Your happy vacation hideaway, tucked away in the heart of the
majestic Shawanganunks. Golf! Tennis! Riding! Swimming (Two
Pools)! Moonlight dancing! That grand Goudeket Cuisine (Dietary
Laws Observed)! Under personal direction of Mrs. S. Goudeket.
However, you would have had trouble smoothing it out, because it was
soaked; it had been thrown in the middle of both of Goudeket's Green
Acres by a dissatisfied customer, raging at the malicious trick Mrs.
Goudeket had played on her by causing it to rain for three consecutive
days.
Mrs. Goudeket, wearing a set smile that was ghastly even in the
candlelight, moved among her guests. She was arch and gay with some
of them, apologetic and sympathetic with others, as circumstances
indicated; but in her heart she was torn between rage and fear. Now
it rains! For two months not a drop, so the grass is dying and the
dug well for the swimming pools goes dry, and the guests complain,
complain, complain, it's hotter than Avenue A, Mrs. Goudeket, and
couldn't you air-condition a little, Mrs. Goudeket, and frankly, Mrs.
Goudeket, what I wouldn't give to be back in our apartment on Eastern
Parkway right now, we always get a breeze from the ocean. And now it
comes down pouring, almost all of last week, and now it starts again
so hard the lights go out and the phone goes out, and there's a hundred
and sixty-five guests looking for something to do.
She told herself pridefully: Thank God Mr. Goudeket didn't have to put
up with this.
Not that he could have handled it; he would have retreated to his
room with a stack of Zionist journals, written letters to friends in
Palestine, wistful letters saying that maybe next year they'd have
enough for a winter cruise--
There had never been enough for a winter cruise; Mrs. Goudeket had
efficiently seen to that. First things first. A new roof before a
winter cruise to visit Palestine, new pine paneling in the recreation
room, things you could lay your hand on. And Goudeket's Green Acres
grew. Because of _her_.
But she had been kind and reasonable. She had let him send a hundred
dollars a year for planting orange groves. She had never argued when he
talked about retiring some day and going to Palestine--he always called
it that, even after it was Israel--to _live_. She could have argued;
she could have told him plenty. That this is America, that here you
don't retire and doze in the sun, here you drive hard and get big.
* * * * *
Dave Wax came half-trotting through the dim rooms looking for her.
He started to call to her, changed his mind and came close before he
half-whispered. "It's the telephone, Mrs. Goudeket. It's working again!"
"Ah!" she exclaimed. "Why are you keeping it a secret? It's good news,
let's tell everybody--they can use a little good news. You see--"
She turned to the nearest couple--"they've fixed the telephone lines
already. I bet they'll have the electricity on in ten minutes, you wait
and see. Did you call up, Dave?"
"Call who, Mrs. Goudeket?"
"The electric company, Dave!" He shook his head. "Go call them! No,
wait--better I'll call them myself." Let him talk to the guests a
while, she told herself grimly. Perhaps when the lights were on again
and things were back in their normal swing she would want to talk to
her guests again. Or perhaps, she thought, hurrying across the dark and
deserted entrance lobby, she would go up in her room and lock the door
and pull the covers over her head, as she wanted to about once an hour
from May through September of every year since Mr. Goudeket died.
The phone was working all right, but it wasn't working well. Mrs.
Goudeket got the Hebertown operator and asked for the number of the
power company's repair service, but there was so long a wait after
that, filled with scratchings and squeals on the wire, that she began
to think something had gone wrong. She pulled out the jack and tried
again on another line.
All it took was waiting, it turned out. While she waited Mrs. Goudeket
had plenty of time to think of the meaning of the long wait to get
connected with the repair service. Not that that was any surprise,
actually, because she had been through storms before in the majestic
Shawanganunks; but always before it had been maybe a quick, violent
thunderstorm coming up after a hot spell, and it was a lark for the
guests because it was a change, or maybe a violent autumn storm when
only a handful remained. But here were a hundred and sixty-five who had
been penned in the hotel for days already and....
"Hello, hello?" She tried to hear the scratchy voice at the other end.
"Can you hear me? This is Mrs. S. Goudeket, from Goudeket's Green
Acres."
