“Help! Help! Hel-pp!” she cried strangling, arms and legs flailing, but no one came to help. All that she could see was blue water. Mrs. Westbury was alone in a salty void that choked and used her.
Her effort became now fiercer, more strained, she was intent only upon one more breath, the quick, gurgling gasp that was never enough. The sky distilled to a stronger blue, a chalkier white, and there came, with her failing strength, a quick moment of clarity as she went under.
It was all nonsense, the things that were said about drowning. Drowning wasn’t pleasant and easy, and the events of her past hadn’t progressed in review like a bad movie. Now that she really was drowning, it was awful. “God, help me. God, I’ll do anything You say. I’ll never do anything wrong again. You’ll see, God. I don’t want to die. I’m not ready. Mom, make God help me. Mom . . .”
She’d give up E. J. and the house in Grosse Pointe, the children, do her own housework, anything, for another breath. “Oh God! Mom!” Mrs. Westbury had been treading water furiously, trying to gain on this final, slippery element, seize this last, manifest moment of simple being, when she had seen the end approaching.
A vast green roller wearing a cap of white spray not much larger than Mrs. Tewksberry’s pink transformation was bearing down on her. Mrs. Westbury had known then that she was a goner, almost enjoyed a quiet moment of realized dread, as a wall of green water advanced with a low, menacing roar. The big green roller had come up, hesitated malignly for an instant, taken sure, deliberate aim.
Mrs. Westbury saw, behind the roller, little fish, small marine animals, pieces of sponge and seaweed, a bright, white convoluted shell, a pebble of pink coral, and then the roller had hit her with its full green force, driving her down like a nail—a very little nail, with a very large green hammer.
Mrs. Westbury was just starting to go down again when a hand caught her shoulder strap and a girl’s voice said, “Take it easy, kid.” It was almost as if it were Mom herself. The girl’s voice was gentle and Mrs. Westbury realized limply that she wasn’t done for after all.
“Over on your back,” the girl said easily. “I’ll take you in.” It had been wonderful to obey, to have someone capable in charge again. She surrendered herself entirely to the voice, floating in docilely under its command.
Mrs. Westbury was winded and pretty well shaken when they reached the shore, and she buckled abruptly and sat down. The girl who belonged to the voice thumped her on the back, sat down beside her and tucked an arm around her in an interval devoted to coughing and dripping.
The girl was beautiful, Mrs. Westbury decided when she could look up—very brown. Her hair was blonde and curly and her mouth was painted a ripe red. Mrs. Westbury observed the girl’s hair critically; it was darker at the roots, but she smiled anyhow and thanked her, and they were soon talking like old friends.
Mrs. Westbury didn’t know when she’d had such a good time. There was no water except out there, somewhere, only sand and sun, and the girl laughed a lot, seeing funny things that Mrs. Westbury wouldn’t have noticed with anyone else. Out of sun and sand and air, the girl produced a dog-eared package of cigarettes and they smoked in raffish content. And the things the girl said were so funny that Mrs. Westbury couldn’t help laughing too. Out loud!
She’d said that Jane Tewksberry looked like a blimp in a fright wig. She’s said that the hotel was a floating cat house washed ashore. She’s said that Mr. Wenton, the owner, braided his toupee.
Mrs. Westbury had laughed immoderately, had giggled and snickered in a way that Mom—Maume—would never have approved of; in a way of which Maume would never have approved.
Mrs. Westbury was having such a good time that she didn’t know where the hours had flown. Lunchtime had come and gone—not that she had any plans.
“What the hell,” the slim blonde said, “you’d have done the same for me—if you could swim, that is.” Mrs. Westbury laughed again, felt better, sat up straighter, and looked around a little. The girl’s voice was talking away. Something about seeing her again. Mrs. Westbury was aware of a certain familiar chic in the blonde girl’s sloping back, her diapered trunks, her studied near-nakedness. She glimpsed a red blob on the blonde girl’s ankle. Probably scraped it on a shell, she told herself.
“Look here,” the girl’s voice was saying suddenly. “Why don’t we have a drink together, kid? You probably need one and I always think I do.”
“It would be fun” Mrs. Westbury murmured. The girl was a darling, Mrs. Westbury was telling herself in hot gratitude, when she noticed Mrs. Tewksberry observing them from her cabana. She didn’t know anything about the girl, she realized. She might be anything, some nobody probably.
