“Certainly.” Montgomery was moving slowly around his huge desk. He seemed to be extending one sleeve. For a panicked second Michael thought he was extending his hand to him, but the infant’s arms were so short Michael would never be able to find the hand, lost in the huge folds of the coat sleeve.
“One more thing.” The infant yawned and its eyes rolled. Up past his bedtime, Michael mused. “Any remaining furniture should fit the hotel. It is very important that things fit, find their proper place. I hired you because you supposedly know about such things.”
“I do, sir.”
The infant lolled its head in the huge collar, then waddled off to bed.
Michael took a long, rambling, post-midnight tour of the Seaharp’s floors to get a preliminary feel for the place. He didn’t at all mind working at night. Most nights he was unable to get to sleep until three or four in the morning anyway. There never seemed to be any particular reason for his insomnia—his mind simply was not yet ready for sleep. And he had no wife or children to be bothered by his sleeplessness.
The walls of the Seaharp’s public areas were well-supplied with art. There were a number of pieces by British painters in the German Romantic style. Michael had a working familiarity with art but knew he’d have to call in someone else for a proper appraisal: Reynolds from Boston or perhaps J. P. Jacobs in Providence, although Jacobs was often a bit too optimistic in his appraisals for Michael’s taste. And Montgomery would want a conservative appraisal, the more conservative the better. So maybe it would have to be Reynolds. Reynolds would have a field day: there were several excellent examples of the outline style, after Retzsch. Also some nice small sculptures he was sure Reynolds could identify—if the sculptors were worth identifying —the pieces looked nice enough but Michael was out of his area here. The themes seemed to be typically classical: Venus and Cupid, Venus and Mercury. The Death of Leander. And several small pieces of children. Cupid, no doubt. But the faces were so worn. Expressionless, as if left too long underwater.
Along one stretch of wall there were so many of these small, near-featureless sculptures, raised on pedestals or recessed in alcoves, that Michael was compelled to stop and ponder. But there seemed to be no reason for it. He could not understand the emphasis of these damaged, ill-colored pieces. Literally ill-colored, he thought, for the stone was a yellowish-white, like diseased flesh, like flesh kept half-wet and half-dry for a long time. Even when he left this area he could feel the sculptures clamoring for his attention, floating into his peripheral vision like distorted embryos.
The door to room 312 creaked open. He pawed through a fur of dust for the light switch, and when he finally got the light on he discovered more dust hanging in strings from the ceiling, and from antique furniture stacked almost to the ceiling, obscuring the glass fixture which itself appeared to have been dipped into brown oil. Obviously, Montgomery had had the furniture moved here some time ago. He wondered why it had taken the man so long to finally decide to get an appraiser. Or maybe it was a matter of finding the right appraiser. That thought made him get out of the chill of the hall and completely into the room, however dim and dusty. The sound of the door shutting was muted by the thick skin of dust over the jamb. Michael slipped the small tape recorder out of his coat pocket.
A good deal of the furniture in the room predated the hotel, late eighteenth century to early nineteenth. Bought as collectors’ pieces, no doubt, by some past manager. Most of them were chairs: Chippendale mahogany wing chairs and arm chairs of the Martha Washington type, late Sheraton side chairs and a few Queen Anne wing and slippers. But they varied widely in quality. Most of the Sheratons were too heavy, with rather awkward carving on the center splat, but there was one boasting a beautifully carved spread eagle and fine leg lines, worth a good ten times more than the others. The Chippendales were all too boxy and vertical in the back. Most of the Martha Washingtons suffered from shapeless arms or legs that were too short, seats often too heavy in relation to the top part of the chair, but there were two genuine masterpieces among those: finely scooped arms, serpentine crests, beautifully proportioned all around.
Some of the chairs had been virtually ruined by amateurish restoration efforts: the arms crudely embellished, mismatched replacement of a crest rail or stretcher, the legs shortened to give the chair an awkward stance. And something odd about one of the altered pieces. Michael clicked his recorder on.
