Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

AMONG THE WITNESSES

The hotel breakfast bell had not awakened him. The hotel social director had. The man had a gift. Wherever he went buzzers buzzed, bells rang, whistles blew. He’s a fire drill, Preminger thought.

Preminger focused his eyes on the silver whistle dangling from the neck of the man leaning over him, a gleaming, tooting symbol of authority, suspended from a well-made, did-it-himself, plastic lanyard. “Camp Cuyhoga?” he asked.

“What’s that?” the man said.

“Did you go to Camp Cuyhoga? Your lanyard looks like Cuyhoga ’41. Purple and green against a field of white plastic.”

“Come on, boy, wake up a minute,” the man said.

“I’m awake.”

“Well,” he began, “you probably think it’s funny, the social director coming into the room of a guest like this.”

“We’re all Americans,” Preminger muttered.

“But the fact is,” he went on, “I wanted to talk to you about something. Now first of all I want you to understand that Bieberman doesn’t know I’m here. He didn’t put me up to it. As a matter of fact he’d probably fire me if he knew what I was going to say, but, well, Jesus, Richard, this is a family hotel, if you know what I mean.” Preminger heard him say “well, Jesus, Richard,” like a T-shirted YMCA professional conscious and sparing of his oaths. “That thing yesterday, to be frank, a thing like that could murder a small hotel like this. In a big place, some place like Grossinger’s, it wouldn’t mean a thing. It would be swallowed up in a minute, am I right? Now you might say this is none of my business, but Bieberman has been good to me and I don’t want to see him get hurt. He took me off club dates in Jersey to bring me up here. I mean, I ain’t knocking my trade but let’s face it, a guy could get old and never get no higher in the show business than the Hudson Theater. He caught me once and liked my material, said if I came up with him maybe I could work up some of the better stuff into a musical, like. He’s been true to his word. Free rein. Carte blanche. Absolutely blanche, Richard. Well, you know yourself, you’ve heard some of the patter songs. It’s good stuff, am I telling a lie? You don’t expect to hear that kind of stuff in the mountains. Sure, it’s dirty, but it’s clever, am I right? That crazy Estelle can’t sing, she’s got no class, we both know that, but the material’s there, right? It’s there.”

People were always recruiting him, he thought. “So?” he asked carefully.

“Well,” the social director said, embarrassed, “I’ll get out of here and let you get dressed. But I just wanted to say, you know, how I feel about this guy, and warn you that there might be some talk. Mrs. Frankel and that crowd. If you hear anything, squash it, you know? Explain to them.” He turned and went toward the door.

Preminger started to ask, “Explain what?” but it was too late. The social director had already gone out. He could hear him in the hall knocking at the room next to his own. He heard a rustling and a moment later someone padding toward the door. He listened to the clumsy rattle of knobs and hinges, the inward sigh of wood as the door swung open, and the introductory murmurs of the social director, hesitant, explanatory, apologetic. Trying to make out the words, he heard the social director’s voice shift, take on a loud assurance, and finally settle into the cheap conspiracy that was his lingua franca. “Between us,” he would be saying now, winking slyly, perhaps even touching his listener’s chest with his finger.

Preminger leaned back against his pillow, forgetting the social director. In a few minutes he heard the long loud ring of the second breakfast bell. It was Bieberman’s final warning, and there was in it again the urgency of a fire alarm. He had once told Norma that if the hotel were to catch fire and they sounded that alarm, the guests would go by conditioned response into the dining hall. Well, he would not be with them at any rate. Richard Preminger, he thought, hotel hold-out. They moved and played and ate in a ferocious togetherness, eying with suspicion and real fear those who stood back, who apologized and excused themselves. They even went to town to the movies in groups of a dozen. He had seen them stuff themselves into each other’s station wagons, and in the theater had looked on as they passed candy bars, bags of peanuts, sticks of gum to each other down the wide row of seats. With Norma he had watched them afterward in the ice cream parlor, like guests of honor at a wedding banquet, at the tables they had made the waiter push together. If they could have worked it out they would have all made love in the same big bed, sighing between climaxes, “Isn’t this nice? Everybody, isn’t this nice?”

