A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (26 page)

Well, she needed new dresses. He left her just before the station and watched her cross the road. He went inside before she did; she wanted to look in the window first, to see what sorts of things they had. If it was anything like the shoe shop, she was in for a depressing time of it. She pulled up the collar of her coat and burrowed into it. She had Everett Gerson’s big mittens on, but they weren’t doing much good.

Inside the dress shop, a woman customer in a worn old wool coat was holding up a brightly patterned shirtwaist, turning it this way and that, studying it. It was not an attractive dress, but it wasn’t awful.

Suddenly Charlotte was aware of someone standing behind her. Maybe because Dickie had told her about the perils Harry imagined for her, way out here near the end of the train tracks, past the bounds, in Harry’s mind, of civilization, she found herself shivering, all the way down her back, inside her clothes. She forgot she was in full view of a police station. She almost didn’t turn around. She had the thought that if she dashed into the shop, she’d be laughing at herself, in less than two seconds, for her fears. She’d probably imagined it. She wasn’t a coward. She turned around.

Hays.

“Good afternoon, Charlotte,” he said gently. He looked away from her, to give her time to conceal from him the degree to which he’d startled her. She appreciated that.

Then he nodded and smiled as if he’d only just parted from her that morning, as if they’d had breakfast together, and perhaps even lunch.

Hays. Flush-cheeked, not completely from the cold, in his handsome, heavy gray English greatcoat with the double set of pearly-gray buttons. His fine leather gloves. Black arctic boots. A muffler at his throat, the striped one she bought for him last November.

The striped one! Maroon and blue stripes, soft cashmere, about a hundred times more colorful than any other item of clothing he owned, which had been the whole point of buying it. She’d never seen it on him before. It disappeared into a drawer right after he opened it. She’d wrapped it like a gift. It hadn’t been his birthday. It hadn’t been anything special. He had hated it. His whole family had hated it.

Derby hat. The dark gray one, custom-fitted. She almost thanked him out loud for not fingering the brim and tipping it to her. He didn’t believe in tipping one’s hat to one’s wife, unless your wife was in the company of another person, or with a group. There were no other people.

Code. Everything, everything coded.

She didn’t mention the first-time muffler, although she knew he wanted her to. His breath made little white clouds in the air between them. He was nervous. She knew that. She could hide things better than he could. She didn’t have a face that went pink with the least bit of feeling.

Next to the dress shop was an electrical-goods shop with the cleanest front windows in town. Displays were in the windows: batteries, buzzers, lighting fixtures, all sorts of gadgets, and those electrical belts that everyone said were so useful, with built-in batteries. You wore them beneath your topmost layer of clothing. They were said to be good for backaches, ailments of the spine, muscle cramping, time-of-the-month disorders, and general problematical nerves. Two of Hays’s sisters had them. When Charlotte was in her sickbed, Aunt Lily had said she would personally introduce a secret, villainous strain of virus into the entire household if anyone tried to electrically shock Charlotte in any way, and she didn’t give a damn what anyone said about juice from a battery being good for paralyzed limbs. If God wanted humans to be jolted with electricity, said Aunt Lily, God would have made it a nice thing to be struck by lightning. Everyone remembered what had happened to Hays’s mother’s personal maid, under that wreck of a tree—the lightning tree—so the threat was effective. Charlotte’s sisters-in-law had stopped wearing their belts for a while, but they missed the tingly little sensations, they said, and put them back on.

This electrical shop stood by an alley. At the end of the alley, easing into the street, was a hired sleigh: two quiet spotted horses, wearing blinders, and a muffled-up driver. The seats were piled high with fur wrappings.

The driver had a silver flask in one hand and a whip in the other. He held both these things idly, like natural extensions of his arms, and Charlotte thought, If he so much as flicks that whip at those horses, I will run to their harnesses and set them free, and slap them on their hinds and tell them, Run.

Hays said, “Are you shopping, Charlotte?”

“In fact, yes, I am. I was just about to go in.”

“Then may I stay here until you come out? I’ve hired a sleigh.”

“I can see that.”

“I offer you a lift.”

“I already have one arranged.”

“The policeman. Who’s just gone into the station.”

“He came with me from Boston.”

“From Lily’s apartment.”

“Yes.”

