Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
If God had found a reason to take a snapshot of Paradise, it
would have shown Main Street to be the trunk of an evergreen,
roads sprouting like boughs so ragged and droopy the whole
thing resembled a Christmas tree left by the curb. Once, fifty resorts
had decorated the branches of Paradise. Now, the remains
clung to the roads like cracked, fading baubles. That December
afternoon in 1978, as I drove with my mother to our family's
hotel, I counted nine victims of Jewish lightning, the freakish
force that strikes only vacant resorts with no chance for profit
except from insurance. ("Hey Solly, I was upset to hear about
your fire." "Shh!" whispers Sol, "it's not until tomorrow.")
Patches of snow drifted over charred beams; the chimneys had
fallen and lay in jutted curves like black spinal columns.
Most of the resorts had simply been abandoned. The main
houses stood, but the stucco had peeled from beneath the windows
and these looked out beyond the gates like haunted eyes.
Handball backboards poked up from overgrown fields, warped
plywood tombstones inscribed in flaking paint with the names
of the dead.
As we drove past the backboard for Fein's Hillside Manor, I
thought of my fight in first grade with Jeff Fein.
"The Eden's a shit house," Jeff hissed across our table in art
class. "The pool's cracked. The food stinks!"
In my rage, I hammered Jeff again and again in his pudding-soft
stomach until he recanted. Now, it seemed my blows had
battered not Jeff, but his parents' hotel. Contrite, I admitted
that Fein's Hillside indeed had been superior to the Eden, at
least in regard to the cheesecake it served, the parquet floor in
its lobby, and the slide by its pool -- a white bow of steel that
shone, iridescent, when the sun hit just so. I took no satisfaction
that the Manor's pool was now gruesome with tree limbs,
the lobby long gone.
Just past the Manor the road became a roller coaster. As a
child I'd loved to ride in the back seat of our car, especially
when my brother, Arthur, was driving. The car would fly over
a rise, then drop. Giddy, I would scream out the names on each
backboard while Arthur cursed the Eden in a voice that made
me think of a radio turned so low you couldn't make out the
words, you only knew the announcer was warning of catastrophes
to come. Once, I asked Arthur why he drove so fast if he
didn't want to get there. "If we have a crack-up," he said, "your
mother might give me the afternoon off."
Today, with the roads coated in ice, my mother drove slowly,
with great concentration. She was four-feet-eleven and seemed
to be using the wheel to do chin-ups. The car barely moved, but
she kept asking, Was she scaring me?
No, I was fine.
"But you keep sighing, sweetheart."
I pointed to the wreckage of the once-stately Queen Esther.
"The Esther's been dosed for three years," my mother said.
"You only noticed it now?"
The truth, we both knew, was that being away at college for
only three months had given me the eyes to see my hometown
as an outsider saw it -- as something dying, or dead. The luckiest
resorts had been sold and reincarnated as retreats for Zen
Buddhists (the former Green Pastures now sprouted a garden
of fat golden statues), rehabilitation centers for drug addicts,
sleep-over camps for handicapped children. Not far from the
Eden were a Bible school for slow-learning Christians and a retirement
home for Jewish vaudevillians.
"These Hasids," I said, "what do they want to do with the
Eden, anyway?"
"Sweetheart," my mother said, "we are not meeting this
man so we can examine his credentials. We are showing him
the Eden, in the best light possible, which probably means we
should hope for an eclipse."
"I don't understand why you're so desperate to sell. After all
these years, why now?"
"Because I'm old. After all these years, I'm old."
I had been staring at the rotting hotels for so long that when
I turned and looked at my mother, the image persisted and she
seemed to me as wasted as those ruins by the road. Not that
she ever had been a beauty. Her hair was dull brown. The center
of her mouth was a smear of red lipstick; frown lines descended
half an inch from each end. For the tour, she had put
on a skirt as shapeless and drab as a grocery bag, white anklets,
loafers, a mangy camel coat. Still, she always had been plump,
with the blush of a peach. Now, a dried fig.
"Did something happen?" I said. "Since I went away, I mean?"
"I appreciate the concern." She tightened her lips to demonstrate
that she didn't value my concern in the least. "It's your
father," she said. "He's not a young man."
In the three seasons of the year when the Eden was closed,
my father taught cooking at the county voc-ed school, preparing
his students to be chefs at hotels that no longer existed.
They were tough kids, rambunctious. He used to come home
at night exhausted, tug off his support-hose and fall straight
into bed. Was he more tired these days? Did he doze as he lectured,
head dipping forward into a soup pot?
A jeep with an upraised plow rounded the curve ahead of us
and charged, furious at our red station wagon. My mother
dropped the full force of her body onto the brake, then swiveled
in her seat to make certain that the jeep wouldn't turn and
charge again. I asked if she thought my grandmother would
agree to sell the Eden.
"She can't run it herself. If we refuse, she has no choice."
"She could conjure her imps and demons to help her."
My mother frowned. "Your grandmother is a strong woman.
Hasn't your generation made that a virtue?"
"You know you'll miss it," I said.
"You'll miss it. Not your father and myself. Remember last
summer, when the stove blew up? I had to drive into town, fry
enough pirogen for fifty-three people, then rush back to the hotel
before they got cold. And dinner! A dozen pullets from that
oven!"
"You're pretending. You really do love it."
"I did love it, at one time. When your grandfather was alive.
I mean, when he was living. You have no idea what influence
he had over people. They would be bickering, complaining.
Then he would start to mingle, and before you knew it, they
would be in tears, that's how hard they were laughing. As crazy
as it was, with him it had spirit."
