1996
The Neversink was closing, and Len was having a final night with friends and family, former employees. Did I want to come? I’d dithered on this point for several months. The last time I’d been, years before, it was too painful to see the state of the place, and this despite the fact that I’d never really cared about the hotel, certainly not like my little brother did. I’d never bought into the mythos surrounding it and my grandparents, never fancied myself the inheritor of an empire. When I left for school, I was happy to renounce an ownership stake in exchange for a modest monthly allowance. This supplementary money has come in handy over the years, allowed me to pursue my interests in academia—take positions not purely based on a paycheck or quick tenure—and indulge in the little pastimes and minor passions for which bachelorhood makes room.
I was grateful for the allowance, but still hated going to the place. In its festering decrepitude, it reminded me of nothing so much as a diseased body—diseased for decades, and now, with its official closing, deceased. Nonetheless, I felt obligated, and with the semester over, I was out of plausible work excuses. I packed my bag, packed my car, left the key for my neighbor, Mrs. Shelden, to feed the cat, turned the thermostat to sixty-two, checked the tire pressure and oil, and set out to pay my last respects, to sit shiva with the Hotel Neversink’s corpse.
On the drive down, crossing a rickety one-lane bridge, I noticed a convocation of eagles nesting in a tree by the river. I pulled over, took pictures, and made a note in my birding book. As a boy, I used to watch them with a kind of pure pleasure, struck, as I’m sure most children are, by their plumage and the fantastic gift of flight. I went further, though, bringing home books from the library, science books that explained their descent from dinosaurs, which heightened my ardor. Then, on my thirteenth birthday, I received a pair of binoculars from my father, and, as they say, I never looked back.
How many countless dreary upstate afternoons did I while away, creeping through the forest around the hotel, clad in my boots and hunter’s jacket, binoculars around my neck and notebook in hand? When the boy disappeared—I was fourteen at the time—I was encouraged to curtail these excursions, but still I went. On weekends, many miles I would gyre around the Neversink like Yeats’s falcon, around a center that, I sensed, would not hold. At eighteen I left for school—Columbia—but continued the habit, as I did through my twenties, my marriage and divorce, my middle years. The life list has grown long, but I thrill the same as I did at fourteen to a new tick, that unique joy only other birders can understand.
I got back on the road with a happy feeling. But as the miles and hours went by and the daylight dulled into a misty upstate dusk, it was as though a thin gauze had been stretched across my vision, and I was once again filled with dread. In the purplish air I could see the Neversink, waiting. I even exited the highway with the fleeting intention of turning around. But no, I’d come this far, was only a hundred miles or so from Liberty.
We ate in the dining room, the twenty or so of us: myself, Len, Rachel and Noah visiting from the city, Susannah down from college, Javits, Sander Levin, and various former employees and longtime guests I didn’t know. The pervasive gloom of the hotel is difficult to describe. As Len led our group to the dining room, I caught my breath a couple of times—the cavernous dark seeming to reach out from places deep within itself. Even in the waning days, the Neversink had done a decent trade, and my memories of the place—populated by familiar old-timers and bustling employees and children carrying dripping toys from the pool—were vandalized by this new reality. My memories weren’t the only thing vandalized—upon arrival, I’d noticed the handiwork of some local graffiti artists, most notably on the south wing’s long side wall, where the word Mulciber! was sprayed, ominous and inscrutable, in dripping red paint.
The mood at the table was not exactly bleak, but it was muted. Len seemed like he’d been drinking—when we hugged, I caught the yeasty tang of beer on his breath. An older woman who Len said sometimes helped in the kitchen nervously brought out the plates of food, reminiscent of my grandmother’s cooking, though flavorless, as if they’d been run through a dishwasher before service.
But the wine flowed and the chat was pleasant enough. We all caught up, and I found myself glad I’d come, in spite of my misgivings. Dinner finished, we went to the bar, behind which ventured Sander Levin. He donned his white tuxedo jacket with a courtly little bow, and to a smattering of applause began mixing martinis. I am not much of a drinker, but I was so enjoying the conviviality that I stayed up, talking to Rachel, to Sander, to Len, not really registering the dinnergoers yawning, saying their good-byes, moving to the exit—to the rooms we’d been assigned by Len for the closing. Finally, it was just Len and Sander and me. Sander removed the jacket, hung it over the door, and with a grave look came from behind the bar to shake my brother’s hand.
“It’s been an honor, Mr. Sikorsky.”
Len wiped his eyes, embraced Sander. “The honor’s been ours.”
I couldn’t help being touched by the moment. I shook Sander’s hand, and he walked out with the stiff dignity of a soldier discharged from his duty. Somehow, with only the two of us now instead of three, the room felt desolate.
“What are you going to do now?” I said.
“Well, there’s a lot to do around here. Have to figure out what to do with the kitchen appliances, art, fixtures.” He gestured overhead without looking at the chandelier. “And the golf course is staying open.”
