A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (12 page)

“Ah, an expert,” said the man called Terence.

Was he making fun of her? Was he teasing her because he knew, with some instinctive ability for judgment, some deft inner faculty that art people had, to use like a weapon against people who only went to places like Miss Georgeson’s, and always felt so intimidated in galleries? And felt moved by a painting in a way that wasn’t sophisticated, wasn’t correct? The look of the ice made her want to cry.

“I am Berenice Singleton,” the woman said. She held out her left hand, the one that wasn’t holding a brush, and Charlotte went over to her and clasped it.

Berenice Eloise Singleton was somewhere around the age of fifty or sixty; it was hard to tell. Her hair was fully gray, done up in a perfectly shaped oval on top of her head. She wore spectacles with thin gold frames. Her face was as smooth as a child’s, except for ribbonlike wrinkles around her mouth and at the sides of her eyes; her eyes were such a pale shade of blue, they looked as if they were colored with chalk. She wore a gray flannel smock, frayed at the edges and stained all over with paint. Under the smock was a light paisley housedress with the sleeves rolled up.

She had the thinnest arms Charlotte had ever seen on a grown-up. And her face was thin, too, in an unsettling way, as if you thought you were looking at her in profile. Her hand in Charlotte’s was dry and cool, but not icy, not as if the blood weren’t circulating properly. The fingers were not returning any pressure.

Because of the smock and the dress, it took a moment for Charlotte to realize that the chair she was sitting on was wheeled: it was the same wood as the beams, and the chair was made to look as if it belonged on a porch or in a yard, somewhere rustic. The two wheels were like a slightly thicker version of bicycle wheels, with rubber edging. The back of the chair had protruding smooth rounded handles.

“Thank you for inviting me, Miss Singleton,” said Charlotte. The stillness of the woman, except for the hand that held the brush, could not be ignored. “I’m pleased to be here. You have polio.”

It wasn’t a question, and it didn’t get an answer. Charlotte was looked at with reproach and she felt herself blushing—it was the same way Heaths looked at servants who did something stupid, like dropping things, or spilling ash on the carpets. God! How could she have blurted it out like that? They probably thought she was a—what did her mother-in-law call it, when talking about people on the other side of town? A yokel. A local yokel. It was written all over their faces that this was how they’d already sized her up.

“I think I had polio myself. That was why I mentioned it,” Charlotte said. The woman touched the brush to the canvas and frowned at it. “Do you have paintings in museums and galleries?”

This seemed like the right question to ask a painter, but obviously it was not. The woman said, in a chilly, flat way, “Harry Alcorn takes most of them for himself.” Charlotte couldn’t tell if this was a good thing, or not.

“But at least you’ve got your good hand,” said Charlotte.

“If the next thing you plan to say is to congratulate me on still having eyes in my head to see with, believe me, I lately have been wishing I did not.”

“But then you wouldn’t be able to paint.”

“Precisely. If you’ve finished with discussing my condition, I must tell you, I’m most very disappointed about my sweets,” said Miss Singleton. “What were they?”

“Tarts. But they were old.” There was no sign of the promised tea.

“Stale,” said Arthur Pym. “Hard as rocks.”

“I’m very, very tired. Forgive me for what may seem impoliteness. I’m not in a mood for company after all.”

And Miss Singleton gave the picture in front of her, with its glassy, glossy silence, a withering, disapproving glance. She placed the paintbrush on her lap, tipped back her head, closed her eyes, and seemed to fall asleep instantly. When the posing man broke the pose and stretched himself, he made as if to go and look at the picture, but changed his mind and dropped himself languidly into one of the armchairs.

Charlotte didn’t know what to do. “Is she really asleep?” she whispered.

“Fast, and you don’t need to modulate your voice, it won’t wake her. Not even a tornado would, when she’s like this. We were talking about the war, just before you came in,” said Arthur Pym. “Terence reads politics at Harvard. Do sit down.”

