The Seduction of Water (18 page)

I blush with pleasure—but also with the consciousness of what I’m planning to do later. It’s not too late though—I can ask him right now to see the registration books before he gives them to Gordon. But before I can say anything, he leans closer to me and whispers in my ear, “I have to confess something to you, Iris.”

I’m so stunned by the sudden intimacy of his voice that I laugh nervously, which draws Aidan’s attention away from the redhead for a moment.

“Mr. Kron, I can’t imagine you having anything to confess.”

He smiles at me and touches my elbow lightly with his fingertips. “But I do, my dear. You see, I’m not always as good a judge of character as I’d like to be. I’ve misjudged people . . . with the direst of consequences at times . . . but never mind, this time the consequences are a pleasant surprise. You see, I didn’t think you’d be much good at this.”

“At this? At running the hotel?”

He nods. “Oh, I mean I knew you’d be competent, don’t get me wrong, and I knew you had the right background. It’s just that I feared you didn’t have your heart in it. That your first love would always be writing. And this book about your mother would take too much of your time and attention. But I see now that I shouldn’t have worried.”

I square my shoulders and try to return his look steadily. “I wouldn’t neglect the hotel.” I can’t possibly ask him about the registration book now, I think.

“Of course you wouldn’t—and I understand that now because of your mother.”

“My mother? But you didn’t know my mother.”

Harry smiles. For a moment I think he’s going to tell me that he did know her. I think of that fantasy I had of my mother dancing at the Cavalieri Hilton in her black chiffon dress—only now, in my vision, she’s dancing with Harry Kron. He must have been very handsome when young. He’s still very handsome—I can tell that from the way Aidan is eyeing us from the Gold Parlor. He would have given her the kind of life she was suited for.

But instead of confessing to an acquaintance with my mother, Harry waves his hand at the black-and-white photographs lining the wall of the library. They’re pictures of events at the hotel: picnics and barbecues, dinner parties and summer dances. In many of them my mother appears. A halo of black hair around her pale, delicate face, her light green eyes—startling even in these black-and-white pictures—fringed with dark lashes. She stands out in every picture.

“I feel I’ve gotten to know her through these,” Harry says. “And from what people have told me about her. But most of all, through you. You have your mother’s grace, Iris. I think you’ll have a wonderful future with the Crown Hotels.”

A few months ago I would not have thought the promise of a career in hotels would make me so happy, but I am truly touched and flattered by Harry’s words. I almost decide to give up on the registration book, but then, in addition to being impressed by Harry’s sense of knowing my mother through her photographs I am also a bit jealous. While he’s been getting to know Kay Greenfeder, I’ve learned almost nothing. I have to know who she was having the affair with.

The library’s ready for Gordon’s lecture, the courtyard is all set up for cocktails afterward. I decide to stay for the first part of his talk and then—when he turns the lights off for the slide presentation—slip into the kitchen and up the servants’ stairway. I should be able to get back before the lecture’s over. I’ve asked Aidan to run the slide projector, so no one should miss me.

The guests take their time filtering into the library and taking their seats. They’re noticeably more relaxed than last night. I notice sunburned shoulders and hair damp from lake swims or late showers. Instead of the contentious little spats I eavesdropped on last night, tonight I hear more shop talk: job openings at museums and galleries, grant opportunities, summer seminars in Prague and Florence. The burning issues of provenance and rightful ownership have ceded to professional advancement and industry gossip.

Only Gordon, hovering at the dais, flipping through a stack of three-by-five cards, seems nervous. I look around for Phoebe—surely she should be here to lend moral support—and spot her standing by the doors leading out to the courtyard. It seems to me that the least she could do for her friend would be to sit up front.

Gordon has to clear his throat several times before the crowd settles down. I find myself unbearably nervous for him and, stealing a glance at Phoebe, wonder if she feels that too and that’s why she’s chosen to stand at a distance.

“Our story begins not in the war-torn Europe of six decades ago, but nearly six centuries in the past in quattrocento Italy . . .”

Good, I think, six centuries in which to get up to Harry Kron’s suite and back.

“It begins with a present made to a young girl on her wedding day from her mother. But before I tell you about this girl, let’s imagine ourselves in fifteenth-century Italy. It’s a time of great prosperity. The rich merchant guilds support not only painting, but jewelry and fashion . . .”

I look around me at this fashionable crowd from Manhattan. The women’s clothes, I notice, are understated, but the shoes expensive; the glimpses of gold, pearls, or diamonds on wrists, necks, and earlobes discreet but rich. In addition to the Art Recovery participants I notice Hedda Wolfe in a middle row in a dupioni silk shift the color of eggshells, a pearl brooch like a spray of flowers on her shoulder.

