A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (22 page)

“Was Moaxley in the States’ War?”

“A sergeant or something. Decorated, and all that.”

“I saw him downstairs. He’s got a Union uniform on.”

“Does he?” Harry seemed pleased. “Nice touch, that. I knew he’d meant to have a replica made and thought it unreasonably sentimental of him. But he was indulgent of the lady. Good Christ, so was I.”

“Why a replica?”

“My dear Mrs. Heath, perhaps when you’re of a certain age, outfits you wore at twenty will still quite fit you. He was twenty years old in his Union days. Pity the fabric’s better now than it was for the war.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

One of the doors opened. A gray-haired, short, plump woman came out from Miss Singleton’s with a bundled-up pile of laundry under one arm. From the way she glared at Charlotte, this had to be the managing housekeeper, Mrs. Fox.

And a curt old sourpuss she was. “Harry, why is this lady out of her room, when it’s against all the rules?”

“I believe, Mrs. Fox, she wants to go and pay respects.”

“She can go to Bowdoin Square like everyone else. There’s to be a laying out before the sailors come to fetch her. Is this the Mrs. Heath who brought the police, and caused poor Lily so much trouble?”

“I did not,” said Charlotte, “do any such thing.”

“Is she dressed?” said Harry, and Mrs. Fox gave a military-like nod of her head.

“What about the pictures?” said Harry. “Tell me you didn’t touch them.”

Mrs. Fox didn’t care about the pictures. “That’s your department.”

“She left them all to me, you know,” said Harry to Charlotte. “I don’t feel grabby and greedy about it, talking about it now. I’ve known for ages.”

Charlotte was curious. “What are you going to do with them?”

“Put them on my walls, and take down every tedious, stupefying thing I’ve got hanging anywhere that’s not one of hers.”

“Maybe they should go to a museum.”

“Maybe they will, I suppose. Eventually. My own demise is not the subject, and I’m not going to think about it. But I’ll tell you, when Moaxley got that suit made, it was likely to be for someone else’s going. Specifically mine.”

He stood up, groaning, and held out his hand to Charlotte. “Come on. This is my hotel and I can do what I like.”

Charlotte fussed with her hair and straightened out the folds of Mrs. Gerson’s dress, dangling off her so amply. Mrs. Fox disapproved of these gestures.

“You’re going to look at a corpse, Mrs. Heath,” she said. “Not to someone’s drawing room Thursday afternoon.”

“Give it a rest,” said Harry, rising to Charlotte’s defense. They went inside through the same door Mrs. Fox had exited.

The big wide-open space was lit by candles, not many of them, but just enough to give everything a yellowy glow. Chairs had been set up at the far end. The screen that had separated Miss Singleton’s sleeping room was gone.

In the chairs, around the bed, were Beechmont servants: little Eunice and Georgina; a few maids Charlotte hadn’t seen before; Terence; a young, blunt-faced, blond man; two curly dark-haired gorgeously handsome young men who had to be the Italians; the woman with the horsey face she’d met in her bath, who was supposed to have stayed in the hotel because the roads were full of snow, which they now were not, and a woman with a dark-blue turban tied around her head, who had to be the pianist, because her fingers were thrumming on the bed where Miss Singleton lay, as if playing a tune for her, and not a somber one: the fingers were moving in a quick, high-spirited way.

Charlotte whispered to Harry, “Where is her chair?”

“In the snow. They threw it out the window.”

“It wouldn’t fit!”

“First they took it apart. It’s not as if she wanted to have it sunk with her.”

No one looked up at Harry and Charlotte. No one was asleep. Quietly, in low, murmuring voices, they were playing some sort of a game, an alphabet game, one of those things Charlotte’s father-inlaw and mother-in-law detested, and said were for dilettantes.

“What letter are we on?” said the horsey woman.

“
P
,” someone said, and Terence said, “What’s the old name for Portugal?”

“Lusitania,” called out Harry. Then he said, “Where’s the Quarterno Gulf?”

“Istria!” said the two Italians, as one. Charlotte wondered which one had thrown the cake out the window.

“Where is the Rideau Canal?” said the pianist, and one of the maids spoke up.

“Canada.” She blushed. “I come from Ontario.”

“What connects the South China Sea to the East?” said the blond man, and Terence said, “We had that one last week,” and the blond man said, “I wasn’t here,” and the horsey woman said, “The Strait of Formosa, and I wasn’t here either.”

