A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (20 page)

“Why, I can tell you, I was here,” she answered. “I only left because the children wanted to be in the country, or a town, as the girl was thrown out of the school she was in before this one.”

“And were the Benevolents after you then as well?”

“Not as energetically. Lily thought the Heath place would be all right for us, and you especially, and she thought the children would be good for you, if not for the family, which of course, they weren’t.”

Aunt Lily, thought Charlotte, with a groan. Everywhere one went, at every turn, there she was.

“Go upstairs quickly, Charlotte, and get your coat and whatever else you’ve got with you, or I’ll send up a maid.”

“Is Georgina going with you?”

“No, she’ll be back here to run things. She’ll do well enough without me.”

“New Hampshire,” said Charlotte.

She leaned back against the long wood table to bolster herself, in case she weakened. In the back of her mind she was picturing Arthur on his way to the second floor. She pictured the slope of his shoulders, the small of his back, the bends of his knees, the downy-hairy fuzz of his shins, his chest, his jaw. She pictured him going into a room, a different room, hers, not handed down temporarily by Aunt Lily, and she pictured him taking off his jacket, his vest, his shirt. She pictured him poking at the fire and closing the curtains, if they weren’t closed already.

“I already went to New Hampshire,” Charlotte said. It was, she knew, a ridiculous reason to offer, but it was the only one she could think of. “After I graduated from the academy I went to, I had a position at a school there, briefly, and as I’d left the state once, Mrs. Petty, I can’t see myself with a view to go back.”

Everything went silent: the clattering of the maids, who’d gone into the scullery; the fires; the things that were cooking in pots; the drip-drip-drip of the sink faucet, which seemed suddenly to halt in mid-drip. Even the clock on the wall seemed to stop its ticking.

“Rowena!” called a voice from outside. “Rowena, come out here this very instant, or we’ll go to the steamboat without you and your children will think they are orphans!”

“That’s Miss Farmer,” said Mrs. Petty.

“You’d said she was very commanding, like a general,” said Charlotte. “Rowena. I didn’t know your name.”

“Then now you do, and I’ll say goodbye for now, and when we see each other again, you won’t need to bother with a Mrs., which I anyway am not,” said Mrs. Petty stiffly, without betraying how she felt. She pulled Charlotte to her and embraced her and kissed her. “Come later. Harry will have the address.”

“Wait,” said Charlotte. Mrs. Petty turned her head. “Which of the children would be his?”

“The girl.”

“And Momo and Edith?”

“That,” said Mrs. Petty, “is known only to God.”

“Thank you for telling me that. Goodbye. Tell the children—”

But Mrs. Petty was already through the door. “Tell the children I envy them their mother, and I will miss them all over again, and her, too,” Charlotte whispered.

She stood against the table for a long moment, listening to the sounds of a sleigh and its horses, with bells jingling wildly as it pulled away. She waited until she couldn’t hear them any longer; then she gave herself a shake and went to the back stairs, and ran up them even faster than she’d gone down.

A
rthur had brought supper, not from the kitchen but from a shop in Cambridge at Harvard Square: crisp-crusted, hearty, tart-sized meat pies, very masculine, all beef. Charlotte didn’t say they weren’t as good as Mrs. Petty’s. She didn’t say she’d had a meat pie for lunch, and she didn’t say she minded eating one cold. She didn’t say there was too much salt, or that half as much bay leaf should have been used. They ate them sitting on the bed.

He also brought a bottle of wine, not the fruity stuff Hays liked, but something dry, thin. It tasted bitter until she had a bit more and got used to it, and liked it very much. The room was stocked with wineglasses and napkins, but no plates or silver. She’d never eaten a meal before with her hands, crumbs falling down her chin, onto her breasts, into her lap, on the bed. Even at picnics, the Heaths insisted on the good silver.

“Arthur,” she said, when he’d finished two pies and was reaching for a third, “how many ladies have you, you know, here, been with?”

“Five thousand.”

“I want to know.”

He said, “It’s not something that needs talking about.”

“Is that a rule?”

“Actually, it is.”

“Twenty?” said Charlotte. “One hundred?”

“What if I told you that you were the first?”

“I wouldn’t believe you.”

“Then I won’t.”

The first time they’d made love, last night, it was slow and tender. Cautious, even, like walking in the woods and coming upon a log bridge someone had erected across a stream that was too deep and too cold to just take off your shoes and wade across. You didn’t know if the logs were rotted, if the lashings that held them together would hold. You put down each foot with trepidation, not daring to scamper across.

The second time, also last night, was more like the act of coming to the bridge in a great burst of steam and running across it. The third time was pretty much the same.

The fourth, which began the very instant Charlotte had entered the room just now and found him waiting in bed for her, without his clothes on, not a single stitch, was based on not bothering with the bridge, but going to the stream at a higher level—where it was frothiest, all churning and agitated—and plunging in. Arthur wore his sheaths for the first three times but not for the fourth. He told her there were ways to make sure, without one, that stuff didn’t get inside her. That was how he’d put it.

