711
Purcell felt pretty sick. He had been right after all. 1414 had jumped, and it had not been pleasant to identify her. He didn’t know just what he could have done for the dead woman, but it didn’t keep him from feeling like a callous bastard just the same. She had minded her own business like a gent, and if she had taken the short way home, Purcell figured that it was nobody’s business but her own.
He couldn’t deny though that it would have been a lot easier for him personally, as executive assistant manager, if 1414 had decided to walk out into the Atlantic and get lost, or taken an overdose of sodium amytal in her own bed. It was bad publicity, of course, and the old bag of guts upstairs would be hysterical. Let him. Well, he had wired her husband and called the coroner and there was nothing, now, he could do for the poor flesh.
For a minute, he wondered what kind of fellow a guy with a name like Fauntleroy could be. He looked up at the big gold clock. It was only four o’clock. He yawned. Maybe he could still get some sleep.
Purcell hadn’t gotten any more sleep though. He had dozed uncomfortably and dreamed that he was falling; had got up finally and sat on the edge of the tub and smoked a cigarette.
There was a pamphlet under the door. Are You Ready? it asked in bold face. He retched suddenly and spat. People who walked and talked with God gave him the pip.
The hotel, the people in it, made him sick, he told himself. Some of them were all right, of course, but the odds weren’t even twenty to one. He thought of his mother then, and the split basket of apples, Russets and Winesaps and Grimes Goldens, that she had kept by the kitchen door. He had a dark-brown taste in his mind and moss on the roof of his mouth, and he would have given a finnif right then for one of his mother’s apples.
He had played around, he told himself, long enough, maybe too long. 1414 had settled it. He’d tell Mary, send her the flowers today.
Christ, you had to love something or go off your rocker. Look at old Mrs. Pierrepont and that horse doctor who gave her high colonics. She had married and dowered him and irrigations—barring tender domestic interludes—were a thing of the past now to Dr. Frisby.
Yes, it was a dirty world, and Mary was one of the few nice things in it. He thought of her suddenly as a gangling little girl with high hips and a smooth circle of light-brown braids. Little girls always got him: they were so goddamned self-possessed and practical.
He dressed finally and went down to the Desk, even if it was still only seven o’clock. The way he felt now, he’d even be glad to see Moxley. Dukemer was on, drinking black coffee like a sponge, and all soggy about this New England Boiled Dinner that she’d been popping corn with lately. Mather seemed to be a nice enough little guy, but Dukemer in love was a horse of a different color. She was so soft and full of good will that she had been short every day for the last two weeks, and gotten it up without even seeming to notice.
She didn’t, now, know a room number from a day rate, and
Purcell wondered just what it was this little guy Mather had.
Whatever it was, he decided, it certainly didn’t show. He was
disappointed in Dukemer. At her age, she ought to start using
her head. After all, Dukemer didn’t have much time left to be foolish in or the dough to back it up.
He’d better check on the Pleasaunce too. The porters had been working on it since daylight, but if J. Arthur found one blade of bloodstained grass, he’d probably s-c-r-e-a-m. He’d call Mary Street, too. No more of this mañana stuff, the time was now.
The Bar
When Mary came in at a quarter to nine Purcell still couldn’t forget Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles and what had been her face, but he had felt better at once. It did him good just to look at her. “I’ve got news for you, baby,” he said. “I’m going to let you see me tonight.” Mary’s eyes widened, she nodded her head emphatically. She smiled a little and seemed suddenly to sparkle like a spun-glass angel.
There was another idea for Christmas. A tree without blue lights. Without any lights. No tinsel. Gingerbread men and candy canes. Strings of popcorn and cranberries. Gilded nuts and pine cones, and the biggest damned yellow-haired angel in the world.
He’d held her hand right out in the open, said “Keep this,” and given it a squeeze and a pat and a push.
Purcell’s bloodstained image of Mrs. Fauntleroy Charles gradually assumed its proper perspective. He’d had one drink and eaten a tremendous breakfast about eleven o’clock, and after that the whole day had taken on an
opera bouffe
quality. It was the job for him, he thought jocularly.
The affair of Mrs. J. C. Bower and Mr. C. J. Bauer, who had checked in on separate registration cards in the late morning and checked out again in the late afternoon, had pleased him so much that he had almost given them a day rate. The old girl had been as dignified as Queen Mary and almost as old, but a lot friendlier, and there had been an illicit sparkle to her pince-nez, a gamine flourish to her ancient script.
Crowding seventy, both of them, Purcell supposed, so they had every right to be proud. Maybe the kids hadn’t made medical history, but they had certainly given it a terrific jolt.
