The Pink Hotel (2 page)

Mr. Mather had lived in subjection to an alarm clock for twenty-five years and when it rang at 5:55, Mr. Mather had risen, heavy and sullen, and gone about the day, tired and yawning. But Mr. Mather with time on his hands had found himself a slave to time. He checked his wrist watch with the big gold clock in the lobby at increasing intervals and, to sleep at all, he had been obliged to buy the noisiest alarm clock he could find, its hollow clacking his familiar spirit through the laggard hours.

Mr. Mather tried to read late and he left early calls with the night operator, but it was no good. He was always awake at 5:55 with better than an hour’s wait before the operator would tell him that it was “Sev-vin oh clock, Mis-tah Ma-therr. Gud mor-ninggg!” Mr. Mather privately thought that he wouldn’t waken quite so early if he could find something interesting to do, someone interesting to know, have a little better time the night before. But although Mr. Mather had promised himself a splurge, a final fling—was having, in the very fact of separation from his wife and daughter, a minor debauch—things hadn’t come off as he had shyly hoped they might.

“Nobody’s fault but my own,” he said to the empty room. Unattached men were worth their weight in gold around the hotel. Miss Furman, the Social Hostess, had pounced on him before he had his bags unpacked. Mrs. Conyngham, the Public Relations Woman, had played Do-You-Know with Mr. Mather and had been more than satisfied with his business and social connections, his New England lineage. And Mr. Mather had run from both women and their steely attempts to lure him into organized play.

Mr. Mather wished he could. . . Well, Mr. Mather didn’t exactly know
what
he wished he could do. Mr. Mather. . .

The telephone rang. “Sev-vin oh clock, Mis-tah Matherr. Gud Mor-ninggg!”

At last! Eagerly Mr. Mather rose to begin another day of play in Florida.

“We-land-in-Miami-in-ten-minutes-fasten-your-seat-belts-please,” the stewardess chanted as she tittuped up the aisle. “We-land-in-Miami-in-ten-minutes-fasten-your-seat-belts-please.” She stopped at Seat 14-6, arranged her face into a smile of winsome American girlhood for the benefit of the old dame who was sitting there and said even more loudly,
“We land in Mi-ami in ten minutes. Fasten your seat belt, ple-eze.
Would you like me to help you with your belt, Miss Pomerantz?” The stewardess always singled out one passenger—usually someone very young or very old, or a couple of nuns or a mother with a baby—to overwhelm with special attentions. It showed what a swell girl she was, so sympathetic and tender, so good at remembering names.

“I have fastened it, thank you,” Dr. Anna Pomery said. Then Dr. Pomery turned back to the window to gaze down upon the town.

Undaunted, the stewardess plunged on. “Your first trip to Florida, Miss Pomerantz?”

“I have been here many times before,” Dr. Pomery said. She was lying. It was her first trip to Florida, her first time in a plane, but she wasn’t going to give that offensive child the
satisfaction of finding out and patronizing her any further. Again she turned and stared out of the window.

Dismayed, but still game, the girl continued. “We are now flying over one of America’s most costly and exclusive hotels, Miss Pomerantz. You see that big pink hotel just off the tip of the wing?That is called the—”

“I know,” Dr. Pomery said. “That is where I am staying.”

The stewardess’ magenta mouth flew open. Then she closed it, turned on her smile again and switched on up the aisle. “We-land-in-Miami-in-ten-minutes-fasten-your seat-belts-please.”

“Just fancy,” Dr. Pomery said to herself, “a
pink
hotel!”

The Lobby

It was five minutes of seven and the lobby of the hotel was still quiet. Two sleepy bellmen and a porter appeared briefly, changed watches, and disappeared down the back stairs for coffee. An elevator boy lounged dispiritedly against a potted palm. The cigar-stand girl dropped her metal bank with a clattering charge of loose change and said a four-letter word. There was a single, desultory check-out.

The big gold clock in the lobby struck seven in tones as deliberately golden as its pendulum, as full-bodied as its weights. The clock was very old. It had seen famine and plague and siege, but the clock had ticked imperturbably on, concerned only with the passage of time. It was a great thing to count the seconds as they hurried into eternity, a fine thing to ring out another year.

Only the clock knew how old it was, and the strange things it had seen. It had been a great beauty in its day, splendid in gold leaf, garlanded with rosebuds and caressed by cherubs: sun, moon and stars revolving tirelessly at the clock’s will.

