A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (4 page)

Antimony, thought Charlotte. For the first time since she had been ill, she began to stir, inside herself. Something—just like a spark—began to flicker in her.

“Antimony!” she said. She knew nothing of chemistry. The actual mixtures of undesirable elements in a less-than-honorable factory was something she didn’t need to spend time considering.

Antimony. A marvelous word, even if it was a poison.

“There are manufacturers of the better-quality utensils who want to expose the bakers, you see,” said Mabel, “who buy from the unscrupulous agents. It’s only a matter of time, if word gets out of these sicknesses, before they send in one of their own representatives. They’ll try to send my husband to prison.”

“That’s not going to happen,” said Charlotte. “Go home and tell your husband to hide his pans. He must send to the best maker and purchase new ones, and make them look as though they are the ones that were always in use, and he should pay something extra to the maker, to put a past date on the bill.”

Charlotte didn’t hesitate when it came to the Colonel. “The Colonel has to remain in charge of the investigation. He’s got to be satisfied that it was something in—oh, the flour.”

“The flour?” Mabel Gerson looked stupefied. She didn’t realize yet that she was going to walk out of Charlotte’s room a changed person.

“You should allow him to believe in something evil in the flour, and your husband should throw it all away and start over. And now that I think of it, he should also dismiss your bakers and hire new ones.”

“New bakers? But nothing of this is their fault.”

“You can hire them back again later.”

She must have thought Charlotte was in that room, flat and unmoving, because she was a lunatic, kept out of an asylum because she was married to a Heath. Mabel sighed wearily. If her own situation were not so bleak, her expression said, she would have let Charlotte see that she felt sorry for her.

Charlotte had no means of putting her hands on money, and it was not only due to her being an invalid.

Hays thought of himself as a liberal, progressive man. Yes, he was an ardent backer of an old-fashioned president, but so were all Heaths and all businessmen who believed, as a type of creed, that
democracy
meant that anyone with the correct sort of ambition, who was also a white man, had the democratic right to accumulate wealth and, having done so, had the right to tell everyone else what rights they could and could not have, which seemed to Charlotte to be more like a kingdom with kings and princes and dukes and earls.

This, she felt, was the reason why the Heaths were devoted so fervently to those history plays.

Her husband did not go nearly apoplectic with outrage like his father did when it came to the subject of what he called the Suffrage Women, not that there were any of them in their town; it was a subject that came up now and then, when things were quiet and the old man found the need to be roused.

Women
voting
? You might as well ask your horses to saddle themselves and hitch themselves to your carriage. You might as well ask a bird to read you your Bible.

Hays would simply say, “Women are not horses or birds, but they have different brains from a man, after all.”

He’d talk gravely about the foundations of America, as if describing well-built cellars or walls—of houses that were just like his—but Charlotte had the feeling that something very worried was always behind his words, so different from her father-in-law’s. It seemed that Hays was worried because, if women voted, there’d be only one possible result: disaster, as though women would cast their ballots for an earthquake, which would happen, and those foundations would rattle and collapse; poor America would fall to pieces.

“But I’m a progressive man,” he would say. “Practical but progressive.” He had irritated his father by arranging for Charlotte to have her own account at the bank, just for herself (and her horses) in her own name.

Charlotte knew that there were women who negotiated with their husbands the right to maintain control of funds and property they had brought to the marriage from their own families, but she had not brought anything to her marriage except herself. Hays regularly diverted money into her balance, so that, officially, she could draw whatever she wanted, at will, and not be expected to explain it.

However, every time she drew a check or presented herself at the bank for an advance, Hays knew about it. There was no stopping the manager from forwarding to him a report of every transaction, the way a schoolmaster reports to a child’s father how the child has performed in a lesson. Hays would tell her he never read these reports. She believed him, as hard as it was to imagine him ignoring information about money.

