A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (14 page)

Maybe he never should have married—not just he shouldn’t have married her, but he never should have married at all. He loved the company of his family, although he denied it when she said so. Maybe it was because, as the youngest, and as the one who turned out to be, objectively, the best off, in terms of how much money he made and how successful his career was, it was important to him to be able to have, at last, the upper hand: his brothers and sisters had treated him for so long as a baby, as a toy, as an underdog, as a much-abused pet, as the receiver of all their roughhousing. He had a hundred ways of describing how horrible they’d been to him. If she never bore children, the bulk of his estate would eventually go to his eldest nephew.

He didn’t want that to happen. His eldest nephew was not particularly bright, but he was a promising enough boy, and he’d probably take up with the lawyer branch, not the business one, which, Hays felt, would be a tragedy. “What if I were to die without a son, Charlotte?” he’d say. “How would I be able to stand it?”

He didn’t talk like this when they were first married, but who ever thinks in their first few years, with visions of pink, smiling infant faces, and parties and holidays and raptures of affection, they’ll go a decade with just one bad thing happening after another?

For Hays, not having a child was like living in a deep hole that someone else had dug for him.

That someone would be her.

Funny that she should be sitting here with Arthur Pym—with his clothes off!—with the story of his mother and father in her head, and feeling a little bit sorry for Hays. She couldn’t help it. Maybe it was because, not counting professions, body size, personality, temperament, education, income, and background, Hays was a bit like Arthur Pym’s father.

Sometimes when she’d settled into bed, she’d hear the door handle of his dressing room turning, clicking open, and just when her body began to tense up, as if she’d been lightly tickled on bare skin, it would be closed, very quickly. The handle would click shut, and she would hear through the walls the muffled voices of whatever Heath, or whichever group of them, had felt like calling on him, after hours. He had one of the biggest bedrooms in the house. He had a card table, lots of chairs, and a cabinet full of brandies and wine, and multiple copies of plays in case it was Town Hall Theatricals time and someone needed to practice lines. It was just like a club in there.

Charlotte said, “It would be all right if you kissed me, Arthur,” and he did, brushing her lips like a tickle. Then a long, long kiss. He had a nice mouth.

At the end of the kiss she said, “I feel like Juliet Capulet.”

“Juliet Capulet when?”

“When she was in, you know, her bed, with her brand-new lover, and she didn’t want the morning birds to be singing. She wanted it to be night birds. She wanted night to go on forever.”

“But Juliet wasn’t in her bed that night simply talking and kissing.”

“I wasn’t being literal. I was only telling you something I’d felt.”

“Then that would make me Romeo.”

“Not exactly. You’re much more sensible. Romeo could never have been a doctor. He probably never could have had any profession at all. Or maybe he’d be a poet.”

“Making love to Juliet would be a profession, I would think. I wouldn’t think his poetry would be any good.”

“No one will know. All that happened to him was that he died. And so did she.”

“Charlotte,” Arthur said, adjusting himself, and putting an arm around her, “do you think we could have a moratorium on mentioning
die
?”

“I want to know the rest about your mother. Tell me what happened after she said she was going away and you only worried about yourself and went right back to sleep.”

“I never saw her again. My father went about in his usual way for a couple of months, and so did I. As odd as it sounds, we carried on. I suppose we were expecting every day she’d turn up again. I didn’t ask him any questions, not because I didn’t want to, but because I knew my father, and he didn’t talk to me. The servants looked after us. Of course there was plenty of talk. Everyone knew she’d left, and I suppose there must have been all sorts of speculations. I had them myself, with my limited awareness of the world. Did she have a lover? Was she somewhere having an illegitimate child? Had she committed a crime? Had she done something disastrous professionally? I’d go around like an eavesdropper trying to pick up signals. But I never picked up anything. If there were people who knew where she was and why—and there must have been, as she had many good friends in the schools and the college—they were keeping quiet about it. My father started—oh, deteriorating. He’d have an extra glass of brandy on a Sunday, then every night, extra glasses. He couldn’t concentrate. He was let go by Sears, Roebuck about a year after she’d left, and he never went to his club again, or anywhere in the city at all. He’d been right about his heart making trouble for him. He died in a Hartford hospital when I was fifteen. After he was buried, a man I’d never seen before came to the house one day and gave me a slip of paper with an address on it. He told me that if I wanted my mother, I must write to the address, with no indication of my identity on the envelope, and I must leave the envelope blank. I should wait some two or three weeks, and a message would be sent to me from her, telling me where I could go to see her, which I would have to do in some sort of disguise. And I should tell no one, absolutely no one.”

