A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (5 page)

Reeling and dripping, she’d steadied herself on the arm the horrified maid held out to her, and she’d been frightened down to her bones because she saw how simple it was to be knocked over—to have your balance shot out—by something as ordinary as cold water. She had felt as insubstantial in her body as a leaf.

That was how it felt right now with Mrs. Petty. The valise and the baked goods in Charlotte’s hands slipped down to the floor; she reached to hold on to the wall. She felt something inside freezing up, as if she’d never move again—was it returning? The paralysis? The empty cave that her own mind turned into?

Mrs. Petty loomed up, larger, with a look of worry, but also of firm resolution. And someone came up behind her, from the hall. A man. All beige and white, in a dressing gown of soft tan cashmere, open at the chest, revealing a crisp white formal shirt; his hair was the color of sand. His trousers were white flannel. He had a staunch muscular compactness, like Napoleon, but there was something about him that was gentle, even delicate. He was fine-featured, with narrow eyes, a narrow nose, and high cheekbones. His face looked recently shaved, and was smooth and pale. He was shorter than Mrs. Petty, so he had to look up to her, but you knew who was the one in charge.

“I was wondering,” he said to Mrs. Petty, as though Charlotte weren’t there, “what is the progress of the supper for numbers Eight and Eleven?”

Mrs. Petty looked at him. “The progress is zero. The kitchen is closed.”

“I see. I was wondering, then, where the tin washing pot is, that very enormous one, the biggest one we have?”

“In the washroom.”

“I believe we should lock the door and hide the key. If we don’t, Mrs. Lattimer in number Eight and Mrs. Upton in number Eleven plan to fetch it, take it outdoors, fill it with snow to be melted, light a bonfire under it and, having obtained some herbs, they will put me into it, and cook me and eat me. That’s how hungry they are. I suppose the police will show up, but I don’t think they’ll mind to see me boiled. Perhaps you recall that the husbands of those women went to one of those mystical tribal islands below the equator where cannibalism thrives, and they are keen to try it out.”

“Tell them I can give them the loan of a long-handled fork to poke you with,” said Mrs. Petty.

“I’d prefer to lock the washroom door.” And with a crisp, dignified turn of his head, he settled his gaze on Charlotte. “I am Harry Alcorn,” he said, “and this is my hotel.” She knew he was sizing her up—all over and in and out, she felt—and she recognized the intelligence of his expression, the interest: this was the way she herself looked at horses. She didn’t mind. She allowed her eyes to stare right back at him, while Mrs. Petty grew more and more agitated.

“Charlotte, where is your husband?”

“Not with me.”

“Were you hoping for a room?”

“I am, Mrs. Petty, though I hardly know you, like this.”

“Rooms’re full up,” she answered flatly. “There, Harry, say goodbye, she’s leaving.”

“I want to see the children.”

“That would be out of the question,” said Harry Alcorn. He smiled warmly. “I didn’t mind having them about, but one of our guests took a liking to them, and she is rich and offered to take them, so our Mrs. Petty has gone and sold them. I tried to tell her not to, as I suspect it will come to no good, but she is a woman with her own mind.”

“This is
enough
!” sputtered Mrs. Petty. “I’ve done no such thing. Mrs. Heath can go down to Charles Street if she needs to be put in a room, a very nice one, and Moaxley can take her, or I shall myself.”

“You have already met Moaxley,” said Harry Alcorn. “Our good-looking, agreeable man at the door, who no doubt welcomed you charmingly, in his attractive cloak. Are your hands quite large, Mrs. Heath, or do you wear a man’s mittens?”

“My hands are quite large.”

“A good quality.”

“Thank you.”

“I was told you were ill. You seem well now.”

“She is not!” cried Mrs. Petty. “She’s mad to be out! In the dead of night! Alone! I can’t think what she is up to!”

“Your ride must have been horrid.”

“I enjoyed it.”

“I was told you were driven in a baker’s sledge.”

“The baker,” said Charlotte, “is my friend.”

“She
cannot
stay!”

“Then so shall I be.” Harry Alcorn held out both hands to Charlotte. She had the thought to slip off her mittens, but suddenly, just when she was beginning to be proud of herself—her self-possession, the way she was holding her own ground—it seemed that it would be much too complicated to even try. How exactly did one go about taking off mittens?

