“What screechy thing, Nuala?”
“The gramophone. What d’ya think I’m talkin’ about? I nearly poured meself down the drain listenin’.”
“When that bloody noise of hers goes on ye better watch out.”
The two floor maids were crackling away like two hens discussing their run-ins with a fox.
“Ah Jaysus, I knew she couldn’t stay away long. I wish she’d stay over there in New York with them Americans.”
I arrived at Room 507. I held the tray in one hand and gently tapped at the door with my passkey. There was no response. I tapped on the door again. Still no response. I began to think that there was nobody in the room at all.
As I turned to look at Mary and Nuala who were still observing me in the corridor, a voice called out from inside the room: “For God’s sake, come in!”
Nuala and Mary scampered into the nearest laundry cupboard. I put my hand to the doorknob, turned it gently and walked in.
The room was dark like an underground cave. Usually a guest expecting breakfast is either sitting up in bed or sitting with the newspaper at the small table by the window. This rainy Dublin morning I couldn’t see anybody. Yet as I stood in the middle of the dark hotel room I smelled perfume and could hear a woman’s voice singing in a foreign language. Two large travelling trunks were against the wall and were wide open. A mountain of personal belongings, hats, dresses, shoes, scarves, glasses, coats were spilling out of them. I looked across the room and with the aid of a small shaft of light escaping from the pulled curtains I saw a record spinning around on a gramophone. The voice on the record continued to screech out. I didn’t know what language it was but I guessed it was Italian. The big bed was empty and the blankets and sheets were hanging over the side. The voice on the record continued to squawk. I stood with the breakfast tray in the middle of the dark room and became more fearful by the heartbeat. I began to question myself as to why I had volunteered to serve this breakfast. The rest of the service staff had warned me about this particular customer but I’d paid little attention to their counsel. This morning in the almost dark room I began to regret I hadn’t heeded the advice. The door to the bathroom was open and I assumed Maggie Sheridan was there, so I decided to just put the breakfast tray on the small table next to the bed and make a fast run for it.
I walked as quietly as I could to the far side of the bed.
As I approached the table with the tray, a head came up from the floor at the other side. I almost dropped everything. For a second or two I was frightened out of my wits. It was Margaret Burke Sheridan. The woman everybody in the hotel whined about. My fingers became so glued to the tray I couldn’t let go of it. I looked across the unmade bed and saw her staring at me. Her hair was all over her face and it had two or three different colours in it. Her face was snow white and she was holding a lipstick in her right hand. Her bottom lip was very red but the top lip was a different colour. I later learned that she was over sixty but she seemed to me much younger. I stared at her. She looked at me but didn’t move. I didn’t either. I was afraid to. She remained on the floor looking directly at me.
Finally out of practice and training, I mumbled, “Mornin’, ma’am.” I didn’t think I was heard so I said it again much louder. “Mornin’, ma’am! Your breakfast!”
There was a stillness and a silence that seemed to last as long as High Mass on a Sunday. The woman kept looking at me and for a second or two I forgot where I was and even who I was. Had the floor opened up under me I would have been happy to fall through it. As I floated in what I felt to be a mixture of Limbo and Purgatory and not too far from the gates of Hell, I heard her voice.
“Good morning, lad,” she said.
To my happy surprise her face was calm and peaceful-looking. Something in her voice was reassuring, even kind. I was feeling like I was before I entered the room. Pain, fear and confusion left me like flames leaping up a chimney and all of the odd and strange things I had heard about this woman on the floor in front of me disappeared. I gripped the breakfast tray but it quickly crossed my mind that she might not want it on the table. Maybe she has her breakfast on the floor every morning, I thought. Maybe that’s why everybody believes she’s a nut case?
