The Electric Hotel: A Novel

by Dominic Smith

  Her life was already slipping into past tense.

  —Okay, Dot, I will. And please call me Sabine.

  —I would shake your hand but the doctor forbids it.

  Sabine nodded, leaned back in her chair, and removed her gloves, wanting to offer something up to Dorothy. She could feel the heat radiating off her skin.

  —You’re French, the widow said.

  —Guilty.

  —I have an ear for accents.

  —Did you ever travel to Europe?

  —James kept our travels strictly domestic, always by train, since he owned a railway. He didn’t like the sea. I adored it, on the other hand. I grew up in Maine, clamming in the wet sand at low tide …

  —Sounds wonderful. I grew up in the countryside. I didn’t see the ocean until the first time I traveled to England.

  * * *

  A violin solo seared the space above the gramophone. Dorothy rubbed a fingertip along the edge of her novel spine.

  —I was expecting students. Callow brings them in here sometimes, these butter-faced Bostonians who study the disease. Do you know the sort of boy who likes to take apart watches, or remove fly wings, and has his hair parted perfectly down the middle? Yes, I see you nodding, that’s them. Some of them become doctors and they want to open up your lungs like a grandfather clock.

  She adjusted herself against the inverted V of pillows behind her back.

  —I’ve been reading a lot of Conan Doyle lately and I’ll try out some induction, with your permission. Are you ready?

  Sabine nodded. The widow’s eyes were glinting and febrile in the quaking aspen-light.

  —From the shoes and the dress, and from the unmarried hand, I’m going to say that you’re a baroness from Europe. There’s privilege in your bearing, but also an affinity with ordinary people. You’ve seen poverty. Perhaps you’ve done charity work, visited almshouses and the like. You took your gloves off, for example, to set me at ease and suggest you’re not afraid of catching the disease. Perhaps you lost someone very dear to consumption and you never had a chance to say a proper goodbye. Is any of this close? Was there a mother who died from the disease?

  —You got the unmarried part correct. I was once married. But my mother did not have the disease. She took her own life when I was young.

  Sabine said it to pave the way for Dorothy’s own intimacies. But apparently Dorothy either didn’t hear it or had no interest in staring into the well of Sabine’s own losses. Because the widow, her cheeks like the luminous insides of an oyster shell, looked down at the book in her lap and changed the subject.

  —Why do you suppose Sherlock Holmes calls it deduction when it’s mostly induction? That bothers me in every single one of these novels.

  Was she superficial and trite, skimming the pond of their conversation with erratic questions and segues but unwilling to talk about what lurked beneath? Had she glimpsed her own underground river?

  —I haven’t read them, Sabine said.

  —They’re a good way to pass the time. Death by induction.

  * * *

  They sat through a leafy silence.

  —If not a baroness, then who?

  —I’m an actress. In pictures and on the stage. We came here because I wanted to meet you.

  —And why is that?

  Sabine took a long moment before answering. It was possible the woman would send her away if she knew the truth about the film. Then again, Dorothy was full of surprises. Sabine had been expecting a woman ravaged by the disease and instead found a woman who looked like she was burning with translucent good health, who might sit for eighteen hours a day reading the world’s detective novels, listening to its boisterously sad symphonies, and writing restrained letters of farewell to distant relatives and lapsed friends. Her preparations for death looked nothing like Sabine had imagined.

  —We’re making a motion picture about you. Not you, exactly, but about your circumstance. I’m going to play a consumptive widow who seduces her hotel guests. I wanted to meet you so I could understand it better.

  Sabine picked at one deerskin glove on the seat beside her while she gauged Dorothy’s reaction. The widow blinked, considered.

  —When you say it?

  —Your life, said Sabine.

  —And my death, I presume? Or at least my dying …

  —Yes.

  —I see. So you can steal a few choice details. Maybe the way I hold a book or what I do with my hands?

  —Perhaps.

  Sabine didn’t know where to look. She settled on Dorothy’s hands.

