A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (3 page)

There were no other families they knew who allowed their servants to have children. It could not have lasted. One day Charlotte’s mother-in-law said simply, “I want to be rid of that woman,” and that was that.

Mrs. Petty hadn’t asked for references, which she anyway didn’t need; you only had to put her into a kitchen with a chicken or some eggs and cheese, and you’d want never to eat the cooking of anyone else.

Charlotte missed her and the children more than anyone knew. But she knew where they were. Mrs. Petty was the cook now in a private hotel for women, the Beechmont, on the back part of Beacon Hill, behind the Capitol with its glittering dome.

“I’m going there,” she decided. “Now.”

She didn’t know Boston well. She’d been to restaurants near the Common, the theaters and music halls of Tremont and Washington, the art museum, the library, the shops of Charles Street, the Garden, Park Street Church and Trinity, and a neighborhood on Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay, where her principal doctor had an office for consultations. Before they were married, Hays had a Commonwealth Avenue town house, but he’d given it up. Boston was only thirty miles from their town, but to Charlotte, since her illness, it could have been a city on the moon.

If only a large talking rabbit would appear in the snow to lead the way. She would have appreciated it. She would have been grateful for the chance to tumble down a magic hole and find herself where she wanted to be, but there were practical matters to deal with. It was cold; the air was turning more frigid by the minute. It would be twilight soon enough. She had no lanterns, she had no bells. She had no money.

She felt no panic, or even fear, but she had images of losing her way; of the horses complaining and giving her grief because they wanted to go home; of her limbs, encased as she was in wool and fur, turning frosty and blue, and hurting worse than they had hurt when she was sick.

Thinking of the warmth she’d receive from her friends did not counteract reality. She realized she might not get far.

There was a whole troop of Heaths gathered in one place nearby—she was not forgetting this. She was sure, at an alarm raised by her husband, four or five of his rowdy young cousins in their mourning suits would have been pleased to leave Uncle Owen, leap on horses like boys in the Wild West, and charge after her and catch her, although she would have given them a good run.

She had learned the lessons of a sickbed very well. What strength you have, you are going to be careful of it; you are going to measure it; you are going to feel nervous about it. She felt that this was the way people must act when they are being released from jail, and first put on go-outdoors clothes, and feel the air on their faces—the real air, and real sun, and real wind.

You can’t believe it’s true that you are free, and you’re terrified; and you cannot believe it’s not going to happen all over again that Fate will conspire against you and lock you up again, as if the worst of your fears is the one thing you can count on to happen.

And meanwhile as you try out your new, out-of-isolation self, on wobbly legs, squinting, squeamish, as pale as white paper, everyone around you is clamoring to know why you don’t seem glad. No one knows that the outside of your body—or what can be seen of it—is the same as a container that seems to be made of something durable. But it’s no more dependable than a water glass, if the glass were placed in a fire.

Because you know what it’s like to be not in charge of yourself. To be at the mercy of confinement. To want out. To stare at a window and wish yourself as thin as a curl of smoke, slipping out through a crack. Get out, get out! And you come to believe that getting out might take place in only one way. And you’d not be afraid of it.

Maybe she had wanted to look at Uncle Owen because she wanted to find out if she envied him, was that it? Because maybe she was afraid of being well?

“Save dark thoughts for bright days.” Where did she hear that? Not from Mrs. Petty. Her father-in-law? Standing in her doorway, gazing past her at some robin that pecked at the glass, trying to destroy its own reflection, thinking its reflection was an enemy bird, a perfectly normal thing? Well, she knew what that was like, hating your own reflection.

“Save dark thoughts for bright days.” It must have been something from the mouth of some king, at the edge of the Town Hall stage, in some battle or some inner-castle mess, trying to put on a brave front. He would smile at her. An old man’s smile. As if he knew what she was thinking. As if it weren’t abnormal to want to die, if the alternative was to not be able to live.

The thing was, there were no bright days. For so very, very long.

“I don’t wish I was you, Uncle Owen,” she suddenly said out loud, quietly, like a prayer, as if he could hear her. Maybe he could. “Listen, Uncle Owen. Wherever you are, I’m glad not to be there.”

“Charlotte!” shouted Hays. “Where are you going?”

She had an urge to tell the truth, to just throw back her head and shout out “Boston!” But she didn’t answer him. Did her father-inlaw know about the woman? Did everyone? She remembered the afternoon she was carried into the front sitting room, the yellow one. It was a consultant who had carried her: a hearty, big doctor; she didn’t recall his name. He had picked her up in his arms spontaneously and said, “Time for tea, my dear,” and there she was, appearing to a room of Heaths, six or seven of them.

