Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

Later my girls entirely forgot that they had met Forster, though they’d liked him fine, but they always remembered the story of my licking a frozen banister on a dare. Another version of their mother! They teased me about it for years. Joe joined them. And I couldn’t help liking being admired for any sort of courage, which it turned out we would all need, over and over.

So now we have the whole world going broke or already gone. Right in the twenty-first century, when people thought profit was so scientific. In a magazine I saw a page of cartoons on the financial meltdown, and one showed a bum on the sidewalk — same scruffy guy with a bottle in a bag who’s always in cartoons — and next to him he has a sign: HAH HAH HAH. I tore out the cartoon and put it up on the door to my apartment. Neighbors kept stopping me in the hall to say, “Anthony, that’s so great, I love that.” Little did they know I used to be that bum. That is, I used to panhandle, when I was young. I did it in Paris, which made it seem less sordid, even to me. But the French can be stingy as a people, and their cops are every bit as mean as ours, so it had its bad days.

I was born in Palm Beach, by way of irony. My parents ran a hotel. They started it at the end of the Depression, when I was a baby, and it was a big deal in the late forties and early fifties when I was a teenager. It was a hulk of stucco built to look neo-classic — like a White House with palm trees — famous for its water views and its Nesselrode pie. The colonnaded lobby was packed with tanned, overdressed guests, all of them eager to call my mother Betsy, to rush at her on sight, to be tickled when she granted favors. Which she didn’t always. She was a little queen of her domain, my mother.

I had two older sisters, Gigi and Ellen, and they both liked working the front desk, smiling away (sometimes they recognized an actress), but they were too earnest and silly to be as good at it as my mother. I was the one boy in the family, lazy and pensive and unathletic, and I hated the desk, I hated wearing a suit. When my mother was around, she would chat up the guests and then treat me to bits of cattiness about them. (“Is that a new haircut or a squirrel on her head?”) But she loved their money, she loved the ring of their names, she loved their parades of suitcases. Her conversation was full of retold incidents and small quotes inflated. Her politics had once been leftist and she still had streaks of those views — she gave everybody a day off for May Day, she let people with Jewish names stay at the hotel, and she refused to let us buy gum because it was an empty commercial product. My father used to sneak us Juicy Fruit.

My father ran the bar and the restaurant. He loved hanging out all day and night, and he liked to think of passing the hotel on to me. Once he had me play my clarinet for Rita Hayworth, a favorite star of his, who was visiting the hotel. I wasn’t a bad player. Happy birthday, dear Rita. On other nights he sat with me on the terrace, smoking his Havana cigar, praising the moon. I liked the moon well enough, but I was immune to the magic of the hotel. From the time I was little, I knew we were the servants of rich people.

I went away to college in Miami, not that far away but far enough. I lived in the dorm, with the rowdiness of other boys (I knew how to drink but I was quieter about it), and I loved the way Miami was a real city, each neighborhood its own planet. I was supposed to be studying business administration, but I was out walking the streets, eating Cuban sandwiches and conch fritters and pastrami (which I’d always thought was a joke, not a real food). The mess and noise of the outer world were a great discovery to me. I wanted to leave school right away, except that the first girl I dated told everyone that I used to party with the son of the Secretary of the Interior and I knew a lot of dirt about Cary Grant. These were exaggerations on her part, but other girls wanted to hear more. I’d say, “No, it’s stupid,” and they’d say, “Oh, come on,” and next thing I knew I was telling some very attentive blonde about Rita Hayworth’s drinking problem and what her daughter looked like.

Word went out that you had to know Anthony (me) very well before he would “confide” in you. I began to feel princely and wellborn. When I went home for Thanksgiving I was the least sullen I had been for years. I was dating three girls at once! Sophomore year I fell hard for Melanie, a lively person with a fabulous way of kissing, and in the course of sleeping together we became engaged.

It wasn’t my worst idea either. Those were heady times for us — all the fun of sex was mixed in with our sense of being golden: we had luck and we deserved it. We felt a little sorry for the other kids, who hadn’t found what they wanted and didn’t even know what it was. We had already come into our own, our true and continuing inheritance. And she wasn’t a stupid girl, my Melanie. She loved music and knew much more than I did — she introduced me to Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal and Big Joe Turner. Like millions after us, we made love with those records playing, and then, when she sat near me in sociology class, she’d hum a bar into my ear, our private language. Unlike me, she had a very exact sense of pitch and could imitate any sound.

I still thought my classes were taught by nincompoops, and I never would have shown up for them if not for Melanie, who said, “Just get through it, get it over with.”

“They’re wasting my precious time,” I said.

“Think of it as a savings plan that will pay off later,” she said. We were both used to waiting. Being young then was waiting, it was the end of the fifties.

My mother liked Melanie’s style — direct and sensible — but she had to tell me that the girl might be a gold digger. “I think you might have delusions,” I said. She did, about Melanie, who was not a grasping type, and about the hotel, which, for all its booming success, was a mom-and-pop operation, not a corporate giant.

“Melanie could do a lot better if she wanted,” I said.

Of course, I believed she could do no better than me. Who made her moan in bed, who could get her laughing at anything, who bought her a very excellent hi-fi for her birthday? And when I graduated (okay, I had a few credits missing, I wasn’t in the ceremony), we could marry right away, because I had a job and a place for us to live, a sunny, peach-colored suite on the second floor of the hotel, in the back. I’d paid just enough attention in my classes to decide we had to modernize our billing and receiving — my mother balked but then relented — and I went through the days quite pleased with myself. All the guests, even the staid and desiccated ones, liked to brag they’d known me since I was knee-high. And now look at me, man of the world, cool as a cucumber, married.

Melanie, who didn’t have to keep house or cook because we lived in a hotel, became my dad’s ally in managing the restaurant and club. They had long conferences about whether to change the house band and what music the square audiences would tolerate. Melanie liked being useful, she wanted a little importance, why not? My dad liked it.

We didn’t take our honeymoon until the next spring, and it was Melanie’s idea to go to Paris for two weeks. “You think I’m made of money?” I said. She pleaded (this was not like her) as if she were my child: “Oh, pretty, pretty please, with a cherry on top.” And in our daze after our long, long plane ride, how beautiful the city of Paris looked, old and stately, dirt-streaked with history, full of nonchalant strangers parading for us. We took a nap in our hotel, woke up, and looked out our balcony at the spangle of streetlamps and lit windows in the dark. Melanie said, “Here we are, sweetie.”