She had a pair of silver bracelets given to her five or six years ago by her father-in-law, as a birthday gift. One was inlaid with a diamond about the size of a kernel of corn, and the other contained four smaller ones, like glittering orange pips. Her father-in-law told her he had not been able to decide at the jeweler’s which one he liked better, so after an hour in the showroom, getting nowhere, he bought them both. This was on a trip to Chicago.

She had noted about the bracelets that her own potential preference did not seem part of the choice, or even to matter, not that she held this against him.

She knew it wasn’t true about the showroom. He had traveled that time with a young man employed by the lawyer Heaths as a clerk’s assistant and errand runner; he was lent to Hays’s father as a valet.

This young man was conducting a love affair, extremely privately, with the upstairs maid of one of Hays’s sisters. Mrs. Petty knew all about it, and so did Charlotte. The valet bought the bracelets while the elderly Mr. Heath dozed outside in the hired carriage. They were chosen by price. The two together cost almost exactly what the valet had been told to spend.

Charlotte never wore them. Her jewelry was in a mahogany box on the bureau of her sickroom, which Hays had moved there, along with other things from her real room, to make her feel comforted. They did not make her feel comforted.

She felt she could say later on—because she never knew when her father-in-law might ask about something he’d bought her—that she hadn’t seen the bracelets since the summer before she was sick. She happened to have worn them, on a whim, while strolling along the cliffs of Squab Cove when they had suddenly slipped off. They went falling down the rocks into the churning, frothy sea, and she’d decided it would not be wise to go after them. Even before she was sick, her wrists were quite thin.

Everett Gerson did not discharge his bakers, but he managed to send for new utensils. “It was the fault of the sugar, and a new distributor must be got,” the Colonel decided mysteriously, and he ordered Everett to pay a fine but suspended it.

The new sugar dealer was arranged by Charlotte’s father-in-law, so the Gersons now had a favorable connection to the Heaths, an unplanned bonus. As Hays always said, in business, when you tweak one branch of a tree, you never know how many others will start shaking, potentially dropping their fruit.

Case closed, with all the credit going to the Colonel, who was given a raise in pay at the next Town Meeting. Everyone admired him for excluding the possibility of bringing in outside people. What was the purpose of a town if it couldn’t handle its own scandals? But the Town Council might have thought differently if the poisoned people were not Hollow people.

Charlotte thought it was loyal and brave of the people of the Hollow to line up all over again for the bakery’s reopening. She had a good idea that, if someone were to dive to the bottom of Big Pond, they would find the at-fault pans, sunk with heavy stones and covered with rust and algae.

“Mrs. Heath! Mrs. Heath! You are up! You’re well! We thought of you every day! We prayed for your recovery!”

Mabel Gerson hitched up her skirt and climbed into the sleigh as if she feared Charlotte would tumble out of it. “And here you are!”

She grasped Charlotte’s hands and stared at her face. Maybe this was the way people had looked at Lazarus.

“My husband is with another woman. I’ve only just found out. My marriage is over. I’m on my way to my friend in Boston and you must help me.”

“Of course. Come inside at once.”

That was how it happened that Charlotte arrived at the Beechmont Hotel on Beacon Hill in a delivery sleigh belonging to Gerson’s Fine Pastries and Biscuits, with fifty dollars in cash (which she’d decided to call a loan) in her purse, and her horses secured safely in a Hollow stable, under the care of the Gersons’ chief clerk’s young brother, a groom she knew was trustworthy because, before she was sick, she had often gone looking for him in the Hollow, to go riding in the woods. He liked to race and did not mind being beaten by a woman. She also had a box of cakes, tarts, and sugar rolls, a pair of Everett Gerson’s wool mittens, and a small valise of clothing and toiletries lent to her by Mabel Gerson.

And she remembered all over again how she had liked the way it felt when she had put those bracelets in Mabel’s hands.