She dizzied. Was she wobbling, was she looking unbalanced? Did it seem she’d been gulping down brandy from Everett Gerson’s flask, against the cold, which she hadn’t done, though he had offered it? It mattered to her if this man, Harry Alcorn, considered her a drunkard. It mattered what he thought about when he looked at her.

How could the wall she leaned against be so insubstantial? She had the sense that the wood was dissolving, that she’d been tricked into thinking it solid. She would have liked to push herself away and hold out her hands to the man coming toward her, but she could not think how. He seemed to be moving extremely slowly, loosely, as if walking underwater.

“I don’t know what’s happening to your wall,” she said, and she was surprised that the words came out thickly, and strangely muffled, as if she’d covered her mouth with her hands.

There was definitely something wrong with the carpentry of this place, and it wasn’t only the wall; it was the floor as well. It made no sound, but it was giving way under her, like a shiny coating of pond ice, which looked thick, until you stepped on it.

A
ll her life, even though she’d developed the skill of keeping most of her thoughts to herself, people told her she had too much imagination, as if that were an awful thing, like an abnormally thickened, embarrassing muscle, which would bulge below the skin indecently, when muscles were supposed to be hidden, and never thought about.

As a schoolgirl, at Miss Georgeson’s Christian Girls’ Academy, long ago in her other life, she stood out from her classmates for her wit, and for her quick, daring physical boldness. She was the one to run fastest in little races at recess, the one to roll her hoops on hilly surfaces when everyone else preferred flat, the one who took to riding horses with such a fearless, alarming joy, her teachers felt she must be partly Indian, in spite of the color of her hair and skin; and she was a charity student, after all.

They only had to say, “Charlotte, if you cannot spell your words as God meant them to be, you won’t be allowed to the stables for a month,” and she’d take up her primer with zeal. She’d been in trouble again and again for not doing copying correctly (but putting in her own phrases), not mastering embroidery in the assigned patterns (but making up patterns of her own, with the brightest threads, which came out all knotted and tangled), and failing to memorize passages for elocution lessons, which came from the Bible or from the pen of the headmistress, Miss Georgeson, who wrote complicated, fervent poems, all odes, about the journey of the life of one’s soul, with its terrors and dangers, derived from her favorite English book,
The Pilgrim’s Progess from This World to That Which Is to Come.

“You must not let your imagination get the best of you. You must learn to tame its desires; you must learn to ignore its appetite,” Miss Georgeson would say, and Charlotte would look at her wonderingly, not understanding why, in all her speeches like this, those two words—
desires, appetite
—would stand out so prominently, with such emphasis, like sudden blasts of a trumpet, when all you’d been hearing was a monotonous background hum of little flutes, say, played delicately.

It was best to consider one’s imagination as one’s own private thing.

All those months in bed she had counted on it, lying there imagining the workings of the household around her, or what the horses were up to in the stable, or what her husband was up to in Ohio or Pennsylvania or wherever he was, or what the world might have been like, outside her room, colorful and dramatic, spinning on its axis without her, full of queens, barges, violence, betrayal, heartache, love, passion, resolutions. “At least I still have an imagination,” she’d say to herself. She felt proud of it.

But maybe something had happened to it when she was sick.

She didn’t wonder where she was, not yet. She felt that, compared to what she was seeing, the facts of her situation were unimportant. She knew she was lying down somewhere warm, and she was quite still, and blankets were on her.

What she knew most of all was that she was experiencing a delusion. Maybe it was fever-raised, she thought, without actually feeling feverish.

Something had to be wrong with her imagination, because look what it was delivering her.

It was unfair,
unfair,
that of all the possible, infinite forms of hallucinations she could have had, this one took the shape of Aunt Lily Heath, her principal doctor, in a nightgown, standing there like a ghostly phantom, looking down at her.

