New Moon (48 page)

The day before I left for Grossinger’s I received Miss Carver’s special-delivery packet with section-by-section instructions for turning my book into a publishable novel. This was the real deal! And I had a whole summer with my sunnier family to carry it out. The first time I would get to live at Grossinger’s I could begin my career as a novelist too!

My father dashed that scheme in about thirty seconds. “You’re living in my home, you work for me.” As far back as my mother’s attempts to valorize prep school, he had made it clear that he looked down on intellectual pursuits. I had assumed the prestige of Viking would transcend his objections and he would recognize me as an aspiring writer—but that was pure naïveté.

“You can’t just study,” he averred. “You’ve got to prepare for life.”

“But writing
is
a job. It isn’t school.”

“It’s too competitive a field. You’ll never make it. You need a real career.”

I had waited all my life for him, and now … who was he? Expecting me to begin hotel training at once, he had made up his mind to place me in the bureaucracy at his own first job: assistant dead-letter clerk. Debate was pointless; he was presenting a
fait accompli.

Michael and James were at camp and Jerry was upstate with his family for the summer, so the house was nearly empty. I inherited Jerry’s small room on the third floor next door to Emma, a large elderly black woman from Carolina. She had worked for Aunt Bunny’s parents for three decades and had come out of retirement to help prepare meals and cocktail parties for our family. She called hotel maids to do any serious cleaning and spent much of each day in her room watching TV—she never missed a Mets game.

Major-league baseball had receded from me that spring in the trials of college. Now I didn’t care about the Yankees anymore, didn’t identify with the self that had rooted for them, but I lay
on the floor of Emma’s room many an evening and afternoon, watching the early Mets with their procession of ne’er-do-well hopefuls—Elio Chacon running the bases like a crazy man, Jimmy Piersall traversing them backwards as a spoof on baseball, Bob Miller pitching his heart out and the bullpen blowing the lead, Marv Throneberry summoning a droplet of his minor-league power as a Yankee farmhand while missing second and third like a locomotive without a conductor, Jim Hickman evincing the clout and speed of Mickey Mantle, then evanescing back into strikeouts. Sitting up in the bed in her nightgown, almost bald without her wig, Emma moaned, hooted, clapped, and did her knitting. It was as good ballgame company as I had ever had. Plus the shifting roster of Metropolitan troops reminded me of my old armory game: Duke Carmel, Cliff Cook, Galen Cisco, Ron Hunt, Cleon Jones. I was hooked, a Mets fan henceforth.

Assigned to train me, the elderly woman who ran the mailroom spelled out my dreary parameters the first morning. I was expected to sit at a desk for eight hours logging undeliverable letters in a ledger. Since the Hotel was a transient establishment, there were dozens of these items daily: for guests who had long ago left; staff who had been fired or quit, or never came; one-night-stand entertainers; even celebrities who hadn’t been there for years or never been there.

It was soon clear that the only functional part of the job was re-addressing mail to those few who had actually left forwarding information. With an alphabetical list to consult and occasionally update, that part took an hour, sometimes two. My other six hours were spent going through grubby filing cabinets trying to match names on envelopes to anything at all in the crumpled chaos. In one week I didn’t find a single match; yet my supervisor thought it worthwhile to spend as much as half an hour trying to locate a staff member from ten years prior—to try to forward a card that said: “Greetings from Tennessee” (on both sides). Ultimately all this mail ended up in dead-letter boxes, the log books themselves piled in similar cartons, sealed, then stored in a dusty closet.

A fan rattled all day, and a janitor periodically passed through,
sweeping scraps off the floor, cigarettes from ashtrays into a metal container on a stick. This was Grossinger’s too, one of the enchanted tableaus I soldiered through in childhood. It registered quite differently now, to one trapped within. I struggled against intermittent surges of panic, scarier than the glimmers I felt during captivity in a burning room. My father had changed from hero and protector to warden—and there was no rescue squad in sight.

I itemized the organizational inefficiencies of the mailroom, expecting PG to see that the job was a waste of time, not just for me but anyone. He shook his head: “You’ll learn discipline. And it’s where I began.”

My next ploy was to have Catherine Carver write him a sanguine letter, but that didn’t move the needle either. “If she wants you to work for her, let her pay you.”

