The Seduction of Water

by Carol Goodman

  Although I have a master key to all the rooms I’m not about to let myself into Harry Kron’s suite and lift the registration book from a locked armoire. I’m sure the idea would never have even entered my mind if not for Ramon’s detailed blueprint of the book’s location. There’s no reason not to simply ask Harry if I can see the registration book for 1973. After all, he is one of the few people who knows I’m working on a book about my mother.

  The only problem is getting him alone for a few minutes. I can hardly ask him during the daily staff meeting with my aunt Sophie sitting across from me on his left-hand side taking minutes. I try him in the dining room at brunch, but although he usually dines alone, this Saturday he’s got Phoebe Nix and Gordon del Sarto at his table. When he sees me hovering by the omelet chef he waves me over and insists I join them.

  Phoebe is in the middle of giving the waiter precise instructions on how to boil her egg. I turn to Gordon and ask him if he found his room comfortable, but Phoebe, done with her injunctions to her waiter that her toast be very, very dry, answers instead. “Two of the drawers in my bureau are broken, and I tore my foot on a loose nail in the closet.”

  I assure Phoebe that I’ll send Joseph—our unofficial carpenter—to have a look at the defective items even as I’m wondering why, since her luggage had consisted of a canvas book bag, she had needed two drawers and the closet.

  “Well, my room was heavenly,” Gordon interjects. “Literally. I awoke this morning to the sun rising outside my window. It was like floating in the middle of a Tiepolo ceiling.”

  “I thought your period was Renaissance, not High Baroque,” Phoebe says to Gordon.

  Gordon blushes to the tips of his large ears as if Phoebe has made an indelicate sexual reference instead of an artistic one.

  “I gave you the room most popular with the sunrise school of painters who used to stay here,” I tell Gordon. “If you look under the rug by the window you’ll find paint splatters.”

  We discuss, then, the Hudson River School painters who stayed at the hotel and some more recent regional painters. I’m impressed that Gordon not only knows of these minor artists but doesn’t seem to consider them beneath his notice. Harry too has an encyclopedic knowledge of local folk artists.

  “I have an idea,” Harry says. “Come stay—as our guest of course—the last week of August for our Arts Festival. Art Recovery has agreed to come back—” Here Harry winks at me, letting me know that the group has been well enough satisfied with their accommodations to rebook. “—and we’re going to judge the ‘Follies in the Garden, Whimsies in the Woods’ contest. Perhaps you could put together a little program on ‘The Arts at Hotel Equinox.’ ”

  Gordon sets down his coffee cup and smiles at Harry. “It would be an honor, Mr. Kron—”

  “Oh, Gordon,” Phoebe interrupts, “say what you mean. You’d much rather give a talk on fifteenth-century Florentine jewelry and not some local Grandma Moses. Uncle Harry, he’s got the slides in the car. Couldn’t Art Recovery fit him in this weekend?”

  Harry puts his toast down and gives his niece his full attention. I remember what he said last night. High maintenance, just like her mother. And then I remember what became of Phoebe’s mother, Vera Nix, award-winning poet, dead at forty-four when she drove her car off a bridge. Harry must remember too because he speaks softly and gently, as if coaxing an excitable racehorse.

  “Of course I would be delighted to hear Gordon speak on the subject of his expertise, and I would have asked already, only the emphasis this weekend is on works of art lost during the war . . .”

  Gordon clears his throat as if to interrupt, then lapses into a coughing fit. While I signal the waiter to refill his water glass, Phoebe places a hand on Gordon’s bony shoulder and takes up the gauntlet for him. I have to admit I’m touched. For all her sharp edges, it’s obvious that Phoebe has a strong sense of loyalty to those she cares about. It also occurs to me their arrival here last night was not by chance—perhaps Phoebe had planned all along to get Gordon included in the weekend’s program.

  “He’s got a painting of a lost necklace,” Phoebe says. “A fifteenth-century pearl necklace that belonged to some Venetian saint and disappeared during the war.”

  “Ferronière,” Gordon rasps out between sips of water. “It’s a ferronière.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “A sort of fifteenth-century headband,” Phoebe answers impatiently.

