‘You have come here with filthy talk and lechery,’ Mrs Eckdorf said in calmer tones. ‘I looked at you standing before me in my room and I hated the sight of your small mouth and your teeth. Looking at you now, I hate the sight of your body and the boil you have on the flesh of your back. I hate your hands because they are filthy hands. I hate your feet. I could not yet anoint your feet.’
‘Please –’
‘It is wrong that I cannot do that, and the moment shall come when I will bend to do it. My disgust shall pass away from me and I shall gaze upon a lecher as he shall gaze at me, refreshed by understanding. A lecher has come,’ said Mrs Eckdorf in a poetic way, ‘and has entered this holy hotel. A lecher is here, through whom I may offer my forgiveness of other persons, whose victim I have been. Time must pass. I must talk to the priest. I must sit in the azure room before I return to the Lipowskystrasse. I am telling my own story, Mr Smedley, through all these people who have been taught forgiveness. I feel the balm of God.’
Mr Smedley rowdily protested, coming near to Mrs Eckdorf, who gestured him away. His clothes would be burnt, she murmuringly said, and then she added:
‘O’Shea will bring you meals to this room. You will remain in humiliation until the moment arrives, until I come to you with a bowl and a towel. You are free to go,’ said Mrs Eckdorf to Mrs Dargan, who hurriedly went.
‘For God’s sake,’ shouted Mr Smedley.
‘No,’ replied Mrs Eckdorf. ‘For your sake and for mine.’
She left the first-floor bedroom, locking it behind her, and in her own room she collected together all the film she had used. She placed it in an aluminium container that was already addressed to her, at the apartment in the Lipowskystrasse. She left the hotel and walked swiftly away from it, towards a post office that she’d noticed the day before. She dispatched the film by registered mail, saying to herself that she would be in the Lipowskystrasse to receive it. From past experience, she knew that it was safer to rid oneself of whatever film there was: for one reason or another, it had been demanded before that film should be handed over.
14
The visitors left the hotel: the birthday was over.
The Gregans and Philomena and Timothy John drove away, in the car that Mrs Gregan owned and which Mr Gregan planned to sell. They talked of Mrs Eckdorf, repeating that it was extraordinary that a woman who was either permanently or periodically insane had turned up in O’Neill’s Hotel. Mr Gregan would look in at the hotel on Monday, he said, to see if she was still there, and if she was still being a nuisance he’d suggest to Eugene that she should be obliged to leave; although after the way he and Eugene had spoken to her he imagined she was packing her bags at this very moment.
Father Hennessey returned to his house, and Eugene made his way through the inclement evening to the Excelsior Bar. She’d gone by now, he hoped, whoever she was and whatever she’d wanted. He forgot about her, and recalled instead that in 1938 humidity in the air had adversely affected the performance of the hitherto imperturbable Skibbereen Hero.
Carrying her presents, O’Shea walked behind Mrs Sinnott as she made her way upstairs. They moved slowly, and in her room she sat down at once. She dismissed O’Shea after he had put her birthday presents on the bedside table. They were kind to bother, she thought: they must find it tedious, having to think of something every year and having to come and sit with her in the kitchen on her birthday. She pulled the china bell-pull, remembering she’d forgotten to make it clear to O’Shea that she wouldn’t have anything more to eat, and wished now to wash herself before going to bed.
‘There’s a woman to see you, Father,’ his housekeeper said in the hall.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked, taking off his hat and his mackintosh.
‘She’s from the hotel. She says you know her, Father.’
He went slowly up the stairs, thinking that the damp affected his joints. He didn’t want to see her. He wanted to forget that she had ever come to Thaddeus Street, upsetting O’Shea and gabbling about the feet of murderers.
‘I must confess my life to you,’ Mrs Eckdorf said in a faint voice. ‘I must tell you everything, Father.’
He sat down at his bureau, turning the chair so that he was facing her. He asked her to sit down, too. Even before she spoke he felt frightened. He had his own people to look after, he thought, but he knew as soon as he’d thought it that he shouldn’t have. She spoke in the same hushed voice.
Father Hennessey heard how Mrs Eckdorf had been served with cognac by a barman on an ocean liner, and how in the course of conversation, and to Mrs Eckdorf’s surprise, the man had told her of his brief sojourn in O’Neill’s Hotel. She mentioned her intuitions, which were part of her professional stock-in-trade, and she explained that while the barman told his tale her intuitions had suggested that she must visit this hotel. She described the books that had made her famous, how the pages revealed unvarnished truth, how the lives of people were shown to other people so that people everywhere might be drawn closer through understanding. In cinemas and on television screens, she said, this documentary form was increasingly an accepted mode: he would agree, she slightly urged, that fiction was outclassed by straightforward truth?
