wicker easy chair.

What if he should drop dead from all this fervor in his heart? And before I have married the devoted girl, bought the cozy house, raised the handsome children …

Then what am I waiting for? If later, why not now, so he too can be happy and count his life a success?

What am I waiting for?

Down the main drag and through every last store still there and open for business my father leads the three of us, he alone seemingly oblivious to the terrific heat. “I can remember when there were four butchers, three barbershops, a bowling alley, three produce markets, two bakeries, an A&P, three doctors, and three dentists. And now, look,” he says—and without chagrin; rather with the proud sagacity of one who imagines he actually knew to get out when the getting was good—“no butchers, no barbers, no bowling alley, just one bakery, no A&P, and unless things have changed since I left, no dentists and only one doctor. Yes,” he announces, avuncular now, taking the overview, sounding a little like his friend Walter Cronkite, “the old, opulent hotel era is over—but it was something! You should have seen this place in summertime! You know who used to vacation here? You name it! The Herring King! The Apple King!—” And to Mr. Barbatnik and to Claire (who does not let on that she already made this same sentimental journey some weeks ago at the side of his son, who had explained at the time just what a herring king
was
) he begins a rapid-fire anecdotal history of his life's major boulevard, foot by foot, year by year, from Roosevelt's inauguration right on up through L.B.J. Putting an arm around his sopping half-sleeve shirt, I say, “I bet if you set your mind to it you could go back before the Flood.” He likes that—yes, he likes just about everything today. “Oh, could I! This is some treat! This is
really
Memory Lane!” “It's awfully hot, Dad,” I warn him. “It's nearly ninety degrees. Maybe if we slow down—” “Slow
down?”
he cries, and showing off, pulls Claire along on his arm as he breaks into a crazy little trot down the street. Mr. Barbatnik smiles, and mopping his brow with his handkerchief, says to me, “He's been hoping a long time.”

“Labor Day weekend!” my father announces brightly as I swing into the lot next to the service entrance of the “main building.” Aside from the parking lot, which has been resurfaced, and the tumescent pink the buildings have all been painted, little else seems to have been changed as yet, except of course for the hotel's name. In charge now are a worried fellow only a little older than myself and his youngish, charmless second wife. I met them briefly on the afternoon in June when I came down with Claire to conduct my own nostalgic tour. But there is no nostalgia for the good old days in these two, no more than those clutching at the debris in a swollen stream are able to feel for the golden age of the birch-bark canoe. When my father, having sized up the situation, asks how come no full house for the holiday—a phenomenon utterly unknown to him, as he quickly makes only too clear—the wife goes more bulldoggish even than before, and the husband, a hefty boyish type with pale eyes and pocked skin and a dazed, friendly expression—a nice, well-meaning fellow whose creditors, however, are probably not that impressed by plans extending into the twenty-first century—explains that they have not as yet been able to fix an “image” in the public mind. “You see,” he says uncertainly, “right now we're still modernizing the kitchen—”

The wife interrupts to set the record straight: young people are put off because they think it is a hotel for the older generation (for which, it would seem from her tone, my father is to blame), and the family crowd is frightened away because the fellow to whom my father sold out—and who couldn't pay his bills by August of his first and only summer as proprietor—was nothing but a “two-bit Hugh Hefner” who tried to build a clientele out of “riffraff, and worse.”

“Number one,” says my father before I can grab an arm and steer him away, “the biggest mistake was to change the name, to take thirty years of good will and wipe it right off the map. Paint outside whatever color you want, though what was wrong with a nice clean white I don't understand—but if that's your taste, that's your taste. But the point is, does Niagara Falls change its name? Not if they want the tourist trade they don't,” The wife has to laugh in his face, or so she says: “I have to laugh in your face.” “You what?
Why?
” my outraged father replies. “Because you can't call a hotel the Hungarian Royale in this day and age and expect the line to form on the right, you know.” “No, no,” says the husband, trying to soften her words, and meanwhile working two Maalox tablets out of their silver wrapping, “the problem is, Janet, we are caught between life-styles, and that is what we have to iron out. I'm sure, as soon as we finish up with the kitchen—” “My friend, forget about the kitchen,” says my father, turning noticeably away from the wife and toward someone with whom a human being can at least have a decent conversation; “do yourself a favor and change back the name. That is half of what you paid for. Why do you want to use in the name a word like ‘ski' anyway? Stay open all winter if you think there's something in it—but why use a word that can only scare away the kind of people who make a place like this a going proposition?” The wife: “I have news for you. Nobody wants today to take a vacation in a place that sounds like a mausoleum.” Period. “Oh,” says my father, revving up his sarcasm, “oh, the past dies these days, does it?” And launches into a solemn, disjointed philosophical monologue about the integral relationship of past, present, and future, as though a man who has survived to sixty-six
must
know whereof he speaks, is
obliged
to be sagacious with those who follow after—especially when they seem to look upon him as the begetter of their woes.

