Everybody's Fool

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WITH THE HOTEL SHUTTERED, the road through Sans Souci Park was blocked off, but a narrow, unpaved and rutted service road ran just inside the stone wall that bordered the property. A PRIVATE: NO TRESPASSING sign was nailed to a tree at the entrance. When Sully ignored it, Rub cocked his head and regarded him dubiously. “I see it,” Sully told him. There were times when he suspected the little fucker could read.

In response the dog sneezed violently.

“I don’t want to hear it. Just sit there and behave, or I’ll take you back and lock you in the trailer.”

Rub sneezed again, even louder, perhaps indicating that he considered this an empty threat, which it was.

The road wound through the tall pines for a good half mile before running into an empty small parking lot behind the hotel. Disappointed not to find the multicolored car he was looking for, Sully pulled in to the lot and parked anyway.

“Twenty minutes,” he told Rub, figuring that if he could read maybe he could tell time as well. “If you’re not back by the time I’m done, I’m leaving you here. Understand?”

Rub appeared to, because he commenced leaping with joy, his skull encountering the cab’s roof with a bang, which had to hurt, though apparently not enough to prevent further leaps with the same results.

“Stop, before you kill yourself,” Sully said, leaning across him to open the passenger door. “Twenty minutes!” he called as Rub disappeared around the corner of the hotel, with the whole of Sans Souci Park to race around in.

Alone now, he turned the engine off and let the past wash over him. Strange, when he thought about it. The park was no more than a hundred yards from Miss Beryl’s house, but it had been years since he’d been on the grounds. As a boy, at least for a time, there’d been no place he loved more.

After an earlier incarnation of the hotel closed, his father had been hired by the estate as its principal custodian and caretaker. It was his job to make sure that the weather wasn’t blowing in through some broken window, that burst pipes and other problems were promptly reported, the damage contained. The most valuable furniture and fixtures had been put in storage or sold off when the hotel closed, but there was still plenty of stuff worth stealing, and it was Big Jim’s job to provide a visible presence to discourage thieves and late-night partiers out in the woods, where they left their empty whiskey bottles behind. It was also his job, or so he told Sully and Patrick, his older brother, to run off local boys who, if they were allowed to, would scale the wrought-iron fence and chew up the elegant lawns with their football games. There was no part of his job that Big Jim took more seriously than putting the fear of God into those lawless little bastards.

Sully and his brother, on the other hand, were given the run of the property. Mostly that meant exploring the woods, pretending, as boys will, to get lost, though in reality this was impossible. The park’s many trails eventually wound through the trees and back to the hotel, and you couldn’t walk more than half a mile in any direction without encountering the stone wall or a perimeter fence that in turn would lead you to either the Schuyler entrance at one end or the Bath entrance at the other. In foul weather, though, if their father was in an expansive mood, he allowed them indoors and gave them more or less free rein to explore the hotel, so long as they didn’t break anything. In the ballroom, where the remnant furniture was gathered into one corner and draped with sheets, their favorite activity was to get a running start and slide in their socks across the burnished floor, until one day Patrick caught a nail that gashed his foot from toe to heel, earning him thirty-some stitches. The library sported a massive pool table with leather pockets, useless to them until one day they managed to pick the lock on a nearby closet containing several cue sticks, a rack, a bridge and a set of balls minus, for some reason, the eight. Because the floor had a slight slope, over time the table’s surface had gone several bubbles off of plumb, which Sully and his brother learned to accommodate and even enjoy. Hit your shots with just the right speed and touch, and you could actually bend your ball around another inconveniently in its path and let gravity pull it into the corner pocket. Because he learned to play on this table, Sully imagined that the incline was part of the game’s design, and years later, when he took it up again, he had to relearn the game completely. He never did love playing on a level surface nearly as much, minus the thrilling element of gravity.

So vast and wondrous a property would have been any boy’s dream, but for Sully and his brother it was also a refuge from their unhappy home on Bowdon Street, where their poor mother was a virtual prisoner, too ashamed to leave the house because she often sported a black eye or a fat, busted lip. Big Jim, who gave her these, was by contrast hail-fellow-well-met in all the neighborhood taverns, where, as unofficial lord of the Sans Souci, he held court and dispensed his not-terribly-secret largesse. Given his numerous and varied responsibilities, he considered himself poorly compensated, which in his view justified his lucrative sideline. Despite not offering many amenities — the water and electricity having been turned off in all but a handful of the rooms — he was still able to rent them out by the hour at very reasonable rates, more than doubling his custodial salary. Indeed, on occasion he was said to take women there himself.