Stuff. It sounded like something that belonged inside a pillow or a sausage, or a drawer in a cupboard, where you put things that had no other place to be put. After the second and third times, he used a towel to wipe the stuff off her belly—liquidy jellylike stuff, which felt, to the touch of her fingers, like something obnoxiously oozy.

“There are theorists in England and Germany,” he told her, “who believe that the origins of humans are in slime at the bottom of swamps, probably deposited by rocks, which fell from other planets, full of bacteria, and broke apart upon landing.”

That sounded demoralizing. No wonder whoever wrote the Bible came up with the story of Adam, where all it took was God’s breath, blown on a clean lump of clay.

Arthur didn’t know about the three times there was supposed to have been a child, hers and Hays’s. But she wanted to mention it. “I conceived three times with my husband and they all came to nothing,” she told him. “I can’t bear.”

“It must have been horrible for you.”

“It was bloody, and I’m not embarrassed to say so. Each time, it was worse. Then afterward no one wanted to look at me.”

“I’ll look at you,” he said. He didn’t want to hear about Hays.

Now the fire in the fireplace was burning away; the coal supply was low, but not too much so. There was a pitcher of drinking water and water glasses. The room was even smaller than Aunt Lily’s, and there weren’t any pictures of Miss Singleton’s, just a few large watercolors of people in different types of weather, with scenes that were Boston places: Tremont Street along the Common, where a man in black clothes struggled with the big black umbrella he was holding over his head, for it was pouring rain; a lady picking a flower at the Public Garden by the swan pond, which was illegal, in sunshine; a lady and a girl on the steps of the Public Library, and they must have been inside a long time, because they were dressed for autumn and it was a snowstorm, the steps banked high with snow.

The people in the pictures looked dull, as if they weren’t having lives where anything ever happened to them, as if they only existed for the pictures, but maybe the point was the landmarks, and what the sky was doing. Anyway, it came as a respite, not to have to look at Miss Singleton’s. Her pictures wouldn’t give themselves up to being things in a background. They would hang there and demand to be accepted as the most important things in the room.

Charlotte said to herself, with conviction, like this was something she was trying to talk herself into, “If he was with two hundred, or a dozen, or two, I don’t care, I won’t think about it.”

The wine! It was making her head feel tickled from the inside out. The last time she drank wine was at Uncle Chessy and Aunt Lily’s house in Brookline, for some family event, some anniversary or birthday. After her second glass, Hays said, in front of everyone, “Charlotte, that’s quite enough for you.”

Uncle Chessy must have noticed, by the look on her face, that she was ready to pick up the nearest thing—a bowl of applesauce, it would have been, for the roast—and then go over to her husband and dump it on his head.

It was unthinkable that a Heath, especially the host of a dinner, would get up from the table and wander off, but this was what Chester Heath, defender of criminals, author of a book on the rights of aliens, and now a judge, did.

“Come with me, Charlotte, I want to show you something.” They went down to his big, booky, leathery study, which was a mess: the untidiest room she’d ever seen in a house that had servants. Cigar ash everywhere; the air like the inside of a cigar. Papers thrown around, unwashed teacups, books stacked in heaps on the floor, window draperies that had not been washed for half a century. Uncle Chessy was famous for not letting anyone in there. He went over to a cabinet and took out a bottle of wine exactly like the one on the table.

He put it into her hands. “Would you like to go back and set this at your place, and we’ll have the waiter open it for you? And you can say to my nephew, who perhaps gets a bit stuffy, God bless him, ‘This is Chester’s house, and this is a gift from him to me, and I’ll do as I please with it’?”

“I want to bash him on the head with it.”

“Besides that.”

“No, thank you. I didn’t want any more anyway.”

And that was when he made his promise to her, well, a renewal of the one he’d made on her wedding day, when he alone of the all the Heaths came to her quietly and took her hands and looked into her eyes—this bear of a man, black-gray bearded, with a beard covering so much of his face, his small dark eyes and small nose and lips, round and reddish, looked like afterthoughts, as if they played only a minor role.

He told her that he would love her as a niece, that he welcomed her, that it pleased him right down to the blood in his veins to see that Hays, for a change, had done something unexpectedly remarkable by marrying her; and he, Chester, could be called upon by Charlotte at any time, in any way, and whatever service she would need him to render, he would do it, as he would for a child of his own, which he and Lily didn’t have, not that he was complaining about it.

She’d been moved, but it was her wedding day and her head was spinning the whole time: there’d been so much else to pay attention to. In the study, she paid attention.

