A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (21 page)

“My true reason for writing besides that is to say: You have offered your willingness to help me in some trouble, if I should need you. I do. Don’t worry about my safety or well-being. I am stopping at an undisclosed location, for how long I don’t yet know. I am safe. I am well. My illness is a thing of the past.

“Please will you do the following. I give you my trust, as you had pledged me yours. No one can know of this.

“I wish for you to engage a detective. I’m told Pinkerton is an excellent agency. You will need to put up payment in my place, at least, for the time being. I don’t have the means just now to have access to my own funds. When I do I shall not mind the expense, however large it may be.

“There was a married couple in Hartford, Connecticut, by the names of Ralph and Florence Pym. Mr. Pym was a New England representative of Sears, Roebuck, with a Hartford office. He died some—”

Charlotte looked up at Arthur. He was standing by the fire, idly waving an edge of the blanket in its direction, as if Charlotte had annoyed him so much, and now he was so utterly bored, he was willing to catch himself on fire.

“Oh, stop that,” she said, “and tell me how many years ago your father died.”

“My father? What are you talking about? Who’re you writing to and what about?”

“I’ll read it to you when it’s finished.”

“I’m not telling you anything else about my family, or about anything.”

“You sound like me, talking to Mrs. Petty.”

“I feel it. She’s left. She wanted you to go with her.”

“I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because,” said Charlotte. She couldn’t say why. “Because I want to write this letter.”

“He died when I was fifteen.”

She realized she didn’t know his age. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Isn’t that old to be in college?”

“I’m combining it with my medical studies.”

“But still.”

“All right, I admit it, it seems to be taking me a long time.”

“I suppose that time is something you feel you have a right to.”

“You judge me!”

“I don’t. I don’t want to argue with you, either. If I wanted to argue with a man, I would have—” She was about to say, “stayed at home,” but thought better of it and continued with the letter.

“…some eleven years ago. Mrs. Pym was in education.”

She would need the names of some places. “Arthur, what was the name of your mother’s school, where she was mistress?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You talk like a little boy.”

“Let’s go back to bed.”

“This is very important.”

“I don’t remember, honestly.”

Who cared what the name of the school was? Let the detective find out.

“She was a well-known teacher,” Charlotte wrote, “and she published articles and taught at a college. Some years ago, prior to her husband’s passing, Mrs. Pym vanished from sight, and was never heard from again.”

“Arthur, I want to know the address your mother had given you to write to.”

By now he was back on the bed, behind her, and he was reading over her shoulder. He said nothing. She couldn’t see his face. His breath was on her neck, winey, warm.

“Unfortunately the address is unknown,” she wrote. “Please instruct the detective to make discreet inquiries regarding, first, the cause for Mrs. Pym’s disappearance, and second, to make every effort possible to determine where she is, if she is still alive. If not, I should like to know where her grave is.”

Charlotte thought that it must have seemed heartless of her to have put in that last bit. But this was a practical matter. One needed to transact a business arrangement without emotions. If she expected a reaction from Arthur, she didn’t get one.

“There is one other matter. I wish to have inquiries made in reference to my husband. I wish to know with what woman he is involved, in a liaison. I wish to know her name, her particulars, and, in short, whatever there is about her to know. I realize, given the two separate situations, more than one detective will be needed.

“You must know, by now, I have left Hays. Please attend to this as soon as you are able. It is most urgent. Proceed without further word from me. I can give you no further information. I shall write again soon to see how it is progressing.

“Your niece, Charlotte.”

She put the letter in the envelope, sealed it, stamped it. “I’ll post it for you,” said Arthur, trying to take it out of her hands.

“You will not. How does one ring for a maid?”

“You’ve been in here most of a week,” he said. “I should think you already know.”

“Whenever I wanted Eunice, she appeared.”

There was a bellpull on the wall near the window. Arthur sat in the center of the bed and put the blanket over his head as if he were willing to be smothered. She pulled the bell for the maid.

“You’ve doubted me, Charlotte.” His voice, under the blanket, was fuzzy and muffled. He sounded hurt. “I bared my past to you, and you wonder if I was inventing it, for I can’t even imagine what reason. How could you do that?”

“I don’t doubt you,” she said.

She found her little purse with the Gersons’ money and took out a dollar. It didn’t take long for Eunice to come up, with a bucket of coal and another blanket. She’d been on her way anyway, not that Charlotte had asked for these things.