He decided, enjoying the small extravagance, to ignore the bell’s warning and forfeit breakfast. He was conscious of a familiar feeling, one he had had for several mornings now, and he was a little afraid of dissipating it. It was a feeling of deep, real pleasure, like waking up and not having to go to the bathroom. At first he had regarded it suspiciously, like some suddenly recurring symptom from an old illness. But then he was able to place it. It was a sensation from childhood; it was the way boys woke, instantly, completely, aware of some new fact in their lives. He was — it reduced to this — excited.

Now he began his morning inventory of himself. It was his way of keeping up with his geography. He first tried to locate the source of his new feeling, but except for the obvious fact that he was no longer in the army and had had returned to him what others would have called his freedom, he didn’t really understand it. But he knew that it was not simply a matter of freedom, or at any rate of that kind of freedom. It was certainly not his prospects. He had none. But thinking this, he began to see a possible reason for his contentment. His plans for himself were vague, but he was young and healthy. (At the hotel old men offered, only half jokingly, to trade places with him.) He had only to let something happen to himself, to let something turn up. Uncommitted, he could simply drift until he came upon his fate as a lucky victim of a shipwreck might come upon a vagrant spar. It was like being once again on one of those trips he used to take to strange cities. He had never admired nature. He would bear a mountain range if there was a city on the other side, water if it became a port. In cities he would march out into the older sections, into slums, factory districts, past railroad yards, into bleak neighborhoods where the poor stared forlornly out of windows. He would enter their dingy hallways and study their names on their mailboxes. Once, as he wandered at dusk through a skid row, meeting the eyes of bums who gazed listlessly at him from doorways, he had felt a hand grab his arm. He turned and saw an old man, a bum, who stared at him with dangerous eyes. “Give me money,” the man wheezed from a broken throat. He hesitated and saw the man’s fist grope slowly, threateningly, toward him. He thought he would be hit but he stood, motionless, waiting to see what the man would do. Inches from his face, the hand opened, turned, became a palm. “Money,” the old man said. “God bless you, sir. Help a poor old man. Help me. Help me.” He remembered looking into the palm. It was soft, incredibly flabby — the hand, weirdly, of a rich man. The bum began to sob some story of a wasted life, of chances missed, things lost, mistakes made. He listened, spellbound, looking steadily into the palm, which remained throughout just inches from his body. Finally it shook, reached still closer to him, and at last, closing on itself, dropped helplessly to the old man’s side. Preminger was fascinated.

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 girl: “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.

Now he stood back from the window. Several of the people from yesterday were there again. My God, he thought, they’re acting it out.

He recognized Mrs. Frankel among them. She was wearing her city clothes and looked hot and uncomfortable standing beside Bieberman’s empty pool. She seemed to be arguing ferociously, in her excitement unconscious of the big purse that followed weirdly the angry arcs of her arms. The sun caught the faces of some stones on her heavy bracelet and threw glints of light into Preminger’s eyes as she pointed in the direction of the pool. He did not know what she was saying, but he could imagine it easily enough. He had heard her bullying before. She was like a spokesman for some political party forever in opposition.

In a moment he noticed something else. Beyond the excited crowd gathered about Mrs. Frankel, he saw Bieberman, who stood, hanging back, his head cocked to one side, his expression one of troubled concentration. He looked like a defendant forced to listen in a foreign court to witnesses whose language he can not understand. Beside him was the social director, scowling like an impatient advocate.

He turned and began again to dress.

When he approached the main building the others had finished their breakfasts and were already in the positions that would carry them through until lunch. On the long shaded porch in front of Bieberman’s main building people sat in heavy wicker rockers playing cards. They talked low in wet thick voices. Occasionally the quiet murmur was broken by someone’s strident bidding. Preminger could feel already the syrupy thickness of the long summer day. He climbed the steps and was about to go inside to get some coffee when he saw Mrs. Frankel. She was talking to a woman who listened gravely. He tried to slip by without having to speak to her, but she had already seen him. She looked into his eyes and would not turn away. He nodded. She allowed her head to sway forward once slowly as though she and Preminger were conspirators in some grand mystery. “Good morning, Mrs. Frankel,” he said.

