A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (27 page)

The roof of the building was clear of snow, too.

The sounds coming out from the building were not churchy. There was a muffled, raucous sort of din, in inconsistent waves. You could tell the place was packed with people. The walls seemed to be oozing out warmth and sweaty vapors. The path to the door was so trodden, the snow was down to last year’s top layer of earth: a path of frozen mud. No horses, no sleighs, no anything. Whoever was in the building had walked here.

“Let’s go to the train station, Dickie,” said Charlotte.

“Don’t tell me you’re nervous.”

“I most certainly am not. I’m ready to go back on the train, that’s all. The last one east is at seven. We won’t have to go back to Biggie M, we can get it down the line. The next station’s not far from here.”

“Biggie!” said Dickie. He was just like a little boy on a treasure hunt, within grasp of the treasure chest of his dreams. You’d think the parents he was looking for were his own. He was taking this hugely personally. “I remember. That’s what the locals called it. Biggie M! You used the old name.”

“I did not. I said Bigelow Mills,” said Charlotte. Her teeth were clattering. She was shivering.

“Remember that stinking, ugly little paper mill that used to be here, and everyone tried to pretend it wasn’t? Like if you said just M, instead of Mills, it wasn’t there? And the ‘Biggie’ was sort of affectionate?”

“I remember your stinking tannery.”

“So do I. Let’s go in.”

And he pushed the door open with one hand while clinging to her arm with the other. A gentleman would have stood to the side and let her enter first, but this was not the time for those kinds of considerations. He went inside ahead of her, shieldlike, a good copper, pulling her behind him.

The noise hit them like a blast. It seemed at first that some sort of festive thing was going on, some wedding or important party. But no one was dressed up. No one appeared to be celebrating anything. There were no decorations. There was, instead, a feel of the everyday.

Dozens of conversations going on at once. Shouting, bellowing, harsh laughter, screechy laughter, tittering laughter, old people, young people, people in the middle of young and old, babies, children—a lot of children. Thrown on the floor just inside the door were the sleds and cardboard carried by the children who’d passed them earlier.

Commotion. Running about. Everyone in some kind of motion, even if it was only with their mouths, or raising their arms in the acts of eating and drinking and making wide, dramatic gestures. Tables of all different sizes. Chairs. A blustery wood fire in a hearth that took up most of one wall. Good chimney. Excellent draw.

Low beams. A smell of beer, cigars, tobacco, cooking oil, lard, sweat, wet clothes, babies’ soiled diapers, animal fur. A dog sleeping under a table. A couple of cats by the fire. Heat. Tempers. Pleasures. Intoxications. A cleared space on one side, like a dancing floor. No music.

Fifty people, sixty, a hundred. Hard to tell. A riot of faces. No one took note of Charlotte and Dickie.

Some eight or nine people were involved in setting up some sort of corral-like scheme in the clear space. For some kind of game? People near the edges pushed back their tables and moved their chairs to enlarge the area.

Several planks were being placed on the floor on their sides, lengthwise, like sideways chutes, with the distances between each one measured carefully. The insides of the planks were completely lined with bumpers of white cotton batting, which appeared to be glued or tacked on. The batting was far from clean, but the effect of softness was obvious. The planks were supported at each end by blocks of wood that looked like small chopping blocks. Grooves had been cut in the blocks so the ends of the planks could be inserted. Four lanes began to emerge, each one about thirty yards long.

“Looks like they’re setting up lanes over there,” said Dickie, leaning toward Charlotte to be heard. He was acting like an expert on the place. “For some racing.”

“Racing of what?”

“Don’t know. Something small. But I’d make a good guess if I said there’ll be some fairly serious wagering.”

“Gambling, you mean. Is that legal?”

“I am not,” said Dickie, “on duty. Are you looking around? Are you picking out your mother and father? Have you planned what to say?”

Was he teasing her? No, he was serious.

“How do you know they’re here, Dickie?”

“Everyone is. This is where everyone comes at the end of the day. The end of the day starts early around here, I was told. Especially in the dead of winter. Don’t you think this is tremendously exciting? I wonder if they have ale. I bet they do. I wonder if I ought to have some ale. I wonder which two are your parents! Hurry, Charlotte, and point out which ones they are.”

