Hotel Angeline

by Kathleen Alcalá

  There were some art posters and a vase of plastic flowers, but not much that would make Architectural Digest, or would even establish femininity. LJ had been up there occasionally and felt it was a curiously empty nest; Edith had put all her home energies into the hotel as a whole, making room for everybody but her own soul. He did see one of the perfumes he sold at Pike Place Market on the bureau. He named them things like “Aquarius” or “Penny Lane,” and the teens who bought them thought they were quaint.

  “So what’s the big emergency?” Alexis asked. She was always in a hurry, the way all fourteen-year-olds hurry, but Alexis was more like fourteen going on thirty-eight because of the deal in the basement. Tougher than she should be because of responsibility—wiry, but tomboy pretty, too. Dark curly hair, full mouth, dark eyes with a smoke to them that could make her look older than she really was. It was no mystery why the older Linda hung around.

  “OK, this is how it went down,” LJ began. His speech patterns had begun to lock up in his brain when he got too heavily into the chemicals business. “The phone rang and rang, and nobody picked it up, and after a while I thought, ‘It’s up to you, man.’”

  “To answer the phone?”

  “So I picked it up, and said hello, and there was this silence, and then this formal woman who says she’s working for your uncle says she has a message for your mom.”

  “My uncle?”

  LJ knew that would surprise her. Edith had always told him how Uncle Burr was well off and remote and disapproving. Getting a call from him was as unlikely as a call from the pope.

  “So I said your mom was indisposed, and could I take a message. And she says, ‘Who are you?’ and I said I’m the executive assistant, and she asked if I am competent to convey a message, like I’m a moron or something, and I said I was conveying and messaging before she was born.”

  “What was the message, LJ?” Alexis was looking impatient.

  “Oh yeah.” He drew himself up. “‘This is to confirm our dinner tomorrow night at the Sorrento Hotel to go over the details in the papers I sent about the hearing next week.’” He nodded, proud of his memory. “You know that fancy hotel? I went there once and I couldn’t even afford the free pretzels.”

  Her mom was to meet her uncle? In the Sorrento? That was weird.

  “What papers?” Alexis asked. “What hearing?”

  “That’s what I would have asked. Except I’d already pretended I was an executive assistant, and I didn’t want to admit to the bitch on the other end of the line that I had no idea what she was talking about. So we need to find them. Because you know as well as I do what must be going down here, Alex.”

  “What?”

  “Your mom got sick, and your uncle smells blood. He wants the hotel. He wants to shut it down and get rid of us all, and head off the revolution.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe. I’m just trying to think this through. Why else do we suddenly hear from him? This is valuable real estate, and making us homeless would make him rich.”

  The girl sat on her mother’s couch, looking sick and stunned. She was a chameleon, going from young girl to harried woman and back again in an instant, trying to take responsibility when most kids were just trying to grow up. LJ wanted to protect her, and figured the first way to do that was to warn her, but he felt bad about the way his message had made Alexis look. Talking about legal papers and hearings was like showing a gun. It scared him, and it scared her.

  He thought again about the secret in the basement.

  “We’d better look through her desk,” he suggested. “I don’t think your mom would throw papers like that away.”

  “If they were from Uncle Burr she might,” Alexis said. Not only did she not have a father, she didn’t have an extended family to help. Unless you called LJ and Ursula and Roberta and Otto and all the rest of them her family. Which reminded her. It was almost time for afternoon tea, and she needed to get to that as well. “But I guess we’d better look.”

  So they prowled through the desk. As before, much of it seemed as incomprehensible as Mayan code to both of them—a bunch of numbers and accounts that gave no clue as to whether the Hotel Angeline was solvent or bankrupt. Chewed pencils, stubby erasers, a stapler with no staples. Alexis looked like she was ready to weep in frustration. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “We need to hang together like we did in the sixties,” LJ counseled. “We gotta have our conspiracy that’s better than their conspiracy. We got to”—he put a hand on her shoulder—“serve afternoon tea and get the Hotel Angeline brain trust to outfigure the figurers.”

