A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (8 page)

He had worked on the tannery’s top floor, six ugly stories up, doing things with piles of hides. She’d forgotten the exact details of his accident: an iron contraption of some sort, some tanning machine, had come undone, and had trapped him beneath it. He had not been expected to live.

On Sundays before his accident he’d been allowed by Miss Georgeson to visit the stable, with free use of the horses, as long as he first attended chapel, which took all morning. In chapel the only girl he sat near was Charlotte, because she was the only girl who would speak to him; he smelled like cows and awful chemicals, even when he’d bathed.

“Do you still ride, Charlotte? As we used to?”

She smiled. “Yes, but not lately. I often wondered what happened to you. I saw you when they took you away. I was looking for you. I had permission to go into the shop for a new harness for Betsy.”

“The spotted mare.”

“Yes.”

“I recovered.”

“I can see that, Dickie. You look well.” As he did not say the same to her in answer, she supplied an answer herself. “I’ve been sick.”

The door opened and the little maid, Eunice, came in with a tray. There looked to be enough breakfast for four large people, and a teapot, and two cups. She set it on a table by a window. “I’m told to tell you, Mr. Policeman, it’s a bad storm you have to go back out in, and please to indulge, courtesy-like.”

“Thank you.”

She fussed about the fire, clearly not wanting to leave, and when she finally did, Charlotte went straight to the plate of toast, already spread with jam and butter; she didn’t care if she looked less than graceful, pressing slices into sandwiches and gobbling them down. She poured tea for both of them. He would take nothing, but sat down across from her and got right to the point. “Are you a guest here often, Charlotte?”

She found herself nodding yes. There was a plate of lemon tarts that she recognized as the work of Mrs. Petty, and decided to have nothing to do with them, then changed her mind one second later. Dickie Lang! Everyone at school had thought he was her sweetheart. Perhaps he would have been, had he stayed in the Valley. Had she stayed, too.

Their Sunday rides had not been supervised. A picture of him on the spotted mare rose up in her mind, but as he was now, not as he was at fifteen—an angry, sullen boy, given to long bursts of talking, in words and phrases that seemed like explosions, followed by longer spells of brooding silence, which matched, she had felt, what it was like for her within her own self.

The lemon tarts were just the right balance of sour and sweet. The crust was buttery, light, delicious. Maybe Mrs. Petty hadn’t made them. They’d never tasted this good back home.

“I have to be official with you, Charlotte,” Dickie said, and she responded so quickly, bits of crust spilled out; she brushed them off her chin with her fingers instead of reaching for a napkin, although fine linen napkins were on the tray.

“Be official! Pretend you never saw me before. I was someone else then, anyway.”

“Are you happy, Charlotte?”

“Extremely!”

“Are you well?”

“Completely!”

“Is your husband with you here?”

She had finished one tart and was reaching for another; she paused. “This is a hotel for ladies only.”

“Can you swear to that, if you had to?”

“Well, there’s Mr. Alcorn and the manservant, Moaxley.”

“Others. In the rooms.”

“Is that a question?”

He reached into his waistcoat pocket, took out a small white calling card, and laid it on the table, facedown. “There’ve been rumors, so I was sent to interview guests. But it seems the only guest at present is yourself, which would appear odd, in a blizzard, but it won’t seem odd if you tell me it’s so.”

“There were two women setting off earlier. You can check with the stable, as one of them must have lodged her horses there.”

“Only two? I was under the impression the rooms are often full.”

“Well, it’s winter. And yes, only two.”

“And now only you?”

She nodded. It wasn’t lying; every door she’d passed upstairs was closed tight; every room was silent. He turned the card over. It was a business card, not a personal one. It said, in a fancy, printed scroll,
Boston Society for the Suppression & Prevention of Vice
.

“Can you suggest to me why I am looking at this, Dickie?”

“Because I’m showing it to you.”

“Vice,” said Charlotte. It occurred to her that she’d never had the chance before to say the word out loud as a grown-up. It had a ring to it. “Well,” she said, “I can tell you, you’d probably find more vice in a church than in here. You’d probably find more in a graveyard.”

