A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (13 page)

“I have, and I wish everyone would stop asking me that.”

“Left him forever?”

“I have no way of knowing that.”

“Was he cruel to you?”

She paused. What was “cruel”? Her second-eldest sister-in-law was married to a man who once, in front of everyone, at the dinner table, in a fit of temper, annoyed by something she’d said, took hold of her hand; he was sitting beside her. She’d been reaching for a spoon, which she never got hold of. He squeezed her hand so hard, her face contorted with the effort not to cry; and then repulsively—cruelly—he let go, as if to say he was sorry; and then he gently ran his fingers up and down the finger on which she wore her wedding ring. Just when it looked like she was relaxing, and was ready to forgive him, and trust him again, he calmly squeezed the finger by the bones at the top, and bent it so hard, her hand looked like a fork with a bent-back tine when he let go. She rushed away from the table, but he did not, and the dinner went on. Charlotte’s father-in-law said, “I won’t have you being harsh with my daughter,” and he said, “I apologize,” and maybe no one was watching closely what had happened, except Charlotte, or maybe they pretended not to have seen it. She was taken into Boston the next day to see Aunt Lily, who put the finger into a splint. It had come out of its joint and was broken. She’d told Aunt Lily that a maid had accidentally slammed a door on it.

That was cruelty. And Charlotte knew—they all knew—it wasn’t the first time, and it wasn’t going to be the last. Hays never said a word about it. That was cruelty, too. She was his sister. What if Sophy, a grown-up Sophy, was the wife of a man who would strike her? Momo would go after the man. If a man broke one bone of his sister’s, he’d want to break ten of the man’s, or all of them.

Cruelty, Charlotte decided, was of a greater degree when you looked the other way while a cruel thing took place.

Hays had
looked the other way
. Being sick was a cruelty. But giving up on her was like his brother-in-law sitting at the table and bending a woman’s finger right out of its joint.

“I don’t wish to talk about my husband,” she said to Arthur Pym.

“Then your silence answers my question.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. The tears had stopped. She had the idea she couldn’t possibly feel worse than she did; what did she have to lose by speaking her mind to this man?

“Would you like a glass of brandy or sherry?” he said. “It would take me just a minute to go downstairs and bring up a bottle.”

“I don’t want spirits. I want to have a clear mind.”

“Then so do I.”

It was odd, she thought, that when you’re ready to say out loud what you already know inside yourself, inarticulately, the words just manage to present themselves. She leaned forward and, as she did, he pulled the chair closer, so that their knees were nearly touching.

Charlotte said, in almost a whisper, “Tell me what goes on in this hotel, please, Mr. Pym.”

“I would imagine you have a fairly good idea by now,” he answered. “It’s not everyone who has the chance of an interview with a policeman.”

“Are you the student you claimed to be, upstairs?”

“I am.”

“Are you planning to have a practice, as you said to Mrs. Petty?”

“If it weren’t for this snow, I would be watching a tutor of mine, out in a town to the west, perform a dissection on a…” His voice trailed off.

“Mr. Pym, I don’t require censoring. I was nearly a year in a sickbed.” She looked at his expression carefully, then said, with a sigh, “You know my aunt.”

“I do.”

“I suppose she told you of my condition.”

“The night you arrived.”

“Then you must know medical information doesn’t alarm me.”

He said, “All right, a dissection on a man who drowned in a bog, so his body is remarkably well-preserved. I should have left early this morning. I’m hoping they’ve waited for me, and I will try to make it out there as soon as possible.”

“What town?”

“Halfway between here and the Berkshire Mountains. My tutor is one of the founders of a hospital for people who don’t, as a regular rule, have faith in doctors or the means to afford one.”

“There are lots of towns between here and the mountains. Cranfield, Morton Falls, Bigelow Mills Village,” said Charlotte. “Chetterdon, Oakville, Blackstone, North Blackstone, Blackstone Junction. Fairfield, Derby River, East Derby. Foxbridge, Allen-burg, Wachusetts, Forge Landing.”

“Oakville,” he said. “You know the area.”

“I used to.”

“Tell me about where you come from.”

“I never talk about that subject, if you don’t mind. I had asked if you’re planning on a practice.”

“If I don’t succeed, it will only be because I’ve died.”

“Are you planning to be dead?”

“Not for a very long time. And yourself?”

“I would think it’s a subject one would avoid. It makes people so very nervous.”

“But not you.”

“No.”

“But you would talk of an idea of death, and avoid the subject of your past.”

