Winter at Death's Hotel (2 page)

“I'm going then, madame.”

“Thank you, Ethel.”

She moved about the room again. She touched things, smiled at nothing, realized that she was excited—
New
York! A hotel detective! An illicit liaison!
She came to the full-length mirror and studied herself. Without her glasses, she looked, she thought, rather pretty—but then without her glasses, she couldn't see very well, so perhaps it was only her poor vision. Her figure had come back after the babies, although she'd been secretly pleased (and scolded herself for vanity) that her breasts had kept their size. So had Arthur been, she thought. Of course, there was the problem of her hips…

She began to unbutton the front of the combinations. She slipped a lacy strap from her left shoulder; her breast appeared, happily plump, rose-brown at the nipple. She exposed the other breast. Yes. She undid more buttons, pulled the garment over her hips. There. There was the soft hair, paler brown, she thought, than her head, so intricately coiled. Her own smell rose to her, clear through the scent of patchouli. She slid the combinations down, pulled one side over her left heel, then the other over the right.

And, naked except for her stockings, wondered if anyone could see her.

She threw her left arm across her breasts and cupped her right hand over her pubis. Crouched, she turned, as if she would surprise an intruder. (
And
say
what?
she asked herself.) There was nobody, of course. She looked at the windows, over which Ethel had pulled lace curtains. Could somebody see in? Some horrible creature several streets away with a telescope?

You
fool.
She had had these fantasies when she was thirteen. They hardly suited her at twenty-eight. Aloud, she said, “Remember—you're a representative of Britain!” That was what Arthur had said to her as they had come down the gangway from the ship. Arthur could be rather stuffy sometimes, was the truth of it, although she'd never say so to anyone else. She said, “Remember you're British!” and laughed and took her hands away and walked with deliberate slowness to the steamer trunk and selected a flannel Jaeger dressing gown and put it on with the same slow grace. Then she looked around the room and even waved (at nothing), as if to show that she had risen above the moment.

When Arthur came in, she was lying in bed, the robe exchanged for a sensible nightgown because of course she couldn't go to bed naked. (“What would people say?” her mother would have shrieked.) Arthur's cheeks were red, his pince-nez fogged, but he was grinning. “New York is a hurly-burly!” he shouted. “Are you asleep?”

She was laughing. “How could I be?”

“I walked to Broadway. I walked
up
Broadway. I walked over to Fifth Avenue and I walked
down
to Washington Square! It is all quite magnificent in a somewhat
active
way. I've never thought of this before. London is magnificent for its static things—buildings and statues and places where great things happened: the Monument! Westminster! New York is magnificent for what
is
happening—the people, the traffic, an electrical feeling. Perhaps it's money being made. Are you tired?”

“Why would I be tired?”

“Remember that you've been unwell, Touie. You mustn't overexcite yourself. And it's been an exhausting day. Getting us and our goods and chattels off the ship and into a hackney carriage; getting here—all that. You must be tired.”

“You're having an idea, Arthur.”

“Oh, well—I only thought—it's an hour until we have to dress for dinner—perhaps a bit of a lie-down…”

“Well—lie down.”

That went well, and they both dozed a bit, and then she lay on his chest and told him how silly she'd been in fearing she'd been watched.

“Nonsense, little one.” He stroked her hair. “Do you know that the walls of this hotel are two feet thick? And do you know why? It's what makes the hotel so quiet: They put up two brick walls separated by twenty inches of air and then filled that space with volcanic stone! Yes, hundreds of tons of porous, and therefore quite light, stone between the rooms! I read the pamphlet the little man at Reception gave me—wretchedly written thing—and it's quite remarkable, quite remarkable. Nothing like it in London. It's very…mmm…
New
York.
”

“It is quiet, isn't it?”

“So nobody could possibly have seen you. What you were feeling were my spirit emanations.”

“You mean
you
were watching me.”

“From a distance, and only in spirit, my dear.”

“And then you came in, in the flesh.” She snuggled against him. “How nice.”