Mrs. J. C. was in the wrong town though, even if she was an eager beaver in elastic stockings. She belonged in St. Petersburg. By now, Old Bauer had probably ripped the white piqu£ piping off his waistcoat, and felt that anyone over eighteen was too old for him.
T. J. Sturt III was another problem. He had been drinking Metaxas for twenty-four hours straight and was wearing a steady glow like an electric Christmas candle. Western Union reported at ten-minute intervals to complain that 926 was sending improper messages in alphabetical order to every hotel in the United States beginning with the Arizona Biltmore and the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. “Go fluff your duff,” was the burden of his song.
The door to 926 was wide open, and the Third had been wearing only a pink lace Lastex girdle and a small bouquet of yellow Shasta daisies. There was a little schoolteacher from Des Moines, partly dressed, in the cupboard. She was fairly drunk, Purcell supposed, but only mildly hysterical. “I teach Civics,” she kept saying, “and I never saw anything like that in my life,” she repeated pointing to the Third who was acting out
tableaux vivants
in the middle of the room.
Purcell could understand how she felt. He didn’t know that he’d ever seen anything quite like the living pictures himself, and he certainly hadn’t been teaching Civics, either.
With Purcell’s hand under her arm, the little schoolteacher had permitted herself to be led very quietly back to her own room, only repeating at intervals, “But downstairs in the bar, he seemed like such a nice fellow.”
“He is a nice fellow,” Purcell assured her lightly, “and you’re a nice girl, but nice girls and nice fellows should never, never get together in a hotel room with a bottle of Greek brandy.” It was always the nice people who got away with the most outrageous things. Nice people were the white man’s burden. It was easy enough to figure the other kind.
The rest of the day had been routine. A couple of cooks had had an argument with kitchen knives over a soufflé. One had lost the tip of one forefinger, and the other part of an ear and the argument. Every time Purcell felt that he had seen everything, that nothing could surprise him any longer, he was at once proved wrong.
It was an improbable world, where only the most unlikely things happened, a world that made no sense of any kind—a vast nursing home for incurables. Upon reflection though, he didn’t know that he’d change any of it. It was a hell of a life, he supposed, dirty and funny and to no purpose, but it was good enough for him.
Once people started being intelligent, ordering their emotions, they stopped being interesting. You could take psychiatry and social consciousness and international relations and everything that Burgeoned Betterment and put it where the monkey put the nut.
He headed for Phil in the bar. Purcell wondered how long Phil would last. Phil was a good bartender, and all good bartenders died of steady, moderate drinking. It was an occupational disease, the only way they could stand people, be civil to the public. He had never seen Phil drunk, but he didn’t suppose he had ever seen him completely sober either.
Purcell had a drink, and then he and Phil had had one together. He told Phil the high lights of the day and had a steak with an order of French fries. “Ever get married?” he asked Phil suddenly.
“You kiddin’, boss?” Phil answered. “Fifteen years in March, and is my Old Lady a pain, but I got one of the cutest little girls you ever seen. She don’t look nothing like me, my wife neither, and smart! Say, know what she says to me yesterday—Ger-maine, her name is—” Phil enunciated carefully, and Purcell found himself looking at a picture of Ger-maine out of Phil’s wallet. “She gets a daisy on her report card, see, and the Old Lady tells her this is very good. Ex-cellent. Well, the kid thinks a while, see, and finally she pipes up. ‘If I’m so smart, Daddy,’ she says, ‘why aren’t we rich’?
“Six years old,” Phil continued earnestly, “and I’m telling
you the questions that kid can ask!” He shrugged, spread his hands and swallowed. “There isn’t no answer.”
“What do you know about that,” Purcell said and backed hastily away.
Taxicab
“That was good,” Mary said of the hot pastrami and sipped her beer.
“Look, baby,” Purcell said. “I’m not much good at talking but you know what I mean.” Mary nodded gravely. “Let’s go,” he said.
In the cab, they had been in each other’s arms at once, had arrived at the Baldwins’ too soon. “Let’s do it all over again,” Purcell said, so they had gone right back to Doc’s Bar & Grill. They had another beer and looked at each other a lot and sighed, and finally they had repeated the business about the
cab.
“Gee,” Mary said, getting out of the cab, giving herself a little shake. “I haven’t been kissed so much since I was a
baby.”
“This is only the beginning, darling,” Purcell told her. “Only the beginning,” and then he had kissed her again, a real awful one, under a spray of night-blooming jasmine on the Baldwins’ front steps.