  * * *

  The gramophone guttered out and Sabine welcomed the chance to get up and tend to it. She stood at the gramophone and lifted the needle. Another recording? The widow shook her head, leaned back in her Adirondack, mulled things over. She made a distant, wheezing sound, as if the whole room were pressing down on her chest. Her face suddenly turned bright red and her eyes narrowed, then closed. The coughing fit was eerily quiet—a silent reel of exasperation. When she recovered, she took a sip of brown liquid in a glass beside her and brought a hand to her chest.

  —In the picture you’re making, whom do I seduce?

  —Practically every man, married or not, above the age of sixteen.

  Dorothy nodded, agreeing with this plotline.

  —As it happens, I only ever slept with James on this earthly planet, and he used to leave his false teeth in a glass by the bed. I’d have to face the other way or make sure there was total darkness. A monster of the deep, those teeth, living in an ocean the size of a water tumbler. Can you imagine such a thing?

  Sabine laughed and felt certain that it was impossible to shock this brazen woman.

  —Sadly, I can imagine it.

  * * *

  Sabine took out her notebook.

  —Do you mind if I ask you some questions, Dot? Some of them might be rather intimate.

  Dorothy took another sip of her brown drink.

  —Proceed.

  —Let’s begin with fears. Can you tell me what you are afraid of?

  —Right this instant?

  —Ever. In general.

  —Let’s see … that my children will be unloved. Of dying and not knowing it. That nothing I did in my life mattered one iota. I’m afraid of cheese that’s been left out. And boredom and running out of things to read. Also, snails. Snail and slug poison was one thing I never ran out of at the big house in Albany.

  —What do you dream about?

  —My children mostly. Sometimes I see myself on a train at night, through the window, and I’m traveling through the desert.

  —Where are you going?

  —Mexico, I think.

  Sabine wrote it down.

  —Cravings?

  —Sauerkraut. Almonds. Tinned peaches.

  —Do you ever want to use foul language?

  Dorothy puckered her mouth and squinted.

  —How foul?

  —Utter filth.

  Now she was nodding matter-of-factly.

  —Oh yes, like a whore of Babylon. I want to yell terrible obscenities so loud that the virgin nurse downstairs runs outside crying into her bonnet. I called her a louse once and blamed it on the fevers. At that moment, though, I felt as cool as a cucumber. I’m conniving when I want to be …

  * * *

  Sabine wrote it all down, enjoying this woman’s brio immensely. She looked up at Dorothy, who was flushed again in the face, and tried to feel into those twin chasms of the body and the mind. Where exactly was a person’s essence located? In Paris, watching melancholic barmaids and shopkeepers ply their trades and burnish their personalities, she was able to probe a person’s insides by letting her mind drift and settle over them. With her attention suspended just above their heads, she absorbed them, a gathering cloud drawing up moisture from the ocean of the self. André Antoine and Pavel insisted that every person had their own atmosphere, that they carried it around with them like a personal weather front—a pair of shoes
badly worn at the heel, a flinching, self-deprecating smile, a smell of fried onions about the frayed collar—and that these details told the story of what was burning inside. The tumult, the need, the want.

  * * *

  Sabine watched as the widow scratched at her hands through her cotton gloves.

  —Your palms itch?

  —Constantly.

  —Give them a scratch. I won’t tell.

  Dorothy let her book drop to the floor, removed her gloves quickly, and raked at her palms for a few seconds. Her eyes fluttered with satisfaction. She flexed her fingers, curled them back and forth. Unlike the rest of her body, her hands were blotchy, red, and excoriated.

  —Do you wake up irritable?

  She shook her head.

  —I wake up with a burning thirst and a chill. I sleep propped up, my body like a fortress in the open air.

  She crossed her legs under the horse blanket.

  —Do you know what I think? You should make your character be avenging a curse.

  —How do you mean?

  —There’s a family curse in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The old aristocrat imprisoned a girl on the estate and a spectral hound seeks justice. Rips the old man’s throat out. What will you wear?

  Sabine smiled; Dorothy’s mind was full of turns.

  —A lot of long black gowns, I think.

  —The longer the better … You could wear anything and look radiant. I imagine you’ve been stared at your whole life. It must get tedious, all that ogling. Being plain is far better.