Charlotte went over to the table and sat down, as if tea would be served after all. “And do you also?”

“He’s medicine,” Terence put in. “If you really want to know why the hump, he’s studying deformities.” There was a liquidy casualness about this young man Terence: Charlotte found herself wondering what would happen at the household if he sat in a Heath armchair in this way, sideways, with his legs dangling over an arm. “Arthur the future wonder physician.”

Charlotte feared that the subject would go at once to her aunt, so she thought of the Colonel back in town, the war. “I know a man who commanded a regiment,” she said.

Arthur Pym remained standing by the fire. “Her husband, the late Commander Enright, was on the ship blown up in the harbor, the very explosion, of dubious cause, that started everything. He’s said to be a hero. What was the name of that boat? It escapes me. For a state.”

“The
Maine
.” Terence waved an arm as if the air were incredibly heavy. “Poof. But don’t let’s start talking of Spanish mines and the Navy.”

Charlotte had never heard about any blown-up ships; what harbor? She looked at the sleeping painter with a surge of sympathy. A widow! All those years ago, a husband killed in war. Thirty, thirty-five years as a widow. She was probably the same age as the Colonel.

“All those years, it must have been hard for her,” said Charlotte.

“Well, it’s only been two, actually, and she did take it rough,” said Terence.

Arthur shuddered. “Don’t please let’s start talking about Rough Riders charging into Cuba.”

“Then don’t let’s start talking about Spain,” said Terence. “And don’t please start talking about Mr. Roosevelt or my blood will boil and I will have to get up and go and lie down.”

“I never said it wasn’t hideous about suddenly being imperial and taking over Hawaii, and then going for poor old Cuba, and now Manila. Do you know how many soldiers have the yellow fever?” said Arthur.

Charlotte had the sense that they were talking another language. Spain, Hawaii, Cuba, Manila: what did any of those places have to do with the North and the South?

“The war with Spain is what we always end up talking about,” said Terence, in a bored voice. It didn’t seem his blood would boil at all; he seemed ready to launch into a speech he must have delivered before, and Charlotte said, “There was a war with Spain?”

Terence looked at her. “My dear woman, where have you been?”

“I thought you meant the one of the States.”

“Two years ago, just. The war of 1898, with
Spain
. Cuba? And Manila? And heroic Teddy, our now-most-glorious vice president, warlording it up among the natives? In all the papers, headlines as big as your hand?” said Arthur helpfully, but Charlotte shook her head.

“I never picked up the habit of looking at news in the papers.”

A light sound of snoring emanated from Miss Singleton.

“I want some rum,” said Terence. “I feel we’re in for a night of it, explaining things to this lady. Rum and perhaps something more interesting.”

“A blank slate,” said Arthur.

“Pure as snow.”

“I don’t want explaining!” said Charlotte. Her cheeks grew hot. She felt she’d been right; they were mocking her. Why should they be mocking her? Why was she up here anyway? It was as mad as an asylum.

She felt ready to burst into tears. And at the same time, it seemed that the stillness of the icy garden in the picture was pushing itself off the canvas, somehow, and getting inside her. She could almost understand why someone would have living, breathing models right in front of her and then paint a scene that was, in a way, the very opposite of those models.

It was as though she could peer into the painter’s secret self. Miss Singleton must have wanted the models to inspire her, the same way a match would be struck. The flame of inspiration would then be put to use, and the painter was free to put on the canvas what she truly felt, and truly saw: a drama of something frozen. It must have been as powerful an inner thing as a storm. And she was a widow on top of it. No wonder she’d wish to be blind.

Well, thought Charlotte, that’s polio. And the thought came to her that if she stayed any longer up here, she’d never move again.

She made it to the door, the one she’d come in. But she couldn’t allow herself to sink to their level of bad behavior, so she turned and said, “Good night. I want to be back in my room. This was not what I expected. And I think it was nasty to put my tarts in the fire, when someone else could have had them.”

