The Inn at Lake Devine Part 1

The Inn at Lake Devine.

Elinor Lipman.

For my sister, Deborah Lipman Slobodnik, and in remembrance of William Austin and vacations past.

Part One.

ONE.

It was not complicated, and, as my mother pointed out, not even personal: They had a hotel; they didn't want Jews; we were Jews.

We were nothing to them, a name on an envelope, when it began in 1962 as a response to a blind inquiry my mother had sent out in multiples. We'd been to Cape Cod and Cape Ann, to Old Orchard, Salisbury, and Hampton beaches, to Winnipesaukee and the Finger Lakes. That year she wrote to Vermont, which someone had told her was heaven. She found a lake on the map that was neither too big nor too small, and not too far north. The Vermont Chamber of Commerce listed some twenty accommodations on Lake Devine. She sent the same letter to a dozen cottage colonies and inns inquiring about rates and availability. The others answered with printed rate cards and cordial notes. But one reply was different, typed on textured white stationery below a green pointillist etching of a lakeside hotel. Croquet on the lawn, the Vermont vacation guide had said; rowboats, sundown concerts on Sat.u.r.day nights; a lifeguard, a dock, a raft, a slide. The Inn's letter said, "Dear Mrs. Marx: Thank you for your inquiry. Our two-bedroom cabins rent at the weekly rate of sixty-five (U.S.) dollars. We do have a few openings during the period you requested. The Inn at Lake Devine is a family-owned resort, which has been in continuous operation since 1922. Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles. Very truly yours, (Mrs.) Ingrid Berry, Reservations Manager."

I hadn't known up to that moment that I had a surname that was recognizably Jewish, or that people named Marx would be unwelcome somewhere in the United States because of it.

I asked if these were n.a.z.is. My mother sighed. I had been wed to the subject since reading, without her permission, The Diary of a Young Girl-specifically obsessed by where we, who had no attic, could hide that would be soundproof, and who among our Gentile acquaintances would bring us food under penalty of death.

My mother explained: There were people, unfortunately-for reasons it was hard to explain or understand-who weren't n.a.z.is but didn't like Jews. Not that she wanted me to worry, because this was America, not Germany, not Amsterdam. We were safe here, remember? The letter was ignorant, and very bad manners. Someone should give this Mrs. Berry a piece of their mind.

I said, "Can we go?"

"You don't go where you're not wanted," my mother said. "Anyone who could write such a letter doesn't deserve our business." She took it back and stuffed it in its envelope with no particular archival care. Two days later, I removed it from the dining-room sideboard to a safer place-my sweater drawer. It fascinated me, the letter's marriage of good manners and anti-Semitism. Why bother to answer Jews at all if you don't want them at your hotel?

I tried to picture this Ingrid Berry who had signed neatly in blue ballpoint-the nerve of her insincere "Very truly yours." Was she old? Young? Married? Was Ingrid a German name? Did she get pleasure from insulting the people she banned from her hotel? And why didn't my parents respond to this slap in the face? "If you paid us a million dollars, we wouldn't come to your stupid hotel," I thought we should say. "If you had a baseball team, would you tell Sandy Koufax he couldn't pitch for you? Would you let Danny Kaye rent a room? Tony Curtis? Albert Einstein? Milton Berle? Jesus Christ?"

My mother didn't show the letter to my father, because she knew that he, like me, would want to jump in the truck and fix the problem. And so I produced it for him with the same flourish my mother had staged for me. "Good G.o.d!" he said, struggling with one hand to put on his reading gla.s.ses.

I asked him if people who didn't rent rooms to Jews knew about the concentration camps.

"Everybody knows by now, honey."

I asked if he thought they had seen The Diary of Anne Frank.

"Probably not," he said. Then, "You know what I think we should do? Let's write back and tell her we want one of her stupid cabins."

I said, "I don't think they have cabins. It looks like a hotel."

He embroidered a little drama-not too seriously, but enough to get my mother's goat: We'd go as the Gentiles! Ed and Audrey Gentile. He'd known a man named Gentile in the navy from somewhere like Delaware or Pennsylvania. It was a real name. People truly had that for a name.

My mother said, "You'll have to drag me there."

"You don't want to see what a place like this is like?"

"And lie for the whole time we're there?"

"About what?"