  * * *

  Dorothy glanced out the windows into the treetops. Sabine saw that there was something sorrowful and enormous pushing at the skein of her thoughts.

  —Why didn’t anyone take in your children back in Albany?

  The widow came back to the breezy room with a resigned sigh.

  —James employed hundreds of men on the railways. If they went out on strike for better wages or conditions, he made sure they were fired. He hired Germans and Bohemians and Irishmen to fill in any shortfalls. They hated him down there. He built a mansion outside of town with a stone wall all the way around it. I always felt like we were living behind a moat. After James died and I got sick, our children were untouchable. It was like they had the plague in medieval Europe, like they were living out the family curse. If they never go back to Albany it will be too soon.

  —Where are they now?

  Sabine saw an image of the two waifs wandering through the hotel in the photoplay. She felt suddenly and hopelessly bereft.

  —They’re out in Westport, with the superintendent’s sister. They visit me once a week, poor little darlings. They’ll be here tomorrow for a few hours. When I pass, they’ll go to boarding school and the sister has agreed to keep them on breaks and in the summers. Leo is very good with mathematics and Cora is a natural scholar in the humanities. I always read to her when she was small. Little Women and Dickens.

  —You have no relatives who can take them in?

  —On both sides, they want the dead tycoon’s money but not his children. I’d rather a kind stranger look after them, to be perfectly honest.

  Sabine tried to name the emotion on Dorothy’s face but it eluded her.

  —Oh God, it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.

  Dorothy blinked and folded her arms.

  —Callow says I’m not allowed to cry. It’s bad for my lungs.

  —I won’t tell. Go ahead. I won’t be far behind you.

  * * *

  The widow was already sobbing quietly, her eyes closed, her mouth faintly trembling. Sabine let Dorothy’s unnamable loss burrow inside her and coil in with her own burdens and regrets. There was the shame at what her husband had done to the town, the fear of abandoning her children to an unknown fate, but there was also a pure white rage. The word avenging kept coming to mind. Why had she suggested a family curse? They cried together—quietly so the nurse wouldn’t ascend the stairs to scold them. Dorothy dabbed at her eyes with a clean handkerchief and Sabine wiped her tears away with the back of one hand. The room emptied out like an exhalation.

  * * *

  Sabine reached out and touched the back of Dorothy’s hand—it was on fire. Dorothy looked up at her.

  —And what are you afraid of, Sabine Montrose?

  —Oh, just about everything. Mediocrity, stupidity, ugliness, of never loving anyone with my whole heart. Loneliness. Stagnation. Standing water. Stray dogs and being murdered in my sleep. Of being forgotten or hated or ignored. Of being loved too much and being suffocated. I have dreams where I can’t breathe.

  Sabine slowly put her gloves back on, cinching them one finger at a time. She let the silence regather.

  —What is the secret you’re hoping to die with, Dorothy? I have no right to ask, but will you tell me?

  Eyes on the shimmering tree crowns, Dorothy Harlow said:

  —That I never loved him and that this is my punishment for it. The children always sensed it, that they were growing up in a household without love. This was our family curse, so to speak, the hound that wanted to rip our throats out. So, here it comes with the comet, the wrath from above … all that cyanide gas is coming just for me …

  She adjusted her head, rubbed the side of her neck, closed her eyes. Sabine could feel the heat coming off her from a few feet away.

  —Will you stay and meet Leo and Cora tomorrow when they come? It would mean the world to me.

  —Of course, Dot. I’d be honored.

  * * *

  When Claude confessed that he’d brought a compact motion picture camera, Sabine insisted that he accompany her the next morning. In the footage of the widow visiting with her children, Sabine could be seen watching from a wicker chair, a tender expression on her face. Claude kept the camera in the corner of the sun porch while Dorothy read Conan Doyle aloud. The girl, her long blond hair in bows, sat on the edge of the recliner, her hand on her mother’s moccasin, one finger curled against the sheepskin lip. The boy was more standoffish in his loosened tie and scuffed leather shoes, a book of puzzles in his lap and a pencil in one hand. He listened and nodded, but his attention was clearly on a mathematical or linguistic clue. The wind shook the trees outside, rippling the walls with delicate shadows that resembled shifting tea leaves.

