A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (6 page)

“Why are you wearing nightclothes, Aunt Lily? Why are your clothes on that chair?”

“Because this is my room.”

Charlotte tried to look as if that made sense, when Aunt Lily had a town house in Back Bay, where her private consulting office was, and the big house where she lived with Uncle Chester, a lawyer Heath, in Brookline.

Uncle Chester resembled his brother Owen, but not below the surface. Unlike Uncle Owen and the other Heaths, he practiced criminal law and was a Democrat and was said to be famous, having written a textbook on the legal rights of people in America who were not American-born and had found themselves in trouble with American police.
Inalienable Rights of Aliens,
it was called, or something like it. Hays had it on a shelf in his study at home. It was six hundred pages long. He had read it. He was the only Heath who had.

Aunt Lily’s expertise was in trauma and diseases of the head, brain, and spine, which seemed like things you would automatically die of, with or without her. Until now, Charlotte never would have thought she’d have a problem with separating the morbid stresses of her profession from her personal life. But Aunt Lily looked as pinched-up and knotted as if she’d caught something from one of her patients, some nerve disease.

“This is your
room
?” said Charlotte.

“It was, and it’s now become yours. For tonight. I’ll have to find somewhere else to put myself. And no more talking. You should sleep now.”

There was something that needed to be remembered—she racked her brain—some family thing, Uncle Chester, Uncle Owen. It was hard to try to think. Uncle Owen had died. The wake in the house she’d not gone into, a funeral coming; had Aunt Lily been at the wake? Oh! The woman!

“Uncle Owen died, Aunt Lily.”

“I know.”

“There was a wake.”

“I had patients.”

“There’s going to be a funeral.”

“I’m aware of that.”

It was like trying to talk to a stranger. What about Aunt Lily’s husband? Uncle Chester was supposed to be made a judge, she remembered. Her father-in-law said it never would happen because Chester was an intelligence-deficient, backbone-deprived, sentimental, radical oddball.

“Did Uncle Chessy get to be a judge?”

“He did, and that’s enough with family chatting.”

“He’s my favorite Heath,” said Charlotte.

Everything was beginning to go fuzzy, which was lucky, because she felt she would not be able to bear much more of Aunt Lily’s displeasure—no, worse than displeasure: controlled, contained, silent indignation, judgelike, as if Charlotte had committed a crime. What had she done?

All she’d done was come into the city to Mrs. Petty. Had she asked to be put in this room? Had she sent for her doctor? She was innocent! And anyway, wasn’t a physician supposed to act kindly, especially with a niece, who was also, she had thought, a friend to her, after all those months of Aunt Lily coming three or four times a week to the household, sitting with her, bringing things—books, magazines, lotions, oranges, warmth, a press of her fingers in Charlotte’s, a cool hand across her forehead—and talking to her, not like this, not stern, forbidding, with daggers of disfavor, directed, it seemed, straight at Charlotte’s heart?

It wasn’t fair,
and her husband didn’t love her, and she’d been out in the freezing cold in a bakery sleigh that took hours and hours, and she had been terrified and had to conceal it, which made it worse, and Mrs. Petty!

Mrs. Petty had been horrible, and now Aunt Lily didn’t care about Charlotte at all. Cold poured out of her with the daggers. Awful doctor! They should take away her license, they should take away her practice, they should take away her privileges at the hospital. So what if she was in charge of a department, so what if people thought she was highly skilled? She wasn’t, even though she looked nice with her hair down like that, her dark curly hair, masses of it, with strands of gray, not a lot, tinsel-like. Charlotte realized she’d never seen Aunt Lily with her hair down.

“I think you’re going to be all right,” said the doctor softly.

Maybe she wasn’t so much of a monster.

“Go to sleep, Charlotte, and I’ll think of a way to send a letter home that you’re with me, but I shall not say where. They can think I took you in at the apartment.”

What was she talking about?

“You look nice with your hair down,” said Charlotte. “But I don’t know why you’re so mad at me, and I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t understand why you told me this is your room.”

“Don’t worry.”

“You already told me that.”

“But that was when you thought I wasn’t real.”

