The Pink Hotel

by Patrick Dennis; Dorothy Erskine

  “Mrs. Dukemer, Mrs. Du-Dukemer,” Mary Street said suddenly through the wicket. “Guess who I saw over in Miami last night, walking up Biscayne Boulevard just like anybody. Mr. Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway!” she said flushing, and got prettier, if possible, than she had been before.

  Little Street was so pretty, so little and dumb and sweet, that a fugitive tenderness stirred in Dukemer. The kid was all excited. “Take it easy,” she said.

  “Miami,” Purcell said. “Did I hear the little lady say Miami and Ernest Hemingway?” Purcell said. “Miami. I obscenity in the milk of their Chamber of Commerce.”

  “I was with Mrs. Baldwin,” Mary continued, “and there he was. Walking along just like anybody. Like this,” she said, springing on her heels, dangling her arms like a honey bear, taking long strides on the balls of her feet. “He was wonderful.”

  Purcell and Dukemer were impressed in spite of themselves. Both of them had seen a lot of people, Purcell had been in the same room once with the Duke of Windsor, but Hemingway was different. The chances were, of course, that it hadn’t been Hemingway. Probably some big hayseed from Duluth looking for fun in the sun. “Did the earth move, baby?” he asked.

  “Why, Mr. Purcell,” Mary said, looking down at her brown and white pumps, “you must think I’m awful.”

  She was getting to be a regular Florida Cracker. There was a big streak of dirt right across the vamp of her pumps. If Mr. Wenton noticed her shoes, he would call her—she didn’t know what. “A slovenly slut,” she supposed. That was about the nicest thing he ever called her. Mary didn’t know exactly what all the things Mr. Wenton called her meant, but the words themselves left a soiled, sore imprint on her mind. Little Street took a quick look at Mr. Purcell, and everything went sort of dizzy—Mr. Purcell and the lobby and the clock and her brown and white pumps on the Persian carpet—a little like that time she had fainted when she was a freshman in High.

  Mr. Purcell was awful good-looking and she liked him an awfully lot, Mary decided again. His shoulders were nice and broad. All of him was sort of safe and solid-looking. His hair was just red brown, but he had a scrub of blond mustache, and his teeth were big and white and strong.

  Mr. Purcell wore his clothes so well that Mary thought that he looked better, bigger, than any man in the lobby, no difference what he had on. He had a way, too, of sucking a joke down between his teeth and letting it out again, that made everything he said funnier almost than it was.

  Mr. Purcell acted sort of hard, but he was really darling, Mary told herself. Dukemer said “Balls!” stopped hitting the machine, and reached for a Correction Voucher. Little Street turned pink in her brown and white voile, looked again at her brown and white feet. Mrs. Dukemer was terribly attractive too; better looking than Darlene or Mrs. Linden back home in Centralia or any of the guests, even if she did always look sort of tired. Mrs. Dukemer was even more attractive than Miss Furman, the Social Hostess.

  Mary wished that she knew Mrs. Dukemer and Mr. Purcell better. They were both so attractive and sophisticated, but both of them treated her like a baby, and she wasn’t a baby at all. She would be twenty-two her next birthday. Well, she’d show them she could be sophisticated too.

  But Mary hadn’t been sophisticated. She had been thinking so hard about Mr. Purcell’s blond mustache, his teeth, his shoulders, how it would feel to be kissed by a man with a mustache, that she had tripped on the Persian carpet.

  “Come here, baby,” Purcell said. “Tell me about yourself. If I were a marrying man . . .” he began. Little Street’s eyes were so big and serious that he couldn’t decide what color they were. He stopped, embarrassed. Pretty and neat and sweet and she smelled like a clean baby. He wouldn’t kid her any more.

  Mary waited, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. Mr. Purcell certainly was acting funny this morning, calling her over to talk, and then shutting up like a clam and moving reservations around in the room rack like she wasn’t even there. Maybe he had a headache. Mr. Purcell had a lot of headaches.

  Purcell patted her shoulder suddenly, gave her a little push. “Up to the salt mines, baby,” he said. “Don’t keep the Little Father waiting.” Purcell sighed as Mary crossed the lobby to the elevator. Poor kid. Old Wenton would have her drawn and quartered by nine-fifteen.