"Church," said my mother. "You can bet the whole place empties out to go to church on Sundays."

"The Gentile family doesn't go to church when they're on vacation," my father said. "We go regularly on the other fifty weeks, but we pray in the cabin when we're on vacation."

"People will know," she said.

He thought they wouldn't. He was tall, taller than most Christians I knew, while my mother was a redhead no bigger than Gidget. And his two daughters looked like any two little American girls. "Except," my father said, smiling broadly, "nicer and smarter."

"And how would you make your point? Announce as you leave that we were the Eddie Marx family? Jews?"

"We wouldn't even have to tell them," said my father. "We could come and go and just know we fooled them."

Of course we didn't go. My mother found a place to rent on the opposite sh.o.r.e of Lake Devine-not a resort, but a heated cottage on a dirt road of private camps, listed with the Chamber of Commerce. We went there for two summers and found it, if not heaven, then very nice. The air smelled like bayberry. Indian paintbrush, a wildflower we didn't have at home, dotted every field. We swam and fished from a rowboat without an anchor, caught only ugly black-horned pouts we couldn't eat, and took a day trip to Fort Ticonderoga. The best miniature-golf course I'd ever played was a five-minute car ride away. The local dairy, which offered not only milk but cheddar cheese, made home deliveries even to the summer population.

My older sister and I often rowed past the Inn at Lake Devine, and studied it as best we could from offsh.o.r.e. It had a very green lawn, broad and sloping to the water, a white flagpole, and a chalky string of buoys marking off its swimming area. Closer to us, a raft covered with teenagers floated on shiny black oil drums. My sister and I had only each other for company, and a dock with no wading area, but here there were kids our age from what had to be a dozen families, swimming and diving as well as if they were on teams.

The following winter, having studied it and envied its postcard perfection, I put a long-thought-out plan into effect as a thirteenth-birthday present to myself. With a deerskin purse full of coins, I went to a pay phone. I called the Inn at Lake Devine and asked for Mrs. Berry. Amazingly, the party said, "This is she."

I read from my notes: "I was wondering if you had a cottage available for the entire month of July?"

"With whom am I speaking?" she asked.

"Miss Edgerly," I said, having elected the name of a Ma.s.sachusetts man recently tried for murdering his wife in a particularly hideous fashion.

Mrs. Berry asked the caller's age, and I said fifteen; yes, I knew I was young to be making inquiries about accommodations, but my mother was recently deceased and my father was spending long hours in court.

She said, "We do have two lovely cottages with sleeping porches."

"Are they really, really nice?" I asked.

"They're in great demand," she said. "Electric stove, baseboard heat, stall shower, picnic table-"

"Is it private? Because my father's kind of famous. He really needs an escape."

"We're quiet and peaceful here," said the Berry woman. "It's a perfect hideaway vacation."

"Can you save it for us?"

"Do you want to inquire about our rates first?"

I told her that my father, Mr. Edgerly, had instructed me to get the best accommodations available no matter what the cost.

"We require a deposit," said Mrs. Berry. "Do you have a pencil?"

I took my time, pretending to record every syllable. "My father will send you a cashier's check first thing tomorrow," I said, adopting the disburs.e.m.e.nt method repeated daily on The Millionaire.

"You are a very smart young lady," said Mrs. Berry.

The next morning on my way to school, I anonymously mailed Mrs. Berry an old Globe clipping, its three-column headline blaring, EDGERLY TRIAL ENTERS 6TH WEEK; JURY SEES "GRUESOME" PHOTOS, to make the point vividly to Mrs. Berry that her system-rooms open to any Gentile who dials her number-was unfair. I enclosed another clipping from my archives (LIZ AND EDDIE/SAY I DO'S/BEFORE RABBI)-this one from Photoplay-which spoke respectfully, even warmly, about Liz Taylor's conversion. The wedding shot showed them under a chupa, the new Mrs. Fisher in a flowered headband and Eddie in a somber dark suit and white satin yarmulke. Honored guests included their best friends, famous and beautiful Hollywood Jews.

In 1964, I would send Mrs. Berry a copy of the new Civil Rights Act. I wrote, "U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C.," in the upper-left-hand corner of the envelope, and typed a letter that said, "Dear Hotel Owners, It isn't only Colored people who are helped by this law. Jewish people and others you have excluded in the recent past must now be welcome at your accommodations. It is the Law of the Land."

