A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (2 page)

The Heaths knew Shakespeare for the histories, and maybe one of them—Hays—knew a couple of things about Hamlet. But Charlotte felt she could say for certain that there was not one Heath who knew anything at all about the greatest of all the great tragic heroines. There were two: Juliet and Cleopatra.

Once at a family Christmas dinner, she made a remark about the Players’ theatricals, which she never took part in, beyond donating her horses (and herself to drive them) for the fetching of scenery, built on a farm outside town. The Players disliked stage settings that were not elaborate.

The scenery makers also sent in carvings of birds such as wood pigeons, thrushes, and owls, to be suspended by wires above the stage, for the sake of Charlotte’s father-in-law, who anyway paid for all the props.

She said at the dinner, wouldn’t it be interesting if the Players put on the tragedy of Queen Cleopatra, which was basically history? She concealed the fact that she’d love to play the part of the queen herself. No one thought to ask her, but she believed she might really be able to pull it off: she would have loved to create the illusion of herself as being larger than life, and brave and majestic and uncontainable.

She didn’t think the queen a coward, or out of her mind, for being bitten by a snake she knew would kill her.

Put on
Antony and Cleopatra
? The managers of the Players were Heaths, as were many of the actors. In every cast the major roles were played by Heaths. That play? In their town? It was the same as if Charlotte asked them to lie on sofas to eat, and then conduct a Roman orgy.

“But it’s
made up,
” said one of her husband’s cousins, who was a professional military historian with the Navy.

“It’s a purely sensationalist romance,” someone else said, “and it’s not even English.”

The odd thing was that the Heaths themselves had not descended from the English. They were German. The original American Heaths had a German name lost to history: they’d settled in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where they operated slaughterhouses and sausage factories, long since sold. The Heath migration east took place years ago, even before there were railroads. There’d been a Heath bank in Boston, but that had been sold. They had left the city and settled a bit to the south; they’d turned their new town into a Heath town, but the Midwest was where they still were making money.

Hays spoke German and French and some Italian without an American accent. Men from those countries, in the East on business, were often turning up at the household for dinners, card games, musical evenings, billiards and gambling with dice in the games room, and Sunday afternoons on the lawn, resting off a night-before of God knew what. Hays had been to college in Michigan, but he’d spent two years in Paris, which he felt had shaped his core, years before Charlotte knew him.

In the presence of those visitors, his European alternative self would emerge in a clear, vivid way, as though he had changed into a costume, and rearranged the lines of his body, and even, perhaps, put on some sort of a mask, which resembled his own face, but was someone else’s. This was not something Charlotte had ever found disturbing, not even when the part he played carried over—after the guests had left—to their own rooms upstairs.

Hays didn’t take part in the Players, partly because he could never be counted on to be in town for rehearsals and stagings, and partly because (few people knew this) he suffered from a terrible form of shyness. He’d go rigid, like a whole other version of himself, changed into a man-shaped wood block. He could not give speeches at meetings, could not perform anything that required an audience.

In college he was part of the debate club, but only as a coach. The one time he was called upon to deliver a eulogy at a funeral—of another Heath uncle, who in fact was childless and a bachelor, and had left Hays his money—he made it to the pulpit of the church, but all he could do was bow his head and say, weakly, “I am too filled with feeling to speak what I came here to say.” When he returned to his pew, the Heaths said he was just like Antony in Shakespeare’s
Caesar,
but a modern-day American one, who’d decided to keep his words to himself. He was a tall man, pole-thin. He was dark-brown haired like all his family, but his skin was fair.

He blushed sometimes like a girl. Spots of pink rose up in his cheeks, out from the ends of his mustache, when he defended Charlotte at that awful Heath dinner. He obviously agreed with his family that
Antony and Cleopatra
was all wrong for them, but he seemed surprised and pleased that his wife even knew who Cleopatra was. “Charlotte has the right to make suggestions and take part in this family as she wishes,” he said. Everyone admired him for his loyalty. Everyone thought, Hays loves Charlotte, for some reason unapparent to us. He’d married for love. Everyone said so.