  “Well, that’s fascinating,” Harry says, “but one slide of a missing headband does not a lecture make.”

  Gordon holds up a finger, takes another sip of water, and clears his throat. “Actually, sir, I have assembled a rather interesting slide presentation surrounding the lost della Rosa ferronière. I’ve got portraits of the della Rosa family and several other examples of ferronières in Lippi and Botticelli . . .”

  “Well, it sounds like quite a thorough program. I’d love to see it. Why don’t we schedule your talk for tonight before cocktails? Have you got enough to fill forty-five minutes?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Kron, I could do a good solid hour,” Gordon says, beaming. I’m so pleased for Gordon’s success that it takes me a moment to realize that I’ve missed my opportunity to ask Harry for the registration books. It’s too late now. Harry is touching a napkin to his lips and sliding his chair back and Gordon is already on his feet to shake his hand.

  “Thank you, sir, I’m sure you won’t be sorry. And of course I’d love to do the program on local artists as well.”

  “Excellent. Come to my room after dinner tonight and I’ll give you all the old registration books. You can comb through them for the names of artists who stayed here.”

  For the rest of the afternoon I kick myself for not asking for the books. I could have done it in front of Phoebe. After all, she knows about the memoir and it was she who gave me the idea that my mother might have been having an affair with a guest. In the end, though, I realize that’s exactly why I didn’t ask for the books in front of Phoebe. I didn’t want her to know I took her suggestion seriously—or how much the idea bothers me.

  I don’t know why it should make such a difference if the man my mother left my father for was married and a guest at the hotel. I have, after all, come to admit that she probably was having an affair—despite all the protestations of my mother’s sainthood. Maybe it’s because since hearing Hedda’s suggestion that it was someone she knew before coming here I’ve gotten a certain picture in my head. All I know about my mother’s life before she showed up here is that she grew up in an Irish neighborhood in Brooklyn, attended an all-girl Catholic school, and was christened at St. Mary Star of the Sea in Brooklyn, the same church where she took me—belatedly, at my soul’s great risk—when I was three to be christened. And so what I pictured when Hedda spoke of a childhood sweetheart was a young Irish boy, poor like herself, a boy who looks, in my imagination, a lot like Aidan Barry.

  Only he wouldn’t have been a boy in 1973. No matter how I might like to fool myself I can’t tell the story that way. There’s no reason to think that my mother, in her early forties in 1973, was having an affair with a man in his twenties. There’s no precedent for my affair with Aidan. No excuse.

  And so, after chastising one of the maids for understocking the third-floor linen closet (and remembering halfway through my lecture that Aidan and I had stuffed the soiled sheets in an unused dumbwaiter), I decide to take the matter into my own hands and retrieve the 1973 registration book from Harry’s suite. Just to set the record straight. I’ll wait for Gordon’s lecture on fifteenth-century jewelry—a good solid hour, he said, and which Harry will of course attend—and let myself in with the master key.

  I’m busy most of the afternoon setting up slide projectors and checking microphones for the evening’s lectures. It’s not an easy job. We’re using the library and two parlors on the north side of the courtyard, across from the bar, and the rooms were meant for reading the newspaper and tête-à-têtes on a rainy day, n
ot multimedia conferences. If Harry’s vision of the hotel as an international conference site comes true the rooms will have to be completely remodeled and rewired. In the meantime, Aidan comes to my rescue with an armful of extension cords, claiming a high school AV club in his past. I don’t see him as AV club material, though, and suspect it’s yet another skill he’s acquired in prison. Where he acquired the skill to charm the lawyers and museum curators is another question. By the end of the day the redheaded Judaica appraiser has him toting her slide carousels and setting up a display of nineteenth-century Kiddush cups along a sideboard in the Gold Parlor. I am in the library, just outside the French doors leading into the parlor, rearranging chairs, when Harry Kron comes to stand beside me. I notice that he too is paying close attention to Aidan. This would be the time—while Aidan handles the jeweled, engraved goblets—for Harry to mention any concern about Aidan’s background.

  “Mr. Barry seems quite an asset with the corporate clients,” he says. “You did well to hire him. Perhaps we should release him from his thralldom to Joseph and give him a position of more responsibility. Say, special-events coordinator? What do you think?”