“It would be fun,” Mrs. Westbury said again with dignity, “but I have another date. I must simply fly.”
The blonde girl’s level eyes rested on Mrs. Westbury. She smiled a little. “Sorry I bothered you, kid,” she said, and walked away.
Mrs. Tewksberry left her cabana and embraced Mrs. Westbury noisily. “Nona, darling,” she said. “I’m so glad that you know Maggie Alexandroff. Can’t you bring her to the Island? I’m dying to meet her.”
Mrs. Westbury turned a slow scarlet. “Oh, no,” she said softly. Maggie Alexandroff? Maggie Alexandroff’s hair was black and straight. The blonde girl didn’t look a bit like Countess Alexandroff.
Mrs. Westbury experienced again the same incredulous panic she had known in the water. The red blob was the De Burke Cabochon, the celebrated Drop of Blood. The illustrated weeklies said that Maggie was never without it, even in her bath. Maggie Alexandroff.
Maggie Alexandroff was the ultimate and the penultimate, the darling of a nation. A millionaire’s daughter, she had grown richer and more famous with every husband, surpassing now even herself. Maggie Alexandroff? She had seen her, talked to her, been close enough to touch her. Why, Maggie Alexandroff had saved her life! Maggie Alexandroff. She was just like anybody, and it would have been so easy to like her. Mrs. Westbury was glad that Mom didn’t know about this, couldn’t see her now.
“Oh, yes,” she said to Mrs. Tewksberry. “I’ve known her for years. But I don’t think she’s very—well—nice.”
The Desk
Mr. Moxley made old Mr. Tilney nervous, standing there and shifting his eyes around the way he did, and sniffing a little through his nose. Mr. Moxley made Mr. Tilney feel as if he was doing something wrong all the time, even when he wasn’t. He was having a little trouble with his sheet; his rooms wouldn’t come out, and he supposed that Moxley knew it, but you’d think that Mr. Moxley would have more consideration for a person than to stand practically over them while a person was trying to get his rooms to come out and a person’s relief hadn’t showed up. Mr. Wenton hisself would have more consideration. Mr. Wenton was a real lovely man, Mr. Tilney thought, a real gentleman, with a real sweet hello, and five dollars extra in his envelope last Christmas.
Mr. Wenton had the artistic temper-mint, and no denying. Look at that clock, if you thought he didn’t. A beautiful thing, egs-quis-it, with all that gold and all, real gold too, he’d bet your life, that Mr. Wenton had picked up at old A. J. Fleughler’s auction. That was the artistic temper-mint for you. Little touches that nobody else would of thought of was what gave the hotel its class.
Mr. Tilney wished that he had a nice little business with a person like Mr. Wenton, who would have some consideration for a person. A nice little high-class haberdashy, say, with hand-painted ties and all like that, or a lovely tearoom, nothing but the very best, for people who was willing to pay for the very best. Not that the people at the hotel wasn’t willing enough to pay, but they didn’t have the artistic temper-mint like he and Mr. Wenton.
He could see it now, could Mr. Tilney, with tapers on all the tables and monk’s hoods over all the lights, and the walls would be fishnet with sea horses and starfish and conchs and them scalloped sea jellies that looked like an old-fashioned glass fruit bowl underneath.
It would be very ar
tistic because Mr. Tilney had the artistic temper-mint too, but he had that pain in his head again; his rooms wouldn’t come out and his relief hadn’t showed up. “Tsk-tsh!” Mr. Tilney said. “The least a person could do is be on time. Seven and five is twelve and two is twenty,” and the pain in his head grew suddenly until it felt like a great big bleeding heart, and the drops gathered like hot jelly on a spoon and slipped down through him in fierce little slivers of pain.
“They must be something terrible wrong with me,” he said. He didn’t know. He’d never felt like this before. He was tired, he guessed, no time to hisself, and a person’s relief always late because they thought they could get away with it. Fear gripped him. If a person was to get really sick, why it would be as much as their jobs was worth. And then goodbye to the gold flannel sport jacket in Beaver Bros, window and them new brown and white moccasin-type oxfords, not to mention being in debt all over again, maybe even having to go live at his sister Margaret’s, and just when he had thought he was going to look like a regular sport for once, be a credit to Mr. Wenton and the hotel.
