The Inn at Lake Devine (6 page)

She asked me if I thought Nelson went to church or to temple. I explained patiently that religion ran in families; there was no way Nelson Berry went to temple.

“Good,” said Robin. “I mean, I’m glad he’s the same thing I am.”

I asked her if she had seen
The Diary of Anne Frank
, with Millie Perkins, the model, because that explained what happened when things got out of hand.

She said she’d heard of Millie Perkins, but not Anne Frank.

I shut off the lamp between our two beds. After a minute, I whispered, “Robin?”

“What?” she asked groggily.

I said, “Don’t say anything to your parents about Mrs. Berry not liking me because I’m Jewish. People hate it when you think that, and she’d say it wasn’t true.”

“Okay,” said Robin.

•  •  •

T
he next day, at breakfast, Mr. Fife asked me if I wanted to take a little ride with him to the grocery store. He was going to buy a newspaper and would like the company. He also needed—wink—help choosing the penny candy. I waited for him to sweep Robin into the invitation, but she didn’t look up from her cereal, the same Sugar Pops every day. I said, “Okay. Sure. If you want me to.”

He waited until we had turned onto the paved road, then said, “Natalie, I hope you know that we think very, very highly of the Jewish people.”

I was stunned by the subject matter and by Robin’s overnight betrayal.

He said, “We live in a state that sent a Jewish man to the U.S. Senate.”

“I know. Robin told me.”

He said, “I work with several very smart and dedicated teachers of the Jewish faith.”

I said, “You do?”

“And you know I love music. I don’t have to tell you that. Do you know how many of the world’s greatest composers and lyricists are Jewish?”

“Lots?”

“George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Sammy Cahn … I could go on and on.”

It was so Mr. Fife-ish, but so earnest and well meaning that my eyes prickled with tears. I pictured the emergency conference he and Mrs. Fife must have had before breakfast—how would they handle Natalie’s religious crisis?

I managed to say, my throat a knot, “I know you’re nice to everyone.”

“And I wouldn’t tolerate anything else. Not in my family. Not in my classroom, not in my church, my choir, not anywhere.”

“I know,” I said.

“I play golf at a club that has several Jewish members. And Mrs. Fife and I have voted for Senator Ribicoff every time he’s run for office. He would
not
get elected in Connecticut if only Jewish people voted for him, would he?”

I said that must be right. What I didn’t know how to say was, Haven’t you noticed that you’ve been vacationing at a Christians-only hotel for the past fourteen years?

“Do you promise me you won’t worry about this anymore?” he coaxed.

I said I wouldn’t worry about it anymore.

“If you ever hear a word that insults you or your religion, then you’ll come to me. Promise? Even if it’s a month from now? A year?”

It was just the gassy gust of wind I needed to dry my eyes and restore my skepticism. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” Yeah right, Mr. Fife, my lifelong friend. Father of the stupidest girl at Camp Minnehaha.

“So do we feel better?”

I said I felt much better.

“Maybe a little homesick?”

“Maybe that was it,” I said.

“We’re your parents this week. And Robin is your sister. And Jeff and Chip are your brothers as long as we’re at Lake Devine.”

“Thanks,” I said, for the twentieth time.

“Can I say one more thing?” He flashed me the coy grin of a leading man about to break into song.

“Sure,” I said.

He smiled, waited a beat, then said proudly, “
Shalom hah-vay-reem
.”

Oh, God—Hebrew.
Hello, friends
. I asked how he knew that.

“It’s a round! I had a counselor at music camp when I was about your age who was from Palestine.” Then Mr. Fife sang in his most cantorial baritone: “
Shalom, chaverim, shalom, chaverim, shalom, shalom
 …”

“You come in … now!” he instructed, chopping the air between us.

And so we sang, round and round in a minor key, all the way to the store and back—“
Shalom, chaverim, shalom, chaverim, shalom, shalom
”—until the final sixty seconds, when we turned onto the dirt road and had to switch to counting.

