"Richard Paul Russo - Nobodys Fool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russo Richard Paul)

Schuyler Springs that had been completed (talk about luck! ) the very
year that the springs in Bath ran dry. Well, maybe it wasn't exactly
luck. For years the town of Schuyler Springs had been making inroads,
its downstate investors and local businessmen promoting other
attractions than those offered by the Sans Souci.

In Schuyler Springs there were prizefights held throughout the summer
season, as well as gambling, and, most exciting of all, a track was
under construction for racing Thoroughbred horses. The citizens of
Bath had been aware of these enterprises, of course, and had been
watching, gleefully at first, and waiting for them to fail, for the
schemes of the Schuyler Springs group struck them as even more foolish
than the Sans South with its three hundred rooms had been. There was
certainly no need for two resorts, two grand hotels, within so small a
geographical context.

Which meant that Schuyler Springs was doomed. There were limits to
folly.

True, Jedediah Halsey's Sans Souci hadn't been so much foolish as
"visionary," which, as everyone knew, was what you called a foolish
idea that worked anyway. And, people were quick to point out after the
springs ran dry and the visitors moved on, the Sans South hadn't so
much worked as it had enjoyed temporary success. The vast majority of
its nearly five hundred rooms (for the hotel had expanded on a very
grand scale, not three years before the springs went dry) were now
empty, just as everyone had originally predicted they would be. And so
people began to congratulate themselves on their original wisdom, and

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the residents of the once lucky, now tragically unlucky, community of
Bath sat back and waited for their luck to change again. It did not.
By 1900 Schuyler Springs had swept the field of its competitors. The
Sans Souci fire of 1903 was the symbolic finish, but of course the
battle had long been lost, and most everyone agreed that you couldn't
really count the Sans Souci fire as bad luck, since the blaze had
almost certainly been started by the hotel's owner in order to collect
the insurance. The man had died in the blaze, apparently trying to get
it started again after it became dear that the wind had shifted and
that only the -old original wooden structure, not the newer, grander
addition, was going to burn unless he did something creative. There is
always the problem of defining luck as it applies to humans and human
endeavors. The wind changing when you don't want it to could be
construed as bad luck, but what of a man frantically rolling a drum of
fuel too close to the flames he himself has set? Is he unlucky when a
spark sends him to eternity?

In any case, the town of North Bath, now, in the late autumn of 1984,