Charlotte did not believe in ghosts and phantoms as things to come lurking about, unhumanly, from some other realm, although once at the household with the three Irish maids—who had rhyming names, Katie, Braidie, and Sadie—she had put on a séance in the root cellar to conjure the soul of her father-in-law’s longtime valet, an elderly man named Willis, who had died of pneumonia. They wanted to talk to him because of a box found (by Braidie) under his bed, containing, among trinkets and coins, a bit of paper in his handwriting, saying, “I am the father of the prettiest nut-haired girl at service in this place, begotten and born in Galway, as God is my witness. I spoke not before this, as her mother was the wife of another.”

All three maids had hair of some shade of a nut; all three had come from that part of Ireland. It wasn’t as if they could write to their mothers back home and ask what adultery had been committed. As for the “prettiest” aspect, they left that part alone, at Charlotte’s command. She had the right to invoke her authority as their mistress: they were all three of them, each in her own way, of equal attractiveness. If they quibbled about it they’d be done for.

So which maid? They’d done everything you were supposed to do to call on the dead. They brought down articles of old Willis’s clothing and his pipe and boots. They lit candles, and the maids spoke some Gaelic, and they concentrated hard, and Charlotte felt the back of her neck go clammy and bristly, as if cold fingers were touching her, and one of the maids, in a terror, raised the possibility that, what if the spirit they drew wasn’t Willis, but someone else, someone of an evil nature? It did not seem likely that a soul which was burning in hell would escape to the root cellar, but one never knew, so they’d given it up. The maids burned Willis’s confession in the kitchen stove and resolved to consider themselves sisters, as if he’d fathered them all. They’d been deeply fond of him.

Maybe, Charlotte thought, hallucinations were like potential visitations of the dead. You simply could not control them. And they could talk.

“Hello, Charlotte,” said the phantom of Aunt Lily. “How astonishing to see you.”

“Don’t try to fool me. You’re a specter of my imagination.”

“Don’t be worried.”

“I’m not.” She didn’t feel worried at all. She felt curious. “Where am I?”

“Not at home, that’s for sure. I’d thought you never wanted to leave that bed of yours. I’d thought, you know, you chose to be there for all the rest of your life.”

If the phantom weren’t dressed like this, it would seem to Charlotte that indeed she was back in her sickroom, and the doctor was with her as usual. The nightdress was lovely: a long white one, muslin, with a ribbon at the collar and some lovely, fine lace around the neckline and wrists, and a scent of lilac that seemed to come from the fabric, but might have been perfume.

This was the best she could get for a hallucination? A talking mirage of Aunt Lily, speaking in that same old doctorly voice—that commanding, I-know-more-than-you-do voice, with its rigid authority, its self-possession, its you-truly-ought-to-listen-to-me conviction?

Stupid brain!

Even the apparition of her old headmistress would have been better, in her old-fashioned bonnet and dark, heavy Sunday dress, with its bustle. Miss Georgeson had believed in wearing a bustle, even after everyone else gave them up.

It protruded from her tailbone like an oddly placed, cushion-soft hump. Charlotte knew how soft it was below the ample folds of the dress because once on a dare, at the age of nine, while Miss Georgeson was occupied with putting books on a shelf, she sneaked up behind her and squeezed it, and got away with it. The older girls had said a bustle was actually human woman-bone, like that was something that happened to you when you passed from wearing girlish dresses that went to your shins, to ladies’ dresses that went to your ankles. You had to sit in chairs with cut-out seats to accommodate the growth of your maturity, they said. But it was only a rectangular small pillow, tied on there, for absolutely no purpose at all. Charlotte had never been afraid of Miss Georgeson. Aunt Lily Heath, phantom or otherwise, was another matter.

A voice said quietly, a male voice, “Is she very impossibly ill?”

“She’s fine. Weak, but fine. She was, as I began to tell you before, never well understood by the family.”

“I can see why.”

“I think we shouldn’t send for her husband.”

“I think, Doctor Heath, that not sending for one’s husband is a matter of regulations here.”

“I should have sent you away. I hadn’t thought she’d wake up until morning. But if you think I’d leave you alone with her, you’re mistaken.”

Charlotte now saw, in the low dusky light of a gas lamp—a lamp had materialized—a pale young man of maybe nineteen or twenty whose face was so flawless, and so perfectly smooth, and so
radiant,
it nearly took away her breath to look at him. He was simply the most beautiful human she’d ever seen, even in pictures. His butter-yellow hair was combed damply back off his face, and it seemed that he shimmered all over with such a marvelous, otherworldly glow, she was forced to decide that her brain was not a letdown to her after all. She could not have counted the number of times when she was sick that she had wished to see such a sight.