“. . . many painters—Ghiberti, Verrocchio, and Botticelli, to name just a few—apprenticed in jewelry workshops, leading to an increased depiction of jewelry in contemporary painting . . .”

I find myself imagining the crowd here tonight as they might look depicted by the Renaissance masters. Phoebe, with her pale skin and serious eyes, looks like one of those thin, ascetic angels of the Annunciation. Hedda would have to be something pagan instead of Christian, I think, a sibyl or a personification of something. The redheaded appraiser would be painted by Titian. Harry Kron, some rich Florentine nobleman, of course. I’m happily playing this game when I come to a figure I can’t fit in because he doesn’t fit here or in the Renaissance. It’s Joseph, who’s standing next to Phoebe in the door to the courtyard, his eyes fixed on the blank slide screen. “. . . the rediscovery of classical statuary loosened the rigid, vertical lines of fourteenth-century clothing and issued in a celebration of form over line.”

The room darkens and a shadowy green wood peopled by pale gold figures in flowing drapery fills the space behind Gordon. Botticelli’s
Allegory of Spring
. I look toward Joseph, wondering if this is what he was waiting for—this beautiful garden. But how would he know the program of Gordon’s slide show?

Without commenting on this slide, Gordon presses the remote and the screen fills with a detail from Botticelli’s painting: one of the three graces, her sinuous blond curls held up by a single strand of pearls.

“Stiff crowns gave way to loops of pearls to hold loose or plaited hair away from the face . . . this hair ornament was called a
ferronière
.”

The slide changes to show a pensive Madonna, which Gordon tells us was painted by Filippo Lippi. She wears a sheer headdress, and a thin strand of pearls forms a V on her forehead. “As you can see,” Gordon is saying, “the style was used for religious as well as secular subjects. Which brings us to the particular
ferronière
we will discuss tonight, the della Rosa
ferronière
. . .”

As much as I’m enjoying Gordon’s lecture, I realize it’s time for me to go. Fortunately, Joseph’s given me the perfect graceful exit. Pretending to notice him for the first time, and pretending—to anyone who’s paying attention—that the gardener must need me, I get up and slip out the door where he’s standing.

“Did you need to speak to me, Joseph?” I say.

Barely taking his eyes off the slide screen, Joseph shakes his head. “I was talking to this boy today about one of the paintings he’s going to show. I wanted to see it.”

“Well, I’m going to just slip into the kitchen and make sure everything’s going smoothly . . .” If Joseph thinks this behavior is suspicious, he certainly doesn’t show it. I leave him to his painting and go out the courtyard, cut through the dining room into the kitchen, and from there to the back stairs. The servants’ stairs are used by the maids in the mornings when they’re making up the rooms, and later during the dinner hour when they slip upstairs to turn down beds and leave mints on the pillowcases. At this hour the maids are eating their dinner or out behind the laundry room having cigarettes, enjoying a few minutes out of sight of guests or management. I make it to the third floor without meeting anyone.

Harry’s suite is called the Half Moon Suite after Henry Hudson’s ship, which Washington Irving mentions in “Rip Van Winkle.” In the late 1950s my mother hired an out-of-work painter who’d done work for the WPA to do a series of murals based on Irving’s stories. As I let myself into Harry’s room and turn on the ceiling light, I come face-to-face with a portrait of Henry Hudson at the prow of his ship, the
Half Moon
, which is floating over the Catskill Mountains. The mural is painted on either side of a large window that faces west, and the artist has managed to incorporate the view of the mountains into the painting. I’d always thought these paintings were kind of hokey, but now the cleverness of the composition takes me by surprise. I have no time, though, to admire it. I go into the next room, the bedroom, and over to the night table.

It’s only when I’m sliding open the drawer that I think to worry about what else I might find there. Harry has come to seem almost like a father to me; I don’t want to discover any embarrassing secrets about him. The drawer contains, though, no compromising materials. Aside from the standard hotel-issue Gideon’s Bible there is only a small leather box and a tin of cough drops. I open the box and there, next to a Rolex watch, is a small key that I think might open the armoire.

