A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (9 page)

“Is that the one with the green door at the end with the knocker in the shape of a lion’s head, and a lamp to keep it visible?” She had passed it last night, and Everett Gerson had said, “That is the biggest door knocker I ever saw.”

“That’s on Joy Street.”

“Is Myrtle the very long one, like three or four others put together?” They’d been on it, looking for the Beechmont, and Everett had said, “Mabel’s mother’s name is Myrtle, I have to remember to tell her there’s a street named for her.”

“Yes. Do you ever go into that tearoom, a genuine English one with completely imported goods, about smack in the middle?”

“I didn’t notice a tearoom. The one here is just fine.”

“Have you noticed anything taking place in this hotel you would call unusual?”

“I would call it unusual to be sitting here talking to you.”

“Have you noticed anything, in all your visits, that might compromise someone’s sense of what is decent?”

“Had I done so, I would swear never to return.”

“And will you?”

“In all probability,” said Charlotte.

He said, abruptly, “Did you think I caused the thing to come out of the wall and topple on me?”

“I’m not going to answer that. I don’t remember what I thought.”

“I think you do.”

“I think, then, if you press me, I could never have thought so for one reason. I would never be able to bear it if you had looked at yourself as something you would choose to destroy. I don’t think you would have intended to have bones broken and survive it. I don’t think I wanted to know how much hopelessness you must have felt.”

“I told you of it often.”

“But we would go riding, and that made it seem all right.”

“Thank you, Charlotte.”

“You’re welcome.”

The interview was over. He gave a glance out the window once more, but this time it was to prepare himself to go out into the storm. “There’ll be no roads cleared, and I expect to be pushing myself through drifts to my knees.”

“Goodbye, Dickie. Maybe all the criminals will stay inside today.”

“That might make it worse. I had my coat with me, and my boots, when I came in here, but the maid came to take them. I would like to find the coatroom. Where might that be?”

Charlotte didn’t know. How should she know that? “The coatroom? Dickie, there are servants. How would I know, when there are servants? Tell the man in the hall you want your coat and he’ll get it.”

“I suppose you’re correct,” he said. Then he said, “I believe you don’t realize how much I trust your opinion.”

“You’re paid to have suspicions.”

“But one knows.”

“And how do you? Because we were friends from before?”

“Because, Charlotte, I live in Dorchester Heights, near the sanatorium. I married one of my nurses. We could never afford this neighborhood. I sometimes spend the night at the station when it’s too hard to make it home. There is no such place as Lilac Street,” he said simply, and stood up, pocketing the card of the Vice Society.

“Dickie!” She jumped up, nearly knocking over her chair. “You
tested
me?”

“It’s all right. You passed.”

C
harlotte holed up in her room—Aunt Lily’s room—and stayed put for four days.

Harry Alcorn knocked on her door now and then. Did she want some company? Was she looking out the window at the hell-forsaken snow? Did she know the city was as stopped as a clock? Did she mind the blandness of the tedious meals, from what they had in the larder, just squash, potatoes, turnips, celery, applesauce, and cakes with no eggs? Would she like to come downstairs for a card game with other guests, would she like to listen to the gramophone, would she like to hear some piano? They had a very good pianist, as it happened, a New York lady who had played three times in concert on Washington Street, was married to a cellist with the Boston Symphony, and was a whiz at those sublime German sonatas, plus the new modern rowdy stuff.

She answered, to everything, “I wish not to speak to you, Mr. Alcorn, or to anyone else.”

She hadn’t been out of her room except to bathe once, in the lavatory down the hall. Every floor had its own, with expensive new ceramic bathtubs fixed with shower heads, which distributed water from a bucket that was nearly as large as the tub.

The showers were not in use this week. There was still no running water but there was coal, gas, and wood; the little maid, Eunice, had been instructed to carry up pails of snow to be melted for Mrs. Heath.

It amazed Charlotte how much snow it took to get two inches of water in a bathtub. And the boiled snow from the fireplace had to be blended with a fresh bucket, or her skin would have probably peeled off her. She hadn’t washed her hair since five or six days before she’d left home, and it was starting to get oppressively sticky and too heavy on her head, but she was used to that. At home when she was sick they’d bring a portable washtub into her room, filling it out of kettles. Often it was just too much trouble to do her hair as well.

In the summer when it rained—the sweet soft rain of July, when the sun kept shining through it—she’d stick her head out the window and soak it, having first made sure no one was observing that part of the house, which they usually weren’t, because her horses were always hanging around that window.

In the early days of her illness, her husband was the one to help her bathe, and he was gentle and affectionate about it, even though it was not certain, yet, that whatever she had was not contagious.