“Only because it’s past, and the other has been closer to me.”

“I would say you are very much alive, Mrs. Heath.”

She felt herself blushing. No one had said that to her for a long, long time. After a moment, she said, “Are you often in this hotel?”

“Now and then.”

“Are you employed by Mr. Alcorn?”

“I am.”

“There was a man in this room with my aunt. Do you know him?”

He nodded. “Martin Wallace. He left the hotel that same night.”

“You say that as if I would hope he were somewhere nearby, Mr. Pym.”

“No, I said it because Wallace, as it happens, is one of my tutors.”

“The man doing the body?”

“No. Wallace is in mathematics. It’s my weak point.”

“He doesn’t look the part.”

“No, I suppose not. Do I?”

“That depends which part you end up having. And Terence?”

“There are actually quite a few of us.”

“I would imagine your college bills are steep, Mr. Pym.”

“They are, for those of us who weren’t born to, shall I say, certain families. But you’d be surprised how one’s debts can build up.”

“By certain families you mean, such as Heaths,” said Charlotte. “I was not born a Heath.”

“Neither was I.”

“Does Mr. Alcorn pay you or does someone else?”

“Harry does.”

“Are you well paid, or would it be indelicate of me to ask?”

“Delicacy is a matter of snobbery. Let’s not be snobs, Mrs. Heath. Harry is generous with his staff. I don’t suppose you made yourself familiar with the cost of one of these rooms.”

“Is that something I would need to have explained, like the Spanish war? Or, perhaps, the Vice Society?”

“No need,” he said. “Do you look at me and think of that word?”

“War?”

“Vice.”

“I look at you and think, Mr. Pym, I didn’t like being upstairs at Miss Singleton’s and made sport of.”

“There was no sport in it. I swear.”

“When you said you would come down to my room with me, had you looked at me as a…as a…?” She didn’t know what to call it. What should one call it? A customer, like someone going into a shop? A customer of a man earning money in a very private way in a very private hotel? A
customer
?

“I looked at you as I look at you now. As a woman I do not want to walk away from, unless you insist on it, and then I would only do so under protest.”

“What kind of protest?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure I would think of something. I would like to stay here with you tonight, Mrs. Heath.”

“Then what about Miss Singleton?”

“She lives here.”

“I should like to have that painting,” said Charlotte. “Does she sell them?”

“She would give it to you. She would enjoy being asked. You liked it?”

“It made me want to cry.”

“All that ice.”

“Yes.”

“You would know what it means to be frozen. Am I right?”

“Do you ask me that as someone learning medicine, or as a person?”

“Actually, both.” He looked at her for what felt like a long, long moment. She didn’t mind the way her eyes met his. I would like to stay here with you tonight. He’d actually said that. Had he, actually? He had. He really had.

And he’d said the room was expensive. She thought, in a practical way, because she couldn’t turn off the part of herself that was practical, not entirely, I only have fifty dollars, and no hope of getting more.

She said, “I don’t have access to my banking account, not at the present.”

“That could just as well have gone unsaid.”

“I think not.”

“This room,” he said, “was taken by your aunt for the week, and there are still two days left to it. And I would imagine, for good reason, Harry would not be inclined to present you with a bill, however long you want to stay here. You have, shall we say, a fairly strong personal credit, with him.”

“You mean I’ve put him in my debt.”

“Yes.”

“Is my aunt here often?”

“Now and then.”

“What if she returns?” gasped Charlotte.

“The door,” he said, “is bolted.”

She tried hard to think of more questions. “Are all the young men who work here, as you do, students?”

“Some of us. Not quite half, I suppose.”

“I don’t suppose Harvard would be happy to know of your… your job. Yours and the others.”

“Oh, we’re not all Harvard. But you know, it’s common to go out to earn some pay—for example, in a restaurant or hotel, as a waiter. Fellows do it all the time. And they’re assistants in hospital wards, and on the trolleys, and all sorts of things.”

“But you didn’t choose a hospital ward.”

“I imagine I’ll have my fill of them soon enough.”

“Are you said to be a waiter?”

“A second assistant cook, actually.”

“And would you tell me the—ah, inner workings of this hotel are private, very private, to the extent that, one is able to maintain secrecy?”

“We’re careful, Mrs. Heath. The ladies who are guests here would be willing to go to a great deal of trouble to keep things as they are.”

“Perhaps you should have come and told that to the police inspector.”

“His visit was unusual.”

“But another one could return.”