  “I think he’d be very good at it,” I say, relieved that the only attention Aidan has drawn from Harry Kron is positive. “And I think it would be a wonderful opportunity for him.” I lay stress on the last part and hold Harry’s gaze for a moment longer than necessary. If he knows about Aidan’s prison record this would be the moment to bring it up.

  Harry looks away from me to Aidan and then back to me. “Part of being a good manager is knowing when to take risks, how to recognize promise in unlikely places—a diamond in the rough, so to speak.” I smile, relieved. He must know about Aidan. “Have I told you lately what a good job you’re doing?” he goes on. “You have that rare talent, invaluable in a true hotelier, of bringing out the best in people.”

  I blush with pleasure—but also with the consciousness of what I’m planning to do later. It’s not too late though—I can ask him right now to see the registration books before he gives them to Gordon. But before I can say anything, he leans closer to me and whispers in my ear, “I have to confess something to you, Iris.”

  I’m so stunned by the sudden intimacy of his voice that I laugh nervously, which draws Aidan’s attention away from the redhead for a moment.

  “Mr. Kron, I can’t imagine you having anything to confess.”

  He smiles at me and touches my elbow lightly with his fingertips. “But I do, my dear. You see, I’m not always as good a judge of character as I’d like to be. I’ve misjudged people . . . with the direst of consequences at times . . . but never mind, this time the consequences are a pleasant surprise. You see, I didn’t think you’d be much good at this.”

  “At this? At running the hotel?”

  He nods. “Oh, I mean I knew you’d be competent, don’t get me wrong, and I knew you had the right background. It’s just that I feared you didn’t have your heart in it. That your first love would always be writing. And this book about your mother would take too much of your time and attention. But I see now that I shouldn’t have worried.”

  I square my shoulders and try to return his look steadily. “I wouldn’t neglect the hotel.” I can’t possibly ask him about the registration book now, I think.

  “Of course you wouldn’t—and I understand that now because of your mother.”

  “My mother? But you didn’t know my mother.”

  Harry smiles. For a moment I think he’s going to tell me that he did know her. I think of that fantasy I had of my mother dancing at the Cavalieri Hilton in her black chiffon dress—only now, in my vision, she’s dancing with Harry Kron. He must have been very handsome when young. He’s still very handsome—I can tell that from the way Aidan is eyeing us from the Gold Parlor. He would have given her the kind of life she was suited for.

  But instead of confessing to an acquaintance with my mother, Harry waves his hand at the black-and-white photographs lining the wall of the library. They’re pictures of events at the hotel: picnics and barbecues, dinner parties and summer dances. In many of them my mother appears. A halo of black hair around her pale, delicate face, her light green eyes—startling even in these black-and-white pictures—fringed with dark lashes. She stands out in every picture.

  “I feel I’ve gotten to know her through these,” Harry says. “And from what people have told me about her. But most of all, through you. You have your mother’s grace, Iris. I think you’ll have a wonderful future with the Crown Hotels.”

  A few months ago I would not have thought the promise of a career in hotels would make me so happy, but I am truly touched and flattered by Harry’s words. I almost decide to give up on the registration book, but then, in addition to being impressed by Harry’s sense of knowing my mother through her photographs I am also a bit jealous. While he’s been getting to know Kay Greenfeder, I’ve learned almost nothing. I have to know who she was having the affair with.

  The library’s ready for Gordon’s lecture, the courtyard is all set up for cocktails afterward. I decide to stay for the first part of his talk and then—when he turns the lights off for the slide presentation—slip into the kitchen and up the servants’ stairway. I should be able to get back before the lecture’s over. I’ve asked Aidan to run the slide projector, so no one should miss me.

  The guests take their time filtering into the library and taking their seats. They’re noticeably more relaxed than last night. I notice sunburned shoulders and hair damp from lake swims or late showers. Instead of the contentious little spats I eavesdropped on last night, tonight I hear more shop talk: job openings at museums and galleries, grant opportunities, summer seminars in Prague and Florence. The burning issues of provenance and rightful ownership have ceded to professional advancement and industry gossip.

