History of a Pleasure Seeker

by Richard Mason

  When the Commandments were over, he turned to the psalm with relief, but its first verse was disquietingly relevant: “Truly God is good to the upright, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had stumbled, my steps had well nigh slipped.” He felt watched and the reading from the Book of Job did little to ease his discomfort: “Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night which said, ‘There is a man-child conceived.’ ”

  By the time Piet Barol had finished the service, he felt more thoroughly chastised than he ever had in his life and his conscience stung with the knowledge that he deserved it. The sensation was extremely unpleasant. It meant, however, that his apology when it came was heartfelt. “I had no right to take you outside, Egbert,” he said meekly. “Perhaps I deserve to lose my place. I certainly will if you don’t forgive me.” He took the boy’s cold hand. “Please let me help you and make amends.”

  Egbert had spent the day planning the banishment of Piet Barol. He had imagined Piet packing his possessions, carrying his suitcase down the stairs, returning to the hovel from which he had come. Egbert had the invalid child’s authority over his parents and knew he could have his tutor dismissed if he chose.

  He had expected an apology and said nothing when it was made, because the prospect of punishing Piet was deeply soothing. But towards evening, as his temper subsided, so did the protection it provided against his wounded pride. He sat in his room, staring at the wall as though chained to it. Slowly a newer feeling began to twist through the ropes that bound him. Perhaps what Piet had done had been good for him. He had been outside now and proved empty the threats of the Shadowers.

  His mother brought him his supper and was surprised by the mood she found him in. She had spent the afternoon feeling treacherous for not dismissing Piet Barol at once and was pleased to see her son looking so much better. Her heart was easier when she left him; and when Maarten said “I suppose I should go up and see him,” she advised him to leave it a day and called Constance to the drawing room to tell them amusing stories.

  Eight hours after saying his prayers with Piet, Egbert did something defiant. He took a warm bath. He had not had one since he was eight years old and the experience was wonderful. He had grown used to fearing water. To take pleasure from it was transformative. He lay in the bath until his fingers shriveled, and when it cooled he added more hot water. The well-being this inspired made him admit that none of his other tutors would have dared to do what Piet had done: they had all been too scared of him. Very gradually, he started to be glad that he had not brought about Mr. Barol’s removal from the house; and when he got out of the bath he was shivering—not with cold, but with the audacity of the idea that had come to him.

  Perhaps Piet Barol could save him.

  Egbert Vermeulen-Sickerts wished desperately to be free of his family’s claustrophobic, demanding house, from which he glimpsed nothing of the outside world beyond what his sisters told him of their impossibly brilliant lives. As he dried, he examined every inch of his body and found no trace of injury. This confirmed the creeping realization that the Shadowers were powerless without him to do their bidding. He went to bed and said his prayers but did not sleep. Tantalizing possibilities were shining in his head. For three hours he gathered his courage, then as the entrance hall clock chimed midnight he asked his masters for permission to tell Piet everything.

  The very suggestion provoked a menacing chatter in the shadows of the room, in the shards of white light sent through the chink in the curtains by the moon. But Egbert bargained with a new confidence and insisted with a metal inherited from his father. By dawn a deal had been reached: Piet Barol could be brought into the secret, but only if he passed the Test of the Entrance Hall Floor.

  Three weeks later, Maarten and Jacobina left for England to join the Lusitania on her maiden voyage to New York, seen off from the quayside at Liverpool by 200,000 sightseers. September had already begun. If the hotel was to open as planned on the first day of October, Maarten knew he would have to see to its completion himself. Mr. Dermont had proved ominously hard to reach by telephone or cable. The only information easily available was that contained in the decorator’s bills, which had reached new heights of absurdity. In the six weeks since Maarten’s departure from America, two hundred further gold-plated taps had been ordered, eighteen hundred gilt-edged plates (for which no discount had been sought or achieved!). And although the Knickerbocker Trust Company had agreed to extend his credit by $150,000, this was far from sufficient.

