Hotel Paradise (17 page)

The notebook under my mattress and my white uniform on, I ran down the stairs and into the dining room, where Miss Bertha and Mrs. Fulbright were already seated solid as rocks, dinner having begun a half-hour before. Vera was whisking through the dining room, her tray of water and rolls held nimbly on her fingertips. The tray hid my quick entrance from view.

I went to the salad table. Fortunately, Mrs. Davidow wasn’t around in the kitchen. Mrs. Davidow always could find the time to rant at me; my mother, however, counted herself too busy to waste much time bawling me out beyond the knifelike look she gave me which cut me dead—or at least down. She was preparing pork chops for browning in the buttery pan sizzling on the stove—browned and then baked with apples and onions. Cutting bits of bone from a pork chop with the cleaver seemed to sluice off the anger she felt for me as it went
whack
through meat and bone, as if she were saying, “This chop showed
up—”
WHACK!
—“when it was supposed to—”
WHACK!—
“because this chop is dependable—”
WHACK!

I tried to ignore the cleaver by concentrating on what was left to do at the salad table. Anna Paugh had completed about a dozen salads, so there weren’t many more to make. On the iceberg lettuce I arranged tomato quarters, a green pepper ring, and an onion ring. There was a little dish of black olives sitting beside the crock of French dressing, and I decided to be a little creative and carefully cut the olives in half and placed the halves dead center. This green, red, and black palette I thought quite pretty until Vera appeared, slipping up to my elbow and picking each olive half off the salads, onto which she spooned the French dressing for her customers. Then she whisked over to the main table and deftly called out her two orders before she spun out of the kitchen with her tray of salads. Vera stirred up breezes in her brisk turns and pauses. She might have been a ballet dancer, only she wasn’t pretty enough.

Although the salads were not to be “dressed” until the diners chose their salad dressings, I decided to adorn three or four of them with my mother’s Roquefort-dressing-without-equal. I know there are people who hate Roquefort cheese dressing. But they have never tasted my mother’s. It is the picture of simplicity: Roquefort (well, blue cheese, as times are hard) and oil. Just those two ingredients. The trouble is, most people (like Helene Baum) don’t know how to put the two together. The dressing is like velvet. I capped the salads with it and replaced the discarded black olive halves, studding them atop the glossy white dressing. I finished them off with just a powdering of paprika. They looked quite lovely.

Mrs. Fulbright and Miss Bertha were my dining-room charges. Miss Bertha was difficult, and cheap to boot. Vera always knew where the tips were. But her dinner companion, Mrs. Fulbright, was as sweet as could be. She wore black voile and was ancient—she might have been even ninety—and she knew Aurora Paradise and would always ask after her, as if Aurora were in some foreign place rather than upstairs.

Miss Bertha reminded me of a silver snail, with her gray hair worn in a bun, a gray dress of some shiny stuff that reflected light like rain, and a corset like a shell. Her small body seemed hard and compact, armored against the world. She had a really mean streak. Of course, she could hardly hear at all and wore a hearing aid big as a fist with
a battery that was always running down. About the only thing that didn’t have to be repeated to her a hundred or so times was the whistle of the passing B&O train. So after several tries of telling her what was out in the kitchen for dinner and having her say “What? . . . what? . . . what?” I’d just yell. Naturally, that would bring Vera fast on her feet and she would later report the incident to my mother, saying, well,
she
had no trouble at all taking Miss Bertha’s order, and no one paid any attention to me saying, “Of course she could, because I’d just yelled out ‘PORK CHOPS OR MEAT LOAF? PORK CHOPS OR MEAT LOAF?’ ” or whatever happened to be out in the kitchen on a given night. No one ever paid any attention to me.

Will and I were always getting lectured on How to Treat the Aged. It was really irritating. My argument was that the aged had been around for decades longer than me and they should know by now that life was really tough. Whereas
I
was only twelve and had yet to learn.

