The Electric Hotel: A Novel

by Dominic Smith

  He heard his own breath catch halfway up his throat.

  —I remember your face in the mirror, she said. You looked like you’d seen a ghost. Or perhaps you saw yourself for the first time …

  He was surprised she remembered that moment.

  —You have always been like a ghost to me.

  She put the tea bowls back onto the lacquered tray one by one. She carried them into the kitchen and he followed her.

  —Let me smooth things over with Hal. But keep the Russian away from him.

  She stared into the kitchen sink.

  —I want to plunge into this woman’s suffering. To soak in her life and ruin … it will make all the difference.

  —Give me the details for the sanitarium and I’ll see if we can arrange a visit.

  —Thank you, Claude.

  * * *

  She walked across the floor to kiss his cheek, but found herself staring into his unflinching eyes. He had traveled a long way from that night in the hotel, with his Rhiny accent and his shabby top hat and the reel of his dying sister. She kissed him gently on the mouth, not out of love or lust, but as a kind of remembrance, almost as a farewell to the boy who’d resembled a provincial undertaker and who they’d both killed off in the lens of the mirror. She went back into the living room before she could regret the kiss or see that lovelorn mania washing over his face. Claude watched her walk away, the kiss peeling back the old, formidable ache.

  * * *

  A moment later, Pavel came to the front door, pointing down toward the cliffs.

  —Lester Summers has just anchored his yacht down in the river at Edgewater. I thought you might like to go down to meet him.

  Sabine stood in the doorway, hands on hips.

  —I think I’ll wait until he makes it up here with the rest of us. I’ve never met a yachtsman I didn’t like better on dry land.

  11

  The Widow

  Dorothy Harlow was living out the remainder of her days in a tuberculosis sanitarium near Saranac Lake. When Claude telephoned the sanitarium superintendent with whom Sabine had corresponded, a Dr. Ira Callow, he discovered that Sabine had never made it clear that she was researching a film role. Fumbling for a reasonable explanation, he said they were making a medical teaching film and wanted to interview Dorothy Harlow about her disease. The doctor said that normally a patient at her stage of the illness wasn’t allowed company outside of immediate family, so Claude hinted at the possibility of a rather large donation to the sanitarium, an amount he hoped would get Sabine’s attention, since the upstate expedition would certainly come out of her fee for the film. The doctor said that an exception could be made.

  —The truth is, the doctor said, Dot will be lucky to see June. You must promise, though, that you won’t make her laugh. That is one of the worst things for a pair of consumptive lungs.

  Claude assured the doctor that there would be very little risk of laughter.

  * * *

  On the train ride north, Sabine slept much of the way, leaving Pavel to hum and reminisce while staring out at the passing hamlets and townships. Claude, who’d come along to ensure they’d be back in time for rehearsals, brought along the photoplay with Pavel’s scrawl in the margins, doing his best to make reasonable—and readable—notes for Nash Sully. He would be tasked with integrating the separate columns of handwriting into a typewritten master shooting script.

  * * *

  Somewhere outside Saratoga Springs, Pavel floated a monologue about Chekhov’s death from consumption, his deathbed vigil in the Black Forest, where he took a shot of camphor and a glass of champagne before turning in for the night one last time.

  —You were there? Claude asked, looking up irritably from the photoplay.

  Pavel didn’t answer but turned from the whirring landscape to Claude.

  —They sent his body back to Moscow in a refrigerated railway carriage designed for transporting oysters.

  He looked back at the scrolling scenery.

  —Anton deserved something a little more elevated than a shellfish locomotive …

  Claude looked at Pavel’s avian profile as he stared out at the rushing foliage, the hawkish, downturned nose and the hooded, imperious eyes. Sabine slept with her head slumped against his cashmere shoulder. Her Baltic big brother and philosophizing protector, Claude thought, even though he’s a decade younger. Had Sabine ever associated with anyone her own age?

  —After my sister died in a Paris hospital room, they wheeled her to the morgue on something resembling a wooden luggage cart. I collected her ashes the next morning in a shoebox. Famous or not, no one deserves the end they get …

  Sabine woke for a beat, smiled blearily at Claude from the outskirts of a dream, then closed her eyes again.

  * * *

  The sanitarium motorcar waited for them at the station in Westport—not an ambulance, exactly, but somber, official, and vaguely funereal, with Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium painted austerely on the side. The driver was a tall, pale man in a wool cap—a recovered consumptive, he proudly announced—who loaded their bags and drove them quietly into the district of conifers and lakes.

  * * *

  An hour later, they motored down a long winding road that followed the bank of a river. They passed through the front iron gates right before dusk, when the sky was turning a smoky gold and the undergrowth among the beeches and aspens was beginning to choke with violet shadow. In the falling light, they came upon a small settlement of wooden cottages with glassed-in porches and an illuminated cobblestone church at the head of a macadam roadway.

