A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (11 page)

“You’re ill, Charlotte.”

And it seemed that her illness—that hostile, powerful thing—was coiled up inside her, hidden, and had only been waiting to be summoned to the surface, to take her over. She knew. She knew it wasn’t going to go away.

She knew how deeply it was hidden because she’d hidden it herself, way down, the unknown knowledge of it, the unbearable fact. She felt her cheeks grow hot, her shoulder humps begin to throb, her legs go tingly. A dull ache took hold of both of her knees, then a cramping in her shins, as if she’d been running. Maybe this was what it was like in stories of enchantment, when someone was putting you under a spell. “I feel you’re putting me under a spell,” Charlotte said.

“Don’t be frightened. I’m likely to be the one who’ll make sure it gets removed.”

“Something is wrong with me.” There it was. She looked away from the mirror. “Something bad.”

“Yes.”

“I want to go to the theater with my husband.”

“You are going,” said Aunt Lily, “to bed.”

What was the submission like? It was like trying not to fall off a cliff when you are already in the act of falling, and saying, “Maybe it won’t be so terrible,” when rocks are rising up right in front of you and your mouth is gulping air, upside down.

Aunt Lily had sent someone to fetch Hays. Charlotte was sitting in one of the leather chairs when he arrived. He went over to her and leaned over her and took hold of both her hands, squeezing hard, as if all she had was a chill that needed warming, as if his touch would make it all go away.

At which point did he give up on her? Last spring, on a trip to Ohio which took longer than usual? Instead of being gone ten days, he stretched it to two weeks, three. Then again, again.

He’d return late at night and come into her room so quietly, she wouldn’t know if he was real, or a part of a dream. There was always a lamp burning low in the sickroom, and sometimes she’d half wake in the night and not know if it was her husband looking down at her, or a shadow. A husband-size shadow on the wall. “I am married to a shadow,” she would think.

His hands were on the woman’s shoulders. The woman’s hands were at his waist.

She pictured Hays staring into the woman’s eyes, and the wintry, dark, snow-laced branches over their heads, and now she thought, Some of those branches over their heads were actually very heavy with snow. She removed the fact of herself in her sleigh. She took herself out of the scene completely, as if she were watching it like a ghost, incapable of corporeal interference. She pictured a great heavy limb breaking off from the tree at the edge of the square, silently, so they didn’t see it coming. Off went Hays’s hat into the road, and the woman’s hat, too.

Bad luck! They’d be knocked unconscious. They’d be buried in snow like the men at the fish plant.

It really was just like a painting. The kiss was interrupted by the branch. They weren’t to die, though; she wasn’t malicious.

Suddenly, late that afternoon, a note was slid under her door. She waited a long moment before picking it up, because she didn’t want it to seem—if someone was out in the hall—that she was idle, or that she was sitting around waiting for Harry Alcorn to make another try at involving her in some activity.

She didn’t know the writing, but it appeared to be a woman’s and she thought at first it had come from Mrs. Petty, ready to make amends.

It wasn’t from Mrs. Petty.

“I am told you were seen admiring my pictures. Please don’t be overly shy, as shyness is no quality I set faith in. Do come upstairs, one flight up, to call on me this evening, at Numbers 21, 22, 23, and 24. It will not matter which one you choose, Mrs. Heath, as all belong to me. If you happen to have any of those cakes which were carried with you on the night you arrived on our premises, do be a thoughtful girl and bring them, as I’ve not had sweets for an age. I shall provide the tea. Until then, I am yours most indulgently.”

There was a florid, complicated signature and it took a while to decipher it. Bernice—no, there was another
e,
between the center consonants—Berenice. Berenice Eloise Singleton (Mrs. Andrew Enright).

An invitation to tea!

She’d forgotten all about the baked goods the Gersons had given her, and when the little maid brought in her supper tray—something different tonight, tinned herrings on crackers and a nice creamed celery soup—Charlotte asked about them.

A guilty, worried expression took hold of Eunice; she stammered and nearly dropped the tray. The cakes? Well, Mrs. Petty had said to put them in the garbage, as they’d come from a bad baker, someone who was a known though unconvicted purveyor of foods that could poison you.

