The Hope Chest (13 page)

“Who got to you?” she demanded. “How much did they pay you, Mr. Walker? Was it thirty pieces of silver?”

Silence fell in the crowded room. Everyone drew back and watched. Mr. Walker put his hand to his throat and took a step back, looking shocked.

“Was it the Louisville and Nashville Railroad that bought you off, Speaker Walker?” the woman hissed.

“How … how dare you!” Mr. Walker jammed his panama hat on his head, spun on his heel, and stalked out of the hotel.

People started talking again, a little nervously.

“Huh,” said the desk clerk. “That's the Speaker of the Tennessee House, Seth Walker. He was one of the Suffs' strongest supporters. If he's turned coat, I don't see how they can win.”

“You mean he changed sides?” said Violet.

“So it would seem,” said the desk clerk. “Interesting.” He dipped his pen in ink and made a little note on his desk blotter, which Violet saw was covered with tally marks.

“Is there a Miss Mayhew staying at the hotel?” she repeated.

The clerk opened his ledger and ran his finger down it. “No, I don't have any Mayhew. Is she a Suff or an Anti?”

“There you are, Violet!” Miss Rowe came bustling up. “Did you find your sister?”

“She's not here,” said Violet, feeling desperate. She had lost Myrtle and Mr. Martin and she couldn't find Chloe. She was completely alone. She felt like crying.

Miss Rowe looked unconcerned. “Squeeze her into one of our rooms for tonight, Frankie. Put her in with Miss Escuadrille; there's an extra bed in there. Violet, come down to the mezzanine once you get settled. You can meet some of the really important leaders in our movement, like Miss Josephine Anderson Pearson! Oh, there's Mr. Burn—I must speak to him. Excuse me.”

Violet looked back at the desk clerk. He ran his finger down a page, frowning. “I'll put you in with Miss Escuadrille, then. It's room 907, on the top floor but one, just below the dancing.” He turned to the hook-covered board behind him and selected a key with a brass tag and handed it to Violet. “Elevators around the corner.”

Finding Chloe

T
HE NUMBER ON THE BRASS KEY WAS
907
. Violet had never been in an elevator before. It was packed, and it stopped at every floor. A teenage boy in a white uniform worked the controls, and every time they left a floor, Violet's stomach lurched unpleasantly. On the eighth floor, several men got on who reeked of whiskey, a smell Violet recognized from back when Father used to drink it, when alcohol was still legal.

“Goin' down?” one of the men asked tipsily.

“Going up, sir,” said the elevator boy.

“Thassallright. We'll go up, then we'll go down.” He and his companion laughed uproariously, then tried to sing a song that went, “The red, red, anti-suffrage rose!” These were the only words they could remember, but they managed to sing them three times before the stifling,
drunk-smelling elevator reached the ninth floor and Violet tumbled gratefully out.

The corridor was C shaped, and she went around it the wrong way and had to turn and go the other way before she found that room 907 was actually right by the elevator. She turned the key in the door and went in.

The room was tiny but had two iron bedsteads in it. One of them was obviously taken. There was a trunk at the foot of it and a selection of shirtwaists laid out on it, as if the owner had had trouble making up her mind which to wear. There was a straw hat decorated with artificial red roses hanging from a peg, and a clothesline strung across the room held several pairs of black nankeen bloomers, two petticoats, and a corset.

Violet ducked under all of these and sat down on the other bed. The room was sweltering hot, as if all the heat in Nashville had risen up and settled in it. The window was open, and so was the transom over the door. There was an electric fan standing near the window. Violet went over and turned it on.

The underclothes flapped on the clothesline. A stack of papers on the nightstand between the two beds fluttered to the floor, and Violet bent wearily to pick them up. They looked like pamphlets. The top one said on the front,
Men of the South! Now is the time to show your gallantry! Southern women require your aid as never before!

