Hotel Paradise (24 page)

I was still thinking of the neon sign, ART—
blink
—EAT, and thinking that cooking was as much an art as anything. I sat there hearing her words, like wasps, circling and mostly dropping dead, but kept my distance by filling up mentally with more of that day’s lunch—
chicken pie. My mother’s chicken pie had no equal, anywhere. The pastry crust alone proved that (she was famous for that crust), for it was light and flaky, gold streaked with brown. But the thing was, my mother’s chicken pie had
chicken
in it, big chunks of white meat (so even I got white meat then) in a gravy that wasn’t that watery stuff you get in most chicken pies, but was creamy and had that sagey, peppery seasoning that took you back to Thanksgiving. . . .

“What are you smiling that silly
smile
for?”

“What? Oh. Chicken pie.” I had just started in on the succulent dice of potatoes, and the peas and the tiny onions, which I guess was too far from Tragic Death for Ree-Jane’s comfort.

“I’m talking about writing and art and you’re thinking of
food
? No wonder you’re fat.”

I wasn’t fat. I didn’t bother contradicting this. “Well, didn’t you have some chicken pie for lunch?”

Preening, showing off her supposedly wonderful figure (which it wasn’t), she said, “I never eat lunch.”

“Poor you.” The bits of deep-orange carrot, the silvery little onions . . .

“I don’t think
only
about food.”

She didn’t think about anything. “But what I was considering,” I said, “was, well, cooking’s an ART.” I sat there in the dark-green slat-back chair, rocking with even more energy, knowing we were so far from Mirror Pond we could have been on a desert island. What a horrible thought: Ree-Jane and me on a desert island.

She was having a little problem, for she actually couldn’t
criticize
my mother’s cooking. Everyone seemed to get almost deathly honest and awed when it came to my mother’s cooking. I frowned, thinking this over. It seemed a little strange. But it was true. Perhaps even I had missed some important point about my mother’s cooking. That was hard to believe, considering.

“Well, okay, your mother’s kind of an artist, okay. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

I decided to change the subject (which had gotten changed three or four times already) again, and drive the final nail into the vampire bride’s coffin by giving her an opportunity to show off and brag. “Why’re you dressed up, incidentally? That’s really a pretty shade of blue.” I’d heard her tell Will she was going out.

“I have a date.” She looked off into the loaming (I was thinking
in poetic terms because she was trying so hard to look dewy and dreamy) and added, “You don’t know him.”

No surprise, since I didn’t know anybody, particularly boys. And of course she wanted to make it seem that there were so many “known” boys interested in her that she had to have a whole new category: the Unknowns. “Where are you going?”

Here she extended her hands behind her head and lifted up her blond hair as if it were angel’s wings. I loathed that gesture. And Ree-Jane’s hair seemed to do a lot of color changing, sometimes lighter, sometimes darker, which she explained in summer by saying it was “sun-streaked.” Well, there were also spring and autumn—meaning, I didn’t think the change was seasonal. “Probably to the Cliquot Club.”

“I thought you had to be twenty-one to get in there.” I said it because I knew she wanted me to.

“
I
can
always
get in. Perry knows me.”

Perry was a man in his thirties who slobbered around lots of women, but I didn’t think Ree-Jane was one of them. “Oh,” was all I said. I was smiling down at the newspaper, now lying forgotten on the porch. I said a few more things about the club, really boring, until she finally got the idea she’d sucked whatever blood she could on this occasion and dragged her blue dress off the porch railing and left.

For another while, I sat there contentedly rocking, looking at the lines of oaks that were fuzzily back in place, mixing with the sky and other trees and mossy ground and gravel. Of course, my eyes fell more than once on the paper, but I was strangely untempted to pick it up and read. For possible bad news is just as much of a magnet as good. Although I still didn’t know the identity of the dead woman, although nothing had really changed, somehow the power of the facts to kill me had been weakened.

I had found out nothing more except for that “possible” suicide business. No details about where she’d come from, no physical description at all. Except she was blond, and blond could mean anything.

Just look at Ree-Jane.

It was a small victory, shutting up Ree-Jane, but that still left me with the problem of finding out just who had died in Mirror Pond.