There was a certain type of lacquer which, when applied to something perishable, stiffened it up, crustlike, with a colorless coating of resiliency. The Irish maids had jars and jars of it. They were always lacquering things for themselves and for Charlotte’s father-in-law: seashells, flower petals, autumn leaves, birds’ eggs, birds’ nests, segments of bodies of birds fallen victim to murderous cats. There were twiggy bits of feet all over a shelf in the yard shed. Tiny beaks. Feathers. The shallow shafts of wing bones. All lacquered. Resilient.

Charlotte imagined such a lacquer on herself, on all of her, from the top of her head to the bottoms of her feet. If Hays were to take off his gloves and touch the side of her face, she thought, he would think he was touching veneer. If he tapped on her forehead, he’d hear an echo. He did that sometimes. Coming home from a trip he’d wait until he found her alone in some room, and he’d go up to her and knock on her forehead: I am home, Charlotte, are you? It was another way of saying
Cross the desert,
but it was special for coming home.

But of course he didn’t touch her. Of course he didn’t take off his gloves.

“I should like to speak with you,” he said.

Lacquer. Veneer. No, more than that. Glass. Thick. She imagined herself inside a jar, a canning jar, with some sort of opening so her voice could be heard. Steady voice. She was proud of herself.

“I should like to speak with you also. Why don’t we arrange a time?”

“A time?”

“An appointment,” said Charlotte. The horses were getting restless. The flask in the driver’s hand was opened, was drunk from. The whip was not moved. Across the street, Dickie was coming down the steps of the station. She saw him. Hays didn’t.

Somehow Dickie knew to go back inside. He walked up the steps backward, stumbled, didn’t fall. He mouthed the words “Is that your husband?” but she could tell that he’d already figured that out.

Then she knew he was watching from a window. She didn’t mind, not at all. She thought, being watched, being followed, this is getting to be a habit. She felt used to it already. What did Hays know, exactly?

That he knew
something
was undoubtable. She was making herself nearly breathless with the effort not to let herself erupt, geyserlike, and flood him with questions, exclamations, everything pouring out at once into the frigid white air. Thicker glass!

The customer in the dress shop who’d been looking at the shirtwaist came out empty-handed. I wonder if they have that in my size, Charlotte thought. Maybe she’d buy it a little bigger than what she needed at the present time. She’d got to like the looseness of Mabel Gerson’s dress. And anyway, she thought, all I’ve been doing is eating; I’ve probably put on five pounds just this week.

“Are you telling me you would want me to walk away from you now, and have, as you say, an appointment, for a later time?”

“You wouldn’t walk, you have your sleigh.”

“I had hired it from the train station.”

“And were you on the train I was on, early this morning? Hays, were you following me?”

“I don’t know what train you were on. Early this morning, I was here. Did you see the hotel by the bank? The Blue Crest, it’s called. Not a bad place. They say the hills to the west turn blue at dawn, but I don’t think it happens in winter. I slept there last night.”

She hadn’t seen any hotel, she hadn’t seen any bank. Slept there last night in the company of
whom
?

No questions! Thicker and thicker glass, thickest of all possible glasses!

“There are private dining rooms. I would like to arrange for one. I’d find it suitable.”

“You mean today, Hays?”

“Certainly I mean today.”

Charlotte shook her head. He looked at her at last, for a long, long moment, as if he meant to penetrate the veneer. She could tell he was giving her credit for it, a lot of credit. And she felt she had to return it, so she let him know, with a look, she did not find him to be, more or less, repulsive, which was pretty much the way she’d been looking at him up to now.

This is business, she thought.

“I think we’ll wait,” she said, “and meet in a place completely, you know, neutral.”

“This town is neutral.”

“Not to me.”

“It’s cold,” he said.

“It was warmer when it was snowing,” she said.

“Then meet where, Charlotte, and when?”

“Boston, perhaps.” She looked down, thinking. It wasn’t as if she could invite him to meet her at Harry’s.

He didn’t put up an argument. He said, “All right. Boston. How about the Tremont Arms?”

“It burned in a fire, Hays, four or five years ago.”

“I’d forgotten.”

She didn’t know what she was going to say until she said it. “The Essex,” she said. She didn’t look at him. She willed herself not to. She felt she wouldn’t be able to bear it if he didn’t remember what that meant. He wasn’t the only one, she thought, who knew a few things about codes.

She looked at him. He remembered. “The one we didn’t go to on the night we didn’t go to the play about the fellow trying to kill the other fellow with the sawmill blade?” He said this somberly, professionally.

The night we didn’t go to the play. Not the night we first knew how sick you were.

Business.