Charlotte opened the door just widely enough to take them. “Post this for me, Eunice, at once, please. And take this.” She gave her the money. “Please go and buy yourself a cake somewhere, and tell the other maids I apologize for taking back the sweets they were counting on.”

The little maid beamed. “This would buy three or four! It’s too much!”

“Go on, and buy yourself three or four.”

“Please, missus, I have to ask, is Mr. Pym with you?”

“He is. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. It’s just that another lady had asked if he was anywhere free.”

“He’s not free,” said Charlotte.

She shut the door harder than she needed to. It was like talking about a cab. Or a hairdresser. Or a shop attendant. Or a doctor.

Suddenly she was tired. Suddenly the room was not quite as attractive, not quite as charming, not quite as comfortable. There was an aching, dull throbbing in both her breasts, from Arthur. Hays never, ever put his mouth on her breasts because that was what infants did, as if he thought that milk was stored there always and he didn’t want to take any away, like it would need to be saved.

Her lips hurt from being kissed. There were probably indentations from Arthur’s teeth all over them. She was glad the room had no mirror. She didn’t want to know what she looked like.

Everything between her breasts and the bottoms of her feet was aching, everything. She should never have written that letter. What did she care about Arthur’s mother? What did she care about him? She never should have gone to the Gersons for help. She never should have come to Boston. She should have hitched her horses outside Uncle Owen’s house and gone inside to look at him lying there dead.

She should have gone home to her husband. She really should have. Then everything would be all right.

What about the woman? Was she supposed to pretend she hadn’t seen what she saw? Could she do that?

She couldn’t have done it before she’d come to the Beechmont. That much was certain. But maybe she could do it now. Or, if not pretend, then just simply find a way to forget about it.

Or if not forget about it, overlook it. Could that be a possible thing, somehow?

“Charlotte.” Arthur had come up behind her. His hands were on her hips, his face was pressed into her hair. “Your hair is all crinkly,” he said.

“That’s because it was in that awful braid all day.”

“Come back to bed.” He lifted the hair at her neck and kissed her neck, the only place that wasn’t aching.

Well, now it was, but it was aching to be kissed a little more. He moved his hands to her breasts, lightly. She leaned back against him.

“Why did you do that?” he said.

“Do what.”

“The letter.”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have had some motivation.”

“To help you?”

“Or to test me.”

That was what Dickie had done in their interview. He’d tried to trick her into confessing that, when it came to the hotel, her word could not be trusted. Maybe people were always doing that to each other: I dare you to prove a big disappointment to me.

“You only say
test
because you’re a student,” said Charlotte.

“Perhaps I’ll be one forever.”

She didn’t answer that. He’d just accuse her again of judging him in a negative light. She thought about the way Hays’s face had looked when he came calling on her—a younger Hays, a nervous blushing suitor, in spite of his money and his position and his career—all those years ago, at that boring school in New Hampshire where she was spending her days teaching frightened little girls to go around in circles in goat carts.

He’d be waiting for her at the edge of the paddock, or by the stables, or in the reception room. And when she came toward him, there’d be a lift to him, a visible rising of his spirits, as real as if his sentiments were like one of those hot-air balloons when the ropes are cut and they soar, miraculously. There’d been no effort made at concealing that.

Funny how Hays could show affection in public in intimate gestures, taking her hand at a service in church, like a lover, or gently, absentmindedly, brushing his knuckles at the side of her neck in the middle of a drawing-room soiree with business associates from so many different countries, it would sound like the Tower of Babel in there, and he alone, Hays, her husband, would know what was what, would stand there with his feet planted squarely, sure of himself, fisting his hand as another man would do to cause violence, and then tenderly, sweetly, caressing her, in front of everyone.

And then in private he’d be secretive, guarded, speaking in camouflage, in riddles, coming to her like a hobbled old horse, like a horse so controlled and so spiritless, it doesn’t know when its bridle is off or on, or if the paddock gate is shut or open. Where did that soaring balloon of the old Hays go?

Off into the horizon, out of sight, sinking into some ocean or crashing on some cliff, or running out of power in a clear blue sky and slowly, gracefully, horribly, descending straight down, as if it were meant to do that all along: it would crash and be pulverized to dust.

Maybe some fault of it was hers. She was willing to admit to herself that it was not all one-sided. Maybe when she’d got sick, at first, she’d given her husband the idea she did not want him near her.

