Sybil (3 page)

She approached the gas station attendant and asked whether she could use his private phone. "Sorry, lady," he replied. "Sorry."

All she saw, as he walked from her and closed the door in her face, was the back of his retreating white coat.

Her fear, she knew, had made him afraid. But contact with another person permitted her to decide to call from the Broadwood Hotel, where she always stayed when she visited Philadelphia.

The thought of the Broadwood and the knowledge that she was in a city she knew well lifted some of the terror. She took time to visit the washroom, where she let hot water run over her hands. Returning to the street, she noticed for the first time the Delaware River and on its other shore, Camden. Both had been there all the time.

The Delaware was familiar. She had once done an impressionistic water color of it while Capri sat at her side. The cat, who had watched every stroke of the brush, had occasionally taken a swipe at the brush handle as if to remind Sybil of her presence.

Street signs began to become visible. Front Street. Callowhill Street.

Spring Gardens. On Front Street, between Callowhill and Spring Gardens, there were overhead elevated tracks. As Sybil approached a corner, she noticed a light, a city bus.

"Wait, wait," Sybil called frantically.

The florid-faced driver waited.

And then, acutely aware of an aching in her arms and legs, Sybil collapsed in a window seat in the rear of the bus. She was ready to go wherever the bus would take her, anywhere, everywhere, world beyond, world without end--anywhere.

Why were these other passengers--three men and a woman wearing a beaver hat--out on a night like this? But was it night? The maddeningly anonymous in-between gray of the overcast sky withheld the clue as to whether it was night or morning. She didn't know the date, either. If she were to ask the other passengers, what a fool they'd think her!

The enigmatic key in her purse, which also withheld all clues, once again possessed her. A Broadwood key? She didn't know. Nor did she know whether she was on her way to the Broadwood Hotel. She could easily get there, however, from wherever the bus took her. Eager to find out, she walked to the front of the bus and asked the driver: "Do you go anywhere near Broad and Wood?"

"Three blocks from it," he replied. "Shall I call you?"

Through the bus window, despite its frosty face, she recognized Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Logan Free Library, the Franklin Institute, and Fairmont Park. She remembered with excitement the two granite memorials in the park. On one, which was of soldiers in bas relief, was the inscription: "One country; one constitution. In giving freedom to slaves we assure freedom to the free." She had painted that war memorial. She must keep her mind on anything, everything, except the key. Except my life, except my life --wasn't that what Hamlet had said?

"Your corner," the driver called to her. She was on terra firma again. Infirm with the skidding conditions of the roads and the slippery sidewalks, it was firm with the solidity of familiar landmarks: the Academy of Fine Arts, on Broad and Cherry Streets, the Hahnemann Hospital, and then, a present reality at last, the gold dome atop the Broadwood Hotel.

Finally, the red brick sixteen-story Broadwood Hotel stood before her. It had a diamond pattern up to the third floor and a white cornice.

Across the street from the hotel were the Roman Catholic High School for boys and an old building that used to be the home of the Philadelphia Morning Record. In front of the Broadwood there was a subway station. The subway had been there since 1927, someone had told her. And the Broadwood itself had been built in 1923 by the Elks. That was the year she was born. Funny.

Becoming annoyed with herself for lingering outside the hotel when she could already have been inside, she finally took the fateful plunge of entering. It seemed to Sybil that it was as difficult to ascend the three steps to the Broadwood's heavy glass front door as to climb Mt. Everest. Her ascent was into the unknown.

In the main lobby she stared at the torchlike lamps suspended from the ceiling, scrutinized the familiar marble, the yellow, black, and white tile floor. Although she knew this lobby well from previous visits, she noted each detail as if she were looking at it for the first time.

Should she register? She hesitated. Should she head for room 1113 on the supposition that it was free and that she had a Broadwood Hotel key? She ran up the fifteen steps to the rotunda. That was a safe detour from both desk and elevator--the Scylla and Charybdis of her terror.