No, the maids had not got rid of them. They’d thought, if they ate just a bit at a time, nothing dangerous would come of it; it was so seldom they had treats, and what with the snow-in and everything stopped, it wasn’t so wicked of a thing. There was still a small jelly roll, half of a lemon pound cake, and some chocolate-fig tarts, all of which were in an oilskin bag and hanging out a window at the top of the house, quite frozen, which was the best way to preserve such things.

Charlotte asked for them to be fetched, and the little maid came back a few minutes later with just the tarts, wrapped in paper. Unfortunately for the rest of it, the cakes, there were two maids upstairs just now in the act of thawing them at the fire, and the edges were already quite nibbled at, as it was the birthday of one of them, so please, would Mrs. Heath mind terribly not forcing the taking away?

She smiled warmly at little Eunice. Her heart felt expansive and glowing.

The maid had aired out Charlotte’s clothes. She was glad to be back in her own dress, with her hair brushed. She said nothing to the maid of her mysterious invitation, but only said she needed help with putting her hair up; the maid was good with hair and didn’t pull too hard or make the knot too tight.

It clearly did not seem strange to Eunice that a lady of the hotel would want to fix herself up for an evening alone in her room. At a little after eight o’clock, nervously, with her pastries, Charlotte tiptoed out into the hall.

A muffled sound of laughter came from the room at the far end. From far below, as if coming up from a cave, she heard piano music, but this time it must have been that actual musician Harry Alcorn had mentioned: it was a slow, melancholy tune—not a funeral-like one, but just sad—with the kind of pausing between notes that made you think something lively would come next, but it didn’t.

Which door of the four? Numbers 21, 22, 23, and 24 were in a row at her left as she cleared the top of the stairs; 21 was first, but she disliked that number because of a game—some card game, she never got them straight—that her husband played late at night in his room with his sisters and brothers-in-law. There were always Heaths turning up in his room. For the rest of her life, she felt, she’d recall the loneliness that struck her every time one of them cried out, “Twenty-one!”

Twenty-one was the number of points you had to score to win a hand. They never invited her to join them; she was sick.

So she knocked politely on 22. The door opened at once, and she stepped into an enormous room that was blazing with light: there must have been twenty gas lamps going, and candles along the three mantels, and three fires burning brightly; the windows didn’t have curtains or shutters but were bare, except for a pair at the farthest end. The window glass was streaming with melting snow, and there seemed something very bright about the darkness on the other side, as if the night were festive and shiny.

Directly in front of her was a young man, barefoot, wearing nothing but a tight white jersey and a pair of loose white flannel trousers with the legs rolled up, as if he were walking on a beach.

He was not the same man as that night with Aunt Lily, and he was nowhere near as lovely, but still, he was fine-looking, about twenty, with the finest, best-shaped chest she’d ever seen on a male that was not a statue in a museum. Was he posing for a picture? To Charlotte’s left was the painter herself, at a large canvas on an easel. A brush was in her hand. The color of paint on the brush was white.

“Hullo!” called out the man. His hands were on his hips; his head was cocked slightly to one side. “I’m Terence.”

Maybe she’d already grown accustomed to the small, narrow room with the walls around her so closely. The man’s voice seemed to echo, as if in a wide-open space. And it
was
wide open.

There was a screen set up at the other end: a lady’s dressing screen, made of dark silk in a thin wood frame. That was where the windows were draped. That must have been the painter’s sleeping area, which looked to be made up of one half of one room. All the rest of the place, the other three and a half rooms, was undivided.

Canvases were stacked everywhere against the walls, backs out. There was a long table filled with jars, brushes, tubes of paint, rags, and a round, dining-style table with four chairs; there were armchairs here and there, too, and a shiny maple wardrobe, and a pair of matching, high, many-drawer cabinets, but the walls were bare. So was the hardwood floor.

Suddenly someone darted toward Charlotte—the person who’d opened the door, she realized. She had a sense of a smallish, almost elflike person, in a bright green jacket that seemed misshapen at one shoulder.