No more daggers. Charlotte was fading out; she couldn’t stop it. Everything was slowly fading. The lamp appeared to have been turned down, although no one had touched it. The fire was nearly out, but she held on stubbornly for one instant longer, because she remembered something she needed to say to Aunt Lily.

“I got well, and you said I never would. You said I had to resign myself and be accepting and be
diseased
.”

“The one who said so was you, Charlotte,” came the answer, from somewhere high up, near the ceiling, as if Aunt Lily had grown even taller—which she probably had, Charlotte thought—as if all the confusions of this situation, gathered together, had stretched her. Now she’d have to go around for the rest of her life banging her head on doorframes, which was, objectively, sad.

Poor Aunt Lily. It seemed to take half an hour for her to bend all the way down to Charlotte to touch her forehead, lightly, the way she used to, as if her fingers, by themselves, delivered sleep.

A
fire was burning, a fresh one; the logs were piled high in the grate. A maid had come in, a small shy girl, barely half through her teens. She went straight to the window and drew back the heavy dark curtains. Whiteness. Hardly any sunlight came through.

It was morning. There would have to be sunlight. Her life could not have got so odd that she would wake in a strange bed to a day with no sun. Charlotte was dressed in the same clothes she’d put on the day before, a black and brown wool shirtwaist, with a matching vest and short jacket. It was a good thing all her clothes were so loose on her. She had never before spent a night fully dressed.

“Excuse me, missus,” said the maid nervously, cautiously.

The glass was completely frosted in every pane, from top to bottom. “Frost,” Charlotte said to herself. “Something natural.” She had thought that, in the instant she looked from the fire to the window, something had gone wrong with her eyes, a sort of white blindness, as happened to people struck by lightning. You go through your life seeing nothing but the same white flash that hit you.

That was what happened to her mother-in-law’s private maid, Miss Stanfield, as elderly as a prune, and everyone had seen it happen. It was summer, at the summer place, and she’d gone out in the rain, at the age of about eighty, which seemed crazy, but she was leather-tough and fanatically healthy; she ate nothing but lettuce and beans. She had lost the little key to her possessions box, which was metal, and which she was carrying with her, tucked under one arm. She thought she’d dropped the key in the grass by the broken elm in the middle of the yard, which had been hit by lightning years before and no longer had leaves or even branches, just a split-in-the-midsection dissipating trunk. Miss Stanfield liked to have her lunches there, picnic-style, alone, on a bench used only by herself.

The box was where she kept her personal diary. She didn’t know as she carried it that it was empty. The three Irish maids had the diary, and Charlotte, too; they were reading it in the kitchen. A lot of it was addressed to Jesus, as in, “Jesus I am mindful of my faults that are legion,” and a lot of it was made up of reminders to herself concerning chores. “My missus said put out the green dress for airing that’s the green with the blue not the gold. She said the brushes and combs want polishing on Thursday.”

It was a big disappointment. They’d just read, “Mr Heath what is her husband had five days go by with no activity of his bowels, & we discussed to send this time for the doctor, to be drained, tho’ he swore to not submit & to jump off the cliff instead,” when one of the yard-work boys, who was Irish, and who knew what they were up to, rushed in to say that Miss Stanfield was on her hands and knees in the grass by that tree, in what had now become a thunderstorm, and they all jumped up to run out to her; they weren’t sadistic.

A general alarm had gone up in the main house and all the cottages around it; everyone had gone to a window or doorway or the wide side porch, calling to her. Charlotte was just coming out of the kitchen door, with the three maids behind her, when the lightning came. Miss Stanfield must have been worried by the first few small flashes, bristling and bright: she held up the box in front of her face like a shield.

It was the third or fourth strike that hit her, and afterward, through the summer and fall, she wore a black satin cloth tied over her eyes like a blindfold, which was supposed to restore her sight, but it didn’t. There was only the whiteness, and then she went to live with a cousin, somewhere far away.

The diary was put back, the key was put back, Miss Stanfield never knew. The three Irish maids had Confession to go to, they had Penance, they were Catholics. But what, Charlotte thought, about me?

