A Town Is Drowning Read online

  It was the car that had passed them. Zehedi recklessly stopped alongside him, making it a tight squeeze in case another car wanted to get by. The other driver misinterpreted the move.

  “Jesus!” he said. “That’s a good idea! Keep them from getting past into that. Jesus!”

  He was in a flap, Groff observed. It wasn’t surprising. “Flood?” he called. But he knew the answer.

  “Flood? Christ a-mighty, the whole goddam Atlantic Ocean’s down there. I was trying to pass a lousy milk tank truck for five miles—they ought to widen this road, you get stuck behind a truck on these hills and—anyway, I finally got past him, and all of a sudden I hear him blowing his horn like a son of a bitch and I turn around and—” The man choked. “Jesus!” he said again. “That lousy little creek. This time of year, half the time it’s practically dry. And here’s the whole creek jumping up out of the ground at me. I stepped on the gas and got the hell out of there.” He peered back nervously, as though the creek might still be following, though they were easily two hundred feet up. “You haven’t seen that milk truck, have you?”

  It would be a long time, Groff was absolutely sure, before anybody saw that milk truck again.

  Zehedi leaned across him. “Hey, mister. You think there was much damage down there? I own the store back there —you know, Sam’s Grocery, down at the foot of the hill.”

  The man laughed. It sounded very nervous. “Not any more you don’t,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  If you had smoothed out the crumpled paper to look at the ad, you would have read:

  GOUDEKET’S GREEN ACRES

  Your happy vacation hideaway, tucked away in the heart of the majestic Shawanganunks. Golf! Tennis! Riding! Swimming (Two Pools)! Moonlight dancing! That grand Goudeket Cuisine (Dietary Laws Observed) I Under personal direction of Mrs. S. Goudeket.

  However, you would have had trouble smoothing it out, because it was soaked; it had been thrown in the middle of both of Goudeket’s Green Acres by a dissatisfied customer, raging at the malicious trick Mrs. Goudeket had played on her by causing it to rain for three consecutive days.

  Mrs. Goudeket, wearing a set smile that was ghastly even in the candlelight, moved among her guests. She was arch and gay with some of them, apologetic and sympathetic with others, as circumstances indicated; but in her heart she was tom between rage and fear. Now it rains! For two months not a drop, so the grass is dying and the dug well for the swimming pools goes dry, and the guests complain, complain, complain, it’s hotter than Avenue A, Mrs. Goudeket, and couldn’t you air-condition a little, Mrs. Goudeket, and frankly, Mrs. Goudeket, what I wouldn’t give to be back in our apartment on Eastern Parkway right now, we always get a breeze from the ocean. And now it comes down pouring, almost all of last week, and now it starts again so hard the lights go out and the phone goes out, and there’s a hundred and sixty-five guests looking for something to do.

  She told herself pridefully: Thank God Mr. Goudeket didn’t have to put up with this.

  Not that he could have handled it; he would have retreated to his room with a stack of Zionist journals, written letters to friends in Palestine, wistful letters saying that maybe next year they’d have enough for a winter cruise—

  There had never been enough for a winter cruise; Mrs. Goudeket had efficiently seen to that. First things first. A new roof before a winter cruise to visit Palestine, new pine paneling in the recreation room, things you could lay your hand on. And Goudeket’s Green Acres grew. Because of her.

  But she had been kind and reasonable. She had let him send a hundred dollars a year for planting orange groves. She had never argued when he talked about retiring some day and going to Palestine—he always called it that, even after it was Israel—to live. She could have argued; she could have told him plenty. That this is America, that here you don’t retire and doze in the sun, here you drive hard and get big.

  Dave Wax came half-trotting through the dim rooms looking for her. He started to call to her, changed his mind and came close before he half-whispered. “It’s the telephone, Mrs. Goudeket. It’s working again!”

  “Ah!” she exclaimed. “Why are you keeping it a secret? It’s good news, let’s tell everybody—they can use a little good news. You see—” She turned to the nearest couple—“they’ve fixed the telephone lines already. I bet they’ll have the electricity on in ten minutes, you wait and see. Did you call up, Dave?”