He seemed to think that a deep-rooted instinct would flicker to life inside her, and she’d be led by it, like one of those pigeons people trained to fly away, then return to the exact spot it had left. Or those big reptilian, ancient-looking, Hollow female turtles that wandered all over for miles, but went back to Hollow Pond to lay their eggs. Even if you caught one, put it in the back of a wagon, and drove it to the edge of Kingdom Come, people said, back it would go, regardless of distance and dangers, as though the muck of its own private territory was sacred, and imprinted forever in its tiny turtle brain.

Maybe if she stood still, they’d spot her. What did she expect? She didn’t expect anything. Or maybe…

A tall broad man in an old sheepskin jacket was testing the slotted-in planks to make sure they’d stay put. He had red-orange hair, not slicked back, but curly and wild-looking. He looked in her direction. Gave her a wary glance: the look of an insider, directed at an outsider. He was only about forty. A smile. He seemed to be saying, Nice hair color you’ve got there, missus. She had taken off her hat and unbuttoned her coat; the room was too hot for them. She felt she was on display.

From the opposite corner appeared two policemen in uniform, hurrying toward the door, as if they’d received some signal. Dickie had been looking about for waiters or for the bar; it was difficult to figure out how things got served.

“Brawl!” someone shouted. “Fight outside! Fight!”

Up went Dickie’s hackles. The two uniforms were just passing, and Dickie quickly spoke police talk to them, identifying himself; did they want help? They did.

He was going to leave her in here alone? “Dickie, you said one minute ago you’re not on duty,” said Charlotte.

“I am now!”

There were shouts from outside, loud, a mob. Something pounded against the other side of the door. It sounded like a man’s heavy body, thudding against it, as if he’d been catapulted.

It took the officers and Dickie awhile to get outside. No one seemed to think there was anything unusual going on.

Charlotte backed against a wall and tried to flatten herself like a board. Maybe she should have worn a sign:
SPEAK TO ME IF YOUR NAME IS KEMPLE.

She’d never been any good at sorting things. Pictures and mementos for scrapbooks, her own jewelry, shells collected from a beach, books—it didn’t matter what it was: she’d lose track of what went where, then she’d end up all thumbs and have to call for a maid. Her father-in-law had found this maddening. He’d point out a tree in which birds were perching and tell her to look at the finch, the little one, with the yellow; wasn’t it perfect? All the birds would look the same; she’d see yellow in every one of them. But she could try. Like eyes that take some minutes to get adapted to the dark, when you’ve just left a bright place.

She decided to sort out faces by age and by arithmetic. It was almost twenty-four years ago that she’d left home. So add twenty-four years to her parents’ ages from the last time she saw them. How old had they been, twenty-four years ago? Old. What were their faces like, twenty-four years ago?

Stupid question. Their faces were like masks on which faces had not yet been drawn. They were turned in another direction, away from her.

The crowd around the set-up lanes was getting bigger, noisier. Someone lifted a metal lunch pail into the air and banged on it with what seemed to be a hammer: a moment later, all through the building, things quieted down.

Now at one end of the lanes—the finish line—something else was being arranged. Four big plush cushions, like things stolen from an enormous divan, were placed within the confines of the planks, and on each cushion appeared all sorts of bright, gaudy baubles: playing balls, rag dolls, cooking spoons, small wooden horses painted orange, purple, and green.

Dickie—where
was
he; things had quieted outside, too—had been right about the gambling. In the hush you could hear the jingle of coins.

Bets were being placed, all right. Impossible to tell quite where or by whom. But there was a system at work, an intricate one, Charlotte thought. Nothing seemed to be written down. It occurred to her that whatever had happened outside might have happened on purpose, as a diversion. “Clear the house of police” might have been part of the system. People farthest away from the lanes stood on chairs, which looked like they’d break apart, but did not.

Charlotte forgot about her mission. Four young women, barely out of adolescence, or perhaps still in it, emerged from somewhere at the back. They were carrying babies who were all about one year old.

Four mothers. Their babies—girls, boys; impossible to tell—were dressed in little smocks, and on the back of each was a pinned-on sheet of paper with a number on it.

