Summer Accommodations: A Novel by Sidney Hart

The women canasta players got little attention because women were lousy tippers. “Thank you dolling, and a pinch on the cheek is nothing to take to the bank,” they’d complain.
    Table assignments in the dining room followed room assignments at the hotel. Stuart Stein, the Maitre d’ who called himself “Sandy” in the summers, dispersed the guests according to a plan he had designed years before. The young singles were clustered to the rear of the dining room but dispersed among three different teams of waiters and busboys. The singles were notoriously cheap and often skipped out without tipping. The “young marrieds”, as they were called, couples without children, sat towards the front across the aisle from Sammy’s station. The waiter assigned to them was usually a basketball player, often an All-American like Ivan Goldman, who was admired by the husbands and swooned over by the wives. Sammy, who was tolerant but cool towards these jocks, his celebrity being confined by place while theirs extended far beyond such local borders, was assigned the Braverman regulars, repeat vacationers who requested Sammy’s station and were rewarded for their generous tips with seats by the windows overlooking the pool. The less generous or more querulous were given to Abe who rarely complained and accepted his lot stoically. Abe’s tables abutted ours along the wall just down from the windows. Stuart took pride in his distributions, rewarding the more compliant and cooperative waiters with new guests who drove fancy cars, information the bell boys supplied, and punishing the trouble makers by assigning them the families that arrived in old wrecks loaded with children and grandparents, large families with little likelihood of proferring munificent gestures of appreciation. I wondered what kind of group Harlan would harvest. His station was located at the rear of the dining room diagonally across from me and from all the windows. Most likely he’d get the newer and less aggressive vacationers, perhaps newlyweds who only had eyes for each other anyway and couldn’t care less about views.
    Then there were the guests, especially the women guests. They came in all shapes and sizes, in all tones of the flesh from milk white to olive bronze. They had blonde hair, red hair, black hair, chestnut brown and champagne pink hair. They were obese and slovenly with tubular rolls of fat hanging like aprons over the waistbands of their pedal pushers and toreador pants, their bulging buttocks straining the seams of these too-tight garments. Or there were the friendly but plain ladies who looked like the mothers and sisters of my friends in the Bronx, non-descript, hardly worthy of a young man’s notice, eliciting neither critical abuse nor lustful fantasies from the dining room staff. But then there were the shapely and gorgeous ones who seemed to find one another quickly and clustered together at poolside like members of an exotic harem; women with fiery red talon-like nails, luscious lips bathed in a creamy, cherry- red wet and glistening lipstick which they licked and caressed with the tips of their tongues; deep tans on their bodies which they oiled and basted by the hour as they lounged on their chaise lounges—the Catskill translation of chaise longue—and discussed their lives, their dreams, and what to do to keep a man reined in and grateful for any attention bestowed upon him. It was not as though they were as thoroughly cynical as this may sound. They truly believed in the virtues of their values and their experiences had rewarded them for staying close to that system which had guided their fortunes. Their husbands were always referred to as “decent and hard working” when they spoke of these men to the other women. But, occasionally, one of the beauties would tell of the dull accountant who was seen in a nightclub with a young showgirl, unmindful of his family’s fight