I would have reminded her that her father would sooner
have sold his wife than his hotel, but just then we passed the
handyman's cabin, white in the mist, and the argument turned
to dust in my throat. In my months in New York, I had come
to suspect that I had imagined my childhood trips to this
shack. I had lived in a fairy tale, inventing a prince I could save
from bewitchment so he could confirm I was nobility myself,
as no one else would. A daydream. A lie. And yet here was the
cabin, solid wood after all.
The station wagon pirouetted across the Eden's parking lot
like an ungainly skater. It skidded to a stop and my mother got
out and minced across the frozen mud to the gate. I followed
her, then stopped in the middle of the rutted lot and looked up.
Seeing the Eden without its camouflage of leaves was like
glimpsing a family friend in a doctor's office, naked beneath
the harsh lights. More than ever I wished the Eden had been
as successful as That Other Hotel -- my grandmother wouldn't
allow us to say its name in her presence -- that splendid city on
the hill, which started from beginnings as humble as ours but
had only grown larger, more famous and more elaborate as the
Eden decayed.
For fifty-nine years my grandmother had vetoed every improvement,
living in the hope that her husband would sell the
Eden and take her back to New York, to resume his position as
foreman at a factory that made ladies' coats, as he was when
she had met him, before he had been "bitten by the hotel bug,"
as Grandpa Abe put it. ("A bedbug!" she screamed. "That's all
that bit you!") But after Abe's stroke, she realized that the Eden
was all she would ever possess on this earth. She refused to
consider selling it; the one time my parents dared to broach the
subject of what they might do if they "got a good offer," my
grandmother cursed and used the cleaver she'd been holding
to hack a game hen in two.
I didn't want to think what or whom she might cleave if she
looked out her window and noticed her son-in-law leading a
Hasid around her hotel. My parents' plan was this: my mother
and I would keep Nana diverted while my father took the Hasid
on a lightning-quick tour. When all that remained was a matter
of blackmail ("Here, sign this paper, or we'll let it sit idle
and you won't get a cent"), they would hide Nana's knives and
hope for the best.
My mother and I set off for the bungalow. The doorbell was
useless. My grandmother was deaf, and, though my mother
had the key, this still left the problem of how to make contact -- if
Nana were startled, she might assume a burglar had sneaked
up behind her and roundhouse the culprit. The trick was to
warn her by stomping your feet like an African hunter beating
the bush.
We expected to find her in the stuffy back room where she
passed the long winters like the miller's daughter, spinning
straw into gold, or rather, converting a room full of garbage -- milk
bottles, flour sacks, bread wrappers, corn husks, wooden
crates and dyed elbow-macaroni -- into lamps, cushions, bath
mats, night tables, vases, and items that seemed to have no
other purpose than to keep the guests guessing as to what
these might be. She'd also painted the artwork on the Eden's
lobby walls: Queen Elizabeth on horseback, fox hunts, a chopping
block in the Tower of London, various earls, dukes and
knights, all of these copied from a book about England, as colorful
as my grandmother's palette allowed. If she caught a
guest staring at a painting, she would shout: "I used to live
there!" and explain that her family spent a year in Liverpool on
their way to New York. "The first day of school, naah, I can't say
good morning in English. By the last day, Charles Dickens! The
Round Table! Shakespeare! The teacher, she said I was a genius.
In America, naah, I sew buttons on coats." She tapped
the Queen Mother on her reddish-green nose. "She got nothing
I don't!"
In the workshop we found a half-finished picture of Buckingham
Palace made of dried split-peas and beans. But no
Nana, anywhere.
"I don't think she went for groceries," my mother said. The
cupboards were full of baby food, which, since my grandmother
wouldn't pay for dentures, was all she could eat. "I'd
better take the car and go find her. You stay here and warn your
father."
I never had felt any great love or admiration for my grandmother.
But, standing in her workshop that wintry afternoon,
I experienced the unsettling sensation we were on the same
side.
"Don't you feel guilty doing this?" I asked.
With a look that implied I was too smart to understand anything
of consequence, my mother left me to contemplate the
murky turpentine in a jar labeled STRAINED BEEF, the pile of
dried peas, Nana's brushes and paints. The fumes burned my
nostrils, and I finally escaped and skated down the path to wait
for my father.
An iron arch spanned the walk, obscured by a chaos of
warped wooden signs. The pictures showed primitive talent,
though the artist since had turned to more regal subjects. At
the center of the arch hung a painting of a couple in flesh-colored
bathing suits. The tree in the background suggested
these weren't ordinary guests, as did the red blob (a beach ball?
some kind of fruit?) the woman was tossing toward the man.
The garden of eden it said below this couple, and, below that:
YOUR HOSTS ABE AND JENNIE APPELBAUM, with APPEL much fatter
so no one could miss the pun at the core of the owners'
name. To the left of this sign hung a golfer in knickers, huge
as Paul Bunyan compared to the forest and lake at his feet.
Eighteen-hole golf course it said, though the sign didn't reveal
that the golf course was public and twelve miles down the
road. More truthful were the promises of SHUFFLEBOARD, BASEBALL,
HEALTHFUL POOL, TV (honest enough in its singular number)
and NITELY AMUSEMENT. At the far right, a chorus of cows,
fish and hens raised their mouths and beaks to sing THREE
MEALS A DAY, VERY STRICT KOSHER. And there, across the top:
ALL THOSE WHO ENTER LEAVE YOUR CARES HERE. I reached up
and stroked Adam's smooth chest, Eve's wavy hair, the apple
tree, the apple, the pale lemon sun.
