So I was determined to keep the subject on the Woods, and said, “What about her cat? She had a cat that died . . . in strange circumstances.” I didn’t actually know that, but said so anyway. “Miss Flagler said. Miss Flyte said so, too,” I added, though she hadn’t.
“Really, I wish you wouldn’t have anything to do with the Wood boys,” said my mother, who was still standing there with her coffee cup.
“And Gertrude Flyte is crazy as a bedbug; don’t you have any friends you can go around with instead of sitting in that shop talking to old women?” said Mrs. Davidow, dragging that topic back.
No one asked me what the strange circumstances were; no one was interested; no one found my news fascinating. It’s always like that, it seems to me: whenever I express excitement over something, or even pleasure, whoever or whatever caused it is discredited (another “dis” word, my life being full of them, it seemed) and criticized, or, worse, made fun of to the point where I feel shamed by my own enthusiasm.
Like the wedding reception Miss Flyte had been engaged to take charge of for one of the McIntyre girls. The mention of Miss Flyte was a red flag to both Mother and Mrs. Davidow, for they had both been furious over this McIntyre reception. My mother had fumed and fussed out in the kitchen, making the ribbon sandwiches that were so pretty and popular, cutting wafer-thin slices of cucumber for the cucumber ones, and painting another delicate white rose on the four-tiered cake with a pastry tube. Anyone can put a few damned candles around, she had said. She was incensed that somebody
else
was to supervise an affair that she was well able to handle herself, and in a domain that was hers exclusively.
Almost
exclusively, for of course Lola Davidow had to have her say, and though she usually disagrees with my mother on principle, whenever there is a slight, real or imagined, to the Hotel Paradise—and to have somebody for whatever reason being hired to boss a party held in the Hotel Paradise was definitely a slight!—Lola would certainly agree with my mother. Lola Davidow considered the Hotel Paradise even more her domain than my mother’s, although she neither made ribbon sandwiches nor baked cakes. But she did make a heady sort of champagne punch. Anyway, Mrs. Davidow’s say was that Gertrude Flyte was a worse thief than William Archibald (vice-president of the First National Bank and its best customer, having taken a lot of the depositors’ money), the way she overcharged; well, did we know what the McIntyres were paying her for “lighting up” this reception? She’d heard one thousand dollars. Since that was almost as much as they were paying for the food and service and use of the big hotel dining room (one hundred people at twelve dollars a head), they were both highly insulted. And neither did they like me pointing out that they would be saved a lot of work and trouble with Miss Flyte having to do all of the “arranging” of things—tables and flowers and, of course, candles. The thing was that the
McIntyres wanted my mother’s cooking and Miss Flyte’s decor. Mrs. Davidow had her revenge by upping the charge per head for the McIntyre party to thirteen-fifty.
She also had her revenge by making unmerciful fun of Miss Flyte and her candles. During the back-office cocktail hour, she would put the stub of a candle on her head and sit there, giggling, until it fell off. After four or five martinis, she was usually in a very good humor, and the candle was the height of it. It doesn’t make me proud to have to say that I would laugh along with her, as it was such a relief not to have her mad at me. But I felt like a traitor to Miss Flyte.
So by the time the wedding reception rolled around, they had pretty much worn away my enthusiasm. The dining room looked beautiful when Miss Flyte finished. Light streamed, winked, cascaded in all sorts of subtle ways, reflecting off the little gold and glass attachments she pinched around the candle tops, doubling the effect. Yet as I looked at it, the light seemed to drain away; the whole elaborate setup seemed silly; the candles were no more than flickering wax. For I was seeing Lola Davidow with the candle on her head and hearing my own laughter.
I have always tried to curb my enthusiasm, for I know if I don’t, someone else will. And if you do that, eventually there’s less and less you feel thrilled about. But when it came to Mary-Evelyn Devereau and what the Woods had told me, I
had
to talk about it, and with the same old result, only worse this time. For once again Mrs. Davidow was “leaving.”
