The Seduction of Water

by Carol Goodman

  “I’ll come down later to see the rest of the gardens,” I tell Joseph.

  “And I’ll just get these into the lobby,” Aidan says, hoisting up my bags.

  I can’t help but laugh when we’ve gotten around the car and Aidan presents me with the rose. “Joseph will have your head for that. He’s the only one supposed to cut the flowers.”

  But Aidan pulls the rose away from me teasingly. “Aye, he’s already had his revenge. Look.” Aidan holds up his hand and I see a long bloody scratch on his palm. “I’d better hold this for you until you have something to put it in. Do you think he breeds them extra thorny?”

  I reach into my pocket and find a tissue, which I press into Aidan’s hand. And that’s how my aunt finds us, holding hands on the threshold of the hotel.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE BROKEN PEARL

  When my mother told me the story about the selkie who leaves her children to go back to the sea I asked her if she ever came back.

  “No, but someday the daughter will join her mother under the sea. That’s why she wove for her the wreath out of sea foam and dew and her own tears. If the daughter throws the net of tears into the sea it will turn into a path of moonlight that leads back to the land under the sea—to Tirra Glynn.”

  It wasn’t until I was older that my mother told me that the net of tears had been stolen from us. Connachar had taken it to the Palace of the Stars and as long as he kept it there was no returning to the sea. “You are old enough now to know,” she told me, “and old enough to take care of your brothers when I go. Promise me you’ll take care of your brothers.” I promised her.

  The next day my mother was gone. She slipped away like a breeze moves through a room, leaving emptiness and silence. I knew that my job now, like the selkie’s daughter in the story, was to take care of my brothers, but instead I thought of the net of tears that had been stolen from us and lay somewhere in the Palace of the Stars. So I disobeyed my mother’s last wish. I left my brothers to fend for themselves and I went as bondswoman to the Palace of the Stars.

  “There you are. I thought you missed your train.” My aunt Sophie pulls me toward her for a quick kiss, her eyeglasses clinking against my sunglasses. She turns away, pulling me into the hotel before I have a chance to really look at her, but the first impression I have is that she’s shrunk in the six months since I’ve seen her.

  “You, Barry, are you going to take Miss Greenfeder’s bags to her room or have you decided they make a nice set of planters for the lobby?”

  “Joseph said . . .”

  “Never mind what Joseph said. There’s a large party coming in by limo from the city and we’ll need all the bellhops for that.”

  Aidan shrugs and tucks my bags under his left arm. With his right hand he tugs a piece of his hair and then swings around and heads for the elevators. It takes me an instant to realize what he was doing. Tugging his forelock. The countryman’s sign of respect to his landowner, here rendered mockingly. Even sillier, he’s got the rose he picked for me sticking out of his back pocket. I struggle to keep the smile off my own face and start to follow Aidan to the elevators, but my aunt grabs me firmly by the elbows and turns me around to give me the once-over. I feel like I did when I was little and she inspected my outfit before letting me into the dining room. It gives me a chance to look at her. My aunt, like Joseph, has always seemed old to me and so I tend not to notice the signs of aging in her. Her hair has been gray since before I was born and her slightly plump face has held up remarkably well to wrinkles. In fact, she’s one of those women who has only looked better as she ages. If she hadn’t so convinced herself she was unlovely in her youth—she always felt self-conscious about her weight, my father told me—she might have enjoyed her good looks. I’ve noticed more than a few bachelors paying her attention over the years, but she’s someone who still carries herself with the defensive posture of the unbeautiful.

  “You’ll have to change of course,” she says to me now. “I hope you brought the right clothes.”

  Actually I thought I was wearing the right clothes. I went out of my way to wear a tailored khaki skirt and a pressed oxford cloth blouse in what I thought was a becoming shade of pink. A little preppy outfit that to me had hotel manager written all over it, but looking down at myself, I notice that my skirt is rumpled, my shirt is coming untucked, and my loafers are covered with grass clippings.

  “I’ll go right up and change,” I say. “I just want to get a look at the place.”