The
Conservative
was lying there near my feet, a corner lifting and fluttering in a gust of wind. What I wanted was to find out in easy stages, a little here and a little there—a shred of truth, a pack of lies, a jumble of information I could choose bits and pieces from and put them together and see the answer to my question when I was ready to see it. Suzy Whitelaw’s drippy story should have satisfied this need; but no, any newspaper account would still have too much truth in it for comfort. But not nearly as much as the blare of truth that would come from the Sheriff’s mouth—and I was amazed by my foolhardy visit to the courthouse yesterday morning. True, I’d rather have heard it from him, but the “it” I wanted to hear might not be the “it” he was going to tell. And the trouble was, I could not let on by so much as the flicker of an eyelash that I would be devastated if he said something like “a young girl, real young, pale blond hair, wearing a sprigged cotton dress.” I would actually turn into the pillar of ice I was coolly pretending to be.

Then came the question Why? Why would I turn into a pillar of ice at the discovery?

I couldn’t answer that.

What I wanted, then, was a kind of
slanted
truth, and I turned over possible sources of undependable information. There was Ulub and Ubub, not because they were undependable but because I couldn’t understand them. Probably, they hadn’t heard about the dead lady. I
got the impression they didn’t keep up with the news in the
Conservative
, and since most people didn’t talk to them, they’d have no way of knowing. Unless from Mr. Root. Then there was Britten’s store, where a lot of old-timers gathered, so each one could prove he knew more than the others. There was Miss Flagler, too. She was much more fearful than Miss Flyte, I’d noticed, and certainly would be of dead bodies. She always tried to pretend they didn’t really happen, or that there was a happier explanation, and so made such details out to be better than they were. She might even bring the dead lady back to life again by saying, “Well, she was probably just concussed after all that, and they must have taken her to County General.” “But the paper said ‘dead,’ Miss Flagler!” “Oh, pshaw, you know you can never believe anything that Whitelaw woman tells you.”

The easiest of all of these at the moment would be Britten’s store as it would take only five minutes to get there. I was about to set out when a car came crunching along the drive, and I figured it was Mrs. Davidow’s station wagon, bringing her back from town. The wagon bumped along, spewing up gravel bits, horn honking as she rounded the corner (as I eased down in my chair so she wouldn’t see me) and coming to rest under the porte cochere. She always tapped on the horn to let people know she was back so we could start up the marching band and throw confetti, but it was mostly a signal for Walter to come and get the groceries. I always thought that was pretty funny; she could have waited on the wind as soon as Walter to carry the grocery bags. Eventually, Walter would get there, but no use honking.

Steps on the porch stairs, and the screen door banged. I heard her calling out for Walter.

Her first stop would be the kitchen, for she would be buzzing with news for my mother. Mrs. Davidow loved her role of Messenger. Sometimes, I pictured the hotel as one of those out-of-the-way castles back in the Middle Ages, where huge beamed doors were flung open and a messenger nearly fell off his horse to rush in with news for the king. In many ways I like this fantasy, for it makes me feel the hotel is its own place, surrounded by water, connected to the rest of the world only by a drawbridge which can be lowered or raised when we see fit. So what I realized was that with the paper out today, she’d come back absolutely full of all the news about this dead woman. There is no better source of questionable information than Mrs. Davidow; she loves her role as the person coming from a distant country so much
that she can’t help making a bad thing worse or a good thing better with a lot of little odds and ends either left out or put in just to make her story better. Thus, if I heard some detail that confirmed my worst suspicions (
“pretty,” “young,” “a stranger”
), I might be able to ignore it.

After these trips to town, Lola Davidow always heads for the kitchen, where she sits on the salad table and smokes cigarettes while she shares with my mother that day’s takings of gossip, and my mother would be standing as always between the long work table and the cast-iron stove, cutting up vegetables or cutting circles in biscuit dough, smoking too, and listening. It’s a familiar scene. When I am not busy criticizing them for a hundred different heartfelt sins, I almost admire them. For they are making the best of things. They certainly aren’t making money.