People warned him, of course, that it was just a matter of time before his high jinks were discovered and he got fired, but Big Jim refused to listen. After all, the men he reported to lived in Albany and New York City. Having lived his entire life in Bath, he had a distorted sense of distance. The former, thirty-five minutes away by car since the completion of the Northway, seemed to him well out of range, and the latter might’ve been on the other side of the moon. How could men living so far away know what he was up to? They had their hands full dealing with the warring factions of the family that held a majority stake in the property and couldn’t agree on what to do with it. Better yet, when these same men visited the Sans Souci with a prospective buyer, they always announced their intention many days in advance so Big Jim could make sure everything was shipshape.

What eluded Sully’s father was that not much ever happened here that they didn’t hear about eventually. What protected him wasn’t so much their cluelessness as the fact that they themselves didn’t own the place. If he had a modest concession going on the side, what did they care? If he acted like a big shot around town, if he was a loudmouth and a braggart and a bore who exaggerated his own importance to the Sans Souci and sometimes treated the hotel as if he owned it, well, it was no skin off their asses. They were either lawyers or in the employ of lawyers, which meant their primary concern was liability. Yes, they wanted Big Jim to keep unauthorized people off the property, but mostly to prevent the possibility of a lawsuit if they got injured. Did they know he was a drunk? Sure. Did they mind? Not particularly. Caretakers of large estates generally ran to alcoholism.

They did, however, mind that he was a smoker, especially since he’d assured them he wasn’t in his job interview. A century earlier the original Sans Souci had burned to the ground, and while the current owners could agree on little else, they were absolutely determined that their hotel should not burn down until they decided to do it themselves and collect the insurance. Discovering cigarette scorch marks on the furniture, the owners’ representatives repeatedly reminded him that smoking was a firing offense, and each time Big Jim promised to quit, claiming he’d been meaning to anyway and this was the very incentive he needed. And, yeah, sometimes he’d actually try to quit for a week or two. By the time they visited again, though, he’d have relapsed. The pack of Camels would be visible through his thin shirt pocket, and a full ashtray that he’d forgotten to hide would be sitting there in the library, and there were fresh burn marks on the oak bar where he liked to entertain women before leading them off to a room with a bed. Then, yet again, they’d read him the riot act and say this was positively his last warning, that next time he’d be replaced. Plenty of men in Schuyler County were looking for work.

Why did they give him so many final chances? Well, groveling before men in suits was one of Big Jim’s few real skills. And of course these men were anxious to return to Albany and New York City, so he never had to grovel for long. Though they threatened to check up on him more regularly, he knew they hated visiting the Sans Souci and wouldn’t unless they were forced to. True, this abasement left a bad taste in his mouth, and Sully and his brother knew to steer clear after he’d been dressed down, but the humiliation lasted for only a week or two, after which their father’s sense of well-being and self-worth always returned, along with his boastful arrogance. “Where the hell do they think they’re gonna find somebody who doesn’t smoke?” he would ask rhetorically. “For the kind of money they pay?”

Like so many men who resent the authority of others, Big Jim hated for his own to be questioned. Sully and Patrick certainly knew better. The same, however, could not be said of the local boys who ignored the KEEP OUT signs posted at regular intervals along the perimeter fence, signs that ironically provided an additional foothold when they climbed over. Though they were the least of his problems, their father managed to convince himself otherwise, telling anyone who’d listen that if these little assholes were allowed to run rampant, playing football and tearing up the pristine lawns, he’d lose his job. He seemed not to understand that the sport they enjoyed even more than football was goofing on Big Jim Sullivan. Quick and nimble where he was slow, lumbering and — depending on the time of day — inebriated, they taunted him relentlessly into giving chase. When he did, they scattered like roaches to every point on the compass, forcing him to decide which of the bastards to pursue, not that it mattered. There wasn’t a sick wildebeest in this particular herd, nor was Big Jim the lion of his imagination. The boys particularly enjoyed letting him get close. One would pretend to fall or twist an ankle, only to leap away like a gazelle at the last second, scamper over the fence, drop down just out of arm’s reach on the other side and blow Big Jim a rich wet strawberry for his efforts. For them, their pursuer was nothing short of a marvel. How effortlessly their antics brought him to a full boiling rage. What was wrong with the guy? How could he fall for the same tricks every day, seemingly incapable of learning from experience, no matter how recent or vivid? They loved, as only thirteen-year-old boys could, his inept malignancy, perhaps glimpsing in this the greater adult world they were about to enter, where rules were made and enforced by fools of every stripe. Seen in this light, wasn’t mocking Big Jim Sullivan a moral imperative? With the wrought-iron fence between them and him, it must’ve seemed to be.

