On the Edge

Prologue

Many years ago, already married and with children grown up, I was driving from Providence, Rhode Island to New York City with my wife, and, as we came through western Connecticut and saw a turn-off for Danbury, I said to my dearly beloved, we should go see if we could find the lake where my parents used to take the family for holidays back in the mid 1950s.  I remembered two landmarks that would be near Ball Pond, whose name was surprisingly no longer on any maps I had consulted over the years: near the little rural  city were a series of hat factories, which made Danbury famous throughout America in those days when more wore hats and would have felt naked to go out in public without one; the other was the federal penitentiary, a jail described as being like a first-class hotel because most of its inmates were financiers and accountants caught in tax evasion swindles and other tricks.  Well, since men stopped wearing hats regularly by the 1950s, it was no surprise to find none of the factories or any signs along the highway.  But we did see a notice for the prison, and thus were able to turn off to go along that secondary road.  We took a short stop at a diner, where we had a snack and looked at the big tourist map on the wall for any lakes or ponds that looked likely.  Then I asked the woman at the cash register if she knew about a lake called Ball Pond that had small hotels, one of which was named Edgemere.  She called her husband in from the kitchen, both conferred, and told us: There used to be such a place, but it had been drained and built up for a housing project about thirty years earlier.  Did they want us to call around to see if any of their friends could give us better information?  We declined.  There wasn’t much time and what was the use?  Better to keep my memories intact, passed on already to our children and grandchildren, as a family tradition.

Here are some of those memories, whether true or not being of little moment.  What is important, though, is what they still mean to me and therefore to my son and daughter and their children.  What else do I have to bequeath but these vague memories?

Into the Land of Birch Beer

To go to Connecticut was a big shlep before there were interstates, but an exciting drive anyway, because it meant getting out of The City and going into The Country.  Summer or winter, it didn’t matter. Snow or rain did. Most of all the family was going all together, and to a place where there were no Restrictions, that is, where Jews could go, as well as Blacks (called politely Negroes, then) and Catholics, but mostly Yiddlach and somewhere other than the Catskills or the Jewish Alps. 

Now we knew we were almost there and could begin to relax when we crossed the state line, and you knew this when you stopped at a café or a service station and they had bottles of Birch Beer.  More than the tall slender and always leaning trees themselves, it was the availability of this drink—so very different in taste, tone and aura than Root Beer—that less know we had crossed the boundary into New England, the home of stockbrokers, rich people and goyim.

From then on we were in Connecticut, more than a state, it was a state of mind, and soon enough there were the signs for Danbury Hats and for the Federal Penitentiary, so just up the road, through some rolling hills, and there it was the big lake, actually a much smaller body of water called Ball Pond, but it seemed immense and awe-inspiring, and, yes, there it was, jutting out on a short peninsula, the hotel, Edgemere Lodge.  What a shayne sight! What a lovely little old hotel!

A Place of Rest for Seasons

In the summer on the lake we could row and swim and just walk around or sit on the porch and snooze.  It was warm and pleasant, quiet, not too many insects, and it wasn’t crowded.  In the winter, with the snow and the ice, such a nice cosy time we had because maybe we were the only guests and the owners, a nice family, with grown up children, and one or two waiters and handymen, would all sit with us, or rather we would sit with them in the little brick and wooden kitchen instead of the dining room, and in the kitchen there was a big open fire and a smooth old wooden table for eating and schmoozing. 

Maybe in the afternoon, if it was sunny, winter or summer, my father would take us for a little spatzier outside along the shore of the lake or over the low hills all around, or if it was too cold and windy then we would sit in that kitchen and some people would schmooze and some would snooze and some would read a newspaper or a book or play a game checkers.  The lady that owned the lodge would always have a big pot of coffee for the grown-ups and of hot chocolate for the kinder and every once in a while a stickle peanut brittle or a piece yummy strudel. 

You would think this was paradise, a regular Gan Eden.  So why not?  Even in the summer, when my family were not the only guests at Edgemere and we ate in the dark-wood lined dining room with other guests, the whole experience was a dream.  So why, you must be thinking, am I telling you this, since nice things and smooth plots do not make interesting stories?  You would be right, but only if you didn’t know my family.  There were no fights, nobody mumbled bad words under their breath, and bad things never happened there.  But always, considering who we were, with the memories we had, and the imagination also in myself, you could not enjoy in a perfect bliss.  A sip of hot chocolate in the winter, a glass of icy cold Birch Beer in the summer, was not enough to make us forget who we were.