I
could only speculate from Mr. Berry’s outward display of good humor that he was, at his core, more Christian than his wife. The term was supplied by Robin, who, quoting some Sunday School lesson, said that
Christian
meant kind, fair, good … 
exactly
like Jesus and his disciples—nice like her parents, like Nelson, like Mo, our junior counselor, and Mrs. Abodeely, the camp nutritionist, and, and …

“Me?”

She thought this over, frowning, her first bump into the guardrail between temple and church.

“If it means ‘nice’ or ‘fair,’ ” I argued, “then you must be able to say it about anyone.” I didn’t really care to win the point I was making. I found that needling her in the brains department relieved the tedium of talking to her—she who couldn’t take, make, or get a joke of any kind. Not that it was satisfying, with no audience to play to. By midweek, I was even missing my sister, the queen of disdain, the master of the withering smile.

I said to Robin one chilly morning on the dock, plucking a ruse out of thin air, “You know, in Tuesday Weld’s family, all the kids are named for days of the week.”

“Really? They are?”

“There’s Domingo, which is Spanish for Sunday—her brother—and a sister named Wednesday.”

“Really?” Robin said again.

“They call her Wendy for short.”

I heard a laugh behind me.

“Good one, Natalie,” said Nelson Berry. He walked right between us, his bare feet grazing our towel. At the edge of the dock, he hesitated for a few seconds, took his whistle off, and handed it to me for safekeeping. Feet together, he dove head-first, no tricks, into the shirred surface of the lake. He came up for air halfway to the raft, then switched to the backstroke, eyes conscientiously watching us, the minor guests.

Robin said, “It’s good that he can just jump in and doesn’t have to get used to the water first. I’d freeze.”

I, who had tried for my junior lifesaving certification at camp but had failed all parts of the test involving the rescue and towing of deadweight counselors, said, “That’s what a lifeguard does, runs and dives. You’re even supposed to do a kind of belly flop so your head stays above the water and you don’t take your eyes off the person who’s drowning.”

Neither one of us took our eyes off Nelson and his straight-edged, rhythmic backstroke.

Robin said, “I never saw him have to jump off and save anyone’s life.”

“Not in all the time you’ve been coming here?”

Nelson executed a snap of a racing turn against the barrels of the raft and was doing a slow crawl back, face out of the water and eyes meticulously forward.

“I think everyone who goes out to the raft knows how to swim really good, and everyone who doesn’t stays inside the buoys,” said Robin.

I stood up, the red cord of his whistle wrapped twice around my fist for safekeeping against wind and water and Robin Fife. Nelson Berry, age sixteen, with the Red Cross badge sewn to his navy-blue
trunks, knew my name and had used it in an unmistakably sympathetic manner. I slipped the whistle’s cord around my neck. Any second now it would be around his.

N
elson, everyone said, took after their father, who seemed happiest playing handyman, crisscrossing the lawn with a wrench or a trowel in his hand. Where Mrs. Berry was superficially gracious but internally cranky or worse, her bashful husband blossomed into a low level of jolliness, especially around kids. He called me Nat almost immediately, in what sounded like election to his exclusive club of favorite guests.

He seemed to like me, even appreciate me. He flagged me down the first time I passed him kneeling in a flower bed and asked if I was having a good time on my vacation.

I said I was. It was very nice here.

“The lake’s not too cold for you?”

I said, “Well, sometimes, but I get used to it.”

“Our little one’s not bothering you?”

I said, well, that was okay.

He sighed. “She can be a pest, no matter how many times we tell her not to bother the guests.”

I said I lived on a street in Newton, Massachusetts, with all girls. Every single family on my street had girls, so I was used to dealing with pests … in Newton. Newton, Mass.

“Is that right?” he asked happily. “I had an aunt and uncle in Newton and I used to love to visit them. They lived near a lake. Right in the middle of the town, it seemed like.”

“Crystal Lake?”

