A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (24 page)

“Half a dollar.”

“Thirty cents.”

“Up front,” said Burke, sighing.

Charlotte had never bargained for anything before; she was careful to conceal the little shock of triumph it gave her. She dug into her purse for the right amount of coins, which Burke quickly put into his pocket.

Digging out an obituary consisted of this: Burke hollered out the name of Miss Eckhart and she hollered what did he want, and he hollered, louder, he wanted a back-paper search, and she came out to the front and asked, for pity’s sake, she was busy, on what?

“Death. Woman named Kemple. Out the farms. Summer, maybe late spring, last year.”

Miss Eckhart had a mug of something hot in her hands; she was using it more to warm her fingers with, than to drink it. She looked down at the floor as if that was where past copies of the paper were stored, right at her feet, and after a moment she said, “Brigid, forty-three, unmarried. I think it was all that diphtheria out there.”

“What were the names of her parents?” said Charlotte.

Miss Eckhart consulted her memory. “Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Kemple, and the address was here, Ninety-eight Market. That’s all that was there.”

“That’s the shoe store,” said Burke. He gave Charlotte a satisifed, end-of-transaction look, and you’d think she’d come into the office to find out the address of Artie’s.

“Thanks for stopping by,” he told her. He turned and went over to the boy at the desk. “Give me that thing, the picture stinks. I’ll have them do it upstairs.” He grabbed the notebook, and the boy followed him out, running after him. Charlotte put her purse back on her arm.

“Going back on the train now, are you?”

She nodded at Miss Eckhart.

“Want me mention to Artie you were around?”

“Perhaps I’ll write him a letter.”

“Feeling a little low down, not getting what you wanted?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Cup of tea, before you shove off?”

“No, thank you.” She could imagine what it would taste like, in that place. She got to the door, and had her hand on the handle, when Miss Eckhart called out—in a sudden mood for conversation, it seemed—“Powerful cold out. Frigid. Was warmer when we were dumped with all the snow, but now it’s just bitter, don’t you think?”

“Thank you for your help, and goodbye,” said Charlotte.

“Seems merciless, the cold out there, for someone that’s been standing on the sidewalk most of the whole time you’ve been in here. It’s not someone I ever saw before. I’d say it’s someone that’s following you, in case you don’t know it, by the way. Course there’s not anyone else here knows it, as I thought you might want to keep it quiet.”

Charlotte froze. The composure, the patience, the outward show of steely reserve and self-containment she’d maintained since she’d been in that awful shoe shop, and even before that, since the moment she stepped off the train, and had her feet on the ground of her old town—well, on the packed-down snow of it—suddenly dissolved inside her into something as mushy as jelly. Her voice came out quivery. “You know that someone’s watching me?”

“Know it when I see it like the hand at the end of my arm,” said Miss Eckhart. “You need a back way out?”

The newspaper front door was solid wood; half of it wasn’t a window, as you’d see in most offices. Funny what you tend to be grateful for.

She couldn’t be noticed from outside. She leaned against the door. She willed it to stay put, as if talking to it: Stay put, wood, please. She knew what could happen. It could crumble, like the wall in the hotel the night she arrived there. Like the ice-garden painting in the fire, the paint making hisses and sparks. Like her own body when she first got sick. Like the life she’d been living with her husband, all of it. Like the solid, crystalline knowledge, inside her like an extra, vital organ, that she could trust him as well as sunrises and sunsets.

You lean on something, chances are, it gives way. One shudder, then a silent implosion, then a silent collapse.

And
then
what? Wake up God knew where, with that man Burke demanding more money, and that boy writing more ditties about cheese? She remembered the snow-laden branch on the tree at the edge of the square, which Hays was ducking behind, to kiss the woman. She remembered that the branch could have broken off and crashed on their heads. She pictured it all over again, as if it really had happened. She felt a little stronger. She said to herself, “I wish I were Miss Blanchette. I wish I were a tree.”

The door didn’t do anything except keep on being a door. “Can you describe the person to me?” said Charlotte.

Miss Eckhart didn’t waste any breath on adjectives. She set down her mug on a desk. She looked at Charlotte squarely, kindly. The lines of her face all relaxed. “He’s a copper.”

