Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel

by William Trevor

  She went on talking, going into greater detail about all she’d said, going on and on about her life until he thought she’d never cease. In the end she asked him what he thought now. He spoke sympathetically in reply. He would indeed pray for her, he promised. He could offer her only words and prayers, he said, and then he spoke more firmly. He said:

  ‘What concerns me is that you are seeing the lives of people who are strangers to you purely in terms of your own life, Mrs Eckdorf. It is not right that you should do that. It is not right that you should dramatize their lives in a book. It is scandalous to do that, Mrs Eckdorf.’

  ‘The notion of your God was absurd to me until I knew the truth about the people in the hotel and the truth about Mrs Sinnott.’

  ‘Please listen to me, Mrs Eckdorf.’

  ‘I cannot forgive my mother.’

  ‘Many of us cannot forgive,’

  ‘When Hoerschelmann took off his clothes I saw the hirsute face of Miss Tample. I heard my mother’s laughter and the laughter of all her lovers. “Give me time,” I said to both my husbands, but time was no good either.’

  She threw away her cigarette, although it was not used up. He watched her light a new one.

  ‘There is nothing remarkable in O’Neill’s Hotel,’ he said. ‘There is nothing about Mrs Sinnott that should call for a book of photographs.’

  ‘I felt a warmth.’

  Again confusion ran through his mind. The feeling of failure that often before had mocked him struck at him less playfully now. Only a few hours ago he had never seen this woman’s face.

  ‘It was like being snug in a bed,’ she said. ‘My father left me in my mother’s house, giving raisins to dolls. I’ve been in need since.’

  Father Hennessey talked to her of faith and said that she must pray. She must allow faith to develop within her until it was unshakable. She must be humble.

  ‘I did nothing,’ she cried, not listening to him. ‘I existed as a child, playing on a nursery floor, and now I am incapable of having a human relationship. I cannot come to terms, as all these people in the kitchen have come to terms in a rough and ready way.’

  ‘They are simple people.’

  ‘They are simple people, which makes it easy for them to accept a myth. Are you saying that to me, Father? Are you denying everything to a stranger you hate and can feel no compassion for?’

  ‘Please, Mrs Eckdorf –’

  ‘Can the needy go mad, Father, for lack of something? Is that what’s happening?’

  ‘Please don’t distress yourself like this. We’ll talk together for as long as you wish. Please don’t distress yourself.’

  ‘It is the needy who have made your God.’

  The priest’s housekeeper tapped on the door and when Father Hennessey bade her to, she came into the room. She whispered to him, saying she’d heard the woman cry out. He said it was all right, and she went away. His mind, unable to grapple, was dazed. He felt hot with a rising desperation; he felt remorse and guilt; he could think of nothing to say to her. If he died in this moment, he feared he would be long in Purgatory.

  ‘Now I think I would do anything,’ Mrs Eckdorf said, ‘to be no more in need. Father, do you understand?’ She cried out loudly that she would lie all day on the hard earth, bitten by maggots, to perish by the sun. It was the needy, she said again, who made his God for him.

  ‘You must not speak like that.’

  ‘I would have given myself to O’Shea, Father. For the first time in my life –’

  ‘I cannot listen to talk like that. I cannot, Mrs Eckdorf –’

  ‘I have told you of my life, I have confessed everything to you. Father, will you help me now?’

  He gestured in an anxious way, a motion that suggested his will to help her and simultaneously his own helplessness.

  She told him about the arrival of Mr Smedley in the hotel and the later arrival of Mrs Dargan and Morrissey. He was in a locked room now, without his clothes. He was a degenerate: there was wickedness in his eyes, he didn’t mind what he said or did.

  Father Hennessey moved his head, turning it slightly away. Why had she come to Thaddeus Street?

  ‘I know what I must do,’ Mrs Eckdorf said. ‘I know it blindly, as I have known everything else about O’Neill’s Hotel, as I guessed at tragedy and as the truth came to me. I must anoint the feet of this degenerate.’

  He looked beyond her, at the books on his bureau, at his fountain-pen and the white paper beside it. He closed his eyes and shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘It is for courage to do that that I have come to you. I know it in my heart, I know it all over my body and in my brain as well: when I kneel with the bowl and towel my forgiving will begin.’

