945: The worst . . .
Leaving Small’s Hotel, Chapter 24 begins
Chapter 24
October 3
The Mysteries of Mrs. Jerrold’s Bedroom
THE WORST of the hurricane struck us in the night. The winds roared, the shutters banged, the doors shook in their frames. Employing the same calm and confident tone that I employed whenever I had to ferry guests across the bay in the leaking launch, I reassured the inmates, explaining that the hotel had survived a hundred years of hurricanes, and I trotted out old photographs and clippings as visual proof of its venerable status as a safe haven in a storm. Lou made everyone a Baldy, and we took to our beds to ride the hurricane out. I lay awake in my bed, of course, trying to calm myself by reminding myself that everything I had said about the staunch and stalwart old hotel was so, that I wasn’t making it up, but I heard every groan that the old place made when the wind beat against it, every creak and drip, and for a while I thought there was a good chance that it was too old and tired to hold itself together, that it might be ripped from around us, snatched away like covers from a bed, leaving us exposed and shivering.
In the first light, I let myself out into the storm and began perambulating the grounds to see how bad the damage was so far. In the past, I would have seen the damage in terms of work, the work that I would have to do to repair it, but now I saw it all in terms of money, and that made me feel desperate. Had it been only a matter of work, I would have felt that I could provide it, that even now I could have found the vigor to do what had to be done (and I will confess that there was a time when I looked at repairs with a kind of pleasure, a time when I enjoyed the work, was proud of my ability to do it, usually did it pretty well if I stayed within the range of my abilities, and felt that the time I put into it was time well spent), but repairs had never really been a matter of work alone, because I could never manage to do all the work alone. They had always meant money, too, and money was another matter. I couldn’t make money appear. Once I had been able to, but I seemed to have lost the knack.
“Peter?” It was Albertine, calling to me from the front entrance. I ran to her.
“Come upstairs. I’ve got to show you something, something very, very funny.”
“Funny?” I said. “There’s something funny happening here?”
“Funny peculiar.”
We went upstairs and walked along the hall until Albertine stopped and put her hand on the doorknob of one of the guest rooms. “Alice and Clark asked to change their room this morning.”
“Water damage?”
“No. Alice said she was ready for a new challenge.” I knitted my brows to indicate that I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about, and she flung the door open. I stepped into a room I had never seen before. It was completely redecorated — no, completely renovated.
“It’s — it’s — ” I said.
“A little fussy for my taste, but — what the hell, it’s a miracle!”
“How did she do this? How did she get the supplies? The tools?”
“Remember all those cartons that Artie brought with him?”
“Demolition equipment, I thought. Explosives. Torpedoes.”
“Wallpaper, ceramic tile, doorknobs.”
I walked around the room, touching everything to make sure that it was real. “This is really weird,” I said. “Very peculiar.” I tried the closet door. I had invested many hours in trying to make that door hang straight and open easily, but I had never succeeded. Alice had.
“This is very odd,” I said, “like a prisoner digging through the walls, working silently, at night. Very, very odd. But she does good work.”
[to be continued]
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