  We’re standing between the Sunset Lounge and the concierge’s desk. When my mother first came here, my father told me, she hated the entrance to the hotel.

  “It’s like you’re coming in the service entrance,” she complained. “There’s no sense of the place—no feeling you’ve arrived.”

  The problem is that the hotel faces east, perched on a narrow ridge above the Hudson. What makes it so spectacular is that view, the expanse of sky, so it only made sense to the hotel’s original builder to orient the hotel toward the east. But you can’t approach the hotel from the east side. The ridge is too narrow. Before my mother redecorated, guests came in the back door and worked their way through a warren of fusty, Victorian lounges before ever coming upon that spectacular view of sky and river.

  My mother had the walls knocked down to create one expansive lobby and sunk its marble floor so that standing on the threshold you look over the pale green velvet sofas and rustic tables, your eye drawn to the floor-to-ceiling glass doors along the east wall, and out to a view of pure sky. The promise of the outer appearance is now fulfilled by the interior: you feel as if you’re on a ship floating above the clouds.

  As a child, hidden in one of the deep sofas, I’d watched guest after guest come in the entrance, nervously looking after their luggage and tugging their clothes straight after long car trips, look up and go still at the sight of all that sky. I could almost count the time it took after that pause for them to float across the lobby and out the French doors, onto the colonnaded terrace overlooking the valley. That’s where I want to go now, only Aunt Sophie is pulling me toward the front desk, which runs along the south wall of the lobby.

  Ramon, the head day clerk, smiles at me as we approach the desk. “Welcome back, Iris.”

  “That will be Miss Greenfeder from now on,” my aunt snaps. “As befitting the new manager.”

  I roll my eyes behind Sophie’s back and mouth “Iris” to Ramon who makes a great show of bowing his head toward me. “Miss Greenfeder it is then—good to have another Greenfeder in the managerial position . . .” I can tell Ramon is gearing up for a speech. Thirty years ago, fresh out of drama school, he’d come up to the Catskills to do summer stock and dinner theater and then, when the big hotels to the south and west closed, just dinner—waiting and busing tables, washing dishes. My mother found him working as a fry cook at a diner in Peekskill. She said he made the worst omelet you ever ate while reciting Shakespeare. She knew he’d never last at the diner so she offered him a job as front desk clerk—“he has just the right voice for greeting guests”—the summer before she died.

  “Yes, yes,” Sophie interrupts, “we’re all glad she’s back, now let’s let her get to work. Where’s the registration book?”

  The heavy leather-bound ledger is lying open beneath Ramon’s long, elegant fingers, but still he takes a moment to look puzzled—as if he’s misplaced the twelve-pound tome—before swiveling the book around and pushing it across the marble countertop toward me. It’s open to today’s arriving guests and the page is full.

  “Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many guests arriving in one day.”

  “It’s a corporate retreat for Crown Hotels International,” Sophie explains. “We’ve got another one next week for museum curators and two in June . . .” I flip through the pages for the next several weeks and see they’re almost all full. In among the blocks of rooms reserved for corporations and various fund-raising groups (I remember what Phoebe told me about
Harry Kron being a great patron of the arts) I notice quite a few familiar family names.

  “The Van Zandts . . . is that Bill and Eugenie who used to come every August?”

  “Their son and his family.”

  “And Karl Orbach, wasn’t he in that painting group that came for a while in the early seventies . . .”

  “And did that awful mural of naked women in the Sunset Lounge . . .”

  “And Claire Mineau and her daughter, Sissy, and the Eden sisters . . . It’s like old home week all summer. Why are they coming now?”

  “Mr. Kron went through our old registration books and sent this to anyone who was ever a repeat visitor at the hotel.” My aunt unfolds a cream-colored card from her cardigan pocket and hands it to me. Encircled by a rustic border of pinecones and acorns is a lavish invitation inviting the “friends of Hotel Equinox to return to the summers of their childhoods, when time stood still and your only appointments were with the world-famous sunrise and sunset.”

  “Who wrote this drivel?” I ask.

  Ramon coughs theatrically into his fist.