“Miss Singleton,” said Harry quietly to Charlotte, “was addicted to place-name games, and would say, when stumped for an answer, that the Pirate, who knew every spot on the globe, would whisper it in her ear, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t, because she’d come up with an answer every time.”

“Shame we’re not playing with shots of whiskey,” said Terence.

“It wouldn’t be right,” said Georgina, “for a vigil.”

“Well, we ran out,” said Terence.

And another maid, as Irish-looking as anything, said, “Are we on
T
?” They were. “So then, where is Tralee?”

Everyone pretended that the question was too hard, but it didn’t matter. You could tell she’d just wanted to say it, and she said it again: “Tralee.” There were tears in her eyes, and she said, “I was just after thinking, it ought to be creepy, her being so suddenly gone. But she wasn’t creepy alive, and she’s not given over to being such-like, now that she’s departed.”

“She would have liked that. Not creepy,” said the pianist, and one of the Italians demanded to know, what was the meaning of the word, and little Eunice said, “Like when you think there’re insects crawling on you, or something’s ugly. Or in other words, the opposite of how she looks.”

“She is beautiful, she is
incantevole,
” said the other Italian, and he didn’t have to say what that meant because his hands made gestures in the air to suggest, somehow, “like a very good statue in the middle of a fountain.”

“Are you sure we’re out of booze?” said the blond man.

“If we weren’t, I’d be sitting here finishing it,” said Terence.

“I have grappa,” said one of the Italians.

Terence brightened. “Where is it?”

“It’s in my room,” said the pianist, “and he and I are not sharing it with anyone else.”

“Don’t look at me,” said Harry. “Bar’s closed.”

Charlotte just stood there. Miss Singleton’s body simply looked like Miss Singleton, exactly as she’d looked the other night, when she’d abruptly canceled out Charlotte and let her eyes close. She was lying down instead of sitting; she was on top of the covers in a purple and red satin gown with ruffles all over the bodice and at the sleeves. A few of the fingers on her good hand were paint-stained.

Maybe whoever had washed her had left the paint there on purpose. Where was the ice-garden picture?

Charlotte looked around. The paintings stacked everywhere on the floor, against the walls, had been backward the night she was here. But now some were turned out. She saw a couple of watercolors of rigid dark boats in an ice-crusted bay, and a watercolor of a man’s battered brown shoe on its side near a dustbin.

What fixed her attention were the three big oils lined up against the wall just outside the sleeping area. No wonder everyone had kept saying to her, Did you see her pictures of Harry, of his wife? No one had mentioned Miss Blanchette, but there she was, too.

At the bottom of each one, unlike all the other pictures, there were titles, in narrowly drawn capital letters, in black.

“Harry Done In.” She’d put him on a sofa, in of course a pale suit, sprawled out, not so much napping as unconscious, his mouth all slack, his lips a little flabby, his face so weary-looking, it would seem no amount of sleep could cure it. On a table beside the sofa in a glass of water were dentures. It was so real-to-life, you’d think that if you held your hand near those lips you’d feel his breath.

It was the first picture she’d seen of Miss Singleton’s which implied in any way that something was actually moving. The teeth in the glass were so detailed, it seemed that if the table were bumped or shaken, they’d start clattering.

Harry noticed what she was looking at. She only now realized that the teeth in his mouth were artificial. She wondered if they hurt, if they fit right. It didn’t seem right to mention it, and she didn’t, but she remembered that Mrs. Petty—Rowena—had written that he suffered from gum decay. She’d had to cook special foods for him.

“I’m going to hide my picture,” he said.

“I think it’s wonderful.”

“Do you like my wife?”

“Lucy Reading,” it was called. Mrs. Alcorn sat at the same table next door where Charlotte had eaten her big, good, game-and-meat pie.

A book was open before her. Her neck was bent slightly toward it, swanlike, and there was something about the look of a swan in the paleness of her skin, the feathery white creases of her dress, a silk one; and it was like looking at a woman whose face you’d think you had seen in the moon, when you were a child and thought the moon had people’s faces. You could tell by the glassy look of the eyes, she wasn’t reading that book.

“She’s beautiful, and it’s so, so very sad,” Charlotte said. “But how did Miss Singleton ever see her?”

“Moaxley carried her over.”