The Conference Room
The Conference Room wasn’t really a conference room at all. It was the Salle Chinoise, the opulent setting of such oriental goings-on as cocktail parties, luncheons, Canasta tournaments, bar mitzvahs, communion breakfasts, alumni get-togethers and an occasional illicit affair. The Salle Chinoise was all things to all men and by means of simple legerdemain on the part of the Banquet Department—the folding and unfolding of its lacquer doors, the practiced reshuffling of its chairs and tables and sofas—the place was ready, willing and able to accommodate any odd function at any odd time. But today’s gathering was one of the oddest.
Hurrying out of the bar, Purcell popped a chlorophyll lozenge into his mouth and made up a fairly plausible excuse for tardiness as he ran, two steps at a time, up the Grand Escalier. As he reached out to open the door of the Salle Chinoise, a strong, hairy hand grasped his wrist. It belonged to the assistant lifeguard at the pool.
“Not so fast, buddy,” the lifeguard rumbled.
“Hey, what is this?” Purcell said.
“Security check, Mr. Purcell,” the lifeguard mumbled. “I din’t reckinize you in this-here dark hall.”
“Security
check? What have you been smoking? Now get the hell back out to the pool before the Old Man finds out you’re away from your post. Poodles could be drowning at this very—”
“Sorry, Mr. Purcell. It’s orders. Mr. Wenton tole me so himself. I ain’t supposed to let nobody in unless their name is on this-here list.”
“What is this?”
“Very hush-hush. Big Christmuss Confrunce. Mr. Wenton don’t want no spies to happen in from none of them Palm Beach hotels. Wait, I gotta see is your name on the list. Let’s see. Purcell. Purcell. I don’t—”
“Purcell,” Purcell said. “With a P—as in psychotic.”
“Huh?” the assistant lifeguard said.
“Look,” Purcell said, pointing to his name on the typewritten list. “There it is. Now let me in, for God’s sake. I’m late enough already.”
“Oh, sure thing, Mr. Purcell. I just didn’t seem able to find your name. Mr. Wenton said it was real important not to let in nobody who wasn’t arthurized. It’s very important. You know. Christmuss.”
“Sure, I know,” Purcell said. “And if you’re a good boy maybe Santa Claus will give you a frontal lobotomy.”
“Huh?” the assistant lifeguard said. But Purcell had already opened the door and slipped inside.
If the unreality of the day had not been enough to shake a stronger man than Purcell, the Christmas Conference was. The first thing he saw as he stepped into the Salle Chinoise was three male choristers, sweating profusely beneath greasepaint/beaver hats and mufflers. Purcell opened his mouth to speak, but the carolers had opened theirs first.
“I—” Purcell began. It was too late.
“Deck the halls with boughs of hol-ly, Fa la la la
la,
la la la
la!”
“I’m sorry I’m—” Purcell tried again.
“
‘Tis the season to be jol-ly, Fa la la la
la,
la la la
la!”
Weakly, Purcell sank into the nearest empty chair as the
men sang on.
The Salle Chinoise had been hastily transformed into what was undoubtedly J. Arthur Wenton’s notion of the Board Room at U. S. Steel. A long row of splintery dining tables had been placed up the center of the room and covered with green baize. Up the center of the table in military precision five pitchers of ice water stood at attention, each surrounded by six tumblers. The rest of the table was covered with an array of scratch pads, clip boards, notebooks, sketches, tinsel and tarlatan, and although Purcell wouldn’t swear to it, he
thought
he saw a nylon Santa Claus beard peeping out from under Mr. Wenton’s attaché case.
Seated at the table Purcell noticed the Old Man himself, looking like a cross between Elsa Maxwell and a horned toad. J. Arthur was flanked by the Maitre d’Hôtel, still in his morning coat, and the Banquet Manager, already in his dinner jacket. Behind a pile of mistletoe and holly Purcell caught the sloe eyes of the Greek florist, looking sad and homesick for the humid confines of his shop on the Promenade Floor. His furry eldest son sat next to him nervously fingering a garland of cranberries. The Housekeeper, the Head Gardener, the Engineer and the Electrician sat restively in their rusty-black Best Clothes trying to look as though Board Meetings were a daily occurrence and as though they did not regret the unkind stroke of fate that had brought them from their snug principalities and duchies below stairs into the august presence of the Emperor.
Across the table from him came the discreet jingle and jangle, rattle and clatter of Edythe St. Clair Conyngham’s many gold bracelets, her gold cigarette case, lighter and holder (all plated). “About two-thirds of a bottle,” Purcell said to himself as he caught a glimpse of Mrs. Conyngham’s glazed, slightly bloodshot eyes. “About two-thirds of a bottle last night and three—maybe four or five—quick pick-me-ups today.” With a final roar, the trio came to the end of “Deck the Halls.” Edythe’s head swayed rhythmically and she pulled her slack mouth into a simper of genteel approval.