“That was it. Their house backed right up to it.” He chuckled. “Big stone house. They were the rich relations.”

By midweek, he was my favorite company. I’d abandon Robin on the croquet court to stand by him and wait for his questions.

“What does your dad do?” he asked early in the week.

“He owns a fruit store.”

Mr. Berry looked up and grinned. “Does he farm?”

I said no, he was strictly on the retail end.

“In Newton?” he asked.

I said, “Brookline, Mass. It started in Chelsea as my grandfather’s truck.”

He’d point to the burlap sack of bulbs or the potted seedlings, and I’d hand him one at a time. “You ever help him out there, Nat?” he asked amiably.

I said, “I sometimes help him with his fruit baskets.”

“Oh yeah?”

I explained about this sideline: the special orders, the novelties.

“That sounds real nice,” he said.

I listened carefully. There were no signs that Mrs. Berry had poisoned Mr. Berry. Sometimes, as she hurried past us to the dock or to a plumbing emergency, she’d say primly, “Hello, Natalie.”

I’d return a wan hello. She wouldn’t stop, but might glance back, at which time I’d take care to have resumed conversation with the far superior Mr. Berry. After we’d had a few daily chats, he said, “You miss your folks a bit?”

I said, “Not really.”

“I think my boys would miss us if they were away. And Gretel? We’d have to ship her home.”

I told him, “Mr. Fife said I was supposed to think of him and Mrs. Fife as my folks while I’m here.”

“Easier said than done, right? Only your parents are your parents, no matter how nice your hosts are. That’s what I’d say. Family is family.”

I handed him another cutting, and said after a pause, “They’re really nice, but they’re not like my parents.”

With two hands, he flattened the soil around a new seedling. “I’m usually around—you know me, puttering in some flower bed or other.”

I said, “I know.”

“Always around,” he said, “and usually hoping for a little company.”

I nodded but couldn’t speak. I knew he was looking at me when he said, “Good company and good conversation.”

I loved Mr. Berry at that moment, a wave of gratitude that left me mute.

“Any time, Nat,” he repeated.

R
obin had neglected to tell me that Gretel Berry was an annoyance factor to all girls vacationing at her parents’ inn. She was only eight or nine that summer, and was like a yappy dog who wanted to play fetch with every passerby. “Want to see my room?” she asked the daughters of every guest, regardless of their age.

Mr. Berry had apologized for her, and it was for his sake that I said yes. The small two-story house was down a path, about fifty yards into the woods. As I followed the annoying Gretel, she chatted in a run-on fashion that didn’t require answers. The back door was wide open, revealing one knotty-pine room bisected by a squat wood stove. I asked Gretel if they lived here year-round and she said they did. It wasn’t the house of a very formidable enemy. The kitchen had open shelves with no cupboard doors and a narrow two-burner stove, which, if the box of wooden matches were an indicator, needed its pilot light ignited with each use. I could see stacks of milky green dishes and sturdy glassware, the same dime-store variety that came with the cabins we had rented over the years. The living room was shabby gold and brown. An orange cotton bedspread with pom-pom fringe covered the couch. Good, I thought; Ingrid Berry has dreadful taste.

Gretel said, “C’mon upstairs.”

At the top, the knotty pine of the stairwell had given way to a dull lettuce-green woodwork. We passed what had to be, thrillingly, the boys’ room: bunk beds and plaid wallpaper extending to the eaves and ceiling. The parents’ room had a high double
bed covered with a yellowed chenille bedspread and decorated with a lone throw pillow of green polished cotton. Gretel’s tiny room at the end of the hall had ballerina wallpaper. Her headboard was tufted with pink oilcloth, and a flat gold button sat in the middle of each tuft. There was a doll bed with a flannel doll blanket in a pastel plaid. A baby doll in what I would soon learn was a christening gown was under the covers, the blanket tucked under her rubber armpits. “Her name’s Annette,” said Gretel.