The Pink Hotel (3 page)

709-10

Miz Dukemer was a right nice-minded lady, for a cashier, Ernie thought as he wheeled his cart, one Club Breakfast, to 709-10, but she certny was goink to give him fits. Miz Dukemer didn’t understand how he couldn’t talk back to people, make them do thinks right. She would give him fits about not beink able to get Mr. Goodenow to sign his check right away. He guessed she would think he was just dumb, but the trouble with Mr. Goodenow was that he had all the time in the world and seemed to think everbody
else did too.

“Come back for the check at eleven o’clock,” Mr. Goodenow would say, and Ernie couldn’t very well raise a stink, because Mr. Goodenow was good for a million checks. Everbody in the hotel knew that Mr. Goodenow was good for anythink, including the hotel if he wanted it. It was just that Mr. Goodenow liked to think thinks over before he put his name to anythink, even the dollar and a half Club Breakfast.

Ernie hadn’t been at the hotel very long, but he had been there long enough to bring a complete service for two with a single order, and the biggest pot of coffee—enough for four—he could find. “Just one, but make it a big one,” Mr. Goodenow always said with his funny little sniggery laugh. Mr. Goodenow wasn’t so stingy exactly, but he liked to get his money’s worth. “Enough is as good as a feast,” he was
fond of saying.

He and Mrs. Goodenow were getting along in years, but he didn’t like to think just how far along they were getting; except as milestones, sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five, when he could boast genially of his longevity and smile grimly at departed Youngsters. Dead, that’s what they were. Dead, all of
them.

He had reached a tacit working agreement with Mrs. Goodenow on ordering meals years ago, when they were just starting out. One morning Mr. Goodenow would have the
fruit and she would have the cereal. The next morning, she would have the fruit and he would have the cereal. They shared the toast and the bacon and eggs and the pot of coffee. “Just one, but make it a big one.” With a box of crackers in the room for nibbling, it was plenty.

After he had eaten, Mr. Goodenow was inclined to be expansive, remember with full warm satisfaction his lean years. He would chew an unlighted cigar and write “Coffee very good this morning. J. E. Goodenow Rooms 709-10” or “Lumps in the Cream of Wheat. This will come to the attention of the management. J. E. Goodenow Rooms 709-10.”

Nobody paid any attention to the little notes Mr. Goodenow wrote on his Room Service checks. Dukemer could post the dollar and a half Club Breakfast from memory, without looking at it. There were no variations. The Goodenows never ate luncheon, and dinner was always the same—one entree, one vegetable, one stewed fruit and one pot of tea. “Just one, but make it a big one.” The Goodenows were more regular than the tide that lapped the beach. When the Valet found himself with a pressing charge for 709-10, he tore it up. “I must made a mistake,” he said unhappily. “Mr. Goodenow ain’t had a suit pressed in twenty years.”

Mr. Goodenow never had a suit pressed because he never mussed it. He never had a suit cleaned either because he never got it dirty. Mr. Goodenow believed in being deliberate, careful in everything. “Waste not, want not,” was his watchword and he neither wasted nor wanted. The Club Breakfast was enough. An entree and a vegetable for dinner were enough. He had enough of everything but sleep, but sleep eluded him.

Mr. Goodenow’s insomnia was a source of considerable satisfaction to him. He was proud of being a light sleeper. He was fond of saying that he couldn’t sleep in the same room with his wife because she was still breathing. It was one of his favorite jokes. Mr. Goodenow felt that being a poor sleeper was proof, if it were needed, of the hypersensitivity of his nature, made him a more interesting person.

“Looks good enough to eat,” he observed jocularly of the
Club Breakfast. He would have liked to talk to the waiter because he had come a long way, been a poor boy himself. Ernie smiled again politely but he couldn’t think of anythink
to say.

Mt. Goodenow sighed. He wanted to talk to the boy, tell him about the trouble he had sleeping, his early struggles. He wanted to tell the boy that he had never smoked a cigarette or taken a drink. He wanted to catalogue his barbiturates, nembutol, allonal, phenobarbitol, sodium amytal, wanted to tell him that he never took more than half a tablet, that none of them did him any good.

He turned to his breakfast. “Gold in the morning and lead at night,” he said. Ernie shifted uneasily. Mr. Goodenow said the same thinks every mornink. “Come back in about an hour, hour and a half, and I’ll have a little something for you,”
he said.