  Dukemer sorted the vouchers she had posted. Restaurant. Valet. Locals. Long Distance. Paid Outs. If I were a marrying man. You’d think he’d change his approach once in a while. Why, he’d even used it on Dukemer before he found out that she wasn’t having any. Purcell wasn’t a bad guy, of course. No wife of his would ever have to wonder about him. She’d know. Purcell would always be at the nearest bar with a strictly no-good dame. Still, from the look on little Street’s face, there couldn’t be much wrong with his line even yet. And thinking of Mary Street, Dukemer smiled. It would serve him right.

  1405

  Dukemer craned her neck. Another old woman was checking in, but unlike most of them this old woman looked sort of, well, sensible. She wore a plain gray traveling coat and a soft brown felt hat with a sedate chou of gray feathers tilted a little forward. The old lady’s eyes were a soft brown too. Her hair was combed back straight and neat, even if the knot had slipped to one side, and she carried a flat, black leather case under her arm.

  The old woman was gaunt and stooped, but still powerful. Determination underlay her crooked back, belied the shrinkage of her bones, the perceptible drag to her left leg. She. looked like an old woman that you could trust with anything, and it had been a long time since Dukemer had seen anyone whom she would trust with change for a dollar.

  The old woman’s thin nostrils dilated as, pen between fore and middle finger, she signed her name, Anna Pomery, M.D., and her address, Eau Claire, Wisconsin. A well-dressed couple in early middle age passed close to the Desk and Dr. Anna’s nostrils quivered again. Carcinoma. She sighed. Poor devil. Yes, she’d know Ca anywhere as she’d know measles or an acetone breath or a phthisical cough. From what she’d read, the effects of radio activity were similar to Ca. About like an X-ray burn, she supposed.

  Dr. Anna regarded the desk, the lobby, the people in it, and to her practiced eye all of them looked a little yellow, sallow, as if they needed a good dose of calomel.

  Her mind retired again to her dead—her family, to her mother, her sisters, her father and the boys—seeing with her inner eye the long diagonal table in the old dining room with its pickles, its jellies, its jams and preserves, its dishes of chow-chow and green tomatoes, spiced peaches and corn relish. She was an old woman, she told herself, and a dying man retreated into the past, seeking with the insane the safe shelter of the womb, the position of the foetus.

  The old doctor was agreeably tired. She had enjoyed seeing the country; had looked hungrily on live oak and Spanish moss, white ibis and blue heron, flat lands and piny woods; had drunk in the degenerate grace of the palmetto palm, the scarlet smear of poinsettia and hibiscus.

  Dr. Anna had enjoyed her trip south because it might be the last traveling she would ever do, and arriving at her destination, checking in, had given her a slight, comfortable sense of accomplishing something, less gratifying but less arduous than delivering a baby or cooking a family dinner.

  There had been a big family of Pomerys once, twelve, including the hired girl; a family that had swelled on holidays, with wives and husbands, nieces and nephews, to a small army. Yes, a big family, puissant in numbers, fertile as the fat grazing land that had nourished them all. War and disease had decimated the Pomerys; separation and private tragedy had alienated them until there had remained only the barren few, and old Dr. Pomery was the last, even of these.

  She had not even known that her brother Stuart was alive until she had received the unreasonable, formal communication from his lawyers that Stuart was dead. It was strange when you thought of it that Stuart, who had been the oldest and perhaps the strongest, who had married and cut himself off early from the family, Stuart with whom she had had nothing i
n common but a name, should have succored her in her extremity, her old age, that she had been his sole heir.

  Yes, Stuart had made her a fairly rich woman. Dr. Anna hadn’t really known how poor she was until she’d had her stroke, and it had been too late then to do anything about it. She had been foolish, she supposed, but her practice had kept her too busy to notice that she wasn’t saving anything, until she had realized abruptly that she had no practice and that there was nothing left to save. She had been overgenerous, perhaps, trusting unreasonably in the Lord to provide, but so, she reminded herself again, He had.

  He had provided, and she was still a little bewildered by the extravagance of His gesture. She had been rewarded, she told herself, not according to her deserts but according, possibly, to her intentions.

