The Pink Hotel

by Patrick Dennis; Dorothy Erskine

  “Just one, but make it a big one,” Dukemer said. “Is nothing sacred to you two, not even money? The Madam wouldn’t approve of this. On several counts. ‘What is a Guest? A Guest is the most important person in this hotel. He is important to you. A Guest is never an interruption of your work. He is the reason for it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a service by permitting us to do so. Smile at all times. If you render a Guest some small service, say Thank You. Do not say Yes, say Yes Sir.’ Not to mention all this he-ing and she-ing,” she added.

  Mr. Mather looked up and saw again the galaxy of extraordinary stars, the absurd orange moon, that had been his catalysts at El Diablo. “A ah-capital night for a swim,” he observed wistfully.

  “The last one in’s a night clerk,” Mary said running. Purcell followed in a spurt of sand.

  “My dear, my very dear Millie,” Mr. Mather said as they walked down to the water. “You ah-need not swim. Float. Float, only. So beautifully, float.” He chuckled and coughed. “Quite ah—Jamesish,” he said.

  Mr. Mather’s eyes were wide to the night as he floated with Dukemer, hands lightly touching in the quiet sea, and he had felt again that he was about to compose a poem. “Pearls. Ambergris,” he whispered to himself. “Anemones.”

  The night sea in its turn cradled them softly, broke gently over them. There was no sound but the lashing of the waves against the breakwater, no time but this, no death. Dukemer and Mr. Mather were of the night and the water and each other, and the night and the water was of them. “To float-to float, only,” Mr. Mather bubbled moistly. Pearls. Ambergris. Anemones.

  Purcell and little Street crawled easily through big rollers to a shallow sand bar, rested and laughed, ducked and splashed. The stars, that moon, seemed unreasonable even to them, took all substance out of their wet frolic. Purcell had kissed Mary once and she had strained eagerly up to him, but a wave that knocked the nonsense out of both of them had intervened. Ny-ah, ny-ah, none of that, my boy, Purcell’s mind warned him. “Let’s go find the bodies,” he said when he could talk again.

  “Hey, you two,” he shouted, as they pulled into shore, looked around. “It’s time for all good little girls, Visiting Clam Chowders and executive assistant managers to be in bed.”

  “Have yourself paged,” Dukemer said from a dune. “I’m not on until three o’clock. Thr-ee o’clock, thr-ee-ee o’clock!”

  “Pretty soft,” Purcell said. “Pretty soft. And you only work seven days a week. Looked at in the right way, you probably owe the Old Man money.”

  “I’m a lucky kid,” Dukemer answered. “My shortages are on me, tra-la, and I send my overage up.” She gestured with her thumb.

  “What I wouldn’t g-give for a cup of coffee,” Mary said.

  “Your all?” Purcell inquired hopefully. “Don’t get mad, baby, I didn’t mean it. If I play my cards right, will you let me hold your hand?”

  “I w-wouldn’t want it to get around,” Mary said, “b-but all right.”

  “Make that maybe,” Dukemer added.

  “I really ah-think I’m hungry again,” Mr. Mather observed.

  “So am I,” Purcell told him. “It’s this damned fresh air.”

  “Food poisons me,” Dukemer said. “I go right into a coma.”

  They finished the beer as they drove back and they stopped at the first all-night that looked clean—Elaine’s Eatery.

  “Coffee all around while we make up our minds,” Purcell said.

  “You don’t have to think real hard,” Elaine told them. “I only got barbecued spareribs and fried shrimp.”

  “I’d like both,” Mr. Mather said thoughtfully.

  “What are we waiting for?” Purcell said. “Bring both.”

  “Both is too much,” Elaine said. “I set a good table. Tell you what,” Elaine said comfortably. “I’ll split it up. Half an order of spareribs, half an order of shrimp.”

  “The lime pie is real nice,” Elaine said when there was nothing left but bones and tails. “I fancy my own crust. You’re newlyweds, ain’t you?” she asked archly, and giggled. “I can always tell.”

  Back in the car again, Dukemer had gone promptly to sleep in the front seat. She had not been quite awake when Mr. Mather deposited her in her little apartment, tried the door after her. He had delivered Mary at the Baldwins’, and he and Purcell had had a nightcap together—another beer—at the hotel.