  CHAPTER 4

  KATHLEEN ALCALÁ

  WHAT IS THIS? THE EMPRESS HOTEL? Alexis thought as she went to the kitchen to prepare afternoon tea. But her mother had started a tradition, and she was bound and determined to follow through.

  Alexis began pulling cups and saucers out of the cupboards. She rummaged through the pantry for a fresh bottle of sherry. They seemed to go through a lot of sherry.

  As she lined up the cups on the counter, Linda wandered back in.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  “Oh, LJ wanted to look for some papers in my mom’s room.”

  “Why can’t your mom look for the papers?”

  “She’s really sick. I told you.”

  “Why don’t you take her to the hospital?”

  “She doesn’t believe in regular doctors.” Alexis was improvising now. “A special sort of doctor, skilled in the Caribbean ways, will be stopping by later.”

  “Hmmm.” Alexis could tell that Linda did not believe her. “That’s the first I’ve heard she was interested in Santería.”

  “She gets interested in lots of things. Right now it’s a spiritual thing.”

  Just then a goldfish fell into one of the teacups. It was accompanied by quantities of water.

  “Hell. Not again.”

  It was not from Ursula’s room. Alexis bounded up the stairs, fish in hand, to the room with the best exposure, which happened to be directly above the kitchen. She knocked on the door of #209.

  “Kenji? Mr. Kenji?”

  The door opened onto a scene out of a tropical forest. Everywhere she looked were palm trees in pots, schefflera, and avocado starts in paper cups. She waded through all this to the bathroom, where she found Mr. Kenji painting.

  The younger brother of a famous Seattle artist, Mr. Kenji was also a vet of some war older than the Iraq war. He was the director and the only employee of the Wabi Sabi Correspondence School of Watercolor. He sat at a rickety wooden easel propped in the doorway to his bathroom, painting the koi he kept in his bathtub.

  “Mr. Kenji, it’s time for tea,” said Alexis, returning the goldfish to the tub.

  “Just finished!” he said, putting a flourish on his damp painting.

  “That’s amazing!” cried Alexis, who took the painting and tacked it up with the hundreds and hundreds of others that lined the walls of the apartment.

  She and Mr. Kenji made their way downstairs, where Linda had started the tea. They were out of cookies, so Alexis passed around a box of Ritz crackers as the residents began to gather.

  “Late again!” said Ursula.

  For a pirate, thought Alexis, she was awfully conscious about time.

  Mr. Kenji took his place next to Otto on the couch, while Ursula took a chair that was easier to get in and out of with a wooden leg.

  Close to the now-defunct fireplace there was a chair that no one ever sat in. It had been the seat occupied by David the poet, who had always had his head in the clouds and his hands full of drafts. He’d moved out ten years earlier, and it was rumored that he’d won a Pulitzer Prize.

  LJ came into the parlor. He had smoothed his fringe back into a ponytail. Alexis recognized this as his “formal” look. LJ cleared his throat. Only Donald noticed.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” LJ began. Someone handed him the Ritz crackers.

  “Ladies and�
��”

  “Oh come on, matey!” said Ursula. “Speak your mind and be done with it!”

  LJ really did like a bit of ceremony once in a while.

  “Oh, all right. I—I mean, we—need your help. You see, I—I mean, we—are in a situation, a pickle if you will, with the Man, the Law, the Other Side, if you know what I mean—”

  “Oh, stop,” Alexis said. She stepped up in front of LJ. “What he is trying to say is, we might lose the Angeline.”

  “What?” said Donald, cupping his ear.

  Alexis soldiered on. “My mom received a call and has to go to a meeting tomorrow. But since she’s sick, I’m going.” LJ gave her a look. “Yes, I’m going to meet with Uncle Burr about signing some papers.”

  There were noises of protest.

  “They can’t do that,” said Mr. Kenji. “This is our home!”

  “Argh!” Ursula said. “I’ve lived here for a dog’s age, and longer!”