I wait to intercede, or call an ambulance. From seeing his life's work mismanaged so by this deadbeat husband and his dour little wife, will my overwrought father burst into tears, or keel over, a corpse? The one—once again—seems no less possible to me than the other.

Why am I convinced that during the course of this weekend he is going to die, that by Monday I will be a parentless son?

He is still going strong—still going a little crazy—when we climb into the car to head home. “How did I know he was going to turn out to be a hippie?” “Who's that?” I ask. “That guy who bought us out after we lost Mother. You think I would have sold to a hippie, out of my own free will? The man was a fifty-year-old man. So what if he had long hair? What am I, a hard-hat, that I hold something like that against him? And what the hell did she mean by ‘riffraff' anyway? She didn't mean what I think she meant, did she? Or did she?” I say, “She only meant that they are going under fast and it hurts. Look, she is obviously a sour little pain in the ass, but failing is still failing.” “Yeah, but why blame
me?
I gave these people the last of the golden geese, I gave them a good solid tradition and a loyal clientele that all they had to do was stick to what was
there.
That was
all,
Davey! ‘Ski!' That's all my customers have to hear, and they run like hell. Ah, some people, they can start a hotel in the Sahara and make a go of it, and others can start in the best of circumstances and they lose everything.” “That's true,” I say. “Now I look back in wonder that I myself could ever accomplish so much. A nobody like me, from nowhere! I started out, Claire, I was a short-order cook. My hair was black then, like his, and thick too, if you can believe it—”

Beside him Mr. Barbatnik's sleeping head is twisted to one side, as though he has been garrotted. Claire, however—amiable, tolerant, generous, and willing Claire—continues to smile and to nod yes-yes-yes as she follows the story of our inn and how it flourished under the loving care of this industrious, gracious, shrewd, slave-driving, and dynamic nobody. Is there a man alive, I wonder, who has led a more exemplary life? Is there an ounce of anything that he has withheld in the performance of his duties? Of what then does he believe himself to be so culpable? My derelictions, my sins? Oh, if only he would cut the summation short, the jury would announce “Innocent as a babe!” without even retiring from the courtroom.

Only he can't. Into the early evening his plea streams forth unabated. First he follows Claire around the kitchen while she prepares the salad and the dessert. When she retires to shower and to change for dinner—and to rally her forces—he comes out to where I am preparing to cook the steak on the grill behind the house. “Hey, did I tell you who I got an invitation to his daughter's wedding? You won't guess in a million years. I had to go over to Hempstead to get her blender fixed for your aunt—you know, the jar there, the top—and who do you think owns the appliance store that services now for Waring? You'll never guess, if you even remember him.” But I do. It is my conjurer. “Herbie Bratasky,” I say. “That's right! Did I tell you already?” “No.” “But that's who it was—and can you believe it, that skinny
paskudnyak
grew up into a person and he is doing terrific. He's got Waring, he's got G.E., and now, he tells me, he is getting himself in with some Japanese company, bigger even than Sony, to be the sole Long Island distributor. And the daughter is a little doll. He showed me her picture—and then out of the blue two days ago I get this beautiful invitation in the mail. I meant to bring it, damn it, but I guess I forgot because I was already packed.” Already packed two days ago. “I'll send it,” he says; “you'll get a real kick out of it. Look, I was thinking, it's just a thought, but how would you and Claire like to come with me—to the wedding? That would be some surprise for Herbie.” “Well, let's think about it. What does Herbie look like these days? What is he now, in his forties?” “Oh, he's gotta be forty-five, forty-six, easy. But still a dynamo—and as sharp and good-looking as he was when he was a kid. He ain't got a pound on him, and still with all his hair—in fact, so much, I thought maybe it was a rug. Maybe it was, come to think of it. And still with that tan. What do you think of that? Must use a lamp. And, Davey, he's got a little boy, just like him, who plays
drums!
I told him about you, of course, and he says he already knew. He read about when you gave your speech at the school; he saw it in the
Newsday
calendar of what's happening around the area. He said he told all his customers. So how do you like that? Herbie Bratasky. How did you know?” “I took a guess.” “Well, you were right. You're psychic, kiddo. Whew, that's some beautiful piece of meat. What are you paying up here by the pound? Years ago, a sirloin cut like that—” And I want to enfold him in my arms, bring his unstoppable mouth to my chest, and say, “It's okay, you're here for good, you never have to leave.” But in fact we all must depart in something less than a hundred hours. And—until death do us part—the tremendous closeness and the tremendous distance between my father and myself will have to continue in the same perplexing proportions as have existed all our lives.