Hotel Paradise (2 page)

I have always thought it speaks well of Lola that occasionally she’s invited to join Aurora for cocktails. I suppose I could be mean and say that these invitations are extended only when Aurora’s supply of Gordon’s gin or Johnnie Walker is running low, but I’m not sure that’s the case. There is something at times actually winning about Lola, a sort of blitheness which is a relief from the grinding work routine that my mother always follows. This is not to say my mother fails by comparison—good Lord, no. If she didn’t have her work routine the whole place would collapse just as the fourth floor fire escape always threatens to do.

One of Aurora’s rooms has a fire escape that she uses as a small balcony. Aurora and Lola Davidow sometimes man the balcony, joined occasionally by our chain-smoking, sixty-year-old desk clerk named Marge Byrd. Marge likes to keep a pint flask under the desk and takes nips from it when business either speeds up or slows down. The three of them sit up there on folding chairs, drunk as loons, hurling down greetings at arrivals coming up the drive. My mother naturally objects to this as unseemly, and so does Lola when Lola’s not up there with Aurora and Marge Byrd. My mother comes out on the porch and then the driveway, looking. Finally, seeing Lola Davidow up there, her hand shading her brow, she calls up some kitchen emergency, real or made-up. The object of this is to let them know that she works while they play, and who can blame her?

So, Aurora can still continue as the “head.” And I suspect that the visits of Alberta’s are to be taken as board meetings, for the sister has a legal interest in the place also. When she shows up (always
unannounced) a couple of times a year, then Aurora has family to join her out on the fire escape. Oh, how they appear out there in their lavender and stiff lace collars and buckled shoes as occasionally they look down and wave!

Lola Davidow sometimes complains (because she isn’t invited, I’m sure) that they’re getting rowdy and maybe we should call the Sheriff’s office. Of course, she’s only kidding, but I wish she’d go ahead and do it sometimes because anything that could get me within a stone’s throw of La Porte’s Sheriff could only be good news.

The county sheriff is the real bright spot in my life. His name is Sam DeGheyn and everyone calls him Sam, except I can’t quite work up the nerve to do it. I call him “Sheriff” even in the privacy of my own mind. Since he has the important job of peacekeeping and, if it’s needed, criminal chasing, I never want to appear to be wasting his lime by hanging around the courthouse or interrupting him in his daily duties. What I do is help by watching for red flags on the parking meters or checking out cars parked where they shouldn’t be—such as blocking an alley or sitting in a loading zone.

I keep my eye peeled for illegal parking so I can have something to report to the Sheriff. At one time I would have loved a horrible crime happening right at the Hotel Paradise—a shootout, maybe, with Ree-Jane in the crowd looking on from the porch, where she would then be sprayed by machine-gun fire. This would be a legitimate reason for calling the Sheriff. But that never happens.

The one time I honestly could have asked for police help, I didn’t: that was the time I was left alone at the Hotel Paradise for two days while everyone else took off to escort the precious Regina Jane Davidow to visit a friend of hers. My brother, Will, was already off visiting his friend Brownmiller Conroy or he would have been left behind, too.

When I say “alone” I mean, of course, me and Aurora Paradise, but somehow I couldn’t imagine Aurora coming to my rescue when the hatchet killer came. Imagine yourself as not even yet in your teens and alone in a ninety-eight-room hotel in dead winter. Imagine the possibilities for random noises—the creakings, the scrapings, the foot-falls,
the howlings in the woods, the owl sounds, the winds, the bats—and so on. Yet, I didn’t think anything of it—I mean, I was
scared
, naturally, but I assumed this to be my lot in life. I had to send food up to the fourth floor on the dumbwaiter, and whisky. I was
not
to bother Aurora myself. She hated visitors. When the delivery was made, I would go to sit as close to the top floor as I could get so as to be near somebody.

I don’t know how Sheriff DeGheyn came to hear about this, but he did. And when he asked me about it, with a look of honest concern, I was casual. Oh, I told him,
someone
had to take care of the hotel. The Sheriff just shook his head and mentioned words like “courage” and so forth that I couldn’t apply to what had been my own quivering self sitting on the stairs, but I was immensely pleased. He told me he would have been happy to keep an eye on the place and even come in and have a Coke or coffee with me had he known, and if ever it happened again—but then he stopped and got a set look on his face and somehow I knew it wouldn’t.

