An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  As soon as she recognizes the vehicle, Allison’s mother calls her daughter; then she phones the police, who say they’ll have to impound the car and then bring Allison and her parents in to headquarters for questioning. When Allison gets the call from her mother, she’s just gotten out of the shower and goes into a state of panic, grabbing the first items of clothing she sees. She asks a friend to take her to the parking lot, as she is in no state to drive, and gets into her friend’s car wearing a tank top, cutoff jean shorts, and no shoes. Her hair is still wet. At police headquarters, Detective James Mingle of the Missing Persons Unit interviews her for more than eight hours. Television trucks are on hand to cover the story. Now that the car has been found, the case has become high priority.

  * * *

  When it comes to missing people, the first day or two after they have gone, it is as though they have left a door open behind them, and they can still turn around and come back. But after five or six days, you get the sense they have crossed all the way over. All that remains, if you’re lucky, is a vague glimpse, caught on tape somewhere, of a pixelated ghost.

  * * *

  When I was at college, I answered an advertisement on a university notice board placed by a retired psychoanalyst offering treatment free of charge. Dr. B. was a tall, elderly, white-haired gentleman with time on his hands. He always wore sweaters or cardigans with house slippers. He’d decided to continue to treat one or two students who would not normally be able to afford his fees. I saw him twice a week for two years.

  I sought help from Dr. B. because I’d started to feel invisible. Other people didn’t seem to notice me, or, if they did, they didn’t remember me when they saw me again. I’d talk to someone in a bar or coffee shop, eat lunch with them on the library steps; then a week later they’d sit next to me in a lecture and ignore me, or walk past me in the street without a glimmer of recognition. I didn’t seem to be even slightly familiar to them. I appeared to be completely forgettable. To make matters worse, I’ve been cursed with an infallible memory for faces and names. For someone so easily forgotten, this is not an enviable gift. It makes me feel even more invisible.

  One day, during our session, Dr. B. seemed to suddenly grow impatient. He told me that my analysis was going nowhere. I was too inhibited, he said.

  He told me I was like a snail whose antennae were attuned to pick up the interest and attention of others, and when I sensed none, I immediately withdrew. I could tell at once when people didn’t register my presence. Dr. B. said that I suffered from “paranoia with a minus sign.” Instead of believing that everyone was plotting against me, I felt that nobody ever paid the least bit of attention to me at all.

  He told me I had to overcome this problem. Fortunately, he said, he knew a technique that often worked in such cases.

  “Close your eyes,” he said, cracking his knuckles.

  I heard him moving his chair closer to the head of the couch. Then he placed one finger gently between my eyebrows and began slowly running his fingertip down the length of my nose. I could feel his hot breath on my face. He repeated the action five times before I asked him to stop. I told him it was not working. I felt even worse.

  “On the contrary,” he said. “You have just insisted on something very firmly. You’ve never expressed yourself to me so openly before.”

  The nose stroking, when it happened, came out of the blue and took me completely by surprise. I searched long and hard, but never found it in any book of psychoanalytic, therapeutic, or mesmeric techniques.

  It is, however, the only reliable method of hypnotizing a shark.

  * * *

  Thirty years later, I am still invisible. Returning with my bulldog from his lunchtime walk, I step out of the elevator in our building and notice a musty smell in the hall. The carpet is covered with plastic. Two contractors emerge from a doorway, pulling a cart loaded with trash bags.

  “Does somebody have a leak?” I ask.

  “A leak? No,” the younger guy replies. “We’re just putting the plastic down to protect the carpet.”

  “Oh. Did somebody die?”

  The older guy laughs.

  “Don’t worry. If he did, it wasn’t here,” says the younger guy.

  They’re cleaning out Mr. Becker’s apartment.

  I spoke to Mr. Becker only once. He’d introduced himself to me in the elevator about a year ago. I remember thinking that he looked like Martin Luther. Or at least, he looked like the image that came to mind when I thought of Martin Luther—a Flemish portrait of a thin-lipped, ruddy-cheeked man in black robes and a black hat. Mr. Becker had the same thin lips and suspicious feline eyes.

