Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

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.