A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (18 page)

It wasn’t until she spoke that you knew something was wrong. It wasn’t so much that her words came out slurred, or that she was hard to understand, or that she couldn’t get her tongue around pronunciations. It was more that you had the sense of a sleepwalker. Sleepwalkers don’t know they’re asleep, or what they sound like.

Mrs. Alcorn took no notice of Charlotte, or of what Miss Blanchette had said, but continued out loud on some thought of her own. “I remembered I was wishing for the green one,” she said woodenly, in a monotone.

Her lips were pale. Those two blue-gray eyes did not seem to be looking at anything that was actually there: bright eyes, with an overgloss of brightness like an eerie, waxy polish. The pupils should not have been enlarged like that. There was a slackness in her jaw, as if she had to keep reminding herself to keep her mouth closed. That was the impression.

Miss Blanchette knew what she meant, or pretended to. “What about the orange?”

The eyes made an effort to focus. The sleepwalker was coming to the awareness of standing upright. There was nothing about her that was drowsy or groggy in a normal way. Instead, you saw that this was her usual state. “I don’t like oranges.”

“Oh, but only yesterday we had a letter from the lady in Florida who says when she comes back to next door, she’ll bring you a bag of them, fresh off the trees.”

“I don’t want them. I don’t like orange.”

“What about the blue, then?”

“Blue is for winter.”

“It’s winter now, dear. Would you like to look out the window at the snow? It’s so lovely today and the sun is shining.”

“I don’t like windows,” said Mrs. Alcorn, and Charlotte said to herself, with a flash of recognition, “Morphine. That’s morphine.”

“Would you like to go and rest?”

Mrs. Alcorn looked up at Miss Blanchette, wordlessly, and closed her eyes as if the act of keeping them open was too much for her. She went back to her room that way, like a blind person. Miss Blanchette went with her, holding up an arm in the air, in a curve, near Mrs. Alcorn’s back, not quite touching it, but ready in case she faltered, as if Mrs. Alcorn were a tiny child just starting to learn to walk on her own.

Miss Blanchette turned her head to whisper across the room to Charlotte. “She wasn’t supposed to have come out. Please. There are only a few who know how things are at Three-forty.” She said this as if she feared that Charlotte might run back through the tunnel to next door and tell every hotel guest she came upon, “Mr. Alcorn’s wife is an addict of drugs.”

“I’m dependable,” whispered Charlotte.

Murmuring sounds came from the other room, all Miss Blanchette’s. Mrs. Alcorn was a shell. There was no other way to think of her. A beautiful white translucent shell.

Where was the woman in the wedding picture? Gone. A great wave of pity rose up in Charlotte.

Morphine. Charlotte wondered what Aunt Lily thought about this. It must have distressed her. Or maybe she didn’t know about it.

She could hear Aunt Lily’s voice. “If any of the consultants try giving you morphine, ever again, and I don’t care what reasons they have, and I don’t care if your husband and his parents and the whole lot of them disagree with me, and I don’t care how much pain you’re in, you’re to tell them all, I will personally make very great trouble for them,” and Charlotte had answered, “But I like it.”

Well, she did. The first few times, only nausea and sickness, like being pregnant, but then came that sweet, lulling, sublime, shadowy pleasure: that stillness and joy, both at once, that softening of everything that had ever been harsh, that deep, deep sense of being safe and sheltered and whole.

“I don’t believe in Satan,” Aunt Lily had said, “and I don’t have to, as long as there is morphine going into the bodies of people who don’t require it, and Charlotte, you do not require it, you’re not dying.”

“But I am,” she’d answered, and Aunt Lily had put down her foot. What were those stories of addicts? There’d been many: gripping stories in terrible detail. Charlotte didn’t recall any of them, but she remembered listening to them as if they were tales of shipwrecks, of horrible things, people losing their reason, people being buried alive, people being boiled in oil, people being subjected to suffering beyond description. You wouldn’t think Lillian Iverson Heath had a gift for that type of narration, but she did, sitting at the side of Charlotte’s bed, conjuring every demon there could be, as if all the hosts of hell were gathered right there in the shadows.