  “Call who, Mrs. Goudeket?”

  “The electric company, Dave!” He shook his head. “Go call them! No, wait—better I’ll call them myself.”

  Let him talk to the guests a while, she told herself grimly. Perhaps when the lights were on again and things were back in their normal swing she would want to talk to her guests again. Or perhaps, she thought, hurrying across the dark and deserted entrance lobby, she would go up in her room and lock the door and pull the covers over her head, as she wanted to about once an hour from May through September of every year since Mr. Goudeket died.

  The phone was working all right, but it wasn’t working well. Mrs. Goudeket got the Hebertown operator and asked for the number of the power company’s repair service, but there was so long a wait after that, filled with scratchings and squeals on the wire, that she began to think something had gone wrong. She pulled out the jack and tried again on another line.

  All it took was waiting, it turned out. While she waited Mrs. Goudeket had plenty of time to think of the meaning of the long wait to get connected with the repair service. Not that that was any surprise, actually, because she had been through storms before in the majestic Shawanganunks; but always before it had been maybe a quick, violent thunderstorm coming up after a hot spell, and it was a lark for the guests because it was a change, or maybe a violent autumn storm when only a handful remained. But here were a hundred and sixty-five who had been penned in the hotel for days already and…

  “Hello, hello?” She tried to hear the scratchy voice at the other end. “Can you hear me? This is Mrs. S. Goudeket, from Goudeket’s Green Acres.”

  The scratchy voice was trying to say something, but she couldn’t hear; evidently, though, they could hear her so she went right on; “Our electricity is off. Can you hear me? Our electricity has been off for two hours. They fixed the phone lines, why can’t you people fix the power lines?” More scratchy sounds. Mrs. Goudeket listened to them—first casually, out of politeness, then very, very hard. Then there was a click.

  Mrs. Goudeket looked thoughtfully at the switchboard for a moment.

  This is new, she thought. Her mind was cold and alert; she knew she could not afford rage. The electric company here is not a good company, not like the wonderful Consolidated Edison in New York City. Here they overcharge you—by mistake, they say—and here the meter readers are underpaid and insolent, even with good customers like me. Their repair men are unshaven and lazy and when they finally get to you they stretch out a job forever so they don’t have to hurry on to the next. But this is new, this hanging up. I’m no fool, not after thirty years in the resort business; I know their phone girls are under orders to kid the customers along, promise anything, not to hang up.

  Something must be happening, something bad.

  She walked slowly into the lobby, with a mechanical smile for each sullenly accusing guest. At the cigar stand she told little Mr. Semmel: “A pack of cigarettes. Any kind.”

  He raised his eyebrows and passed one over. As she clumsily tore open the pack, extracted one and lit it he began to grumble: “Some hotel. Some light-and-power company. By now I should be getting the overnight lines for Monmouth, Hialeah and Sportsman’s, by now I should have booked two hundred dollars on tomorrow. Believe me, Mrs. Goudeket, this is my last year at Green Acres. This kind of thing doesn’t happen up at New Hampshire Notch; I don’t pay good money for the concession so this kind of thing happens.”

  A fattish, red-faced man bulged up to the counter, breathing whiskey at them. That’s a Young Married, Mrs. Goudeket t
hought with distaste; that’s what I have to take at this place because I can’t get enough nice young people. “Sammy,” the red-faced man complained hoarsely, “isn’t the damn ticker working yet? I’ve got fifty bucks I have to play. You’re busting my system to hell.”

  Mr. Semmel said politely: “I’ll see, Mr. Babin.” He opened the plywood door behind the stand, looked into the little room where the teletype horse ticker stood, and closed the door again. “I’m sorry, Mr. Babin,” he said, with a look at Mrs. Goudeket. “I think the wire’s okay, but you got to have power to run the machine and there isn’t any power. If it comes on later maybe I can phone Chicago for a repeat—if there’s time before midnight.”

  “Nuts,” Babin said, and headed through the candlelit gloom for the bar.