Where do They keep Reality?

All this, you should understand, is what I wanted to show to my wife because she comes from southern Missouri, her family hillbillies and Fundamentalist, and she only knows from me what it was like on Ball Pond.  But time flies, people get older, and things change—they don’t remain, even features of the landscape like a little lake.  So on we drove around Danbury and into the hills.  Maybe the dreams were still there.  Maybe the trees still that we once sat under or climbed on.  How can one know?  If the builders come and bulldoze away a natural part of the environment, then a visitor who only has a few hours cannot find where that place of memories once was.  It remains only as some vague memories in the mind.  And for my wife or my children or their children, it is not even that: at best maybe it is the memory of me telling them something they could not really imagine.  And so sooner rather than later that memory of a memory will pass away. 

Swimming through Sludge

One strange memory that keeps coming back, albeit in various forms, is of swimming across the pond itself in the summer on very hot afternoons.  Sometimes I think there was another person alongside in a rowboat to watch out.  Though my strokes were slow and hardly methodical, my strength carried to the other side of the little lake and then back to the dock in front of the lodge where we stayed.  Other people, when they went into the water were faster and more skilful, to be sure, but often, if they were younger or sometimes older, would not have the stamina to go all the way across and would turn back half way, climb into the boat alongside, or float for several minutes to catch their breath and regain their strength.  But I always kept on without a pause, from one side to the other, and then, without a stop, back again. 

Yet what stands out in my dreams is the fact of the thick algae and slimy weeds that turned the pond a viscous green.  Late in the summer, when the weather had been relentlessly hot for a few weeks, the water had a sickly smell.  That odor turned off m any of the guests who wanted to cool off in the pond.  “It doesn’t bother me, “ I would say, partly in a boastful way, and partly in a resigned concession to the realities of the world.  Neither the thickness of the sludge nor the stink that it would produce kept me from my daily swim across and back in the pond. 

While I manoeuvred my way, using a variety of strokes to keep me going, paying no attention to how awkward or ridiculous my motions might be to anyone looking on, there would ring through my mind a song once heard on the radio about a swamp girl who went down to the depths of a sludgy bayou or lagoon somewhere in the deep south and who was accompanied by strange frightful creatures.  It was a song that made little sense to me, but its monotonous rhythms kept me going, and I would partly hum and partly signal with my arms the words, and especially about the way the swamp girl lives inside one and haunts one’s whole life with her mysterious seductive powers.

Tales of High Adventure in the Kitchen

There was a year when my parents went to Edgemere Lodge in the middle of a cold winter, so cold none of us ventured out but stayed indoors almost the whole time we were there.  At such times, you will recall, we would sit in the kitchen rather than out in the wainscoted dining room, and were usually alone with the patrons.  But this particularly cold year, there was another couple there, a man and a woman who had no children.  Everyone would talk for hours before and after the meals and nothing stands out in my memory about what was said, with one exception. 

When the scene comes back to me now, for some reason everyone else had gone away, perhaps for their afternoon naps, or to sit by the windows on the thick lumpy but comfortable chairs and stare into the wintery landscape, enraptured by the fading light of the sun which sinks long before evening usually begins.  It was only the husband and wife and the owner of the hotel sat the table.  They were sipping cups of steamy hot coffee.  Perhaps they forgot I was still there or thought I was too young to care or know or remember what they were talking about, for they seemed at ease, intimate, and, dare I say it? Conspiratorial.    In part they were right.  I cannot remember all that they said, and in what I do recollect I know it didn’t make much sense, and yet I was interested.  It seemed very important, very grown-up, the things that adults do not want children to hear, that probably would frighten them.  It seemed there words about politics and fighting somewhere in the world, and references to people and places that I had never heard before, and hints about something that would have to be done, and that without further delay, but that no one they knew was prepared to take the lead, and wouldn’t it be a shame if the opportunity was lost. Sometimes there would be a pause while the patron went to the stove to bring back a pot of fresh coffee and then he would return, tap his fingers on the table, and say something about the need to try to call the people they sued to know over there and see what plans they could make.  The two men whispered something else, the woman laughed, and then all of them sighed. 

