The Seduction of Water Read online

  “So, what are they paying you for this seal story?”

  “Aunt Sophie,” I say, “I’ve told you before. Literary journals can’t afford to pay. But it’s a credit . . .”

  “You mean they owe you the money?”

  “Not that kind of credit.” She knows this. At seventy-six Aunt Sophie is as sharp as a tack. She’s kept the books for the hotel for fifty years and never been off a penny. “It’s like an honor. I list it on my next submission letter and editors are more likely to publish my next story.”

  “And then you get some money?”

  “Well, maybe,” I lie. “If it’s a big enough magazine. Caffeine is a pretty good credit . . .”

  “And what kind of name is that for a magazine? Caffeine? What are they selling? Literature or Maxwell House?”

  “The idea is that it’s read in cafés and it’s stimulating—like coffee. It’s a good journal. John Updike had a story in it last year.”

  “Well, Mr. Updike can no doubt afford to give away his stories for free, but you—on the money you make? How much did you gross last year?”

  “Eighteen thousand,” I say, my heart sinking. She knows this too. She always does my tax return.

  I hear a sharp snap that sounds like bones breaking, but then I realize it’s just her shaking the wrinkles out of the sheets. I can picture her, in the laundry room behind the servants’ quarters in the North Wing. The folding table is beneath a row of windows facing the circular drive at the back entrance to the hotel. When I was little I used to climb up onto the folding table and wedge myself between the stacks of folded linens—still warm from the dryers—clear a circle in the steamy windows, and watch the guests arriving. It was the perfect vantage point from which to see while remaining unseen. I can hear over the phone line the hissing of the steam irons and I switch the receiver to my left ear and shake my head as if to dislodge water. I could say that it’s none of her business how much money I make, but it is. She sends me a check every month to supplement my meager salary. Otherwise I wouldn’t even be able to afford this little rent-controlled apartment. Even the apartment is thanks to her—handed down to me by an old friend of hers from her Art League days.

  Switching the receiver again, I wait for the other shoe to drop. Usually the mention of my puny adjunct salary is followed by the salary I could make if I gave up my silly notions of being a writer and came back to the hotel to take over my father’s old job as manager. Since my father died last year the Mandelbaums, the hotel’s owners, have made it clear that I could have the job whenever I wanted.

  “You could still write,” Cora Mandelbaum has said to me, “in the evenings after your work was done. Your mother wrote here.”

  But my mother wasn’t the manager. Although she started out at the Hotel Equinox as a maid, once she married my father the only work she did was as unofficial hostess and greeter during the season. In the off-season, between October and May, she devoted herself to her writing. My father, though, worked hard even in those off months. There were repairs to be done, supplies to be inventoried. Although it was true that I would probably be able to find some time to write during the off-season I have always been afraid that the responsibilities of the hotel would weigh too heavily. I know that my father, after fifty years of running the Hotel Equinox, had seemed bowed down by the weight of it, as if its stately six stories had pressed down upon his head. Besides, I don’t want to leave the city.

  I wait some more, but my aunt’s usual offer of employment is not forthcoming.

  “The hotel’s opening next week, right?” I finally ask. “Everything ready?”

  Now I’m almost begging her to regale me with the usual stories of last-minute foul-ups and colossal mismanagement that I, if I only saw fit to, could remedy by stepping into my father’s managerial shoes.

  “I suppose,” she says. “It hardly seems to matter now. What with the hotel closing at the end of this season.”

  “Closing?” I say, but it comes out more as a gasp than a word, all the breath having swooshed out of me. No wonder my aunt has been so calm this morning, with this bombshell under her hat, so to speak.

  “Yes, Ira and Cora have finally had enough. They’ve bought a little motel in Sarasota to manage. If I’m lucky, they’ll take pity on an old lady and let me night clerk and make the beds for them. But it’s you I’m worried for, bubelah, because I won’t be able to send you money anymore.”

  Bubelah. Now she’s maternal. Now that she’s spilling the bad news.

  “Aunt Sophie, are you sure? The Mandelbaums have talked about retiring for years, but that hotel’s been their life . . .”

  “Sucked the life out of them more like. Yes, I’m sure, I’m not senile yet. They’ve bought their motel, given notice to the staff, and put the hotel up for sale.”

  “So maybe someone will buy it. Maybe you could work for the new owner.” Maybe I could still have my manager’s job. Now that my dreaded backup job has vanished I feel suddenly unmoored.

  “Who would buy this old white elephant? It would take a fortune to do the work that needs to be done and what for? We haven’t had a booked season for twenty summers. Truthfully, we’ve been less than half full for the last ten years. We haven’t shown a profit in twice that long. There are liens on the property and back taxes. I don’t know why Ira and Cora held on so long.”

  “But then what will happen if no one buys it?”

  “They’ll tear it down of course. They can’t just leave it here as a ruin to molder away. Kids would get in and get up to no good. They’ll tear it down and make the property into a park.”

  “But they can’t just tear it down. It’s over a hundred years old. Shouldn’t it be a national monument or something?”