He reminded her of what he’d said; he told her she could count on him as a friend. It was a solemn moment, and she squeezed his hands and thanked him, and let him kiss her on the cheek, with a chafing—the beard was rough, prickly; poor Aunt Lily. And a moment later she’d forgotten all about Hays giving her commands across the table, and monitoring her the way he did, and always taking a position of being in charge of her, when she was telling him all the time, “Stop watching me, Hays.”

“What are you thinking about?” said Arthur.

“An uncle of mine,” said Charlotte.

“In what way?”

Charlotte thought of Chester Heath at his desk, in his study that looked disaster-stricken. Maybe he was sitting there at this moment, alone in that big house. Who was to say what was what between a husband and wife? When he’d married Aunt Lily she was already established, with her practice, her own rooms, her own reputation, friends. There’d been a scandal about it because the Heaths were pushing for another match, all of them except for Hays, who could take an independent stand when he wanted to; he really could, and not just about having married Charlotte.

Chester was supposed to have given himself to a much-younger lady from a nearby town whose father was involved with railroads: the lady was porcelain-figurine pretty, corseted up to her neck, with a brain, Hays said, like the inside of a candy box, which was harsh of him, Charlotte had thought, until she found out (from him) that the first choice of the family, for a bride for Hays, was that lady.

Anyway, the marriage of Lily and Chester was hugely opposed by everyone, Hays included, because, first, no one liked Lily, who was tall and strident and professional and unfeminine; it was nice to have a doctor in the family, but lady doctors should still be ladies, it was felt, not go charging into people’s houses and sickbeds as rough and bold and conceited as a man who worked on docks or herded cattle.

And everyone was used to thinking of Chester Heath as a bachelor, a man who preferred the company of men and, more specifically, of other lawyers, or men whose whole existence was taken up in some way with courts and trials and defenses, or in writing about them. Uncle Chessy said that if you couldn’t think of anything else to say to a legal man in Boston, at a party or a dance, you could safely launch a conversation by asking him, “How are you making out with your book?”

Maybe Aunt Lily’s husband knew about the hotel and maybe he didn’t. It was no one’s business, really, except their own. Why should it be anyone else’s business?

A doctor would need to maintain respectability, but when you needed one, you wouldn’t care if it was the worst-morality person on earth, as long as you knew they weren’t a murderer; you’d want your doctor to get rid of your pain. A judge was a different matter. Charlotte wondered what the Vice people would think of a judge who had things in his life that truly needed to be hidden.

But wasn’t that a natural thing? Why should someone’s life seem obvious and plain, and fully surfaced, like an enormous boulder in the middle of a flat, empty field, visible for miles, when it was so much closer to the truth that—if one’s life were like a giant rock—three-fourths of the rock, maybe more, would have to be underneath, invisibly connected to cores of things, for good reason?

“It’s an uncle of mine I would trust with my life. I’m thinking, actually,” said Charlotte, “of writing a letter to him.”

“Now?”

“Yes.” It didn’t seem right to compose one without anything on, so she reached for Arthur’s shirt, a different one, a soft, striped flannel. “Ladies should be able to wear clothes like this,” she said.

“You can if you like.”

“I doubt I’d get away with it, outside of this building.”

“It’s from Sears, Roebuck,” said Arthur. “After my father died I was given a lifetime account to make purchases at discount.”

Charlotte was putting one arm in a sleeve when he said this. She paused to look for a label. She looked inside the collar, inside each cuff, and in the stripes, in case the name of the maker was inscribed in threads, which was a stupid thing to think; but she couldn’t help it. “What are you doing, Charlotte?”

“Checking.” She didn’t know anyone who wore clothes from Sears, Roebuck. “Do you cut off labels?”

“Sometimes, if they irritate me.”

“Well, I need some paper. And an envelope, and ink and something to write with.”

Modestly, or perhaps because drafts were coming in through the window in spite of the closed curtains, Arthur wrapped a blanket around himself when he got up. He went rummaging through the one drawer of the little night table and came up with a leather portfolio embossed in fancy gold letters with the words
THE BEECHMONT: A PRIVATE HOTEL FOR GENTLE LADIES.

“I can’t use paper with a name on it, Arthur.”

“The paper’s blank. Harry Alcorn’s a very careful man, I told you.”

He was right, and there were also stamps, and a handsome, expensive pen, and a new bottle of ink. She sat at the edge of the bed and used the little table as a desk.

“Are you going to tell me who you’re writing to?”

“You can read it yourself when I’m through.”

“I don’t believe in reading other people’s letters.”

She addressed the letter to Chester Heath at his house in Brookline, and put no indication of where she was.

“Dear Uncle Chessy,

“I want to say first that I regret not having been able to go to Uncle Owen’s funeral. It was not that I played truant on purpose. I am sorry for his passing. When I think of him in the future, which I shall do, I shall think of him as Falstaff, his best role, a Falstaff of America but wiser—and richer, I might add. I’m sure you understand my sentiment.