“And he’ll leave in the same state of ignorance.”

“Can you cook, Mr. Pym?”

“Not a bit.”

“Doesn’t your, ah, job, interfere with your studies?”

“I’ve fallen asleep in lectures.”

“And have you been working for Mr. Alcorn the entire time you’ve been a student?”

“Only this year.”

“Hamlet was a student.”

“Yes. The energetic, well-adjusted Hamlet, prince of action and joy.”

“You are mocking me. Again.”

“I am not. I prefer,” he said, “as a man, Othello.”

Charlotte didn’t know who that was. She hadn’t got to that play yet. She didn’t want to admit this. She said, “Because you are a man, or because Othello is?”

“Both. And because he has the bad luck to have trusted the wrong person. And he does not believe that a woman could love him as honestly as his wife. He just can’t get that into his head, that someone loved him, his own wife, who has one of the kindest, gentlest natures ever put into a heroine. And his clever enemy, you know, whom he loved as a friend, turns him against her, and he murders her. That, Mrs. Heath, is what I would call vice.”

“Oh!” said Charlotte. “So would I!”

She couldn’t think of anything else to say. But just when her eyes were perfectly dry, just when she thought she was past the point of tears, here they were again, and this time there was no chance of being completely quiet about it.

She didn’t try to hide it; you can’t hide crying when it’s coming out uncontrollably, as water pours from a broken dam. It felt good. A dam had been in her, and it was broken. At least this time the tears were not quite so icy.

Cool, but not ice. Cool tears, almost at the point of being warmer. She thought, Maybe I am melting, after all.

She sat there and tears poured down her face. Her neck and the high collar of her dress were getting all wet. He didn’t seem to be worried. Was this
normal
? Was this
all right
?

He said, “May I take off my jacket?”

“I don’t mind.”

This was all right. Through her sobs and sniffling, she asked him to please pass her the towel; she’d put it back on the bureau. She meant to cover her face and weep into it, with whatever tears were left, and then she’d try to do a little mopping up of herself. She closed her eyes and held out her hand to take it from him, but then she realized that it wasn’t a towel he pressed against her cheeks. “Here,” he said. It was his own two hands. Warm.

A
rthur Pym’s mother, Florence, was a schoolteacher, the type of teacher who was born that way and never gave a thought to doing anything else. This was in Hartford, Connecticut.

Florence, explained Arthur, had come to America as a teenager, from an industrial town somewhere in the north of England. She never lost her very British accent, and never had wanted to. She taught her first class when she was eighteen. She married at twenty, had Arthur the following year, and by the time he was finished with his primary grades she was not only a headmistress, but a consultant to some ten other schools on issues of curriculum and classroom protocol; she taught a class at a teachers’ college, and wrote papers on educational reform, and spoke at meetings, and was never, ever at home, except Sundays, when the house had to be silent so she could sleep, which she did, nearly all the day.

As a mother she was a failure, but at least she was honest about it. “As a mother, I’ve no hope of being up to snuff. I’ll simply have to trust that you’re like me, and you’ll sooner or later be an adult who’s utterly, absolutely, in your case, Arthur, himself.”

Arthur never wondered if she loved him or even cared about him. She loved him. She cared about him. There was always food on the table, his clothes were always washed, his needs attended to. The family had a live-out housekeeper—a Mrs. Briggs from down the road, who also was English—and a housemaid and a washerwoman, and a cleaning maid. Their house was a comfortable one, two stories, good clapboard, solid, on a quiet, wide, leafy street. There were dogs, cats. He was provided with books whenever he asked for them, which was often, although his parents themselves weren’t readers. There were plenty of children in the neighborhood to play with, and they regularly took him home with them when he wanted company besides servants. He was healthy and thriving, like a weed: a weed with no interest in trying to become, say, a proper flower.

His father, Ralph, was Hartford-born. He had managed a small men’s clothing store, which never did well, and he minded the pressures and responsibilities. When he was approached by that giant Midwestern supply house, Sears, Roebuck & Company, and was invited to become one of their eastern agents, he was pleased to give up the store. He welcomed the regular salary. He was not a tall or heavy-boned man, but he’d always been mightily prone to excessive amounts of weight, which he tried to compensate for by walking wherever he went; he wasn’t comfortable with horses and carriages anyway.

