The Pink Hotel

by Patrick Dennis; Dorothy Erskine

  It was quite a jolt, quite a jolt, Purcell felt heavily. He’d been thinking that good old Baldwin was practically a basket case and now he turned out to be Mr. Rheingold. Right now he was probably telling Mary that Mrs. Baldwin didn’t understand him. A fine invalid!

  “Good evening. Won’t you come in,” Mrs. Westbury said loosely. “I’m Mrs. Westbury and this is . . . what did you say your name was, darling?”

  “It’s Cooper, ma’am. I’m the waiter. Evening, Mr. Wenton. Mr. Purcell.”

  Executive Suite

  It was a long pull from Abbot, Adam and Fam. to Yeagle, Mrs. Florence, and Mary’s fist tightened in cramp. She wasn’t hungry any more. Sincerely, Art Wenton.”. . . “Dear Mr. Potts: We are indeed far removed in time and space from Pottsville, Pa. . . .” “. . . at this glad season of the year . . .” “Dear Miss Randolph:” “. . . our wishes for a real old-fashioned . . .” “A very Merry . . .” “Sincerely, Art Wenton.” . . . “Sincerely, Art Wenton . . . and a very Merry . . .” “Sincerely Art Wenton.”

  It was 11:30 by the little watch on Mary’s wrist that Dad had given her for graduation; there was a big pile of neatly addressed envelopes on her desk, but she couldn’t finish it if she stayed all night.

  The Personal Touch. Sincerely, Art Wenton. Mary began to get mad. Millie Dukemer was right. Men were strictly no good, even Dave. “Me, I’m through for the night,” she informed the Executive Suite. Mr. Wenton could fire her if he wanted to. She didn’t care.

  She called Dave’s room, then the Desk. “Cantrill speaking,” the Desk answered. “Who? Mr. Purcell? Mr. Purcell is off duty,” the Desk told Mary.

  As if I didn’t know that, Mary thought bitterly. “Where’s the Westbury party?” she asked.

  “Mezzanine floor, miss. Four doors from the elevator. You can’t miss it,” Cantrill added, and he was right. There was no mistaking the Westbury party.

  Laughter brayed out the open door and Cooper, who was maneuvering a room-service cart bristling with ripe olives and anchovies, fried shrimp and little sausages, fresh bottles and clean glasses, lurched and leaned heavily against her.

  “Pardon me, miss,” Cooper said, collecting himself. “You looking for somebody?”

  “No,” Mary lied hastily, catching a furtive glimpse of Dave with Countess Alexandroff on one arm and The Honorable Whatever-Her-Name-Was on the other. Seeing Dave being such a hell of a fellow touched a nerve and shuddered down through her. “I should say not,” she said briskly, setting her teeth and squaring her shoulders.

  Mr. Wenton was right. Millie Dukemer was right. Dave was just a big good-looking heel, after all, and she’d been a fool. She’d believed everything he’d told her and a lot of things that he hadn’t bothered to tell her.

  “Oh-oh-h-h,” Mary murmured with a little cry of animal pain as she got into a cab.

  “Hurt yourself, miss?” the driver asked.

  “My ankle,” Mary said swiftly.

  “Tough,” the driver sympathized. “Soak it in Epsom Salts.”

  She was learning to be a good liar, Mary told herself. She was learning a lot of things she didn’t want to know.

  I want to go home. Dave had been fatuous with those two silly-looking women hanging onto him, but Mary Street wasn’t rich or famous. She wasn’t even a very good secretary. At least Mr. Wenton didn’t think so.

  Dave wasn’t nice, and he didn’t love her. She’d fallen for a lot of stuff that was old when the world was young. Dave, darling.

  I never want to see him again, she told herself, even if it weren’t true. Why, the big slob. The big good-looking no-good. And she’d thought he was so wonderful. Mary’s taut anger mounted, and then she began to cry.

  “Try Epsom Salts, honey,” the driver advised her again.

  “Maybe I will,” Mary said.

  Mr. Baldwin was in when she got home, wandering disconsolately. He couldn’t breathe lying down, and he’d been awake for so long that now he wanted to talk, tell her about when he’d been a boy in upstate Vermont.

  Mary liked Mr. Baldwin, and she usually liked his stories, with their homely flavor of boiling maple sap and red crocheted mittens. He’d told her about Wee Ma, the big iron caldrons of apple butter and that time when he had patched his own pants, but tonight she wanted to be alone.