She greeted him solemnly. “It won’t be long now, will it, Mr. Preminger?

“What won’t?”

She waved her hand about her, taking in all of Bieberman’s in a vague gesture of accusation. “Didn’t they tell you I was leaving?” she asked slowly.

He was amazed at the woman’s egotism. “Vacation over, Mrs. Frankel?” he asked, smiling.

“Some vacation,” she said. “Do you think I’d stay with that murderer another day? I should say not! Listen, I could say plenty. You don’t have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to see what’s happening. Some vacation. Who needs it? Don’t you think when my son heard, he didn’t say, ‘Mama, I’ll be up to get you whenever you want?’ The man’s a fine lawyer, he could make plenty of trouble if he wanted.”

For a moment as the woman spoke he felt the shadow of a familiar panic. He recognized the gestures, the voice that would take him into the conspiracy, that insisted he was never out of it. Mrs. Frankel could go to hell, he thought. He’d better not say that; it would be a gesture of his own. He would not go through life using his hands.

Mrs. Frankel still spoke in the same outraged tones Preminger did not quite trust. “The nerve,” she said. “Well, believe me, he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”

Bieberman suddenly appeared at the window behind Mrs. Frankel’s chair. His huge head seemed to fill the whole window. His face was angry but when he spoke his voice was soft. “Please, Mrs. Frankel. Please,” he said placatingly. Preminger continued toward the dining room.

Inside, the bus boys were still clearing the tables. He went up to one of the boys and asked for some coffee and sat down at one of the cleared tables. The boy nodded politely and went through the large brown swinging doors into the kitchen. He pushed the doors back forcefully and Preminger saw for a moment the interior of the bright kitchen. He looked hard at the old woman, Bieberman’s cook, sitting on a high stool, a cigarette in her mouth, shelling peas. The doors came quickly together, but in a second their momentum had swung them outward again and he caught another glimpse of her. She had turned her head to watch the bus boy. Quickly the doors came together again, like stiff theatrical curtains.

He turned and saw Norma across the dining hall. She was holding a cigarette and drinking coffee, watching him. He went over to her. “Good morning,” he said, sitting down. “A lot of excitement around here this morning.”

“Hello,” she said.

He leaned across to kiss her. She moved her head and he was able only to graze her cheek. In the instant of his fumbling movement he saw himself half out of his chair, leaning over the cluttered table, like a clumsy, bad-postured diver on a diving board. He sat back abruptly, surprised. He shrugged. He broke open a roll and pulled the dough from its center. “Mrs. Frankel’s leaving,” he said after a while.

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

“The Catskillian Minute Man,” he said, smiling.

“What’s so funny about Mrs. Frankel?”

Preminger looked at her. “Nothing,” he said. “You’re right. One of these days, after this Linda Goldstone affair had blown over, she would have gotten around to us.”

“She couldn’t say anything about us.”

“No,” he said. “I guess not.”

“ ‘Goldstone affair,’ ” she said. “The little girl is dead.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Affair,” she said. “Some affair.”

He looked at her carefully. Her face was without expression. What did she want from him — a statement?

“All right,” he said. “Okay. The Goldstone affair — excuse me, the Goldstone tragedy — was just the Goldstone drowning. Norma, it was an accident. Everyone around here carries on as though it has implications. Even you. I suppose the thing I feel worst about — well, the parents, of course — is Bieberman. He’s the only one who still has anything to lose. It could hurt him in the pocketbook and to a man like him that must be a mortal wound.”

Norma looked as if he had slapped her. It was a dodge, her shock; it was a dodge, he thought. Always, fragility makes its demands on bystanders. The dago peddler whose apples have been spilled, the rolled drunk, the beat-up queer, the new widow shrieking at an open window — their helplessness strident, their despair a prop. What did they want? They were like children rushing to their toys, the trucks, the tin armies, manipulating them, making sounds of battle in their throats, percussing danger and emergency.

He was in his bathing trunks. On his feet were the “low-quarters” he had been discharged in. He had not had time, so anxious was he to get away, to buy other shoes, not even the sneakers appropriate for afternoon climbs like this one on the high hill behind Bieberman’s.

