The Pink Hotel (4 page)

The Office

Dave Purcell shifted in his chair, looked at the clock, and wondered uneasily what Mr. Wenton would have to say. With the Old Man you never knew. He was strictly an actor, of course, and he had more moods than a pregnant woman. Right now, he was probably up there in his suite pretending to be a businessman. He would fire Miss Williams again, make little Mary Street’s life a hell by demanding a definitive array of inconsequential facts and figures, break all his appointments, write to his wife and then they would all be in for it.

The Old Man had been increasingly restless for days now, and they all, certainly, knew him well enough by now to know what that meant. By God, he wished the Old Man would hurry up and find a nice, plump, blond boy and get it over with. There must be a blond boy somewhere who would love J. Arthur Wenton or who would permit J. Arthur Wenton to love him, and then everybody could breathe for a while. Peace in our time.

Still, it was certainly worth more than a hundred a week to be buffer between the Old Man and things that upset him, and everything upset the Old Man—especially women. Unless maybe it was some old bag with a broad
a
and stockings that wrinkled around the ankle. If a woman was old enough, and looked like a caricature, J. Arthur Wenton was crazy about her. That was because he was an old bitch himself, of course,
and had an affinity for his own kind, but it was a shame the way he hated little Mary Street.

Just because Mary was a dish and all the boys gave her the double O, J. Arthur hated her guts. Purcell was going to have to fight to save her job for her and he was damned tired, he told himself, of fighting. She was good and even the Old Man knew it, but that didn’t make any difference. Mary Street was on her way out unless love came to J. Arthur, and Mary wouldn’t be fired every night and hired every morning like Miss Williams. It went deeper than that. When J. Arthur fired Miss Williams, he was only pretending to be a businessman and a misunderstood magnate, but when he fired little Street, it would be for keeps.

Purcell knew that he didn’t want anyone to fire little Street, didn’t want anyone to hurt her. Even when J. Arthur called her a micturating bitch, she was still just about the nicest thing God ever made. She was so sweet.
If I were a marrying man,
he thought, but there was too much in between. There was the soloist with the band and the Social Hostess and the Public Relations Woman and the food checker—the young one—and that wasn’t even going out of the hotel.

No, he wasn’t in a position to marry anybody. J. Arthur didn’t care what his employees did as long as they didn’t get married. And it wasn’t as though David Underdown Purcell wasn’t old enough to know better. Just the same, Mary was a darling and he didn’t want to hurt her. They almost understood each other, almost spoke the same language. When he was with Mary it was like going home, like hurrying through the dark on Christmas Eve, a dark that was friendly with wreaths and candles, and then suddenly, rounding the corner, there was the house with light streaming out of the windows and the prismatic, tinsel glitter of the tree.

Christ, it was funny even thinking about Christmas in Florida. There weren’t any Saturdays, Sundays or legal holidays, there was only work. Work and playing too hard to make up for all the work. Down here, Christmas Eve wasn’t even as good as Saturday night. Of course the Committee of One Hundred over in Miami had their water pageant up
Indian Creek and everybody got drunk. The flotilla of decorated yachts was lovely in a way but strictly phony, strictly phony, he told himself, another come-on for winter visitors, the pre-season tourist trade. And God, how he wished that they would hurry up and come, even Christmas, because that would mean a flurry of schoolteachers and nice old ladies and tours, not the McCoy, but it was better than sitting around with your teeth in your mouth waiting for something that never happened.

Purcell told himself again that he was where he wanted to be, doing what he wanted to do, that he would rather make a hundred a week down here than two hundred—two twenty-five—up North, and wondered if it were true. Sometimes he got tired of fighting, of buttering up J. Arthur Wenton, of being charming to people he didn’t like. Everybody was on the make, Christ, you could have pretty near a million dollars like the Old Man and still be on the make for a bar waiter. Sometimes he thought that the only gentleman he knew was the night porter, and the night porter would certainly never be written up in
Fortune
even if he was an M. A. from Harvard and spoke three languages well.

The thought of the Old Man filled his mind suddenly again like a seepage. The Old Man colored everything. There probably wasn’t an employee in the hotel who wasn’t thinking about J. Arthur right now, speculating on his perversity, the quirk of power, whether they knew it or not.

