Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel

by William Trevor

  Wearily, Morrissey walked on, reflecting that once again he had trusted a human being, and as a result had been left for dead on an empty street. He hadn’d even his photographs now or books to consult in the presence of Mrs Sinnott, or the small sum of money that he had earned that evening by standing about getting wet. He walked towards O’Neill Hotel, where in his wet clothes he would lie on the floor of the hall and be wakened in the morning by the boot of a half-wit.

  ‘Extraordinary things have happened to me in this city,’ said Mrs Eckdorf in the bar of her hotel at half-past one on the morning of August 11th. ‘You would scarce believe,’ she said.

  She was with people who were talking about an accident to a horse. On Friday afternoon, one of these people said, in full view of all, including the President and the Papal Nuncio, a horse had had to be slaughtered. An Irish horse, another said, a bay gelding called Tubbermac. They appeared to be talking about show jumping: she displayed an interest, liking to have people to talk to.

  ‘On Friday afternoon?’ She had been somewhere called Booterstown, she told them, on Friday afternoon, and earlier in Terenure.’ Before that she been relaxing in a cemetery.

  ‘He was approaching the thirteenth fence,’ one of her companions said. ‘A foreleg snapped with a crack you could hear.’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’ve had a time of it I can tell you,’ she confessed a little later. ‘I’m a professional photographer. I came here on a story.’

  Her companions, whose spirits had all been reduced by the memory of a horse being slaughtered, seemed pleased at the change of subject. ‘Photographer?’ one of them said. ‘I do like this hotel,’ another murmured.

  After a time, Mrs Eckdorf said to the people around her that the notion of God had recently made sense to her because she had felt a warmth. The people politely paid attention.

  ‘And then,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, ‘a priest destroyed my God. D’you understand?’

  The people said they did not, and were surprised when Mrs Eckdorf did not apparently pursue the subject but spoke instead of an elderly woman whose son had had no alternative but to revolt against the weight of her piety. He had ravaged an orphan girl that his mother had adopted, Mrs Eckdorf in passing said.

  The people who had talked about the slaughtered horse left her rather quickly then, all of them yawning and saying they were sleepy. They took their glasses with them and went to another room, where they unanimously decided that Mrs Eckdorf, who in their company had consumed a lot of alcohol, was drunk.

  Mrs Eckdorf found the night-porter in a cubby-hole in the hall. She sat down beside him and told him that her mother had taken perfumed Frenchmen into her bed. ‘That is my life,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, ‘if it interests you at all.’

  The night-porter, finding it hard to make much of Mrs Eckdorf’s conversation, informed her that he had won a sum of money that evening. The unexpected winning of a sum of money, he meditatively argued, made up for many a reversal in life. He had won eight pounds on a dog called Yellow Printer, which had triumphed in the Greyhound Derby by one and a half lengths over Russian Gun.

  ‘That bloody priest was wrong,’ cried Mrs Eckdorf. ‘What does a priest know, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘What d’you mean, madam?’ the night-porter asked, worried because she had raised her voice.

  ‘Tell that priest,’ she cried, ‘to ask the needy his questions. Tell him to let the needy lead him to a God of their own. Will you do that for me?’ she requested. ‘Will you go to the priest now?’

  Mrs Eckdorf, who had risen to her feet, swayed on them.

  ‘Will you?’ she cried again, and since it was apparent to the night-porter that she was not herself and was at last on the way to bed, he said that he would.

  ‘Thaddeus Street,’ she said. ‘A Father Hennessey, an awful man. Look when you are there at the yellow hotel.’

  ‘I will, of course,’ said the night-porter. ‘I’ll go in five minutes.’

  ‘O’Neill Hotel.’

  ‘I’ll have a look at it.’

  ‘Go now.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the night-porter, busying himself with keys and pieces of paper. ‘I’ll just see to these first.’

  ‘Born of the need within them,’ said Mrs Eckdorf. ‘Any God they can find will do. Will you remember those words for the priest? Born of desperation?’