Arthur Pym was beside her in the hall before she knew he’d followed her.

“Please,” he said gently. “Let me go with you.”

Y
ou’d think that the one flight of stairs down to Charlotte’s room was loaded with dangers, like a dark, unfamiliar road in the middle of the night, where robbers hid behind bushes, and all sorts of wild animals: that was how closely and protectively Arthur Pym stuck to her, although who was the protector of whom was hard to tell. She could no more get away from him than she’d be able to get away from her own shadow.

She didn’t find this disturbing. She found it interesting.

Maybe he thought she was modest because she tried to keep her face turned away from him. She didn’t want him to know that tears—silent ones; she was experienced at crying without a sound—were streaming down her face in exactly the same way as the melting snow on the windows, but she didn’t feel that anything inside her was melting.

She felt a terrible, hard coldness. It reminded her of all those nights in her sickroom when she felt she’d do anything, she’d give up anything she had, for five minutes of cool relief from the fevers. She had called on God and all her doctors, in every way she could think of, to make her feel chilled and solid and hard.

Maybe this was what happened if you were religious. Charlotte’s mother-in-law had an active, fervent, personal relationship with her own view of a Heavenly Father, an American-Protestant one, who was busy but dependable, and conducted earthly affairs, of course, like a businessman. She was always telling Charlotte how much she believed in the power of prayer, but she’d also point out the fact that something you asked for in prayer might not be granted immediately, but might take some time, like an overdue shipment of goods from a factory, delayed by a problem with a train, or the weather.

Charlotte envied her for her cleverness. Her mother-in-law was a woman who knew a few things about coping with disappointments. Maybe that was something that happened naturally to people who were born rich, very rich, and then married into a family even richer. If you prayed for something and didn’t get it, you could call it a prayer God hadn’t yet answered, not “I never get what I want when I need it.”

And then you’d never feel sorry for yourself like a low-class sentimental girl with no faith or backbone, crying like a child and never being able to learn skills of proper control, not that Charlotte’s mother-in-law had ever put it quite exactly like that; she wouldn’t have said “low-class” out loud.

Once at the household, in one of the back sitting rooms, a dark one, rarely used, Charlotte had come upon Hays alone, sitting by the window, doing nothing, just sitting there, in a gloomy way, which was something he never did. She’d already reached the point in her marriage where she accepted the fact that she would never be able to know what was in her husband’s mind by simply looking at him. She’d once thought that married people could do this, naturally, as an abstract sort of marital bonus. She always had the sense that, if she asked Hays what he was thinking, he’d invent an answer which had nothing to do with an actual thing in his head.

Why was he so melancholy that day? She didn’t know. She went over to the chair, hitched up her skirt, and climbed onto his lap, facing him.

She’d just simply felt like doing it. “Why, Charlotte, it’s the middle of the day. This is a family room, it’s not right.” She put his hands on her breasts. His quick look of pleasure gave way in one second to pure horror. His mother was in the doorway.

You’d think they were naked, the way she reacted. Hays had pushed Charlotte off him, as if he’d never in his life touched her breasts. And his mother had said, “Charlotte, dismount him at once.”
Dismount
him.

They never mentioned the incident, but afterward, almost every time her husband came near her “like a husband,” as he put it, Charlotte had a nagging sense of feeling humiliated: it would seem that the desires of her body were things to be ashamed of. She wondered if other wives felt this way. There was no way to know.

Now and then in her sickroom she had wanted her husband to make love to her, even during the seven nightmarelike weeks when the paralysis of her legs was fully present. Hadn’t Aunt Lily told her to do everything she could think of to inspire the muscles to unfreeze?

Maybe it would have been like that spark of inspiration Miss Singleton required to make a picture. Maybe the paralysis would not have lasted so long if she’d had the courage or the confidence to speak her mind.

