Mr. Mather hadn’t minded Violet’s bills, the fantasy of Violetta or her periods of unreason, for Violet had, after all, been a Peabody, and the Peabodys, as everyone in Waltham knew, had always been a little queer. Violet was congenitally entitled to certain eccentricities. But on the other hand, Mr. Mather had never quite got over his surprise at finding himself married to Violet in the first place, when he had at the time been, really, almost in love with a pretty little Irish girl from South Boston. He had been quite mad about her when he had suddenly found himself engaged to Violet who, even in a virgin state, already contemplated Violetta.
The sackbut and the viola were forgotten now. They had been abandoned in a corner of the drawing room when it had been discovered that Violetta had an acceptable coloratura, and now Violetta’s teeth were white and gleaming and her rippling hair was as provocatively molten as her golden voice. Mr. Mather admired Violetta, but he would have preferred, in a daughter, something a little more comfortable.
Mr. Mather ate breakfasts at the hotel because his ulcer was hungry in the early morning, when iceboxes were locked and pantries bolted against transgressors. Bismuth tablets were all very well, but Mr. Mather’s ulcer wanted carrot juice and hot milk and zwieback, and he broke his fast, frugally but in state, in a corner of the dining room near the dumbwaiter.
At noon and in the evening Mr. Mather frequented the Oasis Cafeteria, where were served the watery soups, the thin stews fortified by onion and great chunks of potato that made a little gravy go a long way, the innocuous salads of cottage cheese and gelatine, the bland custard puddings, to which almost a lifetime of Violet’s cooking had accustomed him. It had been the alarm clock all over again.
The Oasis was deservedly popular with any number of people who had grown gray on bad cooking. They declared that there was no place quite like it, that it was just like home. And so it was. There were also large signs that read No Tipping, Please, so that it was at once possible to gratify a cordial attitude to the lower orders with conversation and cheery hellos, while maintaining the reasonable tenets of thrift that they had digested with their first bread puddings.
None of it had been very jolly, and Mr. Mather was essentially a jolly little man who liked a joke as often as possible and had an inordinate appetite for puns and limericks. He had brought with him from Waltham a large black silk umbrella with a silver-ringed handle and copies of Emerson and Plato and Lowell for rainy days. It had rained just once, in a sort of wild, warm hurry that made Emerson and Lowell and Plato seem almost as silly to Mr. Mather as his black silk umbrella.
Mr. Mather bought paper-backed novels and mystery thrillers at the cigar stand then, but he had been reading, he told himself, all his life and Mrs. Dukemer came to occupy a larger and larger place in his imagination. In his own way, Mr. Mather was a snob and it gratified him to see that Dukemer was careless with great names and cordial to bus boys. Mr. Mather carried Dukemer with him in his heart, dreamed of her at night, regarded her image steadfastly at the Oasis Cafeteria, saw her face, not tired but smiling, in mashed turnips and beet greens and codfish cakes, caught briefly the arrogant little tilt to her nose in parsnip and rutabaga, meat loaf and fruited rice pudding.
Mr. Mather’s ulcer became hungrier and hungrier until even double lamb chops and baked Idaho potato left him with a gnawing, internal restlessness that communicated itself to his ulcer. Dukemer’s sleek head in her gilded cage was scourge and balm, and Mr. Mather found himself, too often for his dignity, at the Desk asking for mail.
As for his mail, there was so little of it that he was almost reduced to the extremity of writing letters to himself: and when he got it, it was dull enough—bills forwarded from the office, and occasional stately programs of recitals in which Violetta figured prominently.
Yes, he could have put up with Violet and Violetta and the habitual Peabody state of mind if Violet had not turned Theosophist. The Mathers had been Unitarians, of course, but he might have accepted Annie Besant or an occasional Mahatma. A constant procession of gurus, though, reaching their climacteric in Mumser Lai, had been too much for him. Mr. Mather felt that gurus, like Madam Blavatsky, were emotionally unstable, queer things from the wrong side of Queer Street. Gurus were infra-dig.
Mr. Mather would certainly have sent himself telegrams saying MEET ME PHILADELPHIA (STOP) URGENT. P. or MARKET RISING AWAIT CONFIRM YOUR ORDER. MARKHEIM, and gone decently back to Waltham if Dukemer had not decided suddenly to smile at him. It had a warm, this-is-between-you-and-me quality to it, and Mr. Mather had been so elated that he had asked her to dinner. When she had refused, Mr. Mather had been so dejected that he had coughed behind his hand, bowed, and said “Not at all.” He had said something about a chocolate frosted then, had coughed and bowed as before and said “Not at all.”