  “Well, we’re not absolutely sure that’s what will happen, but if you know other people who know about the history of this house, or want to share any of your stories with me that will help us keep this history and this family together, now is the time to call on them, call them up, muster our forces.” Alexis knew better than to ask if they knew anyone rich, or a good estate lawyer—if the residents here knew anyone like that, they would have called in their favors long ago.

  Just then Roberta came in, the python hanging lazily around her neck. “I should have known something sinister was going on,” she said. “Pluto here woke up for no reason at all. I could tell he was agitated.”

  “I’ve got a story,” said Otto. “A long time ago, there was a poetry contest in this very room, where my good friend David the poet and Theodore Roethke and Richard Hugo and . . . I forget who else stayed up all night reciting verse to each other. It was epic!”

  “Good, good,” Alexis said. “Who else?”

  Her friend Mia came in the front door. Mia was a few years older and done with school. She was a violinist with a band that practiced in the Panama Hotel, where she stayed in exchange for cleaning the other rooms. Mia was full of big dreams, and when you were with her, you always felt like they were possible.

  She was tall, with wild hair, and dressed in vintage clothes that on anyone else would have looked terrible. On Mia, they looked divine.

  Mia caught the anxious looks on everyone’s faces. “What’s wrong?” she asked, looking around the room. “Who died?”

  Alexis burst into tears.

  “Oh, honey,” said Mia. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” She gathered Alexis into her arms for a hug.

  “It’s just that, my mom has been really sick, and now LJ says that my uncle Burr called and there are some papers to sign and the ceiling leaks over the kitchen and I tried to fix Ursula’s sink but it still leaks and we’re out of cookies.”

  Linda walked up to them. “But we’ve got it under control.”

  Just then, the first riff of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” came blasting through the room. LJ looked guilty. “I’ll just step outside and take this,” he said, taking out his cell phone.

  Alexis rolled her eyes—LJ was always tinkering with a phone when she needed him to pay attention.

  “How much would it take to buy this place outright?” asked Alexis.

  “Why?” Mia said. “Is it for sale?”

  “It might be. Or my uncle might be thinking about it. I don’t know.”

  “Maybe a million dollars?” Mia ventured.

  Alexis’s heart sank. “Where would we ever get a million dollars?”

  For the first time, Ursula looked interested in the conversation. “There’s ways, matey, and there’s ways.”

  “I mean, legally.”

  “How about a bake sale?” Roberta offered.

  “How many cookies do you need to bake to make a million dollars?” Alexis asked. They all looked at each other, unsure whether she really expected them to answer.

  “How about a concert?” Mia asked. “I don’t think you can get more than fifty people in here, but maybe we could find a bigger venue.”

  “And who would pull that together?” asked Linda.

  “Now, wait a minute,” Alexis said. “We need every idea we can muster to get us out of this situation.”

  Pluto curled thoughtfully around Roberta’s body, a Möbius strip of meditation, as the group concentrated all of its powers on the problem at hand.

  Two more residents came trickling in. They were twins, Kevin and Kato Borealis, and for the life of her, Alexis had never been able to tell them apart. Each wore a beret. Each wore an identical pin on one shoulder, a different one every day. Each completed the sentences of the other.

  “We were outside—”

  “Smoking.”

  “But we heard what you said—”

  “And we have been thinking.”

  “Because two heads—”

  “Are better than one.”

  The twins did not talk all that much, so when they did, everyone paid attention.

  “If there were a concert—”

  “We could publicize it ahead of time.”

  “We could get our story out into the papers, and covered—”

  “By radio and television.”

  “Hmmmph!” Linda said, crossing her arms in front of her.

  What was her problem? Alexis wondered.

  Mia spoke up again. “I’ve got the band, if you’ve got the stories.”

  “Aye, we’ve got stories, matey!” Ursula said.

  “We only lack one thing,” Mia said.

  “What?” Alexis asked. A teacup? A wrench? Clean laundry? Her head was spinning.

  “A violin.”

  Again, the residents of the Hotel Angeline looked at one another.

  “A violet?” asked Donald.