He looked like an angel, but an angel in a gray nightshirt, which had a panel of masculine-pearly buttons from the neck to the waist.

Excellent fabrication! He was high-browed, high-cheekboned, lofty. His eyelashes were thick like a girl’s. He had long fine hands, delicately fashioned. His lower arms were bare and almost hairless, but there was nothing of weakness about him: there was something of such concealed inner strength, she thought, he could probably lift her up bodily, with the slightest of exertions, and the bed she was lying on, too.

The nightshirt went just below his knees; his bare legs were slightly curved outward, like a rider’s. She liked that. He did not seem to mind the way she stared at him. His smile was like looking at the sun when it moves out, unexpectedly, from a grim, dark cloud.

He said, “I’m cold, suddenly. I think the fire’s going out.”

There was a fire, burning low in a small fireplace on the other side of the room, which seemed to appear the very moment it was mentioned. A log snapped, with sparks and a hissing.

These were not made-up things, and neither were the pictures on the walls, all watercolors, in handsome wood frames: a red sailboat in a harbor, an old wagon at the edge of a wheat field, a silver jug on a table with a plate of green grapes. Shadows moved this way and that along walls which were papered very neatly in pale green and yellow stripes. A red-and-brown rug was on the floor.

A chair was in the corner. On the chair was a pile of clothes, not folded like laundry, but draped over the seat, dropped there. There was a bureau, a high one, oak. In the other corner was a washstand. All real. The room was small and narrow.

The young man picked up an iron and poked at the fire. “I thought you were an angel,” said Charlotte, and he looked over his shoulder, grinning.

“Not even an hour ago someone said very near the same thing to me, having heard me play the piano. Irony was involved. I believe I was being insulted.”

“I heard you play! I thought you were wonderful!”

A coat was on a hook by the door. A dark macintosh, wool. A silk scarf dangled from one of the pockets. Charlotte knew that coat. She knew that scarf, with its embroidered initials, L I H.

Lillian Iverson Heath.

Charlotte shifted herself and sat up, leaning on her elbows. She looked up at the doctor, way up, as she was singularly tall: five feet ten, which she carried very well and often joked about, saying that the only way she’d got into medical school with all those men was that a sympathetic bone doctor had taken apart her legs (under ether) and added an extra six inches, like a type of experimental grafting, so there’d be few of her peers or professors to look down on her, at least physically. She favored men’s coats for the length, and men’s shoes, because her feet were big too. But there was nothing mannish about her.

Charlotte sighed. “Hello, Aunt Lily. You’re real.”

“I cannot begin to describe how much I wish
you
weren’t.”

“They called you, I suppose. It must seem I’m not well, but I am. I truly am. Look. Moving.”

Charlotte wiggled her legs under the blankets as vigorously as she could; they were moving just fine, she was fine, and there was none of the old aching in her head, just a heaviness. She sank back on the pillow. She had wanted to sit up brightly, she had wanted to muster her defenses, especially as Aunt Lily, now that it was clear that Charlotte was in no mortal danger, was not in a happy mood, not at all.

But Charlotte was only overwhelmingly tired. “I feel I must have had one of those sleeping drafts you used to give me,” she managed to say. “Isn’t that strange?”

Quietly, at some sort of signal from the doctor, the young man lifted a jacket off the chair, slung it over his shoulders, and slipped out of the room without a word. A murmur of voices rose in the hall. There must have been a small crowd out there, like people at a fire or a wagon wreck. Was one of them Mrs. Petty?

She would never ever say another word to Mrs. Petty. And she felt sorry for herself all over again. She had no friends. Even before she was sick, all the other wives had babies; they were locked in a baby world, speaking only to one another, waving at her when she went by in her carriage, feeling pity for her and not bothering to hide it.

Who were her other friends? Maids, servants, grooms, stable boys. People who were paid. A terrible loneliness began to clutch at her chest, her throat. Now that Mrs. Petty had deserted her, she had only her doctor, who had no choice but to attend to her.