Dukemer was hungry, her meal had been bad to start and cold when she got to it, she would have settled for a beer and bed, but there was something about Mr. Mather’s round red face, his flat a, his blue and white polka dot tie, his neat blue and white seersucker suit, a little too small for him as if it had been washed oftener than was strictly salutary to seersucker, that had undone her.
When she had balanced the sheet and gone off at last, Dukemer had found Mr. Mather pacing shamefacedly, waiting for her at the very entrance to the hotel.
“Hi,” she said.
Mr. Mather bowed and coughed and made an uncomfortable noise in his throat.
“Will you really buy me a chocolate frosted?” she asked.
“Delighted,” Mr. Mather said. “Unexpected ah-honor. This-ah, this fel-low,” he began, “with whom you have ah-a dinner engagement. Very lucky,” he went on. “Very lucky ah-fel-low.”
“Don’t be silly,” Dukemer said. “You belong in a glass case. I always say no. About a million guys ask me to dinner. Are we really going to have a chocolate frosted?” she persisted.
“To be ah-sure.” Mr. Mather whistled a few sharp bars in E flat. “Quite ah-so.”
He had bowed and coughed and they had gone along together sedately until suddenly the whole conception of Mr. Mather’s waylaying a cashier and of Dukemer walking out for a chocolate frosted had become so immediately ridiculous that they had been obliged to stop occasionally to laugh. They had continued to laugh at the milk bar, tasting in the chocolate frosteds the unlikely flavor of Mr. Mather’s turpitude.
Mr. Mather found Miss Dukemer’s stories about the hotel droll, really very droll: and his ulcer, his association with the firm of Finney, Winney, Goldbeck and Chotek, Violet and Violetta, the gurus, the Oasis Cafeteria and the alarm clock became unreasonable and a little hilarious with Miss Dukemer beside him, her legs wrapped around a stool and the corners of her mouth curled in a queer little satisfied half-smile.
“I was starved,” Dukemer said, and found herself telling Mr. Mather about Room Service. “. . . a soft-boiled egg and a pitcher of maple syrup and four cups and saucers. In case someone should drop in.” She had gone on then and told him about the bartender the Old Man had hired for the Desk because he’d had hotel experience. “. . . he checked them out all morning as fast as I could check them in, and then he went out to lunch and never came back.” 809-10 had been sold three times between 11:00 and 11:15. “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” Dukemer piped in a squeaky treble.
Mr. Mather was surprised to hear a sprightly basso reply
“Goldilocks!”
“Goldilocks is an extra,” Dukemer pointed out. “Probably touched up, too. You’d better have a nice middle-aged couple, white, gentile.”
“No, thank you,” Mr. Mather said. “I, ah-damn it, am a middle-aged couple.”
She told him about the Mellotts then and Chiang’s sterling silver sand pan, the Old Man, Maggie Alexandroff and the De Burke Cabochon. The genuine Drop of Blood, she said, was in the vault where it belonged.
They had drifted up the avenue then, stopped in at Doc’s Bar and Grill for a small beer, another and then another, and Mr. Mather was conscious of a pr
ofound sense of well-being. His ulcer had stopped hurting quite a long time ago, perhaps in the milk bar. The absence of pain and the small beers and the presence of Mrs. Dukemer were so stimulating that he had agreed at once when Dukemer had said dreamily that it would be fun to go wading, wouldn’t it?
They had had another and then another, and then Mr. Mather had actually found himself wading in a sort of delightful trance state, with the surf breaking coldly, but very agreeably, against his bare feet, and Mrs. Dukemer was delicious, the wind from the water blowing her sleek hair into curly little tendrils around her face and whipping her skirts about her slim, brown legs.
“Lovely,” Mr. Mather said of nothing in particular. “Lovely, lovely, lovely!”
“I’ve wanted to go wading since I was ten years old,” Dukemer told him seriously, “and now I am wading.”
“Lovely, lovely, lovely,” Mr. Mather said again.
“I really am wading,” Dukemer reiterated to her private gods.
