In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (29 page)

At the foot of the lawn, she stopped behind a bush that hid her from the steps, feeling sick and let-down. She had somehow used Miss Onderdonk’s language. She hadn’t said what she meant at all. She heard her father’s words, amused and sad, as she had heard them once, over her shoulder, when he had come upon her poring over the red-bound book, counting up the references to her grandfather. “That Herbert Ezekiel’s book?” He had looked over her shoulder, twirling the gold cigar-clipper on his watch chain. “Well, guess it won’t hurt the sons of Moses any if they want to tally up some newer ancestors now and then.”

Miss Onderdonk’s voice, with its little, cut-off chicken laugh, travelled down to her from the steps. “Can’t say it didn’t cross my mind, though, that the girl does have the look.”

Hester went out onto the highway and walked quickly back to the farmhouse. Skirting the porch, she tiptoed around to one side, over to an old fringed hammock slung between two trees whose broad bottom fronds almost hid it. She swung herself into it, covered herself over with the side flaps, and held herself stiff until the hammock was almost motionless.

Mrs. Garfunkel and Arline could be heard on the porch, evidently alone, for now and then Mrs. Garfunkel made one of the fretful, absent remarks mothers make to children when no one else is around. Arline had some kind of wooden toy that rumbled back and forth across the porch. Now and then, a bell on it went “ping.”

After a while, someone came along the path and up on the porch. Hester lay still, the hammock fringe tickling her face. “Almost time for supper,” she heard Mrs. Garfunkel say.

“Yes,” said her mother’s voice. “Did Hester come back this way?”

“I was laying down for a while. Arline, dear, did you see Hester?”

“No, Mummy.” “Ping, ping” went Arline’s voice.

“‘Mummy’!” said Mrs. Garfunkel. “That’s that school she goes to—you know the Kemp-Willard School, on Eighty-sixth?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Elkin. “Quite good, I’ve heard.”

“Good!” Mrs. Garfunkel sighed, on a sleek note of outrage. “What they soak you, they ought to be.”

Arline’s toy rumbled across the porch again and was still.

“She’ll come back when she’s hungry, I suppose,” said Mrs. Elkin. “There was a rather unfortunate little—incident, down the road.”

“Shush, Arline. You don’t say?”

Chairs scraped confidentially closer. Mrs. Elkin’s voice dropped to the low,
gemütlich
whisper reserved for obstetrics, cancer, and the peculations of servant girls. Once or twice, the whisper, flurrying higher, shook out a gaily audible phrase. “Absolutely wouldn’t believe—” “Can you imagine anything so silly?” Then, in her normal voice, “Of course, she’s part deaf, and probably a little crazy from being alone so much.”

“Scratch any of them and you’re sure to find it,” said Mrs. Garfunkel.

“Ah, well,” said Mrs. Elkin. “But it certainly was funny,” she added, in a voice velveted over now with a certain savor of reminiscence, “the way she kept
insisting
.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mrs. Garfunkel rather flatly. “Yeah. Sure.”

Someone came out on the back porch and vigorously swung the big bell that meant supper in fifteen minutes.

“Care for a little drive in the Buick after supper?” asked Mrs. Garfunkel.

“Why—why, yes,” said Mrs. Elkin, her tones warmer now with the generosity of one whose equipment went beyond the realm of bargains. “Why, I think that would be very nice.”

“Any time,” said Mrs. Garfunkel. “Any time you want stamps or anything. Thought you might enjoy a little ride. Not having the use of a car.”

The chairs scraped back, the screen door creaked, and the two voices, linked in their sudden, dubious rapprochement, went inside. The scuffling toy followed them.

Hester rolled herself out of the hammock and stood up. She looked for comfort at the reasonable hills, whose pattern changed only according to what people ate; at the path, down which there was nothing more ambiguous than the hazel-eyed water or the flower that should be scarlet but was orange. While she had been in the hammock, the dusk had covered them over. It had settled over everything with its rapt, misleading veil.