  The elevator boy whinnied a little behind his glove, and Dr. Anna looked up sharply. Degenerate ears, set too low on the skull. She drooped a little, looked suddenly older and more tired. For all her scuffed oxfords, her shabby valise and suitcase and portmanteau, Dr. Anna understood the unlovely functions of the human body, the twisted processes of the human mind. But there were certain things beyond which she didn’t like to think, dark abnormalities that seemed to the old doctor a violation of the goodness of her God, treason against the little dignity of man.

  The elevator boy probably howled like a wolf on moonlight nights or when the weather changed. Dr. Anna told herself that she might be wrong about the boy, even if she did know better. She had seen the pupils of his eyes, and she remembered the old joke they had had in medical school. It was better to be an Argyll-Robertson pupil than to have one.

  Well, she would think about something else, something pleasant. She had delivered enough babies, she supposed, to people a fair-sized town. Their first squalls had never failed to excite her and there was probably nothing more rewarding than ministering to a sick child. It had been dreadful, of course, when the best that she could do had not been good enough. It was too bad that medicine was not yet an exact science, although for a moribund child, without the accumulated, crabbed fear of the adult, the transition was easy enough. Too easy.

  The elevator slid quietly from twelve to fourteen and the old doctor stepped out, dragging her cold left leg, her dead left foot.

  A pretty, fresh-faced girl was making up the room, 1405, and she had been an agreeable change from the elevator boy. The girl wore a neat green uniform and a starched white cap and apron. She had fine dark eyes with a little powdering of freckles under them and across the bridge of her nose, and smooth braids of brown hair. The world and its affairs did not concern her.

  Her name was Cora May, she said, and she was deft with the old doctor’s bags; suits and dresses, serviceable blacks and browns and dark blues, soon hung on hangers, shoes marched in tidy rows. Dr. Anna’s old black instrument bag surveyed the room from the top shelf of the closet.

  Cora May forgot her own problems for a moment, and her heart swelled with pity for the pore old lady. She was almost as old a lady as Ma had been even if she did try to carry herself so straight and all. Couldn’t walk good neither.

  “You’re tarred,” Cora May said to the old doctor. “I’ll run you a nice bath, ma’am.” They was somethin’ about the old lady that sure brought back Ma. Thinking about the old lady and about Ma made Cora May reach for a little, stoppered vial she carried in her pocket, measure a few drops into the hot water. Crise d’Amour. It wasn’t so expensive but it was awful sweet and awful strong, Cora May reflected as she inhaled the steamy perfume. Ma would of loved a nice hot bath like this, its good strong smell, when she was tarred.

  The old lady stirred herself, found a clean white envelope, put into it a crisp five-dollar bill.

  “You’re a nice girl,” Dr. Anna had said, handing Cora May the envelope, patting Cora May on the shoulder.

  It was amost exacty what Ma would of done her own self. Cora May would of loved to tell the old lady about Ma, what a good woman Ma had been, but embarrassment constrained her.

  “Tattie for your kindness, ma’am,” was all she said.

  The Office

  Dave Purcell shifted in his chair, looked at the clock, and wondered uneasily what Mr. Wenton would have to say. With the Old Man you never knew. He was strictly an actor, of course, and he had more moods than a pregnant woman. Right now, he was probably up there in his suite pretending to be a businessman. He would fire Miss Williams again, make little Mary Street’s life a hell by demanding a definitive array of inconsequential facts and figures, break all his appointments, write to his wife and then they would all be in for it.

  The Old Man had been increasingly restless for days now, and they all, certainly, knew him well enough by now to know what that meant. By God, he wished the Old Man would hurry up and find a nice, plump, blond boy and get it over with. There must be a blond boy somewhere who would love J. Arthur Wenton or who would permit J. Arthur Wenton to love him, and then everybody could breathe for a while. Peace in our time.

  Still, it was certainly worth more than a hundred a week to be buffer between the Old Man and things that upset him, and everything upset the Old Man—especially women. Unless maybe it was some old bag with a broad a and stockings that wrinkled around the ankle. If a woman was old enough, and looked like a caricature, J. Arthur Wenton was crazy about her. That was because he was an old bitch himself, of course, and had an affinity for his own kind, but it was a shame the way he hated little Mary Street.