Who knew if I'd ever exchange another letter with a doc.u.mented anti-Semite? Just in case no one ever insulted me again-in this land of religious freedom and ironclad civil rights-I employed the big gun I was saving for future transgressors: "P.S.," I typed and underlined: "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

TWO.

We lived on Irving Circle, a cul-de-sac in Newton, Ma.s.sachusetts, famous for its esprit de corps and its near-perfect record of all girls and no boys. The houses were built in the mid-1950s by one man, who named the street after Irving Berlin and added a breezeway, a cupola, a picture window to give each identical ranch house its own character. All had one-car garages, hot-top driveways, lampposts in a lantern motif, and italic house numbers in hammered wrought-iron. It wasn't the grandness of the street that made real estate agents bring a certain kind of family to it-it was modest, in fact, and cookie-cutterish-but the democracy: No one's house was better than anyone else's. All the buyers were veterans, new homeowners, and, as the developer bragged at the closings, good people who would cut the other guy's gra.s.s if he was on vacation.

For a long time, we did that and more. We walked into one another's kitchens without knocking, opened refrigerators without asking, trick-or-treated as a gang. All you had to do was look at the group photo, updated annually at the Memorial Day block party-dads in the back row with long-handled utensils behind wives holding cake plates behind children sitting cross-legged in cotton sunsuits-to see what we had. Life magazine could have snapped us with a wide-angle lens and captioned us AN AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOOD BEFORE HOUSES NEEDED ALARMS.

My parents were Audrey and Eddie Marx, no famous love story, mismatched from their first date, but decent people who stayed married to each other. He was a fruit man and she was a number of things: a pixie-haired redhead, size 4, who cleaned our immaculate house in short shorts, and introduced the neighborhood women to iodine in baby oil as a tanning agent. Her interior decoration was thought to be advanced: sh.e.l.lacked Gourmet covers as kitchen wallpaper, and an oil painting in the living room that no one understood.

Our neighbors were the Donabedians, the Iacovellos, the Nagys, the McKemmies, the Forestalls, and the Loftuses, representing enough cultures and religions to substantiate Newton's unwritten boast of being one third each Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish.

Mr. and Mrs. Loftus, the other Jewish family on Irving Circle, built the last house on the street in 1959, the same year we lost the handsome and adventurous McKemmies temporarily to California. The spring before, after a Disneyland vacation, they returned with the news that they were moving there. It had been a scouting trip, we learned; California promised wonderful opportunities for McKemmie Storms and Screens. Four or five months later, they were back. Kathy McKemmie told us that Whitey and Judy from Leave It to Beaver had been in her cla.s.s, as well as Tonto's daughter. They had had Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant, and almost every yard had a swimming pool. I heard a neighbor say, over drinks in aluminum tumblers, "No need for storm windows out west, Al?" and Mr. McKemmie had said, "Margaret missed her family."

Soon afterward, a moving van pulled up to the newly built Loftus house, and the circle was complete. Pammy and I watched the contents unload, and guessed by the ta.s.seled bike handles and the white provincial bedroom suite that we were getting more girls.

When my mother dropped in that afternoon with her two-toned pistachio bundt cake, Mrs. Loftus invited my parents for dinner on the spot. My mother said, "Absolutely out of the question; you've just moved in and couldn't possibly entertain." Mrs. Loftus said, holding the pink-and-green cake aloft, "We've got dessert. I'll broil some steaks and bake some potatoes."

And that was that. She came home and reported as much as she was able to observe without asking rude questions: The girls were Marla and Sh.e.l.ley (I was between them in age); the house was completely unpacked and set up, down to pictures on the walls and the spoon rest on the stove. There was a mustard-and-brown dining room (hated) and cuckoo-clock kitchen wallpaper (loved). Both girls were adopted, which explained their straight blond hair.

For a few happy days, I was courted by both sisters, who wanted nothing to do with each other. Marla soon recognized my low social standing on the street-defined by my braces and gla.s.ses and twenty-inch bike-and worked her way into the clump of girls a year older (Claudia Forestall, Marybeth McKemmie, my sister, Pammy) who took the public bus to the junior high and dressed alike. Our mothers took us two younger girls to lunch in department stores, pretending we were better friends than we were. That's how it was on Irving Circle and how I was raised: You made the best out of what was within reach, which meant friendships engineered by parents and by the happenstance of housing. I stayed with it because we both had queenly older sisters who rarely condescended to play with us, because Sh.e.l.ley was adopted and I was not, because Sh.e.l.ley had Clue and Life, and I did not.

