Hotel Vendome (11 page)

She saved the Plaza Athenee and the George V, which was now a Four Seasons, until the next day and was equally impressed by them, for their elegance and beauty. But the hotel that had snagged her heart was the Ritz, and she went back to it again and again. She had tea in the garden, and brunch on Sunday morning in the Salon Cesar, to see if she could borrow any ideas for the Vendome.

And she took photographs of the flowers at the George V with her cell phone, so she could show them to Jan at home. The American designer Jeff Leatham had created a whole new style of flower arranging that was different from anything she had ever seen, with long stems sticking at odd angles out of tall transparent vases, creating a whole installation like a work of art. She wanted to try and imitate that for their lobby. For the first time she felt as though she were in partnership with her father, and was prouder than ever of the gem he had created with the Vendome. Paris was like the mecca of the hotel industry, and she visited several smaller, elegant hotels as well, like the St. James in the sixteenth arrondissement, which combined the elegance of France with the atmosphere of a British men’s club, with ancestral portraits, wood paneling, and deep leather couches in the bar.

She spent a week in Paris discovering every hotel she had ever heard of and even a few tiny ones on the Left Bank. And at night she would go back to the youth hostel and plan what sights she was going to see the next day. She had to switch youth hostels after a few days because she had stayed the limit of days they would allow. And she moved to one nearby, also in the Marais.

She didn’t care about the national monuments nearly as much as she did about visiting the hotels. She took notes on what she saw, and photographs whenever she saw something that she thought they could imitate at home.

When she finally heard from her father, he was upset. He had tried her for several days at the house in St. Tropez where no one answered, and finally Miriam told him that she had gone back to New York more than a week before. And when he tried her on her cell phone, it had taken another two days to reach her. He called their friends in Bordeaux, and their daughter knew she had gone to Paris, because Heloise had called her to say hello and report on her adventures.

“Where are you staying?” he asked, annoyed that she hadn’t checked in. She had gotten much too independent over the summer, and he didn’t like it. But she was on a quest, and her own personal mission, and she didn’t want him to force her to come home, so she had stayed out of touch for as long as she could.

“I’m in Paris, visiting every hotel I’ve ever heard of and staying at a very nice youth hostel in the Marais. Papa, it almost makes me cry every time I see those hotels, they’re so beautiful.” She spoke of them like shrines. “The Ritz is the most beautiful hotel I’ve ever seen, after ours of course.” Although he was troubled by not hearing from her for so long, he laughed at what she said.

“I know all about those hotels. I worked there. Why didn’t you call me when you left your mother in St. Tropez? How bad was it?”

“It wasn’t great,” she said vaguely. He knew it must have been pretty bad if she left.

“I didn’t want you to make me come home,” she said honestly. “I wanted to see Paris anyway, on my own. I’m glad I came.” Things had gotten clearer to her since she’d been there, and she knew what she wanted to do now. She was going to discuss it with him when she got home, but not on the phone.

“Well, I’m telling you to come home now. Get your bottom on a plane. I don’t want you floating around Paris alone. You’ve been there long enough.” But she wanted to stay forever.

“I’m fine, Papa. Can I have a few more days? I don’t want to leave yet.” He grumbled when she said it and finally agreed to let her stay if she checked in with him twice a day. “Okay, I promise.” But her father was secretly impressed that she had managed so well alone. She had definitely grown up.

“And don’t go on the metro late at night. Take a cab. Do you need money?”

“No. I’m doing fine.” It shocked him to realize how self-reliant she had become. She had left her mother’s house, for whatever reason, gotten herself to Paris, and seemed to be having a great time on her own. He couldn’t wait to see her, but he knew that the experience was good for her. She’d had a job in Bordeaux, left St. Tropez, and was doing fine in Paris. It had been an interesting summer for her, and she had loved it. She thanked him profusely for letting her stay. She promised to come home in another week. And the week after that she was starting her senior year at the Lycee. The timing of this trip had been perfect for her, more than he knew.

