“Just fancy,” Dr. Pomery said to herself, “a pink hotel!”
The Lobby
It was five minutes of seven and the lobby of the hotel was still quiet. Two sleepy bellmen and a porter appeared briefly, changed watches, and disappeared down the back stairs for coffee. An elevator boy lounged dispiritedly against a potted palm. The cigar-stand girl dropped her metal bank with a clattering charge of loose change and said a four-letter word. There was a single, desultory check-out.
The big gold clock in the lobby struck seven in tones as deliberately golden as its pendulum, as full-bodied as its weights. The clock was very old. It had seen famine and plague and siege, but the clock had ticked imperturbably on, concerned only with the passage of time. It was a great thing to count the seconds as they hurried into eternity, a fine thing to ring out another year.
Only the clock knew how old it was, and the strange things it had seen. It had been a great beauty in its day, splendid in gold leaf, garlanded with rosebuds and caressed by cherubs: sun, moon and stars revolving tirelessly at the clock’s will.
The clock had come down in the world, as had the big Persian carpet. They submitted now to the indignities of commerce, but the clock remembered rose gardens and fountains and royal favors, the perversity of the old cardinal, a naughty, naked duchess in a mirrored, gold boudoir, exquisite dishes not salubrious to the health, fine steel hissing through heavy air, a drooling, highborn imbecile and pretty, painted boys.
The clock had not forgotten, but it observed now the foibles of lesser persons without scorn, for it knew that time was the great thing. See how they waited, the little people, hanging breathless upon it, willing it to stop, to go back, to come forward, hiding its ravages, spinning great dreams against tomorrow: their every act dictated by the vast caprice of time. The men and women in the lobby peered into its golden face: waited before it, adjusted their lives and pocket watches to it, were impatient of its lingering seconds, its ominous waste of years.
Millie Dukemer, the cashier, heavy eyed and breathless, cleared the cigar stand sharply, her vault keys jingling. Seven o’clock, she’d made it again, even if she had been at the One-Two-Three Club until one-thirty, even if she had had a nice little package on, not to mention what had happened after that. Buck Turner was a bastard, she told herself, a garden variety louse, but then everybody was, so what difference did it make?
Dukemer would be thirty-one in February, and this morning, Friday, December the first, she felt her age.
The world going to hell in a hack. Nine more years and she’d be forty. “Now, there’s something to cheer about. My Thought for Today. Fat, forty and fatuous. What do I have to look forward to besides a partial plate? My teeth, sweet harbingers of decay, are falling out,” she said. Not that they were falling out yet, but she did have a pivot in the front, the one that Harry had broken off when he hit her in the mouth that time. “Damn Harry! Damn all men!” There wasn’t one of them you could trust.
She smoothed the lapels of her white piqué blouse, gave an angry hitch to her green linen skirt, ran a quick comb through her hair. Dukemer’s hair was almost black and not quite curly, and she wore it severely, parted in the middle and pulled back tightly with a barrette. Doing things to her hair made her head ache, not that it didn’t ache anyhow.
Dukemer took another aspirin, gulped some water out of the night men’s pitcher and put the tray in the hall. The hall that led to Room Service was dotted with trays—half-eaten sandwiches, coffeepots, dirty cups, cream pitchers, stacks of plates that seemed to have no function other than to be washed or broken.
She called Room Service, ordered buttered rye toast, tomato juice and coffee, not that she would get it. She’d probably get eight or ten pieces of dry white toast with a cereal dish full of orange marmalade on the side. Room Service was capricious. Once she’d gotten a soft-boiled egg and a pitcher of maple syrup and four cups and saucers. She’d save some of the coffee so that she could have a bracer whenever she felt a nervous breakdown coming on. It was a poor day when Dukemer didn’t have a series of nervous breakdowns, but they didn’t show except in the temporary, set expression of her face. My God, people were awful. They got worse all the time.
Dukemer called Room Service again and asked for Ernie. She’d give Ernie a quarter. Oi, the money she spent on tips! But she liked Ernie. Dukemer could sort of imagine the stillborn baby she’d had by Harry as looking like Ernie, say in about five years, if he’d lived, grown up. That was presupposing that it didn’t take after Harry, of course. It was probably just as well. The poor little thing would more likely have had two heads and webbed feet. “Yessir!” she said, straightening her jerkin.
Dukemer posted 306-7’s local phone calls and added three for good measure; she’d be lucky if he hadn’t called San Francisco. $109.54. “Thank you!” she said.
The occupant of 306-7 had sort of reminded her of Harry, but when she thought about Harry and her life with him it was like thinking about somebody else, somebody that she had known a long time ago. Considering everything, she had been a pretty straight kid at that, even at the orphanage.
Of course, Miss Hande had been wonderful. When Dukemer looked at that picture of her mother, dull brown and white it was, with her hair in a Psyche knot and sitting in a wrought-iron chair and holding a rose, she remembered Miss Hande instead and that last, awful Christmas at the orphanage. She still had the crescent of rhinestones set in silver that Miss Hande had given her then, just before Dukemer set out to make her fortune in Chicago.