Hays was talking to one of his sisters, bending his head close to hers, gravely, confidingly. He was the last in the room to notice that Charlotte was there, and when his eyes met hers—as she was placed in a chair, as someone ran to get a blanket—she saw that he looked like a man who had a secret. He looked at her as if he thought she was an intruder. He was holding a teacup. He set it down quickly, roughly, and tea splashed out, and two bright spots rose up his cheeks. And he told her, in a shrill, breathy way that wasn’t like him at all, he’d spilled his tea because he was so happy she’d got up, what a good surprise. He said that he was only just talking about the excellence of the new shade of paint in the room, now that they’d finally completed it. It was the voice of a man talking to someone who didn’t have the right to truly know his thoughts.

The walls were dark yellow. The painting job had been completed a month ago, which Charlotte knew because one of the painters had stopped by her room on the last day to ask, did she want to be carried out to see it? But that hadn’t been possible; a maid had been with her, putting up her hair. The new paint was exactly the same shade as the old one. Did Hays think that being sick had rearranged her memory? Did he think she didn’t know all the ways to read his face, to understand the tones of his voice, to listen to the things he wasn’t saying when he spoke to her?

A maid came in to change the tablecloth. Someone poured Charlotte some tea. Charlotte said, “I like the new color, very much, for the brightness.”

And her mother-in-law, tall and stern, with her Queen Victoria hair, in her at-home quilted gown, her bone-ribbed corset laced up like a trap, in a chair by the fire, with coal light flickering on her glasses, glanced up at Charlotte from a magazine she was reading,
The Saturday Evening Post.
And she said to the doctor, because it was not a good idea in the household to do anything without consulting her, “You didn’t mention you planned to allow her out of bed.”

“She’s getting well,” he answered. When he left the room, Charlotte felt alone. Her mother-in-law turned back to her magazine. Tea was resumed. That was the first time Charlotte thought, in actual words, Hays gave up on me.

“Charlotte! Charlotte! Charlotte!” His words rang out in the cold. He began to run after her, and his hat fell off into the snow, and the woman bent down to retrieve it. He was wearing his dress shoes, not his boots. He didn’t run after her very long.

She flicked to the horses to turn the corner, away from the square. They were glad to start trotting. She didn’t doubt, in theory, her basic ability to get to Boston on her own (even though she had never done it before). But she made it seem that she was turning for home. As soon as she was out of her husband’s sight, she turned again, and headed toward the one part of town where no one would expect her to go.

“Charlotte,” she said to herself, “you have got to get some help.”

N
o one died in the strange epidemic of poisoning last spring. It could have been much, much worse. Charlotte’s illness was unconnected. She only ate food from the household’s kitchen, and anyway, when it happened, she was already sick.

Her section of town stayed free of it. But suddenly in Big Pond Hollow, the thing broke out wildly. There were dozens of cases of skin rashes that looked like poison ivy, and fever, fainting, intestinal cramps, and terrible stomach disorders. And a constant
rat-ta-tat-tat
aching of the head, which was the worst symptom of all, and felt (people said down there) as if you were a tree, and your head was where the bark was stripped away, and a woodpecker was drumming his beak there, without pausing.

Big Pond Hollow was built up along the town side of the pond, with farms opposite, and the pond was a substantial one: big enough to fish in out of small boats and be harvested for ice in the winter.

The neighborhood was made up of some twenty-five or thirty bungalows, each with its own garden, outhouse, and shed. The more prosperous families also had horses and barns, but there weren’t many of them.

Some of the men who lived here were employed at the farms; some worked for taverns and inns on the Boston Road. Some ran gambling enterprises; some made and sold beer and spirits; and some were involved in the collecting of horse droppings in the bigger towns and in Boston, which were carted and sold to a company to the south that operated an enormous flower-growing business: a big part of it was poppies for opium, people said, but that might not have been true. Some were laborers going out on hire for rail work, and some, like their wives, sisters, and mothers, worked in service, and were said (in the other parts of town) to be lucky, as they had their own roofs and did not have to live with the families they worked for.

Besides the houses, there was a small Congregational church, a saloon which was actually a rough cabin built onto someone’s house, and Everett Gerson’s commercial bakery, which had offered employment to four bakers (who did not reside in the Hollow) and three times as many others (who did) for clerking and general assistance. The building was a reconstructed storage house, brick-made, of one story, originally used for grains in the days when the town had its own mill; there used to be a fast-running creek, but it had dried, and the mill disappeared in a fire.