  Just because Mary was a dish and all the boys gave her the double O, J. Arthur hated her guts. Purcell was going to have to fight to save her job for her and he was damned tired, he told himself, of fighting. She was good and even the Old Man knew it, but that didn’t make any difference. Mary Street was on her way out unless love came to J. Arthur, and Mary wouldn’t be fired every night and hired every morning like Miss Williams. It went deeper than that. When J. Arthur fired Miss Williams, he was only pretending to be a businessman and a misunderstood magnate, but when he fired little Street, it would be for keeps.

  Purcell knew that he didn’t want anyone to fire little Street, didn’t want anyone to hurt her. Even when J. Arthur called her a micturating bitch, she was still just about the nicest thing God ever made. She was so sweet. If I were a marrying man, he thought, but there was too much in between. There was the soloist with the band and the Social Hostess and the Public Relations Woman and the food checker—the young one—and that wasn’t even going out of the hotel.

  No, he wasn’t in a position to marry anybody. J. Arthur didn’t care what his employees did as long as they didn’t get married. And it wasn’t as though David Underdown Purcell wasn’t old enough to know better. Just the same, Mary was a darling and he didn’t want to hurt her. They almost understood each other, almost spoke the same language. When he was with Mary it was like going home, like hurrying through the dark on Christmas Eve, a dark that was friendly with wreaths and candles, and then suddenly, rounding the corner, there was the house with light streaming out of the windows and the prismatic, tinsel glitter of the tree.

  Christ, it was funny even thinking about Christmas in Florida. There weren’t any Saturdays, Sundays or legal holidays, there was only work. Work and playing too hard to make up for all the work. Down here, Christmas Eve wasn’t even as good as Saturday night. Of course the Committee of One Hundred over in Miami had their water pageant up Indian Creek and everybody got drunk. The flotilla of decorated yachts was lovely in a way but strictly phony, strictly phony, he told himself, another come-on for winter visitors, the pre-season tourist trade. And God, how he wished that they would hurry up and come, even Christmas, because that would mean a flurry of schoolteachers and nice old ladies and tours, not the McCoy, but it was better than sitting around with your teeth in your mouth waiting for something that never happened.

  Purcell told himself again that he was where he wanted to be, doing what he wanted to do, that he would rather make a hundred a week down here than two hundred—two twenty-five�
��up North, and wondered if it were true. Sometimes he got tired of fighting, of buttering up J. Arthur Wenton, of being charming to people he didn’t like. Everybody was on the make, Christ, you could have pretty near a million dollars like the Old Man and still be on the make for a bar waiter. Sometimes he thought that the only gentleman he knew was the night porter, and the night porter would certainly never be written up in Fortune even if he was an M. A. from Harvard and spoke three languages well.

  The thought of the Old Man filled his mind suddenly again like a seepage. The Old Man colored everything. There probably wasn’t an employee in the hotel who wasn’t thinking about J. Arthur right now, speculating on his perversity, the quirk of power, whether they knew it or not.

  Maybe this hotel had class—almost tone—but Purcell knew of a hundred ways it could be improved. Purcell permitted himself the luxury of wondering what it would be like to be in a reasonable business, deal with reasonable people, keep reasonable hours. He was only kidding himself, of course, he’d go crazy in a reasonable business. He’d probably be a tramp hotelman the rest of his life.

  He wished again that he had a nice little hotel of his own, and he thought of the miracles of service, of cleanliness, of cooking, of organization, of tact, he would perform. Still kidding himself. Well, he might as well get it over with. The daily reports and the mail had to go up to the Old Man sometime and J. Arthur had had his coffee so he was probably in as charitable a frame of mind as he was likely to be in until Love came to him again.

  There was another letter from Pallas Athene Smith, the poetess. Pallas Athene was president of the North American League of Lyric Women, Inc., and the Lyric Women were convening this year at the hotel. The convention was slated to begin on Monday and all the details had been worked out long ago, but Pallas Athene found something to write to J. Arthur about almost every day. The Old Man ate it up, too. He enjoyed being a Patron of the Arts and Pallas Athene was not a serious rival to anyone. She wasn’t the type to engage the temporary interest, the subterranean lust, in the most manly of blond young men.