“A copper,” repeated Charlotte. Well. “Does he look like one from these parts?”

“No. I would’ve recognized him if he was. He’s city. Written all over him, the poor man. I’d venture he hasn’t been at it for long. Like I said, we got a back way.”

“I won’t need it. I’m indebted to you for the warning.” Once again, Charlotte opened her purse. She went back to the counter and placed two dollars on it. “Thank you for the back search on the obituary,” she said.

“You already paid,” said Miss Eckhart.

“Accept this for yourself.”

Miss Eckhart’s eyes lit up. “I couldn’t.”

“You must. I’m sure your salary is wretched. You can go and buy some shoes.”

“Boots, would be more like it.”

“Then go and buy some boots. And thank you again.”

Dickie had chosen that moment, as Charlotte opened the door, to come barreling in, either to take hold of Charlotte bodily, or confront her, or just to warm himself at the weak, smoky stove. She was ready for him. He came in with a headlong rush: it was funny to watch him stagger and fight for balance, like someone on skates for the first time.

Charlotte laughed out loud. Dickie.

Her head went all bubbly, her spirits soared. It wasn’t because of his presence, and she knew it. It was more like a case of absence. It was a matter of who he was not.

Not Hays. For the second time, not Hays. She realized she’d imagined him out there, almost magically, as if he’d picked up some signal from her, all those miles away, like birds of certain species were said to be able to do.

She’d hoped he was a bird. She’d hoped he had flown to her through the cold bright winter sky, and there he would be, her husband: “Charlotte, let’s go home.”

And she wouldn’t care about Kemples. She would tell herself she’d lost her head in coming all the way here (but she would write the shoe store a letter, most definitely). In less than four hours she could be home in the big warm sturdy Heath house, not in the sickroom but upstairs, in her end-of-the-hall real bedroom, with her own dressing room, her own washroom. A bath. Lying in her bed. Hays in the doorway, in good humor, in his dressing gown. “Charlotte, my dear, you’ve been gone pretty much of a week. Did you have a nice time of it?” Like she was the one coming home from a trip, not him.

Not Hays. Weren’t husbands supposed to go and look for their wives, if they got home one day and their wife wasn’t there? And then she wasn’t there the next day, and the next and the next and the next and the next? And all he did to try to go to her was to follow her horse, back to the bakery? And write her a letter, one letter, which had sounded as empty as a hole? He would wait for her to send for him. That was what he wrote.

She pictured Hays at the Gersons’. The good Gersons, covering for her, their debt to her paid in full. “Oh, we drove Charlotte to the trolley, that was all we did.” Hays going back home, exhausted. Going after the horse—it had to have been the mare; the male might even have nipped him—must have been an ordeal. Sherry in his room with some sisters. Eventually a letter: “My dear Charlotte,” or whatever it said.

Wait for you to send for me. That was the only part of it she remembered. It was the only part that mattered. Into the fire it had gone. He would wait, he said.

That was funny, too. She couldn’t help it. She threw back her head and laughed again, not in little giggles, like a girl without an inner core of firmness, but loud, with her mouth open and her shoulders shaking. Miss Georgeson had frowned on giggling, because it sounded like tittering mice.

You couldn’t be married to a man for all those years and not know what he meant when he said something to you that was encoded; you didn’t even need to stop and think of a way to decipher it. Like crossing the desert. Its meaning would be plain because you knew the code. You can’t not know the code, even if you would like to.

It would have been funny if she’d let Aunt Lily read that letter. Aunt Lily didn’t know him that way. She would have taken the “I’ll wait for you to send for me” as a sweet, respectful gesture. Every inch of him a gentleman. Giving his wife the next move. Thoughtful, wise, generous.

Hays didn’t wait. Hays was not a waiter. When he said, “I’ll wait for that,” in some deal he was making, some factory he was trying to get shares in, some bicycles or stoves or carriages he wanted produced, some big thing he was trying to buy, he meant, “Take the deal or the factory, or the bicycles, stoves, carriages, or big thing, and do me a favor and throw it into hell, because I don’t believe in waiting.”