Bad luck was no new thing in the Hollow, but this was different.

It seemed that a plague had arrived, until the Board of Town Council carried out an investigation, and discovered that it wasn’t the water, it wasn’t spoiled meat, it wasn’t milk, it wasn’t some odd malign chemistry in people’s coal stoves or fireplaces. It was baked goods.

The Town Council was supposed to contain, as stated in the charter, four elected officials, equal in rank, who should divide up powers and responsibilities, including general supervision of an appointed police officer and the fire brigade. For as long as Charlotte had been married and living there, the Board consisted of one councilor only.

His name was Bertram Davenport—the Colonel, he was called. He had led a battalion in the war, and was wounded at Gettysburg, and had lost his left arm, almost all of it.

The Colonel was nearly seventy, but he didn’t believe that growing old was something that applied to himself. Some people felt that the reason he was the whole council was that no one else would associate with him, and some felt, why use four matches to light a candle when one will do? He was also the police officer, and chief of the fire brigade. For a time, years ago, all four councilors were either Heaths themselves or Heath-married.

Unlike the usual elected officials, the Colonel had not been to college, had never traveled to Europe, had never looked at paintings or listened of his own free will to music that was not fife-and-bugle-and-drum. Some people said he was barely able to read. Most importantly, in terms of the poisonings, he had never studied chemistry and, if asked, would have said he found the subject of metals boring. Things like compositions and reactions involving inanimate objects were, he felt, esoteric, for the intellectuals who inherited their livings and never did a real day’s work.

Metals containing contamination? This would be something that could not be seen. He did not hold faith in intangibilities. Charlotte knew all these things about him because he came to the house often, and would salute her from the doorway, and say, “I’ve seen men in worse shape get up on their feet when hope was lost.” She would thank him: “You cheer me.”

He was not a bully. He was large, in a Theodore Roosevelt sort of way, but there was a quietness about him, and an overlying feeling of sorrow—a deep, irrevocable grief—which would seem unexplainable, or out of proportion, in the town, until you remembered where he’d been as a younger man.

He never mentioned the war. If other men from the Union Army happened to gather and talk of their memories, he took no part, and he did not display medals or citations, as others did. He was a bachelor.

Charlotte’s father-in-law appeared in the doorway of her sickroom one morning to speak to her about some bird he had observed. He did this almost every day, as he felt that news of a new dove nest, or a cardinal in the apple trees, were the very things she was lying there to hear. He never went all the way into her room. Hardly anyone did, not counting Mrs. Petty and her children.

It was rare for her father-in-law to mention anything but his interest in birds, but that morning he was a worried man. It was the first she heard of the trouble in Big Pond Hollow. He reported the news tersely, just, she thought, to get it off his chest, and he must have thought she might offer some insight, as one who was an expert in illness. She had no insight, at least, not then. Her father-in-law described his confidence in Colonel Davenport, and his trust that word of the problem would not extend out of town.

Little did she know that in just a few days she would become, secretly, behind the scenes, very much involved in the problem.

The Colonel took on the investigation himself. This was what he found in Big Pond Hollow: the one thing everyone stricken had in common was that they had eaten some tarts, cakes, shortbreads, pies, or sugar biscuits from Everett Gerson’s new commercial bakery, which had just opened for business.

In honor of the event, and as an act of advertising, Everett Gerson and his wife, Mabel, with their bakers’ assistants, maids, and clerks, set up a long table outdoors, right by the pond, under a clear sunny May sky, like a picnic, and they handed out baked goods for free, perhaps a full ton of them, to dozens and dozens of people: baked goods cooked in brand-new pans which Everett Gerson claimed to have purchased from the agent of a high-quality, high-priced, highly reputable manufacturer.

There would not have been a reason to suspect Mr. Gerson of lying about where he got his pans, or what they consisted of.

Charlotte would not call what she formed with the Gersons a friendship, because that would imply terms of affection. There was no affection between them. She helped them and, in doing so, she knew that whatever trouble she might find herself in, she could call on them. They had a debt to her. A business debt.

So she knew what she was doing when she turned up at their house in her sleigh, although she hadn’t planned the way she presented herself. It burst out of her.

“My husband is with another woman!” She regretted that, but there was nothing she could do about it. She knew there were tears on her face because she felt them crystallizing into ice.