It was another young man, and this one seemed to carry himself awkwardly, in a tilt. Charlotte felt her sympathies aroused instantly at the sight of him. He wasn’t exactly a hunchback, as the deformity only seemed to be centered on one shoulder, but there was definitely a hump. He didn’t appear to be bothered by it. Maybe he’d been born with it, instead of having had it grow in a glandular way. Maybe he was even proud of it; he didn’t have that cringing, feel-sorry-for-me manner you saw sometimes in cripples.

His eyes were large, wonderful. Deep-brown eyes, as dark as the centers of a certain kind of daisy that grew wild in the fields back in town, her favorite flower, although no one would ever believe this was so, as the Heaths said daisies were common and childish.

Without a word, this hump man grabbed the little package of tarts right out of her hands, dashed off with it toward the nearest of the fireplaces, and threw it in. The paper caught fire at once, but the tarts sounded like rocks landing hard on the logs—had he known they were frozen? Was this his idea of a thaw? Was he a nasty little brute?

The man named Terence—who still, it seemed, was posing—did not alter his expression, and seemed to speak without moving his lips. “Don’t mind Arthur. She can’t have sugar. It affects her nerves the same way cocaine affects lesser mortals, not that I have experienced that glittering drug myself.”

Arthur: his name was Arthur, like the king. The only not-Shakespeare play ever put on by Heaths at Town Hall was
The Story of the Round Table.

Charlotte’s father-in-law had played Arthur, but he had got it all wrong: he’d done it like a businessman conducting a meeting, all serious and overly controlled, as if the famous knights were only talking about which manufacturing plant to back, which real estate to buy next. Charlotte’s mother-in-law was Queen Guinevere, and that was all wrong, too. The man who played Lancelot was Hays’s oldest sister’s husband, and she had not pulled off the way that, historically, the queen simply could not take her eyes off her lover, even though her husband was right beside her—and anyway she was too old for the part. There hadn’t even been a romantic kiss, not even a theatrical suggestion of one. Hays’s oldest sister kept saying, “This is all so filled with perversions.”

This Arthur had the right sort of—well, dignity, Charlotte thought. Self-composure. Deep, intelligent eyes. Depths. Long, strong hands. A suggestion of complexities.

“Pym,” he called out to Charlotte. He gave his head a little bow. “Arthur Pym.”

And he undid the buttons of the green jacket, reached up inside, and removed what looked to be a very small cushion, a cushion for a tiny child’s chair. He tossed it onto one of the armchairs; his back straightened up.

In the stories of the boy Arthur, which were taught at Miss Georgeson’s—with a focus on the holy, pilgrimlike quest for the Grail—Arthur was always up to some prank. He was always using his smarts to get himself out of trouble.

But pretending to be a humpback wasn’t pranklike. “I don’t think that’s funny,” said Charlotte.

“I was terribly bored,” he answered. “I thought she might like a troll for her garden. I thought I’d pose for her in that capacity. But you’re right. I was an oaf. It’s not my usual condition.”

The painter said, in a strong, clear voice, “Damn you, Arthur, and damn you, too, Terence. Damn both your entire lives and well-being.”

Charlotte looked at the picture. It seemed nearly complete. It was being done in oils—that was the overwhelming smell in here, she realized. She’d never been in a painter’s studio before, but she did not find it unpleasant.

In spite of the posing young man, there was no young man in the painting. It was a garden scene, a still life—extremely still. There were raspberry and blackberry bushes, tall, spiky gladiolus and irises, plump begonias, delicate bluebells, and elegant, stately lilies. Every one of them—every bud, every stalk, every berry, every leaf—was covered with ice and frost, as if winter had stolen up on a beautiful summer day, and had seized what was vibrant and alive, and had encapsulated it all.

There was no yellow sunshine, but a moonish white glow instead. Some of the flowers were bent close to the ground under their ice coatings; some were more defiant, stronger, but you knew that, if that ice ever melted, which it showed no sign of being able to do, they’d collapse, extinguished.

The picture showed the same hand, the same stillness, the same tragic, nothing-is-ever-going-to-move-again rigidity as the pictures in Charlotte’s room and in the room downstairs where she’d had her interview with Dickie. A boat, a wagon, a carriage, a field of wheat, it didn’t matter what it was: all of it was utterly struck through with absolute motionlessness.

She had never seen anything so sad. “It’s beautiful, like the others I’ve seen, but more so,” said Charlotte.