By the second week I was no longer under supervision, so I took to throwing more and more of the unforwardable items into the dead-letter box without checking the files. Finally, I stopped entering
any
letters into the ledger and tossed all of them. I finished the job in less than an hour and sneaked back to the house to write.

Aunt Bunny and Emma were my lookouts. If my father came home from work to watch television (as he did at some point almost every day), they alerted me and created a diversion so I could leave by the fire escape.

At Catherine Carver’s suggestion I worked only part-time on
Salty and Sandy,
while beginning a new, more traditional novel
The Moon.
My characters were based on people from Amherst and the teen tour, each chapter told from the viewpoint of a different person. Every fifth chapter (assigned to “The Moon”) was conceived as the mind-flow of a cosmic being.

Living at Grossinger’s was still the fulfillment of my fondest childhood dream. Although the experience wasn’t what I had imagined, it was bounteous enough and, other than my sentence to the mailroom, the landscape was as convivial and beatific as ever. During weekends I hauled my typewriter, two makeshift paperweights, and a stack of paper to the family cabana and worked on sections of my
books, taking occasional breaks to swim and socialize, sometimes with other authors working there. For several mornings I typed next to playwright Paddy Chayefsky at the adjacent cabana. At one point he looked over my shoulder and pointed out false lines in my dialogue.

Aunt Bunny and I had never had this much time together, so we chatted like magpies, an intimacy my father barely tolerated. Seeing the two of us together he snarled, “Richard, fix me a Coke on ice.” I stomped into the kitchen, prepared it, and set it beside him. Without a “thank you” he barked out his next order: “Go to the Hotel and pick up the evening papers and my crossword puzzle book.” There were countless such directives and ruses, more knee-jerk than premeditated. Males of his bent played Humphrey Bogart over Jimmy Stewart. He not only didn’t like conversation, he was a proud Philistine; he didn’t want any serious topic within fifty feet.

Meanwhile Aunt Bunny, like Grandma Jennie, assembled her own clan of friends, mostly male, from the bevy of journalists, movie directors, entrepreneurs, and scholars of indeterminate origin who frequented the Hotel—on the grounds as paying guests, paid lecturers, gratis celebrities, or honorary family. As these luminaries came and went all summer, I hung around with my stepmother’s clique, reading fortunes and engaging in repartees of politics and literature.

Then there was Jennie G. herself. While I was passing through one of her soirées early that July, I ran into Milton Blackstone. Long rumored to be my grandmother’s paramour, he had just addled the Grossinger’s universe by marrying an outsider from Florida in his mid-fifties and was now chaperoning two girls my age: his stepdaughter and her friend, a blonde beauty-pageant winner from Miami Beach named Helene. In presenting her to Jennie, Milton explained that she had ambitions to be a singer and had come to Grossinger’s to be discovered. He ratcheted his voice up a notch to remind all within earshot that he had discovered Eddie Fisher not far from this spot as a singing busboy.

After introductions, the two girls chatted with me and, when Milton and his family said their goodbyes, Helene and I were left standing together.

She wasn’t a type I was beguiled by, though she was a striking young woman—a pin-up moll, short and curvy with an artificially vivacious personality. In conducting conversation, I was more comfortable treating her as an honorary adult, unconnected to my own adolescence, a luminary like actress Kim Novak, who was dating the Grossinger’s ski instructor. I did, however, ask one unavoidable question. And, yes, of course she knew Betsy—she knew both Betsy and Bob; Bob was “a real close friend” of her own boyfriend Spike. We gabbed through dinner at the family table, where she recounted the series of unlikely events that had led her to the Hotel. Unfortunately, Milton was no longer in the talent business, and the best that he could manage was a job as the G.’s assistant teen hostess, performing occasional stints with the band.

Helene didn’t seem to notice that I was a pariah with girls, for after she got a room in staff quarters she called me daily and we began to see each other in the evenings. I was surprised by our exclusive companionship, but I rationalized: she was ambitious, I was Jennie’s grandson, and since she had a boyfriend back home I was a good foil to keep other men away.

Helene dressed flashily—bright lipstick; flashy, loudly colored blouses; high heels; too much perfume. She was quite sexy in her low-cut dresses, throwing rehearsed smiles, so why wasn’t I more captivated?

