Hotel Honolulu

24 The Seductress

"My father, when he lived," Benno Nevermann said, "suffered for having made a terrible error."

His father, Bruno, had been a prosperous Chicago businessman. He had a loving family and an uncomplicated life — one child, a lovely house, no debts. Recklessness was unknown to him, and (so Nevermann said) perhaps that was the problem: he seemed to hold himself in check. He did not drink or smoke. "Maybe he should have had a beer now and then. Maybe he should have smoked the occasional cigar." But the old man's background had been very strict. His mother, Nevermann's grandmother, a German immigrant, always with a Bible, talked Scripture with strangers on buses and readily asked about the condition of their souls. Nevermann's grandfather was less intrusive but similai a perpetual frown beneath his mustache.

Nevermann's father had not rebelled. He was a churchgoing man, but there was rigidity even in that: he went every Sunday without fail, yet never at any other time. He did not talk about religion, but his disapproval was like a bad smell whenever he saw something ungodly. His son came to understand his severity. After he had bought a television, Nevermann's father would leave the room if a woman appeared onscreen in a skimpy dress.

Though Bruno Nevermann did not drink alcohol, his firm supplied brewery equipment, a business his father — Benno's grandfather — had started by importing it from Germany. Later, it was manufactured locally, and he had expanded the business until he was considered wealthy, in a city where only the very wealthy were singled out. Bruno Nevermann could seem stern, but he was the kindest and most merciful of men: he hired people for their poverty — men for their bleak pasts, women for their plain features. Nevermann noticed that at his father's warehouses and factories each person seemed somewhat maimed — the woman with one eye or a hump, the man with a limp or a kinked hand or a terrible scar, the twitching messenger. This was the 1940s. Who else would have them? They were old and lame and they mumbled. Nevermann found the workers frightening and misshapen, especially when they clutched him and tried to be friendly or playful — holding him in their claws, fixing him with cloudy eyes. "This is your son!" they screeched to Nevermann's father. "Come over here!" Then the small boy felt all the breath go out of his body.

But one of the workers held Nevermann's attention for being attractive. She was younger than any of the others. Nevermann asked who she was. "Edith's daughter," the old man said. Edith had a foot that dragged and stiffened fingers on one hand. A stroke victim — the explanation meant nothing to Nevermann, but he was hardly listening, for the young girl was so fragrant as to be a distraction.

She was no more than eighteen. Nevermann was twelve and just able to understand that she was very pretty. He took an interest, went to

the warehouse and stared, but his father warned him off. And at last Nevermann's father threatened him and told him to stay away.

Only later did Nevermann realize how his father was tormented, how whenever Edith's daughter showed up, her pretense of seeming submissive tempted the man. She had a way of walking that was an invitation, suggesting herself as an offering, of moving her arms as if to say, Hold me. She found a way of turning her back to the old man and peering over her shoulder and smiling, of appearing to be timid and encouraging him to calm her fears. All this without speaking a single word.

Comfort me, she seemed to say, and was all the more effective for not saying it. She needed to be rescued. She was so innocent. The old man took her aside and warned her of the wickedness of the world. She said she was shocked, and she was, but the description also excited her. The lurid warnings excited the old man, too. At last, when she was trembling with fear at what he said, when she was in his protective embrace — she was so warm and damp — the old man found that his greatest consolation was his body across hers, and he found himself fumbling with her overalls.

After that he could not help himself anymore. He pitied her for being Edith's daughter, and he was sick with desire. Still married, well known in Chicago, and greatly respected, the old man persuaded Edith's daughter to become his lover. He was grateful to the girl for giving in, never suspecting that it had been her idea from the beginning. Her idea and Edith's too — Edith the badly injured woman whom the old man had admired for her struggle. She had hissed in her daughter's ear.

I remembered how Nevermann had once told me, "It's like that delightful evening you spend with your best friend and his wife in their cozy house, eating a home-cooked meal, and you think, Isn't it great to have a marriage like this! And then your friend, whom you took to be a wise old man, takes you aside and starts whispering about a girl he has fallen in love with."

He had been talking about his own father.

The old man's blurted confession made Nevermann's mother hysterical. The marriage ended messily, like a car crash, every passenger injured. Long afterward, Nevermann saw that the girl, Edith's daughter, had set out to seduce his father. His remarriage wrecked the family. Nevermann's mother got some money and promises from the man, but only a few years after the marriage, Edith's daughter said she wanted a divorce. She ended up getting the house and half the business, and she wrecked her half by spending the capital on herself, and that killed the whole of it. She so thoroughly got hold of the old man's money that he was destroyed, with pills and alcohol — he who had never had a drink! His suicide note was a love letter, to Edith's daughter.

Nevermann's mother was bereft, and her sobbing had scoured her of all emotion. She was skeletal, she trembled, she could hardly speak. No money remained of what was owed her. She was reduced to living in a rented room in Des Plains, with her schoolboy son, Benno, who worked in a supermarket most nights, and after high school got a job in a factory making garden furniture. Nevermann's aim was to give his mother some

years of comfort, to return her to the prosperity she had known. But she died miserably before Nevermann made his fortune.

The girl, Edith's daughter? She married again, and again it was as though she were stalking prey. The man was wealthy. She left him. The next was a dentist, Filipino Chinese, who had invested wisely, Harry Ma. They had a child, Chip. She divorced Mr. Ma but remained Madam Ma — our Madam Ma. I told Nevermann how that had ended, and now all the rest of it: how the harmlessseeming columnist, friend of my friend Buddy and a hotel resident, mother of a murderer, had seduced her own son, and her son's lover, and created havoc here, did not seem to be a broken woman, but only enigmatic and empty. Pretty soon Nevermann, his search at an end, checked out, and at last so did she.