Chicago meant Marshall Fields and Marshall Fields meant gloves to Dukemer, and it was there that she had begun hating people—all women but Miss Hande. The women had fingered the gloves, sniffed at them, mixed up the sizes and the prices, and since she had been in love with Robert Taylor at the time anyhow, Dukemer had thought she was in heaven when she got a job cashiering at an outlying Balaban & Katz theatre. She had been good and they had liked her, and finally she had been transferred right down to the Loop where she had cashiered at the B & K Chicago.
Harry was house manager at the Chicago and Millie had thought Harry was wonderful, even more wonderful than Robert Taylor, with his cigar and the way he sort of narrowed his eyes into little slits when he looked at her, his double-breasted brown suit with the chalk stripe, and that sort of coiled ring, like a snake with a diamond in its eye, on his little finger.
In six months she and Harry had been married, but Millie had gone right back to work when she found out that Harry’s snake ring, the brown suit with the chalk stripe, the black suit with the pencil stripe, his pale blue tweeds, his white dinner jacket and his cashmere overcoat weren’t paid for yet.
Millie had kept right on working until Harry’s bills were paid at Slodkin’s, until their furniture, their Frigidaire and the deluxe cabinet radio-phonograph-television were paid for, until she was seven months along. She had then the two months of gracious living that were her allotment for a lifetime, feeling life, sleeping when she was tired, eating when she was hungry.
Myrtle Schlemmer, who had the ladies room at the Chicago, had changed all that though. Myrtle had said that it was better for Millie to hear it from a friend than from someone who was just going around trying to stir up trouble. Myrtle had done a lot of talking, and when Millie had gone down to the Chicago and burst into a dressing room, the lady acrobat hadn’t been standing on her hands. Harry had looked kind of silly for a minute, and then he had kicked at Millie with his new nineteen-fifty brogans, and hit her in the mouth with his snake ring.
It had been about three weeks until she lost the baby, got a new tooth and got rid of the furniture. Dukemer had worked at the Morrison Hotel for a while then. But she didn’t like the Morrison and she didn’t like Chicago, so she had trickled south—Louisville. Memphis. Sea Island. Atlanta. Sea Island again, and now here.
Dukemer looked at the clock; powdered her nose in a little mirror. It wasn’t bad, as noses went, but her eyes were still her best feature, a candid blue in the olive p
allor of her face. Buck Turner was just a garden variety louse, but Harry had been a perfect, blue-white, gem-cut s. o. b. Harry made almost anybody look good until she got to know them.
The big gold clock looked blandly back at Dukemer. “Sento un soave venticel che spira. Dal’ aurora rutilante e rossa. . .” When Dukemer thought about what a chump she’d been for Harry, she was embarrassed. Still, maybe everybody was one part Farmer’s Daughter. Had been sometime. “. . . La luce e le bellezze e’l caldo amore.”
It was seven-five now, and Rosalie, the night operator, put down her paper and turned the patent alarm clock on the switchboard back five minutes. She yawned and stretched her mouth into the expression of tender banter she considered suitable for early calls.
“Good morning! It’s seven o’clock,” she told the Misses Mellon, E. J. Westbury and Mrs. T. J. Sturt III.
Mrs. T.J. Sturt III tried to sound as bored, as indifferent, as Mrs. T. J. Sturt the Thirdish as she possibly could. It was hard to do because she had to be in the office by eight-thirty.
She must be crazy, she decided, still it had seemed like a good idea last night.
The night auditor drifted to his coffee, his furnished room. Every night he planned to go to the beach, get some sun, when he went off duty and every morning he was too tired, but he always figured that he’d do it tomorrow. The flurry incident to changing shifts subsided and the lobby, under the watchful eye of the clock, was quiet again.
Mr. Moxley, the night manager, leaned against the front desk, watching the clerk and the elevator and wondering if he would be able to sleep. His thoughts were formless, familiar, colored by the impotence of his hatred of Mr. Wenton and his demotion; by hunger, for his ulcer had long rebelled at hotel food, his old irritation at the neighbors’ children and their goddamned noisy play, his suspicions of Mrs. T. J. Sturt III in 926, his mounting anger at Purcell who was the fair-haired boy.
Purcell wasn’t due on till eight, but it was seven-forty-five and Moxley had been waiting for him since seven o’clock. You’d think the bastard could be early for a change, Moxley thought. Once, just once, but no, it was always exactly eight when Purcell showed up, and it was five, ten minutes maybe before Moxley could get away. Ten minutes wasn’t much, but multiply it by 365 and it amounted to six, seven days, he figured. Mr. Moxley wasn’t very good at figuring. He wasn’t very good at anything else either and, beneath his bluster, he knew it. That was the reason why he was on the dead man’s shift, although he liked to think that it was shady dealing on Purcell’s part that had put him there. His wife was acting up again too: cry, that’s about all she did, and say that she wished she was back in Aurora.
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 . . . /-//-///-////-////.
The Pink Hotel Page 2