  Three days before he sailed, Maarten had sent thirty of Piet’s drawings to a Zurich dealer whose discretion was total. He did not intend to sell the pieces but needed accurate valuations as collateral for the loans he would be obliged to seek from his Amsterdam friends.

  Father and son parted stiffly, each daunted by crises they did not confide. When the servants had dispersed, Egbert followed Piet into the dining room and said, “I will answer your question, Mr. Barol, about the music. But only if you pass a test. Please select a number between one hundred and twelve hundred.”

  It was the first time Egbert had initiated a conversation since the episode on the cobblestones. Piet was relieved. “One hundred and seventy-eight.”

  The boy looked pleased. He considered any choice beneath two hundred achievable for a novice. “You mustn’t ask me anything. I can only explain if you succeed. It is important you step on the tiles in the order I give you and don’t make a mistake, or you shall have to start again from the beginning.”

  “I’m ready for you.”

  “Start with white, please.”

  The tiles on the entrance hall floor were small and Piet Barol’s feet were large. As Egbert called the colors he stepped from one to the next, smiling at first at this childish game but then finding, as the boy’s tempo increased, that it was harder than he thought to obey him accurately. Piet’s forty-first step grazed the tile beside the one he had aimed for. “Begin again,” Egbert commanded. “You may only start six more times.”

  “Otherwise what?”

  “Otherwise you shall never know the secret.”

  There was such calm certainty in the boy’s voice that Piet understood his future rested on his ability to hop from one foot to another, in a precise yet mysterious order, on the instructions of a child. It was absurd but he did not intend to fail. He tried harder, and the better he did the faster Egbert went—because the Shadowers were driving him on, willing Piet to stumble. He did, and was obliged to begin once more. Now he was sweating and wished he could remove his jacket; but any lapse in concentration led to error.

  Piet made five mistakes, but on his sixth attempt he reached the 177th tile, a white one, and balanced on it at some distance from the schoolroom door.

  “Now I’ll come to you.” Egbert too began to hop. The neatness of his footwork was impressive. He reached Piet and went five tiles farther on. “You need to step on black one more time and then immediately into the room. Aim for that one there.”

  The tile the boy indicated was a foot away from the door but a stride and a half from where Piet was. Egbert stretched towards him. “Lean on me and jump! You’ll make it.”

  Maarten had looked forward to spending two months alone with his wife in New York. He felt sure Jacobina would know how to handle Lionel Dermont and her presence would certainly enliven the meals he was obliged to consume with his associates. But his hopes of a rejuvenating, contented voyage foundered on the second day out. Complaining that the vibrations of the engines made her ill, Jacobina took to her cabin; and in the countless ways by which couples of long-standing communicate with each other, she made it plain to her husband that he had offended her.

  Jacobina had had no contact with Piet Barol since the afternoon before the workers’ fête, and her body, accustomed to regular pleasure, did not take kindly to the abstinence imposed on it by Maarten. She had imagined that they would have a suite as usual and had relied on the refuge of a private sitting room. To be cooped up instead
in a small compartment with a man who showed no inclination to touch her was maddening. It inspired an uncharacteristic small-mindedness, whose chief victim was Agneta Hemels—who found that there was no way she could dress her mistress’s hair satisfactorily or press her clothes to the standard required.

  Maarten knew his wife was a good sailor and her insistence on permanent nausea first troubled and then annoyed him. He took to spending large parts of each day in the first-class smoking room, in the company of other men who wished to complain of their wives over a whiskey and soda. This offered temporary relief but it did not make him happy. Neither did the spectacle that awaited him at the southeastern end of Central Park: a hotel in name only; in fact a chaotic and costly building site where the curtains had been hung before the cornice work was complete; where there was no hot water beyond the fourth floor and no functioning kitchen in which to train the brigades of busboys and waiters whom Mr. Dermont had already engaged and was now paying to loiter and chew gum and set practical jokes.