She’d probably refused more morphine because, if she hadn’t, her aunt would have thought up more stories. Hays had wanted to tell her to stop attending Charlotte. He’d tried to, on the grounds that it wasn’t appropriate to have a relation as one’s principal doctor.

Aunt Lily had told Hays that, if he blocked her, she’d arrange to have a certificate issued to put Charlotte into an asylum or something. She’d have people from Boston come out and take her away, and how would that look for the Heaths?

Once again, Charlotte looked out the window at Dickie, who never once looked up at anything that wasn’t part of the Beechmont. She thought that Miss Blanchette would have been a truly great detective. If Miss Blanchette were the one down there, nothing on the entire street would escape her eyes, and probably nothing going on behind her, either. She certainly had the size to cope with anything that came her way.

I wish I was big, thought Charlotte. She realized she had never felt, around any other person, so…so what? So safe, she decided. Why didn’t any of the Heaths make her feel that way? Not even Hays did.

Oh, he stood up for her now and then, but not that often, and not dependably, and he never, ever took her side against his sisters and their husbands and his brothers and their wives.

Miss Georgeson at the academy was a little bit like Miss Blanchette, but was a pale comparison in every way, and anyway, it was different then; Charlotte had been a child. There were plenty of things to want to feel safe from when you’re young, but when you’re older, Charlotte thought, it feels good to stand close to someone who would be willing to take your side, no matter what, and have the size and the conviction to really stick to it.

The apartment was even more silent than before. It was Dickie who was down there in the cold, not Hays.

It’s Hays, she had thought, when Miss Blanchette had suggested that she look out the window. Her words rose up at Charlotte, and would not be ignored. I wonder if the man across the road is connected to you.

Crossing that room had been the same as walking through mud. Her legs went all weak. They kept doing that. She’d thought that Hays must have followed Mabel Gerson, as he’d followed the horse; and she had pictured that, although she didn’t want to admit it. Hays in the snow, going across town to the Hollow, where he’d never been before.

He must have made one of the stable boys fix up a sleigh for him; he didn’t ride. Down he went to the bakery. He hated the cold. He would have taken the big fur wrap. Which horse was the one who went home looking for her?

If it was the mare, Windy, she would have allowed Hays to follow gently. He might even have hitched her to the sleigh. If it was the male, Mercury, it would have been a little more intricate, because he would have known that Hays was someone Charlotte had fled from and would think he needed to do the same. Mercury would have noticed the woman at the edge of the square with Hays. Windy never noticed anything except how fast she was being allowed to go.

Charlotte asked herself, “If that was my husband out there, what would I do?”

And the answer was, the truth, as awful an answer as it seemed to her: “I would go to him.”

She’d been almost too afraid to look. She didn’t want to go to him. She wanted to. She didn’t. She did. She didn’t know. She would go to him to tell him she wanted to never see him again, she was going to unmarry him, she decided, and she decided, too, at the same time, to go to him and tell him the same thing she was going to tell him when she didn’t meet him at Uncle Owen’s wake as she planned, as if nothing else had happened in between, and she would say, “Hays, I’m well now, and I miss you.”

She didn’t want to be married to Hays. She wanted to. She didn’t. She might be able to forgive him, for the woman, for the fact that he gave up on her. She couldn’t. She could. She could forgive him for the woman but not for giving up on her. She could forgive him for giving up on her depending on what he had to say. No, she could not.

What about last night? What about Arthur in the washroom, the white tunnel, what she’d done? Was she going to tell him about Arthur? The truth, all of it? What about a part of it? She could almost hear Miss Blanchette’s voice speaking her own thoughts out loud. Was she stark raving mad?

The last thing in the world she wanted was to go back to the household. The thing she wanted most was to be with Hays. No, the thing she wanted most was to not go back to Hays and not go back to the household, and let all the Heaths (except Aunt Lily and Uncle Chessy, and a few of Hays’s nieces and nephews, who weren’t old enough to have caused her trouble) disappear into history, into the mists and unreality of history, like those godforsaken plays of theirs.

Oh, the relief when it was Dickie was enormous. But there was a tiny thud of disappointment inside her, or perhaps it wasn’t tiny and she wanted to wish it away.