  “Not you, Aunt Sophie! I thought you hated this kind of sentimental come-on.”

  “I am trying to save the hotel,” she says, squaring her shoulders. I notice that even when she draws herself up she barely comes up to my collarbone. “Mr. Kron said he especially wanted to bring back the families who used to spend their whole summers here.”

  “I wonder why he needs to bother when he’s got all these corporate events. Still, I suppose it’s nice that he wants to incorporate the old traditions of the hotel into its new profile.” I am thinking, really, that it will help in my research that so many of the old guests are coming back. It’s the kind of altruistic motive, though, that I’d expect my aunt to sneer at but instead she smiles for the first time since I’ve arrived.

  “It is nice,” she says. “Mr. Kron has authorized a forty percent discount to anyone whose family used to stay here . . . so many old familiar faces . . . I only wish your father could have lived to see it.” Sophie’s gaze drifts away from the registration book and out the glass doors to the terrace. Abruptly her smile vanishes. “Or maybe he’s better off not seeing certain people back here.”

  I follow her gaze to the figure of a slim woman framed between two columns, silhouetted against the blue sky. I wonder who she could be, but then she lifts a gnarled hand to adjust the scarf tied around her hair and I recognize her.

  “Hedda Wolfe,” I say before I can help myself.

  Sophie pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose and stares at me. “You know her?”

  This would be the time, obviously, to tell my aunt about my contract, but even if I wanted to my aunt has launched into such a tirade against my new agent I wouldn’t have the nerve.

  “She made your mother’s life a living hell those last years . . . calling constantly to ask about the next book . . . sending her assistants up here to badger Kay after your father refused to let her stay anymore. Your parents would be turning in their graves if they knew . . .” Sophie stops abruptly. My mother, of course, has no grave. Only ashes.

  “I had no idea,” I stammer. “I’ve met her a few times in the city, at readings and seminars. She speaks quite well of Mother . . .”

  “Well, she should! Made her a lot of money, Kay did, and her reputation. I suppose if you already know her you should say hello to her. It’s your professional duty as manager. Don’t expect me to cuddle up to her though.”

  I can’t imagine Sophie cuddling up to anyone. I nod, though, as if carefully weighing her advice. “Yes, I think I’ll go say hello and welcome her to the hotel. Might as well get it out of the way.” I’m afraid that Sophie will offer to come with me, but fortunately the head housekeeper—a new woman I’ve never met before—arrives with news of some laundry emergency and Sophie is called away. Leaving me to go out onto the terrace—as I’ve wanted to since I came in—and try to explain to my new agent why my aunt doesn’t know I’m writing a book.

  I go out the glass doors and find Hedda Wolfe sitting on the balustrade leaning against a column. With her thick silk scarf hiding her light hair and large dark glasses she looks a little like a young Jackie Kennedy—or a little like my mother. She’s wearing well-pressed chinos and a pale blue oxford cloth blouse—an outfit much like the one I’m wearing, only on her it looks somehow rich. No one would send her upstairs to change. Her gaze remains on the view until I’m by her side.

  “Iris,” she says, making a limp gesture with her hands that manages to indicate a greeting while precluding a handshake. “I wondered when you’d arrive. Of course, I didn’t want to ask your aunt.”

  “I’m sorry about Aunt Sophie. She can be . . . a bit judgmental.”

  Hedda laughs. “She would have made a great editor, more sense than half the people in the business. No, don’t apologize for your aunt. I’m only sorry if I’ve made things difficult for you with her. I wondered if I should come when I received Harry’s invitation.”

  “Mr. Kron invited you?” I suppose I shouldn’t sound so surprised—after all, he mentioned he knew her.

  “I believe he’s inviting all the ‘old-timers’ and my grandmother came here for over twenty summers. He was kind enough, though, to include a personal note with my invitation mentioning that he had met you and commending me for my ‘good sense’ in fostering your writing career. So I gather he knows about the memoir?”

  “Yes, I told him about it.”

  “And your aunt? Have you told her about the project?”