  A week after meeting Mr. Becker, I was about to step into the elevator when I saw him again, walking through the lobby. I held the elevator doors open, smiled at him, said hello, and pressed the button for the fifth floor. Unsmiling, not meeting my eyes, he went to press it again right after me, even though, when he’d introduced himself to me just a week earlier, we’d discussed the fact that we both lived on the fifth floor. It was not that he was politely ignoring me, I realized, the way people will sometimes do when your presence is inconvenient to them. He seemed too young to have dementia. No. Mr. Becker had forgotten me already. Even the presence of my dog did not remind him. My cloak of invisibility had made everything around me vanish, even the bulldog at my feet.

  It is a kind of contagion.

  On the fifth floor, the musty smell lingers in the hallway for about a week after the contractors have left. When it has finally disappeared, I walk down to Mr. Becker’s apartment. The door is slightly ajar. I don’t knock; I just push it a little. It swings open, and I can tell at once the apartment is empty. It’s a corner apartment, like the one D. and I share, with windows facing the back and the side of the building. It’s been stripped to the bone. Even the carpet has been pulled up, exposing the bare concrete floor. Not a sign of life remains.

  Well, Mr. Becker, I think. Who’s invisible now?

  II

  THE YEAR BEFORE Rey Rivera went missing, D. and I took possession of our newly purchased apartment on the fifth floor of Baltimore’s Belvedere Hotel. This grand building, whose doors opened in 1903, is one of the city’s oldest and best-known landmarks. It is 188 feet high, configured in a shallow “U” shape, with the opening to the south, and it stands at the corner of North Charles and Chase Streets, on the top of a hill overlooking the city.

  Its architects designed the hotel in the grand style of the French Beaux Arts. The exterior, built of a beige-pink brick, has a two-story-high rusticated base and two cornices: one at the third floor and one at the eleventh. Graceful embellishments in terra-cotta—quoins, balustrades, a row of carved lion heads—adorn all four façades. At the top, elegant dormer windows project from a thirty-five-foot-high slate-covered mansard roof.

  In its early days, this once-stately establishment hosted gala dinners for five hundred, grand balls, fireworks, symphony performances, dancing girls, kangaroos. Prominent jewelers, society dames, company presidents, traveling salesmen, bank chiefs, and clubmen all used the Belvedere as their Baltimore pied-à-terre. In 1905, on a tour of the East Coast, Henry James stepped off a train at the city’s old Union Station and took a horse-drawn taxi up Charles Street to the Belvedere, which he described as “a large fresh peaceful hostelry, imposingly modern yet quietly affable…”

  Postcard from the Belvedere Hotel, 1906

  At a cost of $1.75 million, this spectacular edifice was designed for wealthy tourists and socialites rather than the commercial travelers who make up the majority of the hotel trade, and while the restaurant and banquet rooms were always busy, most of the hotel’s three hundred luxury suites stood empty even as early as 1905. The Belvedere struggled financially from the beginning, with frequent changes in management and five different owners between 1903 and 1917. Only four years after it was built, it went into receivership and was purchased by the Union Trust Company for $1 million, including furniture and supplie
s.

  Crowd outside the Belvedere during the Democratic National Convention, June 1912

  In 1917, a popular and sociable fellow from Virginia named Colonel Charles Consolvo bought the Belvedere, still sinking in value, for $450,000. The rank was honorary—in 1913, Consolvo had been made a “colonial” on the staff of the governor of Minnesota—but he was a genuine hotel baron; among his other properties were the Monticello Hotel in Norfolk and the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond. A former circus clown, the colonel stayed in touch with his pals from the big top, and was known to impress the ladies by walking on his hands in the Belvedere lobby.

  Consolvo owned the building for the next fifteen years; under his ownership and with the guidance of managers John F. Letton and William J. Quinn, the place finally started to turn a profit. This was also due to the war. Celebrities like Mary Pickford would come to the Belvedere to help sell war bonds, and after the opening of Fort Meade a contingent of dashing British and French officers, sent to instruct Americans in the art of modern warfare, would drink in the hotel bar in their off hours, attracting a steady stream of female attention.

