A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (10 page)

The first time he kissed her was at the edge of a potato field. She wished she hadn’t liked it. She wished she hadn’t felt those astonishing powers of
desire
and
appetite,
every time he was near her.

“Charlotte! Let me in! Let me in at once!”

Aunt Lily. Here she was, on the afternoon of the fourth day, as if Charlotte had been waiting for her.

“Charlotte, let me inside. I want to come in. This is the first time I had a chance to get back here, and this
was
my room, and if you’d care to know who’s paying for it, I am.”

The door was locked with the inside bolt, but what was a locked door to a physician?

“If you don’t let me in, I’ll get Moaxley to come up here with an ax. The cost of a new door can be put on the bill—I can afford it—and I’d expect he would enjoy very much the breaking of this one, especially if I tell him you’re in the throes of a fit, Charlotte, an epileptic fit. I can say that’s what you have, and dishonest as it is, no one will doubt me.”

Charlotte opened the door. Her aunt smelled like snow and cold and wind and the hospital.

“You’ve lost even more weight, Charlotte. They said you’ve been eating well, but now I doubt it.”

“These aren’t my clothes.”

Mrs. Gerson’s plain wool dress was big enough to have fit almost two Charlottes. The jacket over it, brought up by Eunice, had been left by some guest, who’d been obviously on the stout side.

“Whose are they?”

“I’m not telling you.”

Aunt Lily bustled in and sat down on the side of the bed. She had a letter. “I have a letter,” she said.

“From the people against vice?”

“I heard about your friend the policeman.”

“He didn’t come here,” said Charlotte, “as my friend.”

The letter was put into Charlotte’s hands. Aunt Lily hadn’t opened it. It was addressed to her, at Aunt Lily’s apartment. It was from Hays.

“My darling, dearest Charlotte,

“The mail is going out again by horseback & I write in haste as they are waiting. Aunt Lily sends word you are safely at home in Back Bay with her, so I will not for the present be as frantic with worry as I was. The thought of your having traveled into Boston on your own fills me with disbelief and great anxiety, and I have never in my life been so anxious as I am now, to be told in your own words if you are all right. What has been in your mind? I have not, I realize, done well as a husband. Only you and I can possibly know that. As for the family, they think you were upset by Uncle Owen’s dying. Had you not gone to Aunt Lily I would be tormented even more than I am. I will come to Boston as soon as you send for me. I shall not impose myself, as much as I want to. Telephone to me at the Colonel’s office and he shall let me know, or telephone to the bank, and likewise. Send for me, Charlotte, I beg you, I won’t mind the weather, I shall come. H.”

“Your hands are shaking,” pointed out Aunt Lily.

“They are not.” Charlotte went over to the fire and tossed the letter in, and watched it curl in on itself and burn.

“A roof collapsed last night under weight of the snow, near the harbor,” said her aunt. “It was a fish-processing plant. Three men were killed, and there are some dozen trapped in the wreck. As we sit here, a rescue operation is taking place. What wasn’t destroyed in the cave-in was destroyed by explosions from the gas they’d had stored there.”

“I’m sorry for them.”

“Sixteen people, four of them children, from the Italian tenements on Hanover Street, were brought into the hospital in a state of near death from the cold. I don’t expect we can revive them. I expect there to be plenty of work for the surgeons in removing fingers and toes of people who, as we sit here, are suffering from exposure. I don’t suppose you’ve been to Hanover Street. Do you wonder why I’m telling you this?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“Because, Charlotte, the world is going on, and I can’t be alarmed about you. If you don’t want to go home to your husband, that’s none of my concern, but you’re to move to my rooms in Back Bay.”

Charlotte looked at her. “Who was that man with you, the night I came in here?”

“A friend.”

“He
works
here.”

“That’s not your concern.”

“But I can put things together.”

“Sometimes when one puts things together, the pieces may not fit in quite the way one wants them to, or they may be fitted together incorrectly. Or the pieces may be better off remaining just that, unconnected.”

“I like connections. Where is Uncle Chester?”

“At home in Brookline.”

“Does he know you come here?”

Aunt Lily didn’t answer.