The rotunda was dominated by a stained glass terrazzo tile marble window forty feet high. It was a beautiful window, overlooking a mezzanine. Inscribed on the rotunda's gold leaf ceiling was the motto: "Fidelity, Justice, Vanity, Brotherly Love--their virtues upon the tablets of love and memory. The faults of our brothers we write upon the sand."

For a few fleeting minutes, as Sybil stared at the ceiling, she felt relaxed by its beauty, but the sensation passed as she slowly retraced her steps from the rotunda to the main lobby. Again taking refuge in extraneous things, she noted how the place had changed since she had last been here. The bellhops were not the same. Nor had she ever seen the owlish, bosomy woman at the registration desk. And then, lingering at the interior store window of Persky's Portraits, Sybil tried to force herself to decide whether to register or to go to room 1113, to which the inexplicable key could conceivably lead. Unable to decide, she rushed out to Broad Street.

At the newsstand in front of the Broadwood she bought a copy of the Philadelphia Bulletin. It was dated January 7, 1958. As if disbelieving the date, she bought the Philadelphia Inquirer. It too was dated January 7.

January 7. She had left the chemistry lab on January 2. Five days lost.

The fear of not knowing had been replaced by an even greater fear--knowing.

"Do you have the time?" she managed with assumed nonchalance to ask the newsdealer.

"Nine o'clock," he replied.

Nine P.m. It had been 8:45 P.m. when she had waited at the Columbia elevator. Almost five days to the hour had intervened.

Slowly, fearfully, Sybil once again pushed open the heavy glass door of the hotel. Panic and a sense of remorse and self-recrimination awakened by the knowledge that she had lost five days compelled her to hurry. Someone, she dimly perceived, was calling to her. It was the owlish, bosomy woman at the registration desk. "Hello, there," the woman was saying, her large head bobbing over the desk in recognition, her eyebrows so prominent that they seemed like the stiff-feathered disks of an owl, by which Sybil had first characterized her.

"Do you have a minute?" the woman called. "I want to talk to you."

As if mesmerized, Sybil came to a halt. "Now, when you get to your room," the woman said solemnly, "take a hot bath and get some hot tea. I was so worried about you out in that storm. "Don't go out," I begged you. You wouldn't listen. This is no weather to monkey around with."

"Thank you. I'm all right," Sybil replied somewhat stiffly.

The woman smiled at her as she headed toward the bank of elevators.

Sybil could swear--in a court of law she would have sworn on oath--that it had been a year since she had been at the Broadwood. In that same court, however, the woman at the desk, who had not worked at the hotel the previous year, would have sworn, also on oath, that Sybil had been in the hotel earlier that January 7.

One of the two elevator doors swung open. Sybil, anxious and deeply apprehensive, entered the car. She was the only passenger.

"Eleven, please," she said.

"Out in that storm?" the elevator boy asked. She whispered, "Yes."

"Eleven," he called.

The elevator door closed behind Sybil, its metallic clang registering in her spine as had the uncomprehending eyes in the chemistry lab. Between the two elevators time had not existed. Remorse quickened at the thought.

Was there really a room 1113? The numbers on the doors, 1105, 1107, 1109, 1111, heralded a probable 1113. Then flashing, receding, and flashing, as if it were in neon lights, was 1113!

Sybil opened her purse, removed the key, turned it over in her unsteady hand, caught her breath, started to place the key in the lock, turned it over again, and wondered whether it was really the key to this door.

Go in? Go back?

She inserted the key in the lock. It fitted. The door swung open. Sybil faced room 1113.

Nobody spoke. Nobody stirred or moved. Did that mean that nobody was there?

She pressed her body against the doorjamb and, without entering the room, moved her hand over the nearest wall in search of a light switch. When the light went on, the thrust of her hand unleashed a floodlight on her fears of what she might find. Stepping into the room and closing the door behind her, she stood transfixed, unmoving.