Violet put the papers back on the nightstand and
weighted them down with an electric curling iron. She flopped back on the bed, feeling hopeless. It was horribly hot in here. It was too hot to move, let alone to go looking for Chloe or to find out what had happened to Mr. Martin and Myrtle. She would have liked to have taken off her clothes, but there was this unknown woman—she of the nankeen bloomers—who was going to come in sooner or later, so Violet couldn't. There was a little door in one corner of the room. Violet went to it. It was a bathroom—well, there was no bathtub, but there was a toilet and a sink. Violet had stayed in hotels twice before, when she'd gone to Scranton with her mother, but she'd never been in a hotel room that had its own toilet. She turned the sink on and splashed water on her face. The water was warm, and it didn't run cold when she left the tap on. But when she wet her hair and neck and stood in front of the fan, she felt a little better.

She was hungry. She got up and went out of the room. She went back to the elevator and pushed the call button. She waited. It was stiflingly hot in the hall. Through the elevator shafts she heard shouts and laughter but no sound of elevators moving. She looked around for the stairs.

It was even hotter in the stairwell. By the time she got down to the eighth floor, Violet couldn't stand the heat anymore. She went out into the hallway, which stank sourly of whiskey. The corridor was full of people, mostly men. They reeled and rolled as if they were standing on the deck of a ship. Some of them were tipsy, but most of them were positively drunk.

A man lurched toward her. His stiff celluloid collar had come loose from all but one of the buttons that held it to his shirt. The collar stood on end on his shoulder, forming a big white C that ended in his right ear. “Here's another Anti, Jim!” he said. “Ask her if there's any more whicks … whickskey coming!”

Violet fled back into the stairwell. Halfway down she passed some women wearing yellow roses, and they edged away from her. “Look at that, Anne!” one of them said to the other. “They're using children now. They have no shame at all.”

She had forty-two cents in her pocket. She came out into the crowded grand lobby. She could smell food from somewhere. She went down the wide marble steps that led to the main entrance. There was another wide stone staircase leading down to the cellar, and that was where the food smell was coming from. She started down the steps.

“I'm sorry, miss.” A man in a white uniform blocked her way. “The Grill Room is for men only.”

Violet stared up at him in disbelief. It was one thing to have to use a separate entrance. But she was hungry!

“I have money,” she said.

“It's not a matter of money, miss,” the man replied, shaking his head. “The Grill Room is for gentlemen. If you go to the dining room on the main floor, they can accommodate you there.” He looked at Violet's plaid dress with the double row of gigantic black buttons and the appalling three-inch-wide patent leather belt. “Provided you're suitably attired, of course.”

Violet climbed wearily up the stone steps again. She wove her way through the crowd and up a few more steps to the grand dining room. Inside, a brass band was playing, booming through the clink of cutlery on china and the sound of voices. A man in a white tuxedo stood at the entrance. “I'm sorry, miss.” He barred her way. “Evening wear is required in the dining room.”

Violet didn't have any evening wear. What was the matter with the world that you couldn't even get something to eat when you had forty-two cents in your pocket? She went back up to the front desk.

The desk clerk was counting his tally marks again. He looked up at Violet. “I have a dollar riding on your side,” he confided. “Ordinarily I'm not a betting man, but I think you Antis are going to pull this off, I really do.”

Violet put her hand to the rose she was wearing. She had forgotten all about it. It had wilted with the heat, and a few petals came off. She looked at them, little bits of velvety crimson in the palm of her hand. She remembered the line the drunks in the elevator had been singing—“The red, red anti-suffrage rose”—and the man who had said, “Here's another Anti!” She'd been too upset to think about it before, but now she realized she'd been taken in by the anti-suffragists. That woman who'd grabbed her at the train station, Charlotte Rowe, was an Anti, and she'd slapped an Anti rose on Violet and taken her up and put her in an Anti room. This was no way to find Chloe!