“Close the door and make a child with me,” she could have said. Instead of maids coming in to rub her with all kinds of liniments, four, five, six times a day. And she’d lie there imagining herself outdoors, on the back roads, in the woods, in the fields, with her hair down and blowing wildly behind her, riding her heart out.

“Making a child” was what he called it. Maybe he’d given up on her because making a baby hadn’t worked. He liked things that worked; he couldn’t help it, he was a Heath. “I’ve lost three,” she’d remind herself, and another swell of shame and humiliation would rise up inside her. What was wrong with her? That was what everyone always wanted to know, even before she was sick.

She thought he would have turned crimson, blushed all over, at the idea of getting into the sickbed with her and making love to her. Making love to a paralyzed wife!

It sounded wicked. He would have thought it a sin of a huge indescribable magnitude. He might have compared her to one of those Old Testament women who had relations in tents with whole crowds of men-who-were-not-their-husbands. What was it that was said about such women in church? Unclean. “Unclean women.” That was what her husband called it when it was her time of the month. “Are you unclean this week, Charlotte?” Was she supposed to feel her body was dirty and his was not?

Right now, all she was was cold.

She’d been right about the mysterious strength of that ice garden. It really had got inside her, so much so that as she stood outside her door beside Arthur Pym in his green jacket, with his deep-brown eyes upon her, she had the thought that if she ran back up to Miss Singleton’s, she would find the canvas absolutely blank.

She looked at Arthur Pym. She didn’t care after all if he knew about the tears. She almost said out loud, “My skin is like those leaves coated over with frost.” If she did, or if she simply said, “I’m very cold, like it’s coming from inside out,” would he touch her, would he put his hands on her arms, her shoulders, her hair, the sides of her waist?

That would be preposterous. One didn’t go around imagining a just-met man in the act of warming one’s skin.

She opened her door without having made up her mind if she’d let him inside, or not. The tears on her face were the coldest-feeling tears she’d ever had. It felt that someone had taken up two icicles and pressed them against her cheeks, drawing on the tears, painterlike, frigid: they were so cold, they burned.

She felt that if Arthur Pym touched her, she would not be able to stand it, but would scream to drive him away, and she felt, at the same time, if he didn’t touch her, at all, ever, she would never be happy again.

“You’re crying,” he said.

“I know.”

The decision on whether or not to allow him in was made for her. There came rushing at Charlotte such a commotion, such a crowd—and it really seemed to be a crowd, in that tiny room—she nearly went backward, to go back into the hall, without fear of being knocked over. Mrs. Petty and her children were flinging themselves upon her, girl and boy and baby, who was dangling off one of Mrs. Petty’s hips and grabbing air with her plump pink hands.

“Arthur Pym!” cried Mrs. Petty, looking over Charlotte’s shoulder. “You go back upstairs! What is the matter with her? What have you done? What have you told her? Go away! Don’t you come into this room! You leave this lady alone!”

Too late: he was already inside. He’d just slipped right in.

“Glorious to see you, as ever,” he said. “Amazing what you do in the kitchen with things out of tins. You have a gift, and when I get around to having my own practice, I will want to hire you to come cook for me.”

“Don’t you speak to me!” cried Mrs. Petty.

“Here we are for a visit! Here we are for a visit! And so are you! And so are you!” screamed Sophy, whose words were repeated by Momo, louder.

“Hello, you angelic, well-behaved children,” said Arthur, brightly; they ignored him. They attached themselves to Charlotte, one at each leg, and she leaned down and patted and kissed them, and patted and kissed the baby, and looked at the baby’s new teeth, and a newly missing baby tooth of Momo’s, and a new ribbon in Sophy’s hair; she told them she had missed them, she had longed for them. Then, to their amazement, she said, “Let’s have the visit tomorrow.”

A hush fell over them. The children had never seen this version of her. They’d never even seen her out of her sickroom.

“There’s no roads open into town, so you can’t go home, and they can’t get in here, but I’ve got a sleigh ready, to take you down Beacon Street to the doctor’s rooms at her office,” said Mrs. Petty.

