Above the Weather

by Groucho Marx, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

It had rained on the Kessler for four days, and on the fifth morning the lake came up over the dock and took two rowboats across to the Rosenthal place on the far shore, which Abe Kessler felt it had done out of spite.

"Eleven dollars a day, American plan," said Abe. He had the ledger open on the desk. The office smelled of wet wool, and of the kitchen underneath it, where they were boiling chickens. "Six people. Eleven dollars. Seven days."

"Four hundred and sixty-two," said Murray Feig.

"You did that fast."

"I've been doing it since breakfast."

At breakfast Mrs. Estelle Margolis of Great Neck had put down her coffee cup, stood up at table nine, and told the dining room that if it rained on Friday she and her party would leave on the Saturday Short Line, and that she would expect to have the second week back. She had brought the brochure with her, and she read from it. THE KESSLER — ABOVE THE WEATHER. Abe's father had written that in 1928, meaning the elevation, and had painted it on the side of the barn, where it could be read from the Liberty road whenever it wasn't raining.

"It's a figure of speech," said Abe.

"She thinks it's a warranty."

"So tell her it's a figure of speech."

"Abe, the woman has been coming here since Coolidge. She knows it's a figure of speech. That's why she's using it." Murray took the brochure off the desk. "You don't argue with a woman like that. You agree with her."

"Agree she gets four hundred and sixty-two dollars?"

"Agree we're above the weather."

Abe looked out of the window. Outside was cloud, and not up in the sky either. It was lying in the yard between the casino and the handball court like a cow that had made other plans.

"We're in the weather," said Abe.

"Then we've been very badly misrepresented," said Murray, "and somebody ought to call a meeting."

In the winter Murray wrote advertising copy for a carpet company in Newark, and in the summer Abe Kessler paid him to be funny, though Abe had never found anything funny. Murray had come to prefer the summer. The carpets never laughed either, but they never asked for their money back.

---

By eight o'clock the casino held everybody who had nowhere else to go, which was everybody. The card tables were folded and stacked against the wall. The bridge players had been at the cards since Monday and had started to suspect them. A bucket in the corner caught the leak over the bandstand, and the drummer, who was a dental student from Flatbush, played with it.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Murray, "welcome to the Rainy Day Sweepstakes. Tonight one lucky guest wins a full week at the Kessler next July, all meals, compliments of Mr. Abe Kessler, who asked me to tell you that and then asked me not to."

Abe stood at the back by the coat rack and did not wave.

Murray had a chalkboard, a cowbell, and an envelope with the questions in it. The questions were for show. He spent four minutes with a cutter from Brownsville and learned that the man had come up without his wife, and that she had told him to, and that he wasn't sure what that meant. He spent another four with a schoolteacher from the Bronx who had brought eleven books for two weeks and finished them all by Wednesday. "You'll have to read them again," Murray said. "Slower. Move your lips. It passes the time and it's very good for the lips." She got the capital of Peru wrong, and the room liked her more for it.

Then the girls from table nine stood up together and pushed Mrs. Margolis into the aisle.

She was a big woman in a navy dress with white piping, and she came up the aisle the way a liner comes into its berth: slowly, with tugs on either side, and with nobody in the harbor in any doubt who had the right of way. Mrs. Pinsky and Mrs. Gold delivered her to the chalkboard and went back to their seats, and they looked like women who had paid to see something.

"Mrs. Margolis," said Murray. "Welcome. I understand you're leaving us."

"On Saturday. If it rains."

"And if it doesn't rain?"

"Then Sunday. I'm paid through Saturday."

"You've read our brochure."

"I read it every year. It's the same brochure."

"We're very loyal to it. It's the only thing in the hotel that's never been repainted."

"The barn has been," said Mrs. Margolis. "Every three years. The old man used to do it himself. Now it's a man from Ferndale, and he spells it with an h."

The room had seen the barn. Nobody in it had read the barn.

Murray went to the window and looked out, although there was nothing out there but the cloud, which was still lying down. He came back.

"Mrs. Margolis, you're perfectly right, and I'll have the man shot. A-B-O-V-E, the, W-H-E-T-H-E-R. Above the whether. Do you know what that means? It means a hotel without doubts. We're not that hotel. We're full of doubts. Mr. Kessler had three this morning before his coffee, and he hasn't finished the coffee." He turned to the back of the room. "Abe, how many doubts?"

"Four hundred and sixty-two," said Abe.

The laugh went right round the room and came back to Abe, and Abe didn't know what to do with it, so he hung it on the coat rack.

Mrs. Margolis hadn't laughed. Murray had worked nine summers in front of women like this one, and with every one of them it was either that she had missed the joke or that she had seen it coming before he set it up. He had never once found out which.