As far as she knew, she had never before been in the room. But if this weren't her room, where had she slept from January 2 to January 7, how did she come by the key? She could not have been in the street all that time.

Was she registered? The woman at the desk downstairs had acted as if she were.

Sybil removed her wet coat and placed it on a chair, kicked off her wet shoes, and slumped into the green chair near the window.

She didn't know that the room was hers, but somehow, from the way the woman had talked, she didn't think it was anybody else's, either.

For a time she just stared vacantly through the window at the Roman Catholic High School for boys and at the building that used to house the Philadelphia Morning Record. Then, unable to find solace in just sitting, she reached for the newspapers that she had brought with her.

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER FINAL CITY EDITION INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER FOR ALL THE PEOPLE My eyes are heavy with exhaustion.

TUESDAY MORNING, JANUARY 7, 1958

January 7. January 7 is a plain fact that spells out that I have lost five days.

MAN ROCKETED 186

MILES UP, REDS SAY Gavin Says Missile Stand Cost Promotion 85th Congress Starts Second Session Today So much has happened while I was out of the world.

Flier Chutes Safely After Epic Ascent My ascent was epic too. The streets. The steps. So many streets. More of a descent since I have lost time after thinking I would not again.

Autos Slither Stop Glassy Roads THE EVENING BULLETIN PHILADELPHIA TUESDAY, JANUARY 7, 1958

Pay bill. Check out. Check out when I haven't checked in? How did I get in without luggage?

SNOWSTORM EXPECTED TO LAST ALL NIGHT

All night?

She had better stay. She tossed the newspapers into the flowered metal wastebasket and went to the desk to call room service. She ordered split pea soup and a glass of hot milk. While waiting for the food to come, she started to call Dr. Wilbur. Too long. Too long. She had waited too long to get through to the doctor.

Sybil lifted the phone off its cradle and started to give Dr. Wilbur's number to the hotel operator. At that moment, however, something on the dresser riveted Sybil's attention. Staring at the object in disbelief, she dropped the telephone receiver abruptly. It was her zipper folder.

Also on the dresser were her mittens, which would have come in handy in the storm, and the red scarf she had been wearing at the Columbia University elevator.

Tremulously she walked to the dresser and clutched at the zipper folder. Unzipping it, she discovered that the chemistry notes were exactly as they had been five days before when she had scooped them up in the lab.

Then, in a corner of the dresser, was something that she hadn't noticed before: a receipt for a pair of pajamas purchased at a Philadelphia department store. She knew the place; she had been there several times. It was a long walk from the Broadwood, but by subway one could make it door to door. The pajamas cost $6.98. Had this $6.98, she wondered, helped to deplete her billfold?

Pajamas! Where were they? She searched the drawers and the closets, but she didn't find them.

She searched the bathroom. At first she saw nothing; then she saw the pajamas on a hook behind the door, hanging like an accusation.

The pajamas were rumpled, slept in. Had she slept in them? They were loud and gay, with bright orange and green stripes. Not her style. She always chose solid colors, usually in varying shades of blue. The pajamas she found were the sort a child might select.

Sybil went back into the room. Her knees sagged. The self-recrimination she had felt upon discovering that she had lost time was suddenly intensified by finding the objects on the dresser. The zipper folder glared at her, the red scarf threatened her, and the mittens seemed to be pointing at her as though they had locomotion of their own.

Then, on a small bedside table an object that she had not seen before beckoned to her: a black and white drawing of an isolated female figure perched on a cliff against a towering mountain that threatened to engulf it, dwarfed it. The drawing had been penciled on Broadwood stationery. Drawn in this room, it had obviously been left behind by the person who drew it. Who?

There was a knock at the door, and the room service waiter placed on the desk Sybil's tray with the soup and milk she had ordered. "You're not very hungry tonight," the lean, lanky waiter said. It seemed as if he were comparing her order to what she had ordered on other occasions. His tone was gentle, his manner protective, as if he knew her well. Yet Sybil knew that she had not seen him before. The waiter left.