She was told back in school that if you swallowed an acorn—she was always casting about outdoors for things to eat, having never been satisfied with the skimpy little meals—a tree would take root in your intestines, and it would grow through your lungs, through your throat, with branches poking out from your ears, obliterating you, like girls in the old Greek stories who did not obey the gods and were enchanted.

Guilt was like that. Guilt was like an acorn.

Charlotte hadn’t thought about Miss Stanfield since the day she left the house with all her things in one trunk, but now she could think of nothing else, with a burning rush of remorse. She found herself trying to pray, which she hadn’t done since school; she’d completely lost the ability. She couldn’t remember the words to a single prayer. The hotel maid was bearing in on her, edging toward the bed.

I wish I didn’t have a conscience, thought Charlotte, and she remembered the black blindfold, and how Miss Stanfield sat so rigidly in a chair by the parlor fire, relieved of all duties, and saying, “Please will someone tell me why I must have a white bandage on my eyes when I would so much prefer a dark one.”

“Excuse me, missus, please.”

“I am very, hugely sorry,” said Charlotte. She had bowed her head, without meaning to. She looked up at the little maid. “What’s your name?”

“Eunice, missus.”

“You’re very young.”

“Sixteen last summer.”

“You made an excellent fire.”

“Thank you, but please, they want to know.”

Charlotte held up a hand to interrupt her. The chair that had been piled with clothing last night was bare.

“I want my aunt.”

“Would that be the doctor?”

“It would.”

“She has left. Someone from the hospital came with a wide-runner sleigh early on, like what they use for dire-straits patients, as it’s bad out.”

“Do you know if she left for a funeral?”

“I believe she was meant to, as I had seen them in the drying room, putting the iron to a dress for her what was black, for mourning. But it may happen she will stay at the hospital today and go nowhere.”

“Is my aunt here often?”

“Please, we’re not to answer questions such as that from a guest.”

“There was a man in this room last night and I wonder, who might he be?”

The maid showed no sign of emotion or hesitance; young as she was, she’d been carefully trained. “We’re not to answer questions.”

“But he could not be a guest, as I know the guests are ladies, and he is a male.”

“We’re not to answer questions of who would visit.”

“Surely he was not visiting. He was wearing bedclothes.”

“We are not to answer questions of who works here.”

“He
works
here?”

“I didn’t say so, missus. I was only saying what the rules are.”

“He works here doing what?” It couldn’t be playing piano, as a hired musician for the guests’ entertainment. Even though she’d complimented him, it was obvious that he didn’t know the first thing about actual music.

“Please,” said the maid, “if I can say what I am meant to, they want to know in the morning room. It snowed something terrible in the night, and Mr. Alcorn said, at the stable, they will not let out the horses, and would you mind going home in the Moberly sleigh, as Mrs. Moberly likes the weather and has a dog at home she is attached to, a spaniel, she said, very prized, which is to have its litter, its first one, and she said—Mrs. Moberly—she couldn’t live with herself if she missed it. She wouldn’t mind the company though you’re strangers to each other, but your towns are side by side, and please hurry, as she is anxious to go.”

The maid paused, flushed with exertion, and Charlotte said, “Is this room near the top of the house?”

She had a sense of being high up. The wind was blowing hard, with a whistling, and the windowpanes seemed to sigh and turn even whiter. She was used to sleeping a lot closer to the ground.

“This is the third story,” said the maid, as if a guest of the hotel would not be thought odd if she didn’t know where she was.

“Is there food downstairs?”

“Breakfast, in the morning room,” said the maid. “Bread and jam, boiled eggs, some rashers and potatoes, from what was in the kitchen already, as there’s to be no deliveries today, with the snow.”

“Is Mrs. Petty in the kitchen?”

“I have not seen her this morning.”

“Then please come back with a tray for me,” said Charlotte.

“But there is no time, please.”

“There is always time for eating alone in one’s room if one desires. Is there water?”

“What we have. There’s none running in the pipes as they are froze. What will I say to Mrs. Moberly by way of answer?”

“Tell her thank you very much, but I never ride with strangers,” said Charlotte.

“They won’t like that. She is well high thought of.”