She returned, as promised, eight days later, after several more visits to the Ritz and a drink on her last night at the Hemingway Bar. She had met up with her school friends once or twice. And several men had tried to pick her up, in bistros and bars, but she had fended for herself. She took a cab back to her youth hostel when she left the Ritz, and early the next morning she flew home. Her trip to Paris had been a total success.

She sat quiet and dreamy all the way back to New York on the flight and went through customs quickly. She had called her father before she left to tell him what flight she was on, and he was waiting for her at the airport, with the hotel driver and the Rolls. She jumped into his arms with an enormous grin, and he held her close, and was so grateful she was home. He had missed her more than he’d admitted to her or anyone else.

“You’d better get into Barnard or NYU,” he warned her on the drive back into the city. “I’m not letting you go away for that long again.” She didn’t answer him for a few minutes and was looking quietly out the window, and then she turned to him with a serious look of determination that he had never seen in her before. She looked into her father’s eyes, and what he saw for the first time was a woman and not a child.

“I’m not going to NYU or Barnard, Papa. I’m going to apply to the Ecole Hoteliere in Lausanne.” She said it in a quiet voice. It was the same school he had gone to, but the last thing he wanted for her now was a career in the hotel industry. She would have to sacrifice too much and have no other life. “I looked them up online, and they have a two-year program that I qualify for, and one of those years is an internship in the industry. I want to run the hotel with you one day, and I have a lot of good ideas we can even try out right now.”

“I used to dream about your running the hotel with me,” he said sadly. “But I want you to have a better life. You won’t have a life. You’ll never have time for a husband and children. Look at me, I work eighteen-hour days. I want more for you than that.”

“That’s all I want and what I love,” Heloise said emphatically and looked like she meant it as she gazed intently at her father. “I want to work with you, not just fooling around like I did as a kid. And I can take it over when you get old.” She had thought it all out and was completely sure that she wanted to work at the hotel, after what she’d seen that summer in Europe.

“I’m not that old yet, thank you very much,” he said, although he was touched. “And I want a better life for you than working eighteen-hour days for the rest of your life. You just want that now because it’s all you’ve ever known.” The hotel was familiar to her, but he wanted her to have a saner life than his own.

“No, I want it because I just saw every great hotel in Paris, and I love what you’ve done with the Vendome. Maybe together we can make it even better. I love living at the hotel and working there. It’s the only life I ever wanted.” As she said it, he felt acutely guilty for not getting her out of the hotel more often. He didn’t want her adult world confined to a small hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He spent the rest of the drive into the city trying to convince her she was wrong.

“Why are you saying that?” she questioned him finally. “Don’t you like what you do, Papa?”

“I love it for myself but not for you. I want you to have so much more.” And then as he said it, he heard himself saying all the same things his parents had said to him thirty years before. He was giving her all the same reasons they had given him, wanting him to be a banker or a doctor or a lawyer. They had done everything to dissuade him from the Ecole Hoteliere, just as he was doing to his own daughter now. He suddenly fell silent as he looked at her and realized that she had to make her own choices, and if this was what she loved and wanted to do with her life, he had no right to stand in her way and dissuade her.

“I don’t want you giving up your life for a hotel,” he said sadly. “I want you to have kids and a husband and a bigger life than mine.”

“Are you unhappy at the hotel?” she asked, as she watched him, and he shook his head.

“No, I love it,” he said honestly. He had found his niche early on, no matter what his parents thought about it.

“Then why won’t you let me do what I love? I’ve loved being in the hotel all my life. There’s nothing I could ever love doing more than that. It’s what you taught me and what I want to teach my children one day, to pass it on.”

Hugues laughed softly as she said it. “They’ll probably want to be doctors and lawyers.”

She smiled at him. “Well, I want to work with you till we both grow old.”

“And you’re telling me you want to leave me and go to school in Switzerland for two years,” he said sadly.

“You can come over and visit. I’ll come home for holidays and vacations, like Christmas and spring break.”

“You’d better,” he growled as he put an arm around her. A page had turned for her while she was in Paris, and they both knew it. She had stepped out of her childhood into adulthood, and the adult life she wanted was at his side, running the Hotel Vendome. “I never should have let you go to Europe this summer,” he grumbled good-naturedly, looking at her and seeing how much she had matured in two months. She looked terrific and seemed very sure of herself and the future she wanted, more than ever before.

