Saratoga Trunk (21 page)

Drowsily she shook her head. “No. I don’t want to be wide awake. I don’t want to drive. I want to be still, still. Talk to me. Tell me more. Little things that are important to know, and then I will dream about them and when I wake they will be settled in my mind. Who is the important woman,
par exemple?
Who is it among them that they all follow? This Mrs. Porcelain? Or the Forosini? Who?”

“Nope!” piped up Cupide in his clear boyish voice. “There’s a fat old woman, I heard her talking to that man—the one who stays in the corner under the stairs. They call him the head usher. I heard her say De Chanfret, so I listened way back under the stairs. She said, ‘I knew the De Chanfrets. Never heard of this one.’ He said something about look it up in somebody’s peerage; she said, ‘That’s no good, it’s English.’ “ The midget’s manner was somewhat absent-minded, for his attention was fixed on his thorn-pricked thumb.

“Get out!” scolded Kakaracou. “What do you know, imp!”

“No, stay. Kaka, make yourself neat, go downstairs, say I do not find it quiet here, I shall move into the cottage wing tomorrow. Go, look at the rooms. Don’t take the first apartment they offer. It must have a servant’s room for you. . . . Cupide, who is this fat woman?”

“Bellop,” blurted Cupide.

“Don’t make ugly noises.”

“That’s her name. I asked the bellboys. They call her Bellhop behind her back, but they say everybody in Saratoga is afraid of her. She looks like a washwoman. Big!” He stuck out his chest, he puffed his cheeks, he waddled, his voice suddenly became a booming bass. “Like that. And talks like a man. She called me to her when I was coming up the stairs just now and tried to question me. Where did you come from and how long had we been in this country and what was your name before you married. She gave me a silver dollar. I took it and pretended I spoke only French. I spoke very fast in French and I called her a fat old
truie
and what do you think! She speaks French like anything!” He went off into peals of laughter. “So I ran away.”

“Oh, dear. I wish I weren’t so terribly sleepy. You sound, all of you, as if you were speaking to me far away. Clint, who is this woman with the ridiculous name?”

Maroon, striding the room impatientiy, tousled the dwarf’s head not unkindly, and sent him into the next room with a little push. “That’s what I’ve been telling you. That’s the kind of thing you get yourself into here. The town is full of bunko steerers. This crowd here in the hotel, millionaires and sharpers, they’re onto each other, no matter which. Our best bet is to be ourselves, get what money we can, have some fun, and light out. I hate ‘em like I hate rattlesnakes, but we’ll never be able to sit in on the big game, honey.”

“This woman,” she persisted. “Who is this woman?”

“Well, far as I know, I’d say she looks about the way Cupide says, Mrs. Coventry Bellop. That’s her name. Lives in New York but they say she hails from out West somewhere, years back. Got a tongue like an adder. Some say she gets her income from blackmail in a kind of quiet way. They say she lives here at the hotel free of charge, gets up parties, keeps ‘em going, says who is who. Just a fat woman, about fifty-five, in black, plain-featured. I don’t understand it. Maybe you do, Clio, but smart as you are I bet you’ll make nothing out of her.”

“I like the sound of her,” Clio murmured, sleepily. “When a fat and frumpy old woman with no money can rule a place like this Saratoga then she is something uncommon—something original. I think we should know each other.”

In a fury of masculine exasperation and bewilderment he stamped away from her. “Oh, to hell with all your planning and contriving, it’s like something out of a storybook you’ve read somewhere.” He came back to the couch. “Now look here, we’re going to drive out to the lake at six, say, when it’s cool, and have a fish dinner at Moon’s, you can catch ‘em yourself right out of the lake. I’m bossing this outfit.”

She had fished the dripping peach out of the glass and had taken a bite out of its luscious wine-drenched cheek. Now, as he looked at her, the plump fruit fell with a thud from her inert hand and rolled a litde way, tipsily. Clio didn’t reply, she did not hear him. He saw that suddenly, like a child, she was asleep, the long lashes very black against the tear-stained white cheeks.

At the sudden silence Kakaracou looked up.

“Looks like she’s clean beat out,” Maroon whispered. “A nap’ll do her good.”

Quiedy Kaka began to make ready the bed. “She will sleep,” she said, and her tone was like that of a watcher who has at last seen a fever break. “She will sleep perhaps until tomorrow, perhaps until next day. Carry her there to the bed. That is well.”