The clock had come down in the world, as had the big Persian carpet. They submitted now to the indignities of commerce, but the clock remembered rose gardens and fountains and royal favors, the perversity of the old cardinal, a naughty, naked duchess in a mirrored, gold boudoir, exquisite dishes not salubrious to the health, fine steel hissing through heavy air, a drooling, highborn imbecile and pretty, painted boys.

The clock had not forgotten, but it observed now the foibles of lesser persons without scorn, for it knew that time was the great thing. See how they waited, the little people, hanging breathless upon it, willing it to stop, to go back, to come forward, hiding its ravages, spinning great dreams against tomorrow: their every act dictated by the vast caprice of time. The men and women in the lobby peered into its golden face: waited before it, adjusted their lives and pocket watches to it, were impatient of its lingering seconds, its ominous waste of years.

Millie Dukemer, the cashier, heavy eyed and breathless, cleared the cigar stand sharply, her vault keys jingling. Seven o’clock, she’d made it again, even if she had been at the One-Two-Three Club until one-thirty, even if she had had a nice little package on, not to mention what had happened after that. Buck Turner was a bastard, she told herself, a garden variety louse, but then everybody was, so what difference did it make?

Dukemer would be thirty-one in February, and this morning, Friday, December the first, she felt her age.

The world going to hell in a hack. Nine more years and she’d be forty. “Now,
there’s
something to cheer about. My Thought for Today. Fat, forty and fatuous. What do
I
have to look forward to besides a partial plate? My teeth, sweet harbingers of decay, are falling out,” she said. Not that they were falling out yet, but she did have a pivot in the front, the one that Harry had broken off when he hit her in the mouth that time. “Damn Harry! Damn all men!” There wasn’t one of them you could trust.

She smoothed the lapels of her white piqué blouse, gave an angry hitch to her green linen skirt, ran a quick comb through her hair. Dukemer’s hair was almost black and not
quite curly, and she wore it severely, parted in the middle and pulled back tightly with a barrette. Doing things to her hair made her head ache, not that it didn’t ache anyhow.

Dukemer took another aspirin, gulped some water out of the night men’s pitcher and put the tray in the hall. The hall that led to Room Service was dotted with trays—half-eaten sandwiches, coffeepots, dirty cups, cream pitchers, stacks of plates that seemed to have no function other than to be washed or broken.

She called Room Service, ordered buttered rye toast, tomato juice and coffee, not that she would get it. She’d probably get eight or ten pieces of dry white toast with a cereal dish full of orange marmalade on the side. Room Service was capricious. Once she’d gotten a soft-boiled
egg
and a pitcher of maple syrup and four cups and saucers. She’d save some of the coffee so that she could have a bracer whenever she felt a nervous breakdown coming on. It was a poor day when Dukemer didn’t have a series of nervous breakdowns, but they didn’t show except in the temporary, set expression of her face. My God, people were awful. They got worse all
the time.

Dukemer called Room Service again and asked for Ernie. She’d give Ernie a quarter. Oi, the money she spent on tips! But she liked Ernie. Dukemer could sort of imagine the stillborn baby she’d had by Harry as looking like Ernie, say in about five years, if he’d lived, grown up. That was presupposing that it didn’t take after Harry, of course. It was probably just as well. The poor little thing would more likely have had two heads and webbed feet. “Yessir!” she said, straightening her jerkin.

Dukemer posted 306-7’s local phone calls and added three for good measure; she’d be lucky if he hadn’t called San Francisco. $109.54. “Thank
you!”
she said.

The occupant of 306-7 had sort of reminded her of Harry, but when she thought about Harry and her life with him it was like thinking about somebody else, somebody that she had known a long time ago. Considering everything, she had been a pretty straight kid at that, even at the orphanage.

Of course, Miss Hande had been wonderful. When Dukemer looked at that picture of her mother, dull brown and white it was, with her hair in a Psyche knot and sitting in a wrought-iron chair and holding a rose, she remembered Miss Hande instead and that last, awful Christmas at the orphanage. She still had the crescent of rhinestones set in silver that Miss Hande had given her then, just before Dukemer set out to make her fortune in Chicago.

Chicago meant Marshall Fields and Marshall Fields meant gloves to Dukemer, and it was there that she had begun hating people—all women but Miss Hande. The women had fingered the gloves, sniffed at them, mixed up the sizes and the prices, and since she had been in love with Robert Taylor at the time anyhow, Dukemer had thought she was in heaven when she got a job cashiering at an outlying Balaban & Katz theatre. She had been good and they had liked her, and finally she had been transferred right down to the Loop where she had cashiered at the B & K Chicago.