I take the key out, cross to the armoire, and open it quickly. Again, I’m relieved by the neatness and ordinariness of Harry’s personal arrangements. Crisp white shirts are stacked like sheafs of paper on one side, summer-weight suit jackets hang on the other. A faint scent of citrus and cigar tobacco wafts off the jackets when I push them aside to reach the stack of leather-bound books at the back of the armoire. Holding the jackets back I run my finger down the books’ spines until I find the date I’m looking for: 1973. I have to use both hands to wrest it out from under the heavy books on top of it, and as I pull it out a link on my charm bracelet catches in the fabric of one of Harry’s jackets. I slide the book onto one hip and try to disentangle myself, but I end up tearing the coarse nubby weave of the jacket and the registration book slips off my hip and thuds loudly to the floor.

I stand still for a moment, listening, but I know it’s silly to worry. One thud in this huge ship of a hotel would hardly cause any notice. I’m less happy about the tear in Harry’s jacket. He’s precise enough to notice something like that. I hold the fabric up and work my hand under the lining to see if I can pull the loose threads through the back. I’ve almost fixed it when I notice that the piece of material I’m holding seems unusually heavy. I’ve got my hand in his pocket before I can think what a bad idea that is: but by then I’ve already closed my fingers around the hard cold metal revolver handle.

Chapter Eighteen

THE NET OF TEARS

I could say that what I did was for Naoise or that I did it for my people but that would be a lie. That watery stirring beneath my skin awakened something in me. At first I thought it was the net of tears I longed for. I knew it would look better on me than on the Connachar woman—that it was made for me. In my dreams I felt the pearls and diamonds against my skin like the coolness of dew, the spray of the ocean. I imagined the weight of the emerald against my breastbone and the absence of it began to feel like an ache—like all the things I had already lost. I burned at night and awoke from these dreams, parched and gasping for air. Only the coolness of those stones could douse this fire. And then I began to dream of his hands laying the stones upon me and I knew it was the hands I longed for as much as the stones.

I leave quickly after discovering the gun. It is, I tell myself, no reason to be alarmed. Lots of people who live in the city carry guns. Especially wealthy, Rolex-wearing executives like Harry Kron. In fact, my father used to keep a gun—we were, after all, rather isolated up here during the winter—but my father kept his in the locked safe behind the front desk. It’s the casualness of coming across it in a suit jacket pocket that has so unnerved me, which I suppose is why I leave so carelessly.

I pull the door closed, but halfway down the hall I realize I didn’t lock it. I go back, cursing the old-fashioned security locks that have to be locked with a key from the outside. It’s one of the things we’ll have to change if the hotel’s to be modernized. Guests are always complaining that they forget that the doors don’t lock by themselves. Worse, they lock the doors when they’re inside and then misplace their keys and can’t get out. My mother always said it was a horrible fire hazard and made me keep an extra room key on a ribbon hanging from my bedpost.

I’m within a few steps of Harry’s door when I hear the elevator door open halfway down the hall. I stop, pretending to be looking for something in my pocket, and hope it will be a guest heading in the opposite direction. But it’s Phoebe and she’s heading for her uncle’s suite, key in hand.

“I think you’ve got the wrong floor,” I say to Phoebe, “the Sleepy Hollow Suite is directly below this one.”

Phoebe pauses at her uncle’s door and stares at me. Then she looks down at the registration book that I’ve got balanced awkwardly on my hip. “I know perfectly well what floor I’m on. Harry asked me to come up because he forgot his cigar.”

Phoebe has slid the key into the lock.

“I’m surprised you don’t mind fetching things for him. He could have sent one of the maids.” It’s a truly tactless thing to say, but my hope is that it distracts Phoebe enough so that in turning the key she doesn’t notice the door is already unlocked. Instead it just draws attention to what she’s already guessed.

“Or apparently we could have just asked you to bring some down,” she says, opening the door. “Why don’t you show me where my uncle keeps his cigars?”

I blush, caught in the act of petty thievery, but as I watch Phoebe smile I realize it’s worse than that. She obviously thinks I’m having an affair with her uncle.

Following her into Harry’s suite, I try to think of ways to disabuse Phoebe of her mistaken notion. I’d rather have her think I’m a thief than having an affair with her seventy-year-old uncle. “Phoebe, I think I should explain what I was doing in your uncle’s room.”

“You don’t owe me an explanation. You’re both unmarried adults.” Phoebe walks over to the coffee table and opens a large wooden humidor shaped like a casket. The smell of good Cuban tobacco wafts up toward us.

“But you’ve got it wrong. I came in here to get the 1973 registration book.” I hold the book up as evidence. “Because of what you said about my mother having an affair with a married guest that summer. I thought I might be able to figure out who it was.”

Phoebe eyes the book curiously. “Why didn’t you just ask Harry for the book?”