Still, how could such fine sport not end badly? How entirely predictable was it that eventually a boy would lose his grip while scaling the fence? And so, one day, it did. An iron spike atop the fence entered a boy’s throat just below his chin and exited his stunned, open mouth. Two of his pals claimed it wasn’t really an accident, that he never would’ve slipped if this large, powerful man hadn’t given the fence a great shake. Big Jim denied this, claiming the wrought-iron fence was too sturdy and heavy to budge at all. Whatever the truth, the boy hung there like a hooked fish, his arms flailing frantically at first, then dangling, useless and limp, at his sides. The fire department was summoned, and the boy, deep in shock, was finally lifted free of the spike, after several horrible failed attempts. Astonishingly, he survived.

But the incident was the last straw, and it cost Big Jim his job, making his prediction of what would get him fired seem prescient. To hear him tell it, he lost his job for doing it, and what the hell kind of justice was that? As if in all other respects he’d been a model employee. Nor in the weeks and months that followed was he ever able to understand why the incident occasioned such an outpouring of moral outrage from the community. Given how viciously people turned on him, you’d have thought he’d done something wrong. Now that he was unable to treat them to a room at the Sans Souci, his former friends, ingrates all, behaved as if he were some sort of monster. Clearly, they’d been jealous of his status all along and loved reveling in his misfortune. It was enough to give a man grave doubts about the entire human race.

Losing his employment at the Sans Souci sparked Big Jim’s final long descent into the bottle. A social drunk before, he became a deeply solitary one afterward — silent, morose, self-pitying, aggrieved. His wife bore the brunt of his moods, as she always had, though Sully absorbed his own share of verbal and physical abuse. “Don’t talk back,” his mother pleaded on the few occasions he stood up for her. “It just makes him worse.” Sully couldn’t see where this was true at all. Cowering and weakness were as likely to provoke and intensify his father’s rages as confrontation. Patrick was a case in point. For reasons Sully could never fathom, he often took their father’s side, despite faring no better than his brother. He was two years older, though, which meant he got to escape the house on Bowdon Street that much sooner. At the time Sully thought his brother a coward for abandoning their mother, but he did the same thing himself when his turn came.

In a sense he’d left home even earlier. As a high-school junior he tried out for football, and Clive Peoples, Miss Beryl’s husband and North Bath’s coach, impressed by his recklessness, took him under his wing. He and his wife, who’d been his eighth-grade English teacher, opened their home to him, and by senior year he was spending more time in their Upper Main Street home than he did on Bowdon Street. Sully tried his best to earn his keep and repay their many kindnesses, shoveling their sidewalks and driveway in the winter, mowing their lawn in the summer and, in autumn, raking the mountain of leaves that fell from the ancient elms that lined their street, duties that otherwise might have fallen to their son, Clive Jr., a soft boy four years younger than Sully who seemed happy enough for him to assume the role of older sibling. Less work for him, in effect. Sully was not only clever with tools but also unafraid of starting jobs he wasn’t sure he knew how to finish, and the elder Clive was delighted by how handy he was becoming. It was Miss Beryl who understood his motivation. Any task that kept Sully away from Bowdon Street was worth undertaking. He’d enlisted right after graduation, telling neither of his parents until it was time for him to report. Though his mother might’ve seen it coming, she didn’t have a clue.

“You’re leaving?” she repeated, stunned by his announcement, as he stood there in the kitchen, his duffel bag slung over his shoulder. The look on her face was the same one she always wore in the instant before one of his father’s ringing head slaps.

“You’re staying?” he replied heartlessly.

She glanced nervously into the front room, where his father sat with the drapes drawn, as usual, the television on but the sound turned down. Sully couldn’t remember the last time they’d spoken but was certain the old man, despite his typically feigned disinterest, was listening. “Why would I leave?”

What she was really asking, of course, was: Where would I go? How would I live? Who would pay? Having no answers to these questions, he told her what she already knew. “He treats you like a dog. Worse.”

Again, she glanced fearfully into the front room. “He just has a bad temper, is all.”

“No, he’s mean and stupid and a coward. And that’s before he starts drinking.” Thinking, Come out here, old man. Come out here and take your medicine if you don’t like what I’m saying. Ready to set down the duffel bag and go at it right there in the kitchen, if necessary.

“Deep down,” she said, “he loves us.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

She lowered her voice. Pleading. “If I leave, he won’t have anybody.”

“He doesn’t deserve anybody.”

She took his hand, then. “You don’t have to be hard,” she said, “just because the world is.”