And his lawyer uncle, who now lay dead in state in his elegant, wide front room, had leaned toward Charlotte and patted her hand with his plump, spotty fingers. He wasn’t unkind to her; he seemed to feel sorry for her. “Look at it this way, my dear Charlotte.” Would she care to know what he was offered to write on years ago for
The Bar
?

The Bar
was a national monthly magazine, now defunct, for lawyers. It was not concerned with legal matters only but had articles, stories, anecdotes, drawings, and personal essays and remarks pertaining to the lives of men in law. Uncle Owen had been a regular contributor. He rarely went into the courts himself; his specialty was business law. But for
The Bar
he wrote jokey pieces about unusual details of court proceedings, family backgrounds of criminals, outfits people wore to cheer on disturbers of the peace, and things people ate at afternoon tea in murder trials.

“My dear Charlotte, knowing my interest in Shakespeare, they asked me to write an article speculating on a scene in which Hamlet, the killer of his butler, not to mention his mother and his king, is put on trial for murder, and I, as his lawyer, must defend him. Can you think of anything sillier than that? No wonder that magazine went out of business.”

Charlotte had not seen the point. “But how would you do your arguments to defend that poor man?”

“Ha-ha!” Uncle Owen cried. “There could not be a case!”

She felt she would have defended Hamlet on the grounds that, one, he was no murderer, and two, everything he did, he did honestly, thoughtfully, and morally. He was the most honest, thoughtful, moral man she ever heard of. “Charlotte would never stand for anyone speaking badly of her favorite dramatic hero, even if he was insane and hated his mother,” her husband said. He seemed to think he was helping her out.

Charlotte said, “Is it out of the question logically to have a defense because, at the end of the play, there could never be a trial, as Hamlet has died?”

And Uncle Owen leaped in with his thrust. “Died or not is immaterial. We’re talking about the difference between truth and fabrications. There could be no case against Hamlet because
he wasn’t real, he was only a story
.”

Well, Falstaff wasn’t real, historically, she should have argued. But Uncle Owen had yet to play that role.

She wondered if he’d changed his mind about stories. She wondered if he caught a glimpse of death, like some sort of shapeless, strange thing coming toward him as he sat in his armchair with his ideal last breath gathering up in his old-man’s lungs. She wondered if he believed that actual death was something history could prepare you for—or history plays. She would think it would not.

She would think it would resemble ghosts, witches, stories, inventions. Maybe she’d had an ulterior motive when she decided to come out for the wake. Maybe she wanted to be looked at as someone who did a remarkable thing. She was never supposed to get well. She was supposed to have been an invalid, period.

Here is Charlotte and her horses. Charlotte and her horses. My wife, up from a sickbed to go to a wake. Isn’t that
odd
?

Hamlet wouldn’t have thought so. And Charlotte remembered what it was like to be still in her twenties, newly married, seated at a table in candlelight in her husband’s family’s dining room, the only one in the house awake, reading Shakespeare for the very first time.

She had sat one night nearly till dawn reading
Hamlet
and for weeks afterward her heart would feel clenched up, at odd moments; and she’d feel a wholly new, powerful, tender affection for her husband.

Maybe she fell in love with Hamlet himself. Or maybe, in her husband, buried somewhere, she saw traces of him. She had told him as much. “You don’t have an uncomplicated soul, Hays, although you would like to pretend to.” He blushed at that, but he didn’t disagree.

Her husband’s family’s household was at the opposite end of town from the lawyer Heaths. Hays had gone out that morning with one of his brothers-in-law and had not taken his own sleigh.

She’d wanted to bring him home herself. She’d pictured the drive, her husband beside her, in dusky air and mild windblown snow: a ride away from death. She’d thought they might bypass home and turn out into the old roads for a while. She’d thought, I miss my husband, and I’ll tell him so.

They had not shared anything for so long. It was as if she’d turned into another of her husband’s sisters or the wife of one of his brothers. Or a stranger. One more member of the household who could never be turned out.