Maybe she’d been a little too shrill in the way she lay there and shouted at him, yes, shouted, “Leave me be!” As if it were his fault that the fevers came, the numbing, the pain.

And what about that day in Aunt Lily’s office, when it was revealed that something was wrong with her? She had never seen that look on his face before, and she knew it was only a shade of the depths of his feeling, because she’d seen his struggle to mask it. Fear. I’m the only thing he’s afraid of losing, she had thought.

Arthur said, “I suppose I should thank you for your intentions.”

“No need.”

“What was in your mind?”

“I had thought of it, that was all.”

“But why?”

“Perhaps,” she said, “it’s because the academy I went to was a Christian girls’ school, and it was instilled in me to be useful.”

“I don’t think so.” He was whispering into her ear, pulling her to him more closely. “I’m glad you can’t see what my face is like.”

“Describe it.”

“No.”

She turned around and he kissed her hard and she kissed him back even harder, clutching at him as if she were drowning. They went tripping over each other to the bed, flinging themselves down, kissing.

Someone was at the door. They realized that the knocking had gone on for some time. Arthur grabbed for the blanket, to cover himself.

It was Aunt Lily: a tense, pinched-face Aunt Lily, with tears in her eyes, tears down her cheeks. “Charlotte, my friend Miss Singleton has died,” she said. “Let me in.”

A
Beechmont bed that was big enough for two lovers was inadequate, Charlotte found, for someone trying to sleep beside her aunt, who was tall and broad to begin with, and kept tossing about and pulling at the blankets and flinging out her limbs, and muttering half-coherent things, repeated in pairs, like, “Clamp that! Clamp that!” And, “The ointment, the ointment!”

She considered going upstairs to the room Aunt Lily had abandoned, but she didn’t want to take the risk of finding someone else in it, such as the beautiful math tutor, or some other man.

It was odd to be in a position of giving comfort to someone who had only seemed to exist to give comfort to you. “You aren’t necessary at the moment.” Those were Aunt Lily’s parting words to Arthur.

Miss Singleton had died in her chair just after dusk. Terence and two other young men—two Italians, from the Italian tenements—were with her, and the lady pianist, and a lady who’d just checked in from Cape Cod, who painted seascapes and hoped to talk shop with someone more accomplished than she was, although she was pretty good herself.

A supper party was taking place, put together from what was scavenged from Mrs. Petty’s abandoned kitchen. There were new candles, a lot of wine, champagne, and a festive air, for no particular reason except that Miss Singleton had spent a pleasant day, and was looking forward to a biscuit cake that Georgina had made her that morning, with no-sugar blueberries and blackberries from cans: berries for Berry, which she never ate.

Terence and the lady from the Cape had argued with the Italians about Rome. The Americans said, Oh, the paintings, the history, the statues, the Pope, the beauty, the hills, the glory; and the Italians laughed at them and said they were naive, they were innocents, they were like schoolchildren. “Roma,
puttana,
is not
bella,
is a whore!” they cried.

Miss Singleton sided with the Italians, great favorites of hers; they’d been with her all day, which was why her mood was good. She said, “Gentlemen, I should love to paint your faces, I’ve been thinking about doing it since this morning, and wondering if I’m up to it,” and then she tipped back her head and gave a gasp, and her jaw fell open and she was dead, and they went running downstairs for Lily.

In a fit of temper, at the sight of the woman so utterly still, as if the polio had entered all of her, one of the Italians had seized Georgina’s cake, rushed to a window, opened it, and hurled it, plate and all, to the street.

“Pity the detective’s not down there to think it was meant for himself,” observed Terence. He’d only arrived for supper but had been told that everyone else had monitored the detective with great interest; he felt he’d missed out on something.

Aunt Lily hadn’t mentioned the detective. She’d waited until Arthur was gone before she threw herself down on the bed and sobbed. Charlotte patted her hair, held her hand, poured her a glass of water, and gave her the rest of the wine.

When the burst of tears had let up, Charlotte asked her, “Were you Miss Singleton’s physician?”

“Not officially. She’d lost faith in the medical profession. In fact I knew her for more than thirty-five years, and I don’t mind telling you, for many of those years, we were singularly close to each other. And I’ve no more to say on the subject, Charlotte, if you don’t mind.”