No? he thought. Because he’d come to the exact opposite conclusion. America would soon be at war, and he would be in it. Hard would be what was called for, he knew that much. Which was why he’d kissed her goodbye that morning but left without so much as glancing into the front room, already the kind of hard his mother hoped he wouldn’t become.

It wasn’t, unfortunately, the kind that would have allowed him to slip out of town without saying goodbye to Miss Beryl. He thought about it, though. Unlike her husband, she hadn’t been enthusiastic when she learned Sully had enlisted. When he asked her why, whether she thought the coming war was wrong, she’d replied that all wars were, to one degree or another, but it wasn’t that, not really. And while she feared he might be killed, this wasn’t it, either. What truly frightened her, she explained, was the violence he would be doing to himself. He wasn’t just placing himself at risk; he was putting his self at risk, the same self that Thoreau thought was worth defending and protecting, the self whose primacy Emerson had argued for. (They’d read “Civil Disobedience” and “Self-Reliance” in her eighth-grade class.) The young, she claimed, were always being asked to risk who they really were, deep down, before they’d even had the opportunity to become acquainted. In her view it was wrong to ask them to gamble something they didn’t even know they possessed, much less what it might be worth. “Also,” she added, “I fear you may have enlisted for the wrong reasons.”

“Why do you think I did?” he asked, curious as to how well she understood him.

“I suspect”—she sighed—“because you’re young and you didn’t know what else to do.”

Though he was young, he hadn’t liked being reminded of it, and he enjoyed even less that this tiny, bent woman who’d been so kind to him should also be so wise and, not just wise, but wise to him as well. Somehow she always managed to outflank him, which gave him little choice but to retreat into youthful bravado he didn’t really feel. “I just think,” he told her, “that somebody needs to hand Adolf his hat.” In response, she’d given him that kind, knowing smile of hers, the one that said she understood him perfectly, as always.

All that had been the week before he left. Now, when he arrived at their house, Coach Peoples was sitting on the porch reading the newspaper. Setting down his duffel, Sully climbed the porch steps and they shook hands.

“So you’re off, then,” the coach said, prolonging the handshake.

“Yes, sir.” Sully nodded.

“Off to hand Adolf his hat.”

Which made Sully smile. Miss Beryl had repeated what he’d said to her, and not unkindly, he felt certain.

“She’s inside, Sully,” Clive Sr. told him, giving him a look that said all too clearly that he understood how difficult — okay, impossible — this goodbye was going to be, that women in general and this one in particular wanted not just everything you had but also, and especially, what you didn’t have and never would. And in return they’d offer what you didn’t want or had no use for or, even worse, was good for you. Which was precisely what Miss Beryl did when she looked up and saw him standing there in the kitchen doorway. “Might I entice you with a cup of tea?” she said, as if young men his age had a long, storied history of being so enticed.

“I hate tea,” he told her for the umpteenth time, but then, not wanting to hurt her feelings on this special occasion, he relented. “Okay, maybe just this once.”

It did seem to cheer her, that and the fact that he took a seat at the kitchen table. “Cream and sugar?”

“Will that make it taste like beer?”

“Donald,” she said, setting the steaming cup down in front of him. “How I hate to see you go.”

“I know. You said.”

“I’m sorry. I had no business trying to talk you out of your decision. I’d forgotten how stubborn you are.”

No point arguing that, so he didn’t. He took a sip of tea, made a face and pushed the cup away. “Good God.”

But she was serious now. “You must tell me. How did you leave things at home?”

He looked around the kitchen. “This is more my home than that place,” he said.

“Oh, your poor mother,” she said.

“I would never say that to her,” Sully assured her.

“I know, Donald, but if you think it, she feels it. Don’t you know that?”

“How can I not feel what I do feel?”

“You have a point there.”

He smiled. “I do?”

“You do,” she said. “You often do. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it. Dare I ask how you parted with your father?”

“With him in one room and me in another.”

She gave him a puzzled look. “Do you understand forgiveness?”

“The concept, I guess.”

“I mean how it works.”

“Somebody’s an asshole and you tell him it’s okay?”

“That’s a willful misrepresentation.”

“As in untrue?”

“As in half true.”

“Well, at least I got half. Why are you smiling like that?”

“Because I’m going to miss your company,” she said.

“I’ll miss yours, too,” he told her. “And Coach’s.”

“But mine a bit more.”

He turned to look over his shoulder, to make sure the man was still out on the porch and not standing behind him, awaiting his answer. “I guess,” he said, surprised to realize it was true and a little ashamed for what felt like a betrayal of a man who’d treated him more like a son than his own father ever had.

