Fathers Always Pay

Hotel Montefiore

Jerusalem

  

My late friend, a professor of sociology at Barnard College and at the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, was a rich man.  One evening, he met his son and his son’s colleague for dinner.  When the son’s colleague excused himself to go to the washroom, my friend asked his son, “who’s paying?”  The son, who like his father and his colleague, was also rich, responded, “fathers always pay.”

Ever since hearing that story, I’ve followed that maxim with my children, even though both of them can well afford to pick up the tab. I thought of it yesterday when we met our son and daughter-in- law for breakfast.  It was no ordinary breakfast.   

Our son and his wife had come up to Jerusalem the night before to stay at the Hotel Alegra, a boutique hotel in the village of Ein Kerem, so as to help him recover from his grueling flight from Los Angeles, from which he had arrived last Friday, and to give the two of them a mini-honeymoon, away from their children, who were staying with her parents in Rehovot. 

The Hotel Alegra is housed in an old stone mansion, named for Alegra Bello, a Jewish girl from Mahane Yehuda, who in the 1920s eloped with Jebra Francis Rahil, a Christian from the village of Ein Kerem, after she converted to Christianity and after her family disowned her and pronounced her dead.  In 1930 she and her husband returned to Ein Kerem and built the mansion that the locals called “The House of the Jewish Girl.”

The hotel is set within lush gardens, pools, and little waterfalls, and a more romantic spot is hard to imagine.  It’s a perfect place for a honeymoon, even for a one-night honeymoon, and as I sat with our son and our daughter-in-law I remembered our own honeymoon, at the Dorado Beach Hotel in Puerto Rico, different in almost every possible way from the Hotel Alegra, with almost all the differences in favor of the latter.  Judging from our own experience, honeymoons are wasted on the newly wed.  We struggled to find topics of conversation, as we sat opposite one another, each of us essentially a stranger to the other, from whom we couldn’t escape for even an hour.  Our son and daughter in law, married for 12 years, were at ease with each other and fully able to enjoy their surroundings.

Our breakfast at the Hotel Alegra was served in an arbor near a little waterfall.  First came freshly squeezed orange juice, followed by an amuse bouche of yoghurt and granola.  Course after course appeared, with the grand finale a thin pancake dusted with sugar.  I’ve never eaten such a good breakfast and as I was doing so, I wondered who would pay the bill.  In fact, the hotel is so luxurious that no bill appeared.  It was our son and daughter-in-law to whom it must have been presented at some point during their stay.  I would have been happy to pay it, though, since the breakfast was so delicious and it’s not every day that we can spend an hour with our son and his wife.  But it was awfully nice that they pampered us and even nicer to learn that fathers don’t always have to pay.

To see all four of us, click on the photograph.