“Miss Blanchette didn’t mention that Miss Singleton was ever a visitor.”

“She wouldn’t. She’s keen on privacy.”

Harry didn’t say anything about the one called “Miss Blanchette Napping.” It was her, all right: brown, inscrutable, tough.

She sat in a ladder-back chair with her hands folded in her lap, her back straight, her feet flat on the rug, the same rug as in next-door real life. In sleep she was as stiff and wooden as ever, but then you noticed that one eye was partially open. There was a gold-brown glint to it and you knew it was not an eye filmed over with sleep. You knew it was fully, absolutely alert.

Another alive thing!

She got you, thought Charlotte, as if her words could float next door into the ears of Miss Blanchette. “But I think it’s safe to say, you’ll not be hung in any of the guests’ rooms.” Then she said to Harry, “I was hoping to look at a picture she made of a garden, in an ice storm.”

“I never saw it.”

“All the flowers are coated with ice.”

Terence had heard her. He perked up his head and whispered, “Do you remember what came of your tarts, or whatever it was you tried to give her?”

Charlotte looked at him. “Are you teasing?”

He shook his head grimly.

“She burned it? She
burned
it? I wanted it!”

This was not appropriate for the situation. She didn’t care. She lowered her voice, though. “I told Arthur I would like to ask her if I could buy it from her.”

“He told her.”

“And she put it in the
fire
?”

“I had to wheel her over myself.”

“But I
wanted
it.”

“She didn’t,” said Terence, “think that it was any good.”

“It was! It was the best!”

Charlotte started over to the biggest of the fireplaces, where the fire was nearly out, as if she meant to get down on her knees and dig through the cinders and ashes. Harry grabbed her by the arm. “She burned lots of them,” he said. “I’m sure she had a reason.”

“The ice was too flat,” said the pianist. “She told me so, and I looked at it myself, and I have to say, she was right. The glaze was a failure. Ice on a bud was trickier than chunks of it in the water, like with those boats. She scrapped it and called it practice.”

Scrapped it! The one single thing! The one single thing she adored! She adored it, she’d wanted it in her room, she’d wanted to fall asleep at night with it there as the last thing she looked at, and there again in the morning, as the first. She knew that stomping her foot on the floor was something a three- or four-year-old would do, and she didn’t care about that, either. It was criminal to have wrecked that picture. It was viceful. It was a sin.

How am I going to imagine it, she thought miserably, when I only saw it that one time?

But in fact it was already fading from her mind: the clarity of it, the solemn, icy stillness, the eerie glint, the silence. And she sniffed and started to cry: for the picture, for the painter, for all that terrible, sealed-up, locked-up, frozen immovability.

And she thought, What room would I have hung it in, anyway?

Not her sickroom; she was never spending another night in there again. Not her bedroom, next to Hays’s, but separated from his by a desert. She could imagine what her mother-in-law would have said if she’d brought the frozen garden into the house. “Don’t you think you’ve had quite enough of things that are paralyzed, Charlotte?”

There was a rap at the door. Moaxley loomed in the doorway, his cloak off, in his old-fashioned uniform with its brand-new texture and gloss. His cap was still in one hand. You wanted to salute him. “Hearse’s here, quiet like, for the trip to Bowdoin Square. They say they’ll get it done before sunup.”

“At the back?” said Harry.

“At the back.”

Harry said, “I have to ask all the ladies to go back to their rooms.”

No one asked why, or put up an argument. Charlotte was the first one out. She went rushing down the two flights to the second floor, but when she got to the bottom, she found that she was sobbing so hard, she was blinded by tears, and she sank down on the step and put her head in her arms.

Damn this hotel! All it did was make her cry. Damn it to pieces!

She stayed there like that, like she was all folded up, crying and crying, until the hearse men asked her to get out of the way. She wiped her eyes with the hem of Mrs. Gerson’s dress, just to be able to see, and then she cried on the way back to her room, even louder, and it didn’t matter who heard her or whom she woke up. Death was in the building. It was allowed.

She crawled back into bed beside her warm aunt. She hadn’t realized how cold she was. Harry must have worn heavy, winter-wool, masculine underclothes under that summery suit. Not her. Ladies didn’t. If Hays had ever found out she used to put on his one-piece long underwear—union suits, they called them—to go out riding, he would have hidden them whenever he went away on trips in cold weather, or he would have taken them with him.