  “Yes, sir,” Mr. Baldwin began again with relish, “a brown patch on my blue trousers, and then I cooked every danged potato I had.”

  David, Mary thought desperately. David. David. David.

  “I ever tell you about the time I went bear hunting with old Squire Mooney?” he asked.

  Mr. Baldwin began to laugh and choke so much thinking about it that Mary couldn’t bear to hurt his feelings. She shook her head miserably, waited for him to say “Well, sir . . .”

  It had been a brutal day, a vicious day. After last night Mary hadn’t expected to spend it buying Florida holly from a baldheaded man in cerise broadcloth shorts who was knitting what appeared to be a white angora baby sweater.

  The Penthouse

  It was midnight before the Westbury party began to break up. The affair had not been without its exciting moments. Ann and Bill McCannon had had an epic row—a real brannigan and he had struck her, knocking her flat. The Mellotts’ Chiang had come, too, quite uninvited and had perched high on an armoire attributed to Boulle, clawing and spitting at all who had tried to remove him while Miss Alicia Mellott vilified Mrs. Westbury, and Miss Gracia crooned “Come to he mudder.” After that the doors had been closed and Are You Ready? pamphlets had begun to appear under them. Mr. Crull was returned to his room by the house dick. The starlet had passed out in a shower of sequins. Lawrence Mendes had recited most of the soliloquy from Hamlet before throwing up. Yes, it had been a great success. The hotel and Mrs. Westbury could be proud. Grosse Pointe would hear of this night for countless nights to come.

  “Look, Purcell,” Maggie Alexandroff had said, “I mean it. Go home. Beat it. You don’t have to be wet nurse to a big girl like me. Visit your girl. See the Late Late Show. You’ve been a prince but you’re dead on your feet. I can take care of myself just fine.”

  Purcell had drunk deeply of his Scotch—at least he had thought it was Scotch. He was drunk and glad of it. “To hell with my girl,” he had said thickly. “To hell with the Late Late Show. I’ll stick with you, Maggie. Just for laughs. You’re okay, Countess. Strictly okay.”

  And that was the last thing he remembered of the Westbury party.

  He didn’t know how he had got to Maggie Alexandroff’s sitting room, but here he was, coat off, shoes off, tie loosened, lying on a tufted damask sofa. Purcell knew this suite well. It was the penthouse. It had terraces on four sides, a library, a dining room, its own kitchen, porphyry floors and onyx toilets. It was so lush that the Old Man had almost had an orgasm decorating it, so expensive that only a Maggie Alexandroff or maybe the president of a labor union could afford to pass a single night in it.

  Purcell sat up groggily, noticed a glass of milk and a half-eaten sandwich on the coffee table in front of him. Drunkenly he got to his feet, made his way unsteadily to the door of the master bedroom. He tried the handles and found them locked. From inside Countess Alexandroff’s voice said, “Not tonight, Golden Boy. Go back to the sofa and sleep it off.”

  Purcell shook his head numbly. The ornate room swam before his eyes. He tottered back to the sofa and fell full length onto it.

  “Mary,” he said aloud. “Mary.”

  495 Palm Frond Avenue

  Mary hadn’t meant to do it and she hated herself for being so weak, so silly, such a sap. But somehow she just couldn’t help it. Lying there sleeplessly she’d argued with herself for more than an hour before she’d given in. And stealing on tiptoe down the stairs to the telephone she’d felt like a culprit, like someone about to steal the Baldwins’ silver.

  And even once she got to the telephone it had taken her more than twenty minutes to bring herself to do it. Then she decided that she simply had to know. A
fter all, she wouldn’t say anything; couldn’t say anything. She wouldn’t demean herself so far as to call a man and plead with him. After he’d said “Hello” she’d cover the mouthpiece with her hand, sit out his irritation. Wait until he’d slammed down the receiver before she hung up. She just simply had to know, that was all. Stealthily she dialed the hotel and, holding her nose so that her voice would sound different, she croaked “Seven-eleven, please” into the mouthpiece. There had been a long silence, punctuated by dull little clicks of the operator’s key. Then the operator’s exasperating voice had cut in: “Sevin-e-o-levin does not an-serr. Ennee mess-suj?”

  “No,” Mary had whispered. “No thank you. B-but would you please ring Countess Alexandroff?”

  “I’m sorree, but the Coun-tiss has left instruck-shins not to be disturbed. Ennee mess-suj?”