He had lost interest in the hike. He turned his back on the sandy, rock-strewn path that continued on up the hill and into the woods he had promised himself to explore, and he looked down to see where he had come from. Below him was the resort. He had never seen the place from this vantage point, and its arrangement in the flat green valley struck him as comic. It looked rather like a giant fun house in an amusement park. He had the impression that if he were to return to his room he would find, bracketed in heavy yellow frames, mirrors that gave back distorted images. In the trick rooms, constructed to defy gravity, he would have to hang onto the furniture to keep from falling. He looked at the fantastic spires that swirled like scoops of custard in cups too small for them, and he pictured Bieberman climbing at sunset to the top of these minarets to bellow like a clownish muezzin to the wayward guests. He saw the beach umbrellas, bright as lollipops, on the hotel lawn. They were like flowers grown grossly out of proportion in a garden.

He grinned, shifting his gaze from the hotel grounds and letting it fall on his own body. It rested there a moment without any recognition and then, gradually conscious of himself, he stared, embarrassed, at his thighs, which exposure to the sun had failed to tan deeply. He traced his legs down past bony kneecaps and hairless shins and mocked in silence their abrupt disappearance into the formal shoes. Why, he was like someone come upon in the toilet. The fat thighs, the shiny pallor of the too-smooth legs, like the glaucous sheen on fruit, betrayed him. He seemed to himself clumsy and a little helpless, like old, fat women in camp chairs on the beach, their feet swollen in the men’s shoes they have to leave untied, the loose strings like the fingers they lace protectively across their busts.

Just what was he really doing at Bieberman’s, he wondered. He could write off his disappointment as an experience of travelers who, having left the airport in their hired cars, and spoken to clerks about reservations, and made arrangements for the delivery of bags, at last find themselves alone in strange cities, bored, depressed, sleepless in their rented beds, searching aimlessly for familiar names in the telephone directory. But what, finally, was he doing there at all? He thought of the other people who had come to the hotel and had to remind himself that they did not live there always, had not been hired by the hotel as a kind of folksy background, a monumental shill for his benefit. They were there, he supposed, for the access it gave them to the tennis court, the pool, the six-hole golf course, the floor show “nitely,” the card tables, the dining room, each other. And he, fat-thighed lover, abandon bent, was there to lay them. Fat chance, Fat Thigh, he thought.

He wondered whether to start up the path once more, and turned to estimate the distance he had yet to travel. He looked again below him. He saw the drained pool. A little water, like a stain on the smooth white tile, still remained at the bottom. Some reflected light flashed against his eyes and he turned, instinctively shielding them with one cupped palm.

“I didn’t think you’d see me,” someone said.

Preminger stepped back. He hadn’t seen anyone, but assumed that the boy who was now coming from within the trees that bordered the path had mistaken his gesture as a wave and had responded to it.

“If you’re trying to hide,” Preminger said, “you shouldn’t wear white duck trousers. Law of the jungle.” The bare-chested boy, whom he recognized as the lifeguard, came cautiously onto the path where Preminger stood. Preminger thought he seemed rather shamefaced, and looked into the green recess from which the boy had come, to see if perhaps one of the girls from the hotel was there.

“I wasn’t hiding,” the boy said defensively. “I come up here often when I’m not on duty. I’ve seen you down there.”

“I’ve seen you too. You’re the lifeguard.” The boy looked down. They were standing in a circle of sunlight that seemed, in the woodsy arena, to ring them like contenders for a title of little note. He noticed uncomfortably that the boy was looking at his shoes. Preminger shuffled self-consciously. The boy looked up and Preminger saw that his eyes were red.

“Have they been talking about me?” the boy asked.

“Has who been talking about you?”

The boy nodded in the direction of the hotel.

“No,” he said. “Why?” He asked without meaning to.

“Mr. Bieberman said I shouldn’t hang around today. I didn’t know anywhere to come until I remembered this place. I was going all the way to the top when I heard you. I thought Mr. Bieberman might have sent you up to look for me.”

Preminger shook his head.