***

At seven, they dressed for a very early dinner (really more a workingman's tea, she thought) with Henry Irving, who'd left a card and an invitation to join him, but who had to be at the theater at what she thought of as the dinner hour. Louisa and Arthur managed, in a practiced but never-mentioned ballet, to avoid dressing in front of each other. Louisa needed the help of Ethel, anyway, and it would hardly have been proper for Arthur to be there when Ethel was and Louisa was less than fully dressed. Arthur, therefore, dressed first while she stayed in the bed. He smoked a cigarette, put on trousers and shirt and announced that he was now decent by walking around to her side of the bed as he talked.

“Perhaps I should take up smoking,” she said.

“Ladies don't smoke.”

“You make it look so nice.”

“Only fast women smoke.” He was trying to tie a white butterfly in his cravat. “Drat! Why did Masters have to make himself sick!”

“I don't think he made himself. I think he caught something.”

“Because he's undersized and pale as a ghost and unhealthy—typical London lower class. I should never have taken him on.”

She smiled. “What you need, Arthur, is some sinister Indian. A dacoit or a dervish—something from one of your stories.”

“Damn my stories. Drat! I can't get this tie right!”

She got into her robe in the shelter of the bedcovers and went to him. He had lit a new cigarette, had it jutting from his mouth as he raised his chin for her to tie the bow. She took the cigarette from his mouth, puffed, and put it back. He cried, “Louisa!”

“Hush or I can't tie your tie.”

“You must never do that again. Promise me.”

He was using his serious voice, when he sounded like her father. She finished the tie and said, “I promise,” but ended the promise with a silent
never
to
take
a
cigarette
from
your
mouth
again.

“I shall be in the sitting room. Shall I ring for Ethel?”

She began going through her dresses. She had put only three evening dresses in this trunk. All were conservative, matronly, “nice,” the sort of thing that the retiring wife of an eminent man should wear. She had picked out the bronze with the gunmetal stripes and the
pavé
over the breasts when Ethel came in. She had been out for a walk. It had been quite exciting! Louisa was left unsure why it was that Ethel could go for a walk alone but she couldn't. The difference was some nuance of propriety, she knew that, but she supposed the real difference was Arthur.

***

A little after eleven that night, Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt was walking—it might more accurately have been said
marching
—up Sixth Avenue. He had been a commissioner for more than a year, the entire time devoted to what in military terms was called a “forward strategy.” In police terms, this meant reorganization, the ripping out of dead wood, and the tearing up by the roots of corruption and graft from what had been (and, he feared, still was, thanks to his three fellow commissioners and a wickedly immoral Democratic Party) the most corrupt police force in the country. Soon, he promised himself, he would go on to better things, leaving, he hoped, a legacy—or at least the reputation of a legacy.

Part of his project of reform was this nightly walk, every night a different part of the city, to check on the beat policemen: Were they on their beats? Were they on time? Were they sober? Terrible Teddy might appear anywhere, any time from nine to midnight, and now and then at three in the morning. He had found sleeping cops, drunken cops, cops sitting over fires in trash cans getting warm, cops getting their ashes hauled by prostitutes, cops doing everything that cops shouldn't. The broken careers of cops littered the paths of Teddy's walks; the ghosts of fired cops haunted them as the fallen haunt a battlefield.

Roosevelt in fact thought in military terms—thought, too, that he'd make a damned good general, if only he could find a war. And of course he'd
be
a general, not a private or a sergeant or even a captain: his career, having started at least halfway up the ladder because he was a child of privilege, was of course headed for the top. And he
had
to reach the summit of whatever mountain he chose to climb; it was no good enjoying the view from even a few feet down. He had to
achieve
—but he also had to be seen to achieve. At that moment, he was thinking that his next step should be to run for governor of New York State. And to be elected, of course. He'd already run for mayor of New York City but lost—finished a humiliating third, in fact—and he'd been appointed to the Civil Service Commission and to this job as a commissioner of police, but what could a man do as one of several members of a commission? Where was the glory in it? Where was the fame?