“It would have happened anyway. I don’t want to go to NYU or Barnard. I want to go to hotel school. I’m proud of what we do, and I want to learn how to do it better so I can help you.”

“All right,” he sighed, as they pulled up in front of the hotel. He turned to his daughter with a resigned expression. “All right, you win. And welcome home.”

He followed her out of the car and into the lobby as all the bellmen, desk clerks, and concierges ran to greet her and welcome her back. He could see that the child she had been had vanished forever, and the woman she was becoming had returned. Somewhere between Paris, Bordeaux, and St. Tropez, a butterfly had been born.

Chapter 6

HELOISE BEGAN HER senior year at the Lycee with more self-assurance than she’d ever had before. She knew what she wanted to do now, and had established clear goals. She sent her application to the Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne in October.

She told Mrs. Van Damme about it when she did. Her old dog Julius had died several years before and had been replaced with a white female Pekingese named Maude. Mrs. Van Damme emphatically approved of Heloise’s idea of going to hotel school since it was what she loved. Her grandson Clayton was at Yale and wanted to study photography eventually, which Heloise knew from talking to him that summer, and his grandmother was encouraging him to pursue his dream too. She said that in the end it was all one had, and turning those dreams into reality was the only worthwhile path. Heloise liked hearing from Clayton but hadn’t seen him for several months. She had been too busy since the summer, and he was enjoying his freshman year in college and seldom came to New York. But he called Heloise from time to time and said he liked Yale but was thinking of transfering to Brown, where he could study photography.

The elderly doyenne seemed to be failing in the past year. Heloise worried about her and always promised herself she’d visit her more often, but she was particularly busy with school-related activities, and it was her last year at home, if she got into the hotel school in Lausanne, as she hoped.

Over Thanksgiving Mrs. Van Damme got ill. She caught a nasty cold that turned into bronchitis, and to pneumonia after that. Hugues stopped in to check on her daily. And Heloise came in to see her religiously every day after school, and brought her little vases of flowers that Jan made for her. Her son came to visit her from Boston, and after consultation with her doctor, they put her in the hospital. She left the hotel by ambulance. And Heloise kissed her goodbye and promised to take care of her dog. Hugues and Heloise visited her and brought her a big bouquet of flowers. But Mrs. Van Damme seemed less and less interested as the days went by, and a week before Christmas, she quietly slipped away in the night. She was eighty-nine years old and the only grandmother figure that Heloise had ever had. All her real grandparents had died before she was born. And she mourned the loss of the elderly lady who had been kind to her all her life. And she was grateful when her son allowed her to keep Maude.

They went to her funeral at St. Thomas, and many of the hotel employees attended as well. Hugues asked Jennifer to arrange for a van to get them all there, there were so many. Even Mike the engineer went, wearing a dark suit. So did Ernesta, Bruce, Jan, several of the maids, an elevator man, two bellmen, Jennifer, Heloise, and Hugues.

Heloise saw Clayton there with his parents, but they barely had time to say hello as they left the church. He looked as bereft as she felt. And living in the same hotel with her, Heloise had had the chance to see her more often, and perhaps know her better, than her own grandson, who didn’t see her often and rarely came to New York. It was a somber day for Hugues and Heloise, and put a damper on Christmas for them.

It was a busy season at the hotel, and Heloise had already tried to implement some of the things she had seen in Paris. Jan was trying to do their flowers for the lobby now like Jeff Leatham at the Georges V, from photographs Heloise had taken there. And she had added many things to their brunch menu that she had noticed at the Ritz. People were already commenting on how spectacular the flowers were, and how great the brunch. Hugues was proud of her and she was pleased. And she was applying what she had learned in Bordeaux to the wines she selected from their cellars. And as soon as she’d gotten back after the summer, she went back to work organizing their donations to the food bank, and working downtown at the soup kitchen and family shelter once or twice a week. Hugues was very impressed.