“We don’t forgive people because they deserve it,” she said. “We forgive them because we deserve it.”

“I guess that’s something I don’t understand.”

She shrugged. “Guess what? I don’t, either. It’s true, though.”

“Maybe I’ll feel more forgiving when I get back.”

“You do know that there’s such a thing as being too late?”

He did, but with a young man’s comprehension, confident but incomplete. “You’re smiling again,” he told her.

She pointed at his cup. “You drank your tea.”

It was true. He didn’t remember doing so, nothing beyond that first awful taste, but the cup was empty, and in his chest there was now a warm glow.

“One day you’ll know yourself,” she predicted. “Your self, I mean to say.”

“You think so?”

“Yes,” she said, gathering their cups. “I do.”

She was releasing him, he realized with a shock, to the looming war. Was it her affection, he wondered, that made him feel afraid for the first time? That made him want to stay here in her warm kitchen? He couldn’t, of course, and they both knew it. The die had been cast, and he himself had rolled it.

Word of his father’s death came when he was in England during the final days of preparation before Normandy. News of his mother’s didn’t reach him until Paris. When he returned stateside, what seemed like a hundred years later, he’d visited their side-by-side graves. Just the once, though. Because standing there in Hilldale he’d felt nothing, which meant, he supposed, that Miss Beryl had been right; there was indeed such a thing as being too late. Normandy, the hedgerows, the Hürtgen Forest, the camps and finally Berlin…they all added up to this: too late. Had he found himself in war, as young men were often thought to do? Perhaps. He’d acquitted himself well in battle, proven competent in the face of fear. But had he also lost something he wasn’t sure he possessed to begin with? Had his self, the one Miss Beryl was worried about, been harmed? He remembered the look on her face when she first saw him again, an expression comprising relief and the old affection, but also a recognition that the boy who’d gone away to war both was and wasn’t the man who returned from it.

—

IT WAS MOST LIKELY a waste of time, and Sully, suddenly feeling unequal to the task he’d set for himself, thought about just letting it go. If Roy Purdy was here at the Sans Souci, the half-purple, half-yellow beater most likely would be in the lot. Still, it was possible he’d just had the Cora woman drop him off, so Sully took the tire iron just in case. The hotel’s delivery door was locked tight, and there was no sign of forced entry, so he methodically surveyed the perimeter, checking doors at various entry points and looking for broken windows. It took him close to half an hour, and by the time he returned to the lot, exhausted, another vehicle was there, a late-model Lincoln Town Car. Its owner was a large, soft-looking man who appeared to be in his early to midsixties. He wore reflecting sunglasses and a dark, carefully trimmed beard, probably to disguise his weak chin. Bald on top, he’d let his hair grow long on the back and sides and gathered it in a ponytail. He was bending down to scratch Rub’s ears, causing the dog to emit tiny, euphoric blasts of urine.

He straightened up when he saw Sully approaching with a tire iron and looked relieved when he tossed it into the truck. “Cute little mutt,” he said. “Shame about his…”

“Dick?”

“Yeah. How’d it get like that?”

“He chews on it.”

“You can’t make him stop?”

“I haven’t tried,” Sully said, opening the driver’s door. “It’s his dick.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Let’s go, Dummy,” Sully said, stepping aside so Rub could scrabble up onto the seat.

“I’m thinking about buying this place,” the man said, taking off his dark glasses.

It was on the tip of Sully’s tongue to say, Bully for you, but he held it.

“Well, not for myself,” the man added, as if Sully had challenged his statement. Without the glasses he looked vaguely familiar. “I represent a developer.”

“Right,” Sully said, getting into the truck to signal his complete disinterest in whatever the hell this guy was doing there.

“Time-shares,” he continued, apparently oblivious. “You’re familiar with the concept?”

“Not really,” Sully said, turning the key in the ignition. The man’s disappointment made him look even more familiar. “Do I know you?”

Was that a smile? The man’s beard shifted, so maybe. Or was it a grimace?

“You might’ve seen me in town. I’ve been around a couple days, talking to people. Getting the lay of the land, so to speak. You live around here?”

Sully nodded.

“You like it?”

He shifted into reverse, determined to make his getaway. “Never really thought about it,” he said. “It’s home, is all.”

“Home,” the man repeated, as if Sully had said something profound. “Right.”

Sully backed up, did a three-point turn and returned to the service road, where he glimpsed the man in his rearview. Shifting into reverse, he backed into the lot. The man strolled over and said, “Hi, Sully.”

He extended his hand through the open window. “Hello, Clive.”