  ‘Born of desperation,’ repeated the night-porter. ‘I’ll tell him that, surely.’

  He watched while Mrs Eckdorf mounted the stairs, thinking to himself, as often he had thought during his nightly vigils before, that drink was a curse.

  Unable to sleep, Father Hennessey prayed that Mrs Eckdorf might become calm in her mind. He prayed that she would cease to distort’ the truth with dramatic adornment, as the truth about St Attracta and St Damien and St Cosma had been adorned. He prayed for her happiness, and that she might receive the comfort she sought. He tried to understand the world she occupied and had told him about. He heard again music by Bach played quietly as a background, and saw a silent manservant passing drinks among elegant people. He imagined the books she composed, all of which appeared to be an invasion of human privacy and were for that reason interesting to some, being perceptive and even charming. A fashion that would pass, he thought: perhaps it didn’t matter.

  His conscience felt lighter after he had prayed for a time. Towards dawn he slept.

  Mrs Sinnott had wakened at midnight and had lain for a while, thinking her familiar thoughts. She had sensed the splattering of rain in Thaddeus Street, which made her feel cosy in her bed, and she remembered a night when she had been awakened by lightning, when the children were small. Eugene had been frightened and Enid had consoled him. She herself had gone to the kitchen to heat some milk. Remembering that, she had dropped off to sleep again.

  Hours later she woke with the face of Mrs Eckdorf in her mind. There was a wretchedness in that painted face she thought; there was something the matter with the woman.

  She had seen her in Thaddeus Street, a white figure walking towards the hotel. O’Shea had written a message to say that a person from Germany had come to stay. O’Shea had brought her into her room. And later she had sat with her. And then she had taken all those photographs at the birthday tea.

  Why had a woman come like that? What was the matter with her? The two questions chased one another in Mrs Sinnott’s mind For a time it seemed that the face of Mrs Eckdorf was weeping, and then that she was screaming out in anguish. These soundless visions frightened Mrs Sinnott. She fell asleep and dreamed that Mrs Eckdorf was pleading with her desperately, unable to understand that she could not hear her. In her dream she made the necessary allowance, knowing that a stranger could not be expected to understand that she was deaf. She saw Mrs Eckdorf in Thaddeus Street and tried to reach her by climbing from the window. She hurt herself. She felt a pain throbbing in her body. Her father shook his head at her. In the yard he gestured at the hornbeam tree, mouthing out words at her, ordering her not to climb it. She ran into the kitchen and sat on a chair, watching her mother and looking up when Leo Sinnott came into the kitchen. She tried to go to him, but the pain in her body held her back. It increased when she moved her legs. She had broken all her ribs, she thought, when she fell from the hornbeam tree; everyone would be cross with her. Mrs Eckdorf came into the kitchen and danced with Leo Sinnott. They waltzed round and round, while her mother and father clapped their hands together and O’Shea stood by the door taking photographs. She had fallen down, trying to cross the kitchen: she pushed her body along the flagstones but found the effort painful. Nobody noticed her as she lay there. Eugene came into the kitchen, and Philomena, and Enid and Timothy John and Desmond Gregan. Agnes Quin looked down at her but did not notice that she was lying in pain. Morrissey sat beside her and wrote prophecies in an exercise-book. She went on making the effort, but the effort tired her and the pain increased. She was dying on the floor; she thought; she was dying while all of them were around her and none of
them noticed. And then Mrs Eckdorf’s face came to her again, with red marks all over it as if it had been struck, with tears streaming on the cheeks. The lips were drawn back, the mouth was rigidly open, as though a furious grief poured out from it. She tried to speak to Mrs Eckdorf. She tried to explain that she was too tired to move her body, that the pain was numbing her as she died on the floor. The face was full of misery and confusion. She tried to make a gesture but she was too exhausted to raise her arm. She tried to apologize with her eyes but she failed in that too. The face was the face of an orphan who had come to her. The face went on suffering before her, until someone came and gently closed her eyes.

