Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel

by William Trevor

  ‘Are there women to be had in this town?’ Mr Smedley asked, addressing a man who was standing at a street corner, offering him a cigarette.

  ‘Women, sir?’

  ‘I’m free tonight: I wouldn’t mind meeting up with a girl or two.’

  ‘Aren’t there women all over the place?’ said the man, gesturing about him.

  Mr Smedley explained what he meant. He was a businessman who had travelled the globe in the pursuit of trade. He had been in the company of women in five continents. He was a man of vigour who didn’t mind spending a bob or two.

  ‘Whores,’ said the man.

  Mr Smedley laughed, but the man, unamused, informed him that no such persons were permitted to exist in this city of godliness and decency. He walked away from Mr Smedley, spitting to the ground the cigarette he had just accepted.

  ‘Charming,’ said Mr Smedley, and went on to consider that of all the cities he had ever visited this one was the most unfriendly, the most unenterprising, the rudest, the ugliest, and the stupidest. There was litter everywhere, he noticed, and poorly-clad children, and a piety in the eyes of the people that wasn’t at all to his liking. It was not a city, decided Mr Smedley, that he would ever wish to return to. He’d end up in a dance-hall, he supposed, picking up stunted wall-flowers in the hope that they were starved of what he had to offer.

  In Thaddeus Street Father Hennessey wrote about St Attracta. How can we reconcile the wild figure of Lough Gara with the humble nun? Why is there a tendency to turn our women into furies? He put down his pen and rubbed his eyes. He rose wincing from his bureau, for he suffered from arthritic joints. He walked about the room to loosen them, an old thin man, gnarled like a nut.

  His mind was full of the saint he’d been writing about. The more he wrote the more he was assailed with doubts as to whether or not she had ever even existed. The truth about any saint, he reflected, was particularly difficult to establish: saints went to people’s hearts, they became decorated with legend, as statues of Our Lady were decorated with glass jewellery in Italian churches. There was no harm in that, except that the decoration too often obscured the reality, and even then one couldn’t condemn because it was a form of worship.

  Of all the myths relating to saints the one associated with St Cosmas and St Damien fascinated Father Hennessey most. Often he considered these two moneyless doctors who had defied death by water, fire and crucifixion before eventually being beheaded, and who were reputed, long after their death, to have returned to their church in Rome in order to perform a miracle. A man with a diseased leg, having fallen asleep, awoke to find that the doctor saints had replaced his bad leg with one from a dead Negro, so that he now possessed legs of different colours. How this tale had come about and been developed in that particular way interested Father Hennessey greatly, as did many of the supposed activities of St Attracta, and the image of St Clare supping with St Francis in Portiuncula, and St Helen in possession of the Cross. Had St Verena taught the peasants of Solothurn personal cleanliness? Had St Fiacre ordered Anne of Austria, Queen of France, to pray outside his door, being unwilling to permit women into his presence? Had green appeared on a withered tree when the coffin of St Zenobius touched it? Had St Catherine not suffered on the wheel?

  Father Hennessey paused by the window of his room. He made a chink in the net curtains and peered through it: the street was empty except for Agnes Quin on her way to O’Neill’s Hotel. He raised his eyes and saw over a long distance the seated form of Mrs Sinnott, close to her window. She was always there, looking down into the street or asleep, and he thought again that it must be extraordinary to live in so silent a world. Was the red of the exercise-books more radiant in compensation? Did the faded blue of her bedroom walls seem charged with a beauty that others missed? Was Thaddeus Street magnificent that she regarded it so humbly?

  He watched Agnes Quin moving slowly away from him and he thought that she was extraordinary too. He had offered to find work for her, he had said that any help he could give she’d be welcome to, but she had shaken her head. What would a woman like that think? he wondered.