Mr. Tilney himself was never late, never absent. That was one thing you could say for him, he thought, a person never had to wait for him. He was always there a good hour, hour and a half, before he was due on. But it stood to reason that if a person was sick, they was going to be replaced because naturally they had to be somebody on the Desk.
Thinking of somebody else on the Desk made Mr. Tilney feel so faint that he dabbed at his forehead with his good, show handkerchief, the one with his initial and the Eau de Cologne. He felt so funny that he figured he couldn’t be bothered getting the mussed one out of his hip pocket. A person liked to make a nice appearance and all like that, but if a person was dead, Mr. Tilney realized suddenly, it didn’t make no difference if he had a fresh pocket handkerchief or not, although Mr. Tilney did like a real neat-appearing corpse.
The pain in his head throbbed sluggishly with his heart and Mr. Tilney sighed. Unless he’d made another mistake, he was six dollars out on the tenth floor. “Them day clerks!” he said suddenly in a passion. “So careless it’s a mercy they don’t forget their heads. Leave early and get there late, that’s all them young noodles think about. They don’t care if a person works theirself to death or not. They can’t even be bothered to relieve a person on time so that they could get their sheet done instead of answering them eternal phones!” He banged his ruler, his freshly sharpened pencil on the marble desk. “Young Pup,” he said savagely. “Eight o’clock! One whole eternal hour late!” It was enough to try a person’s patience, that’s what it was.
The blonde girl who was not Mrs. T. J. Sturt III was very nervous, the arm holding her purse went suddenly limp, but she set herself and tilted her chin. A blonde in a black linen suit ought to be able to get out of pretty nearly anything. She didn’t look like a tramp, she told herself, and thanked God she’d never done anything to her hair.
A man who seemed to be a manager or something surveyed her from the Desk. He wore a knowing scowl, and the blonde girl held her breath as she hurried past him into the pale yellow sunshine. She’d made it. The morning clouds were flamingo pink, and there was still a trace of night-blooming jasmine in the air. Dukemer snorted briefly into the bills she was filing according to room number. “Mrs. T. J. Sturt III, my foot,” she said.
Purcell and Moxley changed shifts with the shortest possible exchange of civilities. “Anything new?” Purcell asked.
“Nothing doing,” Moxley told him. He said nothing about his suspicions of Mrs. T. J. Sturt III. If Moxley got an in with Mr. Wenton on something like this, it was possible that he might do Purcell in, get off the graveyard shift.
The pain in Mr. Tilney’s head swelled again to a crescendo, a roar that reverberated in his ears, dropped a gray veil before his eyes. The pain in his head was a taste like blood in his mouth, a sick wrenching of his entrails.
“You look like hell,” Purcell said. “Go up to 1016 and get some rest, I’ll take the desk. Your reliefs an hour late now.”
“My sheet,” Mr. Tilney faltered.
But Purcell said, “Your sheet, hell,” and put the key to 1016 in his hand. “If there weren’t any mistakes in your sheet, the Old Man would think your job was too easy,” Purcell told him. “Probably dock you. Go get some beauty sleep and put on a fresh hair ribbon. Get the hell out and let the girls in Accounting earn their next permanent.”
He would check the sheet himself, of course, and if he couldn’t find Tilney’s mistake, he’d throw in enough compensating errors to make it come out for the time being. The Old Man liked a fast answer, nothing was deader than yesterday’s House, and what difference did it make? All that he wanted to do was keep the Old Man off until Tilney had a chance to die a natural death.
Poor old Tilney was nine-tenths dead already, he figured. Tilney must have, he didn’t know what, but his face and hands were putty colored and he seemed to know what he was doing even less than he usually did.
Even on his good days old Tilney didn’t have the intelligence of a smart eight-year-old, and Purcell figured that he was as sick as hell now. He was damned if he didn’t think he’d call the house doctor. Mr. Wenton would raise hell of course, if he did it for an employee, but he could explain it to Doc Carling and, if necessary, slip him five of his own. Purcell was annoyed with himself suddenly. Old Tilney wasn’t worth a good goddamn dead or alive. Hell, he wasn’t even good-hearted, but illogically Purcell felt that even Old Tilney ought not to die meshed in his own mistakes, that he too should have some dignity in death.