The boy seemed disappointed. “Look,” he said suddenly, “I want to come down. I’m not used to this. How long do they expect me to stay up here?” For all the petulance, there was real urgency in his voice. He added this to the boy’s abjectness, to his guilt at being found, and to the terror he could not keep to himself. It wasn’t fair to let the boy continue to reveal himself in the mistaken belief that everything had already been found out about him. He didn’t want to hear more, but already the boy was talking again. “I’m not used to this,” he said. “I told Mr. Bieberman at the beginning of the summer about my age. He knew I was sixteen. That’s why I only get two hundred. It was okay then.”

“Two hundred?”

The boy stopped talking and looked him over carefully. He might have been evaluating their relative strengths. As though he had discovered Preminger’s weakness and was determined to seize upon it for his own advantage, he looked down at Preminger’s knees. Preminger felt his gaze keenly.

“Does anyone else know?” Preminger asked abruptly.

“Mrs. Frankel, I think,” he said, still not looking up.

Preminger shifted his position, moving slightly to one side. “She’ll be going home today,” he said. “I saw her this morning. She didn’t say anything.” He did not enjoy the cryptic turn in the conversation. It reminded him vaguely of the comical communication between gangsters in not very good films. A man leans against a building. Someone walks past. The man nods to a loitering confederate. The confederate lowers his eyes and moves on.

He made up his mind to continue the walk. “Look,” he said to the boy, “I’m going to go on up the path.” Having said this, he immediately began to move down toward Bieberman’s. He realized his mistake but felt the boy staring at him. He wondered if he should make some feint with his body, perhaps appear to have come down a few steps to get a better look at some nonexistent activity below them and then turn to continue back up the path. The hell with it, he thought wearily. He could hear the boy following him.

Some pebbles that the boy dislodged struck Preminger’s ankles. He watched them roll down the hill. The boy caught up with him. “I’m going down too,” he said, as though Preminger had made a decision for both of them. The path narrowed and Preminger took advantage of the fact to move ahead of the boy. He moved down quickly, concentrating on the steep angle of the descent. Just behind him the boy continued to chatter. “He needed someone for the season. It was the Fourth of July and he didn’t have anyone. I got a cousin who works in the kitchen. He told me. Mr. Bieberman knew about my age. I told him myself. He said, ‘What’s age got to do with it? Nobody drowns.’ I had to practice the holds in my room.” The path widened and the boy came abreast of him. He timed his pace to match Preminger’s and they came to the bottom of the hill together.

He began to jog ahead of the boy but, soon tiring, he stopped and resumed walking. Though the boy had not run after him, Preminger knew he was not far behind and that he was still following him. He went deliberately toward one of the tables on Bieberman’s lawn, thinking that when he reached it he would turn to the boy and ask him to bring him a drink. He did not notice until too late that it was Mrs. Frankel’s table he was heading for. The wide, high-domed beach umbrella that stood over it had hidden her from him. He saw that the only way to take himself out of her range was to veer sharply, but remembering the boy behind him and the mistake he had made on the hill, he decided that he could not risk another dopey movement. What if the kid turned with him, he thought. They would wind up alone together on the golf course. He would never get away from him. He considered between Frankel and the kid and chose Frankel because she didn’t need advice.

Mrs. Frankel, in her hot, thick city clothing, looked to him like a woman whose picture has just been taken for the Sunday supplements. (“Mrs. Frankel, seated here beneath a two-hundred-pound mushroom she raised herself, has announced…”) But when he came closer he saw that she would not do for the supplements at all. Her legs, thrown out in front of her, gave her the appearance of an incredibly weary shopper whose trip downtown has failed. Her expression was disconsolate and brooding. It was an unusual attitude for Mrs. Frankel and he stood beside her for a moment. She stared straight ahead toward the useless pool.