  “A violin!” yelled Ursula. Everyone could hear Ursula. She was used to yelling over the hydroplanes at Seafair.

  “What happened to yours?” Alexis asked Mia.

  “Had to hock it,” Mia said, shrugging.

  “I’ve got one,” Mr. Kenji said. He had been quietly doodling in the corner.

  “You do?” Alexis asked. All she could imagine was a violin with a plant sprouting out of it. She could not imagine that a musical instrument could survive in that environment.

  “I used to be quite good,” he added. “Before . . . well, before.” Mr. Kenji bowed his head. “Then I just could not make music anymore.”

  “In that case, I will look for a venue that will accommodate more people,” Mia said. She tossed back her hair and grinned.

  “I’ll go get it,” Kenji said, and made his way back up the stairs.

  “That was—,” Kevin or Kato said.

  “A good idea,” the other one said.

  “My idea.”

  “No, mine.”

  “No—”

  “It was everyone’s idea,” interrupted Alexis. “Without all of you, I don’t know what I would do.” She started to get a little teary.

  “Can it,” said Ursula. “You’ll have plenty of time to behave like a landlubber after we ride out this storm.”

  Otto stood up suddenly. “I will send postcards,” he announced.

  To whom, about what, no one else knew. But Otto loved to send postcards. He even played chess by mail, with people in obscure countries who spoke obscure languages, except for the language of chess.

  Tea was over. They began to gather up the cups and saucers, saving the Ritz cracker crumbs for Habib. Alexis noticed that the sherry bottle was empty again. Mia and Ursula stepped outside for a smoke.

  Linda sidled up to her. “I don’t trust Mia,” she said. “I’m just not sure that she is, you know, someone you can depend on.”

  Mr. Kenji appeared with a violin case. He held it lovingly before giving it to Alexis.

  “I should tell you something about this,” he said. “It was a gift. From your father.”

  “My—my father?” Alexis as
ked. She must have misheard him. There was no scrap of anything about her father in the hotel, or in any of her mother’s belongings that she had ever seen. She had never even seen a photo of him.

  “Yes. He seemed to have a feeling that—that things would be lost. So he gave it to me for safekeeping. In case of an emergency. And this seems to be that emergency.”

  Alexis put her arms around Mr. Kenji. Now she was going to go ahead and cry. “Oh, Mr. Kenji. You are so sweet!”

  All this was interrupted by the furious cawing of a crow. LJ and Habib were back. “I’ve got work to do at the perfume factory,” said LJ, “so I’m going now.”

  “Oh, LJ, we’ve got a plan,” Alexis said. “These are the bravest people I have ever met in my life.”

  “What’s the plan?” he asked. “Now that you think you can meet with your uncle by yourself—”

  “I will meet Uncle Burr by myself! You know he can’t stand you.” She was determined to not let LJ bring her down. “I’m going to do it for Mom.”

  “Edith trusts me,” he said. “She knows that I have always had your best interests in mind.”

  Alexis wilted a bit. “I know you have. I trust you. I’ve just got to do this. And the crew here has decided to put on a concert. Mia is going to organize it.”

  Alexis was blue-skying now. “We’re going to rent the Paramount Theatre and sell tickets, and Mia’s band is going to play, and the residents of the Angeline are going to tell stories. Just like A Prairie Home Companion. Or The Vinyl Cafe. Mr. Kenji even volunteered a violin that he had been keeping for me.”

  “For you?”

  “From my dad. Oh, LJ—he actually left me something! A violin!”

  LJ stopped moving. Even Habib fell silent. “A what?”

  “A violin. It’s mine. Mr. Kenji has kept it all this time.”

  LJ began to tremble. He started walking around in circles, Habib flying a bit to keep up with his shoulder. “A violin.”

  LJ whirled around and focused on Alexis. “Do you know how long I have been looking for that thing?”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  LJ tried to get control of himself. “It’s just . . . it’s not that important. It was just something—actually, do you think I could borrow it, just for a little while? I need it for a project I’m working on.”