“I promise,” Charlotte said to the children. “Come tomorrow.”

“They cannot,” said Mrs. Petty.

“We can! We can!”

“Are you tired?” said Momo. He was a gentle, thoughtful boy; he’d grown at least two inches.

“Are you still sick?” said his sister.

“I’m tired, not sick.”

Charlotte smiled at the wonderful, shiny Sophy, who saw her chance to take a deep breath and plunge into the many subjects she’d been saving.

“I don’t like school. Everyone in it is horrible, and the teacher says I am going to go to hell, and so is Momo, and they say he’s not to be called Momo because it isn’t a proper name, so we told them his proper name was the same as his papa’s, who was hanged for robbery and murder, so it’s very bad luck. We said Momo is a magic word for good-luck spells, and it shouldn’t be taken away. If it’s taken away, he will die,” Sophy said, and her brother nodded solemnly, and added, “Except that we haven’t got a papa.”

“No one was hanged!” cried Mrs. Petty.

“Tell me about it tomorrow,” said Charlotte.

“We have to go to school.”

“Afterward.”

“Will you be here?”

“Yes.”

“She will not!”

Mrs. Petty picked up Charlotte’s coat and held it out to her. Charlotte hung it on the hook on the door. Arthur Pym picked up the poker and jabbed at some logs in the fire, causing sparks, which hadn’t needed to be done as the fire was burning very nicely. He seemed to want to have something weaponlike in his hands, which, Charlotte felt, was not a good idea.

But he didn’t raise it up like a sword in the direction of Mrs. Petty. “Mrs. Heath and I,” he said pleasantly, “made each other’s acquaintance just a few minutes ago, and I escorted her back to her room.”

“And now you are leaving, Arthur.”

“No, I invited him to sit and talk with me,” said Charlotte.

“That poor woman upstairs in her chair! Her nurses can’t get through to her!” Mrs. Petty shook all over; perhaps she could not believe that, once again, like the night Charlotte had arrived, she wasn’t being listened to.

“Terence is with her, and the maid will be in,” said Arthur calmly.

“Terence!” said Mrs. Petty.

“He and Mrs. Heath had an interesting conversation about politics.”

“And what else?”

“Please,” said Charlotte. She took hold of the doorknob. The door was wide open, and she placed herself beside it like a hostess at the end of a party, seeing off her guests.

“Why is your face all wet?” said Momo.

“Because I opened a window and snow went onto it.”

“You’ll have the polio all over again! Charlotte! You’ve gone mad!”

“Are you mad?” said Sophy.

“I promise you, there’s nothing wrong with my brain.” She reached out a hand to touch the baby again. “See you tomorrow, Edith.”

“She doesn’t understand what tomorrow is,” said her brother.

“Well, that’s when I’ll see you. You don’t always have to understand about things ahead of time.”

Somehow Charlotte managed to herd them all out. Just down the hall, near the lamp, casting a hulking, overlarge shadow, was Moaxley, in that huge dark cloak. She waved to him as if she’d known him all her life.

“Things all right?”

“They most certainly are not,” said Mrs. Petty, going past him.

“I was asking Mrs. Heath.”

“Things are all right,” said Charlotte. Sophy and Momo went charging down the stairs, as though stairs existed to make noise on. Maybe some of the ladies who were guests here, behind their closed doors—maybe many of them—were mothers, and didn’t mind the racket.

She closed the door and shot the bolt. The maid had left a towel on the bureau by the washbowl, and Charlotte seized it and wiped her face as if she’d just washed it. Arthur Pym had sat down in the only chair.

No warmth was coming at her from the fire. The children hadn’t warmed her—or perhaps they had, a little, and Mrs. Petty had undone it. Charlotte said, “I am so very, very…” Arthur looked up at her.

“Sad,” she said. She’d wanted to say “cold.” What, could she now not even trust her own voice?

He said, “Have you left your husband?”