I explain about our conversation earlier, about his concern that I might neglect the hotel for the sake of researching my book. Phoebe gathers up four of the fat cigars. Her slim hand can hardly contain them.

“So, you were so afraid of disappointing Uncle Harry that you decided to steal from him instead?”

I can’t think of anything to say to that. I realize I’m hugging the registration book to my chest as if afraid she’s going to wrest it from me, but then I see a look pass over her face I haven’t seen before—a softness, something close to pity. “He has that effect on people,” Phoebe says to me. “He’s not a man you want to let down. Speaking of which—” Phoebe holds up the cigars. “—he’ll be wanting these—and you—he told me to find you as well as his Montecristos. Hadn’t you better stow that book and get on downstairs?”

“So you won’t mention anything to him about the book?”

“On one condition. You tell me what you find out and let me have a first look at your memoir.” Phoebe shifts her weight from one foot to the other and rolls the cigars around in her hand. It’s the closest I’ve seen her get to fidgeting. Once again I wonder what she’s read in her mother’s journals that suddenly makes her so anxious to know what I might find out about my mother.

“Of course I’d be happy to get your feedback,” I say. It’s what you say at a writers’ workshop when someone’s about to tear your work to shreds and it’s about as truthful a statement here as in that circumstance. Phoebe, however, seems to accept my assurance. She takes one last look around the room as if checking to make sure she hasn’t left anything—or maybe that I haven’t stolen anything—and her eyes light on the mural.

“My God,” she says, “it’s almost as bad as the one in my room, but at least there’s no Headless Horseman. I’ve got to tell Harry to paint over these.”

Up in my room I drop the book on my bed and sink down beside it. My face, when I touch my fingers to it, feels hot and there’s a thudding in my chest that feels like something trying to get out. I’m not sure if it’s a reaction to stealing the book and getting caught or Phoebe’s humiliating suggestion that I have designs on her uncle. At the same time, a small voice is whispering in my ear:
You wouldn’t have to work anymore—you could concentrate on writing.
I get up, go into the bathroom, and splash cold water on my face. I look at myself in the mirror. I’m wearing another one of my mother’s old dresses, an Empire-style white linen trimmed in black velvet ribbon and a row of jet beads just below the bust. I think of how Harry looked at my mother’s pictures and for a moment the image I had of my mother dancing at the Cavalieri with Harry shifts again and it’s me he’s dancing with.

When I come into the courtyard the cocktail hour is nearly over. Most of the Art Recovery guests have gone into the dining room. There are only a few stragglers around the fountain, too engaged in heated conversation to tear themselves away for dinner. I notice Gordon, flanked by two men—one I recognize as a curator from the Met, the other is one of the lawyers from Art Recovery.

“If the piece was recovered who would it belong to—the della Rosa family or the church? Because if it’s the church—the same church that did nothing to stop the Holocaust—I can’t see restituting it,” the Met curator is saying as I pass through the courtyard. I catch Gordon’s eye and he winks at me, obviously enjoying the debate his lecture has created.

“So what are you saying? Finders keepers?” the lawyer practically shouts. I slip into the darkened library before they can hear me giggle. Finders keepers? It’s like a third-grade spat on the playground.

“What’s so funny?” I’d thought the library was empty, but a flicker of light draws my attention to the back of the room where Aidan is sitting on a couch behind the slide projector.

“These art people,” I say, threading my way through the tightly spaced folding chairs and perching on the arm of the couch. “I know what they’re arguing about is important, but I can’t help but think they’re more worried about their reputations than returning a few Kiddush cups to their rightful owners.” I look over toward the courtyard windows, but with the lights off in here and the Japanese lanterns illuminating the courtyard, no one can see us. I slip down from the arm of the couch and slide closer to Aidan and lean into him. He puts his arm around my shoulder and runs his fingers along the back of my neck where my hair is still damp from the water I splashed on my face upstairs.

“Where’d you go?” he asks, kissing the back of my neck. “You missed the lecture.”

“Shouldn’t that be my line?”

“You’re not my teacher anymore,” he says, “just my boss.”

I pull away from him and try to look at his face but it’s too dark to make out his expression.

“Does that bother you?”

He shrugs. “I don’t much like all this secrecy. Would it be so awful if people knew about us?”

“Oh come on, Aidan, why would you want to be seen with an old lady like me?” Of course what I want is an assurance from Aidan that I’m far from an old lady, but he refuses to rise to the bait.

“It’s not me who wants this kept a secret, Iris, and you know it. Have you told your man in New Hampshire about us yet?”

