The Hotel Neversink Read online

  THE HOTEL

  NEVERSINK

  ADAM O’FALLON PRICE

  TIN HOUSE BOOKS / Portland, Oregon

  The magnificent Hotel Neversink is the crown jewel of the Catskills, a sprawling resort of unparalleled luxury that hosts athletes, actors, and even presidents. Owned and operated by the immigrant Sikorsky family, the hotel is a realization of their wildest American dream. But then a young boy disappears.

  This mysterious vanishing—and the ones that follow—will brand the lives of three generations. At the root of it all is Asher Sikorsky, the ambitious and ruthless patriarch whose founding of the hotel in 1931 sets a fearful legacy in motion. His daughter Jeanie Sikorsky sees the Hotel Neversink into its most lucrative era, but also its darkest. Decades later, Asher’s descendants grapple with the family’s heritage in their own ways: grandson Len fights to keep the failing hotel alive, and great-granddaughter Alice sets out to finally uncover the identity of a killer who has haunted the hotel and family for decades.

  Told by an unforgettable chorus of Sikorsky family members—a matriarch, a hotel maid, a traveling comedian, the hotel detective, and many others—The Hotel Neversink is the gripping portrait of a Jewish family in the Catskills over the course of a century. With an unerring eye and prose both comic and tragic, Adam O’Fallon Price details one man’s struggle for greatness no matter the cost, and a long-held family secret that threatens to undo it all.

  For Elizabeth, for everything

  A History

  1. Jeanie (1950)

  2. Leonard (1950)

  3. Hannah (1955)

  4. Joseph (1960)

  5. Henry (1963)

  6. Lenny (1966)

  7. Alice (1973)

  8. Mr. Javits (1975)

  9. Rachel (1979)

  10. Alice (1985)

  11. Len (1988)

  12. Ezra (1996)

  13. Susannah (2001)

  14. Alice (2007)

  15. Noah (2010)

  16. Ensemble (2012)

  An Ending

  A History

  An article in the Liberty Leader, dated January 8, 1931, announced, in the breathless style of the times, “Local Tycoon Dies in Penniless Despair, Foley House to Be Pawned at Auction.” The local tycoon was George B. Foley, and Foley House was a symbol of his fortune and misfortune, in equal parts. Foley, born an orphan after killing his destitute mother in childbirth, went on to possess one of those uniquely American success stories, both wildly improbable and somehow preordained by his intelligence and cunning. Starting in the 1880s with a single horse-drawn carriage, he amassed a small fortune in livery and turned that into a large fortune in lumber and construction, personally hiring urchins like himself out of local orphanages and homes like the one he’d run away from at fourteen.

  They were put to work building some of the grand homes beginning to dot the Catskills and the Hudson River Valley around the turn of the century, including Foley’s own. A cadre of builders was devoted solely to this project, with the ground broken in 1900 and a two-year project timeline. Foley House was situated on the highest point in Liberty—Neversink Hill—a jutting thumb of granite named after the river that wound around its base. It overlooked the town and surrounding environs, and from its apex you could see the distant Suffolk County Boy’s Home, where Foley had been instructed in how to suffer and survive.

  The mansion was designed to accommodate a sprawling future clan—eight, ten children, perhaps more in his grandest imaginings—with dozens of bedrooms apportioned over three stories. At the time of Foley’s architectural design, he was engaged to a local girl, so these plans were not mere fancy. Shortly after their marriage, however, she contracted typhus and died. Construction was paused from 1901 to 1907, during which time Foley mourned and, for both emotional and financial reasons, moved a great deal of his business to New York City. Putting up many of the tenements in what is now the Lower East Side and Chinatown, Foley accrued a vault of lucre and built Foley Two, so-called, this time on Long Island’s Gold Coast, with easements and tumbling garden walls shared with families named Vanderbilt and Gould.