“Oh,” said Charlotte. “Is that the same hotel? I’d forgotten.”

“I would have enjoyed that play.”

“You would not have, Hays.”

He gave her that. He said, “When?”

“What is your schedule?”

“I have to go to Albany for two days.”

“More bicycles?”

“Yes, and automobiles,” he said.

“You’re branching out.”

“Yes.”

“In three days, then,” she said.

“What hour?”

“I don’t have a preference.”

“Five?”

“Five.”

“Shall I arrange for a dining room?”

“Please.”

Dickie came down the steps again and this time he crossed the street, coming toward them. Hays turned. The two men did not shake hands, but merely eyed each other, not in an unfriendly way, but the way men size each other up, when neither of them is interested in conversation, and neither feels the other is a threat. They would probably get along well, Charlotte thought.

Slept here last night
why
?

Hays nodded in Dickie’s direction, acknowledging him. “Then I’ll retake my sleigh,” he said politely. He held up his hand to the brim of his hat. “Goodbye, Charlotte.”

“Goodbye.”

“I’ve got it,” said Dickie, the second Hays walked away. Hays didn’t look back.

“Got what?”

Dickie was purely one-track. “The
location
.”

“Oh.”

“Come on.”

She was not to have a new dress after all. Maybe she’d go back there. Dickie was bearing her away again, all blustery and police-manish. They were headed in the opposite direction of Hays’s sleigh. She heard the driver call out to the horses. No whip. She heard the tinkle of their bells, just a few of them, but their sounds were shiny and bright in the cold, cold, bright air.

T
hey left the shops and streets of the center of Bigelow Mills and headed toward the next village. She knew they were going east: the sky they were facing was gray with dusk. It did not feel right to be walking away from the sun.

A train whistle blew in the distance. A train she wasn’t on.

A white wasteland. Little houses here and there, huddled down, dark, shuttered, looking like they suffered from spasms, from fatigue. Thick coal-dark smoke huffing up out of some chimneys. Thick wood-gray smoke huffing up out of others. Ice-crusted snow, so hard and dense you could walk on top of it without sinking.

A crowd of children, mostly boys, in too-lightweight clothes, passed by, headed back to the town. A few of them had sleds, but most had flattened cardboard boxes or barrel slats. They weren’t bubbly and cocky and noisy like the Boston children who sledded on the Common. A grim silence was like a thing they carried with them. They were cold. And maybe their instincts told them who Dickie was. They barely looked twice at them.

Something howled from the direction of the woods to the north; the sound seemed to clutch at her heart. Wolves!

“Dickie! Wolves!”

“Dogs,” he called out cheerfully.

Dickie seemed to have tapped into a concealed other self, an alternative personality: a fearless, excited adventurer. A man obsessed with a mission. He also seemed to be immune from normal requirements of sleep. Where was he taking her? It was a criminal act, committed against one’s self, to be out in this frigidity. She’d give anything she had for a horse.

“I want a horse!” cried Charlotte, and she felt like King Richard on that battle plain, even though this wasn’t a war for the ruling of England, and Richard was a twisted, evil man, with a vat of poison for a soul, and so many crimes on his record, including killing those princes in the Tower, and disposing of his wife, no one could feel a drop of sympathy for him, except for the scene where he was unhorsed, staggering about, reduced to whining.

The Town Players had put on
Richard III
while Charlotte was in her sickbed. Hays had wanted to have her carried over for the show, but his mother had felt it would look improper, as if Charlotte, a pale, sick lady in the audience, tied to some chair to keep her upright, would steal all the attention, like a doomed, innocent princess; and anyway the Heaths didn’t want anyone to wonder if they were harboring a victim of the dreaded polio. Hays hadn’t put up a fight against his mother, but he’d found it necessary to be away on a trip for the two nights the play was running.

Her father-in-law had played the lead. Everyone said he’d done it brilliantly. She felt she knew Richard better than any of those other kings because her father-in-law had rehearsed his lines in her doorway. She was the one who’d coached him, urging him to play up the wicked wit, the knife-sharp retorts and observations.

It was true that of all those royal types, in all those histories, the one who was the worst of all villains had the best of all lines, the way that the Old Testament Satan, when you thought about it like this, had the single most interesting part. It wasn’t very interesting to be God or an angel, because everything they did was predictable, and purely for the sake of being good, which was praiseworthy, but not interesting.

There were shadings, gradations of “good.” This was a fact.