  Dukemer slept uneasily, for she dreamed that Violet and Violetta were after her. She had known them at once from their noses. “I fancy my own crust,” Elaine said distinctly, and ate a lime pie. Dukemer ran then, faster and faster, had run until she thought that her furious heart would burst, from the thin, arched noses, the delicately sniffing noses of Violet and Violetta. The noses had been gaining on her, flaring unpleasantly, when Dukemer turned cunningly over on her back and floated away from them. Sea Nautilus. Lime Pie. Anemones.

  “Detail. Meshed in detail. No time for Executive Thought,” Mr. Wenton said. “Mammalia Centralia,” and then Mr. Wenton had thrown a can of alphabet soup, and commas had spilled all over Mary’s typewriter, but she had looked up to see a knight on a white horse. The white horse had come up to the typewriter and laid his head on the keyboard, and the knight had lifted his visor for a moment, and winked.

  Purcell thought that he was wrestling an alligator on the sand bar, but the alligator had turned into Mary, and he had squeezed her and said, “Baby, I didn’t mean it.” Then the alligator had turned into the Old Man and Purcell had given him a disgusted push, and the Old Man had fallen ker-wh-hh-oppp, his scaly tail lashing the water. When he found Mary again, she was under a mango tree. Mary held out her arms and he grabbed her and gave her a real, awful one, one that went on and on and on and on and on.

  Mr. Mather was eating deviled eggs and floating on a pink mountain of cotton candy, when Plato asked him suddenly if his love for Mrs. Dukemer was for the highest good. Mr. Mather had quoted Ficino, and argued that true love was the noblest of neo-Platonisms, but Plato had persisted until Mr. Mather said suddenly, “ψνχή.” “ψνχή” had come out of his mouth and hung in a balloon, as conversation did in newspaper cartoons, until Plato had gone away. Mr. Mather shrugged. “Degno amore,” he said, and ate another deviled egg.

  The Galerie des Glaces

  Brown from his day at the beach, Dave Purcell dressed with meticulous care for another of the hotel’s endless functions in the Galerie des Glaces. He felt good. Not many guys, Purcell told himself, looked almost exactly as they had ten, maybe fifteen years ago. Considering everything, he was doing all right. Crowding forty and although he didn’t suppose that he had ever been what you could call happy, he had had one hell of a good time, a lot of good times. He hadn’t gathered much moss, but he had had more than the average laughs per roll.

  He’d had a good time yesterday, too. Dukemer’s beach party had been very okay, even if it had been some time since he’d been on a picnic that didn’t feature a refreshment pavilion and a buffet, sand and hot ptomaine.

  He thought of Mary, remembered the light slap of his palm against her sun-warmed midriff, the real awful one he had given her on the sand bar, the real awful one in his dream that had been longer than a cattle car. He’d seen her this morning when he had talked to the Old Man about the Lyric Women’s Gala. What a girl, he told himself. What a honey. When she’d smiled and flushed up at him, he’d wanted to give her one that would remove varnish.

  What a honey. Pretty as a new C note, and she smelled like vanilla ice cream and she could cook. Yes, he’d had a good time. Dukemer was still soft-boiled, too, he supposed. She had managed to tip him the wink, but she’d been selling the Fontainebleau Room cashier nickels for quarters in her sleep when he’d seen her at three o’clock.

  She’d probably rally about 9:15, just in time to go bob-sledding with Cotton Candy Mather. He’d been a chump. “Why did I do it?” he asked aloud, and kicked himself expertly with a patent leather shoe. Me and my kind hea
rt. He could be having dinner with Mary right now, always supposing that she wasn’t doing up good old Baldwin or some other lame duck in a temporary splint. Vanilla ice cream and talcum powder, and she felt like an armful of blue mink.

  In his dinner jacket Purcell had to admit that he wasn’t a bad-looking fellow, with his shoulders, his big white teeth, and the scrub of blond mustache. It was funny that his hair and mustache didn’t match, but the contrast only made him look more clean-cut, he figured. He shot his cuffs. A little tight in the waist, but still presentable.