C
opley Square. Boylston Street. Churches, steeples, shop windows. Tremont Street. Park Street along the side of the Common, with trees like stern, dark giants. Beacon Street. The State House, wide and ceremonious and domineering, its dome obscured in snow and darkness and fog.

Charlotte felt she was looking at things in a dream, although she’d never felt so awake. She felt she was seeing Boston for the first time. Two sleighs slid by, with bells wildly ringing, full of boisterous young men in light jackets, hatless, defying the winter air: they called out drunkenly, in a holiday mood,
Race with us!
Their laughter was like music; they were just like a welcoming committee.

The hotel, Mrs. Petty had said, was a wide brick building, four stories high, at the corner of Beech and Eustis, with a maze of stables and alleys beyond it. It did not have a river view. It was not particularly elegant, but it was carefully furnished, it was handsome, it was dependable.

The proprietors were a husband and wife named Alcorn: Harry and Lucy Alcorn, around fifty years of age, both of them Boston-born and bred. Some of the servants were men and boys, but the guests were exclusively women.

A wooden sign on the high iron gate said discreetly,
THE BEECHMONT
:
A PRIVATE HOTEL FOR GENTLE LADIES
.

Mr. Alcorn had an office in the back of the hotel and was always present, with a finger in everything that happened, but his wife was reclusive. They kept an apartment in the next-door building, and Mrs. Alcorn never came into the hotel.

The hotel had been the home of a family of southern cotton growers who came north before the States War but had not lasted long in Boston. They’d found it too dank and depressing. Had they tried to switch sides? Had they foreseen the only way the war would go? It could not have been pleasant for plantation people among Bostonians, especially on Beacon Hill.

The Alcorns were said to have purchased the building for next to nothing. There was a bright, lively tearoom at the front of the hotel, which was open to the public on Monday and Thursday afternoons and was popular with local businessmen, lawyers, and men in town for lectures, or men who were weary of their private clubs, but when Charlotte had asked her husband about it, one afternoon in her sickroom, he said, “A private hotel? The Beechmont? I never heard of it. I believe there’s no such place.”

“Mrs. Petty has a job as the cook there.”

“You must mean the Belmont. There’s a Belmont Inn, at Belmont Hill.”

“No, Boston. She went to Boston. Beech Street, on Beacon Hill.”

“There are so many backstreets up there. Do you remember going with me to a dinner on Beacon Street, when everyone was so worried that William would lose his reelection?” William was President McKinley. How could anyone have worried he’d lose, a Midwestern man, when every businessman in the country was behind him? Hays had gone to his first inauguration with his father and two of his brothers, no wives. The second inauguration needed to be missed because nothing would happen, Hays felt, that was new. But there’d been all sorts of fund-raising things. Was the woman with him at those?

“I didn’t go with you to that political dinner.”

“But I’m sure you got it wrong about your hotel name. I never noticed it listed anywhere.”

He’d said nothing more about it. There was something in his denial that had not rung true, and something in his expression that crinkled up, as it did when he considered something unseemly, but why? He wasn’t a snob. She had no reason to doubt his estimation of things.

She hadn’t pressed. She wasn’t supposed to have kept up a correspondence with Mrs. Petty.

Mr. Harry Alcorn held to high standards. He would never fit in anywhere that was not a city and just barely felt at home in Boston. You were not supposed to be an eccentric in Boston, unless you had the money to back yourself up, which apparently he had. He was eccentric in his clothing and food preferences, and would only wear whites and tans, no matter the season. He ate no meat, suffered from problems with his teeth, and would only take food that was yellow or white, or had come from the vegetable gardens kept by his kitchen people in a stone-walled back terrace. He was said to be devoted to his always-behind-the-scenes wife. A wedding photo of them was somewhere on a wall: both in white, young and pale and ethereal, but this was especially true of Mrs. Alcorn, all gauzy in her bridal dress, and very fragile-looking, like someone who could easily break.