People with complexities were people who never bored you. Who was the least boring character in the whole Bible? Charlotte had said so to her father-in-law, and he had looked at her with eyes blinking hard with surprise, as if he’d only just realized that his daughter-inlaw in a sickbed had a brain in her head, which she now and then actually used. She had opinions, theories.

He’d listened to her (in the greater whole of preparing for his role; it was just that once). He’d agreed with her about the inherent higher interest of evil, and said, winking at her, Richard-like, “But let’s keep that a secret between us two.”

He allowed her to help him think of interesting ways to have his Richard look twisted onstage. He hadn’t wanted to stick a pillow up his shirt and be obviously a hunchback like other Richards he’d seen on other stages, and like Shakespeare had wanted: a deformed body to correspond with a deformed soul. So he gave his Richard a sideways slant, as if he were always about to fall over, which may have been inspired by the way Charlotte looked when she stood up at the side of the sickbed after some of the paralysis wore off. He hadn’t needed the prop of a hump.

Arthur. Arthur the first time she saw him, in the green jacket, that little cushion stuck up his back. She’d thought he was crippled. He’d told her he was posing; he wanted Miss Singleton to put him into her ice garden as a troll. Arthur the troll. Could she think about him like that, shrink him down? Every time the thought of him came into her head, shrink him down a little more, until he was so small she could picture him standing in the palm of her hand, like a tiny ceramic figurine? That would certainly make things easier.

Terence: “He’s studying deformities.”

Arthur: “You’re a magnificent woman.”

Rowena Petty: “Arthur Pym! What are you doing with this lady! You stay away from this lady! You leave this lady alone!”

Arthur: “Delicacy is for snobs, Charlotte. Let’s not be snobs.”

Aunt Lily: “Look at me. Tell me you’re not going to Arthur.”

Arthur: “You can use your lips. You can use your mouth.”

Harry, via Dickie, if she’d got off at Oakville: “Think twice about Arthur, Mrs. Heath.”

Arthur: “Come with me.”

Arthur: “On the night my mother walked away from me for forever I rolled over and went right back to sleep. I was eleven years old. Then everything fell apart.”

Arthur: “Come closer to me.”

Arthur, having looked over her shoulder as she wrote to Uncle Chessy to get a Pinkerton’s man: “Why did you write that letter?”

Arthur: “I’m glad you can’t see my face.”

Arthur: “When I touch you right there, just like this, do you feel you would like me to never, ever stop?”

Stop,
Charlotte thought. He wasn’t tiny. He wasn’t a troll.

“Dickie!” He’d sprung ahead of her; you’d think he was wearing a pair of skis. “Where are you bringing me!”

“It’s not much farther.” He flashed her an encouraging smile over his shoulder.

“Let’s find some horses.”

“You need the exercise,” he called, doctorlike.

“I won’t if I fall down dead from the cold.”

The air was as sharp as pointed icicles. Her eyes kept watering. She felt that the insides of her eyes were being frozen. She felt that if she touched her nose it would fall off. She thought of all those furs in Hays’s hired sleigh. What was that hotel? Crest Something.

Blue sunrises. Far, far back now. She felt like an exile. Slept in the hotel exactly why?

She was getting all fuddled. Wasn’t that something that happened when you were about to succumb to death by freezing? Hays knew something. He
knew
something. He didn’t know about Arthur. He didn’t know about the inner workings of the Beechmont. Or he knew about the inner workings but not that she’d been there. Or he knew she’d been there but not that she had taken part in the inner workings.

Was he going to interrogate her at their meeting, was that why he wanted it, a business meeting, everything just so? “So, Charlotte, I’ve learned you were not as faithful to me as sunrises and sunsets. And I learned that in your unfaithfulness you were quite in a holiday mood. You were happy.”

He knew everything.

No, he knew nothing.

Wait, she was the one who’d had the idea for the meeting. To postpone the inevitable. “I want to divorce you on the grounds of adultery.” That was what he’d say. No, she’d say it first.

She’d forgotten to stipulate that they meet alone.

Maybe he’d bring one of his business-associate lawyers or some Heath one, or two or three, or he’d bring along his sisters, their husbands, his brothers, their wives, his mother, his father, a brigade of Heaths, and there was only one of her and it wasn’t as if she could ask Uncle Chessy to come and stick up for her; he was a Heath, he’d say, “It’s a conflict of interest,” even though he’d sworn to be her friend.