Charlotte said, lightly, “I wonder what the Boston Society for the Suppression and Prevention of Vice would think of our conversation.”

“They’re of no concern. They are people who want to stir up trouble where none exists.”

“Like the witches in
Macbeth
,” said Charlotte.

“Not at all. Real life isn’t quite so melodramatic.”

“You sound like a Heath, not counting Uncle Chessy.”

“There’s nothing Shakespearean in people suffering because they haven’t got heat, they haven’t got suitable clothing, their roofs are falling, their shelves have no food.”

“Well, what I want to know is, why was Mrs. Petty so horrid to me?”

“You would have to take that up with Mrs. Petty.”

“Where are her children?”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Are you in this hotel often?”

“As often as I have the chance.”

“You lied for me so they wouldn’t know at home where I am.”

“I don’t want to do so again.”

“All right, then. I don’t want to make you distressed, you’ve been good to me.” Charlotte sat down at the edge of the bed. She nodded her head, meekly, and thought of the way a young, newly broken-in horse, realizing the odds against it, bows its head and lets its jaw go slack, in submission, with its tongue gently licking at air, or its own teeth, as though it just had been born.

She realized that she’d built up some experience back at Miss Georgeson’s: practical experience to draw from. It was just like that, the same sort of situation, more or less, as if saying, “I want to be a good Christian.”

“Should I tell Harry you’ll be moving to my rooms, Charlotte? I know he’ll fix a sleigh for you. As it’s not very far, and as Tremont Street and Boylston Street are passable, it won’t be quite as treacherous as it may seem, from looking out the window.”

“I’ll tell him myself, Aunt Lily. Thank you.”

“Remember you’re still very weak.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“You’ll go at once?”

“I’d like to change back into my own clothes, and give some money to the maid, and perhaps have some tea.”

“And we won’t speak of this,” said Aunt Lily.

“I’ll say I was at your rooms all along.”

“I’ll trust you. The woman who looks after the apartment will be there. She’ll see to anything you need.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll come to you as soon as I can. In a couple of hours I am going to be assisting at a surgery for a man who was shot by a storekeeper. There’s been looting, something terrible. This man took a bullet in the back of his neck.”

“Oh! Will he be conscious?”

“We have ether.”

“I’ll pray for him. Thank you, Aunt Lily. I’m sorry for the trouble I’ve given you.”

“It’s not trouble. It’s a question of preventing it.”

“I understand. You’re right, and I’m grateful to have your help.”

“I can’t think what might have happened if I hadn’t been here that night.”

“I was so very incredibly fortunate.”

“You don’t want to tell me anything of what’s happened between you and my nephew?”

“I would not, no more than you seem willing to talk to me about the things I most want to know about.”

“Fair enough. You haven’t had an easy time of it. I know what it was like for you to be ill.”

“No, actually, you don’t.”

“I must be going.”

“I wish I could give some help to the people who are suffering.”

“You go to my rooms and stay put.”

“I will.”

Just for good measure, Charlotte took off the top layer of her borrowed clothes, got up and went over to the bureau, and picked up the borrowed hairbrush, as if already in the act of mobilization, of obedience.

Aunt Lily patted her and kissed her cheek, and when she was gone, Charlotte waited a few minutes before securing the door with the bolt; she didn’t want her aunt to hear it. All was quiet. She took a blanket off the bed, wrapped it around her, and sat down by the fire once more, to wait.

She could do that, wait. She was good at it, even though she didn’t know what she was actually waiting for. The uncertainty didn’t bother her. The unanswered questions didn’t bother her.

Who could know what it was like to be sick? Not a physician, that was for sure. She felt a twinge of remorse, a very small one, for behaving so churlishly with her aunt—but not for being less than honest with her, which didn’t count, as Aunt Lily herself had set a standard for choosing to be less than forthright.

Charlotte hated it,
hated
it, when people who never spent a long stretch of time in a sickbed said, Oh, I know what it was like for you. No one knew. It was like walking by a restaurant and looking in at diners at tables, lifting forkfuls of roasted meat to their lips, and saying, “I was hungry a moment ago, but now that I’ve watched someone eating, my own belly is full.” Or like the men who were digging at the cave-in of the fish plant, if they called out to the trapped men inside, “Anything you’re feeling, so am I.”