  That was all they shared with him, this grubby provincial who sullied their parlors and dance floors. Finding himself as lonely rich as he’d been poor, he sold Foley Two and returned to Liberty; but having grown accustomed to the scale of Gold Coast homes, Foley One now seemed paltry, unbefitting his original vision. Despite now being in his forties, he imagined himself the sire of more and more children—twenty, thirty, a biblical number! He put his team back to work, as he too went to work finding a mother for these spectral offspring. It would have been easy enough to scour the poor local towns for a girl, blank-eyed and high-foreheaded and wide-hipped, of a regional type he used to rut around with in his younger years. But being rich, and—crucially—exposed to the snobbery of the even richer, he had in mind a woman with blood pure enough to cut his own rough sludge.

  On a tour of England in 1910, he found her, a woman named Anna Katheridge, the daughter of a baron in arrears, a perplexed gentleman with a country manor coming down around his great red whiskers. These financial woes made it surprisingly easy for the baron to overlook a rich American’s lack of pedigree and table manners, and on a third visit, in 1911, the baron granted Foley his daughter’s hand in marriage. The wedding date was set, the house neared completion, and Anna was booked for the States in lavish style on the RMS Titanic, which set sail from Southampton in April of 1912.

  Over the next ten years, building continued with unabated, even accelerated, vigor and urgency. Rooms were added monthly. In 1920, a fourth floor. Turrets and parapets. The building team, many of whom had worked on the house for two decades, were mostly of the opinion that Foley had lost his mind.

  Whatever the case, Foley’s behavior became increasingly erratic, and he sequestered himself in a large corner bedroom on the third floor, sometimes for days on end. When he emerged, it was usually with a bottle of wine in one hand and a clutch of further plans in the other, instructions to the shrugging foreman and his crew of orphan boys, most of whom now had families and houses of their own. By the 1920s, some of their teenage sons were on payroll, working beside their fathers. And while the crew felt a certain shame in the manifest pointlessness of the house’s endless construction . . . well, the usual excuse went that it was Foley’s money, and he had plenty of it.

  And would forever, so it seemed. Like a wagon released on a slight decline, Foley’s business trundled along without guidance, its speed increasing under the weight of its own inexorable success, until it hurtled off the edge of the financial cliff in October 1929. His inability to pay his workers finally brought construction on Foley House to a halt, with a final count of ninety-three individual bedrooms (most with bathrooms en suite), four floors, a fifth subterranean level, three ballrooms, two dining halls, two kitchens, an auditorium, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, an elevator, and countless nooks and crannies—spaces of no discernible use, though that could be said of the entire house, the entire property, for that matter, a craggy sprawl of shadowy pines tumbling down to the river below.

  On January 1, 1931, a leap from the roof brought George Foley’s dissolution to a halt. With its deceased owner’s assets intestate and in massive debt, Foley’s Folly, as townspeople referred to it, was put up for auction; to the dismay of many of these same townspeople, it was purchased by a local Jewish innkeeper named Asher Levem Sikorsky. Sikorsky had been looking to expand his hotel, and though the mansion far outstripped his relatively humble ambitions, as well as his available credit, he saw in the sprawling grounds an equally sprawling opportunity. Borrowing and leveraging every penny he could, Sikorsky signed the deed on Foley House in July of 1931. He renamed it aft
er the hill on which it perched, after the river that wound by its base, and after his fondest dream of continued, continuous prosperity: May Your Fortunes Never Sink! read the plaque over the front door. In June of that same year, the first guests arrived at the Hotel Neversink, and finally, after three decades, its rooms were filled with children.

  1. Jeanie

  1950

  Yesterday, a boy disappeared from the hotel. Jonah Schoenberg, eight years old. Today, we assembled in the Great Room—dozens of local people, staff, and guests volunteered to help the police search for him. An outpouring of support for the family that eased, a little, the worry everyone in the room felt. The boy’s mother and father had asked me to speak, to direct the crowd as usefully as possible. The father was in conference with the police; the mother, white and shaking. I had personally moved them into our Presidential Suite for privacy and comfort, though what, truly, could be of comfort to her at this time?

  “Please,” I said, “anything you need.”