  Aunt Sophie sniffs. For a moment I think the idea of the old place being torn down has gotten to her too, but then I remember how warm and humid it is in the laundry room and realize it’s probably just her sinuses acting up. As for me, I have swiveled my chair around to look north out my window at the river as if, if I stared hard enough, I could see the white columns of the Hotel Equinox rising above the western banks of the Hudson. Over a hundred miles to the north, but still, I have always felt the pull of the place, like an anchor tethering me to the surface of the water here at the mouth of the harbor.

  “I can’t imagine it not being there,” I say.

  “Nothing lasts forever, shayna maidela.” Shayna maidela. It’s what my father used to call me. Pretty girl. I can’t remember my aunt ever using it before, but today she’s suddenly a font of Yiddish endearments. “Don’t spend so much time worrying over the past. And with such good news about your story in that fancy coffee magazine! Go out and get some sun, you spend too much time sitting at your desk fretting about the past. Like your mother. So morbid. Don’t you worry about an old hotel and an old woman. Go out and enjoy the sunshine.”

  Chapter Six

  As if in direct response to my aunt’s advice to enjoy the sunshine it rains all the next week. The rain strips the trees of their white petals, leaving bare limbs and a litter of soiled blossoms like muddied slush on the sidewalks. It might as well be the middle of winter.

  Jack cancels our Wednesday night together—so he can catch up on the work he missed going out with me on Tuesday—and I realize that instead of a sea change, our Tuesday night together was merely a misplaced entry on the ledger books to be made up somewhere else.

  I collect the fairy-tale papers from all my classes. Eighty-six of them altogether, including Aidan’s hand-delivered essay, which I put on the pile with the papers from Grace College when I get his transfer notice in my mailbox. By the time I wade through the misspellings and incorrect usages, the fragments and run-ons and comma splices, the stack of red-marked essays are so much bloodied paper and my red-stained fingertips the hands of a butcher.

  At the end of each day—when I’ve taught my classes and marked the requisite number of papers I’ve assigned myself—I sit at my desk and try to do my
own writing. I stare out the window where, some days, just before dusk, the cloud cover lifts for the moment before sunset, releasing a thin band of copper-colored light above the New Jersey skyline. I tap my pen against my desk to the tune of follow-up piece and possibly publishable. I try to think about my mother—about what I might write about her next. But instead I think about my father, about how saddened he would be if he knew the hotel was going to be torn down.

  The hotel was his whole life. He’d come there straight out of the war, wearing the one suit he owned—other vets dyed and wore their uniforms but my father burned his—with nothing but his own father’s warnings ringing in his ears. What kind of job is that for a Jew? A hotelier? my grandfather had said to him. He was supposed to go to City College and become an accountant, but on the first day of classes he caught a train north and answered the ad the Mandelbaums had placed in the Times for a night clerk at the Hotel Equinox—“a family hotel in the heart of the Catskills overlooking the beautiful Hudson River.”

  “I liked that,” my father would tell guests over a cigar and a glass of seltzer in the Sunset Lounge (my father never drank hard liquor). “A family hotel. At the end of the war a French family put me up in their hotel while I recuperated from pneumonia. I got to like the hotel life. Of course, I thought the Mandelbaums were Jewish.”

  They weren’t. They were Quakers. The hotel wasn’t in that part of the Catskills—it was north and east of Grossingers and the Concord, isolated on a narrow ridge above the Hudson River. It was the kind of place where wealthy families from the city had summered for generations, hiking and swimming in the cold lake—not playing bingo and canasta by a pool. The nightly entertainment was more likely to be a lecture on birding or “folk songs around the campfire” than a Borscht Belt comedian or social dancing. But the Mandelbaums didn’t care that my father was Jewish or that he’d never worked in a hotel before.

  “I liked how clean he looked,” Cora Mandelbaum once told me. “I knew he’d be a hard worker. He’s never let us down.”

  And he never did. Not until last spring when he came back from the hospital in Albany with the news that the touch of indigestion he’d been getting every night after dinner wasn’t Cora’s stuffed cabbage, it was a tumor, high in his stomach, too close to his heart to operate. The doctors gave him eight months.

  “This season you’ll be our guest,” Cora told him. “You’ll sit in a lounge chair and take it easy. Let the college kids do the work.”

  But my father wasn’t one to lounge. He’d seem to sometimes. To keep a guest company he’d sit with his seltzer and cigar and admire the sunset, looking like he had all the time in the world. My father never hurried. But always, he’d have one eye on the new bartender, an ear cocked for late arrivals, for the crunch of gravel on the driveway and the ping of the bell at the front desk. He worked through that last season with the same unhurried grace and when the last guest checked out he went back to the hospital in Albany—as if keeping a date—and died.

  Maybe, I think now, it was better he didn’t live to see the hotel sold or torn down. But the thought fails to console me. Even my lunch with Phoebe Nix—lunch with my editor, I hum to myself—fails to lighten the gloom I seem to be sinking toward.

  We meet at Tea & Sympathy, a mousehole of a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue for expat Brits homesick for bangers and mash, bubble and squeak. When she named the place I remembered that her famous poet mother had been married to a British lord something-or-other and I thought I’d be treated to high tea and expansive anecdotes of life across the pond.