“But they didn’t send me to those places.”

“What sort of vice exactly?”

Gambling, she thought, some secret gambling den? Opium? Was Harry Alcorn running one of those opium places, somewhere in a hidden hotel chamber?

What were the other vices? She tried to run through the list of sins she’d been taught at Miss Georgeson’s. Weren’t there supposed to be seven? She couldn’t think of one.

Liquor? Was there a secret room of drunken binges? The Vice Society and the Temperance Movement people were likely to be the same people. And what about so-called indecent profanity of the written word, like what happened to the poems of Walter Whitman?

She knew about it because Hays owned a book of them which he’d bought in France; he had wanted her to read them, which she would have done, but the poems were in French, which her lessons had not prepared her for, not that she’d tried to master them with any diligence. No, not Walter, she remembered; his name was just Walt. He was the very reason the Vice Society was organized in the first place: to ban him. Fifty years ago, or something.

She remembered Hays telling her that. He was always trying to tell her about things that went on before she was born. He was older than Charlotte by eight years, but sometimes it felt like twenty. The poems were all about the poet himself, Hays had told her: things like lying naked in the sun outdoors, as naked as Adam, and praising old Indians, and being vigorous, and being happy and strong, and not giving a damn what anyone thought of him, which had not, except for the naked part, seemed worthy of being viceful; but the Vice Society had prevailed, the imbeciles, Hays had said. He believed that the American Constitution gave you the right to express yourself, for one thing, and for another, the poems were beautiful. “But don’t tell Mother or Father I said so,” he had told her, and why would she? She knew how to keep secrets.

Was Harry Alcorn a poet like Walt Whitman? One could suppose so, although it was hard to imagine a man like him letting people outdoors see him naked; he seemed much too fond of nice clothes. Maybe he had an alternate self which only came out in verses. Or maybe it was his wife! “She doesn’t receive.” The woman in that photo could certainly be a poet. She had a dreamy, pensive air. But it might have been the dress. Was there a secret printing press in the hotel basement and they were turning out pages and pages of vice? What sort? Pictures? Books of photographs? Stories?

No, it couldn’t be. She would have smelled the ink and the solutions, even if they were locked away behind a thick door.

“Charlotte, are you listening to me?”

She realized he’d been talking and she hadn’t paid attention. “Perhaps,” he said patiently, “you can tell me the names of the two ladies who left already today.”

She was about to say, “Someone named Mrs. Moberly, and my aunt,” when something stopped her: the dimly recalled words of Aunt Lily, which didn’t come back exactly, but were significant in their hint at secrecy. The family. “I’ll let them know you’re with me at my apartment.”

Something else had been nagging at her, too, and now she got it. “Dickie,” she said, “why did you say, when I told you I’m Mrs. Heath now, Oh, so you married him?”

“We’re to be official.”

“This is official.”

“Because,” he answered, carefully picking his words, and shifting around on the chair, and looking out the window at the snow, as if he’d only now seen that it was storming, “I saw you one day with him, here.” He pointed out the window vaguely. “Walking in the Garden, by the Pond. It was summer and your dress was blue. You were watching the swans.”

“You know my husband?”

“I don’t, personally, but I would know who he was because an uncle of his had an office above one of the banks. I was in private security then. I was twenty.”

“If you saw me, why not speak?”

“Because,” he said, “I thought I would have embarrassed you.”

“Dickie! You would not!”

“Then I saw an announcement of your marriage somewhere.”

“Are you married, Dickie?”

“I am.”

“Do you have children?”

“Two. Two sons. Babies still, the pair of them. And you?”

She shook her head no, dismissively, with no explanation, and he said, “Odd that there would have been rumors of men as guests here, don’t you think?”

“The tearoom is open to the public,” said Charlotte. She suddenly remembered that fact, from Mrs. Petty’s letters.

“This would be at night.”

“There’re servants,” said Charlotte. She forced herself to not think for even one second about the angelic young man of last night in his nightshirt. She willed her brain to conclude she must have dreamed him, and this was not a good time to remember a dream, as much as she would have loved to, just to picture his face, his hair, his skin. If she didn’t think about him as an actual person, it wasn’t a lie.