Ralph Pym opened a Sears, Roebuck office in central Hartford, and it was much more successful than anyone expected. People from all over Connecticut, and parts of New York and Rhode Island, and southern Massachusetts, used the office as a middleman-communication device, between their own desires for the cheaper goods from a catalog, and their suspicions of long-distance negotiations, as it was hard to trust what was, to New Englanders, a foreign power. People in the rural towns and on isolated farms had their orders shipped to Ralph: he would bulk individual orders into groups to cut the cost of shipping, and when you came to Hartford to pick up your goods, it felt friendly and pleasant. Ralph was a sociable man. He hired commission-based representatives to stir up more sales; he had his own phones and telegraph system; he made deep, lasting friendships with the people who handled the mail and the delivery system of the trains. He joined a downtown club of Hartford businessmen, which had a building across from the office. He had most of his meals there—lavish many-course affairs. There was morning tea in the office, furnished by a shop next door, and afternoon sherry and cakes. He grew fatter and wider.

His life was conducted like a clock. He worshiped routine. He went around in his weekday schedule from home to the office to the club, and on Sundays, while his wife shut herself up in an isolated cocoon of rest, he either spent the whole day at the club, or shut himself up in a cocoon of his own in the front parlor, drinking brandy and being called on by his friends from downtown who wanted to escape from their families, as if the parlor were an extension of the club.

Into this format a child did not fit. Ralph was indulgent of his son and never refused him anything, but he would always seem amazingly distant, in an unfocused, baffling way. He lacked, Arthur felt, a basic capacity to understand the first thing of being aware of other people with whom he was not performing his job; and in a personal way, his entire universe began and ended with his own self, and especially with the requirements of his girth. He would become anxious of what his next meal would be before he’d finished the one he was having. His body became a demanding machine that needed constant attention, and if he hadn’t been a very plump man when he married Florence, it would have seemed to his son that his obesity could be squarely placed on Florence’s shoulders, for neglecting him, in every way.

But somehow they seemed suited to each other, especially as neither one of them was interested in any sort of intimacy. They had it in common that they were consumed by their professions and wished to be left alone. It was not an unhappy household. Arthur never bothered to ask himself if his father liked or disliked him. It would have been like asking the question of the grandfather clock in the front hall.

It seemed that life would always go on the way it was. Arthur started thinking about college when he was very young; when he was still in primary school his mother told him that she wanted to know, before his tenth birthday, what profession he’d choose, because she felt that this was something one ought to know as soon as possible. Early on the morning of his last day as a nine-year-old he got hold of his mother as she was cramming books and papers into a satchel, preparing to rush out for a day’s work. He asked her for some help on his decision and she said, “How would I know?” He pressed, and she finally advised him to think of the one person whose work he admired beyond all others; then he should set about emulating that person.

She knew he wouldn’t pick Sears, Roebuck, but she had probably expected him to pick her, to pick “education.” She seemed a little disappointed the next day when he told her he wanted to be like the elderly Mr. Gudjohnson, two streets over, who had a medical practice in the bottom half of his house. Arthur was playmates with children in the family next door to the doctor, and though he rarely saw the doctor himself, except when he was hurrying off to some childbirth or sickbed or death, he had observed that of the many people who went into his office every day, there were people who actually looked better, walking away, than they had looked when they arrived on his doorstep. “My son, a physician,” Florence said gamely, trying it out. She felt it was a pretty good second choice. She felt it was understandable. She felt he had the independence for doctoring, the self-confidence, the stamina, and the smarts, all inherited from herself, plus his father’s dependable, highly developed social skills.

She bought him books on physiology and chemistry and a wooden model of a human skeleton with all the bones labeled. His father was very pleased and said, “I suppose my poor ticker might give me trouble around the time you open a practice, so count me your first patient, Son.”

Arthur felt he had no problems. Then one night, around midnight, when he was thirteen, his father and mother came into his room and woke him. His father was in his nightshirt, but his mother was fully dressed, and she was wearing her coat. The fact that they were both in his room, together, at the same time—or any room at all, for that matter—was so extraordinary, it almost seemed an anticlimax when he learned why.

His father said, “Arthur, your mother is going to go away, not because she wants to, but because she feels she has no choice, and it is very, very likely that she will never come back.”

“It’s true,” said his mother.

“What about me?” he had asked.

“Up to you, Son,” said his father.

Arthur had spent the day, a Sunday, outside the city with a school friend whose father studied geology: they’d gone out to a quarry, and it had involved a great deal of climbing. He was exhausted. And at nine in the morning he was scheduled for a grilling from his Latin teacher on Caesar, which he had not read as thoroughly as he should have; he was not a natural at translations, and thought Caesar’s
Gallic War
was the most dreadful, boring thing ever put on paper, in any language. He was planning to cram at breakfast.