A sudden suspicion smote him. He strode over to Kaka, he took her bony arms in his great grasp. “Look here, if you’ve given her anything—if this is some of your monkey-shines I’ll break every—”

The black woman looked into his face calmly. “It is bad to be long without sleep.” She went about pulling down the shades. “I will rest here on this couch. Cupide will keep watch there in the next room. But here, until she wakes, it must be quiet. Quiet.” She stood there, in silence, waiting. He paused, irresolutely. The room and the two women in it seemed suddenly of another world, eerie, apart. He turned and walked toward his own door. He felt a stranger to them. He heard the door close after him, the key was turned, the bolt shot. Then he heard the closing of the bedroom door. He stood in the center of his own room, an outsider. To himself he said, “Now’s your chance, Clint. Vamoose. Drag it outa here and drag it quick. You stay in these parts you’re going to get into a heap of trouble. If you’re smart you’ll git—pronto.”

But he knew he would never go.

X

In the fortnight following Clio’s arrival old Madam Van Steed was
made to realize that her male offspring in Saratoga was even more in need of her maternal protection than was her ailing daughter in Newport. News of Bartholomew’s preoccupation with a mysterious and dazzling widow traveled to her on the lightning wings of hotel gossip. Bag and baggage, the beldame arrived, took one look at what she termed the shenanigans of the dramatic Mrs. De Chanfret, and boomed in her deepest chest tones, “De Trenaunay de Chanfret de Fiddlesticks! The woman’s an adventuress! It’s written all over her!”

But before her antagonist’s arrival Clio Dulaine had had a fortnight’s advantage. And in less than two days after Madam Van Steed’s announcement the Widow De Chanfret had managed to bring about a cleavage in the none too solid structure of that bizarre edifice called Saratoga society.

On one side were ranged the embattled dowagers holding the piazza front lines, their substantial backs to the wall at the Friday night hops. Behind their General, Madam Van Steed, rallied the conservatives, the bootlickers, the socially insecure and ambitious, mothers with marriageable daughters, daughters for whom Bartholomew Van Steed was a target. Defying these pranced Clio Dulaine and her motley crew made up of such variegated members as Clint Maroon, a frightened but quaveringly defiant Bart Van Steed, Kakaracou and Cupidon, all the Negro waiters, bellboys and chambermaids, a number of piazza rockers who for years had been regularly snubbed by Madam Van Steed, and, astonishingly enough, that walking arsenal of insult, bonhomie, and social ammunition large and small, Mrs. Coventry Bellop of the Western Hemisphere.

The batde had started with a bang the very morning on which Clio, refreshed to the point of feeling actually reborn, awoke from a thirty-six-hour sleep. The hotel management had been politely concerned, then mysdfied, then alarmed by the tomblike silence which pervaded 237 and 238. Messages went unanswered, chambermaids were shooed away, food was almost entirely ignored, a discreet knock at the door brought no response, a hammering, if persisted in, might cause the door to be opened a crack through which could be discerned the tousled head and goggle-eye of a haggard Cupidon or the heavy-lidded countenance of Kakaracou looking like nothing so much as a python aroused from a winter’s hibernation.

“What you want? . . . Madame is resting. . . . We have all that is needed. Come back tomorrow. . . . Go away. Go away. Go away.”

Once a tray was demanded. The Negro waiter saw that the bedroom door remained shut, and it was evident that it had been the Negress and the dwarf who had partaken of the food.

Then, suddenly on the morning of the second day following the arrival of Mrs. De Chanfret and her attendants all was changed. The chambermaid slouching along the hall in her easy slippers at seven in the morning heard a gay snatch of song whose tune was familiar but whose words differed from those she knew. A fresh young voice, a white voice, for all its fidelity to the dialect:

Buckwheat cakes and good strong butter

Makes mah moufgo flit-ter flut-ter.

Look a-way a-way a-way in Dix-ay.

“Them funny folks ‘is up an’ stirrin’,” she confided to her colleague down the hall. “I thought they was sure ‘nuff daid.”

