We emerged one by one from a large round hole in the ground, each of us, waiters and waitresses, bearing trays of food and drink for the patrons of a Catskills resort. It was early summer, 1946. My left arm was swollen and sore from the tetanus and typhus shots administered by a doctor in anticipation of my passage across the Atlantic Ocean to Southampton, England.
To distract myself from the soreness in my upper arm, I sometimes imagined the tips I might find among used glasses, dessert plates, and spilling ashtrays on the stained tablecloths when lunch or dinner was over. Those who tipped me at the end of their stay, rather than each day, would press pocket-warmed dollar bills into my hand.
The underground kitchen where we worked was connected to the upper world by a short spiral stairway. It was a hard climb upward, turning in a circle while carrying a full tray; sometimes one of them was dropped to the floor below. China crashed and fragmented, liquids splattered, food fell in repugnant lumps, the metal trays and covers banged and clattered, leaving silence in the wake of these disasters soon broken by our murmurs and cries of sympathy for the waiter or waitress whose tray had fallen and who was staring down in dismay at the underworld.
The dining room was thirty yards or so across a lawn, and its glass doors provided another hazard when they were closed against inclement weather. Yet it was a relief to be aboveground, out of the tight kitchen quarters and away from the predictable outbursts of the three bad-tempered cooks.
The male customers I waited upon called me dear or darling. Their wives or girlfriends gave me hard looks if they glanced up at me at all. Younger guests ignored me, except to send me back underground for more bread and water. I worked at the resort for five summer weeks, sleeping nights on a cot in a staff dormitory that smelled of unwashed socks and raw pine boards.
When I went back to New York City, I sublet a room in a tenement on Morton Street from an American Indian who was returning to his reservation in Arizona for a two-week visit.
There was, unaccountably, a shower stall standing in the center of the room that resembled a shaky voting booth. When I turned the taps, a spray of tepid water dropped on and past me to the grainy floor. I kept beneath the cot mattress a small roll of money I’d saved from the resort tips and my wages. The amount was enough to pay for my passage to England and, I estimated, a month of living in London.
The only window was close to the cot and gave onto a rusty fire escape. Beyond it was a narrow, dark airshaft.
Early one morning I awoke to find a young man crouched on the metal bars, staring at me through the open window, which I had flung up the night before. When he saw I was awake and staring back at him, he asked me for a cigarette, saying in a slurred voice that he had run out. He was fair-haired and thin, and his eyes held a reddish feral glow. I had a nearly empty crumpled pack of Camels beside the cot. I eased one out so it wouldn’t break in two and handed him the rest of the pack; he muttered thanks and climbed back up the fire escape until he was out of sight. A few days later, I learned from the old Italian landlady that he’d overdosed on a drug she didn’t identify and had been taken to a nearby hospital in an ambulance.
Decades later, at a party given by the painter Wolf Kahn on a Martha’s Vineyard farm he had rented for the summer, I saw the red-eyed man again, recalling his face at once perhaps because he had startled me so—and frightened me, too, although I had not at the time recognized that fear. It came to me now. Wolf told me later his name was Miles.
He didn’t recall the circumstances, but he remembered me too. I reminded him of the cigarettes I’d given him as he crouched on the fire escape. He pressed nearly a whole pack into my hand as we stood there on the hummocky ground. Both of us were struck by the same impulse; we bent forward and embraced, then stepped back and stood silently for several moments until Emily, also a painter and Wolf’s wife, came between us with a plate of fresh corn.
THE SHIP I SAILED ON TO ENGLAND HAD BEEN MINIMALLY converted from its wartime function as a troop carrier. I wasn’t troubled by its discomforts; I had hardly noticed them. I was departing from what was for me a land of sorrow. But it turned out that when the ship sailed one morning from New York City, my past followed me like its wake. On deck were the substantial ghosts of all the people I had ever known.
The journey took six days. One hot night, I was uncomfortable in my berth and went up to the top deck to sleep. I found a large group of people on deck in their nightwear, each one equipped with a pillow and a light blanket as I was, laughing and talking beneath a sky spangled with stars, some leaning on their elbows or sitting up and clasping their knees. Among them were several young people going to Yugoslavia to work on the “youth railroad” only for the glory of it.
One of them whom I knew, Kurt, who was eighteen, told me that night, or boasted, about his mistress, age thirty, and how she had wept when he said goodbye to her. He was a skinny boy, fluent and good-looking, well on his way to becoming a seducer of women. I could hardly have guessed that night, sitting with him, both of us covered with our blankets—it was chilly on deck—and talking with momentary intimacy, that I would meet him again four decades later at an Italian Center for the Arts that also held monthly conferences.
We recognized each other but had different memories of what had happened. He confided to a member of the bankers’ conference he was attending that I had tried to draw him into a shipboard affair. I was happy to see him and recalled how he had spoken of his older lover on the voyage. For the five days the conference lasted, he smiled remotely at me. Once I heard what he had presumed to recollect, I stopped smiling back. I didn’t ask him how he had liked Yugoslavia and the railroad.
One morning, seagulls began to circle the ship. Several hours later we landed at Southampton. From there, most of us took the train to London.