That was the extent of Charlotte’s knowledge of the Beechmont. Mrs. Petty’s letters, smuggled to Charlotte by one of the kitchen maids, were lavish in detail and description. She was a colorful letter writer. Charlotte knew to believe every word. Like all good cooks, Mrs. Petty had a firm, insoluble grounding in Fact.

But the letters didn’t come half as often as Charlotte wanted them to. In the latest, a week ago, Mrs. Petty spoke of the children. The baby was nearly ready to start walking but was lazy about it. Sophy was attending a primary class in the Park Street Church, and so was Momo, who was too young for it, but he would not be separated from his sister; they allowed him to sit among the girls like a toy of theirs. And just lately, Mrs. Petty took on a second position, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, trying out recipes at the Boston Cooking School, under the direction of Miss Fannie Farmer.

Dear God, it was cold. The gas lamps were lit along the hill, casting their lights in a yellow haze through gently falling snow. Everett Gerson was patient, and he didn’t complain, but Beacon Hill was like a maze.

It was tricky to negotiate the side streets, but at last, here was Eustis, here was Beech, here was the brick hotel, the Beechmont itself, on the corner behind a handsome iron fence.

A PRIVATE HOTEL FOR GENTLE LADIES
. It was just as Mrs. Petty had described, but the words of the sign were elegant, put into the fence in fancy metalwork, with bits of snow clinging to some of the letters, like decorations in a picture book.

Everett Gerson had the long ride home in front of him, but he wanted to tie up his horse and go inside with her. It didn’t seem right to just leave her there.

No, she was fine; this was where her friend was; honestly, he had done quite enough. Which way should she enter? The horse through long experience wanted to go and find the back, like this was any other delivery, and perhaps a kitchen maid would come out with some sugar or an apple.

The front. She was a guest. She was a gentle lady. “Good night to you, Mr. Gerson. Tell your wife I feel more well than ever.”

Her spirits were singing inside her. Everything was going to be different. She found it amazing to remember she’d ever been sick at all.

The walkway was clear, right down to the smooth granite squares laid carefully in tidy rows; someone must have swept it very recently. A large iron knocker in the shape of an acorn was in the center of the door, and when she rapped it, the door opened at once, so that she nearly fell inside.

She hardly had time to notice right away who was standing in front of her in the vestibule. She had a sense of dark wood, smelling of polish, and shadows and flickering candlelight, and the warm rich colors of the inside walls, and a scent of flowers. There was a vase of hothouse roses on a table.

“You have the wrong place,” said a raspy male voice.

“No, I think not.”

“Your name.”

The voice didn’t sound friendly, but still, she felt no sense of foreboding.

She realized she hadn’t been able to tell if the figure was a man or a woman. It was the shape of a person in shadows dressed in a dark hooded cloak and holding a broom, which dripped with melting snow. Then she saw a ruddy face, stubbled at the chin and cheeks with a coarse gray sprinkling of beard, and a very large, bulbous, reddish nose, which looked as if it had been broken more than once.

Somewhere inside someone was playing a piano, stopping and starting again unevenly, playing scales, picking out odd combinations of notes, lightly, without skimming off into a tune. She said her name. She said she was the friend of the cook, Mrs. Petty, from the household where Mrs. Petty had been employed; would Mrs. Petty please be told?

A sound of grunting emerged from the man, and dragging his broom behind him he disappeared down the hall.

She stepped farther inside. A door was at the right, and she knew instinctively it led downstairs to the kitchen, like the one at home, where her sickroom was. She liked the symmetry of that: every door toward every downstairs kitchen for the rest of her life, she felt, would remind her she was free.

Do-re-mi, do-re-mi, do-re-mi went the piano: a sound of muffled laughter, a sound of wind at the windowpanes, a sound of creaking furniture overhead, a sound of crumbling logs in the little hall fireplace. Do-re-mi-fa-
so
.

She could picture herself ten years ago at the piano in the long gallerylike room the Heaths called their conservatory. “We would love for you to be musical.”