  But there is nothing expansive about Phoebe Nix. I’d forgotten, from our one meeting at the reading, what a stern young woman she is. There’s not an ounce of spare flesh on her T-shirted, black-jeaned figure, which makes it far easier for her than for me to fit into the narrow slot allotted us by Tea & Sympathy. Her fair, baby-fine hair is shorn so close to the skull I can see the pale blue veins throb at her temples beneath its colorless sheen, like blue-veined rocks under a mountain stream. Her only adornment is a delicately engraved wedding band that she wears on her right thumb.

  “My mother’s,” she says when she sees me looking at it. “It’s the only thing of hers I got. All her other jewelry went back to the family estate, but I didn’t want any of that ancestral crap anyway.”

  “It’s lovely,” I say, leaning over our tiny table—and knocking over a tea strainer—to get a better look at Phoebe’s thumb, which is splayed over the painted roses on her china teacup.

  She slips the ring off her thumb and hands it to me. I hold up the thin band of silver—terrified that I’ll drop it into my Earl Grey—and study the design. It takes me a minute to realize that the band is engraved with an interlocking pattern of barbed wire and thorns. And then I do drop it—into the sugar bowl.

  “Wow,” I say, fishing the wedding ring out of the sugar. “Your mother and father must have had some interesting wedding vows.”

  Phoebe shakes her head and blows on her hot tea (chamomile—the same color as her hair—unsweetened).

  “I did the engraving,” she says. “I took a class at Parsons just so I could do it myself. I wanted to remember every time I looked at it that marriage is a trap. It killed my mother. Kept her from writing and then she figured she might as well be dead if she couldn’t write.”

  “Wow,” I say for the second time today (I’m really impressing her with my writer’s vocabulary, I think), “their marriage was that bad?” I hand Phoebe back her mother’s ring.

  “All marriage is that bad,” Phoebe says examining the ring for sugar crystals. She pops the ring in her mouth, sucks, and then spits it out into her napkin. For an instant before the ring reappears on her thumb I think I see blood on the napkin—as if the barbed wire and thorns on the ring sprang to life in Phoebe’s mouth—but then I see it’s just a spray of embroidered roses on the cloth. “But you must know that. I mean ‘The Selkie’—the story you chose as a vehicle for your mother’s story—is a classic entrapment tale. The woman’s true nature—her skin—is stolen by the bridegroom. He holds her captive by hiding her skin. That’s what my father did. He promised my mother financial support so she could write but then when she didn’t want to have children right away—she was over forty when she had me—he was furious at her for not providing an heir to carry on the Kron name. He made her life a living hell—drinking, having affairs—and when she finally gave in and had a child he was pissed off I wasn’t a boy. My mother killed herself six months after I was born.”

  Phoebe takes a sip of tea and I study a portrait of Queen Elizabeth hanging on the wall behind her because I can’t think of anything to say. The worst part, I imagine, is knowing your own mother chose to die so soon after giving birth. At least I was ten when my mother died.

  “Our mothers had a lot in common,” she says after a moment’s silence. “It would be interesting if they had known each other.”

  “Did you look in your mother’s journals to see if they did?” I ask.

  Phoebe studies me closely and then makes what for her constitutes an expressive gesture. She tilts her narrow hand over to show an empty palm. “She mentions a Katherine in her early New York journals, but I’m not sure if it’s your mother. Her later journals are at my place in the country. I’ll look through them when I go up there this summer. Even if they didn’t know each other, their stories have remarkable similarities. My mother stopped writing the year before she died and your mother was unable to finish her third book. Don’t you think that had something to do with her marriage?”

  I shake my head. Although I’m flattered that Phoebe has included me in her sorority of writers’ daughters—after all, her mother was a famous poet, while my mother was a has-been genre writer whose two fantasy novels are out of print—I can’t allow her to lay the blame for that unfinished third book on my father. “Actually, my father was really supportive of my mother’s writing. When they met she was a maid at the hotel—he found pieces of her novel under the
stacks of linen and instead of firing her, he gave her one of the guest rooms to write in.”

  I watch Phoebe’s eyes, over the rim of her teacup, widen, but I go on.

  “When he found out she only liked to write on hotel stationery—the expensive kind with a watermark—he ordered an extra ream for her personal use. He bought her a typewriter when he proposed to her instead of a ring. An Underwood,” I finish lamely. Fortunately our lunch comes—a plate of undressed baby greens for Phoebe, Welsh rarebit and scones for me—or I’d still be rambling on, singing my father’s praises and the joys of matrimony.

  Phoebe spears a clump of prickly escarole and waves it at me.

  “Then why, if your father created such a perfect atmosphere for writing, didn’t your mother write her third book?”

  I look down at the pool of melted cheese on my plate and shrug. Even shrugging is too expansive a gesture for the cramped confines of Tea & Sympathy. The motion of my shoulders dislodges from the arm of my chair my umbrella, which unfurls and flaps to the floor like a large, damp bird.

  “She wrote her first two books before I was born,” I say, bending to retrieve my umbrella and knocking my head on the next table. “So I have to assume her inability to finish the third one had more to do with being a mother than being a wife.”