“Charming,” Mrs. Conyngham said, “rilly charming.”
“Chowmin’,
Edie?” Peggy Furman said in her thick, fake Southern accent. “Why, it’s dowlin’, that’s what it is, honeh.
Dowlin’!”
“Quite so, dear,” Mrs. Conyngham said. “Rilly charming.”
Edythe Conyngham and Peggy Furman, the Social Hostess, hated one another so intensely that they always made a point of conversing a great deal in public, their repartee salted with endearments, peppered with slightly upstaging corrections. Purcell couldn’t for the life of him understand why they disliked one another so much. Conyngham and Furman had many things in common—poverty, pretense, loneliness, frustration and a tendency toward alcoholism that should have made them inseparable. They were both on the make, although the disparity in their ages had rendered them noncompetitive in the matrimonial sweepstakes. But hate they did and in their loathing of one another they became even more nauseatingly gracious and false under public scrutiny.
“Dowlin’,” Furman added, determined to have the last word.
“If I may—” Purcell started.
“Good King Wensez-louse looked out
o
n the Feast of Stee-vun”
the carolers bawled.
Conyngham sat up with a jerk, her blue-lidded eyes popping open catatonically. Then she settled back with a pathetic little clink of bangles and charm bracelets to wait out the
siege of song.
Down the green baize table Purcell noticed Sandy Sands, who was almost as permanent a fixture in the hotel as the Old Man himself. Sandy had run through three wives, six toupees and forty mistresses leading the band in the Fontainebleau Room. The hotel’s supper club had been called the Palm Room, the Surf Room, the Casa Sevilla, the Maisonette Hongroise, the Regency Room and the Embassy Club in past incarnations. Only its pillars and Sandy remained unchanged, and even the pillars were said to be disintegrating under the steady
bump-bump-bump
of Sandy Sands and his Imperial Floridians. Save for an occasional foray down the corridor to the room of his current mistress, Sandy was rarely seen before seven in the evening when, trimly corseted beneath his dinner jacket, he appeared in the rose glory of the spotlight, lean, bronzed and muscular under a bewitching tangle of red-gold ringlets. For thirty years people had been remarking about how youthful Sandy looked for a man of forty. But this afternoon, in the cold light of the Salle Chinoise, Sandy looked every minute of his sixty. His ultraviolet tan reminded Purcell more of hepatitis than sun-drenched beaches. His golden hairpiece rode unsteadily on the crest of his brilliantined side waves, the mesh surrounding its widow’s peak gooey with spirit gum. Sandy had left off his girdle and his contact lenses so that both his eyes and his diaphragm seemed to reach out over the table in helpless supplication. He reached furtively into the pocket of his too-blue cashmere jacket and popped a pill into his mouth. Then he silenced what might have been a Wagnerian belch and settled back into his chair, an expression on his seamed face that made Purcell think of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Sitting beside Sandy was his current soloist and mistress, a shrill doxie with the improbable name of Claire de Lune, who had so far slept with Sandy, the pianist, the percussion man, Purcell, six of the hotel staff, T. J. Sturt, III, and eleven other guests and the season hadn’t really begun. Claire looked tired. She stifled a yawn and gathered her platinum mink stole around her shoulders with a sinuous little shudder. It was only about eighty-five degrees in the room.
Beyond Claire, Purcell saw five men who were foreign to the hotel staff. Could they be guests? Never! They looked faintly familiar but, other than in a police lineup, Purcell couldn’t imagine where he had seen any of them before. Then he remembered. The first man ran a talent agency and was providing the choristers who, even now, were making the rafters ring with “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” The next man ran a company that made large commercial displays for such traditional feasts as Easter, Thanksgiving, the January White Sales and, of course, Christmas. Beside him sat a flinty-eyed Swede who sold sound effects and recording equipment. Next came an entrepreneur in live animals. That was right. There were to be eight real reindeer standing in the artificial snow of the Pleasaunce. And finally a slick little man from Miami who dealt in slightly soiled costumes for masquerades, pageants and amateur theatricals.
With a start, Purcell realized that he, David Underdown Purcell, had been responsible for this conference, this travesty on Christmas. “What have I done?” he asked himself aloud.
“What say, Dave, dear boy?” Mr. Wenton asked.
Purcell looked up startled. The singing had stopped. The room was still.
“Charming,” Mrs. Conyngham said. “Rilly charming.”