  * * *

  This place reminded Claude of the remote Alsatian villages his father took him to explore when he was a young boy—a single row of pristine houses at the end of a daylong trek, rooms burnished by alpenglow under wide-gabled roofs, an atmosphere of eerie mountain quietude. They would spend the night in the hushed dormered rooms of an inn, barely talking over a dinner of knackwurst and braised red cabbage, then hike back down to the valley floor the next morning. His father picked and pressed wildflowers along the way and always emerged fortified by these hikes into the mountains, by the polite but distant service of the innkeeper and his wife, by the ribbons of cold alpine sunlight that streamed between summits. These people live up here where no one bothers them, his father would say. But Claude remembered the villages as aloof and secretive, and he sensed the same condition here. An old woman’s face appeared beside a curtain, a world of pale lamplight behind her head.

  * * *

  The driver parked the motorcar outside the infirmary and directed them to the superintendent’s cottage, where they would spend the night. He told them to keep their voices down, since most of the residents were retiring for the night or taking their supper in the refectory. They carried their suitcases along a paved walkway lined with trees and ornamental shrubs, up toward the church.

  * * *

  Because it was almost May the cooling night air carried an edge of pinesap and moss. That smell always made Claude nostalgic for short winter nights of wood smoke and storytelling, for that brief window of his childhood when he could remember his mother’s buoyant domestic presence in the house. She lit lamps, kindled fires, left out plates of strudel, told stories of her querulous Austrian grandparents. She rarely spoke German, except when a place name or recipe or folk-song lyric demanded the correct pronunciation.

  * * *

  They headed toward a building that resembled a chalet, its windows low and streaked with twilight under the eaves. It was Sabine who first noticed the few dozen patients sitting in the refectory at long tables with their meals. They were all dressed for an avant-garde theater director’s idea of alpine convalescence—the men shuffling along in leather leggings and sheepskin moccasins and cable-knit cardigans, one elderly gentleman in a chamois vest and kidskin gloves, a handful of women in knitted shawls and jodhpurs. Sabine stepped into a flowerbed to take a closer look, hooding her view through the window.

  �
��Oh, look, aren’t these people fabulous in their felt footwear? It appears they are eating plates of sliced cold meat and drinking enormous glasses of milk. Can we go in?

  —We mustn’t intrude. The superintendent is expecting us, said Claude.

  * * *

  Sabine straggled behind as they continued up the pathway to the superintendent’s cottage. When Claude knocked, a sallow-faced woman in a dirndl appeared and introduced herself as Miriam Callow, the doctor’s wife. The superintendent was doing his evening rounds and wouldn’t return for some time. Miriam said she would prepare them some sandwiches and tea in the kitchen. She looked at Sabine, whose hair was unruly from the day’s travel, then at the Russian in his moccasins and cashmere shawl. It occurred to Claude that Pavel had been dressing for a sanitarium all these years.

  * * *

  Sabine was shown to a large room with a double bed upstairs while Pavel and Claude were directed to the basement, to a small room with twin beds. Claude unpacked a few things from his suitcase while Pavel, facing east, did some stretching and breathing exercises at the foot of his bed. Claude was careful not to show Pavel that he’d brought along a compact camera in his luggage in case the circumstances allowed for the filming of the widow.

  * * *

  About halfway through their second cup of tea in the kitchen, Dr. Callow came into the house with a small Pekingese dog following after him. Apart from his white coat, he seemed to be the only sanitarium resident wearing civilian clothes—a tartan tie and tweed jacket, a pair of oxfords instead of something fashioned from felt or fur. He kissed his wife on the cheek, shook hands with everyone else, and took a cup of tea to the head of the kitchen table.

  * * *

  It wasn’t clear why they weren’t being hosted in the parlor; perhaps film people were the sort you made sandwiches for in the kitchen. The doctor made several nervous visual sorties over to Sabine, whose midlife continental beauty and elegance were conspicuous, even after a day of travel and in the jaundiced affections of a single Edison bulb overhead. They chatted about the train journey and the invigorating lake air. Then the doctor gave them a brief synopsis of the sanitarium’s mission, about his days spent conducting experiments inoculating guinea pigs and rabbits and studying infected sputum under a microscope.

  —Robert Louis Stevenson visited, you know, very early on … we have his complete works, signed and dedicated, over in the library. Dewey decimal is the system of choice over there, for all two thousand volumes. You’ll find we run things like clockwork at the sanitarium. Convalescence is nothing but ordered restraint …

  * * *

  A few minutes before nine-thirty, Dr. Callow asked them all to come out onto the glassed-in porch to watch the observance of lights-out. They stood behind the louvered glass walls of the porch while the lights of the sanitarium went out, one by one, until the northern stars were the brightest things they could see. Even the lights behind the stained-glass windows of the church were snuffed. The cure lives by a schedule, Dr. Callow said, heading back into the hallway.

  * * *

  They stood at the foot of the stairs, saying good night.

  —We’ll have to invite you back to show a film sometime. Medical and educational films would be of great interest to our residents, I believe. We have lawyers, teachers, housewives, every sort.

  —You should know that some of our motion pictures might excite a patient’s breathing, said Sabine.

  Claude had told Sabine about their medical-film cover story and he hoped she remembered.