  “You see?” Mr. Semmel hissed, in a hate-filled whisper. “You see what you’re costing me? Never again, Mrs. Goudeket!”

  She wandered off, preoccupied. Semmel was a nobody, a clerk hired by the big brokers, in spite of his pretensions. But if the brokers, in their cold and analytical way, did decide at the end of the season that Goudeket’s Green Acres didn’t handle enough to make the operation worth their while, next year nobody would come around and bid for the horse-book concession. And it was the concession that pushed the resort over the line between red and black ink.

  You had to make money and you had to grow. Mr. Goudeket had never understood that. Orange trees were all very well, but since 1926 she had been the driver, the doer, the builder. And Mr. Goudeket had never got to Palestine after all, which showed that dreaming got you nowhere. She felt a guilty twinge. One year they could have made the cruise. One year there had been nothing urgent, which is a miraculous year in the resort business. She had put the money aside as a reserve and said nothing about it, and poor Mr. Goudeket couldn’t understand a financial statement. The guests loved him, his Zionist connections had been valuable, though he never suspected it, and he had been a fine all-around handyman since the days in the Brighton Beach boarding house; he had saved them thousands of dollars with his clever hands and brought in thousands of dollars with his connections. But grow? He had never understood. And so he never got to see Palestine? What of it, anyway? And again Mrs. Goudeket felt the guilty twinge.

  She peered into the bar; it was doing a good business by candlelight. Her Young Marrieds—she grimaced—were getting drunk early. Dave Wax was on a barstool with an on-the-rocks glass in front of him; he was telling one of his stories.

  “Dave,” she said softly, “when you’ve finished your drink why don’t you give a little show for the people outside?”

  The comedian theatrically gulped from his glass and told his barmates loudly: “I love this dear lady. Just like my mother, she is. Just like my mother—always hollering, ‘Get to work, ya bum!'

  He pranced out, grinning, on the tide of half-drunk laughter. She watched him from the bar for a minute; he went looping through the room loudly announcing a one-man show by that star of stage, screen, TV and radio, Dave Wax, also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs, call Murray Hill 3-41798805427—it went trailing on and on and on as he led them to circle him around the piano. He pounded out the introductory chords of his “Nervous in the Service” routine, which was very funny and not too dirty; from there she hoped he’d go into a community sing; that would calm the people down.

  She went to the switchboard again and snapped the toggle for the outside line. Try the electric company, get some kind of a real promise out of them, maybe bully her way through to the Load Dispatcher, a really responsible person, not like their phone girls.

  “Hello,” she said. “Operator, hello?” The line wasn’t stone-cold dead, but it wasn’t buzzing with the reassuring familiarity of the dial tone. A delusive droning kept encouraging her to try; mechanically she switched off and on again, asked for the operator, tried dialing various service numbers. As she went through the motions she thought abstractedly that something had to work; the horse-book concession was absolutely vital. She’d always known she should have an auxiliary generator, paid for God knows how, so the teletype could be kept going—but what good was a teletype with paper and no line in? It was dawning on her that the place was cut off from the outside world, that the wires were down and would stay down for hours.

  Radios? The radio must be saying something. There was a little station in Hebertown that played nothing but records and news a couple of times a day from the Weekly Times office. Junk like who’s in the hospital, the borough council meeting, “want ads of the air,’

  ’ traffic things. They’d know what this rain was doing, they’d have an estimate from the power and phone companies of the damage to the lines and when they’d be back in service.

  The radio would tell her everything she needed to know; then a calm announcement to the guests and everybody would go to bed cheerfully, rather enjoying the excitement…

  But little Mrs. Fiedler came up and she had her portable radio in her hand, weighing her down like a suitcase; it wasn’t one of those little pocket jobs but a substantial long-range outfit. Little Mrs. Fiedler made something of a nuisance of herself when she played it beside the swimming pool—highbrow music from New York City stations.

  “Could you get me an outside line, Mrs. Goudeket?” she said. “I want to call my mother in New York so she won’t worry.”