You couldn’t be a Heath and turn out your wife. Her illness had terrified Hays. She knew this. And she had thought, back at the house, putting on her coat, sending for the sleigh and the horses, that a death in the family would be a reasonable time to try to set things at last on the course they were supposed to have taken.

Death, she’d thought, would have a practical, logical application. But she didn’t go into Uncle Owen’s house on High Street for his wake. How could she, when Hays had just come out of it with the woman?

She wondered if Hays was trying to remember the last time he’d seen her outdoors. She couldn’t even remember herself. A long time ago.

Her length of time in a sickbed was ten months. But it seemed much longer: two years, five years, eight, nine. Her principal doctor felt that what was wrong was some form of brain disease. She had heard that often. “Charlotte, brain disease, it’s some form of brain disease, which I expect will go away. Probably.”

The consultants, and there were many, believed it was a type of polio. They insisted on the “some type of” aspect, as if rubbing it in that her particular case was abnormal—as if she’d not got it right, as if it were one more thing not right, like not having children.

Or even like the color of her hair, as though she’d had a say in it. She had hair the color of a pumpkin, a ripe one, and it was frizzy and wild and would never stay tucked in. She was no longer paralyzed from the disease, not in any part of her that showed.

The polio theory was the one that made everyone more nervous; the Heaths didn’t want anyone outside the household to hear about it. It seemed less offensive to them to say, “Something is wrong with her brain,” which to Charlotte sounded horrible and embarrassing, and was a lie.

The woman with Hays was as fit as Charlotte’s horses, all glowing, with that perfect lady’s hourglass figure. Perfect. Like a picture in a magazine. She looked like she’d never been sick, from anything, ever.

One good thing that happened in the sickness was this: Charlotte was able to stay out of hospitals. The room she was kept in was off the front hall, at the top of the stairs that went down to the kitchen. The cook’s children had stayed close by her.

The girl, Sophy, was nine now, and Momo, the boy, was six. There was also a baby, Edith. When Mrs. Petty came to the household for her interview with Hays’s parents, she’d come alone. The Heaths didn’t know about the children until they all moved in.

Those children had loved it that Charlotte was still for all those months, with nothing to do, it seemed, but have her muscles rubbed, and talk to them, and allow them to climb all over her and brush her hair and use her bed as their playroom.

The girl heard one of Hays’s sisters say that the story of Alice and her adventures in Wonderland was a blotch on the tradition of English culture, and a silly, ridiculous thing, as bad for the mind as a diet of maple candy, and nothing else, for the body. Sophy loved maple candy. She took about a month to have memorized a large portion of the story, and might have completed it all if she had not gone to Boston.

She stole the book from neighbors who had a daughter her age. The neighbors used to let her and her brother play in their yard with their ponies and ducks, but there’d been trouble.

One day Momo Petty went into the neighbors’ house by the front door instead of the rear. A child of a servant at a front door! When he was made to see his mistake, Sophy walked into a mud puddle (it was raining), slipped into the house, and allowed herself to place footprints of mud on the neighbors’ extremely expensive drawing room carpet. A vase was broken as well.

Charlotte only had to think of Sophy and her brother ducking under her bed to hide from some trouble they’d been in—and the baby curled on a pillow, sometimes fussily, bubbling up oatmeal or milk—and she could hear that voice.

“Alice shall have an adventure. There’s a big white rabbit. You must prepare yourself for things you would never expect,” she’d begin, as though no one had heard this before.

“She is going to be sitting near a river with her sister, who is a very boring girl and she is going to
run fast and fall down a hole
.”

There was a loose eye of pine in one of the floorboards, under a little brown rug, and the boy would lift the rug to reveal it. It would seem they’d fall down that hole just like Alice. Under them was the kitchen with its heat and steam and Mrs. Petty.

The Alice part of their lives was a secret.

People often remarked on the fact that the children did not resemble their mother, or each other; certainly none of them appeared to have shared a father. Mrs. Petty believed in keeping things discreet. She was a genius of a cook. Even Charlotte’s father-in-law had to admit she would never be matched in the household, although the new cook, a middle-aged widow, had trained in New York at well-known restaurants. There was no Mr. Petty.