I argued. Will smiled. Will would just stand there with his bright brown eyes agleam for all the world as if he just adored these lectures and was soaking up
every
word, when I knew he wasn’t paying the least bit of attention. His way was to pretend life was just great and then go away and do what he wanted, which included things like going to Miss Bertha when no one else was around and pretending, by moving his mouth, that he was talking. She would get really hysterical about her hearing aid—pounding it, shaking it, and so forth—until Will would calmly take it and give it a little punch or something and then start talking in a slightly louder tone of voice. Miss Bertha thought Will was the Miracle Worker. Most people did. Sonny Smooth.

Instead of the two dozen guests expected, there were only ten or twelve more who showed up, and they all came in fairly close together, so I was able to break away earlier than usual. After my own wonderful dinner of apple-onion-laced pork chops and mashed potatoes, I retrieved the notebook from under my mattress and carried it down to the Pink Elephant, where I burnt the candle at both ends, as the saying goes.

•   •   •

The notebook was wonderful.

It was full of strange utterances, as if the story had been told by someone in a cave, the words coming through some tunnel in the rocks, distorted by twists and turns. There were a lot of cross-outs,
some scattered words and phrases that Dr. McComb had managed to make out. But mostly it was like an indecipherable code.

Indecipherable until now, that is.

When the leaves fall, you can see—

But see what?

—minnows swimming light.

Was Ulub talking about the lake? Was it minnows swimming in the lake? That didn’t make any sense, either.

I had taken the big flashlight from the drawer beneath the front desk where Mrs. Davidow kept a few tools. Down in the Pink Elephant, I lit what stubs of tallow candles there were, dropping their wax in the saucers and drawing the saucers right around the notebook. I spotlighted the words with the flashlight’s beam. Its top was nearly as big around as a car headlight, and it was heavy to hold. But the candles were too low and guttery to shine across the pages, so the flashlight would have to do.

And I had to remember: this was not only Ulub’s stumbling account of what happened (
what
happened?), but it was his account in combination with his brother’s equally difficult speaking problem, and then strained through Dr. McComb’s understanding of both Ulub and Ubub, for it was he who was deciphering the words. A shadow of a shadow of a shadow.

I refused to be discouraged. Carefully, I read every word—or maybe I should say every
marking.
Words failed Dr. McComb at certain points and he tried to put in sounds, like little grunts across the page, and sometimes left blanks. There were also a lot of cross-outs. So that

When the leaves fall, you can see minnows swimming light

really was set down

When the leaves fall, you can see
minahs minds mends winds
minnows swimming
lake like
light.

It was not long, the notebook story, not much more than three pages, and it stopped abruptly, as if they were all tired out, the three of them. But after a while there were not so many cross-outs, not so many grunts and blank spaces. This was not because Ulub had finally grown a silver tongue, but it seemed like Dr. McComb had got caught up in his story and just supplied words that sounded like what Ulub was saying without all of the agonizing over them or trying to make sense out of them. Although the “minnows” passage certainly made precious little sense. I read on through a rush of images and sounds that I could make nothing of, except to note their movement and color.

The word “raft” ended it so abruptly I felt as if I’d stumbled and fallen, as if my foot had hit a boot scraper and dropped into some dark doorway.

I went back to the first sentence and the cross-outs. What I thought was that the words crossed out must
sound
like what Ulub and Ubub had said, and Dr. McComb had been looking for a meaning in the sound so he could put down actual words and make some sense out of them. They
didn’t
make sense, of course, so there were cross-outs.

“Minnows” I was sure didn’t mean tiny fish, nor had Ulub meant anything like fish. The crossed-out words were “minahs,” “minds,” “mends,” and “winds.” “Minds” was probably changed to “mends” as that was nearer the sound. But there was an “o” sound too, so that’s where he’d gotten “minnows.” I looked at “winds.” I thought about that. I tried to be Ulub, pouting up my lips, and hearing an “m” and seeing how close it might sound to a “wuh.”

My eyes snapped open. Windows.
Was it “windows”?

When the leaves fall you see
windows
swimming light

Oh!

When the leaves fall you see windows
swim in
light!

Could Ulub have been
looking in through a window?
But that made perfect sense. For Ulub and Ubub worked around the Devereau house, raking leaves and pruning and stuff during the day, so it was certainly possible that Ulub might have gone back at night.