  ‘Mrs Eckdorf, there is no need to anoint anyone’s feet. If you have locked some man into a room –’

  ‘He stood there in the hall, Father, bargaining for his pleasure. I listened to him and looked at him. “There is a reason why this wretch is here,” I said to myself. And suddenly I was told. In this holy hotel –’

  ‘The hotel is not holy,’ interrupted Father Hennessey mechanically.

  ‘The proud cannot forgive. I felt myself told that I must kneel before him. He shall become my father and my mother, and Miss Tample, and my mother’s lovers, and Hoerschelmann and Hans-Otto Eckdorf. And other people.’

  ‘No, Mrs Eckdorf –’

  ‘And yet I seek the strength for that. I am asking you to help me, Father. I am asking to come to your God.’

  He repeated that there was no need to anoint a man’s feet. That was a nonsensical notion that had accidentally strayed into her mind. She was confused, he pronounced as gently as he could; he asked her to be calm.

  ‘It is not a mistake,’ she replied. ‘I felt that God speaking to me as He has spoken to Mrs Sinnott in her hotel. He has become used to speaking to people in her hotel –’

  ‘No, Mrs Eckdorf.’

  ‘You said humility. A moment ago you said humility.’

  ‘Humility is a state of mind, Mrs Eckdorf. You are taking too much upon yourself. No one has set you a penance.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m a priest –’

  ‘You’re smug,’ cried Mrs Eckdorf shrilly. ‘You’re a smug man sitting there.’

  Emotionally, she reminded him that there was a body burning beneath her clothes. She had been a child once, and nothing had given her solace. She came from a world that was strange to him and yet she was a human being: she ate and slept, she washed herself, and sometimes fell ill. She had a human temper, and impatience; she cried salty human tears.

  ‘All I wanted was that you’d give me your blessing. All I wanted was to hear you say I must display my willingness to forgive by performing an action that disgusts me. The man is waiting there.’

  He found it hard to imagine her as the child she had described, walking with her father. Whether she was sane or mad didn’t seem to matter: he could feel no pity for her because she spoke as she did, and he realized then that she repelled him. If it was true what she said, that other people’s treatment of her had turned her into what she was, it wasn’t a help to remember it. He thought of the fears and superstitions of O’Shea, and appreciated their simplicity. He was used to such fears and superstitions, and to birth and death and the smell of poverty, but not to this ungodly mess. She was a vandal. She was guilty of pride, presumption, blasphemy, falsehood, heartlessness. She was wrapped up in pretence. She was guilty of inventing a God to suit her own needs, she ordered a God as she might order a dress. She spoke of anointing the feet of some man, her careless language seeming to spit upon the beliefs of other people. He had denied that he hated her: he’d been wrong to do that. He would pray for her when she left him, but he could not do so now: while she was in the room he could not keep revulsion from him. He gave in to it, unable any longer to prevent himself: all charity left him.

  ‘You’re saying your God’s a bearded face,’ she crie
d out, ‘that isn’t there at all. You’re saying there is nothing but the neediness of the human heart. You’re telling me to travail alone. You’re telling me to clear off and leave you in whatever peace it is you know.’

  ‘I am saying none of those things, Mrs Eckdorf. I would sincerely like to help you.’

  ‘What good’s your God if He’s here one minute and gone the next? What good’s your God when the breath of a schoolmistress is quickened by passion? What good’s your God when a mother laughs and gets into bed with a perfumed Frenchman? I felt a warmth and you have cruelly taken it away. I would have shown my willingness by anointments in a back-street bawdy-house –’

  ‘Anointing feet has nothing to do with it, shouted Father Hennessey. ‘God does not expect you to anoint the feet of anyone.’

  ‘God is a disease in all your minds,’ cried Mrs Eckdorf with greater force. ‘My photographs will illustrate a myth.’

  She turned away again, about to go. With a levelness in his voice, emphasizing each word equally, Father Hennessey spoke to her back.

  ‘O’Neill’s Hotel cannot be called a bawdy-house,’ he said. ‘Nor do those people for a moment believe that God acts particularly and directly through Mrs Sinnott. You are dramatizing everything, including your own state of gracelessness. For me you represent a contemporary decadence. You act in pride and bitterness. You are telling lies.’