I had “talked back” to her; I told her that she didn’t know anything at all about the Woods, that she’d only come to Spirit Lake five years ago, so how could she say they didn’t remember? And I said all of this in a determined manner. The result was (it always was when I talked back) that she would leave, and leave immediately. She threw down her napkin and clattered up from the table, jumping the dishes and spilling the water glasses, and my mother hurried after her, cajoling all across the dining room.
I was in disgrace. Dis-grace, perhaps the saddest of the “dis” words. Out of grace, fallen from grace, lost grace.
I sat in the Pink Elephant with my head lying on my outstretched arm and my hand making slow loopy doodles in the notebook, and letting the uproar proceed without me. Mrs. Davidow would be either packing or still threatening to pack. Ree-Jane would be in a fix of indecision (though decision was out of her hands, anyway), not wanting at all to go with her mother. Why would she? If she wasn’t living exactly high-on-the-hog at the hotel, she still had a white-meat-of-chicken kind of life. Even though the Davidow absence would continue only for a day or two, three at most, the leaving still had the weight of forever, a catastrophe for my mother.
For some time I sat this way, my head on my arm, looking sideways at my notebook, as if I hoped the notebook would give me enough energy to write in that afternoon’s revelations. To raise my head seemed too much effort, and I just let my eyes move slowly around the room, taking in whatever they could. The room had pink stucco walls and a low ceiling, and it was the ceiling I was seeing most of from this lopsided angle. I saw a spiderweb I hadn’t known was there. Given the cold pink stucco it was not surprising spiders might home there, for the Pink Elephant was something like a cave. From the web, a medium-sized spider dangled, motionless. I wondered if spiders got weary. And that made me wonder if the whole insect world, and by extension the
animal
world, could get “weary.” Tired, yes, but
weary
? Weariness was more like your
feelings
giving out. I watched the spider, dangling up there in the shadowy darkness, for signs of industry, and saw none. Of course, the thing was that insects and birds (for instance)
couldn’t really afford to be weary, for they had to be always on the lookout, so to speak, and had to move quickly just to survive. I remembered the afternoon I’d been sitting on the porch watching the hotel cat hiding and waiting in the flowerbed near a berry bush the birds liked. For an incredibly long time, the cat was frozen there among the marigolds, tense and patient, before it finally sprang and a cloud of wrens rose in the air. It did a pirouette, nearly a full circle, way up in the air there above the berry bush, and gracefully batted down a bird.
Wow. I inspected that “wow” to see how much energy was in it, but there wasn’t any, so it was not yet time to raise my head. The spider hadn’t moved, either, and I wondered if it had its eye on a fly droning around up there. The insect world rolled on, oblivious to weariness, I guessed.
The Pink Elephant was directly below the dining room and the window right behind the family table. The window was open, as was the door to the Pink Elephant, open a little, and I could hear voices growing weaker, growing stronger. There was a lot of to-ing and froing going on up there, and raised voices, notably Lola Davidow’s, she having apparently returned—probably with a fresh martini instead of a suitcase—angry and arguing. I knew I would have to apologize, and I closed my eyes and did not care that my arm was asleep by now. Apologizing is hard to do even when you’re wrong, but when you think you haven’t done anything, not really, except just
disagree
, well, having to apologize is horribly humiliating. But I would have to, and depression settled over me.
Does it come, this depression, when you first know the hopelessness of your situation, the way, perhaps, a convict on Death Row knows it? (The term was always written with capitals, as if it were a hotel.) You hide from yourself the fact that the hopelessness comes from something that can’t be changed. It’s like a switch was thrown at some point to change the train’s direction on the railroad tracks. And you’re going to end up wherever the track takes you and see whatever is along the line—and only that. You might be sleeping in your seat or just reading—not paying attention, anyway—when the switch is thrown and the train takes its new direction. Asleep and unaware that something horribly important had happened and that you don’t have any control over it. With my other hand I felt around for my Whitman’s candy box, pulled it over, and pushed the lid from it. I drew out the snapshot of the Devereaus, standing outside the hotel with the porte
cochere as a backdrop. There were three Devereau sisters and Mary-Evelyn. I held it close to my eyes and studied it. Mary-Evelyn was standing in front of her aunts and she looked . . . I don’t know . . .
apart
somehow, as if she had nothing to do with the picture taking, as if she wasn’t really there.