“A metal rod has been added to the top of the chair, with leather straps attached.” He brushed off the leather and leaned in for a closer look. “It appears to be some sort of chin strap. Another, wider leather strap has been attached to the seat. Like a seat belt, I’d say, but poorly designed. It would be much too tight, even for a child.”
He gradually worked his way around the room, not trying to catalogue everything, but simply trying to get a feel for the range of the pieces, highlighting anything that looked interesting. “An English Tall Clock, with a black japanned case embellished with colored portraits of both George III and George Washington. An excellent matching highboy and lowboy with cabriole legs. An early eighteenth century high chest of drawers. Ruined because one of the cup turned legs has been lost and replaced at some point with a leg trumpet turned. A very nice India side chair with Flemish scrolls and feet …”
He stopped once he discovered he was standing by the window. A heavy fog had come in from the bay, had crept like steaming grey mud over the trees, and was now filling the yard to surround and isolate the Seaharp. It seemed only fitting for such obsessive, lonely work. On the evening before his solitary Thanksgiving meal. It had been only recently that Michael realized he had no practical use for the antiques he valued so much. These were heirlooms, family icons and embodiments. Made for a family to use, for fathers and mothers to pass down to children and grandchildren. And he was someone who had no place to go for Thanksgiving. A wet fish trapped inside the aquarium. He was haunted by mothers and fathers, grandparents, generations of ancestors who—as far as he could tell—had never existed.
He had no fixed place. He was, forever, the rootless boy who cannot get along.
He got down on his hands and knees and rooted like a pig through the dust of ages. He pretended to be a professional. He examined the pieces for patina, wear, and tool marks. His fingers delicately traced the grain for the track of the jack plane. He crawled around and under the pieces seeking out construction details. He made constant measurements, gauging proportion and dimension. “A sofa in the Louis XV style with a scroll-arched rail and a center crest of carved fruits and flowers with foliage,” he chanted into the recorder held to his lips, like a singer making love to his microphone.
But in fact he was a dirty little boy, four or five, hiding in a forest of legs and upholstery. Now and then he would try out a chair or sofa, sitting the way he was supposed to sit, sitting like a grown-up in uncomfortable furniture that broke the back and warped the legs and changed the body until it fit the furniture, and nothing was more important than fitting in however painful the process. “A Philadelphia walnut armchair, mid-eighteenth century, with a pierced back and early cresting.” Yellow-pale, distorted children with featureless heads were strapping themselves into the chairs around him, trying to sit pretty with agreeable smiles so that visiting adults would choose them. “Three Victorian side chairs after the French style of Louis XV, both flower and fruit motifs, black walnut.” Wet children with eyes bigger than their mouths pressed tighter and tighter against the glass. “Belter chair with a scroll-outlined concave back and central upholstered panel crowned by a crest of carved foliage, flowers, and fruit.”
He examined the wall nearer the floor. Letters were scratched into the baseboard, by something sharp. Perhaps a pocket knife. Perhaps a fingernail grown too long. V. I. He imagined a child on his knees, scratching away at the baseboard with his torn and bleeding fingernail. V. I. C. T. O. R., the baseboard cried.
The next morning he woke up, from a series of strange dreams he could not remem
ber, in the rough chair with the straps, the cracked leather chinstrap caressing his cheek like a lover’s dry hand.
The morning’s disorientation continued throughout the day.
Thanksgiving dinner in the Dining Room was a solitary affair; he quickly discovered that the last of the hotel’s guests had left that morning and, other than two or three staff members and the Montgomerys hidden away in their quarters at the top of the hotel, he had been left to himself. An elderly waiter poured the wine.
“Compliments of Mr. Montgomery, suh,” the old man creaked out.
“Well, please tell Mr. Montgomery how much I appreciated it.”
“Mr. Montgomery feels badly that you should dine alone. And on Thanksgiving.”
“Well, I do appreciate his concern.” Michael tried not to look at the old man.
