Hotel Paradise (38 page)

All of the other reservations had descended on the dining room at exactly the same time as the Baum party and Miss Bertha. As good a waitress as Anna Paugh was, she could not be at all the tables at once, so that eventually the diners were sending out little silent signals to me (since I appeared not to be doing much but standing at attention over the Baum table), either trying to beckon me over with little waves or mouthing silent requests—“water, water,” “rolls, rolls”—as if they were perishing in the desert. Miss Bertha, however, was not silent. She trumpeted down half the length of the room. I ignored them all.

It was halfway through this dinner that I realized several of the Baum guests were exchanging comments and theories about the dead
body found in Mirror Pond. I picked up the water pitcher and edged closer to the table, presumably to refill water glasses but really to listen. All that was clear was that the Sheriff and his men still hadn’t been able to identify the woman, and wasn’t it the most incredible mystery?

Unfortunately Helene Baum chose this interesting moment to take her life in her hands and complain that her lamb was overdone. The talk about White’s Bridge and the dead woman was deadened by the quarrel that broke out between Helene Baum and Mrs. Davidow over the lamb. Instead of quietly and quickly sending the lamb back for whatever reason, Mrs. Davidow told Helene that the lamb was
perfectly
cooked, that Jen always roasted it for exactly the same period of time. Naturally, Helene kept on complaining. It wasn’t pink, she said; it wasn’t
rare.
When she had it in Paris, it was
rare.
She started showing it around and holding it aloft as if for the judgment of God and the president of France. If Vera had been there at that moment, instead of in the kitchen, she would have made mewling, apologetic noises and offered to get a lamb-replacement. I’ll say this for Lola Davidow: no one was going to criticize my mother’s cooking when
she
was around. So since no one was going to do anything but fight about it, I snatched the plate from Helene Baum’s presenting hand and hurried off to the kitchen.

There was nothing overcooked about the lamb at all; it wasn’t supposed to be served rare. Even I knew that. My mother said it could give you the same disease you could get from underdone pork. Helene Baum always claimed something was wrong every time she came to the hotel, for she was jealous of my mother and her cooking. I set the plate on the surface of the black iron stove to heat up. Vera and my mother were hovering over the dessert table, apparently doing something complicated with the pies.

Just then Mrs. Davidow stormed into the kitchen, red-faced and fit to be tied, as Helene Baum was still going on about Paris and spring lamb. She told my mother about the complaint.

“Rare? The damned fool wants
rare
lamb?” My mother reached around to a shelf that held empty canning jars and banged one down on the pastry table. “Here, take her a jar of trichinosis.”

Lola and Vera laughed and so did my mother. It was a good lesson in not wasting anger on damned fools. But there was still Mrs. Baum’s dinner to be dealt with. What I did with the plate was to add a fresh half of roast potato and neaten up the pile of peas. I intended simply to make the plate look like a whole new dinner.

I did this mechanically, as my mind was really on the dead woman and Fern Queen. I was the only person, besides Jude Stemple, who suspected they were one and the same. As I spooned fresh hot gravy over the same old lamb slices, I wondered about my promise to Jude Stemple. Had I really, officially “promised”? I didn’t think so. I hadn’t actually
said
“I promise.” But it was no use; I couldn’t convince myself. Granted, I was often pretty careless with the truth, but it was one thing to make up convenient little stories and another thing to break promises. As I plucked a sprig of parsley from the parsley bowl and dropped it on the gravy, I was feeling noble.

Back at the Baum table, Mrs. Davidow was still smarting over the “undercooked lamb” accusation, and when she saw me place the fresh plate before Helene, she raised her eyebrows. For all that we didn’t get along most of the time, Mrs. Davidow and I often operated on the same wavelength. I wiggled my eyebrows at her, in answer to her own eyebrow movement, and as Helene Baum pronounced
this
lamb properly cooked, I rolled my eyes and Mrs. Davidow answered with some eye rolling of her own.

So the dinner proceeded through dessert, with Vera whisking around the table placing a piece of Key lime chiffon pie, elegantly decorated with whipped cream, before each guest. Poor Anna Paugh was charging about between her five tables, and Miss Bertha was still yelling at me. I continued to pay no attention.

