Hotel Paradise (42 page)

I had missed the piano bench when I was looking through drawers, so I lifted its hinged lid, not expecting to find anything, which I didn’t, except for a lot of sheet music. Aurora’s favorite, “Alice Blue Gown,” was right on top. I opened it and looked at the notes. I was useless as a musician (which was why I admired Brownmiller so much, as he played everything by ear), but I did remember simple notes and could
tap out a song with one finger. So I raised the big lid on the piano, propped it open as if I were about to bless a concert hall with my playing. The record on the phonograph had come to an end and the needle was scratching away on the inside, so I went over and removed the arm. Then I was back at the piano, sitting down at the keyboard. I punched out “Alice Blue Gown” and even sang some of it. I tried to play a chord with my left hand, but that didn’t sound any too good, and I was glad Brownmiller wasn’t there to hear it. I played “Alice Blue Gown” twice (liking the sound of my own voice singing), then grew tired of it and went back to the inside of the bench again for some more music.

The old sheet music swam around beneath my hand. A lot of these pieces, too, were in French. I picked out several and tried to make out the titles, which of course I couldn’t, except to note that “amour” appeared in a lot of them. Some of them looked vaguely familiar, though, and my eye flicked over to the phonograph and the inside of the cabinet which held the records. Apparently, the Devereaus had been very fond of these French songs, because the records and the sheet music were, as far as I could make out, similar. I saw the title of one piece of sheet music was the same as the name of the song I had just been playing on the phonograph. I thought it would be nice to play my one-finger pieces with accompaniment and so I went to the phonograph to replay the record that matched my music. I wound and wound the handle and resettled the needle on the record, then raced back to the piano.

The French singer and I had a good time for a while. It was lucky the song was so slow—mournful, I realized when I actually stopped to listen. The voice came out of the phonograph suspended in air, as if there were nothing to support it, as if it were disembodied. Some of this of course was its foreignness. Since I couldn’t understand the words, I couldn’t attach any images to them. There were only the words—syllables, sounds. This slow French song was the only thing to break the silence of the shadowed parlor, and with the slow movement of cloudy light across the rug it was just—lonely. And as the voice continued, it became a crushing loneliness. My body grew heavy with the weight of it. It was as if the stone lady standing watch in the garden had come in and sat down beside me, leaning her weight into mine. Finally, the song stopped, the statue rose to return to her dead garden, and I could move my fingers again.

The silence was almost worse than the song. So I went back and played the opening notes again. The needle was scratching on the inside of the record. I was about to get up and move the needle when I happened to look through the screen door.

The Girl was standing out there, inside the rim of pines, just beyond the clearing. Over the rim of the pines across the lake the fiery sun looked about to go down in a blaze. Then the room got colder, and the woods darker, and she turned and walked away.

I do not go off the deep end about fate or God or astrology. Ree-Jane, on the other hand, takes to heart the horoscope column in the
Conservative.
It’s pretty safe to believe in, since the only future it foretells, no matter what sign you’re born under, is a good one. A great one, to hear Ree-Jane talk about her many future romances, the handsome strangers who will go with her on all of the exotic trips she will be taking, luring her away from all of the careers she will be having.

Ree-Jane reads all of this aloud to me, and, of course, reads me my horoscope, too, even though I’ve told her I don’t believe in it. I am at times cruelly honest with myself (although I don’t make a habit of it), and I must admit the reason I don’t believe in horoscopes and Ree-Jane does is because hers are a lot happier-sounding, lighter and brighter than mine are. Her sign paints a picture of a future that will have her twirling down the nights and days in a white net evening gown aglitter with sequins. (I see it clearly because just such a gown is hanging upstairs in her wardrobe.) But I see myself in my own future wearing thick glasses and mouse-brown sweaters and being incredibly intelligent and looking down my nose at silly pleasures like dances.

So Ree-Jane also likes to read my horoscope to me because
my
sign always leans toward things like doing good works, being loyal and self-sacrificing—in general, qualities found in nuns and saints, people like Joan of Arc or someone willing to die in an anthill for God. (I have never heard of God stepping in and taking over in cases like Job’s; I guess He’s waiting to see if you’re really serious, but by the time you prove it, it’s too late, anyway.) Even though my own horoscope
was lacking in love, money, and fame, it was still complimentary. Still, Ree-Jane managed to turn it into something really awful. She kept on about my fate, and what she called my “karma,” and how I couldn’t escape it.