Except for three brief intervals Clio Dulaine actually had slept through that first night, through the following day and the second night. Once Kaka had brought her a
tisane
of soothing herbs brewed over the spirit-lamp, once she had fed her half an orange, slipping the slim golden moonlets between the girl’s parted lips as you would feed a child. Clio’s eyes were half shut during those ministrations, she murmured drowsily, almost incoherendy, “. . . sleepy . . . what time . . . Mama ... no more . . . Cleent. . .
chéri. . .
Cleent...” And she had giggled at this last coquettishly and then had sighed and snuggled her face into the pillow and slept again. During the heat of the noon hour Cupide had stood in his shirt sleeves, a tireless little sentinel fanning her gently with a great palmleaf fan as she lay asleep. Time after time Clint Maroon had knocked at the inner door. Sometimes he was admitted, often not. He had tiptoed away mystified and resentful but satisfied that nothing was seriously wrong.

“When she wake up,” Kaka droned each time, “zoomba! Look out!”

Clio had opened her eyes at six in the morning. It was fresh and cool this early. Wide awake at once, alert, renewed, she stood in the middle of the room in her bare feet and nightgown and surveyed the world about her. Kaka, fully dressed, lay on the sofa, her tignon askew so that you saw her grizzled skull, so rarely visible that now it gave the effect of nakedness. She, too, was at once awake at this first sign of fresh life in her mistress. She got to her feet, her tignon still tipped rakishly.

“My
gabrielle
Clio commanded, crisply. “Go down to your own quarters. Make yourself fresh from head to foot, everything. Roll up those shades. Where is Cupide? In there?” She passed into the sitting room where Cupide lay curled like a little dog in one of the upholstered armchairs. Awake, he was either merry or pugnacious. Now, asleep, he looked defenseless and submissive as a child. “Poor little man,” murmured Clio, looking down at him. She picked up a shawl from a near-by chair and placed it gendy over him. But at that he, too, awoke, he cocked one ribald eye up at her, then he leaped to the floor in his tiny stockinged feet, shook himself like a puppy, and, running to a corner, slipped into his boots, shrugged himself into his coat.

“Why didn’t you sleep downstairs in the room provided for you?” demanded Clio, not unkindly.

“I wanted to be near you and Kaka,” he answered, simply.

“Get down there now, both of you. I want you to wash and make yourselves neat and smart. You, Cupide, look to your shoes and your buttons. Be quiet. And above all, polite to the hotel servants.” She eyed Cupide severely. “No tricks. And you, Kaka. No voodoo, no witchwork. Your best black silk. I am going to bathe in that funny box. Like a coffin, isn’t it! But to have one’s own bath in a hotel—how wonderful! America is really marvelous. When you are fresh and clean come back. Then you will make me a cup of your coffee, Kaka, hot and strong. How good that will be! Then I’ll dress and we’ll go to the Congress Spring, early. It will be the fashion to walk to the Congress Spring, early. I’ll make it so. You’ll see. Get along now! Quick.
Vite!”

When the door had closed behind them she stood at the window a moment looking down at Broadway, watching the little green-shaded town come to life.

The long trancelike sleep had left her mind clear and sharp as mountain air. She felt detached from her surroundings, as though she were seeing them from some godlike height. Curious and haphazard as her life was, there always had been about it some slight sense of security at least. In her babyhood there had been her mother, the luxurious litde house in Rampart Street; later there had been the orderly routine of school in France and the rather frowsy comfort of the Paris flat with Rita Dulaine and Belle Piquery and Kakaracou and Cupidon to give it substance. Even on her return to New Orleans, brief as the interlude had been, the Rampart Street house had again given her the illusion of security that accompanies the accustomed, the familiar or the remembered. Now, she thought, as she stared down at the main street of the little spa, what have I? In the whole world. Well, an old woman and a dwarf. In the next room a man I have known a few weeks. A
blagueur,
for all I know. Trunks full of clothes. Some good jewelry. Money enough to last me a year if I am careful. No home, no name, no background, nothing. I want comfort, security, money, respectability. Love? Mama had that and it ruined her life.

“Food. That is what I need,” she said, aloud. She looked around the disheveled room. Hot, hot coffee, very strong. It was then that she began to sing as she turned on the water for her bath. By the time Kaka and Cupide returned and she had her second cup of Kaka’s coffee she was buoyant, decisive, gay.

“Cupide, go downstairs, tell the man in the office that I have decided to move into the cottages. Kaka, you yourself look at the rooms. Make a great
bruit,
but everything dignified and proper. Tell them I will not pay more than I pay here in this location. Here it is noisy and hot, and anyway, for my plan it is better to seem to be alone. This is not discreet, here. The rooms must be ready when I return from the Spring.”