  Father Hennessey returned to his bureau, but when he picked up his pen he found he was unable to write. His mind functioned in another direction. He visualized the figure of Agnes Quin mounting through the gloom the stairs of O’Neill’s Hotel and entering the room of Mrs Sinnott. He visualized the two women sitting there, one closer to the window than the other, one asleep perhaps and the other awake. Did they ever think of him? Did they ever consider, two different kinds of women, that he had failed in his duty to both of them, that he had failed to understand them and could think of them now only as extraordinary? Did they share the thought that he was more at ease with dead saints than with the ordinary living?

  Such thoughts, and the hotel itself, occasionally depressed him. It depressed him that Mrs Sinnott sat in her crowded room while all that had been created in the past fell down around her. It was harsh that that should happen, and he did not know how to explain it to her. Venice is heaven, she had written for him, as though she expected when the moment came to find herself in that watery city again, hearing the sounds that had escaped her in her lifetime. She had looked at him, wishing maybe to sec his seal of approval on her anticipation, and again he was unable to contribute anything.

  Tomorrow, the feast day of St Laurence of Rome, he would visit the kitchen of the hotel, timing his arrival so as to catch only the end of the birthday, since he was not a member of the family. He found it awkward in the kitchen: sometimes he entered to find that only Mr Gregan was talking and that no one was apparently listening to him. ‘The hard man,’ Mr Gregan always said to him. ‘We’re having a whale of a time.’ He would smile at Mr Gregan and his eyes would pass over Eugene and Philomena and he would feel his limitations like a pain inside him.

  Increasingly the hotel had an effect on him, as though it stood there to challenge him, as though it, and more especially the people associated with it, offered him some chance that he was unable to seize. O’Shea, eccentric in his uniform, his greyhound at his heels, came out of O’Neill’s Hotel every morning. At night Eugene Sinnott, in another world, returned to it. Morrissey misled an elderly woman with nonsense; he took money from her, as probably did Agnes Quin. ‘As a child I wanted to be a nun,’ Agnes Quin had said, and would say no more.

  Father Hennessey picked up his fountain-pen but instead of St Attracta he discovered St Laurence in his mind. St Laurence had died laughing, some said. St Laurence, burning on his gridiron, had asked to be turned over, saying he was underdone on the other side. St Laurence, patron of washerwomen and schoolboys, martyr and wit: did it matter, really, how he had died? Did it matter if St Attracta had taken the veil from St Patrick or had lived a century later?

  Father Hennessey shivered, thinking of the people of O’Neill’s Hotel: if the mysteries of the saints didn’t matter there was the implication in his mind that the mysteries of the ordinary living did, and should instead be solved. He had been given every chance, he knew the people of the hotel well: he it was who had married Eugene and Philomena and had baptized Timothy John. He had known O’Shea for the greater part of his life. He had known the parents of Mrs Sinnott and her husband too. And yet he could solve no living mysteries, nor indeed the mysteries of the dead he had been acquainted with: for an elderly priest who had done his best in other ways, his reward to himself was the documented lives of his chosen saints. What would God, wondered Father Hennessey, say to him about that?

  That morning he had passed Mrs Eckdorf in Thaddeus Street without paying her any attention. At the time he had been absorbed in his thoughts; he had noticed a whiteness going by him and had devoted no consideration to the matter. The whiteness might have emanated from the overalls of a workman for all he knew, or from sheets carried on a person’s arm. He had not thought to himself that a stranger was abroad in Thaddeus Street, and when later that day O’Shea was to describe the clothes of Mrs Eckdorf to him he did not conn
ect the whiteness he had vaguely noticed with the visitor who had come to the hotel.

  At half-past three on that warm Friday afternoon, while he wondered what God would one day say to him, Father Hennessey was unaware that Mrs Eckdorf existed. At that moment he could not have guessed, nor would he have accepted even as a possibility, that he would come to believe that God might one day wish to hear him speak only about the advent of a stranger in his parish.

