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The Mailer Review/Volume 11, 2017/Norman Mailer in Long Branch: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 11, 2017/Norman Mailer in Long Branch (view source)
Revision as of 12:05, 8 November 2019
, 8 November 2019Fixed dates.
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Chaim spent less and less time in the store. Not only did he prefer to study the Talmud, but because he tended to undercharge or give away food to customers that he thought were needy, his children encouraged him to stay at home. | Chaim spent less and less time in the store. Not only did he prefer to study the Talmud, but because he tended to undercharge or give away food to customers that he thought were needy, his children encouraged him to stay at home. | ||
The store did well enough to enable the family, after years in several rented homes, to buy one of their own, and in | The store did well enough to enable the family, after years in several rented homes, to buy one of their own, and in 1906 they moved into a lovely house on Morris Avenue. | ||
[[File:1920 Fanny.jpg|thumb|left|Mother on the steps of the Morris Avenue house, c.1918.]] | [[File:1920 Fanny.jpg|thumb|left|Mother on the steps of the Morris Avenue house, c.1918.]] | ||
That is Mother, sitting on the steps to the porch. The property was large, about the size of two city blocks. It included several buildings, and a forty-room building across the street. The first summer there they rented it to someone who ran it as a hotel. Seeing how well it did, our grandmother decided that it would be more profitable to run it themselves. And that was how they got into the hotel business. The Maple Hotel, as it was called, lasted only a couple of years. Like so many Long Branch hotels, it burned down. But the family was hooked. | That is Mother, sitting on the steps to the porch. The property was large, about the size of two city blocks. It included several buildings, and a forty-room building across the street. The first summer there they rented it to someone who ran it as a hotel. Seeing how well it did, our grandmother decided that it would be more profitable to run it themselves. And that was how they got into the hotel business. The Maple Hotel, as it was called, lasted only a couple of years. Like so many Long Branch hotels, it burned down. But the family was hooked. | ||
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I don’t know how much we realized it at the time, but it was, for the family, the end of an era. | I don’t know how much we realized it at the time, but it was, for the family, the end of an era. | ||
About fifteen years later, one summer day in New York, Norman and I and our spouses and several friends, decided to go to the beach. Norman suggested that instead of coping with Long Island traffic, we drive down to Long Branch where we’d hardly been since the summer of | About fifteen years later, one summer day in New York, Norman and I and our spouses and several friends, decided to go to the beach. Norman suggested that instead of coping with Long Island traffic, we drive down to Long Branch where we’d hardly been since the summer of ’41. There were a lot of us, so we went in two cars, Norman in one and I in the other, since we were the only ones who supposedly knew where we were going. Blithely, the two of us agreed to meet at the corner where we remembered the boardwalk ended and Ocean Avenue turned a block inland. As it turned out, we had a hard time hooking up. The waterfront had changed. I think there had been erosion, and the corner where we had expected to meet no longer existed. Ocean Avenue had turned inland sooner. And we both wondered if the other one would realize what had happened. We did eventually find each other, but I don’t remember whether we ever got to go swimming that day. I only remember the ache one feels when one realizes for the first time that the past seems irrevocably gone. | ||
{{Review|state=expanded}} | {{Review|state=expanded}} | ||
[[Category:Articles (MR)]] | [[Category:Articles (MR)]] | ||