  One of these preceded Maarten’s arrival by minutes. On finding that a bucket of water had been balanced over the ballroom doors and had drenched the plasterer who dislodged it as well as the newly laid parquet floor, Maarten gave vent to his feelings by firing every one of the twenty laughing bystanders. This sobered even Mr. Dermont, who conducted his Dutch partner and his wife to the Hotel Metropole across the street and took the afternoon train for Philadelphia, with his 50 percent share certificate in a black pigskin bag. He had no desire to be present when the decorator presented his latest bill, particularly since he had nothing to contribute toward it. He was rather sick of the whole business and already coming to see himself as the situation’s victim—the man who had bravely shouldered the practical burden and received nothing in return but queries and suspicion and demands for money. He rehearsed this narrative so spiritedly that by the time he reached his destination he entirely believed it. This enabled him to send a brief and unapologetic cable to Maarten—“Relative unwell STOP See you Opening October 1st STOP”—without the faintest twinge of contrition.

  On receiving this communication, Maarten locked himself in the marble bathroom of his suite, ripped the telegram into tiny pieces, stamped on them, flushed them down the toilet and spat into the bowl after them. Then he prayed. It was not a happy prayer, and he opened his eyes convinced that the deity had declined to rescue him.

  He went into the salon and found his wife with the hotel’s manicurist. The bill presented by this lady depressed him further. He paid it and left the building and took a cup of coffee at Walker’s Café; and when he had paid for this also and left a large tip, he walked slowly toward the Plaza. It is dangerous for a man to peer too closely at the workings of God, he told himself, and took courage from the optimistic blue of the sky.

  Above him loomed the vast façade he had called into being. For the first time he saw something marvelous in it and not merely monumental. It was a building that might survive a hundred years and it made him remember what his father had taught him: that there is nobility in anything that endures.

  By the time he reached it, he felt better, and before its elaborate doors he made a solemn vow: that he would not let these Americans break him.

  The day Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts fired the Plaza’s decorator, the head of construction, the chief plumber, and a further fifteen, mischief-filled bellboys, Egbert honored his promise to Piet Barol. At the end of the morning’s translation exercise he took from a kid purse his grandfather’s signet ring and put it on his middle finger, which was the only one thick enough to secure it. He had been given this ring at his confirmation and through injudicious experimentation had unlocked with it marvels over which he had no control. Now it frightened him, but he knew he could explain nothing without it.

  An alertness to sequence and order was deeply buried in Egbert’s nature, but the tyranny of the Shadowers had not been inevitable. He stood up and went to the piano. Piet was sketching a small table carried down from Jacobina’s sitting room and did not look up. The boy coughed self-consciously and rapped six times with the ring on the piano’s lid. “Listen,” he whispered. “You can hear them.”

  Piet raised his head and listened. The ringing strings made a sound like the small talk of ghosts. Egbert knocked again, requesting entry to an invisible universe. It seemed to Piet he caught snatches of waltzes and gavottes and the fast movements of concerti, and that these were all that remained of the people who had played them; who had once been as vigorous as he was and were now dead and forgotten.

  Quite abruptly, the young man understood that he would one day lie in the earth and be eaten by wild things. So would the child who stood before him, looking so brave. Piet had met Death early, when it snatched his mother from him; but until this moment he had felt removed from it, as though extinction awaited other people.

  “What does this whispering mean?” he asked.

  And Egbert told him.

  As his son’s demons were growing weaker, Maarten’s were threatening to overwhelm him. He kept this fact secret, especially from his wife, and to the outside world presented a façade of implacable calm that was exhausting to maintain. He dismissed the most important men Mr. Dermont had hired, engaged new builders, watched over them closely, and summoned from Lucerne the maître d’hôtel of his establishment there who took the training of the staff in hand.

  A spirit of terrified industry took hold of the site at the bottom of the Central Park, but each small triumph was succeeded by a greater disaster. Ten days before the scheduled opening a fire destroyed a third of the kitchen. Forty-eight hours later, a cistern in the maids’ bedrooms on the top floor exploded, leaving seventeen rooms uninhabitable.