I could have been imagining this and decided to raise my head and get a better view. All of the aunts were smiling stiffly at the camera, arms held awkwardly at their sides. Usually, when children stand for snapshots with grown-ups, the grown-ups are almost always putting their arms around the kids, pulling at them, strongarming them, clasping them—generally mauling them around, for they love to have the kids in these little pictures and want them to do something the kids don’t want, like smile, or stand up straight, or be petting the dog, or something. Yet here, not one of the grown-ups so much as laid a hand on Mary-Evelyn’s shoulder. They stood there, the three, with silly useless smiles, staring directly at the camera, not noticing Mary-Evelyn.
It was as if she were
invisible.
Why didn’t they touch her, and why didn’t they talk to her?
For I still believed what Ubub and Ulub had told me, no matter how much my mother and Mrs. Davidow put down the whole episode.
I sat there for another little while in spider darkness. Then I decided I might as well go on up and apologize.
We weren’t, as I’ve said, permitted to bother Aurora Paradise. If even Lola Davidow was skittish about the fourth-floor stairs (except for the rare occasions when she’d been invited), then certainly we young ones would hardly brave them. Aurora had no interest at all in me or Will, we being nonspecific Paradises. If she wouldn’t grant that my
mother
had any claim on the family, then Will and I could pretty much count ourselves out as Paradises. At best, we were leftover Paradises.
My impression of my great-aunt Paradise is of a gnarled gnome-like creature, something that might be happy living under a bridge and popping out to mistreat travelers. Her old-fashioned dresses of gray silk and black wool didn’t actually brush the ground, but they didn’t miss by much, either. She wore her hair pulled back and tightly coiled.
So.
The next morning, after the guests had been fed my mother’s shining yet greaseless eggs over easy, and the kitchen had been vacated, I set out bottles and blender and went to work. I poured and measured, measured and whirled, dropped in ice cubes, made the blender grit its aluminum teeth and grind away, whisked in a drop of food coloring, and when it was in the tall glass iced with granulated sugar, stuck in a fruit assortment speared on a skewer. The result was very handsome, and I left the kitchen pleased with myself.
I carried it on a small black enamel tray, decorated with a brilliant green dragon breathing fire. My mother’s strict dining room rule was
that anything that went into the dining room went in on a tray and never,
never
in one’s hands! I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d meted out some old Oriental punishment, like cutting off the offending hand, as I had heard that Japanese princelings would do to servants and pickpockets back in the old days. Yet the tray rule was perfectly understandable, not merely a rule all hotels should follow but (according to my mother) a matter, simply, of breeding.
Despite whatever Aurora might say about the superiority of the Paradises, my mother, in terms of good breeding, could have run circles around her or anyone else.
I carried my tray and glass through the late-morning silence of the hotel, hiked up the stairs, stopping on both landings to screw up my courage. Instinct told me that there was only one way to succeed with Aurora: do not hesitate; do not back down.
• • •
She was sitting in a dark green wicker rocking chair, one of the porch chairs that my mother was always complaining were being stolen. There were two more in the room and I knew there were a couple out on the balcony. Against one wall leaned several faded paintings in oil and three others hung askew on the walls. Two steamer trunks stood open and rich-looking clothes hung in them. I guessed she was using the old trunks in place of a wardrobe. She herself was wearing her long-sleeved gray silk dress and fingerless crocheted gloves, also gray and decorated with brittle little sequins that winked in the sunlight, very pretty for a ball, perhaps, but not what you’d expect for a morning on the fourth floor. She wore a brooch at her lacy neckline of a blue so deep you could dive into it, and I wondered if this was a star sapphire. I knew nothing about jewels, and was never likely to, my jewelry prospects being limited.
Next to her chair was a table on which were set out items for her entertainment. There was a Bible that looked scarcely used, and a deck of Bicycle cards that looked like they’d been put through a wringer. There were walnut shells, three of them, and a dried pea.