The scratchy voice was trying to say something, but she couldn't hear;
evidently, though, they could hear her so she went right on: "Our
electricity is off. Can you hear me? Our electricity has been off
for two hours. They fixed the phone lines, why can't you people fix
the power lines?" More scratchy sounds. Mrs. Goudeket listened to
them--first casually, out of politeness, then very, very hard. Then
there was a click.
Mrs. Goudeket looked thoughtfully at the switchboard for a moment.
This is new, she thought. Her mind was cold and alert; she knew she
could not afford rage. The electric company here is not a good company,
not like the wonderful Consolidated Edison in New York City. Here they
overcharge you--by mistake, they say--and here the meter readers are
underpaid and insolent, even with good customers like me. Their repair
men are unshaven and lazy and when they finally get to you they stretch
out a job forever so they don't have to hurry on to the next. But this
is new, this hanging up. I'm no fool, not after thirty years in the
resort business; I know their phone girls are under orders to kid the
customers along, promise anything, _not to hang up_.
Something must be happening, something bad.
She walked slowly into the lobby, with a mechanical smile for each
sullenly accusing guest. At the cigar stand she told little Mr. Semmel:
"A pack of cigarettes. Any kind."
He raised his eyebrows and passed one over. As she clumsily tore open
the pack, extracted one and lit it he began to grumble: "Some hotel.
Some light-and-power company. By now I should be getting the overnight
lines for Monmouth, Hialeah and Sportsman's, by now I should have
booked two hundred dollars on tomorrow. Believe me, Mrs. Goudeket, this
is my last year at Green Acres. This kind of thing doesn't happen up at
New Hampshire Notch; I don't pay good money for the concession so this
kind of thing happens."
A fattish, red-faced man bulged up to the counter, breathing whiskey
at them. That's a Young Married, Mrs. Goudeket thought with distaste;
that's what I have to take at this place because I can't get enough
nice young people. "Sammy," the red-faced man complained hoarsely,
"isn't the damn ticker working yet? I've got fifty bucks I have to
play. You're busting my system to hell."
Mr. Semmel said politely: "I'll see, Mr. Babin." He opened the plywood
door behind the stand, looked into the little room where the teletype
horse ticker stood, and closed the door again. "I'm sorry, Mr. Babin,"
he said, with a look at Mrs. Goudeket. "I think the wire's okay, but
you got to have power to run the machine and there isn't any power. If
it comes on later maybe I can phone Chicago for a repeat--if there's
time before midnight."
"Nuts," Babin said, and headed through the candlelit gloom for the bar.
"You see?" Mr. Semmel hissed, in a hate-filled whisper. "You see what
you're costing me? Never again, Mrs. Goudeket!"
She wandered off, preoccupied. Semmel was a nobody, a clerk hired by
the big brokers, in spite of his pretensions. But if the brokers, in
their cold and analytical way, did decide at the end of the season
that Goudeket's Green Acres didn't handle enough to make the operation
worth their while, next year nobody would come around and bid for the
horse-book concession. And it was the concession that pushed the resort
over the line between red and black ink.
You had to make money and you had to grow. Mr. Goudeket had never
understood that. Orange trees were all very well, but since 1926 she
had been the driver, the doer, the builder. And Mr. Goudeket had never
got to Palestine after all, which showed that dreaming got you nowhere.
She felt a guilty twinge. One year they could have made the cruise.
One year there had been nothing urgent, which is a miraculous year
in the resort business. She had put the money aside as a reserve and
said nothing about it, and poor Mr. Goudeket couldn't understand a
financial statement. The guests loved him, his Zionist connections had
been valuable, though he never suspected it, and he had been a fine
all-around handyman since the days in the Brighton Beach boarding
house; he had saved them thousands of dollars with his clever hands and
brought in thousands of dollars with his connections. But grow? He had
never understood. And so he never got to see Palestine? What of it,
anyway? And again Mrs. Goudeket felt the guilty twinge.
She peered into the bar; it was doing a good business by candlelight.
Her Young Marrieds--she grimaced--were getting drunk early. Dave Wax
was on a barstool with an on-the-rocks glass in front of him; he was
telling one of his stories.
"Dave," she said softly, "when you've finished your drink why don't you
give a little show for the people outside?"