“It’s not like Jack and I have a conventional relationship,” I say, regretting as I do the primness of my own voice.
You’re not my teacher anymore,
he said, and yet that’s what I feel like. The prim schoolmarm laying down the rules.

“Look,” I say, “Harry told me tonight he could see you in a management position—coordinating the corporate retreats. It would be a great thing for you and once you were settled in it . . . well, we’d both be management. There’d be no reason people couldn’t know about us . . . if that’s what you still wanted.”

In the dim light of the library I think I see Aidan smile. He runs the back of his fingers down the side of my face and the coolness of him makes me shiver. “If that’s what you want, Iris,” he says, “we’ll wait until I’m in Sir Harry’s good graces.”

When I leave the library half an hour later the curator and the lawyer are gone but Gordon is still in the courtyard and he’s helping Joseph pluck cigarette butts out of the planters.

“Gordon, you’ll miss dinner entirely—Joseph and I can take care of this.”

“I couldn’t eat a bite,” Gordon says, dumping a handful of cigarettes into the bag Joseph is holding open for him. “I think the Met may offer me a permanent job.”

“Miss Greenfeder is right,” Joseph says, “you go on into dinner. And wash your hands first.”

Instead Gordon wipes his grubby hands on his seersucker slacks and holds his hand out to Joseph. “Thank you,” he says, “for the tip.” He clasps Joseph’s hand in both of his and then, as if embarrassed at this display of emotion, abruptly leaves.

“What was that about?” I ask Joseph, who’s rooting now in a potted hibiscus.

“Nothing much. I just told him about a guest who stayed at the hotel I worked in at the end of the war—an Italian countess who might have been related to the della Rosa family. I thought if she was still alive she’d know something about that missing necklace he’s so interested in. Can you do nothing about where these people throw their trash?” he says, plucking a wadded-up cocktail napkin from the hibiscus roots. “What kind of animals are they?”

By the time I make it into dinner the guests have already finished their entrées and are listening to speeches over coffee and dessert. The director of one of the Holocaust restitution commissions is just winding down a tribute to someone, so I stand by the dessert tray and wait for the speech to be over before joining Mr. Kron’s party.

“. . . who fearlessly risked his own safety to rescue over two hundred works of art from the fascists,” he says, holding a wineglass up in preparation for a toast. “Without his efforts our world would be a much bleaker place. Please join me in raising your glasses to salute our host, Sir Harold Kron.”

There’s a swell of murmured congratulations above which one deep, raspy voice calls out “To Harry” and the crowd follows suit, chiming in “To Harry.” I look to where the voice came from and see it’s Hedda Wolfe, sitting across from Harry at the banquet table, radiant in her eggshell silk and pearls. Harry rises from his seat and inclines his head to Hedda, then lifts his glass to the speaker, thanking him for what he calls his “small part in a large collaborative effort to do what little could be done in the face of monstrous evil.”

“It makes you wonder,” a voice at my side whispers, “if they could have hidden a few Jews for the trouble they took over their precious paintings.”

I turn and find my aunt Sophie straightening a doily under the Viennese sacher torte.

“Surely it wasn’t a question of one or the other,” I say in a low voice, looking around to make sure we’re not overheard. Of course, Sophie’s always had a critical nature, but I’m afraid that if her acerbic comments get back to Harry she’ll be out of a job. “I heard Harry was knighted for his work as a Monuments officer during the war, but I didn’t realize he saved so many paintings.”

“Not just paintings. I gather he found a trove of statues—Michelangelos and Donatellos—in a storeroom the Germans were using as a garage.”

“I would think as an artist yourself you’d be impressed by that.”

Sophie sniffs. “I’d trade a Michelangelo for your great-aunt Hester who perished in Theresienstadt any day.” Our great-aunt Hester—a younger sister left behind in Poland when my father’s family emigrated—is the one relative we know of who died in the Holocaust, and throughout my childhood Sophie would bring her up whenever I complained of some hardship—as in, “Your great-aunt Hester would have been happy with last year’s coat instead of freezing to death at Theresienstadt.” I had grown to dread the invocation of her name.

“Well, I’m sure Mr. Kron would have saved Great-Aunt Hester if he could have, but in the meantime I guess those Michelangelos are a good thing. I think we should be proud that our hotel’s owner is a hero.”

Sophie gives me a long assessing look and I find myself blushing. “I thought it would be harder for you seeing someone in your father’s place,” she says.

“I’m in my father’s place—not Harry Kron. Dad was never the owner here, just the manager, like me—which is what you wanted in the first place, right?”