  9

  Mrs Sinnott opened her eyes and discovered that Agnes Quin was in the room with her. Just perceptibly, she gestured towards her visitors’ chair. Agnes sat down, Mrs Sinnott’s eyelids dropped again. It was nice to sleep in the afternoon, to doze when there was somebody with you. She remembered that her father had given her a bracelet and she’d lost it. Leo had given her the cameo brooch as they walked by the Dodder; he’d teach her to fish, he said, but he never had. She slept again.

  Lower down in the hotel O’Shea dusted Mrs Eckdorf’s room and opened one of the windows slightly. She was the kind of woman, he was thinking, who probably didn’t eat any lunch at all and had forgotten to tell him that.

  ‘Ridiculous,’ said Eugene Sinnott, as he raised himself from his bed. ‘Ridiculous,’ he said, thinking of the woman in white who had come into the hotel that morning, announcing her search for a grail. A moment ago, lying for some minutes after sleep, he’d been wondering if by chance he had dreamed the encounter. He had recalled O’Shea standing in the background while the stranger uttered her remarks; he had recalled O’Shea’s movement from the hall to a telephone booth from which he might phone for the stranger’s luggage. It was then, as this particular detail returned to his mind, that he realized that the arrival of the woman called Ivy Eckdorf had been no fantasy. He recalled that in the Excelsior Bar they had discussed the advent of the photographer, concluding that as far as they were concerned she represented a tip for the Greyhound Derby. Yet, that being so, why didn’t she now go on her way? What was to be gained, either from her point of view or theirs, by her continued presence in the hotel?

  Eugene stood beside his bed, thinking about her. Her face with its smile and the pale eyes came easily back to him. It was entirely. O’Shea’s fault that she was still here. O’Shea had made it seem the most natural thing in the world that a person of that appearance should lodge for a night or two in an hotel that offered neither service nor comfort. There was something wrong, he slowly thought; there was some reason why this Mrs Eckdorf had demanded attention and a room; there was some reason she had failed to reveal. He patted his suit, trying to smooth the creases it had suffered during his siesta. Still concerned with Mrs Eckdorf, he left his room.

  In the hall O’Shea was brushing the carpet. On one of the chairs there was a white enamel basin containing water and a cloth. These were the preparations for the washing of the glass panes in the doors of the hotel: Eugene had seen them often before in the afternoon. What was the point of it? he thought again.

  ‘O’Shea.’

  ‘We need a new carpet, Mr Sinnott.’

  ‘Why is that woman here?’

  ‘I spoke to you myself about Agnes Quin, Mr Sinnott. I said this morning –’

  ‘I mean Mrs Eckdorf.’

  ‘Mrs Eckdorf is staying here. Her luggage arrived.’

  ‘Why is she staying here?’

  ‘She chose O’Neill’s for quietness. She liked the feel of the place. It’ll not do, Mr Sinnott, that Agnes Quin and Morrissey come in at night when Mrs Eckdorf –’

  ‘Why did she come here?’

  ‘She’s anxious to buy O’Neill’s, Mr Sinnott. She’s going to buy it and set it going again.’

  Having imparted that information, O’Shea continued with the brushing of the carpet. Eugene watched him, his face without an expression, his left hand coaxing open a packet of cigarettes. He lit one, still regarding O’Shea as he laboured. Then, dropping the used match on to the floor, he began to laugh. He laughed loudly, increasing the volume of the noise until O’Shea took notice of it.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mr Sinnott?’

  ‘I’m thinking of her nibs.’

  ‘It’s the best thing that could happen,’ said O’Shea, not pausing in the brushing.

  ‘It’s a lot of old cod,’ said Eugene.

  Whistling unmelodiously, he stepped from the hotel into Thaddeus Street. There, his whistling abruptly ceased and the signs of laughter that his face had retained at once disappeared. His brain worked swiftly and uneasily. His mother was old; she was quite capable of doing a foolish thing without knowing why she was doing it. She would not be guided; she might easily get it into her mind that the future of the hotel could be better ensured in hands other than his, even though it meant allowing the hotel to pass out of the family. She might in some senile way consider it wise to take what could be acquired for the hotel; she might consider it more satisfactory to distribute money at her death instead of leaving behind an hotel that had ceased to function. She would make her own mind up and no one would be able to influence her once she’d done it. Where would he live? What kind of life would there be for him without the empty hotel and his walking every day up and down Thaddeus Street?

