I stood. “Well, that should make Sol Walkman happy,” I said.

“So, what are you going to do?” Carter asked. “Or do you need me to repeat the lecture?”

“Right now, I’m going back to the Inn and sleep for an hour or so, then I’m having dinner with Amy. And what happens—frankly, I don’t know.”

Carter smiled an understanding smile. “Don’t let her get away this time,” he said.

CHAPTER

20
 

BEFORE MY MOTHER AND CAROLYN ARRIVED IN THE CATSKILLS with Raymond and Linda, I asked Nora Dowling if I could invite them to the Inn for a meal.

“A meal?” she said energetically. “No, for your mother, we must have a party.” And she rushed off to huddle with her sisters to begin the planning.

The party was a smorgasbord buffet of every specialty the Inn offered—steak tartare to roast duck, Wiener schnitzel to calves’ tongue, soups to compotes, fresh fruit cups to butter cake. It was a celebration to honor the mother of her two Southern men, as she referred to Raymond and me. She led my mother from table to table, introducing her, lavishing praise on her in a loud, dominating voice, an English-Yiddish-German splintering of language. Carolyn sat in my dining room with Raymond and my sister-in-law, Linda, watching the spectacle with awe and bewilderment.

My mother bravely sampled each dish of food. The food had a strange, rich taste, she later told me, but she beamed with gladness over the attention, and in the tradition of the Southern woman, she stood before the guests of the Pine Hill Inn and responded with gracious appreciation for the “kindness extended to my sons” in a small village in the New York mountains.

Carter whispered that he had always believed Scarlett O’Hara was literary myth until he heard the gushing of my mother. I told him that Southern men took great exception to the slightest insult to their mothers and warned him that I would employ Ben Benton to whip his ass if I saw even a hint of a smile.

To Nora Dowling, my mother’s comments were inspired. She hugged my mother and wept. “Such boys,” she declared in a booming voice. “Such boys.”

“Ja, ja,” the diners of the Pine Hill Inn sang in agreement.

“This Bobo, I taught him to be the waiter,” Harry barked with pride.

The only people who did not attend the buffet were Joel and Esther Lourie. He apologized to me the following morning at breakfast, explaining a previous engagement with a couple they had met from the Greenleaf Lodge. I knew instinctively that the previous engagement was a convenient excuse to avoid making me, and them, uncomfortable. I did not tell him that Carolyn and my mother and brother and sister-in-law had sat at their table.