Mr. Mather whistled tunelessly. The garish seascape, the small beers and Mrs. Dukemer’s lifted skirts were one in sudden content in Mr. Mather. “Lovely, lovely,” he said.
He hadn’t felt ridiculous even when he was putting on his socks. He had got some sand in his shoe, but Mrs. Dukemer only said that that meant that he would be coming back to Florida—Chamber of Commerce plug.
They had progressed then, hand in hand, from bar to bar, had found themselves quite accidentally at El Diablo and had wandered into a deserted alfresco dining room, to which the music of the orchestra penetrated in a sort of seminal whisper.
They ordered more drinks then under a galaxy of extraordinary stars, and it had seemed to Mr. Mather that he remained stationary, while people and places and events whirled up to and away from him. He was still holding Mrs. Dukemer’s hand, and then he had been eating something rich and delicious with faint undercurrents of cheese and thyme and onion and peppers and tomato.
And afterwards they ordered coffee and stingers, although Mr. Mather had proposed Postum. Mrs. Dukemer had been right, of course, and his ulcer purred with pleasure. Mr. Mather’s person seemed to expand; he had never, certainly, felt like this before. It is even possible that Plato, who was, after all, a good fellow, might have concurred in all this, for Mr. Mather had at last achieved kálpós, the unique moment of proper measure, in which there is neither too little nor too much.
They rose then, and although Mr. Mather had put his arm briefly around Dukemer’s waist in the position of the dance, he had whirled off suddenly, alone. An absurd moon had been looking down on them like a king orange, there was a waiter with sad eyes and bad feet lurking in an area-way, and it had seemed to Mr. Mather that their formal, impersonal embrace was somehow compromising to Mrs. Dukemer. “Infra dig,” he murmured as they rotated, facing one another gravely. He shook his shoulders. He appeared, at times, almost to rhumba.
The moon and the stars became more and more improbable as Mr. Mather danced. Caressing zephyrs followed him, the throb and pulse of the orchestra gently agitated his extremities, and now it became Mr. Mather’s turn to whirl up to and away from things.
He could, he discovered, retreat at will from the moon and stars, from Emerson and Plato and Lowell, from Violet and Violetta, but there was no escaping Mrs. Dukemer. She was white and soft and lovely, and nothing lovely was wanting in her. No, no, that was Boccaccio. Mrs. Dukemer was like a field of flowering clover. She was really, Mr. Mather told himself, an extraordinary woman. Remarkable. Mrs. Dukemer was honey in the comb, clear water over stones, a sword on which to die with honor.
Mr. Mather’s head became a little confused: for a moment he had been quite sure that he was about to compose a poem. “Weave me a ah-clover crown,” he had said aloud. “Bu-h-h-d, sing a roundelay.” But it had passed over quickly, and Mr. Mather had told himself again that Mrs. Dukemer was an extraordinary woman. Remarkable, really. They would go wading again tomorrow, every day, Mr. Mather assured himself firmly. Every day. Hand in hand.
It was Mr. Mather’s nuptial flight; he did not want to be publicly familiar with Mrs. Dukemer, although to be sure he wanted nothing so much as to be very, very familiar with her indeed. Emerson and Lowell still constrained him, for Dukemer was Mr. Mather’s Rapunzel, his darling, his Snow White and Rose Red. He wished, in his seersucker suit, to be king, and to lay the whole of his kingdom at her feet.
Dukemer was touched. “My heart’s so soft it wouldn’t form a hard ball in cold water,” she told herself. She wanted to cry. Why, he hadn’t even made a pass at her!
“You’re cute,” Dukemer had said. “Sweet, too,” and kissed him on the cheek. “The old Cotton Candy Kid—”
“My dear Millie,” Mr. Mather had said on tiptoe. “May I call you Millie?” Remembering even then that Violet had always called him Will.
He had coughed and bowed and said “Not at all,” when his arms had gone suddenly around Dukemer in spite of the moon and the stars and the malevolent stare of the waiter with the sad eyes and the bad feet. Cotton Candy Mather, that was droll, really very droll. She was an extraordinary woman. Remarkable. “My dear, my very dear Millie,” Mr. Mather had groaned, forgot Emerson and Plato and Lowell and been lost in love.
Executive Suite
Purcell could hear Mr. Wenton before he got off the elevator. He couldn’t distinguish the words, of course, but he knew the script. The net was that the Old Man was right and everybody else was wrong.