Father Hennessey did not particularly agree because he did not at first understand what Mrs Eckdorf was talking about. The coffee-table volumes of which she spoke had never come his way, and it required consideration on his part before he was able to envisage them. They were not books that people read, she said, but rather that people picked up. He imagined people picking them up and turning the pages. They were authentic documents, she said: they made their statements in pictures of actuality and not in words, being concerned with reality. As her voice continued in his study, it seemed that humanity had become a raw material, which was something that Father Hennessey had not known about, any more than he had known about coffee-table volumes. He wondered if there were symphonies composed of real tears and shrieks of anguish, or films which showed how a man continued his life, having destroyed his wife and children. It sounded from what his visitor was saying as if such works might indeed exist, or would soon exist. He shuddered within him, finding the novelty upsetting.
Mrs Eckdorf related how she had walked by the river, arriving in Thaddeus Street by a round-about route, how later she had discovered the tragedy she had professionally sought and had then discovered a greater truth: she told Father Hennessey of what had occurred in O’Neill’s Hotel on this day once and of the forgiveness that had developed since. It was of this forgiveness, she explained, that her work would treat; God moving in a mysterious way was what her photographs were about. She spoke at length and slowly. A single action on this birthday twenty-nine years ago had altered the lives of a handful of people. Violence had created the life of a child; it had made the mother what she was today, and the father too. It had driven Enid Gregan from the home she had loved because it was stained with a violence that disgusted her. It had ruined the contentment of O’Shea. And yet there was forgiving now.
Having listened, Father Hennessey’s first thought was that speedily he should pray for Mrs Eckdorf. He did not do so. Instead he said:
‘Where did you get these facts from?’
She replied that O’Shea had led her into the past and that she had seen what there was to see. The facts were true, she said: she had sensed it in this room. Her eyes fell on the priest’s eyes: had not these facts been once confessed to him, a long time ago now? It wasn’t difficult, she revealed, for a professional mind to fish out the truth.
‘You cannot do a thing like this,’ he said with sharpness in his voice.
She looked away from him. She had informed him of all that so that he might understand what next she had to say, which was to do with herself. The’ photographs would be nicely produced; the volume would be well finished and bound; its price would reflect its quality. They must forget the volume now, since the volume was already a fait accompli. She had come to confess her life to him, which was sur
ely more important, a person’s life as opposed to a book.
‘All you have said is private to that family, Mrs Eckdorf.’
‘I had forgotten God, until He was again revealed to me through her. Call it my repayment of that debt, Father: my monument to her, more lasting than brass.’
Father Hennessey pressed with the palms of his hands on the two arms of his chair, raising himself to his feet. He crossed painfully to the window. He parted the lace curtains and looked at the wet evening. He tried to think constructively, but found impatience in the way. He spoke, still looking at the rain. He said again she could not do what she intended to do. He said that a volume such as she proposed would not contain the truth. Quietly, she questioned that. He said:
‘These people live ordinary lives. They have a love for that old woman. They come to her birthday, as I do myself. There’s nothing more to it.’
‘There is all the rest, God working in His way –’
‘You are inventing all the rest,’ cried Father Hennessey passionately, turning to her. ‘You are making an ordinary thing seem dramatic when it is not that at all. The truth is simple and unexciting: you are twisting it with sentiment and false interpretations, so that a book will sell to people.’
‘I am not doing anything for mercenary profit.’
His grey face was close to hers. A vein quivered on his forehead.
‘You must not do this,’ he repeated.
‘I wish to show the working of God, Father. I came to your house to tell you that. I came to obtain your blessing, and then to gather strength from you.’
He controlled his anger. She asked if she might smoke a cigarette in his house and he said that she might. She offered him one from her packet, but he said he didn’t smoke. He watched her lighting the cigarette and returning the packet to her handbag. As she blew out smoke, he explained that everything was the working of God, that it could not be otherwise. Mrs Sinnott was a kind woman, he said, but she was like any other woman. Her visitors wrote about themselves because she was interested in them. He himself, he pointed out, wrote about his work. There was nothing remarkable in any of it.
‘They lay their lives before her,’ she said. ‘She sees no difference between one person and another, as God does not.’
‘They write things about themselves because she likes to hear about them. She likes other people.’
‘Timothy is the child of a crime. If a crime had not been committed he would not be there.’
‘Will you please stop talking like that? Will you please now?’ ‘I am speaking the truth, Father.’
‘If you read the lives of the saints, Mrs Eckdorf, you’ll find that the truth has also been adorned with fancy. Only it is different with you because you have a camera, and people imagine a camera cannot lie. Cameras lie all the time.’
‘Why do you hate a stranger?’
‘I do not hate you.’
‘Then will you listen to me, Father?’
‘Yes, Mrs Eckdorf, I will listen to you.’
How could a woman go about invading the privacy of people and then delude herself that it was in a good cause? How could she extract from persons and from families selected elements that put together would make up a story to titillate the interest of others? He imagined the pictures in the book she said she had completed about a priest in Sicily, and he imagined its examination by people who were affluent enough to make such a purchase. They might be moved by the bewilderment of peasants and by the peasants’ love of the priest they had always known, but being moved like that was surely a luxury? She was like some awful puzzle, sitting there with her lips moving, talking a kind of gibberish. Her mind was in disarray, yet he believed her when she said that people picked up from their coffee-tables the volumes she composed, and wrote her admiring letters, and even shed tears over the ersatz truth she offered them. It amazed him, but he believed it.