  Only Gordon, hovering at the dais, flipping through a stack of three-by-five cards, seems nervous. I look around for Phoebe—surely she should be here to lend moral support—and spot her standing by the doors leading out to the courtyard. It seems to me that the least she could do for her friend would be to sit up front.

  Gordon has to clear his throat several times before the crowd settles down. I find myself unbearably nervous for him and, stealing a glance at Phoebe, wonder if she feels that too and that’s why she’s chosen to stand at a distance.

  “Our story begins not in the war-torn Europe of six decades ago, but nearly six centuries in the past in quattrocento Italy . . .”

  Good, I think, six centuries in which to get up to Harry Kron’s suite and back.

  “It begins with a present made to a young girl on her wedding day from her mother. But before I tell you about this girl, let’s imagine ourselves in fifteenth-century Italy. It’s a time of great prosperity. The rich merchant guilds support not only painting, but jewelry and fashion . . .”

  I look around me at this fashionable crowd from Manhattan. The women’s clothes, I notice, are understated, but the shoes expensive; the glimpses of gold, pearls, or diamonds on wrists, necks, and earlobes discreet but rich. In addition to the Art Recovery participants I notice Hedda Wolfe in a middle row in a dupioni silk shift the color of eggshells, a pearl brooch like a spray of flowers on her shoulder.

  “. . . many painters—Ghiberti, Verrocchio, and Botticelli, to name just a few—apprenticed in jewelry workshops, leading to an increased depiction of jewelry in contemporary painting . . .”

  I find myself imagining the crowd here tonight as they might look depicted by the Renaissance masters. Phoebe, with her pale skin and serious eyes, looks like one of those thin, ascetic angels of the Annunciation. Hedda would have to be something pagan instead of Christian, I think, a sibyl or a personification of something. The redheaded appraiser would be painted by Titian. Harry Kron, some rich Florentine nobleman, of course. I’m happily playing this game when I come to a figure I can’t fit in because he doesn’t fit here or in the Renaissance. It’s Joseph, who’s standing next to Pho
ebe in the door to the courtyard, his eyes fixed on the blank slide screen. “. . . the rediscovery of classical statuary loosened the rigid, vertical lines of fourteenth-century clothing and issued in a celebration of form over line.”

  The room darkens and a shadowy green wood peopled by pale gold figures in flowing drapery fills the space behind Gordon. Botticelli’s Allegory of Spring. I look toward Joseph, wondering if this is what he was waiting for—this beautiful garden. But how would he know the program of Gordon’s slide show?

  Without commenting on this slide, Gordon presses the remote and the screen fills with a detail from Botticelli’s painting: one of the three graces, her sinuous blond curls held up by a single strand of pearls.

  “Stiff crowns gave way to loops of pearls to hold loose or plaited hair away from the face . . . this hair ornament was called a ferronière.”

  The slide changes to show a pensive Madonna, which Gordon tells us was painted by Filippo Lippi. She wears a sheer headdress, and a thin strand of pearls forms a V on her forehead. “As you can see,” Gordon is saying, “the style was used for religious as well as secular subjects. Which brings us to the particular ferronière we will discuss tonight, the della Rosa ferronière . . .”

  As much as I’m enjoying Gordon’s lecture, I realize it’s time for me to go. Fortunately, Joseph’s given me the perfect graceful exit. Pretending to notice him for the first time, and pretending—to anyone who’s paying attention—that the gardener must need me, I get up and slip out the door where he’s standing.

  “Did you need to speak to me, Joseph?” I say.

  Barely taking his eyes off the slide screen, Joseph shakes his head. “I was talking to this boy today about one of the paintings he’s going to show. I wanted to see it.”

  “Well, I’m going to just slip into the kitchen and make sure everything’s going smoothly . . .” If Joseph thinks this behavior is suspicious, he certainly doesn’t show it. I leave him to his painting and go out the courtyard, cut through the dining room into the kitchen, and from there to the back stairs. The servants’ stairs are used by the maids in the mornings when they’re making up the rooms, and later during the dinner hour when they slip upstairs to turn down beds and leave mints on the pillowcases. At this hour the maids are eating their dinner or out behind the laundry room having cigarettes, enjoying a few minutes out of sight of guests or management. I make it to the third floor without meeting anyone.