  “No,” Mary said bleakly. “No thank you.”

  1414

  “A penny for your thoughts,” Earle said. There was a little worried frown between Dawn’s eyes, and she twisted at her rings until the chips in her new wedding band didn’t show and her Miss Simplicity Classic Tailored-Style Diamond Engagement Ring cut into the wet palm of her left hand.

  Dawn was nervous in 1414 with just Earle. It was a funny feeling, just the two of them, and their bags there in the middle of the room.

  Dawn was frightened and pretty uncomfortable, thinking about tonight and all.

  She was doubtful, too, about the Wallace Nuttings that Mrs. Wilmerding had given them. She couldn’t very well afford to offend Mrs. Wilmerding either; no one in Jersey City society could. Thinking about the Wallace Nuttings when she had hoped for sterling ice cream forks made Dawn’s head ache worse, furrowed the frown between her eyes, presaged a permanent discontent to come.

  Earle finished writing in his little leatherette notebook. Taxi to hotel. . . $2.35. Well, a fellow only lived once. Bellboy . . . 15¢. And twenty smackers each and every day for the room. Whew-w!

  “Still waters run deep,” Earle said, thinking back to Page 78 in A Practical Manual of Married Love. It was a passage that he had particularly enjoyed because it made everything pretty clear, pretty clear, step by reasoned step. Earle was a little nervous, too; he liked to know where he was at, and thinking back to the diagrams, Page 78, made everything pretty clear, pretty clear, he told himself again, clearer even than that time with Birdie Shifflett.

  He took off his rimless glasses, polished them, and put them in their case with a snap. “A place for everything. . .” he began, and stopped abruptly, rubbing the red ridges on either side of his nose. “Poco a poco . . .” he began again and abandoned that too, even if he had taken a commercial course in Spanish.

  “Oh, Earle!” Dawn fingered the cleft in her chin, the sore hard swelling on the side of her nose, dispiritedly, mentally hung the Wallace Nuttings defiantly in the breakfast nook. She really liked them, she told herself, they were sweet, but she couldn’t quite see them as Antiques of Tomorrow, like she did her reproduction Sheraton sofa and her ruby-glass hurricane lamps.

  Dawn loved a lovely home, could almost hear Mrs. Wilmerding saying, “Dawn Funk has taste, my dear!” But it wasn’t Dawn Funk any more, it was Dawn Funk Tribbie. Mrs. Earle Tribbie. Dawn Tribbie. A beautiful name. Mama used to say that she had been born at the dawning. Dawn. It had always sort of set her apart.

  She would have been shocked to know that Mama considered her now a nice, plain, sensible girl; regretted, in the cold face of Dawn’s acne, her early extravagance, wished that she had given her a nice, plain, sensible name like Edna, as she had with Agnes and Clara.

  Earle’s mind left Page 78 reluctantly; he hitched his trousers. It was a little early for anything like that, a little early, and his mind returned obediently to Page 61. Take it easy. “One thing at a time, and that done well.” Dr. Sharpe had been pretty definite about Shock, Avoidance of: Woman, the Delicate Nervous System of.

  He looked in the mirror, but without his bifocals he couldn’t see very well, and without the padding in his coat, his shoulders looked pretty narrow, even without his bifocals. Earle had an uneasy feeling that he ought to do something, get started.

  “I forgot to thank Dr. Jubb,” Dawn began, but Earle said, “Never mind; he got his ten bucks,” and started saying “Dear!” and sort of kissing at her face in a smarmy way that gave her little cold chills of apprehension.

  “My hair!” Dawn said, thinking about tonight, wondering how she could maintain the stiff wonder, the sausage-like precision of her new permanent, without bobby pins. She’d get up later and put on a hair net, she decided, only maybe then it would be too late. She’d probably be all frizz.

  Earle released her; he was out of breath and already tired of Page 61. Dawn touched her back hair, reassured herself as to the crisp order there. Dawn thought about her Toast-master Set and how funny Earle looked without his glasses on and that sort of place in his head where he had been operated on for mastoid.

  Earle kissed her suddenly and bit her ear while she was thinking about those amusing little decalcomania she had put on the walls of the kitchen and bathroom in their little home. Paunchy Mexicans in sombreros under cacti and little, lost burros. Swans and water lilies and goldfish with big bubbles coming out of their mouths.

  “Why, Earle Tribbie! No,” she said. “You’ll ruin my blouse!”