The record on the machine stopped. I stood in total silence for what seemed a lifetime. I then walked around to where she was sitting, still half under the bed, and looked down at her. Her long blonde hair was partly covering her eyes and I wasn’t sure she could even see me. She didn’t seem to want to move. I wondered to myself if she liked sitting on the floor in the dark. I stood awkwardly over her, still holding the breakfast tray. I had an impulse to tell her to get up but I didn’t. My mind then raced to thinking that she had hurt herself and couldn’t get up but she showed no signs of being hurt or wanting any kind of assistance. She made no effort to move and I finally became convinced she wanted to eat on the floor.
“Would you like your breakfast there on the floor, ma’am?” I asked.
“Here? On the floor?” she answered.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She began to laugh. I felt foolish and was convinced that I had fallen into some strange trap this dreary rainy morning.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said with a trembling voice.
The woman was still on the floor, laughing at me. All positive feelings had now deserted me. I stood in fear and thought about dropping everything and making a run for it.
Maggie then got up from the floor. She then turned and faced me.
“Put it on the table, please.” She was still holding the lipstick tube in her hand. “I dropped this silly thing and had to go under the bed for it,” she said as she lifted the silver top on the fried kippers’ plate. “Smells good!” She reached over to the toast rack, picked up a slice and took a bite out of it. “Nice and warm, I hate cold toast.”
* * *
Soon I had got used to Maggie and the way she carried on since I’d first served her. She talked about her life in opera and the places she had visited and sung in. When she talked to me I felt like a statue. I either stood or sat in front of her while she reminisced about songs, opera, Ireland and the world and just about everything I had never heard of. If she wasn’t blabbering on about Michael Collins and de Valera and how the two main figures in the Irish Uprising didn’t get along with each other, she was talking about herself being alone and not having a family. She identified with Mr. de Valera because, as she repeated over and over, he didn’t really have a happy childhood. I was tempted to say that was the case with everyone I knew in Ireland.
One particular day Maggie was fussing with her old dresses and hats. She then stopped abruptly.
“I was tailor-made for opera. The characters I sing are always in such pain I feel like I’m a member of the same family: sisters of pain, rejection and unfulfilment. The greater the pain, the higher the note I reach. This terrible life-long search to be part of somebody else’s life has given me pneumonia more times than I can count. I know I wasn’t the only one but what use was that to me? I don’t know why God made pain so important in a person’s life. What’s the use if it’s all pain? What’s the use if you can’t learn to rub two happy thoughts together and know how to repeat it whenever you want? Jesus, when I look back at the early days in the convent and the faces of the other orphans and the thoughts that must have been in their little minds! What did they think at all? And they prayed all day to be thankful for being miserable and lonely and frustrated and angry and bitter. Some of them were even suicidal. I remember a few girls jumped out the window because they couldn’t stand being alive any longer. How in the name of the Divine Jesus did any of us ever manage to smile or laugh or wake up the next day? I don’t know. I don’t.
“And the country, Ireland itself, was something like an orphan if you ask me. What did it know about the people born there? What? I don’t know if it knew an awful lot. I seriously don’t. It had been beaten and battered by England for centuries. When it got out on its own i
t was turned over to the Church. We had a leader in Ireland who should have been a priest instead of a politician. I’m not saying that I’m not a Catholic or that I don’t believe. I do, I do. When you have nothing and no chance of anything in life it’s easy to believe. Well, let me put it this way, if you don’t believe in something, what’s left? The nuns only had what they were given. I suppose I was lucky to have them. I think they saved a lot of girls in those days.
“All that time I spent in Italy singing my heart out. I had a lot of good times too, I suppose. I’m not saying I didn’t. There was that mad aristocrat; he said he was an aristocrat anyway. I allowed him to take me over and I let him use me until I felt more worthless than I can remember. I gave everything up for him. I was hoping and hoping he would hold me up but he didn’t. He held me every so often then he let go of me and I fell flat. He was married and religious at the same time. I knew deep down he would never leave his wife. I must have been insane to even imagine it for a second. What was I thinking? I knew hardly anything. I was too needy. That’s what I was. Needy! Lost and needy! I couldn’t sing any more after that. Sometimes I couldn’t even breathe. I was an artist. At least I thought I was. Then again what in the name of God is an artist? Sometimes I think it’s some kind of crucifixion or some religious torment. For half my life I couldn’t even stand up. Back and forth from Rome to Dublin! To London and Italy! All the operas and I got so soaked in singing women of pain.”