“If you’re going to tell me you never went to see her, I will put up my hair, and I will put my stockings back on, and I will ask you to leave this room, Arthur.”

“I almost didn’t try to go. I was mad at her, you see. I didn’t even know what country she was in, and I often drove myself wild thinking she’d gone home to England, or she’d gone to God knew what place. She’d been connected with teachers who went off starting schools in Africa, all over the place, South America, everywhere, and on those days when I wasn’t busy judging her with some heinous thing, I thought of her in a saintly, heroic way, giving up everything to go teach natives somewhere how to read.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Yes. It was arranged that I would take a train to New York. The Hartford station was a long walk from the house, and I asked a friend of mine to drive me there in his buggy.” He paused. “My friend’s name was Paul. He was like a brother to me. We’d been growing up together all along. I did something I never should have, I told him everything. It had never occurred to me not to trust him with my very life.”

“What did he do!”

“He took me to the station. We said goodbye outside. The train was leaving in a couple of minutes. I was just about to step onto it when I was grabbed from behind by two very large men, who told me they had pistols, and they were going with me to meet my mother, and if I didn’t cooperate, I would be—well, hurt very badly. I think we were to travel all together like a nephew with his two uncles, very cozy.”

“Oh!” said Charlotte.

Her body was tense. Part of her was thinking—because she wanted so very much to put up some new sort of dam or line of defense against sadness, against sorrow, against all the rotten things that kept happening, all the stories of all the rotten things—“I wish I never asked him to tell me about his past.” She’d mostly done so because she’d got in the habit of never, absolutely never, saying anything about her own. And she’d actually wanted to know things about Arthur Pym. Things such as, everything.

And part of her was thinking, Worse things have happened to him than to me.

“Arthur! What happened?” she said.

“I’m not sure. Do you believe in God?”

No one had ever asked her that question, not even at Miss Georgeson’s, where it was assumed that a stern and fatherly God was as present in life as air. “I’ve tried, especially when I could have used some help, but if you really want to know, I never had any reason to think that all those stories in the Bible had an actual basis in anything real,” she said.

“I agree,” he said. “But somehow I was able to get away from those two men before we got onto the train. Something must have distracted them, I don’t know. I was small for my age and I was nimble. I saw an opening and, without thinking or being afraid, I dodged them, and went running off the platform and out of the station. My friend of course had already gone. I hid for a few hours in a stable near the station. I didn’t think it was safe to go home, so I went to the doctor’s house, Mr. Gudjohnson’s. He didn’t know me except as a neighbor child, but I had estimated that a doctor is someone accustomed to taking people in, whether they like it or not. In just a couple of minutes with him, I realized that whatever had happened with my mother, and wherever she was, he knew, not that he was telling me anything. He seemed to have been waiting, in a way, for my appearance, and I believe my mother must have told him about my choice of profession and his part in it. He was kind to me. He wasn’t a trained medical man, but he’d been a medic in the war, in the—uh, States War. It was he who arranged for me to go to Cambridge, to Harvard.”

“But the two men,” said Charlotte. “With the pistols.”

“I don’t know. I wrote once more to the address I’d been given, and this time I put in a note saying, ‘Dear Mother, I cannot come to you because I am being followed and I believe someone would want to harm you.’ ”

“But who were they?”

“I don’t know. They looked ordinary enough. Big, but ordinary.”

“What did you do about your friend who betrayed you?”