  ‘You stupid man,’ snapped Mrs Eckdorf in her old, professional manner. Abruptly she left the room.

  15

  Having paused in the brushing of the maroon carpet, O’Shea was imagining a scene in which Mrs Eckdorf was writing out a cheque., She was blowing in order to dry the ink when he heard a voice calling him from one of the first-floor bedrooms. He went to investigate and discovered a locked door. When he rattled the handle the voice spoke again, asking him who he was.

  ‘I’m the porter. What are you doing in there? Who are you?’

  O’Shea placed an ear against the door and heard that the man within had been deprived of his clothes, and had been locked into the room by a lunatic who was coming back in order to anoint his feet.

  ‘Can you get me out and get my clothes back?’ whispered Mr Smedley. ‘I’ve got a plane to catch.’

  At that moment another voice called out in the hotel, that of Mrs Eckdorf.

  O’Shea!’ called Mrs Eckdorf in the hall, and O’Shea left the locked door and went to where she stood.

  ‘Get a taxi and then carry down my baggage,’ she ordered in a peremptory way.

  ‘You’re not going? You’re never –’

  ‘Quickly, O’Shea.’

  She left him standing there and strode smartly up the stairs. She was not smiling. He called after her, asking if anything was the matter. She told him to look slippy.

  He carried her suitcases from her room and put them in a taxi. On four occasions when he spoke to her she didn reply. She offered him no payment for her stay in the hotel, she did not mention that she would be returning in order to make arrangements for its purchase. She stepped into the car, looking more severe than he had seen her looking before. He returned to the hall and stood staring ahead of him, not knowing what to think. Five or so minutes later, still confused, and gazing intently at the coloured glass of the hotel doors, he was aware that the glass moved. Eugene Sinnott entered the hotel.

  ‘Where that woman?’ he said.

  O’Shea told him, and Eugene nodded with satisfaction. He had come back, he said, to tell her she must go. You couldn’t put up with a performer like that about the place, upsetting everybody. In the Excelsior Bar he been mentioning the trouble they had with her, and Eddie Trump had strongly advised him to give her her marching orders. Falsifying the details, Morrissey had said that she had struck him twice.

  ‘But she’s wanting to buy the hotel,’ cried O’Shea. ‘She’ll come back, Mr Sinnott.’

  ‘You’re a terrible eejit, O’Shea.’

  ‘Let me out of this bloody room,’ demanded the distant voice of Mr Smedley, no longer discreetly muffled but coming as a roar that echoed through the hall, causing Eugene to jump.

  ‘What on earth’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘She locked a man in a room,’ said O’Shea mournfully, ‘so that she could wash his feet.’

  Mrs Eckdorf returned to the hotel in which originally she had stayed. ‘I did not ever say I was not returning,’ she protested to the manager. ‘I moved out for one night only on business. That was made quite clear to some foolish clerk, who took it upon himself to forward all my luggage and, I ask you, the bill.’

  The manager apologized. He thought there’d been something unusual in the manner of Mrs Eckdorf going: the foolish clerk had in fact been dismissed. Unfortunately, her room had been given to someone else, this being a busy time of year. Hearing that, Mrs Eckdorf’s shrugged: it was no affair of hers, she sharply said, the internal difficulties of an hotel, and in the end a room was found for her.

  Sipping a glass of cognac, she unpacked her belongings. Then she took off her clothes and stepped into a foamy bath.

  *

  The clothes of Mr Smedley remained in the sideboard in the dining-room and were not discovered for four months. In the meanwhile, Mr Smedley, wearing clothes belonging to Eugene Sinnott, left O’Neill’s Hotel. He walked the length of Thaddeus Street with Eugene, relating all that had happened to him, but he noticed that his companion didn’t seem to be listening. ‘Will you take a drink?’ Eugene enquired when they arrived at Riordan’s public house, and Mr Smedley said he could do with a drink but had neither money nor cheques. ‘Come in anyway,’ invited Eugene.

  They drank together in the Excelsior Bar and to Mr Smedley’s great surprise Eugene offered to supply him with money in return for his permanent address and an I.O.U. They drank some more together. Mr Smedley missed the last air-flight of the night and said it didn’t matter. ‘I got the wrong end of the stick,’ he said. ‘I thought at first that woman was the madame’

  ‘There something up with her,’ said Eugene Sinnott.