Everett Gerson was forty. His wife was closer to Charlotte’s age, seven or eight years younger. They’d both grown up in the Hollow. They’d gone for a time to New York, where they picked up experience in another commercial bakery; they’d returned to take their chances on a business of their own.

The savings bank had financed them. Hays was not involved directly, but Charlotte knew that you could not do anything involving money or the law without involving a Heath, and Hays was the one who (secretly, behind the scenes) advised the bank not to hold back on its lending.

The place was expected to turn a profit in three or four years, supplying all kinds of shops and restaurants, and in the process, perhaps, as Hays had put it, “The more disreputable elements of the Hollow will go away.” Or as one of his brothers-in-law had said, “They can give up that hauling of horseshit.”

If there was ever a married couple who did not look the part of their vocation, it was the Gersons, who, as it happened, resembled each other as closely as a brother and sister, although, where Everett was fair and blond, Mabel was as dark as a Gypsy. They were as pinched and thin as if no food, other than the most basic sustenance, ever crossed their lips. Their expressions were stern; they rarely smiled. They reminded Charlotte of horses who have been beaten and know of nothing but whips and harsh words, but perhaps this was something in their favor when it came to the bank. Everett was taken for a man who could be depended upon to work, work, and work.

Their house was next door to the bakery. Mabel came running out first, from the house, when Charlotte arrived, and she must have had some intuitive means of communication with her husband, because he appeared a moment later, gently taking hold of the horses, with a look of relief in his eyes, Charlotte felt, because he had figured immediately that she’d come to collect on the debt.

She had sworn a vow to the Gersons that the money she gave them, indirectly, would never need to be returned.

The relief came from the fact that their obligation to Charlotte would be lifted. The stress of their enormous business problems—and there were many—was a heavy weight on their shoulders, pushing them down and almost physically diminishing them. They’d got into things that were very much bigger than they were.

It wasn’t hard for Charlotte to picture the scene, and the Gersons’ emotions, when the Colonel revealed to them (privately) that their product was making everyone sick.

The bakery was closed down immediately. The ovens were banked. The doors were secured. Charlotte knew from the talk at home that the Colonel believed there was something rotten in the grains or eggs or butter, or something being done, grossly incorrectly, in the mixture of ingredients.

And meanwhile, at the bank, they were getting nervous, and were thinking of calling in the loan, taking possession of the bakery, and running it with their own people.

No one except Everett and Mabel—and then Charlotte—knew it was the pans.

It happened that one of the Heaths’ washerwomen, from the Hollow, had fallen ill. She did much of the washing at her own house, and a great pile of sheets and towels needed to be returned—after Charlotte’s father-in-law consulted with doctors, who assured him they would not get sick from laundry. The person who drove up to the house, with an old chestnut pulling a two-wheeler, and the Heath linens, was Mabel Gerson.

Charlotte felt that Mabel must have been a Catholic. Something about delivering those linens made her think of a penitent.

Having entered the back of the house and finding no one downstairs, which was extraordinary, Mabel somehow made her way to Charlotte’s room. She must have taken the woman in bed for a victim of the same thing everyone else had.

Charlotte was quick to set her straight. It was the one time she was pleased to say the words, “I am told I have polio.”

Who can know what impulse made that woman go in and sit down? When the story of what went wrong was revealed—not in sobs or melodrama but unemotionally, dryly—Charlotte did not feel she had a choice.

Mabel Gerson told her, “Everett bought the pans very cheaply from an agent who called on us, and if they investigate any further they will know he has lied about the quality. If we start up again, we can’t use the pans we have. Everett meant no harm. We’ve no money, and we are done for.”

It was the flat, dull voice of someone who has moved past hope. Charlotte knew the sound of it. She recognized it like a memory of her own.

“I don’t know why you’re sick, and I don’t know why you’re not getting worse and not getting better. You seem to have given up hope. Under these conditions, I can’t promise recovery. I’m beginning to agree with the consultants: you’re in a position to remain as an invalid for the rest of your life. I don’t see what else I can tell you.”

Those were the words of her principal doctor. Her principal doctor was a Heath by marriage and could have been speaking out of personal interest, or even fondness. Hope. It was easy to see that hope was a made-up thing, a delusion.

“I believe that the pans Everett bought are from a shoddy factory and contain certain cheap elements,” Mabel said. “Elements that are chemically poisonous. When we were in New York we heard of the very same thing, and there were people who died because of it. I do not remember the different types of materials, but there is an element named antimony they talked about, which I believe can be deadly if used wrong. This agent promised my husband that there was no danger, I swear it. But no one must know. You must keep our secret, now that I have told you.”