Manly House - Part #1
Gerald Beckman
Issue #1 (March 2008)
Manly Goodwin worked in his father’s inn by the creek at the foot of the wooded hill ever since he could walk. With blonde curls and blue eyes, ruddy cheeks and a perfectly formed face, he was a natural attraction for the clucking old ladies and their doting husbands around which his father built his business. Retirees for the most part, the patrons habituating the inn were hard-working, blue-collar citizens in search of a taste of God’s wilderness before their declining abilities put it totally beyond their reach. Unfortunately, most had waited too long. They wobbled when they walked, they slept too late, and they ate far more fat and sugar than was good for them. But they didn’t mind parting with their money as long as Manly’s father kept the three acres behind the inn mowed and sprayed for mosquitoes, and provided enough rustic wooden chairs on the long veranda behind the inn to lower their broad posteriors into on those afternoons when the sun lent enough heat to the thin mountain air to be comfortable, and enough pine logs for the gigantic fireplace in the sitting room when it didn’t.
Guests began pulling up in the inn’s gravel parking lot in their Buicks and Oldsmobiles with their sunglasses and floppy hats and their shorts and sandals and flowery shirts in the spring of the year; the end of April, generally. Decrepit and bent, joints stiff and ligaments reduced to near ruin by a lifetime of hard use, they would grunt and strain to drag their piles of luggage from their cars to the lobby. There, in loud, jocular voices they would greet Manly’s father as though to relieve him of the vigil they thought he had been keeping behind the counter all winter and spring just for them. After supervising the hauling of luggage to their rooms, they would return to the sitting room off the lobby and sit like great lumps of dough around the fireplace drinking ice-cream-laced alcohol and digging into piles of pastries and fatty meats while waiting for the supper served at
It was then that Manly’s mother, as proud of Manly as the owner of a perfumed lap dog, would lead him into the sitting room to show him off. Fat ladies kissed him and squeezed his cheeks; and smelly old men, filling the air with stinking cigar smoke, shook his hand and tousled his hair. He shrank from the slobbery kisses and fondling of hair, and began hating the people dispensing them even as his astounding cuteness seduced them to part with still more of their money.
As he grew older his duties changed. He was made to carry trays of meats and breads and cheeses to the breakfast room in the mornings, and sometimes, when the guests were many, to help change linens and clean showers and toilets. Later still he was put to trimming trees, mowing, maintaining the wooden bridge across the creek, keeping the sewers unstopped, even balancing ledgers and carrying receipts to the bank for deposit. Thus he passed the years, learning the business, but to the consternation of his parents, perfecting the technique of avoiding guests whom he continued to despise as smelly, old, and ugly.
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