Maybe this hotel had class—almost tone—but Purcell knew of a hundred ways it could be improved. Purcell permitted himself the luxury of wondering what it would be like to be in a reasonable business, deal with reasonable people, keep reasonable hours. He was only kidding himself, of course, he’d go crazy in a reasonable business. He’d probably be a tramp hotelman the rest of his life.

He wished again that he had a nice little hotel of his own, and he thought of the miracles of service, of cleanliness, of cooking, of organization, of tact, he would perform. Still kidding himself. Well, he might as well get it over with. The daily reports and the mail had to go up to the Old Man
sometime and J. Arthur had had his coffee so he was probably in as charitable a frame of mind as he was likely to be in until Love came to him again.

There was another letter from Pallas Athene Smith, the poetess. Pallas Athene was president of the North American League of Lyric Women, Inc., and the Lyric Women were convening this year at the hotel. The convention was slated to begin on Monday and all the details had been worked out long ago, but Pallas Athene found something to write to J. Arthur about almost every day. The Old Man ate it up, too. He enjoyed being a Patron of the Arts and Pallas Athene was not a serious rival to anyone. She wasn’t the type to engage the temporary interest, the subterranean lust, in the most manly of blond young men.

Pallas Athene was probably one of the best arguments for homosexuality that J. Arthur would ever uncover, Purcell thought, even if she was all frightened doe, womanly as hell, with him. She bossed everyone but J. Arthur around like a sergeant-major. “Her voice!” Purcell said aloud. “My God, her voice!”

It would be hell this week. The Lyric Women would be all over the place. They would want more hot water. They would want ice. They would arrive for breakfast at a quarter of seven in dinner dresses. They would order quarts of orange juice because they thought oranges were cheap in Florida and refuse to pay the menu price. They would have letters of confirmation quoting twenty-dollar rooms at seven-fifty. They would demand service extraordinary and give ten-cent tips. A couple of them would get tight before dinner and flirt with one of the bartenders and complain to the management when he made a polite pass at them. They would want stone crabs for luncheon when only crayfish would straighten out his food costs, and on an all-expense tour there wouldn’t be a cracker left over. Purcell would remind them of their sons or their grand-nephews. He always did. They would give him souvenir coconuts and plug the washbowls with the strange, exotic remains of strange, exotic marine life. One of the old ones would have a heart attack or a sun
stroke and there was usually a youngish epileptic to be seduced by one of the bellmen.

It was a hell of a life, Purcell thought, and he promised himself a drink, a double Scotch, as soon as the Old Man got through with him. In the first place, the house count would be ‘way off. As far as the Old Man was concerned, the house count was always off, even with top prices at the height of the season and it would be Purcell’s fault, or it would be the fault of the night clerk. The night clerks he had hired and fired for the Old Man! Maybe it
was
his fault, he didn’t know, but the hotel was a very moral hotel; Mr. Wenton was hysterical over any mixture of the sexes, and he tried to see that the house rules were kept—except in private, of course.

But even the Old Man ought to know that if a night clerk was any good, he didn’t stay a night clerk. Night clerks were either pushy youngsters or deaf old men, and only the deaf old men stayed. After sixty-five to a hundred years, a deaf old man was willing to stay up all night seven nights a week, providing he wasn’t bothered too much, but the young fellows wouldn’t do it unless they could get a hand in the till.

Purcell didn’t blame either of them. He had been a night clerk himself once, too.

He waved to Dukemer. She wasn’t a bad kid, pretty regular in fact, even if she did have a double-edged tongue and could be as bitchy as the Old Man in heat when it suited her. He didn’t blame her. Let her grouse if it made her feel any better. Dukemer wasn’t as young as she looked and time didn’t seem to improve anybody’s disposition. Not till they were licked, anyhow.

The Cage

“Purcell isn’t a bad guy,” Dukemer told herself. He drank too much of course, but it was probably the only way that anyone could stand Mr. Wenton. She supposed that she drank too much herself, but not on duty, she thought virtuously, not in the morning. Dukemer had been up since five-thirty, and she considered what she would do when she got off at three,
if
she balanced. She crossed herself and said “Olav Hasholem.” Dukemer was a Presbyterian as much as she was anything and she didn’t know what
Olav Hasholem
meant, but it sounded the way that she felt about balancing.