Soon after that, my mother asked me if I’d told Sam DeGheyn I’d been left by myself, and I said no, of course not, which was true. The tight look on my mother’s and Lola Davidow’s faces told me that he must have given someone absolute hell. It was worth being in the way of Mrs. Davidow’s terrible temper for a couple of days to know this. (The Sheriff is the only person in three counties who can bawl out Lola Davidow and get away with it.)

I was absolutely flabbergasted that I had managed to call up such concern in anyone, especially the Sheriff, for I was not used to someone’s sticking up for me. I don’t mean that if I was in real danger from illness or accident my mother wouldn’t be
concerned
; but it’s not wholly satisfactory to think you have to be mashed on the railroad tracks or get typhoid before someone cares. So the Sheriff’s attitude made having to stay in the hotel alone an experience I wouldn’t mind repeating, and I wished they’d all go away again. To work up that protective feeling in the Sheriff I would have wandered through the Transylvania woods with Earl Dracula himself for a week.

The Sheriff likes Teaberry gum, so I carry a pack in my pocket for when he runs out. He always seems to be running out, which surprises me, as he’s a man with a good memory, hardly absentminded at all. But when he starts searching his pockets for gum and mildly cursing himself for leaving it back in his desk, I casually produce my
pack. The Sheriff’s smile is high-voltage, and he turns it on when I do this. I always tell him to take a stick for later, too.

Then, we’ll walk along the pavement, the Sheriff with his citation book, me with my fund of knowledge about cars illegally or at least wrongly parked. People use five-minute zones and the La Porte library lot shamelessly.

Much of the time we share a comfortable silence on our curb treks. I love silence; I hate babble. Silence is a way of saying: We do not have to entertain each other; we are okay as we are.

The only place I have seen this at work is in a movie theater. Of course, there is the film up there as a wholesale “distraction,” that’s true. And yet, and yet . . . I like to look around in the auditorium lit just enough so that you can make out profiles and planes of cheeks, smiles or downturned mouths. Feelings show. And what I see then is little infant faces, child faces, tilted toward the screen, eating popcorn or drawing on straws in Pepsis and Cokes. When people are unaware they are being watched they look so innocent. Maybe I’m speaking of thralldom, of minds working together, a hush of lips, a hundred eyes all seeing the same thing and wanting the same thing (
“Oh, no! No! Don’t go in that room; he’s waiting for you, you poor girl. . .”
).

So the Sheriff and I walk in movie silence. The exceptional thing about him is that he never asks questions merely to fill a vacuum. “How’s the hotel?” or “How’s your mom?” never pass his lips. I imagine he’s fairly certain that if the hotel collapsed and killed all the guests and help, or if my mother’s eyebrows got burned in a grease lire, or if Lola Davidow got her hand wedged in the cocktail-onion jar—I would mention it. No, if the Sheriff asks a question or makes a remark it means something. And because we can’t always engage in meaningful conversation, we are sometimes silent.

On one such occasion, the Sheriff asked me if Regina Jane Davidow had got that new car Lola said she was getting for her sixteenth birthday.

“Yes,” I said, glumly to his back. He was kneeling down checking the rust on the underside of the fender of Miss Ruth Porte’s little VW. Miss Ruth knew nothing about cars, and Sam kept his eye on the VW.

“Is it a white convertible?”

Glummer still, I said yes, again. Imagine not only being able to drive, but having your own car, your own convertible to boot. Ree-Jane was all over town in it, showing it off. I had not been invited yet to ride. The Sheriff straightened up, put a nickel in the meter because
you could just see the red flag was raring to go, and said to me, “I’ll tell you something, and you can do what you like about it. You know that tavern—the El Lobo—outside of Hebrides?”

I frowned slightly. “I think so.”

We continued on our walk. “Twice I’ve seen a brand-new white Chevy convertible parked outside it, sales sticker still on the side window.”

That was Ree-Jane’s, all right! How wonderful she should be in bad with the Sheriff, since she’s so sure he adores her, although I have never seen evidence of it. I watched him then snap his citation book shut and jam it in his hip pocket. He did not look at all adoring of Ree-Jane Davidow.

“That place is strictly off limits to kids—”

Kids!
He had referred to the future Countess of Kent as a “kid”! I could hardly wait to tell her.