  “Worry? About somebody at Goudeket’s Green Acres?” the old woman kidded. “She should have such worries. But I’m sorry, the phone’s out again. I don’t know for how long. But why should she worry?”

  “There was a news broadcast from New York, there’s a flood up in Richardstown. Of course that’s a hundred miles away, but to my mother, the mountains are the mountains.”

  “Ah. Richardstown. Mrs. Fiedler, did you try the local station? Let’s go into my office and see what they have to say.”

  But even the big, powerful portable failed to pick up the local station. Mrs. Goudeket refused to think of what that might mean.

  Alone again, she realized that she’d have to send somebody out into that terrible rain, send them to town, the Times office or any other phone they could reach. She had to know what was coming next. Send who? Not the bartender; he was the most valuable man on the premises right now. Dave Wax was next, and the kitchen help couldn’t be spared. Dick McCue, the “golf pro”—nineteen years old, doubling in trumpet—where was he? He should be in the social hall backing up Dave Wax, keeping the people busy, keeping their minds off—whatever it was. Where was he?

  And then she thought, distastefully, of exactly whom she’d have to send. Sharon Froman, she called herself, and in the wild week before opening she had let Sharon Froman foist herself on Green Acres as a “publicity director”—just room, board, ten a week for the season. At first Sharon Froman had actually worked; she had written good stories that actually appeared, not cut too badly, in the issues of the New York Post which also carried Green Acres advertisements; maybe she had even got them a couple of guests. That lasted for about ten days, and then Sharon Froman had slowly withdrawn from any hotel activity except eating; when you passed her room at any time of the day or night you were as likely as not to hear the muffled thudding of a noiseless portable. When Mrs. Goudeket barged in or met her in the dining room and asked how the publicity stories were coming, Sharon Froman would smile vaguely, teasingly, and say something that didn’t, after you stopped to think of it, make sense. “I think I’ve got a very dynamic program lined up, Mrs. Goudeket, and I’m polishing the rough spots.”

  Black-haired, square-jawed, near-sighted, in her early thirties, a persuasive talker—Mrs. Goudeket was the living proof of that—groomed either to perfection or not at all, maybe five feet six, easily twenty pounds overweight. Sharon Froman. The perfect expendable to go out and learn the score. Mrs. Goudeket started grimly up the steps. You better be feeling good and dynamic, Miss Sharon Froman, she thought, nerving herself for a battle. I got some real rough spots for you to polish now.

  In
the bat’s nest that that sneaking old hag Goudeket called a room, Miss Sharon Froman was lovingly recopying chapter one of Her Novel. Her only light was a candle socketed in the sticky neck of an empty Southern Comfort bottle, and the flame flickered and turned blue regularly as the wind swept through the closed windows. What a shack, thought Miss Sharon Froman, not in anger but in judgment.

  But it had its compensations. She could see the jacket copy for the novel now: “Spraddled Evening is an odd book, written at odd times in odd places. Begun in a shabby trailer outside a Mississippi Army camp—” She grimaced, remembering how perfectly foul Ritchie had been when she’d had story conferences with Don while Ritchie was restricted to the post—“it was shaped and polished by turns in the dub car of a transcontinental train, a cold-water flat in the East Bronx, a luxury resort hotel and a Jersey fishing village, reaching its evocative climax while Miss Froman was—” Well, that you would have to wait and see, thought Miss Froman, taking page 2 out of the typewriter. But the end was almost in sight. The first chapter set the tone for the whole book; and now that that was nearly perfect it was only a dash to the finish line.

  She lit a cigarette from the candle before she put page three into the typewriter. Page three was the one that would do Hosch in the eye. He’d be sure to recognize the savagely drawn, feudal-minded pants presser if he read it—and he’d be goddam sure to read it, if he had to hock the watch she’d given him to get the price. Sixty bucks that watch had cost out of her share of his Christmas bonus, and it was the only decent thing he owned. “So why doesn’t he sell it,” she demanded of the wind, “if he’s so broke he can’t keep up the alimony?”