  “Find my boy,” she said, looking up at me as though I possessed some mystical power to make things right. “Find my boy.”

  The search party walked down the road to the base of the hill. With the hot sun rising high above us, we spread out and scaled the hill again, slowly dragging the woods in a long, grim line. I had not been in this region since we first bought the hotel many years ago. But the trees bent over us as they did in my memory, thick and shadowy, swaying together as though in secret conference with each other. After an hour, we regained the Neversink, and on the north lawn I stopped at my father’s grave—a small plot at the tree line, barely noticeable. The headstone’s marble was cool under my hand: Asher Levem Sikorsky, b. 1882–d. 1948. No inscription, because none was needed: the Neversink was inscription enough. As we pressed on into the northern woods, calling for the boy, I felt myself somehow calling for my father, calling for myself. I thought of the long, arduous journey he had made to wind up here. The success he had at last achieved, and in doing so the price he—all of us—had paid.

  My father was not an easy man. But why should people be easy? It is a cherished lie of the modern world, of America, that everything should be good and easy, as though comfort were a moral condition rather than a historical fluke. I already see in my children an abiding, soft sweetness, as though the country of their birth was, while they slept, piping them with cream. They cannot know, and should not, the feeling of true cold, true hunger—hunger so complete and total that one’s mind becomes like a dying candle cupped in a blizzard. They do not and should not know, yet I silently resent them this privilege they will never know they possess.

  When we still lived on the farm, in Silesia, our father nearly starved us to death. This was in the midst of the drought that came as a treble curse so close after the Great War and the subsequent uprisings. It was as though God, in his wisdom, had heard the prayers of our people and answered them with a further test to prove that things, truly, could always be worse. Three years with scarcely a single rain shower had winnowed our farm down to the four of us—my father, my mother, me, and my little brother—and a mule we’d named Zsolt. During planting season my father would trudge out in the blue morning, side by side with Zsolt, and they seemed a single creature, a two-headed beast of burden going about its senseless labor.

  For we knew that, even should the rain have come again during the summer, the ground was so parched that the topsoil, and my father’s seedlings, would be washed away. And so the rain came at last, and so it was. And in our barren harvest, we knew the winter would kill us at last. Anything but moving from the farm was hopeless. My mother pleaded almost daily with my father, behind the heavy closed door of their bedroom, to let us leave.

  “And go where,” he might have said, in a version of this conversation I must have overheard dozens of times.

  “Wrocław. You know that. We have family there.”

  “They have a home here that is theirs. They have pride.”

  “Pride will not feed them.”

  “But loss of it will starve them.” Then the sound of crying and my father’s murmurings. “Tut, little chick. I will see us through this. One day, we will have everything anyone could ever want.”

  For my father had long carried an image in his head, a vision of himself as a figure of importance—someone who would become Someone—if fate would serve him a turn. His mother, my grandmother Perla, had spoiled him, her only son—though their family was poor, he was first to eat, and he ate well. She bought him books and sent him to school, telling him “Asher, work hard and you will bring us great honor and great fortune.” How this promise must have nourished him as we bent to our empty bowls, warmed him like the small fire we huddled around after supper, thin as bundles of dry sticks.

  It is difficult to explain to someone who has never gone hungry what it is like to not eat for days on end, a week; rather than simply a state of discomfort, the hunger becomes something active, the thing you fill your time with. You can think of nothing else. Joseph and I would play a game called “Restaurant,” in which we would pretend it was our birthday and we could have any dinner we wanted. With my brother playing the white-shirted waiter, I would order my feast: piles of roast beef with gravy, potato pancakes, paprika cabbage in the sauce my grandmother used to make, green beans with bits of ham, and kolachkes for dessert. My brother, when it was his turn, simply wanted bread, buttered bread, endless trays of it. This was in the good times, when we had the energy to play. In the bad times, we simply lay in our beds.