•   •   •

When the dinner party was over (or over enough for me to leave, as they were still carousing with brandy snifters), I had my own dinner (mint sauce like liquid emeralds), and at nearly ten p.m. I was sitting in the Pink Elephant with my notebook open before me and my chin in my hands, staring at my most recent rented painting. It was a restful, watery-colored garden scene by one of those French painters whose names all begin with M, and who the part-time librarian said was her very favorite painter. She told me all about him, but five minutes later I forgot. I wondered what that meant for my future education. There was another French painter who lived and worked at the same time and whose name (which I also forgot) was almost exactly the same as this one’s except for one letter. And the second one also painted in those watery colors, with tiny little strokes and dots. Now, I wondered how anyone in his right mind could be
expected to keep those two M-painters separate—or even why I
should
keep them separate. I wondered if it might not be a hoax, and it was all one painter.

All of this was merely distracting me from my real problem, about how not to tell the Sheriff about Fern Queen. And even Fern Queen was only part of a wider mystery. I sat at the green painted picnic table sleepily trying to figure it out.

“Fern didn’t have no kids.” That’s what Mr. Stemple had said. I reached for my Whitman’s box and removed the snapshot of the Devereau sisters taken out in front of the hotel with Mary-Evelyn in the foreground, standing slightly apart. Was Rose not there because she had run off with Ben Queen by then?

Why
were people’s memories so bad? My mother hardly seemed able to recall anything about these important people of forty years ago, even though she could tell stories about her family and my father’s and long-ago guests at the Hotel Paradise and residents of Spirit Lake that stretched back practically to the beginning of time. I’d heard her tell these stories, sitting out on the front porch late summer evenings with her glass of tawny port and Mrs. Davidow with her highball, with the smoke from their cigarettes sifting upwards, blue in the dull gold of the porch light overhead where dead moths were imprisoned in the white globe. My mother would remember so very clearly those past times, while Mrs. Davidow would rest one arm along the porch railing and carelessly tap her cigarette over it, sending the ashes sifting down to dust the rhododendron bushes. They would both laugh gaily at these recollections, for they were indeed quite funny.

As crazy as Mrs. Davidow drove me most of the time, on these front-porch evenings when my presence did not seem so much a burden to them I honestly wished their pasts had joined further back, which sounds strange, coming from me. If five years of having Mrs. Davidow around was awful, why would I wish for fifty? Well, I don’t know. I mean to make it clear that I’m talking about Mrs. Davidow,
not
Mrs. Davidow and Somebody Else. The Somebody Else never hung around for these porch talks, anyway. The past bored her. This was probably because she wasn’t in it. But I was never bored. Such nights were as smooth as the tawny port in my mother’s glass, and the light was close to its color. I would sit there rocking and listening and wishing I had been part of this past.

For my mother was a great storyteller, in addition to being a great
cook. Probably, she should have been a writer. At the very least she should have been a society hostess in some huge and fancy city, like New York or Paris. She should have hosted those gatherings (I forget what they’re called) where artistic people would all drop by of an afternoon or evening for drinks and talk and leave little white cards on silver trays. My own life would then have been much different, I guess, although it was difficult for me to picture myself living it: would I move through the crowd with plates of tiny sandwiches or hot crab puffs (assuming my mother would still be making them), listening to words and laughter tinkle like those little spoons on demitasse cups?

But then I wondered: if all evenings were to be brimful of “sparkling repartee” (as I believe it is called), then how much would I value those rare nights on the porch with the crickets droning into the summer silence?

Because of my mother’s storytelling abilities, I couldn’t figure out, sitting here now in the Pink Elephant, why she didn’t seem to remember clearly the details of Mary-Evelyn Devereau’s death. Maybe she just didn’t want to.

Sleepily, I stared at the snapshot, bringing it right up to my eyes to better make out the faces. And I remembered the photograph left hanging on the wall in the Devereau house. They had been much younger then, but easily identifiable as one or another face in this little snapshot.