It was Mr. Goodenow’s turn for fruit and he smacked his lips noisily over his orange juice. He looked across the table at his wife. He would have missed her if she hadn’t been there, wiping her mouth with her napkin, observing a proper silence, waiting for him to start. He thought dimly of the old days when they had risen hungry from breakfast like this after a night of boisterous love and heavy sleep. It had been hard to do sometimes, Etta had used to cry, he remembered, but he had needed every cent for a
stake.

Mr. Goodenow propped his newspaper against the large coffeepot. “Blizzard in Chicago,” he read. “Twelve inches of snow in Buffalo.” There was a jolly picture of snowdrifts in New York, of ice blocks in the Ohio at Pittsburgh, and Mr. Goodenow hugged himself in his exuberance at being alive, keeping warm. He enjoyed his breakfast. After the terrors of the night, breakfast was hearty and commonplace.

He thought dimly, too, of his younger days in business. He’d been a little harder, a
little
harder, he figured, than he needed to have been. There were a few things he regretted. Maybe that was why he had so much trouble sleeping. It seemed that way at night as he tossed carefully, unwilling to bear the pressure of his thoughts on either side. He would be a little easier, a little easier, he told himself, if he had it to do again. When a man was getting along in years, a clear conscience was a comfortable thing to have.

Thinking of his conscience, reminded him again of Etta. She was a little foolish of course, like all women, but she had been a pretty good wife to him all along, even now. He would try to show her some little attention. “Etta!” he shouted, twisting his newspaper into a horn. “You turned a lot last night,” he said.

The Desk

Purcell felt awful, too—a hangover; not that there was anything new about that. “What’s a hangover?” Dukemer asked. He had picked up a babe in the bar last night who looked like Marilyn Monroe—slinky dress, jeweled sandals, bracelets. He teetered against the Desk, looking hazily at the room rack.

The catch, of course, was that without her jeweled shoes, her dress, her mouth and eyelashes and falsies, the babe had looked a lot more like a picked chicken. If she weighed ninety pounds soaking wet, he, D. Purcell, was the Jersey lily. That business about the sweetest meat being next to the bone was all in your hat in the ocean. He had left the babe flat and got drunk alone.

“What do you say, kid,” he asked, moaned, and cocked an eye at Dukemer, “on this beautiful winter morning, with the snow cracklin’ underfoot, and Gram and Gramps in cotton playsuits under a tropic sky?”

“Phooey,” Dukemer said without looking up. Dukemer was posting local phone calls, a pencil mark for every call in the little block marked Fri . . . /-//-///-////-
////
.

“Mrs. Dukemer, Mrs. Du-Dukemer,” Mary Street said suddenly through the wicket. “Guess who I saw over in Miami last night, walking up Biscayne Boulevard just like anybody
.
Mr. Hemingway.
Ernest
Hemingway!” she said flushing, and got prettier, if possible, than she had been before.

Little Street was so pretty, so little and dumb and sweet, that a fugitive tenderness stirred in Dukemer. The kid was all excited. “Take it easy,” she said.

“Miami,” Purcell said. “Did I hear the little lady say Miami and Ernest Hemingway?” Purcell said. “Miami. I obscenity in the milk of their Chamber of Commerce.”

“I was with Mrs. Baldwin,” Mary continued, “and there he was. Walking along just like anybody. Like this,” she said, springing on her heels, dangling her arms like a honey bear, taking long strides on the balls of her feet. “He was wonderful.”

Purcell and Dukemer were impressed in spite of themselves. Both of them had seen a lot of people, Purcell had been in the same room once with the Duke of Windsor, but Hemingway was different. The chances were, of course, that it hadn’t been Hemingway. Probably some big hayseed from Duluth looking for fun in the sun. “Did the earth move, baby?” he asked.

“Why, Mr. Purcell,” Mary said, looking down at her brown and white pumps, “you must think I’m awful.”

She was getting to be a regular Florida Cracker. There was a big streak of dirt right across the vamp of her pumps. If Mr. Wenton noticed her shoes, he would call her—she didn’t know what. “A slovenly slut,” she supposed. That was about the nicest thing he ever called her. Mary didn’t know exactly what all the things Mr. Wenton called her meant, but the words themselves left a soiled, sore imprint on her mind. Little Street took a quick look at Mr. Purcell, and everything went sort of dizzy—Mr. Purcell and the lobby and the clock and her brown and white pumps on the Persian carpet—a little like that time she had fainted when she was a freshman in High.

Mr. Purcell was awful good-looking and she liked him an awfully lot, Mary decided again. His shoulders were nice and broad. All of him was sort of safe and solid-looking. His hair was just red brown, but he had a scrub of blond mustache, and his teeth were big and white and strong.