He turned her baths over to maids when Aunt Lily decided on a brain disease. “If you’re going to make anyone sick, I suppose it ought to be me,” seemed to have been his feeling. He never talked about it. People said you could catch polio just by standing near someone who had it, or even touching their bedsheets or clothes, including things they weren’t lying on or wearing, which hadn’t been washed yet, in hard lye soap.

Was that why Aunt Lily said brain disease? So no one would look at her like a modern-day carrier of some old historical plague, like the smallpox, or that really bad one they had in Europe, in the Middle Ages, like an instrument of torture: the Black Death?

Even the biggest worrier-of-catching-diseases would not be able to say that something in someone’s brain could get out and infect others, because how would it get past the skull?

It seemed reassuring to speak of it in this manner, as her sisters-inlaw did, in her sickroom doorway, in a general, polite way: Oh, let’s not say polio, let’s say brain disease, not catching. They were trying to be friendly when they said things like, “It’s interesting that the human skull is like a fortress—how excellent of God to have done that.” Charlotte’s skull was often a matter of discussion, but at the mention of the word she’d think of nothing but Hamlet, melancholy and handsome and hugely, tragically misunderstood. Lines of the play floated through her head.

But they didn’t drown out memories of Aunt Lily’s voice. “It’s in her brain and nowhere else, I assure you.”

Aunt Lily, Charlotte decided, treated her like a child. And she hadn’t even introduced the man in bedclothes who looked like an angel. Charlotte wasn’t supposed to have seen him. Maybe it was getting to be a pattern, seeing things she wasn’t supposed to.

The passing of time was not a burden. If there was anyone who had experience in staying still—and not complaining about it, or wasting energy by squirming with boredom, and thinking of things you missed out on—it was her. She felt that if you didn’t count riding, staying still in a room by herself was the one thing in which she had a genuine level of expertise.

Maybe this was what it was like to be old, sitting quietly, your eyes on the play of a fire, and looking at scenes in your mind, selectively, as if the living of life was for the gathering up of memories. When you watched them unfold in your head you were free to change anything you wanted, then convince yourself the new way was the way it really happened.

But she did nothing about changing the moment when she first caught sight of her husband embracing the woman at the edge of the square. She saw it over and over again. Like a painting. “Interrupted Kiss,” it would be called. Where were his hands? On the woman’s shoulders.

Where were hers? At his waist, one at either side.

Was her face tipped up toward his, expecting the kiss, in the cold? It was. Did it seem that this was the first time it was happening? Was it some sort of innocent, spontaneous thing, as if they’d met at Uncle Owen’s wake, two long-lost relatives? Was it grief that threw them together, simple grief, which always made people do strange things, for which they had to be forgiven?

Well, no, no, and no, and the woman wasn’t dressed in the type of mourning clothes suggesting a relative. Were those hands on his waist the hands of a woman who would look at him and say “mine”? They were.

On the morning of the fourth day of her self-imposed confinement, Charlotte began to criticize herself for falling for Hays in the first place, back at Miss Georgeson’s, when she was the most senior of the boarding girls.

She pictured the grounds of the academy and the locations of the biggest trees, the vegetable garden, the chapel, the tea patio with its roses on a trellis that never stayed put because the wind would knock it over, and everyone anyway picked the roses as buds: in the middle grades they believed you could put a brand-new baby rose under your pillow, and your wildest wish would be granted if, in the morning, the bud emerged as a full-blown flower. She’d done so herself dozens of times.

Her wish was always the same: to find a way to get out of the Valley and live—on her own, if she had to, as solitary as an owl—in a city, any city, anywhere, as long as the people in it spoke English. She’d never been to a city, but she would picture high buildings, crowds, shops, movement, stories everywhere, pickpockets slipping their hands in people’s coat pockets, theaters, music halls, galleries, restaurants, hotels.

“What do you want for your life, Charlotte?” Miss Georgeson would say.

She’d known enough not to answer, “I want it to take place in a city.” Miss Georgeson had come from Manhattan, and said cities were full of filth in every possible configuration, filth and degradation and injustice. The rich were filthy rich and the poor were filthy poor and if there was anyone in between with any sense, they would move somewhere else.

There was an enormous ballroom near Fifth Avenue, she’d told Charlotte, where every year at Easter poor people from the tenements were gathered for a meal on the dance floor, where tables were set up, little round tea tables, about one hundred of them, and white cloths were put on them, very elegantly. They were people in raggy, dirty clothes who had not had a bath for months; perhaps they’d never had one at all, how could they, there was no plumbing in those horrible buildings, crowded together, firetraps every one of them.