Why hadn’t Hays come after her? Why hadn’t he followed Mabel? He thought she was at Aunt Lily’s, for one thing, and for another, he’d stated his intentions in that boring, stupid letter, and she was glad she’d burned it in the fire because she didn’t want to ever see it again. He would wait until she sent for him. He knew his own guilt. He knew that for the last year or so he’d been lousy as a husband. He knew what she’d seen, with the woman. Clear. Like a business transaction. He never strayed from his intentions once he had made up his mind.

Or maybe he didn’t want her back. She hadn’t considered that possibility.

That would make everything easy. “That would make everything so easy,” she said to herself. It would. Would it? Good God, she thought, how could she ever be with Hays again when he was with her like a husband? That would be, in a way, like saying, “I loved being sick and not being able to move my legs or even stand on them, and now I’m anxious to do it again.”

Maybe her marriage was like polio or some brain disease, and maybe it wasn’t. How could she lie there in her bed again, waiting while he went through three doors, across a desert, hoping he wouldn’t change his mind along the way? If she wanted to, she would have to take those tranquilizing nerve pills that her mother-inlaw and Hays’s sisters were always talking about: “I am nervy today; I must take one of those pills.”

Or morphine.

Then here was Miss Blanchette again, coming up beside Charlotte, silent, intractable, brown, a tree. Neither one of them said anything for a very long moment. Some snow fell off an overhead ledge or a sill, and cascaded like a powdery waterfall. Everything outside was sparkly, glittering, white, a world of white and light. Charlotte thought of Mrs. Alcorn burrowing into her bed like a creature at the bottom of the sea.

“It’s morphine,” said Miss Blanchette, as if Charlotte had asked.

“I pity her.”

“Yes.”

“How does she get it?”

“In the beginning, it was a doctor. She’d had trouble with an arm that was broken very badly, in a fall down some stairs. There was a tower she’d much wanted to go up, at a little town in Mexico. She’d gone there with Harry. He hadn’t done the climb, he has trouble with heights. She slipped on a wet spot. The stairs were stone. He brought her back home with her arm in a splint, but the pain was worse. That was years and years ago. But it wasn’t just the arm. She was lost, I think, from the time she was a young girl.”

“How does she get it now?”

“Her husband has a great deal of money from the hotel, Mrs. Heath.”

“But money can be spent for a cure.”

“Don’t you think it was?”

“I don’t know.”

“Money was spent for a cure, Mrs. Heath,” she said. “And now…” Miss Blanchette listlessly held up a hand and made an arc in the air, indicating, in its sweep, everything. “We take care of her.”

“Does my aunt know about her?”

“And who would your aunt be?”

“A doctor. She’s sometimes a guest next door.”

“Three-forty knows a lady physician from Watertown who has a skill with digestive problems and has been called for consultations.”

“That’s not my aunt.”

“We don’t mingle, Mrs. Heath, on a regular basis, with next door.”

“But you know a lady from Florida bringing oranges.”

“She’s a friend.”

“Do you ever go over there?”

“Not once, except to go and find Mr. Alcorn if a crisis arises.”

“He must be a sad man.”

“Oh, but he knows how it could have been. She had made an effort, before, to stop, you see, not once but several times,” said Miss Blanchette. “But now she’s lost the will for it, which has to be counted as good fortune.”

“To be cured, you mean.”

“Yes, if you consider that a cure would mean no longer to be part of this world.”

“She isn’t!”

“I mean to be gone from it in a physical sense, forever.”

“To die?” said Charlotte. “By her own hand?”

“I wish not to speak of this anymore. I’ve said more than I wanted to. I don’t mind your company, though. You may return here whenever you wish. You’re an uncommonly perspicacious lady.”

Charlotte didn’t know what that meant. She hadn’t minded being corrected about what to call a poet, customarily, but this was different. She was afraid to ask about the word because she didn’t want to know if she was being uncomplimented, like at the household, where Hays’s brothers and sisters—before she was sick—were always flinging extravagant words and phrases at her, in that way they had of making fun of her indirectly. They could sound all flowery, but it was only to sweeten the thorns. How many times had they mentioned to Hays he’d made a mistake in marrying her? One million. But after she’d got sick it really was flowers. Maybe they’d felt guilty.