THREE.

My father sold fruit from a truck, which was parked year-round in front of his small shop on Harvard Street in Brookline. Inside the shop were cheap straw baskets stacked to the ceiling and cases of the novelties that adorned them: jar grips, rabbit's-foot key chains, marshmallow chicks, wax lips, candy cigarettes, b.a.l.l.s and jacks, bubble-gum cigars, decks of Old Maid and Authors, nickel-plated lighters, Chinese finger puzzles, paddle b.a.l.l.s. To tease my mother and, on occasion, his mother-in-law, he'd answer a question about his line of work by saying, "Peddler."

"He owns a produce business," my mother would say, correcting any impression that we were poor.

"I specialize," he'd add.

"In gift baskets," said my mother. "He's famous for his arrangements."

He'd give the listener his card by this time, or at any point the listener evinced signs of sidling away. It said, FRUIT BASKETS FOR ALL OCCASIONS, CUSTOM.

"NOTHING SAYS CONGRATS OR OUR THOUGHTS ARE WITH YOU ... LIKE FRUIT."

OPEN 7 DAYS, EDDIE MARX, PROP.

My mother, doing homework for her perpetual college courses, didn't help with the business. If the red phone in the kitchen rang after hours and my father wasn't home, she let it ring. And who could have pictured her at the fruit truck, giving change from a dirty ap.r.o.n and tousling the hair of customers' kids? It wasn't just her tanned and finished look that made her girlfriends wonder how she had paired up with Eddie Marx, but that other thing-the college girl and the fruit peddler, the Jewish debutante and the blue-collar laborer, the tiny bathing beauty and the big bulvan.

She always told it the same way: "Eddie was in Boston the same time I was." B.U. would be mentioned, or Bay State Road, leading to the flat-tire episode that both of my parents liked to tell with their own twists, and that my maternal grandfather told best and most economically of all.

"You met him at B.U.?" the listener would ask.

"The last day of my soph.o.m.ore year. I was packing the car, yelling at my father because he had driven right over a broken bottle."

"And Eddie?" they'd prompt.

"He said, 'Need a hand?' My father said, 'You mean it?' He opened the trunk, found what he needed, and thirty seconds later was on his knees."

And while my father was changing the tire, my grandfather was busy asking questions: What kind of business was his father in? What street in Chelsea? How many brothers and sisters did he have? What plans did Eddie have after graduation? Boston State? Not Boston University? Cost any less? Were his brothers big men too? Ever heard of Interlon? Well, know what interfacing is? Did his mother sew? Ever see her sew an extra layer of stiff cloth between the body of the garment and the facing?

It was inevitable that a conversation between my grandfather and a mechanically competent, friendly Jewish boy in which Interlon was mentioned would lead to a summer job offer.

Eddie said, "No, thanks. I help my dad in the summer. It's his big season."

"Fruit, did you say?"

"That's right," said Eddie.

"We go through a lot of fruit in our house," said Mr. Cohen.

Audrey, approaching with a huge Raggedy Ann doll, a tennis racquet, and a gooseneck lamp, heard "truck," and pictured exactly what Eddie's father's livelihood was: fruit sold from an open truck, a scale hanging from the back, and Eddie's father making change from a bus driver's coin holder. "This is everything," she said. "Let's go."

"I'd help," Eddie said to Audrey, showing his palms, "but I don't want to get your things dirty."

"You've helped enough already," said my grandfather, "and I just wish you'd let me buy you lunch as a thank-you."

Eddie looked down from his great height at Audrey. She smiled politely-the man had changed their G.o.dd.a.m.n tire, after all-but in sourpuss fashion. My grandfather asked her, "Where can you get a nice lunch around here? Where do the professors eat?"

"All my stuff is in the back," she said, hoping her father would understand that she couldn't have lunch near B.U. with this man-he looked old for a college student-especially with her sixty-year-old father along to pepper him with questions about the fruit business.

Eddie said, "Thanks, but I'll take a rain check."