Right at this moment, Charlotte thought, Hays was drawing up whatever sort of papers one drew up to dispose of one’s wife, which he anyway had started to do, correct? Emotionally. Physically. The woman at the edge of the square. Or he’d drawn up the papers already; he’d had them in the sleigh.

What about the striped muffler? Oh, that. That was a—what did Hays call it when you went into a business meeting having planted incorrect information in the minds of the people you were negotiating with? Subterfuge. Necessary subterfuge. Not tipping his hat to her when he found her alone? Same thing. As if he were saying, “You’re still my wife but not for much longer.”

She never should have thought of meeting him in the Essex Hotel. Mistake! Sentimental! A crack in the glass, a big one!

The sawmill play. The teeth of the giant saw. The heat of a packed-in audience. Nothing polite like at the types of plays her husband would rather go to. Shakespeare had not been polite. Those histories in Town Hall—even
Richard
—had been done too politely. What about Juliet? What about Cleopatra? There was nothing polite about mooning on a balcony because you want your new lover to come up to your bed. Or that dagger into Juliet’s chest: her own hand seizing it like a deliverance.

And there was nothing polite about a snake in a basket, brought in to you so you could murder yourself with it. What part of Cleopatra’s body did the snake bite, actually? Probably somewhere at her chest. Her breast, which one? In a spot her lover had put his mouth? To poison whatever traces of him remained?

After the sawmill play, they’d planned to have dinner at the hotel. With the type of wine Hays liked. She had partly planned what to say, and she’d partly been all right about just letting it run its course. The right moment. “I want us to have our own house. I want us not to live in the household. I want to buy furniture.”

Then flat on her back in a sickbed.

She should have agreed to speak with Hays immediately. She shouldn’t have made it a condition that he wait.

She should have got it over with. Wherever he was now, he’d be warm. He wouldn’t be walking in the middle of nowhere, toward darkness, on a mile-high ice pack of miserable, rotten snow. Blisters were sure to be forming on every one of her toes, her heels, the soles of her feet. The blood in her veins was getting sluggish, as if chunked up with ice. The food from the tea shop sat uneasily in her belly. Lard. Lard made her queasy. She felt a cramping, midsection. Like a punch. Another, another. Left side of her stomach, low. Not the food. Not the effort of walking on ice-packed snow. Her time of the month. Cramps started one or two days before the blood came. There’d be preliminary spottings in a couple of hours.

A terrible desolation hit her. She realized that at the back of her mind she’d been (secretly, in spite of her better judgment) working up the hope that she had conceived.
Conceived
. And this time of course it would work, it would stay. And everything would be beautifully simple.

Charlotte: “Hello, Arthur, I’ve something to tell you. Something wonderful. You and I are going to have a child.”

Arthur: “Super! Let’s get Harry to give us a celebration supper!”

Charlotte: “I suppose now you’ll have to finish your studies.”

Arthur: “You’re absolutely correct! We’ll be together for always!”

Crunch, crunch, crunch. The sky growing darker. Every one of her bones, chilled. It hurt to breathe. She said to herself, “I’m so empty. And everything I do, comes out wrong.”

Suddenly Dickie turned around, hopping from one foot to the other. “Here!” he shouted. “The location!”

They’d come to an outlying neighborhood of the next village, if “neighborhood” was what you could call it.

They were approaching a low, rough-wood, flat-roofed building, which stood between the edge of wintry nothingness and a jumble of rowhouses—a maze of them—that looked something like the bungalows of the Hollow but all pressed together, without the natural relief of the pretty Hollow pond and its grasses and trees. And there was no central focus, like the Gersons’ bakery, which functioned in the Hollow like a yeasty hearth.

The building must have once belonged to some church. A faded, chipped sign above the door said “Bethel Congregational Meeting House.” There were few windows—just two, one on each side of the door—and the glass was so steamed up you couldn’t see inside. It was well-lit in there: lots of gas lamps and no one skimping on fuel.

There was no sign of a church, but just to the east, on a little mound of a hill, were piled-up stones in a rectangular pattern, which might have been a church’s foundation. Yes, it was: what looked like a stack of rubble was actually five or six pews on top of each other, laid flat, like benches that have fallen over backward. In the dim light they looked eerie; they were scarred with burns.

The church had burned down. The remarkable thing was that the stones and the pews were clear of snow: either someone took care of them, like graves in a graveyard, or it just simply, irrationally, didn’t snow on that mound, as if God chose to spare it, and had reached down into the sky, just right there, to protect it with a giant hand, umbrellalike.