Mr. Purcell wore his clothes so well that Mary thought that he looked better, bigger, than any man in the lobby, no difference what he had on. He had a way, too, of sucking a joke down between his teeth and letting it out again, that made everything he said funnier almost than it was.

Mr. Purcell acted sort of hard, but he was really darling, Mary told herself. Dukemer said “Balls!” stopped hitting the machine, and reached for a Correction Voucher. Little Street turned pink in her brown and white voile, looked again at her brown and white feet. Mrs. Dukemer was terribly attractive too; better looking than Darlene or Mrs. Linden back home in Centralia or any of the guests, even if she did always look sort of tired. Mrs. Dukemer was even more attractive than Miss Furman, the Social Hostess.

Mary wished that she knew Mrs. Dukemer and Mr. Purcell better. They were both so attractive and sophisticated, but both of them treated her like a baby, and she wasn’t a baby at all. She would be twenty-two her next birthday. Well, she’d show them she could be sophisticated too.

But Mary hadn’t been sophisticated. She had been thinking so hard about Mr. Purcell’s blond mustache, his teeth, his shoulders, how it would feel to be kissed by a man with a mustache, that she had tripped on the Persian carpet.

“Come here, baby,” Purcell said. “Tell me about yourself. If I were a marrying man . . .” he began. Little Street’s eyes were so big and serious that he couldn’t decide what color they were. He stopped, embarrassed. Pretty and neat and sweet and she smelled like a clean baby. He wouldn’t kid her any more.

Mary waited, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. Mr. Purcell certainly was acting funny this morning, calling her over to talk, and then shutting up like a clam and moving reservations around in the room rack like she wasn’t even there. Maybe he had a headache. Mr. Purcell had a lot of headaches.

Purcell patted her shoulder suddenly, gave her a little
push. “Up to the salt mines, baby,” he said. “Don’t keep the Little Father waiting.” Purcell sighed as Mary crossed the lobby to the elevator. Poor kid. Old Wenton would have her drawn and quartered by nine-fifteen.

Dukemer sorted the vouchers she had posted. Restaurant. Valet. Locals. Long Distance. Paid Outs.
If I
were a marrying man.
You’d think he’d change his approach once in a while. Why, he’d even used it on Dukemer before he found out that she wasn’t having any. Purcell wasn’t a bad guy, of course. No wife of his would ever have to wonder about him. She’d
know.
Purcell would always be at the nearest bar with a strictly no-good dame. Still, from the look on little Street’s face, there couldn’t be much wrong with his line even yet. And thinking of Mary Street, Dukemer smiled. It would serve him right.

1405

Dukemer craned her neck. Another old woman was checking in, but unlike most of them this old woman looked sort of, well, sensible. She wore a plain gray traveling coat and a soft brown felt hat with a sedate
chou
of gray feathers tilted a little forward. The old lady’s eyes were a soft brown too. Her hair was combed back straight and neat, even if the knot had slipped to one side, and she carried a flat, black leather case under her arm.

The old woman was gaunt and stooped, but still powerful. Determination underlay her crooked back, belied the shrinkage of her bones, the perceptible drag to her left leg. She. looked like an old woman that you could trust with anything, and it had been a long time since Dukemer had seen anyone whom she would trust with change for a dollar.

The old woman’s thin nostrils dilated as, pen between fore and middle finger, she signed her name,
Anna Pomery, M.D.,
and her address,
Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
A well-dressed
couple in early middle age passed close to the Desk and Dr. Anna’s nostrils quivered again. Carcinoma. She sighed. Poor devil. Yes, she’d know Ca anywhere as she’d know measles or an acetone breath or a phthisical cough. From what she’d read, the effects of radio activity were similar to Ca. About like an X-ray burn, she supposed.

Dr. Anna regarded the desk, the lobby, the people in it, and to her practiced eye all of them looked a little yellow, sallow, as if they needed a good dose of calomel.

Her mind retired again to her dead—her family, to her mother, her sisters, her father and the boys—seeing with her inner eye the long diagonal table in the old dining room with its pickles, its jellies, its jams and preserves, its dishes of chow-chow and green tomatoes, spiced peaches and corn relish. She was an old woman, she told herself, and a dying man retreated into the past, seeking with the insane the safe shelter of the womb, the position of the foetus.

The old doctor was agreeably tired. She had enjoyed seeing the country; had looked hungrily on live oak and Spanish moss, white ibis and blue heron, flat lands and piny woods; had drunk in the degenerate grace of the palmetto palm, the scarlet smear of poinsettia and hibiscus.