She would always have a sort of pocket in her mind to contain what it felt like that moment, long ago last year, when she knew, really knew, that something was very wrong with her: it was in Aunt Lily’s office. How could she ever go back to Aunt Lily’s?

There was a big oak desk, a couple of leather chairs, framed certificates and diplomas on the wall, a vase of flowers on a table by a window, shelves holding bottles and vials and shelves filled with books. Aunt Lily’s coat on a hook. Aunt Lily herself in a white muslin dress and a white muslin jacket. “Charlotte, that swelling of your glands I noticed before has increased, does it hurt very badly for you to swallow?”

No, it didn’t hurt at all, nothing hurt; there were only these swellings around her neck and just under her arms, and this tingling sensation in both her legs, now and then, and this small, annoying fever, which came and went, sometimes as mild as a hot wet towel held to her forehead, sometimes as hot as if her blood had been set to a boil. She blamed it on going out to ride in bad weather.

She’d only come to the office because Hays was involved in a business meeting at a bank. She would visit with Aunt Lily and meet Hays afterward for a play.

They had planned to see a play on Washington Street—not Shakespeare, but a thrilling drama of a malevolent sawmill owner who wanted to marry a woman engaged to his foreman. First he would tie up the woman with a horse rope and hide her in a closet, and then he would overpower his foreman and place him, like a log, on a table that held the giant wheel of an high-powered, steel-toothed saw, which would turn as in real life. Head first, the foreman would be slid toward it. The woman in the closet was supposed to undo her rope just in time.

Charlotte knew the plot because everyone did; it was in all the papers. Hays had bought tickets secretly. They’d told everyone at home they were going to a recital of some boring soprano.

There would always be a part of her in a state of excited suspension—which a fever could have resulted from, a tingling. A part of her that was waiting to be thrilled. A part of her that was all seized up in an act of expectation.

How had it happened that she felt herself in an act of submission instead? It had happened very quickly. Her aunt was behind her. She had placed her hands on the sides of Charlotte’s neck, gently pushing down on the collar of the high-necked dress she was wearing. Then she touched Charlotte’s shoulders and, in the mirror—there was an oval mirror on the wall, in a smooth, blond-wood frame—Charlotte saw that the hands which should have been flat were instead quite raised, as if she wore, tucked in the fabric of the dress, two bustlelike cushions, like shoulder humps. And then it seemed that such a hump was inside her throat.

“Swallow as if you’ve just had a drink of water,” said Aunt Lily, and it couldn’t be done. Charlotte felt herself gagging, being choked. Aunt Lily did something—some sort of patting—and it relaxed a little, she was fine; she thought with a little giggle that she must have empathized with the heroine of the play without realizing it: there’d been mention in the papers of a choking scene, in which the heroine was first subdued.

After the play there’d be a hotel, on Tremont Street, a night in the city! And dinner at a small table just for the two of them, herself and her husband, no Heaths, and maybe she could tell him what she wanted, what she’d kept putting off.

“I want to have a house of our own.”

There’d be a bottle of wine, the fruity Spanish wine he liked. There’d be the leftover thrill of the play, the rising tension, the buzz and whir of the saw, the sold-out audience holding its breath as one person—and then the relief, the flood of relief washing everywhere. The heroine would undo her ropes and save her beloved, and wasn’t life
grand
? As for the mill owner, the police would rush in and nab him. Hays would be pleased in the core of himself to see order restored, and he would sip his glowing glass of wine, and be glowing himself, and she would say, “Or if not a house, then an apartment, Hays, right here, perhaps on Beacon Street, or Boylston. And I should like to hurry and buy furniture.” And he would say, “Why, of course, Charlotte, of course,” and that would have been that; they’d go to see a buildings agent the next day, as they’d be in town anyway.

In the mirror her aunt’s eyes were clouded. It was funny, Charlotte thought, how your mind can be churning away with plans, with anticipations, with scenes being played, with
hope,
but your body can go off in quite another direction, as though your own being is a villain turning against you, with the terrible force of its own irrefutable will.