For a long time, Charlotte sat in the one, narrow, straight-backed chair. She was fully dressed, in respect for Aunt Lily, who had anyway demanded it. She was wearing Mrs. Gerson’s too-big dress; she had no nightclothes. Mrs. Gerson had forgotten to pack any for her, in the haste and confusion of that flight. “I have got to buy some clothes,” Charlotte said to herself.

She watched her aunt sleeping. Arthur had left for the night train west, to go and see his dissection. Strange that a man who planned to be a physician, and was so eager for a body dug up from a bog, was so squeamish, so downright hostile, when it came to the proximity of known, brand-new death. He kept nervously glancing up at the ceiling as he dressed—and there was some awkwardness about that, in front of Aunt Lily, and with the tiny size of the room.

He shuddered to hear Aunt Lily’s recounting of what had happened. He said, “That’s so vulgar,” and it wasn’t clear if he meant Rome-like-a-whore, or the act of someone’s heart, right there in the building, performing one last beat and then stopping, just stopping. “You can go up to see her before you leave tonight, if you like,” Aunt Lily told him. By the look on his face, you’d think it would be torture for him to do so; he looked as though he would rather throw himself off the roof.

“Good night, Arthur,” Charlotte said, at the door.

He tried to pull her into the hall with him. He wanted to kiss her, but she pushed back her shoulders and went stiff, and spoke to him formally, hostesslike.

“I hope you have a safe journey.”

“Come with me. Come out to the Valley.”

“Go, or you’ll miss the train.”

“Your old home. West, all those towns. You all but said it’s your old home.”

“I’m with my aunt now.”

“No, come with me. You must realize you want to. Your aunt has so many friends here, she’ll be all right without you.”

“You’re the second person in one evening to ask me to go away with them.”

“You said no to the first to be able to say yes to the second.”

“I think not,” said Charlotte, and she smiled at him sadly.

And shut the door.

She pictured him out in the darkness, the snow. She pictured the journey of the train. The frosty windows, the steady beat, the sound of the whistle, the iron wheels, the sight through scrapes in the frost of black trees lit up by the moon, and looking like black, somber skeletons. She pictured the mountains in the distance, and the little stations—grimy, desolate, dirty lanterns on dirty poles, snow everywhere.

It still felt good to know their names. Forge Landing. Wachusetts. Allenberg. East Derby, Derby River. Fairfield. Blackstone Junction, where Miss Georgeson’s was. North Blackstone, Blackstone. Oakville, where Arthur was going. Chetterdon. Bigelow Mills Village, where her home was, before Miss Georgeson’s.

Morton Falls. Cranfield. Westerville. Wall Gorge Township, with a tower of a mighty, astonishing waterfall, where you weren’t allowed to go until you’d turned thirteen; it was your thirteenth birthday present—pure, raw watery power—and then you had to be with so many teachers and servants, who guarded you fiercely, every second, it was galling, and they said they’d tie you with a rope like an animal if you tried to get close, so close that the roaring of the water came into your head so loud, it would seem you’d be deaf forever, and think that the deafness was worth it; and the spray with its icy strength made you feel that if you threw yourself to the Gorge, just fled from every restraint, you’d be as light as a feather, borne up by all that water, pushed up into the air; and you could fly.

Then Lanbridge, at the end of the line, where the little lake was, where she’d tipped over in a sailboat and might have died if the water had not been so shallow.

She tried to picture herself beside Arthur on a train seat, her hand holding his. Her head on his shoulder. Her thigh pressed up to his thigh. “A newly married couple,” other passengers might say.

“I hired him,” she’d have to answer. She couldn’t picture herself beside Arthur.

She put some more coal on the fire. She didn’t know where the lavatory was on this floor. She was not in the mood to go searching for it. She relieved herself in the chamber pot, as quietly as she could.

She covered Aunt Lily with a blanket she’d thrown off. She cleaned up the remains of her and Arthur’s supper. She balled up the wrappings and threw them into the fire. She brushed her hair, leaving it down. At about four in the morning, she ventured out into the hall.

She peered down from the second-floor landing. The gas lamps at every staircase and in the downstairs hall were lit—they were low and flickering, but they were on. A noise had got Charlotte’s attention: a growly, nasally heavy snoring, which sounded at first like a door being blown open and its hinges creaking.

Moaxley, his cloak around him like a blanket, was asleep with his mouth wide open in an armchair. He must have dragged the chair out to the hall from one of the sitting rooms.