“It’s funny,” she said, turning to him. “A little girl.” He had never heard her talk so softly. “Did you see her? Like she was just some piece of cardboard that had been painted like a child. It’s too terrible,” she said. “To happen here? In the mountains? Just playing like that? All right, so a child is sick, it’s awful, but a little child gets sick and sometimes there’s nothing you can do and the child dies.” He was not sure she was talking to him. “But here, in the mountains where you come for fun, for it to happen here? It’s awful — terrible. A thing like that.” She looked directly at Preminger but he could not be certain that she saw him. “Did you see the mother? Did you see the fright in the woman’s eyes? Like, ‘No, it couldn’t be.’ I was there. The child wanted an ice cream and the mother told her that her lips were blue, she should come out. She looked around for a second, for a second, and when she turned around again…” Mrs. Frankel shrugged. “How long could she have been under — five seconds, ten? Is the pool an ocean, they had to search for her? No, it’s more important the lifeguard should be talking to his girl friends so when he hears the screaming he should look up and holler ‘What? What? Where? Where?’ Who’s to blame?” she asked him. “God? We’re not savages. Let’s fix the blame a little close to home.”

He shifted under her direct stare. She had recovered her stentorian coloratura and for this he was grateful. She was running true to form again and her elegy or whatever it had been was only a kind of interlude, as though the woman caught her breath not by ceasing to talk but by lowering her voice. However, her question still hung in the air. He didn’t want to answer it but that didn’t seem to make any difference to these people. At least, then, he could give his testimony on the side he believed in.

“All right, Mrs. Frankel,” he said. “What is it? All morning you’ve been hinting at some dark secret. Is it that the lifeguard wasn’t old enough?” His voice sounded louder than he had intended. He heard it as though he were listening to a recording he could not remember having made. “Is that what’s bothering you? Is that the little secret you’re determined to let everyone in on? Well, relax, it’s no secret. Everybody knows about it. It’s too bad, but even if the kid had been eighteen instead of sixteen the little girl would still have drowned.”

“The lifeguard was only sixteen?” the woman asked. It was impossible that she didn’t know. She must have guessed, must have suspected it. That had to be the reason for her outrage.

“The lifeguard was only sixteen?” she repeated. It was too much; he couldn’t be the one she learned it from. “Only sixteen?” she insisted.

“I don’t know how old he is,” he said, reneging. “That’s not the point. It was an accident. What difference does it make how old he is?” Only now was he conscious that the boy had not left them. He was standing about twenty feet away, listening. Preminger remembered seeing Bieberman stand in the same attitude just that morning, his head bowed low under the weight of his embarrassment, buffered from his enemies by the social director. He was waiting for Preminger to go on with the defense.

Blithely, however, he changed the subject. For no apparent reason he began to tell Mrs. Frankel of the walk he had just taken, of his vague plans for the future. She listened politely and even nodded in agreement once or twice to things he said. He remained with her in this way for about ten minutes, but when he started to leave he caught for a moment Mrs. Frankel’s angry stare. “It’s better we should all get out,” she said.

He lay beside Norma beyond the closed-in tennis court. He watched the moon’s chalk-silver disintegrate and drift icily to the lawn. They had not spoken for a quarter of an hour. He did not know whether she was asleep. The ground was damp. He could feel, beneath the blanket, the evening’s distillation like a kind of skin. He raised himself on one elbow and looked at Norma’s face. Her eyes were closed and he lay back down again and watched the sky.

The lawn was deserted; the exodus of late that afternoon had ended; the last cars from the city had gone back. He thought of Bieberman, alone beside the pool, and could still see the old man’s awful face as he waved at the departing guests, pretending it was only the natural end of their vacation that took them back.

He pulled a blade of grass from beside the blanket.

“The slob,” he said.

Norma stirred, made a small sound.

Preminger only half heard her. “He stood in the driveway and waved at them. He shook their hands and said he’d save their rooms. He even told the bellboy where to put everything.” He tore the grass in half and threw one piece away. “The slob. I was ashamed for him.”

He rolled the grass between his fingers. Feeling its sticky juice, he threw it away in disgust. “Even the social director. Did you hear him? ‘I’m sorry, Bieberman, but I’ve got to have people. I’ve got to have people, right?’ And Bieberman told him, ‘You’re a fine actor. You give a professional performance.’ It made me sick. And Mrs. Frankel didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. He gave himself away.”

“The poor thing,” Norma said. Her voice was low and cool, not sleepy at all. He turned to her and smiled”

“Bieberman?”

“I meant the little girl,” she said. Her voice was flat. He studied her pale face and the skin, which looked cooler and softer than he remembered ever having seen it. She seemed smaller somehow, and, in a way he did not mind, older. It’s the moon, he thought.