Dukemer had an apartment—one room and a sink—and she would go home and take off her shoes and then she would make herself a drink. There was usually one drink, sometimes nearer a pint, left from the night before. Drinking didn’t cost Dukemer much because someone was always coming to see her and leaving what was left of the bottle, and on the infrequent occasions when she bought a bottle herself, she could feel that she was paying the world back; giving as good as she got. Dukemer was lordly with her own whiskey and mixed a very stiff drink, the kind she liked herself, for all comers, but what she really preferred was to get a little drunk all by herself and go to bed.

She checked out a couple who had come to town to sell their orange grove and go back North where they belonged, took in three Room Service checks, gave the bar cashier fifty dollars in small change from her bank and the old eye to a new guy who was registering in. She gave him the old eye from force of habit, without interest. He was probably married, a good Catholic, and had seven children back in Plainfield, N. J. Dukemer was still tired from last night. She didn’t want a date but her attitude was detached, professional. She liked to keep her hand in, feel that she still had that thing. She would give him the eye, then he would leave the Registration Desk and after he had given her the old magoo, she could say No.

Dukemer could say No to any proposition, any blandishment. She loved to say No. The answer to everything was No. She wanted to get home, take off her shoes and have a drink by herself, but she exulted in the act of negation. She had been civil to so many people, said
sir
so long, seen so many phonies, that Dukemer hated the world. She would go home, take a nap, make a salad, cook a chop, wash her underwear,
order some beer and be back in bed again by eleven. The early shift took everything out of her.

Next week she would sleep, she told herself. She would draw the blinds and sleep until twelve o’clock, she would eat a magnificent breakfast, take a swim every day. She cashed a check with the funny, wiggly
P
on it that meant that Purcell had okayed it, shorted a guy a buck because he bit his fingernails, and left a dollar on the desk so that it wouldn’t interfere
with her balance.

Dukemer hated everyone.
“People!”
she snorted to herself. The dollar would go to the Franciscan Home for Crippled Children. Over a period of time, she had been able to give them a respectable amount. When Dukemer had a good chance to short a dope and didn’t, her conscience hurt her. She regretted it, worried about it, felt that she wasn’t taking full advantage of her opportunities, was acting like a dope
herself.

The one that she regretted the most was a B. O. A. C. from Byington-sur-Thames, for God’s sake. Pronounced Chumley, she supposed. She had stood there like a damned fool and given him the right change, practically had to make him take it, and her conscience had been hurting her ever since.

That was the worst because Dukemer hated the British anyhow. She hated the British, the French, the Italians, the Russians, the Germans. What frigid tenderness she had, she reserved for the little people, the Dutch, the Finns, the Swedes, the Greeks, the Norwegians, the Danes. She felt about all the little struggling countries as she did about the crippled children, that they were precociously decent, waging their own battles, paying their own bills, and that all the big, robber nations were international thieves, ancient in dishonor. “Finest country in Europe,” she would say about each of the little fellows in turn. “Most corrupt people in the world,” about each of the powers.

The new guy finished registering and came over to her window, asking her if she sold stamps, if 223 was a good room, what time she went off duty. She dimpled, twinkled up at him and replied demurely, “At eight.” He asked her if she worked all the time, if she liked seafood, where the bar was, where he could get a good seafood dinner, if she could meet him at eight for dinner, drinks. Dukemer said No with considerable satisfaction. She had another date, she said, and gave him the old eye so that he wouldn’t quit trying.

She was almost thirty-one even if she could pass for twenty-four, on a dark night, she added, and it was fun to say No. It was a damned sight more fun to say No than it was to go out with most of these guys, she thought. Me, I’ve heard everything. Every once in a while she got lonesome or restless or something and went out and got plastered with the first guy that asked her, but it was never very satisfactory. “Still looking for Mr. Right, I suppose,” she told herself acidly, “even after Harry.” Sometimes she thought that there weren’t any nice guys in the world, the more harmless they seemed to be, the quicker they made a pass at you.

Dukemer craned her neck, leaning over the desk to the little wicket of her cage, and regarded the great golden clock intently. She wished . . . she didn’t know what. Of course she wished it was three o’clock instead of only ten-thirty, but when she looked at the clock, she wished all sorts of things, things like she was rich and young and in love with a guy who was in love with her. The clock made her feel funny.