  I cannot remember when, but at some point, my mother began to obtain our meager sustenance. Once a week, Monday mornings, she would put on her walking boots and heaviest jacket. She disappeared down the path that led to the rutted road, her small figure moving carefully on ground covered by hoarfrost. In the afternoon, she would return with a small bag of game meat and a few vegetables—turnips and carrots, and sometimes potatoes if we were lucky. This bounty she made into the thin, watery stew we ate twice a day. I don’t know where she got this food, if it was charity, or if she earned it in some way I refuse to imagine, but I came to realize it was a kind of arrangement between my father and her: if we were to cling to the side of his dusty mountain, she would bring back the sack of food. But it was never discussed. For months this went on, as though my father believed the stew was either arriving through divine providence or else somehow created from the occasional withered plant he foraged, the skeletal rabbit that collapsed in one of his traps.

  One night, eating silently, I noticed our father was watching our mother through slitted lids. Hunched, scowling over his bowl, he finally put down his spoon and said, “Where did you get this food?”

  To this day, I have no idea what changed that night. Perhaps he really had, in half-starved derangement, convinced himself he’d been providing the food. Perhaps he had discovered what the transaction in the village was. Perhaps he’d always known and could simply not take it any longer. In any case, he was angry, angrier than I’d ever seen him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me, Amshe.”

  “Asher.”

  “It is not ours,” he yelled. He picked up his bowl and hurled it, half-full, across the room, where it shattered against the stone wall. Around the table he went, doing the same to our bowls. Joseph bawled, but I knew better and sat very still, feeling the white flower of hunger rooted deep in the soil of my stomach. Standing by the pile of broken earthenware, the thin gruel already seeping into the floor, he said, “We cannot eat what is not ours.”

  He pushed into the pantry and emerged with the paltry sack, holding it with a prosecutorial look, as though it proved something. He went out into the freezing cold and into the stable. A minute later, he emerged with Zsolt, the animal blinking past our windows, muzzle twitching as it followed the smell of the sack. The flickering candlelight played along the accordion of its ribs. My father held a gun over his shoulder, a balky musket from the Crimean War, and old Zsolt seemed resi
gned to whatever was coming. It was as though my father had conferred with the beast and convinced it to accept this as its due. Or perhaps, as one twinned creature, he was doing away with the other half, the part of him that had labored so long and for so little.

  I put on my mother’s heavy coat and went outside. The wind bit into my bare ankles, but I wanted to see what would happen, though I knew. In the field, my father scattered the bag’s contents on the frozen ground. The mule worked its handsome head side to side as it bolted our week’s sustenance.

  My father said, “Go back inside, Jinya.”

  “I want to watch.”

  He gave me the slightest nod, a momentary flash of recognition, then returned his attention to the mule. When Zsolt finished eating, he looked up as though just noticing us, steam rising from his flared nostrils. In a single smooth motion, my father raised the gun to the mule’s head and fired. Zsolt dropped to his forelegs in a polite, almost graceful curtsy, and fell sideways, dead.

  For the next two months—February and March—we ate only mule. First mule tenderloin (not so very tender), then mule rib, mule sausage, mule shank, sliced mule heart. By the end, we were eating another soup prepared by my mother, this one made from boiled mule hooves. The soapy bitterness of it still sometimes rises into my throat, and I gag a little at the memory. But it took us through the winter, and it remains inside me, the long-ago version of myself that was nourished and sustained by that mule, by my father.

  On a bright sunny day in April, with ice melting down the roof in rivulets, my father walked down the muddy path toward town. Two days later, he returned with a pellet-filled squab and the news that he was going to America. Until he sent for us, we were to stay with our mother’s sister, in Wrocław. And so we did, living there for two drab years with my aunt Sara and her husband and family. It is strange how gray these days seem in memory—after all, we were no longer constantly hungry and cold—and in contrast, how brightly colored our desolate farm, with its sprays of larkspur, its sprinkles of hollyhock. Despite the best attempts of Sara and her family, their home was not our home, their town not our town, their life not our life. Lying in my cot in the colorless dawn, I stared at the spidery lines of cracked plaster overhead and thought how my father had been right: a proud home that is your own—a person needs this the way they need food, water, air.