Free The Resort by Sol Stein

husband?
    To Clete, Margaret said, “Where are the young children?”
    “There are no children, Dr. Brown.”
    “What about the nursery?”
    “There is no nursery,” Clete said. “Oh, by the way, your husband and I were just exchanging notes about New York and California.”
    “Clete’s never been out of California,” Henry said.
    “Don’t feel sorry for me,” Clete said. “California’s a big and varied place. I like it here. And the people. I don’t mean movie Jews or students, people with real values about the world. There was this one couple who were like a mother and father to me, not just talkers and doers, people with ideas to put into practice, and they taught me a lot more about life than I ever learned in high school.”
    “Who were these people?” Henry asked. He thought it a good idea to keep Clete talking, but wondered why Margaret was sitting as if carved out of stone.
    Clete’s eyes glistened. “Mr. and Mrs. Clifford. They had more than a dozen of us on their ranch, fed us, gave us horses to ride, taught us what we had to know. Mr. Clifford it was who had the connections and the money to get things started. That’s why this place is named after him. Cliffhaven. Now, Mr. Brown, while we’re having our coffee, tell me about you.”
    This is insane, thought Henry. This is the United States. We don’t have things like this here. But at the same time he felt no anger, as if the problem was an abstract one or concerned other people.
    He doesn’t realize about the food, thought Margaret.
    *
    For a long time Henry had put out of his mind what had happened to him at Fort Benning, Georgia, toward the very end of the war. They were housed in two barracks, the officer candidates in his company. On the bottom floor of the first barrack were the trainees whose last names started with Acker and ended with Fielding. Opposite his bunk, across the aisle, lived a tall, slightly pockmarked boy from southern Illinois named Cooper who, one night, brought a clip of live M-l ammo into the barracks and, without the stimulus of alcohol, stood up on his bunk while everybody was cleaning their weapons, shoved the live clip into his rifle, and looking straight at Henry, announced at the top of his voice, “The only mistake Hitler made was he didn’t kill all the fucking Jews.”
    They were bedded in alphabetical order. The bunk to Henry’s right was the province of a young man named Brownell, who had admitted to Henry during one of their late-night chats that, before the army, he’d never met a Jew. It was Brownell who slowly got off his bunk and strode across the aisle. Suddenly he grabbed Cooper’s rifle away from him, pulled the bolt back, unloaded the M-l, threw the empty weapon on Cooper’s bunk, and said so he could be heard by everyone who was staring, “That’s not a toy,” and that was that.
    Except the next day Henry had, with some trepidation, sought out his platoon leader, a certain lieutenant from Virginia, and told the officer about what had happened the night before.
    “Why are you telling me this?” the officer had said.
    “Cooper just could have shot somebody.”
    “He broke the rules, bringing live ammo into quarters,” the officer said. “If you and he and Brownell want to make an issue of it, I can tell you none of you is going to get your bars two weeks from now. If I were you, soldier, I’d just forget you came to see me.”
    Two weeks later to the day, Cooper and Brownell and Henry Brown were all made officers and gentlemen by act of Congress, second lieutenants of infantry in the Army of the United States.
    *
    “Hey there,” Clete said, “you’re daydreaming. I asked you to tell me about yourself.”
    Henry stood up, got behind Margaret’s chair so she could rise easily, then walked with her through the dining room toward the door. Some of the guests pretended not to watch. Others couldn’t keep their gaze from the familiar spectacle of a first-nighter’s behavior.
    Clete