I hadn’t yet set definitive parameters for girlfriends, but I had consistent passions and predilections. I liked mysterious, shadowy, wittily coy or nuanced girls, even ghostlike wraiths, girls who seemed to have come from Oz or Atlantis. Helene wasn’t magical or bewitching; there was no enigma or subtlety to her, she was just another brassy Jewish girl, ambition and fame written all over her. She equated my writing with her singing and considered us two talented teenagers waiting for our big breaks. Up in my room she sat on the bed, I on the chair, and I read her safe passages from both books, after which she sang rock ’n’ roll ballads.

I stared at this amazing-looking creature on my bed belting out love songs a cappella and flashing the most fulsome looks, thinking how she would have played on fourth-floor James. A decade or two
down the road, she would have been Miss Thing.

Helene loved to review the precise parameters of our relationship: we were buddies, “platonic friends,” not romantic partners. All the while she encouraged me to have hope for Miss Sley; in fact, she told me one night that she was going to give me a present. She smiled coyly, then said, “Betsy and Bob are no longer going together.” I knew from Betsy that she was heading off to the University of Colorado in the fall. The news of her separation from Bob was a surprise, but I had no idea what to make of it.

That evening after dinner, as Helene and I were strolling to the Lake, she stopped and kissed me forcefully on the lips before I could even think. “Don’t you know what that is?” she said. “It’s a pedillo.”

I stared blankly.

A car wound around the crooked road and came toward us in the distance. “Only one headlight means—kiss your partner.”

It was my first kiss.

Grandma Jennie bought me a bike, so I raced along Hotel paths, back and forth between the mail room and home, the ballfield and rendezvous with Helene, as the summer found its merry pace and rhythm. I was happy again. I could finally savor my emancipation from the Towers household, for I was free of the teen tour and gauntlets of freshman year at Amherst too. Helene and I enacted our non-romance night after night: in the bar, at movies in town, sitting in chaises at the cabana by the deserted pool under stars, holding hands at the Lake. I played softball on the staff team, wrote new chapters of
The Moon
and, slipping into my father’s office at night, called Catherine Carver on his New York line.

“Exciting stuff,” she said in praise.

I remember the evening Helene came to cheer for me at a game against Brown’s Hotel. She was wearing an enormous panama hat with a pineapple on top of it and a dancer on top of the pineapple. Everyone stared, and some players whistled. Caught between secret pleasure and blushing, I dove for a grounder down the line, trapped it in the webbing, and threw from my knees with all my might to first. This
one
time (though always in my iterated fantasies) I got
the out.

People were talking about the play the next morning, and a few staff tried to convince PG to come to our next game. He said he would, but it didn’t happen. In his whole life he never once saw me in a game. We never threw a baseball back and forth either. We weren’t that kind of father and son.

Late in July I got my grades in the mail: A’s in English and humanities, which, combined with my complete failure of math and physics, pulled me barely up into the high D’s. The University of California wrote that my grade point average did not allow admission as a transfer student. Meanwhile, Amherst wasn’t giving up. A letter from Dean Esty indicated that I could enroll for sophomore year, as long as I made up the lost credits; I didn’t have to repeat the math and physics courses. I resigned myself—even looked forward to—returning.

Aunt Bunny went to visit her parents in Atlantic City for a stretch of early August, and late one afternoon I came home to what appeared to be an empty house except for Emma watching the Mets upstairs. I was startled when my father shouted for me from the back porch, a place used mostly for storage. I opened the door to see his substantial bulk draped over a very young woman on the wicker couch. As she raised herself I noticed she was short, busty, and very made up. He had a broad guilty smile. “I just wanted you to know,” he remarked disingenuously, “where I was,”

Later that week he chose to pursue the topic. He asked if I had slept with Helene. His vicarious interest repelled me, and I said that she was just a friend.

“Let me tell you something, Richard; they’re always your girlfriend when they hang around you. It doesn’t matter why. Maybe she thinks you’ll get her a break in show business; maybe she thinks she’ll marry into this Hotel. You know you’re not going to marry her. So why not get some experience. Just don’t get her pregnant. And if you do, tell me, and I’ll pay for an abortion.” It was the whole father-son service in one brusque speech. I guess he thought it was his job and, from my growing up with my mother, long overdue.