I was truly excited. For if I began with the fact that Ulub had been
peeking through the windows of the house, and had
seen
something, then other details might fall into place. I sat there with my head in my hands, staring down at the page; the candles flickered wanly and the old flashlight, brilliant as a sun at the start, was now weakening, its batteries dying, I supposed. I shook it, but that only made it fade more. Light was being leeched away, sucked into the shadows that were growing like thick heavy vines up the Pink Elephant’s stuccoed walls.

Oh, if only Mr. Root had been there when Ulub and Ubub told this story!

Well, he wasn’t, so I would have to make do with what I had. And what I had to remember was that this tale was important enough to make the Wood boys actually tell it to Dr. McComb (who they were probably even more afraid of than other La Porte people, given his “position”). So there was no doubt that it was worth getting to the bottom of.

But it was more like the bottom of a dream. For it read, not like a waking experience, but a dream one, where images tangle together and meanings pile on top of one another like a row of cards in Aurora’s solitaire game.

I had the notebook. And I had Ulub. And Mr. Root, the translator. And I could put questions to Ulub, who could at least nod, or say no or yes, or some version of them.

But then I wondered: Should I put poor Ulub through this? Bring it all up again when maybe all the Woods wanted to do was forget it—maybe already
had
forgot it? I ran my hand over the cool black-and-white cover, thinking. Curiosity, I guess, won out. But it was more than just curiosity: I had to know what had happened to Mary-Evelyn.

I snuffed out the candles and sat in what was left of the dying light of the flash. The flashlight pointed its dim ghost-circle at the wall and in my mind I saw the Girl again as I had seen her that morning. Was it only that morning? It seemed so long ago.

Anyone would have said to me that I’d seen a ghost, and laughed. Would a ghost appear walking along Second Street in La Porte? There was just something so
substantial
about Second Street, where the Sheriff gave out parking tickets.

If I hadn’t been so sleepy, I think, I would even have come down here to the lake, like I did tonight. I think I wanted to look across its flat blackness, wanted to see if the Girl would be there. Wanted to see her moonbright hair shining, like Wonder bread, in the dark.

You would think that the very first thing I’d do the next morning would be to take the notebook straight up to Britten’s store and look for Ulub and Ubub. But I didn’t. First, I wanted to talk to the Sheriff, for I was uncertain about making Ulub relive all of this, as it might be painful to him.

Anyway, the
first
thing I always did in the mornings was to get down to the kitchen at seven o’clock and see to putting the syrup pitchers on the tables. It was always cold in the dining room before my mother got the stoves going full blast, especially if you were carrying a bowl full of ice and butter around. Even Vera, although she would not stoop to such a chore, and who was always black-uniform-perfect, would sometimes wear a dark cardigan as she whisked around the dining room, checking the tables for syrup and meanly hoping I hadn’t done my job.

The other girls, like Anna Paugh and Sheila, would come later, Sheila looking disheveled, like she didn’t know what struck her and like she’d just this moment risen from bed and yanked on whatever was lying around. It was hard to blame anybody for acting dislocated and wandering in with a “Where am I? Where am I? Is this hell?” expression. To have to deal with Miss Bertha’s hearing aid in the early-morning cold was not my idea of fun, either. Since the breakfast menu was much the same from one morning to another (except French toast sometimes replaced pancakes, as it did this morning)—eggs any which way, bacon or sausage, toast or biscuits—I thought sometimes Miss Bertha was just doing this to me on purpose, making me repeat and
repeat items. But my humor would always improve when I remembered that I myself was soon to be the recipient of some of my mother’s powdered-sugar French toast and spicy sausage.

This particular morning my mind was occupied by things more important even than French toast, and I raced through the serving and then polished off my allotment very quickly so that I could take a taxi into town. I called Axel’s Taxis to pick me up about halfway up the drive, because Ree-Jane was up early for once and would undoubtedly want a ride, with me paying, of course. The dispatcher told me Axel would be there right away, but of course it was Delbert, not Axel.