“Mr. Montgomery says a family is a very important thing to a man. “Families make us human,” he says.”
“How interesting.” Michael bolted his wine and held up his glass for more. The elderly waiter obliged. “He is close to his family, is he? And was he close to his father as well, when he was alive?”
“Mr. Simon Montgomery had a strong interest in child-rearing. He was always looking for ways to improve his children, and read extensively on the subject. You can find some of his reading material still in the library, in fact.”
“Is that why he brought the children from the orphanage here over the years?” Again, Michael bolted his wine, and again the old waiter replenished his glass.
“I suppose. Did you enjoy yourselves?”
Michael stared up at the waiter. The old man’s tired red eyes were watching him carefully. Michael wanted to reach up and break through the glass wall that had suddenly surrounded him, and throttle this ancient peeping tom. But he couldn’t move. “I don’t remember,” he finally said.
After dinner Michael spent several hours in the library trying to sober up so that he could continue his cataloguing. He was particularly interested in the older books, of course, and in the course of his examinations discovered the German title Kallipädie, 1858, by a Dr Daniel Schreber. Michael’s German was rather rusty, but the book’s illustrations were clear enough. A figure-eight shoulder band that tied the child’s shoulders back so they wouldn’t slump forward. A Geradhalter—a metal cross attached to the edge of a table—that prevented the child from leaning forward during meals or study. Chairs and beds with straps and halters to prevent “squirming” or “tossing and turning”, guaranteed to keep the young body “straight”.
Off in the distance, in some other room, Michael could hear the pounding of tiny knees on the carpet, the thunder of the old men trying to catch them.
Michael made his way down to the cellars via a door in the wall on the north side of the back porch. That door led him to a descending staircase, and the cellars. The main part of these cellars consisted of the kitchen, laundry, furnace, and supply rooms, and various rooms used by the gardeners and janitors. But hidden on one end, seldom-used, were the storage cellars.
In the cellars had been stored a treasure of miscellaneous household appurtenances: some of the most ornate andirons Michael had ever seen, with dogs and lions and elephants worked into their designs; shuttlecocks and beakers; finely painted bellows and ancient bottles and all manner of brass ware (ladles, skimmers, colanders, kettles, candlesticks and the like); twenty-two elaborately stenciled tin canisters and a chafing dish in the shape of a deer (necessary to keep the colonials’ freshly slain venison suitably warm); dozens of rolls of carpet which had been ill-preserved and fell into rotted clumps when he tried to examine them; a half-dozen crocks, several filled with such odd hardware as teardrop handles, bat’s-wing and willow mounts, rosette knobs and wrought iron hinges, and the largest with an assortment of wall and furniture stencils; another half-dozen pieces of Delft ware from Holland (also called “counterfeit china”); a dripping pan and a dredging box; a variety of flesh hooks and graters and latten ware and patty pans, all artefacts from earlier versions of the Seaharp’s grand kitchen; a jack for removing some long-dead gentleman’s boots; a finely-made milk keeler and several old jack mangles for smoothing the hotel’s linen; a rotting bag full of crumbling pillow cases (sorting through these Michael liked to imagine all the young maids’ hands which had smoothed them and fluffed their pillows—they would have been calling them “pillow bears” back then); skewers and skillets; trays and trenchers; and a great wealth of wooden ware, no doubt used by some past manager in an attempt to hold down costs.
He could spend a full week cataloguing it all, which wasn’t really what he wanted to do during his time at the hotel. After seeing just these more common, day-to-day bits and pieces, he was more anxious than ever to go through the other rooms in the hotel. But he would tell from his finds in the cellars that there was quite a bit of antique wealth here. If the sales were handled properly they could bring the Montgomerys quite a bit of money. And the beauty of it, of course, was that these relics were now of little use in the actual running of the hotel.