  Later that night, after Eugene had entered a familiar state of inebriation, Mr Smedley walked away from Thaddeus Street to the hotel where his luggage was. It was still raining. The ends of his trousers trailed through puddles; he felt a dampness spreading on his back. In good faith, he thought, he had accepted the word of the man who had shown him photographs the night before. In good faith, he had come to the hotel at the time specified, expecting what had been promised to him, but instead of that his clothes had been stolen and he had been subjected to ridicule. He had been insulted and sworn at by a lunatic, he had been obliged to tie a bedspread about his naked body and then to dress himself in the clothes of another man. The euphoria that his hours in the Excelsior Bar had induced began to evaporate beneath the discomfort caused by the rain. Only the man whose clothes he wore had shown him human decency; a uniformed porter had told him to walk naked through the streets.

  As Mr Smedley mulled over his considerable misfortunes, he saw ahead of him, coming towards him with his head down, the undersized man who had instigated everything. He waited in a doorway. When Morrissey was about to pass he drove out an arm to prevent him.

  ‘Good night, sir,’ said Morrissey, and then saw that his companion was not one he would himself have chosen.

  ‘You bastard,’ said Mr Smedley.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, sir. Agnes was unavailable.’

  ‘You stole my clothes.’

  ‘Ah, no.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I never touched your clothes, sir.’

  ‘You and the woman between you. You took my money and my clothes.’

  ‘No,’ said Morrissey.

  Mr Smedley hit his adversary on the neck. He struck him another blow, meaning to land it on the side of the face but striking instead Morrissey’s nose. Blood flowed at once.

  ‘Stop it,’ pleaded Morrissey, a request that angered Mr Smedley more. He hadn’t hit a man for twenty years, he said,
and he intended to make up for it.

  Morrissey fell to the wet pavement and lay still, hoping that the attack would cease. But Mr Smedley two hands gripped his shoulders and stood him on his feet again. ‘I want to know where my clothes are,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Will you leave me alone? I didn’t touch your clothes. I fixed you up with Mrs Dargan –’

  Mr Smedley hit him again. He allowed Morrissey to strike the pavement a second time. He rolled the body into the running gutter and then picked it up. He looked into Morrissey’s eyes.

  ‘You took my clothes.’

  ‘I did not, sir. I’m bleeding all over me, sir.’

  ‘Where are my clothes?

  ‘You’ve nearly killed me, Mr Smedley. I could report this, sir.’

  ‘You sold them. You took the money. There was an air-ticket in the wallet.’

  Again Mr Smedley fist rose and fell. He punched Morrissey in the stomach and then dropped him on to the pavement. He bent down. ‘You showed me photographs,’ he said. ‘You promised me a woman. I came to that hotel in good faith. You took advantage of me because you know I can’t go to the police. I’m going to kick your face in.’

  In a whisper Morrissey said he was in need of medical and spiritual aid. He reminded Mr Smedley of the presence of Mrs Eckdorf in the hall that afternoon: it was she, he said, who had been up to no good. Still lying on the pavement, he asked for mercy.

  Mr Smedley’s hands felt in the pockets of the disabled man. They drew out small change and a comb, the paper-backed books on astrology, and the photographs of Agnes Quin, Mrs Dargan, Mrs Kite and Beulah Flynn. He tore these into small pieces, which he allowed to fall on Morrissey’s inert body. He would keep the books and read them, he decided. He broke the comb in half; the money, he said, came to three shillings and five pence. He jingled it in his hand.

  Morrissey, his eyes closed and running with tears, heard the footsteps of Mr Smedley moving away from him. Why was it he, he wondered, whom men jammed in the stomach with their fingers and other men turned savagely upon, when all he had ever done was to attempt to help such men? Why was it he whom the insane attacked without warning? He rose painfully to his feet. His head felt giddy. His body was wet all over. He felt a gush of fresh warmth on his face as more blood came out of his nose. He had done that man no harm of any kind; he had never done harm to a man or to a woman. Did it harm anyone that occasionally he took stuff out of Woolworth? Did it harm anyone that occasionally he extracted from strangers small sums of money in return for services?