The comedian theatrically gulped from his glass and told his barmates
loudly: "I love this dear lady. Just like my mother, she is. Just like
my mother--always hollering, '_Get to work, ya bum!_'"
He pranced out, grinning, on the tide of half-drunk laughter. She
watched him from the bar for a minute; he went looping through the room
loudly announcing a one-man show by that star of stage, screen, TV and
radio, Dave Wax, also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs, call
Murray Hill 3-41798805427--it went trailing on and on and on as he led
them to circle him around the piano. He pounded out the introductory
chords of his "Nervous in the Service" routine, which was very funny
and not too dirty; from there she hoped he'd go into a community sing;
that would calm the people down.
She went to the switchboard again and snapped the toggle for the
outside line. Try the electric company, get some kind of a real promise
out of them, maybe bully her way through to the Load Dispatcher, a
really responsible person, not like their phone girls.
"Hello," she said. "Operator, hello?" The line wasn't stone-cold dead,
but it wasn't buzzing with the reassuring familiarity of the dial
tone. A delusive droning kept encouraging her to try; mechanically
she switched off and on again, asked for the operator, tried dialing
various service numbers. As she went through the motions she thought
abstractedly that something had to work; the horse-book concession
was absolutely vital. She'd always known she should have an auxiliary
generator, paid for God knows how, so the teletype could be kept
going--but what good was a teletype with power and no line in? It was
dawning on her that the place was cut off from the outside world, that
the wires were down and would stay down for hours.
Radios? The radio must be saying something. There was a little station
in Hebertown that played nothing but records and news a couple of times
a day from the _Weekly Times_ office. Junk like who's in the hospital,
the borough council meeting, "want ads of the air," traffic things.
_They'd_ know what this rain was doing, they'd have an estimate from
the power and phone companies of the damage to the lines and when
they'd be back in service.
The radio would tell her everything she needed to know; then a calm
announcement to the guests and everybody would go to bed cheerfully,
rather enjoying the excitement....
But little Mrs. Fiedler came up and she had her portable radio in her
hand, weighing her down like a suitcase; it wasn't one of those little
pocket jobs but a substantial long-range outfit. Little Mrs. Fiedler
made something of a nuisance of herself when she played it beside the
swimming pool--highbrow music from New York City stations.
"Could you get me an outside line, Mrs. Goudeket?" she said. "I want to
call my mother in New York so she won't worry."
"Worry? About somebody at Goudeket's Green Acres?" the old woman
kidded. "She should have such worries. But I'm sorry, the phone's out
again. I don't know for how long. But why should she worry?"
"There was a news broadcast from New York, there's a flood up in
Richardstown. Of course that's a hundred miles away, but to my mother,
the mountains are the mountains."
"Ah. Richardstown. Mrs. Fiedler, did you try the local station? Let's
go into my office and see what they have to say."
But even the big, powerful portable failed to pick up the local
station. Mrs. Goudeket refused to think of what _that_ might mean.
Alone again, she realized that she'd have to send somebody out into
that terrible rain, send them to town, the _Times_ office or any other
phone they could reach. She had to know what was coming next. Send who?
Not the bartender; he was the most valuable man on the premises right
now. Dave Wax was next, and the kitchen help couldn't be spared. Dick
McCue, the "golf pro"--nineteen years old, doubling in trumpet--where
was _he_? He should be in the social hall backing up Dave Wax, keeping
the people busy, keeping their minds off--whatever it was. Where _was_
he?
And then she thought, distastefully, of exactly whom she'd have to
send. Sharon Froman, she called herself, and in the wild week before
opening she had let Sharon Froman foist herself on Green Acres as a
"publicity director"--just room, board, ten a week for the season. At
first Sharon Froman had actually worked; she had written good stories
that actually appeared, not cut too badly, in the issues of the New
York _Post_ which also carried Green Acres advertisements; maybe she
had even got them a couple of guests. That lasted for about ten days,
and then Sharon Froman had slowly withdrawn from any hotel activity
except eating; when you passed her room at any time of the day or night
you were as likely as not to hear the muffled thudding of a noiseless
portable. When Mrs. Goudeket barged in or met her in the dining room
and asked how the publicity stories were coming, Sharon Froman would
smile vaguely, teasingly, and say something that didn't, after you
stopped to think of it, make sense. "I think I've got a very dynamic
program lined up, Mrs. Goudeket, and I'm polishing the rough spots."