I nodded. He said, “What about you?”
“Oh, you know. Teaching, writing articles. Going to a conference in Vancouver in July.” I suspected Len wasn’t quite sure what my field was, and I was almost tempted to ask him, but I didn’t. “I’m going on an expedition in Victoria while I’m there. There’s a type of red-throated warbler thought to have been extinct for decades. It’s really quite exciting.”
He went behind the bar and sloppily fixed us another round, then bent forward on his elbows. “Ez,” he said, “I’ve got some bad news. I have to pull your allowance.”
“We can’t pay you out anymore.”
I sipped my martini, which now tasted of spoiled vermouth, water from a vase full of dead flowers. “That wasn’t the deal. It was supposed to be for life.”
“Well, the Neversink was supposed to be for life, too.”
“That’s not my concern.”
“It is, though, because there’s no money to pay you.”
“I find it hard to believe there’s nothing left behind. And you said you’d be selling off parts of the hotel, right?”
He looked at me with mild disbelief. “I’m selling stuff to pay our creditors.”
“Well,” I said, “consider me a creditor.”
“You always were a cold fish, Ezra, but this is really something.” He came around the bar with his sloshing drink, shaking his head as though to the beat of a tune only he could hear. “I’ll see what I can do. I know you’ve always counted on that money. But I have to tell you, if there isn’t any—if the golf course is in the red—you’re out of luck. It’s not as though you signed a contract.”
“It was a promise.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
We drank our drinks, raising them to our mouths with a mechanical air. My brother and I have never been especially close, talked to each other only on occasion, and I felt that distance between us now more than ever before. I didn’t really know him, and he didn’t really know me. We sat in silence. The darkness of the hotel just past the bar was like a living presence; from somewhere in its depths, a clock ticked like a heart. “Who,” I said finally, breaking the awful silence that had gathered around us, “do you think it was?”
“The killer.”
He looked at me. “How the hell should I know?”
“I’m asking who you think.”
“I think some lunatic out there.” He swept his arm as though the nearby wall were invisible and we had a vista that stretched all the way through the valley, to the city and beyond.
I should have stopped there. I should have said good night and gone up to my room. But the drink I had in me, the anger I felt at the prospect of being cut off, and the ambience of the place—at any moment you expected a gun to go off, a scream to issue, and Miss Marple to walk through the front door—all combined to produce in me a noxious mirth. “But surely you’d entertained the idea that it might have been someone here.”
He didn’t respond, bent forward over his drink with a slightly insipid-looking overbite. Even in my drunken state, I understood he was plastered, legless. Doubting he’d remember any of this the next day, I said, “I mean really, two of the killings happened here. Well one, I guess, but still.”
“Enough,” he said, waving his hand.
“It could be me! Did you ever think about that? I mean, I would have been a little young at the time, fourteen. But old enough. It might have been me this whole time, making the occasional trip up here to visit Mama. The perfect excuse! It’s as plausible as anything else.”
“Ezra, I mean it.”
“Or you! What if it was you? You would have been too young for the first one, I suppose. But how do I know what you’ve gotten up to since? You’ve been here the whole time. You were Mama’s favorite. If she’d found out, she never would have gone to the police. Ooh, or it could be Javits, Sander—”
Somehow this last was a bridge too far. He grabbed me by the lapels and stood me up. He said, “You are desecrating the last night of this place. Just leave.”
So I did. I got back in my car—ill-advised, given the drinks—and drove back the way I’d come. I couldn’t say why I’d done it, why I’d pushed him. The money, yes, but there was something else deep inside me—a sadness, a sad anger at always feeling on the outside, though outside is where I’ve always been happiest. Trees alongside the winding country roads seemed to lean in, grasp at the car, sensing my flagging attention, desiring me upside down in a ditch. When I made the highway, I immediately pulled off into a rest-area parking lot and fell into the kind of dark sleep that enshrouds, after the fact, any trouble it may have contained.
In the morning, the sun slanted viciously through the windshield, turning the inside of my eyes a fragile pink, baking the car’s trapped air. It was cooler outside, refreshing to be out of the hot stuffiness, and I walked around on dead legs that eventually began waking to the irrefutable fact of the day. A long sip from the nearby water fountain further revived me. I splashed water on my face and returned to the car, intending to get on the road.
Before I got in, however, a flash of yellowy-green caught my eye. A bird in the trees, one I didn’t recognize—I paused, listening to its call, a brief warbling complaint. A juvenile, by the sound of it. Gently closing the door, I retrieved my bag from the back seat, slung it over my shoulder, and crossed the tended lawn beside the granite bathrooms. No one seemed to notice me as I slipped into the woods, heart fluttering like the wings of the creature I pursued, ecstatic at the prospect of adding one more to the life list—that ineffable pleasure only other birders can really understand.