  16

  Mrs Eckdorf took a knife from the breakfast table and walked with it in her hand across the dining-room of the hotel.

  Waiters eyed her, considering it unusual that a guest should openly filch cutlery. The people with whom she had spent some hours the night before observed the knife in her hand and wondered about it too. ‘She probably has string on a parcel to cut,’ one waiter said to another, and the second waiter agreed that this might be so. The people who had told her about the slaughtered horse didn’t form a theory about the knife, and soon forgot about it.

  The manager of the hotel, who had the evening before gone to much trouble in order to accommodate Mrs Eckdorf with a room, saw her with the knife in her hand and saw that the knife bore traces of the butter that she had spread on her toast. He memorized the fact that this guest had removed a knife from the dining-room, so that later it could be established that the knife had been returned.

  In her room Mrs Eckdorf washed the knife and put it in her handbag. She felt the need of a knife’s protection. She felt that when she returned to Thaddeus Street she would be physically attacked: O’Shea and Eugene Sinnott would attack her, and when that happened she would take the knife from her handbag and brandish it. She put the strap of her camera around her neck: in the azure-blue room Mrs Sinnott might like to have her photograph taken again.

  In the hall of O’Neill’s Hotel Mrs Eckdorf witnessed the figures of Eugene Sinnott and O’Shea coming down the stairs, with the dog trailing behind them. Her hand sought the knife in her bag, but the men seemed not to be aggressive. Eugene said nothing to her. He passed into the passage that led to the kitchen. O’Shea said that Mrs Sinnott was dead.

  ‘Dead?’ cried Mrs Eckdorf.

  ‘She is dead now,’ said O’Shea.

  He followed Eugene, and his dog followed him.

  ‘Dead?’ said Mrs Eckdorf again.

  The men had not attacked her because the old woman had died. They would not attack her in the house of a dead woman. Voices would be hushed in the house today: there would be neither violence nor unpleasantness, nor horror for Philomena. Slowly, she ascended the stairs.

  In her room Mrs Sinnott lay as she had died. Her eyes were closed; there was no suffering in her thin face. O’Shea had lighted two candles and pulled the blinds down. In her room the stillness seemed greater than it had been before.

  Mrs Eckdorf looked round. The red exercise-books were stacked as they had been, beneath the deep window-sills. A few were on the table by her chair.

  ‘You have died,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, ‘and they will bury you in the ground and you will rot.’

  Wearily, she prepared the Mamiya, her fingers moving automatically from long practice, her mind elsewhere. She had come back from school at the end of one term and her mother had not been at Paddington. She had taken a taxi, but when she arrived at their house she found her mother was not there either. She had discovered as well that she hadn’t enough money to pay the driver. She had never rid herself of the feeling of desperation that had overcome her then, as the taxi-man waited, becoming angry. She’d managed to borrow a pound from the caretaker of a block of flats, and her mother had laughed when she told her, even though she’d been crying. The man with her mother had said a little matter like that shouldn’t make a big girl cry. ‘Pay back the caretaker,’ she had screamed at her mother, who had promised to and then forgotten.

  Dutifully, she worked the Mamiya, the professional part of her continuing to operate. The Seikoshna-S shutter flicked, as swift as light in the action. It flicked again, and again and again, in the silent gloom. She took her shoes off and stood on the bed, straddling the body that the bed contained. She changed the lens, thinking of her mother’s friend saying that a little matter like that shouldn’t make a big girl cry. With skill, she photo-graphed the dead face.

  In the hall Eugene Sinnott said to her that she must not again return to the hotel.

  ‘We can’t have you here upsetting people,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d come to get something you’d left. O’Shea says you were in with my mother.’

  She took the knife from her handbag and held it before her. Eugene looked at it. She did not say anything.

  ‘We can’t be dealing with persons like you,’ said Eugene. ‘We have a funeral to see to now, Mrs Eckdorf.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Sinnott –’

  ‘You caused an extreme embarrassment for myself and O’Shea yesterday –’

  ‘I only took photographs. I’ll explain to you, Mr Sinnott.’