  * * *

  Sabine studied the children’s faces, jotting observations in her notebook. While he filmed, Claude watched the movements of her fountain pen, the pensive loops and slow-to-form punctuation, and wondered what kindness or insight she had reserved for these strangers. Dorothy Harlow enunciated bravely through a dramatic passage of the novel, and her son’s attention was finally drawn into the story. The boy put the tip of his pencil to his lips and waited for the hound or the curse to present itself. But Dorothy delivered a cliffhanger, snapping the book shut with relish, and both her children erupted into protest. The daughter pressed her hands together and the boy said something angrily. The mother smiled benevolently but held her ground.

  * * *

  Later, when they watched the footage back in New Jersey, Sabine suggested that perhaps this was her way of delaying her own storyline, of ignoring the gas plumes and comets outside her window. They watched the part where Sabine said something encouraging to the children and touched the back of Leo’s head, who softened under her hand. Then there was a moment when Sabine lifted her chin and turned directly to the camera, stared into the hooded lens, and raised one hand to her throat, as if to stifle a cough. Look, she said, watching it unspool with Claude, you filmed the exact moment I dropped into Dorothy’s heart and mind.

  12

  Filming Begins

  Every role is a seduction and this one was consummated with a homeopathic dose of Tuberculinum. For a week, Sabine had been studying the footage of Dorothy with her children and immersing herself in the photoplay, which had been revised to make the dead husband a begrudged railway tycoon. She paced through the cottage, reading aloud the dialogue title cards that moviegoers wo
uld never hear. She experimented with vocal gestures, vowels, and registers, with the sound of her voice trailing off into silence. Then, at Pavel’s insistence, she took the remedy two days before production began—a small white pill that tasted of sugar.

  * * *

  In the cottage, she opened a bottle of burgundy, reclined on the divan with the photoplay, and began to experience what Pavel called proving the remedy. Her lungs felt heavy and constricted, her neck ached, and the sitting room had somehow become a furnace. She was convinced that she would burn up, so she rushed through the house, flinging open the curtains and windows and tearing off her clothes. In nothing but her gauzy underwear, she lay down on the cool tile of the kitchen floor, only to find that she was insatiably hungry. She raided the icebox, ate two cold chicken sandwiches over the sink, and repaired to the sitting room, feeling a little feverish. On the divan, she fell asleep and passed quickly into unsettled dreams.

  * * *

  A night train roared through the desert, Leo and Cora pressed at a glimmering windowpane, and her own mother sat eating a meal of coq au vin in the brassy, surgical light of the dining car. Sabine could somehow see into all the train cars at once. Blue finches were swooping in and out of the open windows as the train bawled along, and she saw a single white lily in a vase on her mother’s railcar dinner table. Meanwhile, her thirteen-year-old self sat singing and crying in an adjacent compartment, in braids and a school uniform, a suitcase neatly laid across her lap. When she woke, it was to a feeling of immense sadness and bafflement. Where was the train headed? And why was her mother eating coq au vin in the dining car?

  * * *

  Then a memory bloomed: Sabine coming home from school to find her mother preparing a lavish dinner, as if it were her wedding anniversary. In her best frock, Eliza Montrose sets the dining room table while the coq au vin simmers, tells the story of killing the old barnyard rooster whose crowing days were well behind him. A cup of his blood for thickening agent, the feet and kidneys and coxcomb thrown in for good measure, she recounts her grandmother’s recipe like an incantation. It was, Sabine now realized, a tribute to the ancestors before joining them. Eliza persuades her husband to go get some extra Beaujolais from the cellar, the vintage he’s been squirreling away for a future wedding or christening, and then they all sit and eat. Eliza insists they each tell stories and share memories. She’s recently been in the hospital for a month, and now, she tells them, everything will be better. But what is the special occasion, maman? Sabine asks. At this, Eliza looks at her daughter calmly and blinks back the slightest suggestion of a tear. Quietly, quietly, she says, How does it taste?