Her sisters-in-law played somber German compositions, hymns, songs about babbling streams and flowers, and lovers dying in moonlight in each other’s arms, all boring. Her mother-in-law would stand behind her at a lesson. “Charlotte, you make it seem a piano is an instrument of torture; you behave as though all your fingers are thumbs”—she didn’t know how accurate she was—while the stuffy fat teacher, beloved of the family, who affected an English accent but came from Vermont and had a mustache like walrus tusks, frowned harder and harder at her and tapped his hand on the piano in time to the horrible metronome, and she’d be filled with the desire to go out to the shed for the ax and chop up the whole thing, and all the furniture too, those pink-and-white chairs from France, those spindly tables, those portraits of dead Heaths in wood frames so thick, they would kill you if they fell on your head. Why had she married Hays Heath?

Because saying no to him would have been like saying no to your own heart, that was why, if your heart could ask if you wanted it to keep ticking.

Do-re-mi, do-re-mi-fa-so-
la
, then the sound of a trill, then a stillness. She felt that if she listened closely enough she might hear Sophy or Momo, calling to each other, or the baby crying, even though it was well past time for them to be in bed. A shiver of pleasure went through her: she thought of what their expressions would be like when they saw her. They would have grown, children grew fast; it had been almost six months since they’d left the household.

There had not been an emotional farewell. There had been no leave-taking at all. One morning, late last fall, Charlotte woke from a troubled sleep to something that felt like a blanket thrown over her face: a blanket of stillness.

The kitchen below her was as silent as stone. It was as if she’d gone deaf, as if deafness were one more manifestation of being sick. “I shall send up your breakfast myself, as the cook has been discharged,” said her mother-in-law, in the doorway. A bowl of ginger pudding arrived, left over from supper and warmed, with cream. She only ate it because Mrs. Petty had cooked it. She considered going on a fast; she considered stopping eating entirely. She imagined herself shrinking under her bedsheets, like the potion-drinking Alice, getting smaller and smaller and smaller, except that, for her, there would be no marvelous adventure.

Then a note was presented to her, privately, a note left with one of the maids, in Sophy’s scrawny printing. “You must not be sad you must be good and you shall have some letters she sed so and goodbye I do not like your family just you and Mr Haze we go to the cittie.” At the bottom Mrs. Petty had written, “I shall write very soon.”

That was when she made up her mind to get well. She must have been preparing for this reunion all along, without knowing it. The image of her husband at the edge of the square was burned into the backs of her eyes, so that she’d seen almost nothing else all the way to Boston—his look of surprise, his hat dropping to the ground, the woman beside him in her belted coat, her arm on his—all that was gone, as if it had happened a long time ago, as if it were truly meant to be.

The door was flung open. She jumped. Her arms were already extending themselves for the embrace she was certain was coming. She felt her throat clutching up and willed herself not to burst out with emotions, like she’d done with the Gersons.

Then suddenly: “You can’t stay here.”

This was Mrs. Petty, of course it was: this tall, sturdy, big-bosomed woman, bursting toward Charlotte, panting lightly and patting her chest where her heart was. She had run up the steep flight from the kitchen in shock, it seemed, like someone running away from a fire. She wore her same old tie-in-the-back heavy cloth apron. The ties had come loose and the sides of the apron hung limply at her sides.

“Mrs. Heath, you must leave this place at once.”

There was a flagstone path outside the conservatory at home, and one chilly morning, before she was sick, Charlotte was out there; one of her horses had got loose and left a lot of droppings. Not good. She’d put the horse back in the stable and was just returning to the path to clean it up when, rounding the corner of the house, she happened upon a maid who’d got there before her. The maid had a bucket of cold water which she heaved up, in a big expansive gesture, and splashed toward the stones, except that Charlotte was now in the way. The force of the blow was like a punch in the face out of nowhere.