She walked around to the foot of the front steps. A thin, emery edge of autumn was in the air now. Inside, they must all be at supper; no one else had come by. When she walked into the dining room, they would all lift their heads for a moment, the way they always did when someone walked in late, all of them regarding her for just a minute with their equivocal adult eyes. Something would rise from them all like a warning odor, confusing and corrupt, and she knew now what it was. Miss Onderdonk sat at their table, too. Wherever any of them sat publicly at table, Miss Onderdonk sat at his side. Only, some of them set a place for her and some of them did not.

Young Workers in the Hotels

Phil Brown

I
grew up in hotel kitchens and dining rooms. To be near my parents between the ages of five and ten, I sat at the “owners’ table” in the Seven Gables kitchen where the bosses held court, and where my mother as chef sat during the rare moments she was not working. Even though the hotel had an office in the Main House, it seemed that most business was conducted from this round table in the corner of the kitchen. Deliverymen came to get their orders signed, the talent booker came by to arrange entertainment, and key staff people sat down to go over work issues. Guests who were friendly with the owners, from years of vacationing there, would even walk in to chat. All sorts of food popped up there, especially bits of whatever was currently being prepared at the stove.

I was fascinated by the bustle of the place, and learned hotel life as a preadolescent ethnographer. I learned to set tables by helping out the waiters. Running errands for Paul the salad man taught me the rudiments of “garmigiere” (typically pronounced “garmazhay,” and probably a corruption of “garde de manger”) work—artful food presentation. Watching food dished out at the range showed me how the kitchen ran. When my father had the concession at the Seven Gables I sold soda and beer in the dining room at dinner. Helping at the soda fountain while still under ten gave me a talent for fast work in the short-order mode.

Being a “staff kid” was a mixed bag. I had the run of the hotel, and by about age ten ate in the main dining room at the “staff table”—lifeguard, camp director, bookkeeper and band members, who were always my favorite. One Labor Day when I was around ten, after everyone checked out, the bookkeeper’s daughter and I decided to rummage through all the guest rooms to see what people had left behind. We turned up tennis rackets, baseballs, and other little treasures in several hours of hunting. This seemed our due after tolerating a whole season of the guests dominating our lives.

But no matter how much fun, I felt an outsider—neither guest nor staff, and of a lower class; even if many people at this hotel were of modest means, we were the ones having to work there to serve them. Tania Grossinger, whose mother worked as a social hostess at the relatives’ hotel, writes extensively of the in-betweenness of this staff child status. Even being an owner’s child or relative had drawbacks:

I always yearned to get into a dining room job, where I would be my own person. When I was thirteen at the Cherry Hill, a busboy missing at the last moment on a busy weekend late in the season gave me the opportunity of a lifetime—a half hour before dinner, I grabbed a cutaway jacket and bow tie, and went to work full-time for the remaining two weeks of the season. From then on, I worked the Mountains every summer, till the end of college. At the age of fourteen I felt I knew enough to be a waiter, having helped out the other dining room staff for years, but no hotel owner could swallow the idea of a fourteen-year-old waiter. Given my connections, I only needed a year of that apprenticeship, and at fifteen was a waiter.

W
ORKING THE
D
INING
R
OOM

Every meal had a “shape,” a way that it went—a good meal, a bomb, a breeze. A “good meal” was what you could usually hope for—a fairly routine event. When the meal was a “breeze,” you had waltzed through it without a care, always being ahead of the pack, with no complaints from guests. The worst, a “bomb,” was when you were “hung up” and could never catch up with the guests’ demands or the kitchen schedule. One of the measures of how well a meal went was how early you got out of the dining room. If you could “check out” with the waiter captain and the maitre d’ while most others had as much as fifteen minutes’ more labor in setting up, you felt you had done well. The amount of sweat was also a good way to judge how well the meal went—if you were excessively drenched in sweat, compared to what you usually were, then you had run too fast, made too many extra trips, worried too much about being “hung up.” A gauge of success, in the middle of the meal, was how close you were to the front of the line to pick up each course, especially main dishes.