The reason I bring up astrology and horoscopes is because in Spirit Lake there is a fortuneteller by the name of Mrs. Louderback. Mrs. Louderback is said to be pretty noble herself, because she does not charge for her services. Not officially, that is. She is willing to accept “offerings,” so naturally those people who accept her services “offer” her something so as not to appear cheap. I don’t want to sound spiteful about Mrs. Louderback (or “cynical” might be the word, though it only means smooth spite), for Mrs. Louderback, I’ve heard, is a really nice person who uses her kitchen to tell people their fortunes and for which the “offering” is generally two dollars.

And, after all, who else did I have to consult with? To tell the story of the Girl and anything to do with her—Mary-Evelyn, the evil sisters (which is the way I’d come to think of them), the house, Jude Stemple —this story would fall on deaf ears. No, not deaf exactly, but people would certainly laugh at me. When I saw them in my mind, standing in a circle with me inside, and all of them laughing (including even Will, who ordinarily wouldn’t, but whenever he was around the others he’d kind of “catch” their mood), I also saw this: that they weren’t really laughing out of spite (excepting, of course, Ree-Jane). It was more as if they felt it was their right. My mind would flood with a jumble of images when I thought about this. I saw war-painted Indians whooping in a circle around a fire, calling forth whatever their gods were, or their spirits. I saw people surrounding a goat, fixing pots and pans on its back, then herding it into the hills.

Someone
had
to be It. Someone
had
to be. This was not really a punishment; it was more like karma.

Going back to Mrs. Louderback: I’m a practical person. I don’t believe in ghosts, spirits, devils, angels, monsters springing from dark closets, and so forth. I don’t mean I
test
my unbelief. I don’t do things like going into vacant houses on Halloween or walking through cemeteries. But that, again, is simply being practical.

The way Mrs. Louderback works her hobby is for a person to make an appointment for certain afternoon times (as she has her housework to do just like everybody else) and
not
tell her who it is calling. This struck me as strange, since she probably knows everybody
in Spirit Lake on sight. Maybe you aren’t supposed to tell your name to ensure that she won’t in the meantime check up on you, like finding out things that happened in your past so that she can then pretend to guess at those events. I don’t think Mrs. Louderback would cheat in that way, anyway; why would she rush to find out what went on in any of the pasts around Spirit Lake or La Porte? Helene Baum is, I have heard, one of her regular customers. Imagine hearing all about the boring past of Helene Baum. It was probably hard enough to face her across the kitchen table right now in the present.

Ree-Jane went to see Mrs. Louderback several times and always came back looking like the cat that swallowed the cream. I gave up asking her what she’d found out, because all she’d say was that it was wonderful but refused to give me details. Mrs. Davidow also went to her. My mother never did. Mrs. Davidow tried to get her to go, not wanting to appear silly by herself.

I was afraid Mrs. Louderback would think I was a kid pulling a joke on her when I called for my appointment, but she didn’t. She told me I could come at four-thirty.

I spent the day being very nervous. I was afraid of the future. I had heard that Mrs. Louderback would not tell anyone of a truly bad future happening, such as dying next week. That made me feel a little better, but then I was afraid I would just read something bad into her expression if she turned up a suspicious-looking card. I had seen the tarot cards because Ree-Jane (naturally) owns a deck. Unlike Mrs. Louderback, Ree-Jane is always happy to flip over Death and Damnation cards predicting my future. In Ree-Jane’s readings of my future, I would burn at the stake without the reward of people thinking I was a saint and worshiping me. I’d just burn. Naturally, Ree-Jane was lying, for no one’s future could
always
be the gloomy picture she painted.

But the cards themselves I thought to be fascinating and some of them quite beautiful. It surprised me to find out the meanings for a few of them: the Hanged Man, for instance, who meant something like “rebirth” and not (as I imagined) death from hanging by your foot.