He was a rumpled, bedraggled-looking guard, and you had to wonder what he was sitting guard for, in the silence, with the door locked and bolted. But then you remembered: death.

The cloak had slipped off him here and there to reveal not his customary clothes, but something blue. In one hand was a blue cap, which was clung to in sleep like something attached to Moaxley’s fingers.

It was the uniform of a Union soldier. He was the right age for it. It almost made you wish you were a man, and a soldier yourself, just to have something to put on when death came onto the scene, besides draping yourself in yards and yards of black, like ladies were supposed to. Charlotte’s mother-in-law had about an acre’s worth of black crinoline, folded up and stored in a chest, for the widow’s dresses she felt sure she’d be one day needing to have made. All the ladies over forty had some. White when you’re a bride, black when you’re a widow, as if there were nothing worth mentioning in between.

Why should death be given the pitch of an empty-sky night?
Raise the colors! There is nothing ignoble in a pulse being stopped when the blood coursed valiant and true.

Maybe it wasn’t “pulse.” Maybe it was “heart.” She couldn’t remember where those lines came from. Some history play: Richard, John, Henry? Some old king, played by some Heath, as out of place in an American town hall as a bustle at the tailbone of a young and vigorous American lady.

All the same, they were nice lines. Maybe the histories had their uses. If anyone’s blood had run valiant and true, it was Berenice Singleton’s.

Charlotte turned and climbed on tiptoes up the two flights to Miss Singleton’s floor. She almost lost her footing as she neared the top and heard her voice called, in a small masculine whisper. She’d been so intent on watching the steps, one at a time, she didn’t see Harry Alcorn until she was right before him. He was sitting on the topmost tread, with his head in his hands and his knees bunched up. He was wearing a cream-colored linen suit and a white shirt without a tie. In the thin light, he looked ghostly.

“Hello, Charlotte, what are you up to?”

“You startled me!”

“But wouldn’t one expect to be startled, walking about in the dead of night?”

She caught her breath. “I’ve come to look at Miss Singleton.”

He waved his arm in the direction of all of the doors, shut tight, of her rooms. “A crowd’s in there. They’re not wasting any time. They’re fixing her up. Did you know she’s to have a burial at sea?”

Charlotte had a mental image of a gang of dark-suited men holding up a coffin in which lay Miss Singleton, and throwing it over some cliffs, like the cliffs at the summer place at Squab Cove. That couldn’t have been what he meant.

Harry moved over and let her sit down beside him. A burial at sea? “They’re going to put her in the
water
?”

“Her husband was an admiral or whatever it is that’s close to the rank. He was on that infamous ship at Havana.”

“They told me. That warship that was exploded. They said he was the commander.”

“No. That would have made it more bearable, I suppose. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He was inspecting things, and was given a ride, and was due to meet up with another one. Berry took it bad. She was already living here pretty much most of the time. So we brought in a lawyer and she put it in her will she wanted to be taken out by the Navy and put into the waves, so she could join him, which isn’t allowed for civilians, ordinarily, but she paid the Navy in advance for their trouble, and they feel bad about that boat. And her husband was a powerful man.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“Oh, certainly. Berry’s Pirate. That’s what he was called. His name was Andrew, and he was the best-humored, most energetic man that ever put foot on a vessel. He really looked like a pirate, you see. Had these big mustaches and the torso of a giant, and short legs, bowed like. Could cuss like the worst of them. A good man. Dead.”

“Does Miss Singleton have to be taken to Havana?”

“No,” said Harry. “I suppose they’ll just do it from here, and chug off from the naval yard over in Charlestown. Where’s Lily?”

“In my bed.”

“She’s got to get in for early rounds, or the wards will fall to pieces, even worse than the shape they’re in.”

“I’ll make sure she’s up soon. I met your wife,” said Charlotte.

“I heard.”

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, at the moment, about that. “Can one go to the yard and watch the boat go out?”

“Indirectly, I would think. She’s got a house, a grand one, right over at Bowdoin Square, empty as anything for the last two years, except for servants. It’s her official, you know, residence. We’re going to have her brought over there so the Navy can fetch her properly. Anyway, that’s the address they’ve got. No reason to confuse things. And it’s the Navy who’s getting the house. The Pirate was particular about that, though I suspect he might have changed his mind if he lived to see what was done to poor Cuba.”