But first things first. “Where can I get something to eat?” she asked the desk clerk. “They won't let me into the Grill Room downstairs or the dining room.”

The desk clerk frowned. “Well, you have to change for dinner, miss. Of course.”

“I don't have anything to change into,” Violet said. Her other dress wouldn't do either. She was starting to feel very cranky. “Is there anywhere I can just buy something to eat?” She thought about the businesses they had passed on the way from the train station, all closed except the theaters.

“Not at this time of night. Not anyplace that a young lady ought to go into. You'll have to wait till morning.”

Violet felt like crying. She didn't care about where a young lady ought to go; she just wanted something to eat. “I can't wait till morning. I'm hungry right now!”

“Hmm.” The desk clerk frowned, thinking. “Don't they serve refreshments at your meetings? There should be one going on right now.” He nodded upward. “Up there on the mezzanine floor. The Antis' strategy meeting should have sandwiches. I saw the waiters taking them up.”

Violet thanked him hurriedly and ran up the narrow stone stairway.

The mezzanine was a broad balcony above the lobby, with a large room set off it by French windows. In the room were many women and a few men, all well dressed, all wearing red roses. Violet didn't really pay much
attention to them, though. In the room there was also a stand holding a tray, and on the tray were sandwiches: cucumber sandwiches, sliced cold chicken sandwiches, and cold tongue sandwiches. Violet gathered as many of them as would fit onto one of the little china plates provided. Then she sat down on a chair near the wall and ate.

Nobody in the meeting seemed to have noticed that she had come in. They were all listening to a tall, thin, horse-faced woman in an enormous hat decorated with a flood of red roses and two ghastly green bird wings. She wore three red roses in a row on her lapel.

“I think we can count on Speaker Seth Walker from here on in,” the horse-faced woman was saying. “He no longer hearkens to the cry of the suffrage siren. We've got him listening to something else.”

A man in the room took two gold coins out of his pocket and jingled them loudly. The people in the room chuckled. Violet ate a cucumber sandwich.

“That's one thing we don't have to worry about, Miss Pearson,” a woman in a full-length black bombazine gown said to the horse-faced woman. “Money.”

“No, thank goodness,” said Miss Pearson. “There are so many gallant men willing to do their utmost to protect the rights of Southern womanhood.”

“And an employer's right to hire anybody he wants, including needy children who have dependent parents,” the man who had jingled the coins said righteously.

“And, God willing, the rights of the whiskey distillers
to conduct their business freely again someday,” said a woman sitting near Violet, but not loud enough to be generally heard.

“So I don't think we need to worry about all that yellow bunting hanging in the capitol,” said Miss Pearson. “The Suffs can hang all the yellow bunting they want. Yellow bunting doesn't vote. And neither do they.”

People chuckled.

“But what about our resolution to table?” a little woman in a lavender dress squeaked. “It failed.”

“It doesn't matter, Miss Claiborne,” said Miss Pearson. “We can make as many motions to table as we want. We'll make another tomorrow.”

“And besides,” said a woman in a floppy straw hat. “There's another little surprise in store for the Suffs tomorrow.”

“Now, now, Mrs. Pinckard. Tomorrow evening, of course, is the public meeting at the capitol to discuss the passing of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.” Miss Pearson said the name as though Susan B. Anthony were a woman of particularly evil repute, and several people in the room hissed.

“Passing of it indeed!”

“That's not going to happen.”

“Not if we have anything to say about it.”

“That's the spirit,” said a man near the back of the room. Everybody turned to look at him. “And speaking of spirits, we've just run out in the hospitality room. Not to
worry”—he raised a hand—“there's plenty of gold in the kitty, as you all know. We have more coming in from the mountains, but meantime we have sent to Hell's Half-Acre for a small supply to tide us over.”

The Antis were bribing people! Violet thought. They'd bribed that Seth Walker fella to make him change sides. And they were serving illegal alcohol to legislators up on the eighth floor—that's why those drunks were up there.