That evening Michael began his inventories of the guest rooms themselves. Most could be handled very quickly as there would be little of value or interest. The only thing that slowed him was a continuation of the vague sense of disorientation he’d felt since awakening that morning. Things—most recognizably the faceless cupid statues he’d encountered his first night—hovered at the periphery of his vision, and then disappeared, much like the after-effects of some drug-induced alertness. He began to wonder if there had been something wrong with his Thanksgiving dinner—perhaps it had been the wine the old waiter had delivered so freely—and he became very careful of the things he ate, examining each glass of beverage or piece of bread or meat carefully—for consistency, pattern, tool-marks, style—before consumption.
“A tea-table with cabriole legs and slipper feet tapering finely to the toe. Like some stylish grandmother dancing. Perhaps my own, undiscovered, grandmother dancing. Second quarter of the eighteenth century, probably from Philadelphia.”
The orphans squealed with delight, their tiny knees raw and bleeding from carpet burns.
“This kettledrum base desk is obviously pregnant. A portrait of my mother bearing me? Its sides swell out greatly at the bottom. A block front.”
In two rooms he found painted Pennsylvania Dutch rocking chairs. The pale yellow children rocked them so vigorously he thought they might take off, fuelled by their infant dreams.
When it finally came time to retire Michael of course had his choice of many beds. But many of the beds were of the modern type and therefore of little interest to him. Where there were antique beds they were usually Jenny Linds with simple spool-turned posts or the occasional Belter bed with its huge headboard carved with leaves and tendrils.
Michael finally settled for a bed with straps, so many straps it was like sleeping in a cage. But he felt secure, accepted. He began a dream about a forest full of children, tying one another to the trees. The crackling noises in the walls of his bedroom jarred his nerves, but eventually he was able to fall asleep. That night, as always, he had a boy’s dreams. No business or marital worries informed them.
It was only upon waking that Michael discovered this room had a stenciled wall. This was of course a surprise in a structure from the 1850s, with the number of manufactured wallpapers available, but he supposed it might have been done—no doubt using old stencils—for uniqueness, to preserve some individual effect. Michael was surprised to find that it had survived the many small repaintings and remodelings which had occurred over the years. Usually a later owner would find the slight imperfections normal to a stenciled wall irritating, and the patterns crude, as certainly they often were.
But Michael liked them; there was a lot to be said for the note of individuality they added to a room. He suspected the only reason this particular wall had been saved, however, was because the guests hadn’t the opportunity to see it. Looking around the walls—at their shabbiness, and the crude n
ature of the furniture—he felt sure this room was not normally rented. So an owner would not be embarrassed.
The pattern was an unusual one. The border was standard enough: leaves and vines and pineapples, quite similar to the work of Moses Eaton, Jr. Some of the wall stencils Michael had found in the cellar matched these shapes. Within these borders, however, was a grove of trees. Most of them were large stencils of weeping willows, but still fairly standard, again derived from Easton’s work. But here and there among the willows was another sort of tree: an oak, perhaps, but he wasn’t sure, tied or bound by a large rope, or maybe it was a snake wrapping around the trunk and through the branches. Bound was the proper description, because the branches seemed pulled down or otherwise diverted from their natural direction by the rope or snake, and the trunk twisted from the upright—a dramatic violation of the classical symmetry one usually found in wall designs.
The design of this particular tree was obviously too intricate to have been done with a single stencil. There had to have been several, overlapping. But the color was too faded and worn to make out much of the detail, as if some past cleaning woman had tried to remove the bound trees, though not the willows, with an abrasive.
He got down on his hands and knees. The baseboard was covered with scratches, the signatures of dozens of different children. He could hear a distant thundering in the hall outside, hundreds of orphan limbs, pounding out a protest that grew slowly in its articulateness. Choose me. Me me me. He began to doubt that Victor Montgomery had ever been away to school, that he had ever left this hotel, and his father’s watchful eye, at all. The voices in the hall seemed strangely distorted. Distorted embryos. As if under water. The scratches in the baseboard tore at his fingertips.
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