I got the feeling that she had forgotten that I was in the room. She quickly turned as if she had just discovered me there.
“Oh, yes, take the tray out, please. Thank you.”
I picked up the breakfast tray and, somewhat embarrassed, walked out of her room.
* * *
When I entered her room early every morning Maggie Sheridan was either asleep or resting her eyes. She might have been attempting to delay the beginning of the new day. I sensed she liked the night because it was silent and less likely to make demands. Night for her appeared to be a place where time paused and in its shadow neither age nor fear nor ambition mattered. The world was not awake or looking at her. In the darkness of her closed eyes she could reach back to La Scala and relive the roles she played. Mimi in La Bohème. Iris in Mascagni’s Iris. Maddalena di Coigny in Andrea Chénier. Cho Cho San in Madama Butterfly. Manon in Manon Lescaut.
I got into the routine of opening the curtains for her when she woke up. After I gave her the weather report she asked me so many questions about opera I felt I had sawdust in my head.
Some mornings before she’d even look at her breakfast tray, she’d stare out the window and talk to herself as if I wasn’t in the room.
“Sister Agnes was the most loving person. God rest her merciful soul! If anyone deserves a place in heaven it’s Sister Agnes. She took her vows seriously. The most unselfish human being ever on the face of this earth. If it hadn’t been for her, God knows where I’d be today.” She stopped talking to herself and turned back to me with a smile. “Were you listening to me?”
She asked the question as if she hadn’t remembered that I was there in front of her and as if she couldn’t help herself from falling into some strange part of her own past.
“Yes, ma’am, a little bit. I’m sorry.”
She picked up the teapot. When she started to pour the tea I turned to walk out of the room but just as I got to the door I heard her voice calling out. “Wait! Wait!”
I stopped dead in my tracks.
She then let out a happy kind of moan. “God, I miss Italy! I miss it in my bones sometimes. Passionate they are over there. I was so determined to live there for the rest of my life. Why did I ever leave a place where I was so adored?”
I didn’t know if I should even try to answer her. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to herself.
“I’m off to New York soon. I’m not gone on that place, mind you. You’d shiver to death there in the winter. Do you hear me?”
“Yis, ma’am.”
“Yes! Not yis. Yes! Yes! Say ‘yes’ the way it’s supposed to be said. Don’t mumble and don’t be afraid to open your mouth. Speak out and speak up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When she felt she’d frightened me she quickly changed the subject.
“You’ve never been to the opera, have you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Pity, pity. The nuns brought opera to me. Well, one did anyway. I was orphaned when I was . . . oh . . . never mind. I only knew the nuns after I lost my parents. Those poor unfortunate women were entrusted with my life. They were to show me love. The poor nuns . . .” She fell silent. It was as if she didn’t want to remember what her words were evoking.
She then got up from the bed, walked to the record player and put on a different record.
“This is Floria Tosca!” she called out.
I stood and watched her sing along with the voice on the record player.
“You wouldn’t know Puccini from Verdi, would you now? In the name of God, how would you know? What kind of schooling could you have got anyway? I don’t suppose you had much of a chance in any case, had you now? Can you hear this? You’ve no sense as to what I’m talking about, do you?”
“No, ma’am. I don’t.”
“How could you? You only know about going to the pictures and imitating all those Americans who sing on the wireless. If you’ve nothing to say, don’t say it.”
I was shaking in my shoes and didn’t know if I should turn and leave the room or not.
“What’s your name?”