  I stare off at the view to avoid meeting Hedda’s gaze. It’s one of the oddities of conversations held on the terrace: people hardly look at each other out here—the view is so commanding. Today the sun has bleached the color out of the valley and the river looks flat and far away. “No,” I say, “I haven’t told her. I’m afraid she wouldn’t like the idea at all. She’d call it airing our dirty laundry in front of the world. I know it probably sounds cowardly . . .”

  “Not at all, I think it’s wise. Sophie never really approved of Kay’s writing—if it had been up to her your mother would never have had any creative outlet other than rearranging the pillows in the lobby. I always thought it was because Sophie herself had given up her painting. There’s no one more intolerant of an artist than a failed one.” I’m a bit taken aback by the harshness of her tone, but then it strikes me that she may be right. Sophie had been a student at the Art League before coming up here to help her brother at the hotel. I always wondered why she didn’t at least paint in her spare time, but she told me once that if she couldn’t pursue her art seriously, she’d rather not pursue it at all. Still, I feel I should defend my aunt, but then Hedda lays one of her soft crumpled hands on my arm and it totally disarms me.

  “Don’t let her do to you what she did to Kay. You’ll be far better able to ask questions about your mother and look for the manuscript if she doesn’t know what you’re doing. And I’ll be right here if you need any advice about what you find. I plan to stay all summer.”

  “The whole summer!” I realize my surprise might sound ungracious. “I mean, how will you conduct your business while you’re up here?”

  “Oh, the wonders of the Internet,” she says gesturing toward a thin silver laptop lying on one of the rocking chairs, “and FedEx. I’ll probably go down to the city for a few days every other week or so, but for the most part, you won’t be able to get rid of me.”

  After my talk with Hedda, I walk up the main central stairs, even though it’s six flights up to my attic room. I am eager, I suppose, to put space between Hedda Wolfe and myself. I’ve never deliberately concealed anything from my aunt before and the fact that I am collaborating with a woman she hates makes it worse. As I climb the stairs, though, I feel better and not, I realize, because I am leaving Hedda Wolfe behind but because I feel as if I’m leaving myself behind—or at least that part of myself that would deceive my aunt for material gain. It’s what I have to do, I tell myself,
feeling lighter with every flight as the view through the arched windows on each landing grows wider and higher. It’s like climbing into the clouds. The valley below recedes; the curving band of blue river unfurls into the distance. The thick carpets absorb the sound of my steps, and the stealthy glints of the chandeliers wink in the watery afternoon sunlight. Instead of feeling winded by the climb I feel as though I can really breathe for the first time in months. It’s just as my father always said: a good hotel allows its guests to become their best selves.

  On the fifth floor the main staircase ends and I have to walk to the south end of the hall to a door leading to the narrow attic steps. I notice along the way that the hall carpets have been replaced—instead of the old threadbare flowered ones there are cream and purple runners bearing the Crown logo. The walls have been repainted a glossy cream with lavender trim. It’s a bit like being inside a candy box.

  I peer into an open room that’s being cleaned by a maid and notice with relief that the renovations haven’t extended that far yet. My mother’s choice of color scheme—forest green and white—has faded but still looks good in the muted carpets and faded silk curtains. And when I head up the attic stairs I see that nothing has been changed up here at all.

  Most of the rooms I pass haven’t been occupied since the new servants’ quarters were built in the early 1950s. Over the years the rooms have become a repository of broken furniture—too good to throw out, though, my aunt would insist—holiday decorations, and the things that guests have left behind. “You never know when they’ll realize they’re missing something and expect you to have it. And send it free of shipping charge, no doubt!”

  When I was little I loved to go through the boxes of things—amazed that people could be so careless as to leave such treasure. Silk nightgowns and robes were the most commonly forgotten items because, my mother once explained, guests hung them on the bathroom hooks and forgot to check the back of the door when they were packing. But there were also shoes and books and tennis racquets and paint boxes and diaries and shawls and ropes and ropes of cheap paste pearls in every color imaginable, which sometimes my mother would wear. On her they always looked real.