  Consolvo spent most of the year traveling on business; nonetheless, he took over the entire second floor of the Belvedere and stayed there whenever he was in town, along with his second wife, the former Blanche Hardy Hecht, an opera singer thirteen years her husband’s junior. When she was in town, this bohemian lady had the habit of walking around her rooms in the buff while singing the “Habanera” from Carmen (her mezzo-soprano voice was, according to the Virginian-Pilot, “smooth, and of good quality and range”). Accompanying this interesting pair was the colonel’s “mentally subnormal” “adopted” son (who may have been Consolvo’s natural child).

  In Italy in early 1922, Mrs. Consolvo, thirty-seven, drew the admiration of Count Manfredi Cariaggi, thirty-two, a major in the Italian army. On May 8 of that year, she obtained a quickie divorce in Reno, Nevada, and was married in Fredericksburg, Virginia, five days later, thus progressing from an honorary American colonel to a real Italian count. She left with her new husband for Italy, sailing on May 23.

  All ties between Colonel Consolvo and the Belvedere ended in 1936, and although it continued to operate under the able management of Albert Fox, ownership was turned over to the bank. In 1946, the financially troubled Belvedere was offered up in an arranged marriage to the Sheraton Hotel Corporation, making her the Sheraton-Belvedere. It was a match made for money, not love—nobody liked to see the grande dame becoming part of a corporate chain—but, like many arranged marriages, it worked surprisingly well. For the next twenty-two years, business was good and finances stable. The week before Christmas 1954, Albert Fox opened the doors to African-American guests. His decision was a bold one, but it was felt to be the right time, and business increased—despite pressure from the conservative Baltimore Hotel Association. Two months later, after media scrutiny, the hotel association changed its restrictive guest policies, and other hotels in the city gradually began to accept African-American clients.

  Thanks to the proximity of Johns Hopkins University, the Belvedere has hosted some prestigious intellectual guests. The poet Marianne Moore arrived in Baltimore on a summer afternoon in June 1960. “Never felt such oven heat as in the taxi to the Belvedere,” she wrote to a friend. “I had waited in the sun but the hotel is very cool even with no air conditioner, which I turned off immediately. A better hotel than the Ritz in this respect; the coat hangers are not locked to the rod and the bathroom would satisfy Nero—either scented or unscented soap—huge towel racks peopled with bath towels—and on another wall, linen—well it is crucial.” Staying with Moore at the hotel were Margaret Mead and Hannah Arendt; the three women had come to receive honorary degrees from Johns Hopkins. (Afterward, Arendt described it as “an idiotic affair,” calling Moore “an angel” and Mead “a monster.”)

  Magazine advertisement for the Belvedere Hotel, 1936

  Six years later, over the weekend of October 18–21, 1966, Johns Hopkins again relied on the Belvedere to accommodate various academic luminaries, this time those attending the inaugural conference of the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center. Guests at the hotel that weekend included Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida, who, at age thirty-six, was just beginning to make a name for himself.

  Upon his arrival at the Belvedere, then, Derrida was surprised to learn that the charismatic and far more famous Lacan had already taken the liberty of requesting a deluxe room for the younger man. Over a buffet dinner in the hotel restaurant that evening, the two Frenchmen finally got the chance to discuss their ideas, but quickly found themselves at odds. Their argument remained unresolved. Lacan, who still had not written his conference paper, went to bed, then got up very early and wrote as he sat at his window watching dawn break over the city. Those who attended the conference recalled that, while all the other speakers spoke in elegant French and relied on the talented translators provided by the university, Lacan insisted on using his terrible English.

  “When I prepared this little talk for you, it was early in the morning,” the eccentric Frenchman began. “I could see Baltimore through the window, and it was a very interesting moment because it was not quite daylight, and a neon sign indicated to me every minute the change of time, and naturally there was heavy traffic.” He then declared, in a startling and bizarre insight, that “the best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.”