  He had lost his mind, he supposed. Here he was, on duty to eleven when he had already worked his full shift, so that Daniels could take his wife out for an anniversary dinner. Having seen Mrs. Daniels, it was a little hard to think of the occasion as a feast day. If he were Daniels, he’d spend the day praying for a blonde angel on his knees fasting, but Daniels was either crazy about the old harridan or scared to death of her. You could pay your money and take your choice. On the face of it, though, the latter seemed more tenable. Mrs. D. was from Virginia, suh, and of an unreasonable gentility, but he’d hate like hell to hold a pay-check out on her.

  Purcell could hear the Lyric Women before the elevator stopped at the ballroom and he had stepped off into cacophony. It was their Gala Dinner, and they were being gala as hell. Christ, most of the dinner dresses reminded him of his mother and the days when he was still in panty waists.

  He was swept into a squealing limbo that interspersed high-pitched feminine shrieks with hearty, bronchial coughs. There was a smattering of arty-smarties, deliberately underdressed, in suits. There were newly upholstered jobs from small-town department stores, the desperately creaking stitches of loving hands at home and an occasional solid old girl with dollar marks all over her. The Lyric Women were powdered and rouged and curled and baked to a fine glaze under hair-drying machines when they should better be writing their wills, Purcell told himself as he looked around uncomfortably.

  Everything was all right. The long tables scalloped with fern looked very nice, the flowers on the Speaker’s Table would last until dinner was over. Madam Chairman’s silver gavel was garlanded in black and white ribbons, and cocktail glasses flaunted their pastel burden of canned fruit salad. Purcell shuddered. The fruit cup had been warm and gelatinous since three o’clock, but the girls would gobble it up. They would eat the Chicken King, morsels of duck and cold pork chop and veal cutlet fortified with pimiento and green pepper and masked with the chef’s own Creme Sauce. They would be archly elegant over the Biscuit Tortoni.

  Thinking of the Chicken King, Purcell could smell the sour reek of the hotel kitchen, picture the nameless, unsavory miscellany that composed it. Well, thank God for cream sauce. His food costs would go up a good thirty per cent without it, and it was rare that he had a real case of food poisoning. Shellfish, of course, was lethal at twenty paces, and he thought of the people to whom he would like to send an order of Crab Cakes Baltimore.

  The Old Man, of course, and Pallas Athene and Chiang and Mr. Goodenow, to name only a few, with a great big a la carte portion for Mr. and Mrs. Browne-Smythe. A double header.

  He had a four-page, single-spaced typewritten letter from the Browne-Smythes in his pocket right now. The letter detailed the extra services the Browne-Smythes were to receive; the number of water glasses, their height and circumference, to be in the room on the Browne-Smythes’ arrival. The placing and spacing of clean white bedsheets on the rug, the depth and constitution of the mattresses, the temporary lining of all available closet space with fresh paper. Yes, a double a la carte order of Crab Cakes Baltimore for the Browne-Smythes on a sterile doily, and three rousing cheers for the Lyric Women who could digest anything with cream sauce on it.

  It was one hell of a girlie-girlie, the biggest he’d ever seen, compounded into eternity in the mirrors of the Galerie des Glaces. It made the prospect of living with any woman for the rest of his life, even Mary, pretty appalling.

  But that was exactly what he wanted to do, he decided. He had Mary’s phone number now, and he found himself almost immediately in a pay station beside the temporary checkroom that had been set up by the elevator. Not that there was anything in it but a parlor maid. The revelers weren’t trusting anybody with their impedimenta. Their teeth were in their mouths, their furs were over their arms, and their purses were grasped securely in their good right hands.

  “I’d like to speak to Miss Street,” he told a woman with a voice like a squeaky shoe. So that was why poor old Baldwin had asthma.

  “Hello?” Mary said thinly. “O-h-h, Mr. Purcell. Gee, I’m glad you—I mean I had such a good time at the picnic. We—anyhow, I. . .”

  “Speak a little louder,” Purcell said.

  “Gee—I—we. . .” Mary began again. Her voice made Purcell feel soft and foolish: “Look, baby,” he told her. “I’m tied up with Pallas Athene and the Gala Dinner. Can’t you hear them? Every old cat up here is squealing like a stuck pig—”

  “Speak a little louder,” Mary said.

  “I want to see you,” he shouted. “I’ll pick you up in an hour. No use fighting fate,” he pointed out. “Just say yes.”

  Mary’s voice was clearer now, in the transmitter. “Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes!”