He regarded the powdered face and the teeth that had a slight gap in the centre of them, and her tongue moving swiftly to form the words she spoke. He wanted to stop her flow of speech, to cry out harshly that the currency of her world was all debased, that people were not objects for cameras to look at, nor actors in her documentary form, nor raw material. There was something wrong if living people could be watched and studied so that other living people might somehow benefit. There was something wrong in looking through a keyhole at people being themselves.
‘I want to tell you, Father,’ she said, ‘about my life.’
She told him about her early childhood. She remembered taking her father’s hand and walking with him through the streets of Maida Vale, in London. She remembered the smell of her father, an odour of tobacco, and the brownness of his hard fingers, and his mouth smiling at her. He had read to her from books and had told her stories about animals he invented, he had taken her regularly to a waxworks. She remembered walking on Hampstead Heath with him one Sunday morning, an occasion when an Alsatian dog, bounding from its leash, had bounded back upon its master and knocked him to the ground. The man, having dislocated some part of himself in the rough-and-tumble, had been unable to rise. He lay there calling out abuse at his obstreperous pet, while her father ordered a youth who was laughing at the misfortune to telephone for an ambulance. After the incident, when the dog had been punished and its master’s injury attended to, she and her father had laughed, too, and had gone on laughing, unable to cease. It had happened so quickly, they said to one another, one moment a cheery Londoner and a dog, and the next a man unable to stand up from the damp ground. She’d been eight at the time.
In their flat in Maida Vale she gave raisins and crumbs of bread to dolls, and her father sat beside them on the floor, receiving raisins and bread as well. There was a doll that always sat on her father’s lap, called Janey Rose, whose hair he said he liked because she always kept it brushed. After tea-time with the dolls her father would find that he had sticks of Peggy’s Leg in his pocket, or liquorice sweets. ‘We’ll read the dolls a story,’ she would say, listening while he read aloud. And then one day her father wasn’t there.
She did not see him ever after that. She asked her mother if he’d died, but her mother replied that he was still very much alive. They had agreed, she said, that none of them should meet again: she had insisted upon that, since she was being left with the burden of the child. He had decided on another wife, she explained, who did not wish to take on another woman’s child. They had talked sensibly, her mother told her, the three of them, and had agreed to go their chosen ways. Her mother was glad he’d gone: she hadn’t liked him.
And then, said Mrs Eckdorf, the house filled up with one man after another man. In her mother’s bed the men lay naked, and her mother laughed, giving them her body like giving a piece of chocolate. On Sunday mornings a man and her mother would sit around in coloured dressing-gowns, drinking coffee and arguing. Sometimes a man would bring her sweets or take her on to his knee. ‘She’s such a mope,’ she heard her mother say. She hated the men, and her mother too, and her father who had betrayed her callously. She went to a boarding-school and found Miss Tample waiting for her.
She walked about his room, smoking and gesturing. Tears fell on to her clothes and sometimes on to his books and papers. He prayed that she would go away. He did not understand, he whispered in his prayer: he begged forgiveness; he was too old to understand this modern woman.
‘I sat in a room,’ she said, ‘in St Monica’s School for Girls and could not, after that, bear the thought of other people’s flesh. My mother laughed when I told her.’
‘Mrs Eckdorf –’
‘My heart was full of tears, and all she did was to throw her head back and laugh her horrid laugh. “We all concern one another,” I might have said. “A daughter’s injury needs a mother’s love.” Instead I went out for a walk.’
‘I’m sorry you have suffered, Mrs Eckdorf.’
‘My world today is a different one from yours, Father. You would sit awkwardly in my cinder-grey apartment in
the Lipowskystrasse. Hans-Otto would have thought you quaint’ He nodded, understanding that a man she had been married to should think him quaint.
‘My world glitters like glass of different colours, thin and brittle. In my world, Father Hennessey, people dress nicely; they take personal pride. People talk across the length of a room, Bach plays softly, a manservant passes drinks in simply-shaped glasses. On grey walls hang photographs of Mexican peasants, magnified a score of times. The people mention Louis Malle, and a beach in Portugal, and new movements in Dance, and Stan Getz. On a coffee table somewhere there is a volume that tells in candid photographs a human story that’s made more beautiful by the beauty of the photographs.’
Father Hennessey, who had not before heard of Louis Malle or Stan Getz, none the less derived from what Mrs Eckdorf had said an intimation of the world she called her own. He saw quite easily people sitting in an elegant room, talking quietly while harpsichord music played as a background to what they said. He imagined a woman moving soundlessly across the floor, and taking from a low table a book that told in photographs a true story.
‘“Sugar?” Miss Tample said in a different kind of room. “Sugar in your cocoa, Ivy?” And in my mother’s, house my mother laughed and lit a tipped cigarette. She said there was someone she wanted me to meet, some small young Frenchman with whom currently she was committing fornication. All that makes up my world, Father Hennessey. My marriages were unconsummated.’
Watching her striding about his room, shedding these facts about herself, Father Hennessey said again that he was sorry. ‘
Why should you understand? I make no sense to you.’
Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel Page 24