  Maarten cabled to Amsterdam for money. He promised favorable terms and deposited $500,000 in the vaults of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, from which he hoped to elicit a further million dollars in credit. His own deposits were sufficient to keep the project afloat while the trust company deliberated, but he would soon need more. He kept on doggedly, determined to win; but though he spent eighteen hours of every day at work, the end of September found him facing a brutal choice: to open as planned, while there were workmen in the building, or delay the project until they had finished.

  He decided to open, against all precedent. At once the New York Stock Exchange, which had lost a quarter of its value since the commencement of his hotel, dipped further. He was alerted to this by a screeching newspaper boy, and as he read the headlines he understood that God was willing to break thousands in order to chastise him.

  He walked through the Plaza’s lobby and stood beneath the stained-glass ceiling of its Palm Court, thinking of Babylon’s fate. The light outside was fierce and cold and fairies of colored light flitted across the furniture, which smelled of new upholstery and glue. It was a splendid room, but its opulence demanded the presence of patrons with money. If these did not come in their hundreds he would be ruined.

  He sat with this thought for some time. Then he went to find his wife. She was in the sitting room of their suite at the Metropole, surrounded by boxes from which Agneta Hemels was removing shoes and cuffs and scarves and gowns, each more ravishing than the next. Finding no way to articulate her dissatisfactions, Jacobina had punished her husband by spending a provocatively large sum of money. She had bought presents for herself and the children and a painting for her aunt at Baden-Baden. As Maarten entered, Agneta was removing from tissue paper a pair of ankle boots in dark blue leather, fastened with nine pink pearls and lined in scarlet. The sight made him angry, then sad. “If you please, Miss Hemels,” he muttered, and when the maid had curtsied and left he said, “I have annoyed you on this trip, my dear.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I am sorry for it. It was not my intention to displease you.”

  “Why ever should I be displeased?”

  “I have absolutely no idea, and I cannot make amends until you tell me.”

  Jacobina put down the sap
phire choker she had taken, on approval, for Constance and looked at her husband. She was very fond of him and in the past he had been an attentive recipient of her few, pathetic secrets. It appalled her to possess a secret she could not share with him. But the recollection of Piet Barol prohibited truthfulness, and instead of saying “You never touch me,” which was what she wanted to say, she smiled and said, “I’m just anxious, darling. I want the hotel to be a success, as you deserve. I promise to be more cheerful.”

  In this way, neither husband nor wife communicated anything of substance. All Jacobina did to show Maarten she was sorry for a crime to which she would never confess was exert herself at the Plaza’s opening and ensure by the deft bestowing of an empty suite that the first name in the visitors’ register was “Vanderbilt.”

  Piet Barol did not insult Egbert Vermeulen-Sickerts by telling him that the Shadowers were not real. To the child they were very real indeed, and that was the only useful truth. He addressed him on the subject, therefore, as one general to another on the eve of a great battle.

  First he ascertained the enemies’ methods and territory. He observed Egbert crossing the entrance hall floor and inquired what the punishment was for seven missteps. When he learned of the ice-cold baths he almost cried. He saw to it that a warm one was run for Egbert every morning and evening and that at other times the cistern in his private bathroom was drained and inoperable. This innovation produced a gradual but unmistakable improvement. So did jovial admiration. When he told the boy he looked braver and stronger every day, Egbert began to feel brave and strong. It was his first encounter with these emotions and he enjoyed it wildly. He began to dare other audacities for the pleasure of recounting them to his tutor, who listened with absolute attention.

  For the first time a genuine affection blossomed between them, nourished by a sincere unity of purpose. On the seventeenth day of joint operations Egbert did not accept the first number announced to him and crossed his aunt’s entrance hall floor in 70 steps rather than 821. In celebration of this triumph Piet asked Mrs. de Leeuw to make one of her excellent apple cakes. They shared it while conducting an optimistic review of their progress.