1016
Mr. Purcell could be real sweet, Mr. Tilney thought, as he locked 1016 from the inside. Real sweet, even if he was sort of a roughneck. If a person’s language wasn’t nice and refined, Mr. Tilney was inclined to be censorious because Mr. Tilney liked everything nice and refined. He supposed, hanging his coat and trousers neatly over a chair, that he had sort of inherited liking everything refined and artistic from Auntie.
Auntie had had the artistic temper-mint all right, and Auntie had wanted him to have everything real nice, too. “Them children!” he said suddenly again in a passion, “That Margaret, breaking a party’s will: saying Auntie was in-com-pe-tent. Undue influence!” He snorted. After a person had give the best years of their life to a party, that Margaret had to step in and ruin everything. A person had hardly even had a chance to stand up for their rights what with a closed hearing and all like that.
And it wasn’t like Auntie hadn’t tried to do the right thing, Mr. Tilney thought, taking out his teeth, creaming his face, shaking out his socks. He looked anxiously through his pain to the top of his head, but his eyes were still blurred. “Them treatments,” he said. “Them treatments. Take a person’s good money, that’s about all them treatments was good for!” He couldn’t see that his hair was no thicker than it had been before.
And Auntie had always said that he had the prettiest hair she’d ever seen. Poor Auntie, she wouldn’t know him now, and Mr. Tilney thought of the days when he had been slim and straight. Mr. Tilney thought of his eyes as they had used to be, blue and fringed with heavy lashes, of his hair, a silvery gilt, of the vanished glory of his teeth, his coral cheeks. Auntie always said that he was as pretty as a picture, and he had always been a real neat-appearing boy, but Mr. Tilney’s head swelled again in a blurred cacophony of sight and sound and color.
Auntie, Mr. Purcell, the gold flannel sport coat, Mr. Wenton hisself, impinged themselves upon his mind, dwarfed but accurate. The pain in his head grew suddenly fiercer, as if a giant hand held it and squeezed out the slivers of pain. He had to get to bed. That Margaret, he thought as the pain in his head exploded into a dull roar, a blow shivered through him and his whole left side died and turned cold upon the solid magenta rug. That Margaret, Mr. Tilney thought, and did not think again.
711
In his own room Purcell drank, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and sighed. Old Tilney had been found in 1016 deader t
han Kelsey’s nuts, but everything had been taken care of. It was all over now. The windows had been opened for two hours, the bed changed, the furniture rearranged. There wasn’t a smell of old Tilney left. He could sell 1016 tonight.
Everything had gone off very well too. Dead, old Tilney was so small that he and the bell captain had put the body on a room-service cart, covered it with a tablecloth, and taken it out through the kitchen. There hadn’t been a break in the service. J. Arthur had raised hell this morning when the transcript was late but Purcell supposed that he would be desolated by tomorrow, inaugurate a blanket of roses by popular subscription. A blanket of roses would be a hell of a handy thing for old Tilney to have around in Potter’s Field or the local equivalent.
Purcell felt lousy. He wished that he had time to run over to Miami and watch the unreconstructed Seminoles stalk majestically barefoot, Aztec ruins, through the five and ten. It always amused him to observe their dirty dignity and to remember that the Seminole nation did not recognize the sovereignty of the United States. He liked their attitude.
The sun smiled on the water. The wind soughed sweetly with a gentle susurrus through coconut palm and Spanish pine, and Purcell found himself thinking again of little Mary Street. It was funny how, no matter what he started thinking about lately, he always came back to Mary. She was innately sweet, Purcell told himself again, and there was a sort of golden shimmer to her, yellow high lights in her hair and flesh tones, the amber sparkle of her eyes. Mary was like a yellow rose, she seemed so . . . and Purcell squirmed uneasily in his chair. . . good.
Why, he would almost bet, he thought with a kind of awe, that Mary was a virgin. Probably the only one over fourteen in the whole goddamned state, he supposed.
Yes, if he were a marrying man, Mary Street would be just what he wanted. It always got him when people were decent, not that he had been bothered much that way lately. A good guy was just a chump, he told himself, but he thought again of what he would do if he were a marrying man. He would send Mary Street the biggest goddamned bunch of flowers in the world, he supposed—but he was interrupted by a tentative knock and then another.
The Pink Hotel Page 7