Before my appointment with Mrs. Louderback I went to Britten’s store, legitimately this time, as my mother had told me to pick up a box of cornstarch for tomorrow’s Floating Island. It wouldn’t be needed until then, so I didn’t have to run back with it.

Mr. Britten looked at me over the tops of his black-framed glasses,
suspiciously, as always. But since there was no one in the store who looked like a source of Ben Queen information, I didn’t linger over the display cases or hang around the shelves. He knew to put the cornstarch on the Hotel Paradise account, which might or might not get paid before Doomsday. Lola Davidow is very good at juggling bills.

Outside, Mr. Root was occupying his end of the bench. The Woods weren’t around, though. He greeted me with a wink and a nod, then looked all around, as if we belonged to the same secret society and he didn’t want anyone else horning in.

“I thought maybe,” he said, nodding towards the highway, “when that bus pulls in, you know, that there church bus, that maybe I could ask a few questions.” Mr. Root turned his head to the side, away from me, and spat out tobacco, quite delicately. “Thought I might find out whatever happened to Sheba—you know, the one that married one of them Queens? You think maybe we should go back to that house? You and me and the Wood boys?”

He meant to the Devereau house, of course, and I never knew when I might want company, so I told him maybe we should, a little later. After we sat there for another while, Mr. Root soberly chewing and apparently thinking hard (to judge from the furrows in his forehead), and me looking at the woman on the cornstarch box, I decided it was time to be starting for Mrs. Louderback’s. She lived on the other side of the village, across the highway, and down several streets, but it would only take me ten minutes to walk it.

“You be careful now,” Mr. Root said.

I thanked him and went down the embankment in front of Britten’s and across the highway. There was never much traffic on it. I passed by Greg’s rickety restaurant where the pinball machine was, and the lunchroom next door to it where Mrs. Ikleberger served up her potato soup in winter. That was all of the “business area” Spirit Lake had. Britten’s store across the highway, and Greg’s and Mrs. Ikleberger’s. I walked along between rows of big old Victorian houses and smaller, neat cottages, like Marge Byrd’s which had a lot of lattice and climbing flowers across its front. The garden looked weedy, but Marge Byrd wasn’t the type to leave off reading a good book to go out and pull weeds.

I was let in to Mrs. Louderback’s house by some woman—family or friend, I supposed—who told me just to go on into the parlor and that Mrs. Louderback would see me in a few minutes.

The room I entered was cool and dark. It reminded me of Dr. McComb’s house, stuffed with furniture and piled high with shadows. Framed photographs were grouped on one large round table that was covered with a runner of darkly patterned material; the overstuffed chairs were so close together that the arms touched. I wondered if she needed to provide for a lot of people at once, as in a doctor’s waiting room.

But I was the only customer at this time and I was relieved. One thing that had inhibited me was running into Helene Baum, for instance, someone who would blab all over town that I was seeing the fortuneteller. I had already decided that if there were other customers there, I would make it appear that I had only come to deliver the box of cornstarch. I was embarrassed by the thought of anyone else knowing.

Mrs. Louderback is a heavyset woman in her fifties or sixties or seventies (those ages looking pretty much alike to me). She has a lot of gray hair that she wears in a coil, extremely clear skin, and eyes with such pale irises I can’t tell their color. You know right away from her expression that she must be very kindly. On this occasion, she was wearing a bib apron over a cotton housedress, and out of the apron pocket she drew her deck of cards. It was all very homey. We sat down at the kitchen table, which was covered with a red-and-white checked cloth, and on this I set my box of cornstarch. Then I removed it and set it down on the floor, in case it would cause confusion in the spirit world. She knew me, she said, and called me “Jen Graham’s girl,” which surprised me, as I was so used to people thinking I was Lola Davidow’s. I could never understand this, for my family had certainly been around a lot longer than the Davidows. One reason might be that in the last five years, my mother didn’t go into La Porte to do the shopping. Mrs. Davidow always did, and she also went to social events when my mother was just too tired out from all the cooking. So it was the Davidows who got “seen” around town. This, as I have said, caused people to confuse me and Ree-Jane, which naturally made me nauseous.