  This gathering of luminaries provided a last moment of glory for the hotel; in 1968, Sheraton sold it to Gotham Hotels, Inc., which in turn leased it to a shady corporation that rented it out, in September 1971, as a dormitory for students at all the colleges and universities in Baltimore.

  It was a stroke of genius that became a nightmare. Each university that sent students to the Belvedere assumed that the company would provide appropriate supervision for the hundreds of young men and women living in the old hotel, many of whom had arrived from small towns and were away from home for the first time. Their parents, who may have stayed at the hotel ten or fifteen years earlier, no doubt imagined their sons and daughters sipping tea in the John Eager Howard Room. But the truth could hardly have been more different.

  It was the tail end of the 1960s, and the hotel dorms were coed and unregulated. There were all kinds of drugs and plenty of sex. Every weekend, all-night parties took place in the ballrooms, at which drag queens would mix with locals who had walked in off the street in hopes of picking up a shy young student. These festivities would attract local underground celebrities like the movie star Divine, as well as street hustlers and drug dealers who came to prey on fresh meat.

  Those who lived through the four-month experiment all remember their majestic dorm rooms, the chandeliers, and the fancy furniture (although the meals, served in a cafeteria in the basement, were anything but fancy). The atmosphere was recalled as being pleasantly communal during the day, but it could get threatening at night. On the eighth floor, shy art students from the nearby Maryland Institute lived in uneasy harmony with the Morgan State University football team—a group of burly guys with little interest in abstract painting. The only supervisor anyone can remember seeing was a creepy guy with an artificial leg who was always hanging around at the parties, trying to pick up girls.

  By the time the first semester was drawing to a close, things had started to get seriously out of hand. Fights broke out in the hallways. Two rapes were reported. The trash went uncollected. Police raids became regular events. By January 1972, the city had announced that the building would be closed because of extensive code violations, and everyone had to get out. Some of the students, angry at their sudden eviction, retaliated with vandalism, destroying their rooms and the hallways; others took along a few fancy lamps and end tables with them when they moved, mementos of the hotel’s former majesty.

  Today, the Belvedere is a condominium complex. We live in an apartment that was originally two hotel suites, 501 and 502. The moment I la
id eyes on the space, I fell in love with its shabby grandeur, the Swarovski chandeliers, the bare concrete floor, and the peeling paint. We’ve lived here for over ten years now, and our love is still strong. But as we soon discovered, there are drawbacks to living in a building constructed over a hundred years ago and designed as a hotel. The original kitchens are tiny, the windows almost impossible to clean; the air-conditioning system leaks, and until they were recently replaced, the elevators would regularly break down.

  Thanks to its location and lack of outdoor space, the Belvedere is a quiet building, unsuited for families. Most of its inhabitants are older single people. Hardworking, quiet medical students at Johns Hopkins rent a number of the one-bedroom units, and there are a few older couples, like the two elderly ladies on our floor whom we see only on Sundays, when, dressed in matching wigs and hats, they make their way shakily to church. The grand ballrooms are owned by an events company, Belvedere & Co., which rents them out for weddings, rehearsal dinners, and other social functions. Enter the lobby through the revolving doors and you can still sense the old grandeur, but go upstairs to the residential floors and you will notice the carpets are worn, the light fixtures coated in dust.

  * * *

  In 1912, the Washington Post reported that an “Esthetic Nobleman” named Count August Seymore had planned to construct a “hotel for suicides” in the nation’s capital. This building, according to the count, would be a “haven for the depressed and weary of life.” Once the disillusioned guest had checked into his “eternal rest room,” taken the complimentary sedative, and pressed a bedside button to indicate his readiness, the desk clerk would discreetly turn on a gas tap in his room (thereby ensuring none of the furniture or carpets will be “spoiled by grewsome gore”). A crematorium on the roof would assist in disposing of the guests’ bodies, its furnace providing the hotel with a cheap and handy source of power.