  It did not occur to Eugene that O’Shea might be mistaken or that the photographer who had come had been making a joke. It seemed to him to be not at all unlikely that a person with money should seek to purchase a property that was not for sale. Foreigners were buying up a lot of property, he had heard: they came as foreigners had come before, upsetting the natives. He’d now be obliged to think about the whole matter, the fact that a peculiar woman had made this statement to O’Shea, and he’d have to consider in detail its import and possible consequences. He hadn’t time, he said to himself, to be devoting his mind to such affairs, but simply because the woman had made a nuisance of herself he’d have to do it, and if necessary he’d have to argue with her and request her not to annoy his mother. Why couldn’t she go back to where she came from and allow the people of Thaddeus Street to continue as they were meant to?

  A man spoke to him, and Eugene replied. They conversed for a moment together and then Eugene walked on, feeling relaxed after an exchange of views on the capabilities of certain greyhounds. He’d think about the other matter later, after he’d cleared his mind with two or three glasses of sherry.

  In the exercise-books Agnes had never told how her livelihood came to her, guessing that somehow Mrs Sinnott must know but might not care to see it written. The books were full of talk about films she had seen and suppositions about the lives of Hollywood actresses, in particular the life of Olivia de Havilland. In her thoughts there was the feeling that the women of Hollywood had made their lives what they were, that many had clambered to their pinnacles from beginnings as grim as her own. Whole cinemas of people watched their shadows now, and wept and loved them. They could lift their fingers and the world would come to them, longing to look upon their real faces. Often she imagined a woman among them who had precisely shared her own first moments on earth, receiving from the two who had caused her existence only the gift of rejection. In desperate compensation, this woman created herself again, making of herself a creature in glamorous armour who knew more easily who she was.

  Agnes recognized now the source of the desire she’d had as a child: the habit of a novice was an armour, too. Glamour bred love of a kind; no one did not respect a nun. Behind the Electricity Works she had received again, from the boy she’d loved, the same gift of rejection that her parents had lavished on her. Doyle had wanted her in his way, but what was Doyle’s wanting of her compared with the wanting of one man after another, men with passion in their eyes and hands, who for a time wanted her more than life itself, more than wives and children, more than they wanted the God who, too, had turned her away?

  A lot of years had passed since she, that first night, had asked a man for money. How can it matter so much? she had written once upon a time. Why would it make a difference, a man handing you in? Now, so much having h
appened, she knew it didn’t matter as greatly as it had. She had turned away while men took off their clothes, looking back again to see a corpulent body or one that was stony with bones. Men seemed different naked, or different to her because in her presence they were different, with all their spirit turned to flesh. A man had once unstrapped a leg, another’s back was in a metal harness. A man from Belgium, so he said, had made an odd request. A man in black, his collar gone, had asked only to look upon her body. An Englishman had shown her photographs of a wife and children, Janet eight and Jeremy four. ‘I love you,’ men had said. A man had kissed her hair with pure affection, as a friend might kiss her. A man had plugged a razor in and shaved himself before coming to her. A man had poisoned her with biting. Men had sought her toes, others the crook of her elbow. A man had tried to kill her, another had had a convulsion. Some made her retain her clothes, her shoes and scarf as well. ‘I love you,’ men had said. ‘I want you,’ men had cried. A man had given her a stick to strike him with. ‘As God is my witness,’ men had cried. ‘I love you,’ men had said.

  But now their wanting of her palled. Men waited now while with their money she bought whiskey and biscuits and did not bother to return to hear them speak to her. She had nothing more to write down in the exercise-books: she came to the silent room while the old woman slept, to be there when she woke, to offer the company that any human being on earth could give, to take no more away.