Black-haired, square-jawed, near-sighted, in her early thirties, a
persuasive talker--Mrs. Goudeket was the living proof of that--groomed
either to perfection or not at all, maybe five feet six, easily twenty
pounds overweight. Sharon Froman. The perfect expendable to go out and
learn the score. Mrs. Goudeket started grimly up the steps. You better
be feeling good and dynamic, Miss Sharon Froman, she thought, nerving
herself for a battle. I got some real rough spots for you to polish now.
* * * * *
In the bat's nest that that sneaking old hag Goudeket called a room,
Miss Sharon Froman was lovingly recopying chapter one of Her Novel.
Her only light was a candle socketed in the sticky neck of an empty
Southern Comfort bottle, and the flame flickered and turned blue
regularly as the wind swept through the closed windows. What a shack,
thought Miss Sharon Froman, not in anger but in judgment.
But it had its compensations. She could see the jacket copy for the
novel now: "_Spraddled Evening_ is an odd book, written at odd times
in odd places. Begun in a shabby trailer outside a Mississippi Army
camp--" She grimaced, remembering how perfectly foul Ritchie had been
when she'd had story conferences with Don while Ritchie was restricted
to the post--"it was shaped and polished by turns in the club car of a
transcontinental train, a cold-water flat in the East Bronx, a luxury
resort hotel and a Jersey fishing village, reaching its evocative
climax while Miss Froman was--" Well, that you would have to wait and
see, thought Miss Froman, taking page 2 out of the typewriter. But the
end was almost in sight. The first chapter set the tone for the whole
book; and now that that was nearly perfect it was only a dash to the
finish line.
She lit a cigarette from the candle before she put page three into
the typewriter. Page three was the one that would do Hesch in the
eye. He'd be sure to recognize the savagely drawn, feudal-minded pants
presser if he read it--and he'd be goddam sure to read it, if he had to
hock the watch she'd given him to get the price. Sixty bucks that watch
had cost out of her share of his Christmas bonus, and it was the only
decent thing he owned. "So why doesn't he sell it," she demanded of the
wind, "if he's so broke he can't keep up the alimony?"
She knew as soon as she heard the knock on the door that it was Mrs.
Goudeket. The chapter went into the bulging file under the bed; the
half-page beginning on the story about Dick McCue went into the
typewriter, using the paper bail so Old Bat-Ears wouldn't hear the
ratchet clicking. "Come in, please," she called, with just the proper
annoyance at being interrupted.
She glanced coldly at her employer.
Mrs. Goudeket sat down without waiting to be asked; those stairs were
getting steeper every day. "Sharon, honey," she wheezed, "I want you to
do me a favor. Frankly, I'm a little worried."
Sharon listened with minimal courtesy. Unbelievable, she thought to
herself, now the old harpy expected her to go driving out in this crazy
rain to find out if it was really raining. So suppose she got into
Hebertown, what could she find out? The lines were down? They knew
that. And what else could there conceivably be?
Since it was a point of principle, she knew what she had to say.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Goudeket," she said gently. "It just isn't my job."
Besides, the season was practically over; so let Old Bat-Ears fire her.
"Aw, Sharon," wheedled Mrs. Goudeket. "Who else have I got? Believe me,
it's not for me, it's for all of us. Suppose--"
"No."
"No!" shrilled Mrs. Goudeket. "I feed you the whole summer, for what?
One little thing I want you to do, and what do I get? Listen here,
young lady, I'm telling you for the last time--" It went on for ten
minutes, during which Mrs. Goudeket quite forgot to worry about the
storm.
She was still breathing hard when she appeared at the door of the Game
Room and signaled imperiously to Dick McCue.
"You got to drive me into Hebertown," she ordered.
"But Mrs. Goudeket!" He nodded back at the room, where a couple of
sullen guests were doggedly putting golf balls into a tumbler. "I got a
contest going. Dave said I had to help out; he said--"
"This is more important," Mrs. Goudeket said firmly. "You think I like
going myself? God knows what the guests will think, so don't tell them.
Let them look."
"All right, Mrs. Goudeket. I'll tell you what, I'll go get the car and
meet you at the kitchen entrance. Just the two of us going?"
Mrs. Goudeket smiled frostily. "Three," she said. "Miss Froman is
leaving us."