  It was awful, almost as bad as Mama said, and this was only the beginning. Dawn couldn’t remember Daddy, but Mama said that he had been a gentleman if there ever had been one. Mama had had a little talk with Dawn about two weeks ago, had told her how Daddy had gone down in the lobby and smoked a cigar, given Mama a chance to get undressed, put out the lights.

  Of course, Earle didn’t smoke cigars, but he did have his pipe. Dawn still had a snapshot of Earle with his collar open and his teeth clenched over a curly meerschaum. In it Earle had looked young and sad and sincere and dead.

  She wished that the honeymoon was over, that they were back in their own little home, old married folks. There must be some way of getting Earle down in the lobby, smoking a good cigar, like Daddy. “Earle wants to kiss her,” Earle said.

  “Earle, dear, where’s that old pipe of yours?” Dawn asked, picking at a thread on his shirt with one long, curved, opalescent fingernail. “I don’t honestly believe you’ve smoked that old pipe of yours once since we’ve been married. I love you with your teeth clenched over a pipe” she said enthusiastically. “I simply love the smell of good tobacco, a good cigar.” Well, she had certainly given him a hint, for mercy’s sakes.

  “I—uh, I don’t know. Somewhere, I guess. Maybe in my bag.” Women were certainly funny. With their budget figured down to the last cent, and Dawn quitting her position, and the payments on the home, and a Florida honeymoon and all, there wouldn’t be much left for Corona-Coronas. Of course, Earle didn’t want his wife to work. She’d probably be busy enough with the home and, uh, a family later on, but he couldn’t understand why Dawn hadn’t insisted on it for the first year or two, anyhow. He’d known a lot of fellows who didn’t want their wives to work, but the wives had just gone ahead and done it anyhow. Real little helpmeets. Still, Earle Tribbie certainly wasn’t the kind of a fellow to let his wife work. His self-love swelled briefly before he sighed, remembering the fat brown envelope Dawn used to get on Fridays.

  Dawn found herself thinking of her wedding again; it had been a long time since she had thought about anything else. After all, she and Earle had been engaged for, let’s see, six years, and Mama had given her her hope chest when she graduated from high school. Walnut burl, and not a scratch on it. Mama had started her sterling, too, Lady Imperatrix, a spoon for every birthday and now she had a full service for six. In the long run, it paid to get the best.

  Yes, the wedding had been lovely and so dignified. Mama knew how to do things up. Even Mrs. Johnson had looked real nice in the plain black dress with the white ruffled cap and apron that Mama had finally got her to wear, not that Mrs. Johnson had wanted to
do it. But Dawn had been just a teensy-weensy bit disappointed in Earle. A cutaway and striped trousers would have made all the difference, especially in the pictures, even if they had been rented, but Earle had been stubborn about his dark blue. Not even Mama had been able to do anything with him.

  Goodness knows, she was glad that she had listened to Mama. Dawn had always sort of wanted to be married in white, but Mama had said that nothing was as pretty and girlish as pink, and Mrs. Wilmerding had backed her up. Mrs. Wilmerding had told Mr. Wilmerding later that, with Dawn Funk’s complexion, white satin would, at best, look like a clean Band-Aid. With the pink tulle dress and the short pink tulle veil that sort of stood out over her face, and the nosegay of sweetheart roses and her new Break-of-Day Pancake, her, well, bumps had hardly showed at all. Everyone said that she had been a beautiful bride.

  Our side, now. Well, if she did say so, Clara and Agnes had been pictures, simply pictures, in French-blue taffeta, with pink shepherdess hats and crooks, and slippers and gloves to match, and Uncle Harold clear from Tacoma to give her away. Mama had been simply wonderful. Mrs. Leonard Funk requests the honor of your presence at the marriage of her daughter. . .

  It had been so strange and romantic and sort of, well, sacred standing under the big pink crepe-paper bell in the bay window with Earle, and Dr. Jubb saying, “Do you, Doris Dawn . . .” with the shades all down and simply masses of gladioli, and no lights except the pink tapers in Mrs. Wilmerding’s Sheffield candelabra.

  Earle had left his glasses off for the Ceremony, and he had looked so sort of refined and well, spiritual, in the flickering pink flare of the candles, that Dawn had felt for an instant that she was marrying a stranger. He didn’t look refined or spiritual now with his glasses off, though; he just looked sort of funny and undressed.