He touched her cheek with his fingers. “You would have gone with them, wouldn’t you?” he asked softly. “You would have gone with them if I hadn’t asked you to stay.” She didn’t answer. She turned her head and his hand dropped to the blanket. “You’ve done that twice today,” he said.

“Have I?”

He looked at her body. She lay straight back, her arms at her sides. He rolled toward her quickly and his arm fell across her breast. She tried to move away from him, but he grabbed her arms and pinned them to her sides and kissed her on the mouth. In a few minutes, he thought, my vacation begins. A nice abandoned Jewish girl in a nice abandoned Jewish hotel. She shook her head ferociously. His face fell on top of hers and he forced it with his weight toward the blanket. He felt her body stiffen, her arms go rigid. Then her arms shook in a rage against him and he was helpless to hold them at her sides. She was very strong, and with a sudden convulsive movement she threw him off. She sprang up quickly and stood looking down at him. She seemed unsure of herself.

“Get away from me,” he said.

“Richard…”

“Get away from me.”

“Richard, I didn’t want to go back.”

“Get away.”

“All right,” she said quietly. She turned and started away.

“There she goes,” he called after her. “Don’t touch her, she’s in mourning.” His anger rose in him. “Hey, come back, I’ve got an idea. We’ll have a lynching. We’ll string the kid up to the diving board and hang Bieberman from a beach umbrella.”

She was moving from him quickly, back to the hotel. He got up and ran after her. He put out his hand to stop her but she eluded him and he saw himself stumble forward, his empty hand reaching toward her. He recovered his balance and walked along a little behind her, talking to her. He felt like a peddler haggling, but he couldn’t help himself. “The drowning loused things up, didn’t it? It killed a stranger, but nobody around here knows from strangers.” She broke into a run. From the way she ran he could tell she was crying. He ran after her, hearing her sobbing. “Let’s blame someone. The lifeguard. Bieberman. Me. You want to know what to blame? Blame cramps and lousy Australian crawl.” As he approached the hotel Preminger halted. Norma walked into the hotel and Preminger slumped on the steps. He clapped his palms together nervously in raged applause. That kid, that lousy kid, he thought. He thought of his tantrum as of a disease which recurs despite its cure.

When the world had quieted again he knew that he was not alone. He realized that he had been aware of someone on the porch when he turned from Norma and let her go inside. He looked around and saw in the shadows about twenty feet away the silhouette of a man propped against the side of the porch. In the dark he could not make out his face.

“Bieberman?”

The man came toward him from the dark recesses of the porch. He walked slowly, perhaps uncertainly, and when he passed in front of the hotel entrance he was caught in the light slanting down from the interior like a gangplank secured to the building.

“Ah, Preminger.” The voice was deep and mocking.

“Mr. Bieberman,” he said softly.

The man stayed within the light. Preminger rose and joined him there nervously. “It’s about time for bed,” he said. “I was just going up.”

“Sure,” Bieberman said. “So this will be your last night with us, hah, Preminger?”

Preminger looked at him, feeling himself, as they stood together within the close quarters of the light, somehow under attack. “I hadn’t planned for it to be.”

“Planned?” The old man laughed. “The girl will be going in the morning. What will there be to keep you? The food?” He laughed again. “You’ll leave tomorrow. But I thank you for staying the extra day. It will make me a rich man, and I can go myself to a hotel.” He noticed the bottle in Bieberman’s hand. The old man followed his glance and looked up, smiling broadly. “Schnapps,” he said, holding up the bottle. “A little schnapps. I’ve been sitting here on my porch and I’m on a deck chair on the Queen Mary, which in honor of my first voyage over is keeping a kosher kitchen. The only thing wrong is that once in a while someone falls overboard and it upsets me. If we weren’t three days out, I would call my wife she should swim up from the city and we would go back.’

Preminger smiled and Bieberman offered him the bottle. He took it and, unconsciously wiping off the neck, began to drink.

“I guess I will be going,” he said.

“I guess you will.”

“I shouldn’t be here,” Preminger said. “It was supposed to be a lark. I didn’t come slumming, don’t think that. But it didn’t work out. I guess I just wanted to fool around.”