Harry was house manager at the Chicago and Millie had thought Harry was wonderful, even more wonderful than Robert Taylor, with his cigar and the way he sort of narrowed his eyes into little slits when he looked at her, his double-breasted brown suit with the chalk stripe, and that sort of coiled ring, like a snake with a diamond in its eye, on his little finger.

In six months she and Harry had been married, but Millie had gone right back to work when she found out that Harry’s snake ring, the brown suit with the chalk stripe, the black suit with the pencil stripe, his pale blue tweeds, his white dinner jacket and his cashmere overcoat weren’t paid for yet.

Millie had kept right on working until Harry’s bills were paid at Slodkin’s, until their furniture, their Frigidaire and the deluxe cabinet radio-phonograph-television were paid for, until she was seven months along. She had then the two months of gracious living that were her allotment for a lifetime, feeling life, sleeping when she was tired, eating when she was hungry.

Myrtle Schlemmer, who had the ladies room at the Chicago, had changed all that though. Myrtle had said that it was better for Millie to hear it from a friend than from someone who was just going around trying to stir up trouble. Myrtle had done a lot of talking, and when Millie had gone down to the Chicago and burst into a dressing room, the lady acrobat hadn’t been standing on her hands. Harry had looked kind of silly for a minute, and then he had kicked at Millie with his new nineteen-fifty brogans, and hit her in the mouth
with his snake ring.

It had been about three weeks until she lost the baby, got a new tooth and got rid of the furniture. Dukemer had worked at the Morrison Hotel for a while then. But she didn’t like the Morrison and she didn’t like Chicago, so she had trickled south—Louisville. Memphis. Sea Island. Atlanta. Sea Island again, and now here.

Dukemer looked at the clock; powdered her nose in a little mirror. It wasn’t bad, as noses went, but her eyes were still her best feature, a candid blue in the olive pallor of her face. Buck Turner was just a garden variety louse, but Harry had been a perfect, blue-white, gem-cut s. o. b. Harry made almost anybody look good until she got to know them.

The big gold clock looked blandly back at Dukemer.
“Sento un soave venticel che spira. Dal’ aurora rutilante e rossa. . .
” When Dukemer thought about what a chump she’d been for Harry, she was embarrassed. Still, maybe everybody was one part Farmer’s Daughter. Had been sometime. “. . .
La
luce e le bellezze e’l caldo amore.”

It was seven-five now, and Rosalie, the night operator, put down her paper and turned the patent alarm clock on the switchboard back five minutes. She yawned and stretched her mouth into the expression of tender banter she considered
suitable for early calls.

“Good morning! It’s seven o’clock,” she told the Misses Mellon, E. J. Westbury and Mrs. T. J. Sturt III.

Mrs. T.J. Sturt III tried to sound as bored, as indifferent, as Mrs. T. J. Sturt the Thirdish as she possibly could. It was hard to do because she had to be in the office by eight-thirty.

She must be crazy, she decided, still it had seemed like a good idea last night.

The night auditor drifted to his coffee, his furnished room. Every night he planned to go to the beach, get some sun, when he went off duty and every morning he was too tired, but he always figured that he’d do it tomorrow. The flurry incident to changing shifts subsided and the lobby, under the watchful eye of the clock, was quiet again.

Mr. Moxley, the night manager, leaned against the front desk, watching the clerk and the elevator and wondering if he would be able to sleep. His thoughts were formless, familiar, colored by the impotence of his hatred of Mr. Wenton and his demotion; by hunger, for his ulcer had long rebelled at hotel food, his old irritation at the neighbors’ children and their goddamned noisy play, his suspicions of Mrs. T. J. Sturt III in 926, his mounting anger at Purcell who was the fair-haired boy.

Purcell wasn’t due on till eight, but it was seven-forty-five and Moxley had been waiting for him since seven o’clock. You’d think the bastard could be early for a change, Moxley thought. Once, just once, but no, it was always exactly eight when Purcell showed up, and it was five, ten minutes maybe before Moxley could get away. Ten minutes wasn’t much, but multiply it by 365 and it amounted to six, seven days, he figured. Mr. Moxley wasn’t very good at figuring. He wasn’t very good at anything else either and, beneath his bluster, he knew it. That was the reason why he was on the dead man’s shift, although he liked to think that it was shady dealing on Purcell’s part that had put him there. His wife was acting up again too: cry, that’s about all she did, and say that she wished she was back in Aurora.