Every man he’d ever made a deal with—if that man got to know him even a little bit—must have known what it meant for Hays to say, when a shipment of something was late, or a payment was overdue, “Are you asking me to wait for that?”

She’d heard him herself many times, in meetings in his study—there were always processions of men in business suits coming to the town. Voices muffled on the other side of the door. Long minutes of silence. Then words from Hays like a proclamation: “If I tell you I would wait to see that happen, I would mean it is not worth having.”

He wasn’t like his mother, who believed in God taking his own good time in getting around to answering people’s prayers.

That was pretty much it. She’d known this about him forever. At Miss Georgeson’s, he’d come right back to see her, and Miss Georgeson was quick, at the very beginning, to speak to him about her age. “Miss Kemple is so young, and this school is the only place she knows, so why don’t you wait to court her until she’s at least gone off to her after-graduation new position?”

“I don’t believe in waiting. Waiting is for people who have nothing better to do.” You could admire it, in a way. Miss Georgeson certainly had admired it. It was honest. An emblem. A sign of a man who knows his desires and knows how to have them satisfied. A man who knows his own mind.

Maybe some of it had rubbed off on her. Maybe she ought to thank him for that.

And now here was Dickie, upright, his decorum reestablished, in the ugly rundown newspaper office. She held out her hands to him. She wondered if she would always, for the rest of her life, remember this, exactly the way it was.

“I’ll wait for you to send for me.” It had been embedded in her mind since the moment she’d seen it written on that page. She must have been waiting for it to come to the surface, to allow itself to be found. If it hadn’t been her husband’s handwriting, she would have thought that someone else had done it, in his name. Someone who didn’t know the code.

She hoped she would remember it like something filed away in her brain, like Miss Eckhart’s back-search of old papers. She hoped that in five, ten, twenty years, and more and more, she’d be able take out this memory, intact and solid, and say, “I was wavering on what to think about my husband, but when it came to me, when it really, truly came to me what he thinks of me, I had thrown back my head, and I was laughing.”

“Hello, Charlotte,” said Dickie.

She squeezed both of his hands, thick-gloved, but she could feel the cold in them. Her own self was a firm thing she could count on, after all. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had practice in coping with complexities.

“Hello, Dickie. You know, I was only just thinking of you, and saying to myself, ‘I wonder if I’ll ever see him again,’ and here you are, to answer my question.”

Dickie was not in a jokey mood. He said to Miss Eckhart, “There’s a tea shop at the end of the street that just closed its shutters. Does that mean it’s closed for the day?”

“They do their business mornings, rule-like,” Miss Eckhart answered, with her chin out, her eyes narrowed. She was as wary as if this were an interrogation.

“Is it closed for business now?”

“It could open if you were to knock at the window and have a coin in your hand, like an admission price.”

“Thank you,” said Dickie.

And Charlotte was bustled out into the street, down the icy sidewalk, in the shock of the freezing air. Dickie didn’t touch her, didn’t offer his arm or put a gloved hand at her elbow, as if steering her, and he walked at his own fast pace, without taking slow steps like men were always doing with ladies. It felt good to trot, just to keep up with him.

The shop owner must have recognized Dickie for what he was; there was no need to offer money to get him to open up. It was a small place, dim, coal-smoky, with smells in the air of old cooking grease—lardy and oppressive—and stale tobacco, and that dank smell of snow brought in on people’s shoes, which had melted into puddles and dried. Charlotte sat down with Dickie at the table nearest the hearth. The shop owner was a dour, pale, heavy-whiskered man without an ounce of congeniality in his body, or maybe this was only the way he behaved with policemen.

There was no menu; there was nothing left to be had except chopped-egg sandwiches and potato cakes and stewed tomatoes. We’ll take it, the man was told. Dickie acted as if he and Charlotte had been going into restaurants together for years. The owner did nothing with the fire, which was down to charcoal, so Dickie disappeared into the back and returned with a bucket of coal and took care of it himself.

There was no waiter. The owner brought tea and milk and put it down grudgingly. Dickie’s mood was like a nimbus around him of bad air, combined with what was there already. Charlotte saw the way he wasn’t looking at her directly, not once. He knows, she thought. He knows about the hotel.