“Yeah,” Bieberman said. “I know you guys. You’ve got a suitcase filled with contraceptives. Fooey.”

“I just wanted to fool around,” Preminger repeated.

“Nobody fools. Never,” Bieberman said.

“You said it,” Preminger said.

Bieberman went back into the dark wing of the porch. Preminger followed him. “I don’t want you to think I’m leaving for the same reason as the others. I don’t blame you.” The old man didn’t answer. “I really don’t,” he said.

Preminger almost lost him in the shadows. “A boy who likes to fool around doesn’t blame me,” the old man said.

Preminger paused. “Well,” he said lamely, “good night.” He went toward the door.

“Preminger, tell me, you’re an educated person,” Bieberman said suddenly. “Do you really think they could sue me?”

He turned back to Bieberman. “I don’t see how,” he said.

“But the lifeguard — the boy. If I knew he was a boy? If I knew he was sixteen? If they could prove that, couldn’t they sue?”

“How could they find that out?” Preminger said uncomfortably.

“Well, I wouldn’t tell them. I wouldn’t run an ad in the Times, but if they knew it, could they sue me?”

“I suppose they could try, I don’t know. I’m no lawyer. I don’t see how they could find you responsible.”

“My guests did.”

“They’ll forget.”

“Ah,” the old man said.

“Next year your place will be full again.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” he said sadly.

“Wait a minute, it wasn’t your fault.”

“It made them sick,” Bieberman said so softly Preminger thought he was talking to himself. “All they could do was get away. Some of the women couldn’t even look at me. Sure, that’s why the Catskills and Miami Beach and Las Vegas and all those places are so important. That’s why a man named Bieberman can have his name written across a hotel, and on towels.” Preminger couldn’t follow him. “I mean, what the hell,” he said, suddenly talking to Preminger again. “Does Spinoza get his name written on towels?”

“Why don’t you come inside?” Preminger said, offering him his arm.

“When a little girl drowns in such a place where nobody must drown, where you pay good money just to keep everybody on top of the water, it’s a terrible thing. I understand that. You’re not safe anywhere,” Bieberman said. “Not anywhere. You go to a football game and all of a sudden the man on the loudspeaker calls for a doctor it’s an emergency. Not during a holiday, you think. You think so? You think not during a holiday? You think so? In a forest even, by yourself, one day you notice how the deer are diseased or how the rivers are dried up — something.”

“Come on inside, Mr. Bieberman,” he said.

“Preminger, listen to me. Do me a favor, yeah? Tomorrow when you get back to the city, maybe you could call up those people and tell them what the lifeguard told you. You’re the only one who knew about it.”

The old man lighted a cigarette. He could see the glowing tip pulsating softly as Bieberman spoke. He tried to see his face but it was too dark.

“You’re crazy,” Preminger said finally.

“I’m responsible,” he said sadly. “I just don’t have the nerve.”

“Well, I’m not responsible,” Preminger said.

“You are, Preminger.”

Preminger got up quickly. He walked across the darkened wing of the porch and came abruptly into the slanting yellow light. Bieberman called him and he turned around. “Preminger,” he said. “I mean it, tell them you heard me brag once how I saved a couple hundred bucks.” Preminger shook his head and started carefully down the steps, afraid he would stumble in the dark. “Preminger, I mean it,” Bieberman called.

He took the rest of the steps quickly, forgetting the danger. He discovered, surprised, he was going toward the empty pool. So many times now, after he had already made them, he had discovered the pointlessness of his gestures, his un-willed movements. Ah, I am abandoned, he thought, surrendering. He turned around. A light was on in Norma’s room. He could still hear Bieberman calling his name. He stood among the beach umbrellas on the wide dark lawn and listened to the old man’s desperate voice. “Preminger, Preminger.” It was as if he were hiding and the old man had been sent out to look for him. “Preminger, I mean it.”

All right, he thought, all right, damn it, all right. He would wait until the morning and then he would go to Norma’s room and apologize and they would go back to the city together and he might investigate some jobs and they might continue to see each other and, after a while, perhaps, he might ask her to marry him.