In the kitchen, everything seemed warm and comfortable, as safe as possible, and I looked through my half-closed eyes at these people who seemed not to remember who I was and yet their presence made me feel deeply happy to be there with them and to hear this special grown-up talk.  Outside, when the sound of the voices around me grew still for a moment, the sound of heavy wind could be heard and branches knocking against the roof.  That outside world was thick and oppressive, very much like a wall of snow keeping the other world out of sight and out of mind.  “If only the leaders would make a firm decision,” I seemed to hear, and then, perhaps in answer to some remarks that had passed by, “”It’s not like the good old days” and, somewhat later perhaps, “My son, if he were alive, well, it would be a different story, wouldn’t it, but it’s too late now, too late for him…. And I fear for all of us.”  Eventually, my father came back into the room and told me to go to the room and lie down there if I wanted to sleep.  “You have a couple of hours before dinner,” he said, and then to the three others at the table, “He hasn’t been bothering you, has he?”

When the Moon Disappears

The last memory I have comes from a few years later, from may also be about the last time we went to Ball Pond.  I was then eleven years old.  When we went away now, I had my own room, while  my sister, still a small child, slept with my parents in their room.  It was a bit scary because, unlike at home, where everything was familiar, at Edgemere, despite dozens of visits, the room and the furniture and the very sounds throughout the night were strange.  Though I made no formal complaints, my father seemed to understand and he whispered to me before he closed the light and left me alone, “Just look through the window and you’ll see the moon.  It’s the same here as back in Brooklyn.  You can depend on it.”

            The door clicked shut.  The room was dark.  In a few minutes, my eyes adjusted to the night and there outside, in the sky, just above the hills across the pond, the moon sat in all its white radiance. 

“Hi there, Mr Moon,” I said.  “Good to see you over there. “

For a while, I lay on my side, looking through the window into the night and contemplated the white disk hovering over the water and casting a long wispy beam towards me.  It seemed to say, “Don’t be afraid.  If you have a bad dream, put your hand out and my beam will touch you and everything will be fine.”

“Thanks, Moon,” I whispered to the lunar body, and then I fell asleep.

I don’t know how long I lay there silent and oblivious to the world, but at some point my eyes peeked open, and the room and the world outside was pitch dark.  Unlike the city everything was perfectly still: no cars rumbling by, no subway trains in the distance, no voices of passers-by out on the street.  Dark and silent.  Suddenly, it struck me: the moon had disappeared. In fact, the whole world seems to have vanished, leaving only a black thick nothingness…

In a moment, I was standing up, putting my hands out, like a bond man or a zombie.  It was impossible to know where I was. 

“Where are you, Mr. Moon ,” I said.  “It isn’t fair.  You promised.”

Then the door came up and bumped into me.  My fingers found the knob, which I turned, and was out into the hall.  It too was dark and silent, but when I looked as hard as I could, there were some thin shafts of light under some of the doors, and when I listened really really hard I could hear sounds, first, like music on the radio, and then voices, but I couldn’t tell if they were also on the radio or from people in one of the rooms talking to each other.

Something banged.  I turned around to go back into my room but I couldn‘t remember which one it was.  A square of light exploded into the hallway, then vanished with a bang. Silence followed.  The slither of light slid back under the door.  The whole hall was black.

Crawling down the corridor from room to room wondering which was mine, which my parents, which the other guests, some lit faintly by the reddish glow that came from radios, others more white from bed laps, and most dark where everyone was asleep, and yet there were fragments of speech, men’s, women’s and the indeterminate:  people say things like “did you remember to take your pills” and  “yes, yes, right there, that’s the spot, slowly, please, slowly” and somewhere else “shh-shh, they’re bombing the canal now” or “why didn’t you pay the damned bill”. 

But when I wake up, I am in my bed, the sun is already shining brightly, and though the moon has disappeared, like the memory of how my room once again formed around me, the night has left a shadow over me.  It takes a while to climb out of the bed.  By the time I am dressed and ready to go downstairs for breakfast, most of the memories have been shuffled off.  The rest of the day carries on normally.  Months and years later, this night still haunts me, and I keep asking the moon to tell me what I have forgotten, but he refuses.  The hotel, the pond and that night have all but disappeared.  All except the niggling sense of something important being missing in my life, so that every time the moon shines brightly the pain strikes me right in the heart.