  —Quite right, yes, Dr. Callow said, we would have to choose carefully. Nothing with breaching ships or vertiginous heights! Very well, good night, all. Dorothy Harlow is expecting you to visit at nine in the morning. Oh, Mr. Ballard, there is the one matter we discussed on the telephone …

  As the doctor crouched down to rub the Pekingese’s rump, Claude realized the superintendent was prospecting for his donation.

  —Of course. I will leave it on the kitchen table for you in an envelope.

  The doctor and his wife disappeared upstairs. The others returned to the kitchen and their cups of tea.

  —As a matter of interest, how much is my donation?

  Claude knew he would enjoy the sound of the number.

  —Enough to sting.

  —The amount, please.

  —One thousand dollars.

  Pavel slurped his tea as he wrote in a notebook. Sabine stood and pushed in her chair.

  —That does sting. And for that kind of money, I can surely dictate the terms of the visit. I’d like to meet with the widow alone tomorrow morning.

  —As you wish, Pavel said. This is for your art.

  Claude thought about the camera in his suitcase, about the value of capturing the widow on film. But something stopped him from calling after Sabine as she walked for the stairs. It was the thought of Odette’s death endlessly looping for fickle audiences in Paris, New York, Sydney, and Brooklyn, for bored office workers with a few coins in their pockets. She’d died a thousand times for these strangers.

  * * *

  Unlike the other consumptives confined to absolute rest, Dorothy Harlow had been given an entire Queen Anne cottage for the final phase of her illness. She had bequeathed a large sum of money to the sanitarium, and in return they named the cottage where she was staying Harlow House. While the rest of the dying lay in the infirmary, in sun-scrubbed rooms separated by Dutch doors, Dorothy spent her time out on her private sun porch in an Adirondack recliner, playing solitaire and reading novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Occasionally she listened to a piece of classical music on a gramophone recording.

  * * *

  Sabine gathered all this information on her way over to the cottage, with the doctor at her side and the fussy little dog trotting a few feet behind. She asked about the risk of infection, and Callow assured her that every precaution was taken, from daily wet mopping to constant airflow to patients coughing into disposable handkerchiefs. Sabine had brought along a notebook and pencil and she jotted down something about the widow’s white linen handkerchief, how it should be monogrammed with her dead husband’s initials and become symbolic over the course of the film.

  —The bacillus loves close quarters and we do our best to blast it with sunlight and air.

  They rounded a corner and he gestured to the front steps of the cottage.

  —She’s all the way at the top, out on the porch. Just follow the music. There’s a nurse on duty, but she won’t bother you.

  * * *

  Sabine climbed the porch stairs and went inside the Queen Anne cottage. The rooms were sparse and airy—polished wooden floors with Amish rugs and sturdy walnut furniture, all the windows open, the gauzy curtains billowing gently. It smelled of linseed oil. A uniformed nurse in a bonnet sat completing some paperwork behind a small desk at the foot of the stairs. They exchanged polite nods. Mrs. Harlow is expecting you, said the nurse. Sabine thanked her and started up the stairs, careful not to touch the handrail; no matter what the good doctor and the latest science said, she suspected bacilli grew like a fungus along every surface of the house. She was glad she’d brought along her deerskin gloves and intended to keep them on for the duration of the visit. Somewhere near the top of the stairs she heard classical music—brooding and Germanic—coming from the sun porch. It was not the sort of music she could imagine slipping from the world to.

  * * *

  Through a set of French doors, she glimpsed the widow in profile, reclined in her Adirondack, her feet up, wrapped in a horse blanket and reading with a pair of white cotton gloves on her hands. One moccasin wagged slowly and arrhythmically to the music, almost as an afterthought. Sabine gently opened the French doors and saw that the sun porch was up in the treetops, submerged in a bowl of aspens and elms. I hope I’m not disturbing you, she said, coming in. My name is Sabine Montrose. The widow couldn’t easily turn her head to see Sabine enter, but she gestured to the wicker chair opposite.

  * * *
>
  Sabine studied the widow’s face for a moment in the dappling light of the tree crowns. Her skin was oddly luminous and smooth, like a piece of sea glass. There was a fringe of thinning, gray hair, but she couldn’t have been more than forty with two children under the age of eleven. Her china-bone complexion had somehow made her ageless in the days or weeks before dying. Dorothy looked at Sabine over the rim of her reading glasses.

  —When the comet passes we’re going to move into a cloud of cyanide gas. The whole planet, you understand, could suffocate. Are you a doomsdayer?

  —I tend to see the tragedy in things. Cyanide gas, for instance, wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

  Dorothy’s face brightened, as if she’d at last found a sparring partner for her fevered bouts. She folded up her eyeglasses and set them on a side table that was spread with a half-finished game of solitaire. Then she closed her novel and set it in her lap—The Hound of the Baskervilles. Her expression changed.

  —I’ll be gone by then. But Leo and Cora …

  She broke off, looked down at her gloved hands.

  —Do you enjoy reading mystery stories, Mrs. Harlow?

  —I do, said Dorothy. They keep me amused. Sherlock Holmes can infer a lot from very little. I like that in a man. The slow and plodding ones can all burn in hell, if you really want my opinion.

  Sabine flashed her a smile.

  —I couldn’t agree more.

  —You should call me Dorothy. Or Dot. They always called me that.