Today the Old Man’s battle cry was so shrill that Purcell’s knock went unheard. Purcell listened a moment just to get this drift of today’s agony.
“. . . distinctly told me, Mrs. Conyngham, that the Sylvesters were a prominent New York family. I believe, Mrs. Conyngham, that you even implied that they were relations or connections of yours. And now, Mrs. Conyngham, what do I find booked into one of our best suites at off-season rates but a loud, vulgar dress manufacturer and his impossible wife. Sylvester, indeed! Silverstein, I say.”
“Rilly, Mr. Wenton,” Purcell could hear poor old Edie Conyngham say in her tarnished society voice, “when you said Sylvester, I simply assumed that you meant the Sylvester Sylvesters of New York, Bar—”
“You simply assumed incorrectly, my dear,” Mr. Wenton said dangerously. Purcell knew that Conyngham was in for it, that she’d had a bad night and that later—just as soon as she could break away—she would be found bolting doubles in the bar. But he also knew that the Old Man would never fire Edythe St. Clair Conyngham, not unless he caught her with her hand in the till. Mrs. Conyngham, for all of her alcoholism, her absenteeism, her pragmatism, was the one safe employee at the hotel. To anyone else she may have been a down-and-out, wet-brained, two-faced old has-been, but to Mr. Wenton Edythe Conyngham represented Culture, Society, the True Values and Good Connections. With her archives of visiting lists, Social Registers, card files and Celebrity Service reports, Mrs. Conyngham served as Public Relations Woman, advising Mr. Wenton on who was or was not worth cultivating, and keeping the Society editors informed, by means of ill-spelled hourly bulletins, of visiting, arriving or departing notables. Today she’s pulled one of her real boners.
“Now remember this, Mrs. Conyngham,” Wenton screamed. “No photographs, no news releases, not a word to the papers. And I want those Hebes out of here—out, out, out—before Christmas. Is that quite clear, Mrs. Conyngham?”
“Well, I mean rilly, Mr. Wenton,” Mrs. Conyngham trilled, “it’s hardly my place to evict them. They’re here for three months and I rilly—”
“You got them in here, Mrs. Conyngham. Now you get them out.”
“Well, I rilly think—”
“That will be all, Mrs. Conyngham. I can only imagine that you have work to do and I happen to be a busy man. Good morning, Mrs. Conyngham.”
The door opened and Edythe Conyngham emerged, pale and shaken.
“How goes it, Edie?” Purcell said.
“Oh, David darling,” Mrs. Conyngham said with all the regality she could m
uster under the circumstances. “Lovely morning. So like Capri when I was staying with the . . .”
“How’s the Madam this morning” Purcell said under his breath. “Still up to his old tricks?”
“Oh, Mr. Wenton is splendid, David darling. Rilly splendid.”
Purcell watched Conyngham make her way unsteadily down the corridor, her blue-rinsed head held very high. Of course she wouldn’t admit that the Old Man had just given her a chewing out, any more than she’d admit that she had a hangover, admit that her mink coat had been bought secondhand, admit that she had to hold down a job, admit that her husband had left her, admit that her social connections were tenuous at best. All of this was common knowledge to the staff—all except Mr. Wenton—but Edie admitted none of it. Conyngham wouldn’t confess to a slight twinge of pain if she were on the rack. If Mrs. Conyngham weren’t such a fraud and a snob and a bore, Purcell would almost have admired her spirit.
“Do it over, damn you!” Mr. Wenton bellowed. “I distinctly said comma. ‘Receipt of your esteemed letter, comma, and beg to advise that. . .’ “
Purcell knew that Mary Street was getting it now. He burst through the door with a cheery Good Morning.
“Morning, Dave,” Mr. Wenton said, warming somewhat. “I presume that you can give me the house count. Miss Centralia, here,” he cast a withering glance toward Mary, “says she thinks it’s ‘pret-ty good.’ Thinks, if you please. She doesn’t know. Doesn’t know how many hot cereals we served this morning. Miss Centralia only thinks that she thinks.” He shuddered delicately and held his brow. “Miss Centralia has the mind of a mouse. A mouse with dugs. Mammalia Centralia.” He smiled in appreciation of his little joke. He’d never once let Mary forget that she came from Centralia, Illinois, and never once had Mary stopped wishing she were back there. “Now, about the house count, Dave?”
The Pink Hotel Page 5