“—to
anyone
under twenty-one years old.” His look at me was very serious. “Now, I didn’t go in and drag her out by her heels, which I should’ve. But if ever I see her there, I’ll bust her. I’m telling you because you might want to warn her. Or not.” He shrugged slightly. His eyes were expressive, but I couldn’t quite read the message.

Wonderful!
How wonderful to be in possession of this nugget better than gold, this warning to plague her with! Of course, I was casual about it, and merely said, “Um . . . I’ll see what I can do.” But roiling around in my mind as the Sheriff and I continued on our walk was a selection of great openings for the subject of Ree-Jane getting busted by the Sheriff. There was: “Oh, incidentally, I was talking to the Sheriff this morning, and . . .”; or “Sheriff DeGheyn happened to mention to me that a white convertible . . .” Et cetera. Making sure I stuck in how the El Lobo was “off limits to
kids.
”

It occurred to me that the Sheriff could easily have done the warning himself, as Ree-Jane has taken every opportunity to sit her ass on his desk since she’s been picking up speeding tickets from one of the deputies, Donny. She sits on the Sheriff’s desk like Lauren Bacall and tries to smolder.

I wondered why he didn’t. Probably because he didn’t want to embarrass her; the Sheriff is really nice that way.

Spirit Lake is a half-mile from the hotel, and I often walk down here and might even be the only person who does, aside from my brother, Will. I like to stop here at the spring and sit on the wall even when I don’t have any particular reason for coming, as I have tonight. The place is overgrown now, the untended grass and weeds and trees choking the narrow road halfway around so that a complete circle of the lake is becoming impossible, even on foot. But it is still quite beautiful, at least I think so, and some of its beauty comes from all of the undergrowth and overgrowth, from its wild look.

The most important thing about Spirit Lake, or the most terrible, is that a girl drowned here over forty years ago. The girl was my age—twelve—and no one knows exactly what happened. They say she took a rowboat out into the lake and it must somehow have capsized. The boat was seen drifting in the middle of the lake one moonlit night, but the people who saw it thought nothing of it; they thought one of the rowboats at the boathouse must have come loose from its mooring. And then the girl was found. Her absence wasn’t even reported until the next morning, and finally the family had to call the police.

Spirit Lake is small and partly covered with masses of water lilies and tall blowing grasses. Her body was found caught up in this water growth. Spirit Lake has always seemed mysterious, I think, and the drowning that no one could ever explain made it more so. No one back then knew why she had taken a boat out in the lake, especially at night, for her family said she had always been a little afraid of it.

Her family was made up of three aunts who lived in the only house
near the lake, a large gray house built a short distance back from the lake’s edge. There was no mother or father, only these sisters who all looked very much alike; yet she looked like none of them. Their name was Devereau, and her name was Mary-Evelyn. Mary-Evelyn Devereau.

I know all of these details because I have studied up on the case. Also, my own mother knew the family when she was a young girl herself, although she was older than Mary-Evelyn. I think my mother was about sixteen back then.

My mother was there when Mary-Evelyn drowned—I don’t mean she was an eyewitness, but she was one of the many people who gathered down at the edge of the lake when the police were searching for the body. My mother actually saw them pull the body in from the grasses and water lilies, where it had lain near the bank, tangled and floating. Mary-Evelyn was wearing a white dress like a party dress; it had layers of ruffles all around the skirt and was embroidered with tiny flower buds of blue silk up and down the front. My mother, being good at sewing herself, noted these details.

And my mother knew the family from their visits to the hotel; this was when the Paradises were still rampaging through it, including Aurora. Forty years ago, my great-aunt Paradise was probably just working up steam. Anyway, the Devereaus would occasionally drop in to have dinner. The dinners weren’t nearly so good then, for my mother hadn’t yet started doing the cooking. She is famous for her cooking. I have always been sorry she never got a chance to go to Paris and be famous in a place that’s worth being famous in. The point about these visits, though, is that during one of them, which was a birthday party for one of the aunts, someone took pictures of all of them, and my mother kept one. So I know just what Mary-Evelyn looked like, and her aunts, just before she drowned. I keep the snapshot in a Whitman’s candy box, along with some other objects I prize. My mother doesn’t know I held on to it while she was rummaging through her snapshot collection, nor do I think she’d care or miss it.