So at the single most important event in his life so far—perhaps in the whole of his life—he rolled over and went soundly, deeply back to sleep.

“Mother walked out of our lives that night, and then everything fell to pieces, more or less,” said Arthur, like this was the end of the story.

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Charlotte.

Arthur was sitting beside her in her bed. There was only one pillow, and they had placed it between them at the small of their backs. Arthur leaned his head against the headboard with his chin pointed up, and Charlotte touched a finger at a tiny cleft there, tracing a line from it down his throat and down his chest, stopping about halfway and pressing lightly. “What’s this?”

“Sternum,” he said.

He had taken his shirt off, and his trousers, too, and his stockings, but not his drawers, which were winter underwear, wool, dark blue. His chest was downy with light brown hair, all tufted and curly. It was a narrower chest than her husband’s, and paler. She liked it. Hays was starting to have a rounded little indication of an extra bulge around his middle, not that she’d seen him, for over a year, with any of his clothes off. She had taken off her stockings and vest. Her hair was down. All the blankets were on them, to their waists. The fire was out. There were no more logs.

“Are you cold, Charlotte?”

“No.”

“I was thinking I could bust up the chair and we could burn it.”

“I don’t think Harry would appreciate that.”

“Then I won’t.”

“Are you tired now?” she said.

“No.”

“Neither am I.” It was somewhere between the darkest part of the night and the moment when the first gray sheen of wintry dawn begins appearing.

She leaned her head on his shoulder. It was thin, on the bony side, but she found a softer spot just below it. She had never been in a bed for a whole night with a man before. Hays didn’t believe in a man and woman sleeping side by side.

Falling asleep after making love was acceptable, but he’d always wake up and pad softly away to his own bed. They always made love in Charlotte’s bed. He insisted on it. Their separate rooms were side by side with connecting inner doors, without locks. Separating their rooms was his dressing room and his private washroom, each of which had doors, and he kept them closed. To get to his wife’s bed from his, he had to open three doors.

Her own washroom and dressing room were on the other side and ended at an outer wall; they could only be entered through her bedroom. Hays’s rooms all had doors to the hall, to the rest of the house.

“I had to go through three doors to reach you,” he would say to her solemnly, as if he’d crossed a desert in burning sunlight, without water.

“Honestly, I feel that I just crossed a desert to be with you, Charlotte,” he’d say, which was his way of telling her he wanted to make love to her as much as he’d want a drink of water. Sometimes he’d check with her secretly, at dinner, to see if a visit was a good idea. “Would you mind if I was very thirsty tonight?”

That was his way of asking her, first, if it was her time of the month, and second, what her mood was. If she said, “I wouldn’t mind,” it meant she was
clean,
and if she added, “Please don’t take a long time along the way,” it meant she was inclined to be in an excellent mood indeed.

For all three times she’d been pregnant, he never came in. He’d felt her body was as sacred as a shrine.

Once, in Italy, Hays had gone to a chapel in a giant cathedral which had a life-size statue of some saint, a woman, and there were two workmen in there, doing something with trowels and clay, repairing something; they were sweaty and filthy and they had stripped to their undershirts. One of them had thrown his dirty jacket on the statue’s head. One arm of the statue was held outward and a workman’s lunch bucket, empty, had been hung on the hand. Cheese rinds were on the floor. An empty bottle of wine was on its side by the statue’s feet, and the workmen were humming the tune of a peasant song from Naples that described—well, Hays’s knowledge of dialect wasn’t good, but it described unspeakable things a man with an olive grove wanted to do to the wife of his overseer.

In other words, he’d gone into the chapel to be close to something sacred and it was rendered disgusting, although it hadn’t sounded disgusting to Charlotte; anyway, Hays wasn’t a Catholic.

“They were only doing their jobs,” she pointed out, but he felt very strongly that you just don’t do unsacred things in a church.

Her pregnant body was a church? She didn’t feel holy when she was pregnant. She felt sick all the time, and kept vomiting, every morning.

Each time she’d failed to stay with child, he stayed away a little longer. First a month, then five weeks, then six or seven. It began to be a way for her of counting the passing of time, as if time were a vast, dark, wide-open space, in the outer reaches of things, where there weren’t even any planets or stars, just space; all the nights she was alone were like that. And that was before she’d got sick and was set up downstairs.