There wasn’t an answer for a long moment. Then he said, “I haven’t taken care of that yet.”

“Where is he?”

“In the army. He is an officer.”

“What are you going to do to him, Arthur?”

“I would rather,” he said, “not talk about that.”

“Othello,” said Charlotte.

“Perhaps.”

“So it’s all a mystery?”

“There’s more. I went to a lawyer friend of Mr. Gudjohnson’s to sell my parents’ house and take charge of their finances. I had expected at least to have one bright spot in my otherwise dreary situation, the bright spot of having some money. But my parents’ estates had been seized. My father had left no will, and as it was not determined if my mother was dead or alive, the bank said that nothing could happen. It was all very shady, very sinister. Then the lawyer explained to me that my parents in fact had sold the house already, to whom, I wasn’t able to know. There were masses of papers, documents. All forged, but I was a minor, and had no way of proving it. I believe the house is still sitting there, empty. I’ve never gone back to Hartford. In my first year in Cambridge, I met a fellow who’s the son of a private detective with Pinkerton’s. He told me if I came up with the cash, it would be possible for me to hire someone to help take care of the—as you put it—mystery.”

“I know a detective,” said Charlotte.

“Ah, the man sent by the Vice people.”

“We were school friends, in a way.”

“In your mysterious towns between here and the mountains.”

“I could ask him to help you.”

“I don’t need,” said Arthur, “a Boston man. Pinkerton’s is a widespread agency.”

“Is it horribly expensive?”

“Not horribly.”

“Is that one of the things you meant when you talked about how one’s debts can mount up?”

“Yes.”

“Oh!” said Charlotte.

Then she said, “Can I ask you a question, not connected to what you’ve just told me? A delicate one?”

“We said we wouldn’t be delicate.”

“Did you ever father a child?”

“No,” he said. “When you’ve been with your husband, did he ever, Charlotte, use a sheath?”

She didn’t even pretend to know what he was talking about. “On the man,” he said. “So that the stuff to conceive doesn’t go where it wanted to go.”

“It goes into the sheath?”

“It does.”

Amazing! And she suddenly lifted her head and moved away from him, bristling. A terrible thought had come to her.

Was this part of the—ah, routine? Did Harry Alcorn’s staff—the young men like Arthur—do this sort of thing as a type of
seduction,
as a spider would lure an unwary bug? She wasn’t calling herself “unwary” but still, had he been sitting there all along just playing on her sympathies, which were fully, actively aroused?

Who could fail to be melted like butter at such a tale? He could have invented it anyway, he was clever enough; it might have been part of the scheme. “I work here because I want to hire a private detective to find my mother.” He’d just about said so. He might have told a different story about his mother and father every time he…

Charlotte didn’t want to think about the “every time he” part.

“I’m cold,” he said.

“Pull up the blankets,” she said.

“Come closer to me.”

She looked at him. Later on, she thought, when she figured out how to get hold of her bank account, she could hire a Pinkerton detective herself and order an investigation. And while she was at it she might also have her husband investigated. “Who is the woman with whom he is having a liaison?” she’d ask. Something like that. Was there a Florence Pym of Hartford who vanished, twelve or thirteen years ago, with a husband who had died? People were always hiring private detectives for things like that.

The possibilities of her own future suddenly opened up. What an astonishing thing that was, a future.

“Charlotte? Come closer to me.”

And she did. How she got out of her dress while in bed, she didn’t know; she’d never undressed this way before. It just seemed to come away of its own accord, although Arthur was helping.

Her underblouse slipped right off her. “You wear no corset!” he said, and she felt proud of herself for that, like it was one less thing to be removed, like that was really the reason, all along, she had stopped wearing corsets.

She said, “Are you going to take off your drawers?”

“Do you want me to?”

“I do. May I touch you—there?”

“In what way?”

What did he mean, what way? “With my hands,” she said.

“You need to ask?”

She had never put her hands on a man’s private parts before. Hays would never allow it, not even when she said, “Oh, just for one second, just to know what it feels like, because I’m so curious.”