He swung his arms, as if to a military band, marched toward Twenty-Second Street as if on parade. If eleven o'clock at night was at least theoretically a dangerous time to be out, let the crooks and bad men beware: Terrible Teddy was armed with both a police whistle and a revolver. He secretly hoped some fool of a criminal (criminals were stupid, he insisted) would try something. Action—he was a man of action!

He was aware of a horse-drawn wagon heading downtown. Somebody sat on the box. The rig-out didn't look criminal and so didn't interest him, and he barely looked at it before returning to thoughts of himself as governor; what he saw from the corner of an eye registered only as
Sheeny
with
a
wagon.
Of no interest to a commissioner of police.

He walked on, glanced at his watch, thought that the beat policeman was thirty seconds late. Another deadhead! Another time-server, another—

A large bulk in heavy blue wool rounded the next corner, his truncheon spinning on its strap as if he were giving a display of fancy stick-work. He would be Irish. They were all Irish; that was part of the trouble: they stuck together; they owed more to their common Irishness than they did to law and order; they were the creatures of Irish politicians, who got them their jobs and paid for their funerals, and they were the pawns of the Sons of Erin and the Hibernian League and Tammany Hall. The only thing that could have been worse, to Roosevelt, was if they had been Italian. A few Italians had been let into the force, doubtless bringing the Black Hand and other criminal societies with them, because it was well known that all Italians were criminals. Trying to turn them into policemen was like making a bed for the fox in the henhouse and expecting it to lay eggs.

“Sure, and it's Mr. Roosevelt hisself!” The Irish accent was probably laid on thick for his benefit; the beat cops knew it annoyed him. The man seemed so jovial that Roosevelt wondered if he had been warned. Or was drunk.

“You're a minute late, officer.”

“Aw, I was having a bit of a waterworks in an alley, your Eminence. Hard to concentrate on the police work if your bladder's screaming for a drizzle.”

“Report.” Roosevelt moved himself close enough to sniff the man's breath.

“Ah, very much a great deal of the usual tonight, Commissioner. Staying alert, being vigilant, preventing crime.” The man seemed to blow his breath out with greater force to make sure Roosevelt got its pungent cabbage-with-onions scent.

“That's what the handbook says you
ought
to be doing. When I say ‘Report,' I don't want my own words recited back to me, man. I mean, tell me what's happening!”

“Oh, sure it's very quiet. Cold, not many of the bad boys and girls on the streets. And this is a decent neighborhood, gentlefolk all, most of them tucked up in their beds by now. I been checking the locks on the businesses with rigor; all well and good there. Cautioned one young swell was three sheets to the wind and headed for a rap on the head by some lushworker and his pockets emptied if he didn't go home, so I put him in a hack and sent him on his way.”

“You'd better have found him a night in jail.”

“Indeed, indeed, but that'd of meant me walking him to the station and leaving the streets without police protection, so I used me better judgment and let him go. And isn't it that we're supposed to be preventing crime more than punishing it? Oh, and I met you, Mr. Roosevelt, which is a high point of the evening and will go in my report for sure.”

Roosevelt grunted in disgust. “Well, you'll simply waste more time, standing here jawing at me. Good night to you.”

“Indeed, indeed, and to yous, your Honor.”

The fat cop went off whistling and spinning his stick. Roosevelt, deflated by the triviality of the encounter—not quite what Prince Hal found when he made the round of the campfires before Agincourt—turned right and walked back to Fifth Avenue and right again and so headed home.

***

The wagon that the Commissioner had hardly noticed made its plodding way down Sixth Avenue, its driver seeming to nod over the reins. At Fourteenth Street, it picked an erratic route by side streets down to that over-romanticized area called Greenwich Village, now a louche resort of the down-and-out, the bohemian, and a good many of the Italians who were part of the latest tidal wave to break over New York. Respectable brownstone houses clustered near the bottom of Fifth Avenue and Washington Square (although the original families had already moved farther north), but south and east there was squalor. It was a village in name only, bleeding into the Bowery to the south and the new tenement area that bulged into the East River in that direction. It had been a village when Washington was president; now, the city had engulfed it, eaten it, digested it, excreted it as a slum.