These people sat down to eat free spit-cooked mutton, roasted chickens, boiled fruits, vegetables, and Easter cakes, with expensive silver, and with policemen watching so nothing would be stolen. Above, in alcoves, along an extended balcony, gold-rimmed, where people usually sat to watch the ballroom action—couples lavishly waltzing, introductions being made, an orchestra playing, people strolling about in their best clothes—there sat, watching the poor eat their meals, the one hundred richest men of New York City, with their wives.

They were up there like the people in ancient Rome, Miss Georgeson said, watching to see if Christians would be eaten by lions or saved, like Daniel, by their God. And this took place every year on the very day of the Resurrection. If Jesus walked among them, at whose side would he have pulled up a chair? Not the Romans. They were the ones who killed him.

What did she want for her life? “I want to be a good Christian, Miss Georgeson,” Charlotte would say. But all the same, she crossed New York City off her list of possible places.

Oh, it was easy to picture the academy: the gray, gritty smoke in the air from the Blackstone factories, the school, the little writing tablets, the generous back folds of Miss Georgeson’s dresses over her bustles, the worn copy of
The Pilgrim’s Progress
that was always somewhere nearby, the faces of other teachers, other girls, servants, horses.

It was autumn. A day in late autumn, beginning like any other day. She remembered the task she was assigned that morning. She was past all lessons herself, and was living in a fuzzy, undefined state of being somewhat still a pupil and somewhat a member of the staff.

She was supposed to conduct a schoolroom lesson with four French girls whose fathers—they were two pairs of sisters—were setting up a glass factory somewhere in the Valley. She was sent to teach them pronunciation. She had a list of English-for-foreigners phrases and sentences to be recited, elocution-lesson style. She remembered some of them still. “The, thee, the, thee, the, thee.”

“Did you read in the reeds what I had read in my bed?”

“Aitch, huh, ha, ho, hard, half, wholesome, who, handle, whistle, her, aitch.”

“Don’t you know that the bow of the boat lies low in the water, brought down by the laughter of daughters?”

It was all ridiculous; Charlotte carried no weight of authority. The girls’ chirpy voices rolled over the sounds melodically, trilling
r
’s, running everything together, dissolving into giggling, into rapid French chatter. The lesson was in chaos when the classroom door opened to reveal the girls’ fathers, with Miss Georgeson.

And with them too was the young American businessman—with high spots of color in his face—who was helping to broker their financing.

The girls rushed to their fathers to complain. The businessman turned to Charlotte and said, in a condescending, high-handed way, “Your pupils are appalled by what Americans do with the first letter of the alphabet. And
ow
is a sound that horrifies them, and they’re horrified by our
t
and our
h
put together, especially with an almost-silent
e,
after them, which sounds depressing and so much like a thud. They feel sorry for English itself for having words that look the same but are spoken so differently—which, by the way, they feel, demonstrates a deficiency of intelligence.”

He looked directly at Charlotte for those last five words. Just to show off, he said everything all over in French, which took such a long time, she knew he was making fun of her. She immediately imagined this awful American up in the balcony of that ballroom, making sport of watching paupers at a feast.

What a Roman! What a pagan! What an awful, self-satisfied man!

The girls knew him, and you’d think he was a prince, or a French girl’s idea of a god, the way they marveled at him. “Mess-yure ’Eet! Mess-yure ’Eet! Vuze ett tray jo-lee!”

Charlotte had fled the schoolroom. She had thought his name was Eet, until he was presented to her more formally the next day, when she was called to Miss Georgeson’s reception parlor, and found him standing there in a tweedy gray suit, with his hat in his hands.

“Forgive me, Miss Kemple, if I had seemed, yesterday, to be somewhat repulsive to you,” and she answered, “Forgiveness would be too strong a word, as I believe your repulsiveness, as you put it, was based on rudeness and not in sin.”

He seemed to be encouraged by the fact she didn’t take him for a sinner. “Then forgive me for the rottenness of my manners.”

“I’ve no reason not to.”

And then suddenly ten minutes later, when she was walking outside, he was beside her. “May I walk with you?”

She was on her way to the stables. She didn’t want to say yes to him, because she couldn’t think of a reason why she’d want to have his company. She couldn’t say no to him because she couldn’t think of a reason why she needed to send him away. He walked with her that day, without speaking. He watched her ride off, but when she came back he wasn’t there.

When she was just over eighteen, she was given a position at another academy, in southern New Hampshire. He came to call on her. Her job was as a lady riding master, teaching tiny girls to handle a pony with a goat cart on a dusty little oval of a track, around and around all day.

Now, sitting by the fire, she wished he hadn’t done that. She wished she’d seen the last of him back at Miss Georgeson’s. She wished he hadn’t taken her driving with him in his carriage. She wished he hadn’t looked in her eyes the way he did, and she wished she hadn’t looked back, the same way.