Serving lunch, and even more so dinner, the key thing was to get on the “main line” early. Guests might have drifted in and leisurely eaten appetizers and soups, easy to pick up in the kitchen. Busboys were not allowed to pick up these appetizers and soups themselves, as captured in Sidney Offit’s novel,
He Had It Made
: “Danny Rose picked up the mushroom and barley soup. The chef knew he was not a waiter and shouted loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘I’ll cut off the hands of the next busboy I see picking up on this side of the stove.’” If you didn’t get caught by an irate owner who felt the waiter should be doing the serving, you could even pick the food up and hand it immediately to your busboy, poised beside you, for delivery to the guests. The chef and steward might be tolerant with soups and appetizers, but they got frenetic and deadly serious with mains, which only waiters could handle. Partly this was because they were more expensive, there were more choices, various options about how well cooked, and what vegetables and garnishes were accompanying. Mains were large, and unlike soup, you couldn’t get enough on your tray to serve your whole station at once. If you were at the head of the line for your first trip, you’d be back quickly for the next trip or two. You wanted to get mains out early since you didn’t want your guests complaining that other people were being served first.

It was possible to get “hung up” during any course, but once you were late with mains, you completely lost control of the meal. Some waiters routinely got hung up because they couldn’t organize their work habits and let guests send them to the kitchen too often. The trick was to not make extra trips for a single request, since you’d never stop running. You bided time until several requests were pending or you had finished serving the current course. Waiters prone to getting hung up never learned to manage themselves or others. The frenzy of a hung-up waiter was pathetic; they would be running around, dripping sweat, asking other waiters for any extra dishes, whining at their busboys to help out.

Waiting at the Karmel in Loch Sheldrake, I had to put up with Julie, one of the owners. As in many hotels, two couples owned the place, typically in-laws. Julie’s fiefdom as the quasi-steward was the kitchen, where he supervised meals, dressed in a white apron over his regular office clothes, brandishing a giant serving spoon for dishing out vegetables. He yelled all the time, and when really angry waved the spoon threateningly; the prominent vein on his forehead throbbed and we joked he was on the way to a stroke before dessert. Julie and his brother-in-law, Perry, could not stand that we hung out in the kitchen waiting for the main line to open, while our guests presumably were left without our attention—as if our busboys patrolling for us were not sufficient. When, in the course of the season-long civil war of bosses and waiters, Julie and Perry managed to scare us out of the kitchen, we resorted to leaving our trays standing silent sentinel, to hold our places for when the main line opened. Then we merely kept popping in to see when the race was really on, at which point we’d take our positions where the trays stood. When this outrageous tactic got to Julie, he outlawed tray placing, and we were back to the original status of putting our bodies on line, chatting and joking, listening to Julie’s and Perry’s nonstop harangues to at least stand straight and not slouch over the counter.

Some of our best efforts at pleasing the guests ran up against the bosses’ attempts to control us. For instance, to keep the guests happy by serving them quickly, we tried to put lots of mains on our trays. Four dishes, with metal (meat meals) or plastic (dairy meals) covers fit on a tray. The acceptable limit was three stacks of plates, allowing for only twelve mains. This often meant splitting up tables, which often had eight or ten guests; guests at one table couldn’t stand to see others at their table eat while they might have to wait ten more minutes to get theirs. A fourth stack would give you two tables’ worth of guests in many instances. But bosses and stewards often prevented that for fear that we would drop the whole tray, no matter how experienced and strong we were. One strategy was to have your busboy next to you, hand him some mains, and then meet up with him between the kitchen and the dining room to add them to the stack. Often enough this backfired when we were caught—the owner would halt us, yell, and take away the top stack.