Well, so am I, Charlotte thought, going prickly all over, with a haughty and dangerous crankiness, which, she liked to think, was something picked up from the Heaths, but it wasn’t; it was all her own. She threw off the blankets and, carefully, warily, because she still wasn’t sure her legs would hold her up, she swung herself out of the bed and stood upright, wobbling a bit, but not falling. The little maid forgot about her errand and smiled in a cheering way, as if congratulating her; someone must have told her about the illness.

“I had a cousin fourteen years old what had the paralysis,” said the maid. “He took down with a fever and his legs went stiff in one night, like two wood boards, then both his arms the next day.”

“What happened to him?”

“It was polio. He died.”

The knock on the door was so gentle—a light tapping, with the tips of someone’s fingers—Charlotte might have missed it, but the maid jumped, startled, and opened the door and peered out.

“Is she dressed?” Charlotte recognized the voice, though she’d only heard it once.

“She is, Mr. Alcorn.”

“Please ask if I may be allowed inside to speak with her.”

Charlotte put her back up straight and allowed herself to consider that, whatever the morning room was, and whatever one did there, and whoever Mrs. Moberly was, they were trying to get rid of her. She needed to relieve herself—her bladder was nearly bursting—and she spotted a chamber pot under the bed. This must not have been the first time the plumbing had frozen.

“Please ask Mr. Alcorn to give me a moment,” said Charlotte, and then added, tipping her head in the correct direction, “and yourself as well.” She was not about to pull down her drawers in front of a strange maid.

“Oh,” said the maid. She went out to the hall, but first looked anxiously over her shoulder as if Charlotte, left alone, might try to escape out the cold white window. And when Harry Alcorn came in, he looked at her in much the same way. She hadn’t brushed her hair; she had never before presented herself to someone who wasn’t her husband or a maid, first thing in the morning, unwashed, but there was nothing to be done about it.

You’d never know it was a snowstorm, or even winter, by the way he was dressed. His linen suit, the color of cream, was perfectly shaped; his white shirt was as crisp as paper. His necktie, silk, was a soft light tan, like milky tea, and just as liquidy. The vest beneath the jacket was his only concession to the weather; it was of fine white wool and fit him so elegantly—even with, Charlotte noticed, a slight bit of paunch in his stomach—it looked like an extra coating of skin, and she thought, as if this were the reason she’d run away, Now, why didn’t Hays take a little bit of interest in how he dressed, instead of covering himself, day in and day out, in dark, dreary things, all grays and blacks and browns, all shapeless, all dull, and as interesting to look at as mud?

There wasn’t any good morning or how-did-you-sleep from Harry Alcorn, as one would expect from a hotelkeeper. He didn’t even ask her to sit down, as a gentleman would. She felt she knew what he was going to say. He was going to evict her, as one would evict a pauper.

“I can afford to pay for this room,” said Charlotte.

“Please, Mrs. Heath, do not misunderstand me.”

Her defenses went up at once. Except for the one time her mother-in-law had required her to leave the summerhouse kitchen, and the three or four times she was banished from the stable at Miss Georgeson’s as punishment for minor offenses—which wasn’t so bad for someone who’d been there straight through for thirteen years—she had never in her life been required to leave a place she didn’t want to leave.

It wasn’t so much that she liked the room or even the hotel. She couldn’t think where else to go. And she wanted a bath. And she was hungry. And she wanted to change her clothes, even though the clothes she’d change into were someone else’s, and would fit her even more loosely than her own.

What had she done that time in the summer kitchen? Oh, that was when the father of the three Irish maids was still alive. He had wanted some of the sherry-soaked jam cakes being saved for a tea with some visiting politician or some banker; the cakes were locked in the pantry.

People were always going to Charlotte for keys to things. One thing had led to another, the old man told some story or other, he was always telling stories, and the entire batch of cakes was disposed of, Charlotte having wolfed down the greater portion, so that—they were extremely heavy on the sherry—it ended with his attempting to teach her an Irish song, something about waiting by a gate in the mist for a lover who’d never come. She didn’t remember the words. It was her baying of the song (she lacked a melodic singing voice) that brought in her mother-in-law. “Get out.” She could hear the words still. She had a good idea her mother-in-law had not only meant the kitchen.