In all the world in all of time there could not have been babies, thought Charlotte, who were more exuberant, or more wildly consumed with baby joy and baby greed, than these, when they spotted those playthings on those cushions. When they were set on their feet and let go in those lanes, no one would need to advise them what to do.

The four men shifting their weight from one foot to the other near the start line were obviously the fathers. The man in the tall black squared-top hat that said
JUDGE
in white paint positioned himself with his back up straight on a high-legged stool that had materialized near the finish line. It was a good thing that everyone nearest the lanes sat down or crouched so as not to block anyone’s view: Charlotte had been standing on tiptoe and she couldn’t maintain it, and she’d never in her life stood up on a chair in public. She knew she wouldn’t be able to even consider it.

The mothers placed their babies at the starting line, crisscrossing their arms in front of them, like harnesses, awaiting some signal. A man had come up close beside Charlotte. She saw the black wool sleeve of an overcoat, patched above the wrist with a shinier fabric. And a heavy black wool glove with patches of leather in the palm. Horse-smelling. A horse man. When she turned her head, she saw that the face of the man was Hays’s face.

It wasn’t a trick of her eyes. She hadn’t been thinking about him so fully that she was seeing him in strangers. She wasn’t hallucinating; she hadn’t been brain-impaired from the cold, although the possibility of these things crossed her mind.

He’d switched coats. Hays had taken the sleigh driver’s coat and gloves. Charlotte looked at him. He seemed pleased with himself. Did he think a local man’s coat would make him
blend in
? He probably did. He probably really thought so.

“I hope you gave the cabdriver your coat, Hays. I hope you didn’t leave him half naked in the cold.”

“I loaned it to him. He’s not getting to keep it. I’ve paid him quite enough,” he said quietly. “Number Four, I’ve been told, is the odds-on favorite.” He bent down toward her, as if everyone was still shouting, as if the noise level had grown higher instead of lower. She could feel his breath in her hair.

“You can’t tell if they’re boys or girls,” said Charlotte.

“Four’s a girl. She finished second last month, I heard them say, and she’s been getting in practice in her grandfather’s barn, where they set up a lane for her, just like these.”

“Did you place any money on her, Hays?”

“I don’t,” he said, “gamble, you know.”

“Then what would you call what you’re doing here?”

“That’s been more of an instinct.”

“I want you to stop following me.”

“I didn’t follow you in the way you think I did. I’ve been out in this valley on my own. You’d seemed so surprised when you saw me. Didn’t you think, Charlotte, that this part of the world was where I’d come to look for you?”

“You should have looked for me at Aunt Lily’s.”

“I had figured,” he said, “if you were camped at Lily’s, it would be an intermediate step, until the roads cleared.”

“I think,” she said, because her brain just couldn’t—or didn’t want to—make sense of what he was saying, “I want you to stop following me. I’ll
not be kind
about it, if you ever follow me again.”

“I went to your old school,” he said. “Yesterday.”

“I would never have gone back there without Miss Georgeson. You didn’t know that?”

“I was looking for information. If you ask me the names of towns for a radius of, oh, fifty miles from the academy, I’ll wager I could name them.”

“If you don’t stop following me, I shall cancel our meeting.”

“I don’t need to stop doing something I haven’t done, unless by follow, you mean look for. Or you mean, go to a place where I think you’ll turn up.”

“I don’t care what you call it.”

“But you seem to care, Charlotte.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

“Hays, let’s be polite.”

The signal for the start of the race came just then: a tinny child’s whistle, blown by the judge on his stool.

There was a noticeable discretion about the cheering and encouragement rising up from the spectators: this was a subdued audience, enjoying what it felt like to hold back cries, so as not to startle the racers. Two babies immediately tripped over their own feet, and then everything had to be started over again because someone (an unseen, anonymous saboteur) tossed a small bright-red spinning top into the lane of Number Three, who promptly dropped down and crawled toward it.

Wailing when the top was taken away. Discussions. Bubbles of noise, rising, falling, and then the father of Number Three got the offending obstacle placed on Number Three’s cushion, which the judge allowed. The wailing stopped. You could tell that this was the baby who’d win, because his (or her) finish line now had the most toys.