“Dowlin’,” Furman offered.
The trio stood nervously about, looking as though they’d give their souls for cold showers and reefers all around.
“Well?” their agent said pregnantly.
“Well, I don’t know,” Mr. Wenton said. “It’s not very original, but. . .”
“Oh, but it’s so charming, Mr. Wenton,” Mrs. Conyngham said, coming suddenly, vivaciously to life. “Like the Christmases at home when I was just a tiny little girl. I remember how the help used to come up to our big veranda and serenade us. And then we always had this rilly enormous Christmas tree lighted only by candles with our footmen—these two
lovable old darkies—stationed beside the tree with—
h
ahahaha—
big, wet sponges tied to the poles in case anything caught
on. . .”
Peggy Furman rolled her eyes dangerously in Mrs. Conyngham’s direction. It was tacitly understood that while their backgrounds were supposed to be equally aristocratic, Mrs. Conyngham’s territory was to be
above
the Mason-Dixon line, Furman’s below.
“Did yoah dahkies really do that ‘way up in New Yoke City, Edie honeh?” Furman asked dangerously. “Ah’d always though yew came from
Yankee
stock.”
“Of course, Peggy darling,” Mrs. Conyngham said velvetly. “But we always spent
Christmas
down on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with the—”
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Wenton said, interrupting Edythe’s girlhood reveries. Ordinarily the Old Man would have sat rapt in a burning building, only too happy to be a part of any conversation that had to do with the haut monde. It was Mrs. Conyngham’s only hold on him. But today he was more than Wenton the Gentleman, he was Wenton the Gentleman Executive. Turning briskly toward Sandy Sands he said, “You’re the musician, Sandy, old man. What do you think?” Sandy Sands sat up straight, fought down another wave of flatulence and moistened his lips. Known for his profanity and his frank appraisal of other musicians—almost as damning as their appraisals of him—he was also notorious for his tact whenever his contract was up for renewal. “Well Jesus, Art,” Sandy began dulcetly. “Course it’s corn. Square as a city block. But what the hell. For Chrissakes, that’s what Chriss-mus is for, isn’t it. A mean so’s a lotta cornballs can sit up and weep over White Chrissmus’ an’ Sanny Claus Is Comin’ to Town’ an’ crap like that. Well, what the hell. . .” He sensed, rather than saw the menacing look in Mr. Wenton’s eye. “Sure, Art, I say that for a coupla days before Chrissmus it’s okay. It’s sorta, well, hell, it’s sorta
quaint.”
“That’s it,” the Old Man said. “It’s quaint. Are you getting all this,
Miss Street?
That’s the feeling I want to get. Quaint. Homey. Just folks—
nice
folks, of course. Nothing too chichi, too Miami. Just a real, old-fashioned, merry. . .”
For the first time Purcell was conscious of Mary Street. She sat nervously at a cramped corner of the table writing furiously in her notebook. How like the Old Man to want every vulgar word, every inane comment recorded for posterity. Purcell wondered if poor little Mary had been required to put down the lyrics to the Christmas carols.
Ah, she was so sweet, so pretty and clean and sweet, the only person in this room—in the whole hotel, practically—who had any notion of what Christmas was all about.
As he thought of Mary he could hear snatches of the conference going on about him.
“An’ then when Desire and Dolores finish their Christmas tango,” Sandy was saying, “all the lights in the Fountain-blow Room go off an’ Claire, here, comes out in this ole-fashion costume and sings ‘Silunt Night’ with a sprig of mistletoe pinned onto her muff.”
“Onto my what?” Claire de Lune said ominously.
“It’s parta yer costume, baby,” Sandy said. “Then there’s this chime effect and all the boys in the band . . .”
Purcell looked again at Mary, his darling girl. He watched the top of her lovely head bent forward as her pencil flew across the pages of her shorthand book. The angel, he thought. My beautiful angel. If I could only catch her eye. Tell her that I. . .
The talk swirled around his head.
“Now, we’ll go over the whole Christmas celebration just once more,” Mr. Wenton was saying. “Now, just as my able assistant, Mr. Purcell, has said, we won’t give them even a hint that we’re planning to do anything about Christmas. It’ll be pure Florida—sun, sand and surf—right up until midnight of December twenty-third. And then, on the
eve
of Christmas Eve, up goes the tree, up go the wreaths, up goes the mistletoe. Out with the Yule log. You’ll have the air conditioning in the lobby turned ‘way up, won’t you, Henderson?” he asked the engineer. “We hit ‘em where they live.
Nothing crass, nothing commercial. A real, old-fashioned merry. . .”