Knowing where she was going, I followed her. When I banged through one of the swinging doors between dining room and kitchen, Mrs. Davidow was perched as always on the big white porcelain table where at dinnertime I put up the salad bowls. The table was blessedly clear now of everything—a clean slate—except for the crock of French dressing that always sits at one end, aging and being added to when it gets low. Half an onion steeps in the crock; a red swirl of paprika floats on top. It is, of course, the best French dressing in the universe. The kitchen was blessedly free of Vera, who always butts into their conversations, correcting them for truth. The only other person was Walter, standing in the shadows at the far end of the room with the big industrial dishwasher. Mrs. Davidow was telling him to go out and bring in the groceries, and Walter nodded, but just kept wiping at a cookie sheet. Naturally, I didn’t want anyone to think I’d come to
listen
, so I purposefully moved to the French dressing crock, lifted the lid, and peeked in. As it was my responsibility to keep an eye on the dressing level, no one paid any attention to me. Anyway, I put on a busy frown, twirled the ladle around, and made patterns with the paprika. Then I added some oil. I wanted to think it was a compliment to my skill that no one questioned what I was doing, but I knew that wasn’t so, since it would be hard to ruin the French dressing, there being no exact ratios of one thing to another. This is another thing that amazes me about my mother’s cooking: there seldom are. And one day it struck me that this was real ART-EAT, in the full Arturo sense—that an artist simply
knows.
It might appear that the person was haphazard, tossing a little paint here, a little paprika there; but
no. The artist has such a feeling for what he is doing that little measurements are built into his mind and eye and hand. That’s the way I explained it, and with this thought I lightly tossed a sprinkling of paprika and a teaspoon of sugar into the dressing.

I was also lightly listening. Lightly, because what I wanted to do was partly remove my eardrums from unpleasant news and partly open them up to what I wanted to hear. If I’d had Miss Bertha’s hearing aid I could have fiddled it around. What I did was to enter a kind of dream world where I could raise and lower a sort of theaterlike curtain between Mrs. Davidow’s words and my hearing. Like a filter.

Mrs. Davidow was perched in her usual way on the salad table, her stocky legs crossed at the ankles and swinging slightly. She smoked and talked. My mother smoked and listened. I added salt to the crock and stirred and heard her words muted as in a dream or in memory.

. . . a stranger, probably not even one of the lake people.

Well, I already knew that no one had identified her. I decided to go to the icebox and look in. Now she was talking about actually having bumped into “Sam” in the Rainbow Café. That stopped me in my intention of making a Black Cow with Coke and vanilla ice cream, as it would be too complicated a procedure. Instead, I quietly slipped out a small pitcher of iced tea and went to the cupboard for a glass.

. . . said it was really strange, she must have walked across White’s Bridge. Where was she going
?

Lola Davidow, lady dick. My mother said something about she didn’t see why that was important either and then told me to put back the pitcher of tea. As I did this, Mrs. Davidow was answering:

To meet someone
?
She might not have gone there on her own.

Dreamily, I carried my iced tea glass towards the dish drain, walking between Mrs. Davidow’s swinging feet and my mother’s dicing knife, too close to their voices to blunt the hard edges of their words.

By the time I got to the drain table, where we waitresses dump trayloads of dishes for Walter to stack up, I was out of waking danger, back into semidreaming. The state was helped along by Walter, whose motions were always dreamlike, and who was wiping a big platter, cradling it like a baby and slowly dragging the dishtowel around it. He told me “Hello,” a nasal, sort of tongue-stuck sound, as he gave me his wide, rubber-band smile. Walter was always in a good humor,
always working at his many jobs, always in shadow, as if he carried a bag of shadows to take out and put on.

“Sam said there were tire tracks. A pickup truck, probably. Four-wheel drive.”

My mother said, “Mirror Pond. I wonder why anyone would get killed there. Or kill herself. It’s miles from anywhere.”

That was true enough. But then I suppose if you’re going to kill somebody, you’d want a miles-from-anywhere sort of place. The map in my mind of the local geography was about as dependable as directions from a blind man. I knew Mirror Pond and White’s Bridge were somewhere north of Spirit Lake; that is, if you went as the crow flies from the Devereau place, you’d come to White’s Bridge and Mirror Pond, near it. But this was miles I was talking about; it was too far to walk.