I rested my chin on my arm and slowly turned the snapshot, my fingers on its edge, as if I were looking through a kaleidoscope. Perhaps I thought this action might rearrange the surface. Of course, it didn’t. Sideways or standing on their heads, the Devereau sisters looked out at me in their dark clothes and with their changeless expressions, silent as the tomb.
Fern didn’t have no kids.

If the Girl wasn’t a blood relation of Rose and Fern, where in heaven had she sprung from?

My eyes mere slits of sleepiness, I could see down the table to my stack of books. With the hand not holding the picture, I pulled a Nancy Drew towards me and looked, sideways, at its torn cover. There was Nancy with her flashlight and her aghast look. Probably she’d stumbled on a clue as big as a giant’s footprint.

I closed my eyes. There were no clues.

I woke into eerie pink darkness, wondering where I was and what all the commotion was overhead. Up there was the dining room and part of the kitchen, and the noises, I realized, were breakfast (I hoped not lunch) preparations.

Groggily, I shook myself awake and saw one hand was still clutching the snapshot and the other had been lying atop the Nancy Drew book as if it were a holy missal and as if all through the night my sleeping mind had kept searching out clues. At the other end of the table, the hotel cat was curled in a doughnut, having managed to get into the Pink Elephant somehow. Cats could dissolve, I’d decided long ago, and re-form themselves on the other side of a wall.

The hammering sound continued off and on, and I had the fanciful notion that Miss Bertha was up there thumping her cane. Probably, even after I was buried, Miss Bertha’s table would sit on top of my grave, and she would pound her cane at me and yell,
Get up, get up, and bring me hot rolls!

I was all cramped and had to shake myself and jump around to get some feeling back in one arm and a leg. Then I crept to the door (hoping the day wouldn’t hear me, I guess), pulled it open a crack, and looked out. Early morning, quite early. I relaxed and opened it all the way. Everywhere ground mist, like quilts and cobwebs, stretched and clung. It lay evenly over the tall wet grass, the acre of mint, and then vaporized upwards to drift in branches. Far off across the mint
acre and up an incline, the line of woods was utterly shrouded in fog, making ghosts of trees.

I always thought it was beautiful, on those accidental occasions when I witnessed such morning scenes, and each time I vowed to get out of bed an hour before I had to in order to appreciate it. But sleep won out over nature (as most things do), so it was only by stumbling on it like this that I saw the mist-covered road and the fields and the muted gray shapes that would become the icehouse or the chicken coops when the fog dispersed.

The cat had woken behind me and apparently seeing me standing in the door of the Pink Elephant, slipped through it. As I said before, cats can get in and out of anyplace completely on their own, but just let a human show up and you can bet that person will have to hold the door. It walked on ahead of me. Since it was probably only a half-hour before I’d have to appear in the kitchen anyway, I didn’t want to bother going back to my room. I went directly to the kitchen. There were four ways into the kitchen, two doors on each side of the wing and two in back, one through the laundry and one all the way around by way of the enclosed porch (where I hoped Paul wasn’t still tied to his chair). That door was the least likely one to cause comment if Vera was there, or anyone question why I was early, so I walked around toward it. We (the cat and I) walked the dirt road up and around the laundry room. I liked looking down and seeing my feet lost in fog. It fascinated me, too, that all I could see of the cat was its big gray tail ahead of me, weaving through the ground mist, its body otherwise shrouded. On the flagstone walk that led to the kitchen door, the tail swerved off through the grass, taking its own early-morning route, maybe up to the big garage to chase mice.

Pushing through the door, I wondered why I had been so particular about which way I entered the kitchen, and why I thought I would be questioned. I could have fallen through the roof and no one would notice, invisible as I was, like feet in fog.

•   •   •

Breakfast was short, thank heavens, and would have been shorter if I hadn’t had to listen to Miss Bertha complaining about last night’s dinner. “The rolls were cold and that little wasp-waisted waitress didn’t know what in hell she was doing. . . .”

I stood there with my tray tucked under my arm and my eyelids heavy as lead. Then sweet old Mrs. Fulbright tried to calm Miss Bertha down and told me that they did prefer having me wait on them as I was so good and so familiar with their wants. I admired Mrs. Fulbright for turning the whole harangue into something complimentary. She was almost as diplomatic as the Sheriff.