He raised his eyebrows and passed one over. As she clumsily tore open the pack, extracted one and lit it he began to grumble: "Some hotel. Some light-and-power company. By now I should be getting the overnight lines for Monmouth, Hialeah and Sportsman's, by now I should have booked two hundred dollars on tomorrow. Believe me, Mrs. Goudeket, this is my last year at Green Acres. This kind of thing doesn't happen up at New Hampshire Notch; I don't pay good money for the concession so this kind of thing happens."
A fattish, red-faced man bulged up to the counter, breathing whiskey at them. That's a Young Married, Mrs. Goudeket thought with distaste; that's what I have to take at this place because I can't get enough nice young people. "Sammy," the red-faced man complained hoarsely, "isn't the damn ticker working yet? I've got fifty bucks I have to play. You're busting my system to hell."
Mr. Semmel said politely: "I'll see, Mr. Babin." He opened the plywood door behind the stand, looked into the little room where the teletype horse ticker stood, and closed the door again. "I'm sorry, Mr. Babin," he said, with a look at Mrs. Goudeket. "I think the wire's okay, but you got to have power to run the machine and there isn't any power. If it comes on later maybe I can phone Chicago for a repeat—if there's time before midnight."
"Nuts," Babin said, and headed through the candlelit gloom for the bar.
"You see?" Mr. Semmel hissed, in a hate-filled whisper. "You see what you're costing me? Never again, Mrs. Goudeket!"
She wandered off, preoccupied. Semmel was a nobody, a clerk hired by the big brokers, in spite of his pretensions. But if the brokers, in their cold and analytical way, did decide at the end of the season that Goudeket's Green Acres didn't handle enough to make the operation worth their while, next year nobody would come around and bid for the horse-book concession. And it was the concession that pushed the resort over the line between red and black ink.
You had to make money and you had to grow. Mr. Goudeket had never understood that. Orange trees were all very well, but since 1926 she had been the driver, the doer, the builder. And Mr. Goudeket had never got to Palestine after all, which showed that dreaming got you nowhere. She felt a guilty twinge. One year they could have made the cruise. One year there had been nothing urgent, which is a miraculous year in the resort business. She had put the money aside as a reserve and said nothing about it, and poor Mr. Goudeket couldn't understand a financial statement. The guests loved him, his Zionist connections had been valuable, though he never suspected it, and he had been a fine all-around handyman since the days in the Brighton Beach boarding house; he had saved them thousands of dollars with his clever hands and brought in thousands of dollars with his connections. But grow? He had never understood. And so he never got to see Palestine? What of it, anyway? And again Mrs. Goudeket felt the guilty twinge.
She peered into the bar; it was doing a good business by candlelight. Her Young Marrieds—she grimaced—were getting drunk early. Dave Wax was on a barstool with an on-the-rocks glass in front of him; he was telling one of his stories.
"Dave," she said softly, "when you've finished your drink why don't you give a little show for the people outside?"
The comedian theatrically gulped from his glass and told his barmates loudly: "I love this dear lady. Just like my mother, she is. Just like my mother—always hollering, 'Get to work, ya bum!'"