Carolyn has always believed there was some reason, some calling, for me to return to the Catskills that was more alluring than friendship. She has always been suspicious of the trips and of my insistence on taking them alone. I had argued that Avrum would be uncomfortable if she was with me. It was a childish and transparent suggestion, but I could not think of anything else to tell her. “I could stay at the hotel while you’re with him,” she would protest, and I would answer, “Maybe next time. We’ll talk about it.” But there was never a next time. Finally, we had stopped discussing it. I would leave and Carolyn would be bitter. I would return home and nothing would be said.

There is part of me—my social conditioning, I suppose— that made me believe I should suffer guilt because of the trips and leaving Carolyn, but I did not. I think of the Catskills as my moment, my one grand, undeniable moment. Mine. Not Carolyn’s. Not mine and Carolyn’s. Mine, alone. How could I feel guilt over something that changed me forever, even if I had never expressed that change?

It was different in 1955. I wanted Carolyn with me. We even talked about it before the summer. The two of us working together in a resort in the Catskills, hundreds of miles away from our hometown. It would be fun, we said. And romantic. “I want to go with you,” Carolyn told me then. But it was only talk, a kind of dreamy prelude to the separation that we both knew would happen.

That separation was on the morning of May 27, 1955. It is one of the few dates in my life that I cannot forget. We were in New York City on the first stop of the high school senior trip, but I would not go with my classmates to Washington, D.C., and from Washington back to our home. I would say good-bye to them at Penn Station, would watch the train heave forward and take them away, with Carolyn waving to me from a window, crying and mouthing, “I love you.” And then I would walk back to the hotel where we had stayed and wait for my brother, Raymond, to find me and drive me to Pine Hill to begin work that day in the Pine Hill Inn.

It was Raymond who had arranged for me to work at the Inn. He was studying for his doctorate at New York University and was serving a circuit of small parishes in the Shandaken Valley for the United Methodist Church. One of his parishioners was named Nora Dowling. Her late husband, Morris, had owned the Inn. Morris was Jewish, but Nora was Lutheran. Because there were no Lutheran churches in the area, Nora attended my brother’s services. She liked him. When he told her about me, she offered a job for the summer.