  Bless her heart, she’d probably been sitting right there waiting for him to call her. Something had happened last night but Purcell wasn’t sure whether it had happened on the beach or on the sand bar or later, in his dream. The dream had been so damned real that he couldn’t help feeling that Mary had been there to, shared it with him. She was a honey, but there were few things worse than too many women on an empty stomach. He’d go to the bar and have a quick one, come back and fight it out with Us Girls for another hour, and then he would go and get Mary. “My girl,” he said tenderly, and exhaled. What a honey!

  1221

  George was the elevator operator. In his pocket was a chamois bag in which he kept his clippings and swatches of different sorts and colors of hair. George was the PARK ROMEO CUTS CURLY QUEUES of Washington, the HAIR MANIAC CLIPS VICTIM’S LOCKS of St. Louis, the BURLY BARBER BOBS BLONDE BEAUTY, of Chicago. He had been many other things in many other places.

  George had also figured in a number of cases that did not involve headlines or court costs. He was an agreeable-looking fellow, barring his eyes, which always seemed to be looking straight ahead. In a way, he was almost handsome, with regular features and straight black hair. Some of his more romantic victims had been unwilling to prosecute for this reason.

  Now, at thirty-five, he had had three wives, one child, and a collection of seventy-two wigs. The wives and the child had had no real existence for George, but he still had the first wig that he had ever bought, together with his mother’s best chestnut switch which he had stolen when he was ten years old.

  Before that, he had been content to brush and fondle the switch where it lay on the dresser, but suddenly he had known fiercely that he wanted it for his own. A piece of the switch was in the chamois bag now with some crisp, curly tendrils of his own hair, a circle of braid from the mane of a beautiful dappled mare, and souvenirs of other satisfying adventures.

  When he was in the elevator alone, George’s hand sought the chamois bag, identifying, caressing the separate strands. He did not stop for passengers, his eyes seemed more fixed no than usual, and from the back of his throat there proceeded a sort of high, animal whinny.

  Eugenia Clupp, riding with her bags to the twelfth, cast little sidelong glances at George. It was her first trip away from home without Mummie and Daddy. She had never married. She had never even gone to school. Mummie and Daddy had never let her go anywhere by herself for fear she’d have one of her attacks—do something.

  Eugenia carried with her a dazed, shamefaced memory of coming out of her attacks, of clinging hotly, hips rotating, to her mother, of embracing her father fiercely, head thrown back, feet planted wide apart. Mummie and Daddy had held her off, and sometimes they had thrown cold water o
n her, but she remembered the deep tremors, the exhausted impatience, that followed her syndrome.

  Eugenia hadn’t had an attack since Mummie and Daddy had Been Taken. They had been killed in a traffic accident a block away from home. She had had just one attack in the bathroom, right after the funeral, but she had been alone and so it didn’t seem to count.

  She had come around all right and splashed water on her face and gone down, still dazed and very white, to the funeral buffet. The neighbors had been lovely, and it had been that night that she had written “Threnody in A Minor,” and it was “Threnody” that had made her a topflight American poetess among the few. “Threnody” had piqued Pallas Athene Smith’s interest in Eugenia, it had been her first published work and the title of her first collected book of verse.

  Eugenia was thirty-six, but she looked much younger in her little round hats and the little round collars that she affected, her large gray eyes peering in eager distraction through her pince-nez, and kinky little tendrils of blonde fuzz escaping from her braids.

  Eugenia was terribly excited by her journey alone, at finding herself someone, a poetess, by the friendly slapdash of the blue and white waves, and by the magic towers of other hotels glistening in the distance, a plaster Camelot.

  In her room at last, Eugenia bathed, unpacked, pressed her demure, beige crepe dinner dress with a little traveling iron. Looking out of the window at the ocean’s blue to green to blue to far-off gray, words tumbled in and out of her mind like a rhyming dictionary.

  She unbraided her hair slowly, her eyes on the horizon, brushed it, and in the warm, salt air each hair took on a tight and crisply bristling entity. Eugenia was aware suddenly of the old, imponderable blankness attacking her in subtle ways, hallucinated sensory experiences of sight, sound and odor. She started for the bathroom, for cold water, as her limbs jerked, crumpled, and she fell to the floor, teeth grinding, arms and legs working in a slow, inviolate frenzy.