Free The Seduction of Water by Carol Goodman

the middle of winter.
    Jack cancels our Wednesday night together—so he can catch up on the work he missed going out with me on Tuesday—and I realize that instead of a sea change, our Tuesday night together was merely a misplaced entry on the ledger books to be made up somewhere else.
    I collect the fairy-tale papers from all my classes. Eighty-six of them altogether, including Aidan’s hand-delivered essay, which I put on the pile with the papers from Grace College when I get his transfer notice in my mailbox. By the time I wade through the misspellings and incorrect usages, the fragments and run-ons and comma splices, the stack of red-marked essays are so much bloodied paper and my red-stained fingertips the hands of a butcher.
    At the end of each day—when I’ve taught my classes and marked the requisite number of papers I’ve assigned myself—I sit at my desk and try to do my own writing. I stare out the window where, some days, just before dusk, the cloud cover lifts for the moment before sunset, releasing a thin band of copper-colored light above the New Jersey skyline. I tap my pen against my desk to the tune of
follow-up piece
and
possibly publishable
. I try to think about my mother—about what I might write about her next. But instead I think about my father, about how saddened he would be if he knew the hotel was going to be torn down.
    The hotel was his whole life. He’d come there straight out of the war, wearing the one suit he owned—other vets dyed and wore their uniforms but my father burned his—with nothing but his own father’s warnings ringing in his ears. What kind of job is that for a Jew? A
hotelier
? my grandfather had said to him. He was supposed to go to City College and become an accountant, but on the first day of classes he caught a train north and answered the ad the Mandelbaums had placed in the
Times
for a night clerk at the Hotel Equinox—“a family hotel in the heart of the Catskills overlooking the beautiful Hudson River.”
    “I liked that,” my father would tell guests over a cigar and a glass of seltzer in the Sunset Lounge (my father never drank hard liquor). “A family hotel. At the end of the war a French family put me up in their hotel while I recuperated from pneumonia. I got to like the hotel life. Of course, I thought the Mandelbaums were Jewish.”
    They weren’t. They were Quakers. The hotel wasn’t in that part of the Catskills—it was north and east of Grossingers and the Concord, isolated on a narrow ridge above the Hudson River. It was the kind of place where wealthy families from the city had summered for generations, hiking and swimming in the cold lake—not playing bingo and canasta by a pool. The nightly entertainment was more likely to be a lecture on birding or “folk songs around the campfire” than a Borscht Belt comedian or social dancing. But the Mandelbaums didn’t care that my father was Jewish or that he’d never worked in a hotel before.
    “I liked how clean he looked,” Cora Mandelbaum once told me. “I knew he’d be a hard worker. He’s never let us down.”
    And he never did. Not until last spring when he came back from the hospital in Albany with the news that the touch of indigestion he’d been getting every night after dinner wasn’t Cora’s stuffed cabbage, it was a tumor, high in his stomach, too close to his heart to operate. The doctors gave him eight months.
    “This season you’ll be our guest,” Cora told him. “You’ll sit in a lounge chair and take it easy. Let the college kids do the work.”
    But my father wasn’t one to lounge. He’d seem to sometimes. To keep a guest company he’d sit with his seltzer and cigar and admire the sunset, looking like he had all the time in the world. My father never hurried. But always, he’d have one eye on the new bartender, an ear cocked for late arrivals, for the crunch of gravel on the driveway and the ping of the bell at the front desk. He worked through that last