Dr. Anna had enjoyed her trip south because it might be the last traveling she would ever do, and arriving at her destination, checking in, had given her a slight, comfortable sense of accomplishing something, less gratifying but less arduous than delivering a baby or cooking a family dinner.

There had been a big family of Pomerys once, twelve, including the hired girl; a family that had swelled on holidays, with wives and husbands, nieces and nephews, to a small army. Yes, a big family, puissant in numbers, fertile as the fat grazing land that had nourished them all. War and disease had decimated the Pomerys; separation and private tragedy had alienated them until there had remained only the barren few, and old Dr. Pomery was the last, even of these.

She had not even known that her brother Stuart was alive until she had received the unreasonable, formal communication from his lawyers that Stuart was dead. It was strange
when you thought of it that Stuart, who had been the oldest and perhaps the strongest, who had married and cut himself off early from the family, Stuart with whom she had had nothing in common but a name, should have succored her in her extremity, her old age, that she had been his sole heir.

Yes, Stuart had made her a fairly rich woman. Dr. Anna hadn’t really known how poor she was until she’d had her stroke, and it had been too late then to do anything about it. She had been foolish, she supposed, but her practice had kept her too busy to notice that she wasn’t saving anything, until she had realized abruptly that she had no practice and that there was nothing left to save. She had been overgenerous, perhaps, trusting unreasonably in the Lord to provide, but so, she reminded herself again, He had.

He had provided, and she was still a little bewildered by the extravagance of His gesture. She had been rewarded, she told herself, not according to her deserts but according, possibly, to her intentions.

The elevator boy whinnied a little behind his glove, and Dr. Anna looked up sharply. Degenerate ears, set too low on the skull. She drooped a little, looked suddenly older and more tired. For all her scuffed oxfords, her shabby valise and suitcase and portmanteau, Dr. Anna understood the unlovely functions of the human body, the twisted processes of the human mind. But there were certain things beyond which she didn’t like to think, dark abnormalities that seemed to the old doctor a violation of the goodness of her God, treason against the little dignity of man.

The elevator boy probably howled like a wolf on moonlight nights or when the weather changed. Dr. Anna told herself that she might be wrong about the boy, even if she did know better. She had seen the pupils of his eyes, and she remembered the old joke they had had in medical school. It was better to be an Argyll-Robertson pupil than to have one.

Well, she would think about something else, something pleasant. She had delivered enough babies, she supposed, to people a fair-sized town. Their first squalls had never failed
to excite her and there was probably nothing more rewarding than ministering to a sick child. It had been dreadful, of course, when the best that she could do had not been good enough. It was too bad that medicine was not yet an exact science, although for a moribund child, without the accumulated, crabbed fear of the adult, the transition was easy enough. Too easy.

The elevator slid quietly from twelve to fourteen and the old doctor stepped out, dragging her cold left leg, her dead left foot.

A pretty, fresh-faced girl was making up the room, 1405, and she had been an agreeable change from the elevator boy. The girl wore a neat green uniform and a starched white cap and apron. She had fine dark eyes with a little powdering of freckles under them and across the bridge of her nose, and smooth braids of brown hair. The world and its affairs did not concern her.

Her name was Cora May, she said, and she was deft with the old doctor’s bags; suits and dresses, serviceable blacks and browns and dark blues, soon hung on hangers, shoes marched in tidy rows. Dr. Anna’s old black instrument bag surveyed the room from the top shelf of the closet.

Cora May forgot her own problems for a moment, and her heart swelled with pity for the pore old lady. She was almost as old a lady as Ma had been even if she did try to carry herself so straight and all. Couldn’t walk good neither.

“You’re tarred,” Cora May said to the old doctor. “I’ll run you a nice bath, ma’am.” They was somethin’ about the old lady that sure brought back Ma. Thinking about the old lady and about Ma made Cora May reach for a little, stoppered vial she carried in her pocket, measure a few drops into the hot water.
Crise d’Amour.
It wasn’t so expensive but it was awful sweet and awful strong, Cora May reflected as she inhaled the steamy perfume. Ma would of loved a nice hot bath like this, its good strong smell, when she was tarred.

The old lady stirred herself, found a clean white envelope, put into it a crisp five-dollar bill.

“You’re a nice girl,” Dr. Anna had said, handing Cora May the envelope, patting Cora May on the shoulder.

It was amost exacty what Ma would of done her own self. Cora May would of loved to tell the old lady about Ma, what a good woman Ma had been, but embarrassment constrained her.

“Tattie for your kindness, ma’am,” was all she said.