"Who are you up here with, Mrs. Margolis?"

"The girls."

"And before the girls?"

"Herman."

"Mr. Margolis isn't with us this year."

"Mr. Margolis is at Mount Hebron."

The drummer stopped playing the bucket. The rain went on playing the roof, and now everyone could hear it.

Murray had a line ready. He always had a line ready. He had three in his pocket, and he left them there.

"What was Mr. Margolis in?"

"Linings."

"Coats?"

"Coats, suits. Forty-one years on Thirty-Seventh Street. You never saw his work in your life."

"I could be wearing it right now."

She looked him up and down. "Not in that jacket. Herman wouldn't have lined that jacket. Herman would have taken it out in the street and put it out of its misery."

It was the biggest laugh of the night, and it was hers. Mrs. Pinsky put her hand over her mouth. The dental student hit the bucket twice. Mrs. Margolis stood there and took the laugh with the air of a woman accepting a parcel that had been addressed to her, and then she looked at Murray, and Murray saw that she had known it was coming. She had known about the jacket since Tuesday.

"Mrs. Margolis," he said, "for a week at the Kessler next July, all meals. What is the elevation of the Kessler Hotel?"

He had picked the question at lunch. It was in the brochure, on the same page as the weather, and he had meant it as a gift.

"Nineteen hundred and twelve feet," said Mrs. Margolis.

Murray looked at the brochure. "It says nineteen hundred."

"The brochure is wrong. Herman brought an altimeter every summer. He took it on the porch the first clear morning, every year, before breakfast. Nineteen hundred and twelve. He said the old man rounded down to save on paint."

Every head in the room turned to the back. Abe Kessler stood beside the coat rack with his hands in his pockets. Twenty-three years of brochures had gone out with the wrong figure, and so far nobody had charged him for it.

"Twelve feet I didn't know we had," said Abe. "And still it rains."

"The judges," said Murray, "will accept nineteen hundred and twelve."

He wrote out the certificate at the chalkboard on hotel paper, One Week, July 1952, American Plan, and Abe came up the aisle and signed it as though it were a check. Mrs. Margolis read it through. She read it twice.

"This is for next July," she said.

"That's right."

"Then I have to come back to collect it."

"That's how prizes work. It's a terrible system. I didn't invent it."

"And if I leave on Saturday," said Mrs. Margolis, "I lose table nine. The Feinbergs have wanted table nine for six years. They'll be in it by Monday lunch. Next July I come up with a free week, and they put me by the kitchen door." She folded the certificate in half and put it in her purse and shut the purse. "I can't afford to leave."

She went back down the aisle to the girls. Mrs. Pinsky and Mrs. Gold made room for her as though she had won something larger than a week, and possibly she had. Abe went back to the coat rack and did the arithmetic in his head, and for once it came out in his favor.

---

Murray didn't sleep. He hadn't slept properly since 1938, and the Kessler had never been the place to start. At three o'clock he put his coat on over his pajamas and went down to the porch, because his room was over the kitchen and the chickens were already in for the morning.

Mrs. Margolis was in a rocking chair at the end of the porch, in a raincoat over a housecoat, with something in her lap.

"It's still raining," she said.

"I'll take it up with the management."

"The management is asleep."

"Then the management can't hear me, which is how we both like it."

He sat down on the rail. She held up the thing in her lap. It was a pocket altimeter in a leather case, brass, the size of a big watch, the kind sporting-goods stores sold to men who were going to climb something one day.

"I wasn't going to bring it," she said. "I put it in the bag. I took it out of the bag. Then I put it in the bag."

"May I?"

She gave it to him. He held it up to the porch light. The needle stood at two thousand and sixty.

"Mrs. Margolis, this says we're a hundred and forty-eight feet higher than Herman left us."

"It does that in the rain. The air gets lighter, it reads higher. Herman explained it every summer. I never understood it. I don't think he did either. That's why he only measured on the clear mornings." She took it back from him and tapped the glass with her fingernail, and the needle did not move. "In weather like this, he used to say, the Kessler goes up in the world."

Murray took the brochure out of his coat pocket. He had carried it around all day, and the damp had got to it. He found a pencil, and under THE KESSLER — ABOVE THE WEATHER, in the margin, he wrote 2,060 (rain), and then, because he had been a writer before anyone paid him not to be one, he wrote H. Margolis, instrument, and he gave her the brochure.

She held it up to the light, read it, and kept it.

Then they sat there, the two of them, a hundred and forty-eight feet higher than Herman had ever measured it, and listened to the rain coming down on the roof and the lake and the barn, where the man from Ferndale would have to be paid to paint the whole thing over again.

---

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Grouchōne Marx per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Groucho Marx, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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