“These men didn’t strike anyone as servants. Have you ever seen a young man or two upstairs, which truthfully, Charlotte, is no crime? The quicker I get rid of this business, the quicker I’ll be happy. A woman in a hotel has the perfect right to have visitors. This is not the Middle Ages.”

“This is Boston, though,” said Charlotte quickly.

“Do you know the city well?”

“Moderately.”

“Odd I’ve not seen you before, as you say you’re a regular visitor here, and I live…” Again he gestured out the window, again vaguely. “Close by, on Lilac Street, in the direction of the Dome. Surely as a regular guest, you’ve been by it.”

“Lilac Street,” she said. “I don’t know it. I don’t know names of streets.”

He sat forward, eagerly, smiling at her. “But I’m sure you must have passed my house, without my noticing. Passing by each other unawares seems to be something we have in common.”

She felt bad about disappointing him. He seemed to want so badly to establish this other connection with her—an image to take away of her, out for a stroll on Beacon Hill, glancing up at window that was his. It was a nice thing to think about, but she knew, as a rule, that if you wanted to get away with a lie, or a circumspection, the way to do it was to tell no lie you didn’t absolutely have to, even if not to do it was making you want to burst. It would have been so easy to agree with him, yes, I know that street, isn’t it nice our paths are crossing?

“Surely on your visits you go walking, especially in the spring when things are at their best. The houses on Lilac Street aren’t quite so close to the road as most others, and people have gardens, in a competitive way. The flowers are quite spectacular. I’m sure you would have noticed them.”

“If I came to Boston to look at flowers, I would not come to Boston. They’re quite spectacular at home.”

“I remember at the bank, they had a joke about the name of your town, and called it Heathtown.”

“It’s not completely a joke,” said Charlotte.

“I’m sorry I didn’t know you were near when I was injured.”

“You weren’t conscious, and it was a long time ago, so I can’t hold it against you. They said you’d broken a great many of your bones.”

“Did you worry?”

“I did, Dickie. Did they send you home?” His family, she remembered, lived somewhere in the west, near the Berkshires, working someone else’s farm, someone else’s orchards; they had sent him to the Blackstone Valley in order to receive his paychecks, which were mailed to them and which he never saw. He was to wait until the age of eighteen before he could keep any part of his earnings, she now remembered.

“I was sent to a hospital here and, afterward, to a sanatorium at Dorchester Heights. Bones heal, you know, eventually. Would it be out of the question for you to mention the names of the ladies who went out this morning?”

“It would, Dickie.”

“Because you feel you should be loyal?”

“Because I don’t know the names of guests here, any more than I know the streets.”

“I don’t remember you being shabby with your memory.”

“Oh, I always was. You only ever saw me around horses.”

“And in church.”

“I was shabby in church. I seem to remember people saying, and I don’t want to offend you, that you might have caused that thing at the tannery to fall on you, you know. I just suddenly remembered that.”

“It was a stretching machine for hides. Deerskin, cows,” he said. “In the Middle Ages, it was the kind of thing they tortured people on. It was attached to a wall with iron bolts.”

“Miss Georgeson said you were a nice, decent boy and people were awful to whisper about you.”

“Miss Georgeson only saw me in church. The tannery paid my parents a hundred dollars for the loss of my wages,” he said. “And in my profession, believe me, I know exactly how awful people can be.”

She liked the way he said “can be” instead of “are.” Like there were exceptions to being awful.

“Are you an inspector of vice, if there’s such a thing?”

“Not actually. My usual stuff is something different than stuff based on rumors.”

“Murders, Dickie? Things like that?”

“All sorts of things. I’m still a junior.”

“So they sent you here because you live in the neighborhood, is that it?” Well, Harry had said he walked here. It didn’t have to be from a police station. Did he think, at the first opportunity, she’d head straight toward the Capitol and find his street, and he’d be there in a window himself, waving at her, his babies in his arms?

“What about Myrtle Street?” he said.

“What of it?”

“Do you know it?”