“Gabriel,” I answered.
“Gabriel?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Gabriel what?”
“Walsh. Gabriel Walsh, ma’am.”
“My breakfast wasn’t left lying about this morning, was it?”
“No, ma’am. I brought it right away.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“What time do you come to work?”
“Six o’clock, ma’am.”
“That’s early.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What does your father do?”
“Nothin’.”
“Nothing? No job?”
“No, ma’am. He used to be in the British Army.”
“Poor man.” She then reached for a piece of toast on the plate in front of her and purposely mumbled loud enough for me to hear. “Life, it’s confusing when you don’t understand it and it’s lonely when you do.”
What she meant by that I wasn’t sure and with nothing else to say I turned and retreated from the room.
* * *
Mrs. Ruth Houghton Axe, a small and slightly rotund woman, tapped on the door and entered Maggie’s room. I had just returned to retrieve the breakfast tray.
Mrs. Axe had a smile on her face and looked exceptionally well dressed, wearing an expensive-looking two-piece suit.
“Good morning, Margarita! Good morning!” she said as if she was addressing both Miss Sheridan and me at the same time.
I was holding the breakfast tray and was about to exit the room.
“The phones in the hotel are out of order this morning. So I couldn’t ring. Sorry!” Mrs. Axe said gleefully.
“Yes, yes!” Miss Sheridan responded with a joy in her voice I had not previously heard. “Have you heard from Emerson?” she added without missing a beat.
I stood awkwardly and looked towards Miss Sheridan as if to get permission to leave but she made a signal with her hand which I interpreted was for me to stay exactly where I was.
Mrs. Axe then walked towards the window and looked out towards Stephen’s Green.
“Emerson?” she said.
“Yes.”
“He called last night. Not happy that I extended my stay. I told him I’d be back on the weekend.”
In one of her rambling monologues Miss Sheridan had previously told me Emerson Axe was a descendant of the ninth Attorney General of the United States and a master chess player as well
as a fencing champion when he was at Harvard. The couple headed a large investment house in New York City and lived in a real castle in Tarrytown near New York. Miss Sheridan had spent many years with the Axes touring Europe and America, attending opera festivals and operatic contests. Sometimes she served as a judge in certain parts of Europe and as often as not Mr. and Mrs. Axe would accompany her on such artistic adventures. Most of the time they were in New York and all three of them rarely missed an opera season at the Metropolitan Opera house there. La Margarita, as Mrs. Axe called Miss Sheridan, spent most winters in the huge castle that overlooked the Hudson River. The castle stood on top of a hill surrounded by sixty acres.
“How is Emerson?” Miss Sheridan asked.
“Oh, the truth about Emerson is he’s got more patience than understanding. I on the other hand have more understanding than patience. If you were to ask me which of the two concepts I prefer, I’d have to say the person with the patience is better off.”
“You don’t say so, for God’s sakes!” Miss Sheridan responded as she looked over at me.
“You know why I think that, Margarita? If you don’t know, I’ll tell you.”
“Please do.”
“I’ll try anyway. The person with patience doesn’t need understanding. He or she can just as easily be contented waiting for things or someone to change. Whereas the person with only understanding, I’m afraid to say, gets frustrated and even angry.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Miss Sheridan asked.
“Well, it’s my way of thinking that, if you only understand without having patience, you’re very likely to end up alone. And annoyed at everything most of the time. I’m glad Emerson has patience. I really am.”
“Husbands are that way, I suppose,” Miss Sheridan said as she walked across the floor and entered the bathroom.
“Mine is anyway. But he’s not too happy about my trip,” Mrs. Axe called after her with a laugh.
I moved towards the door. Just as I did Miss Sheridan stuck her head out of the bathroom door and signalled again for me to stay where I was. I went back and put the tray down. My arms were aching. Mrs. Axe remained at the window observing the grey Dublin morning. She then turned back to me as if she knew me.
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