  ‘You locked a man in a room.’

  ‘I’m tired, Mr Sinnott.’ She returned the knife to her handbag, realizing again that it was not necessary to protect herself.

  ‘Do not return here, Mrs Eckdorf.’

  ‘There is no need to now.’

  She continued to speak to him. She had come that morning to talk to his mother in an exercise-book, as he had and as others had. Yesterday she’d felt a peace in the presence of his mother. She was sorry she’d caused trouble by locking a man in a room: a notion had come to her that she should humiliate herself, but Father Hennessey had said that that was nonsensical and maybe it had been, but how was a person to know, when a person felt something strongly? The God of the needy had spoken through his mother, and now his mother was dead. The God of the needy was a myth, but did that matter? A myth could be potent too, a myth could be a solace and a balm when people failed each other in that respect. His mother, silent in a silent room, surrounded with sacred references and rich in human goodness, made the myth a warm and living thing: you could sit there and give yourself to it, and feel it doing you good. Was there anything wrong in that?

  She repeated the question when he didn’t reply. He said:’

  I cannot listen to you, Mrs Eckdorf. No one here can understand you.’

  ‘I shall remain in your city until the time your mother is buried, Mr Sinnott, and then I shall go away from your city for ever.’

  She left the hotel, and Eugene shivered. She gave him the creeps, he thought, as Agnes Quin had thought also.

  The family came to the hotel. Mr Gregan said he was glad to learn that Mrs Eckdorf had packed her bags. It was an amazing thing that she had turned up in that manner, he said, and Eugene told him how she had returned to the hotel with a knife, although she’d made no attempt to attack him with it. O’Shea was still in the dumps, he said, having seen the error of his ways after Father Hennessey had had another word with him, ordering him to take a hold on himself. Mr Gregan said he’d read in a newspaper one time about a woman of a similar kind who used to go into people’s houses on the pretence that she was a saleswoman of bathing costumes. Once she was in she wouldn’t go out again. She used to sit down at the kitchen table under the assumption, apparently, that she was one of the family. She’d talk away, twenty-two to the dozen, until policemen were fetched to remove her.

  In a lowered voice Eugene related to Mr Gregan the facts of Mr Smedley’s captivity. ‘A very decent man,’ he said, ‘that she had imprisoned in an upstairs room.’ He related other facts: Morrissey had been making immoral use of the hotel ever since the time he’d given him permission to lie in the hall at night as a temporary arrangement. O’Shea had complained that Agnes Quin had been bringing elderly men into the rooms, but he’d always put it down to O’Shea’s imagination. Now
, it seemed, it was true. Morrissey and Agnes Quin had abused the hospitality they’d been offered. They’d been turning the joint into a kip while his back was turned. Father Hennessey, who’d had the information from the photographer, had spoken sternly to him about it and he was going to have to give Morrissey the sharp side of his tongue. ‘Bedad,’ exclaimed Mr Gregan, already fully cognizant of the activities of Morrissey in this respect, ‘you’d hardly credit it.’

  O’Shea spoke to no one. He made necessary arrangements and went about his ordinary tasks with a mind that was empty of thought. He had found her as he had always known one morning he would find her. She had died peacefully, which was what she had deserved.

  The family sat in the kitchen that Sunday morning and drank tea, agreeing about the details of the funeral. After that, Mr Gregan said that Eugene had been telling him that the photographer of yesterday, having left the hotel, had returned that morning with a knife. For the benefit of the others, Eugene repeated much of what he had related to his brother-in-law, but because of the presence of the two women he did not include certain details. The photographer, he told them, had managed to incarcerate an unknown Englishman in one of the hotel rooms for the purpose of washing his feet, although since she had later arrived in the hotel with a weapon he was inclined to wonder if she hadn’t had it in her mind to inflict an injury on the man.

  Mrs Gregan said she hoped O’Shea had recovered himself, and Eugene passed on the information that Father Hennessey had told O’Shea not to be a damn eejit.