801-2-3-4
In the living room of one of the large suites on the eighth floor, Gracia and Alicia Mellott eyed one another coldly over a can of crabmeat. Chiang had refused it, and both Gracia and Alicia felt that the other was at fault. Both Gracia and Alicia respected Chiang above themselves, honored his royal Siamese blood, enjoyed their association on terms almost of equality with an aristocrat. Chiang sniffed delicately, licked his immaculate forepaws, and stalked away.
They remembered too well their own escutcheon,
that label.
Mellott’s Mulled Malt the label said from a green
and gule shield, a bottle of Mellott’s ale rampant on an argent field. It was actually a good label; it stood for
More, like before,
but Alicia and Gracia had spent their lives trying to get away from it, were embarrassed by it, apologized for it, even though they owed all they had, their comfortable amenities and annuities, even Chiang himself, to Mellott’s.
Chiang was their life, their darling. He was ten years old and as fat as lobster and fancy white tuna could make him. He was old and fat, but he was still their baby. His intestinal upsets were the occasion for their complete hysteria. When Chiang was ill, Alicia cooked chicken livers in butter over a grill on the grand piano. She sometimes put a towel under the grill, but it was politic to keep a large vase of flowers on that end of the piano. Hotel managers were barbarians; they didn’t seem to care about Chiang, if he was happy or not. Their old furniture, that was all they cared about!
Gracia stroked Chiang, ran her hand lovingly along the knot in his tail as he stalked past. “He wud a mudder’s baby,” she said. Gracia was the elder and she had certain rights and privileges for that reason. She permitted Alicia to cook chicken livers for Chiang, but it was an act of deliberate bounty. Gracia was just, though, even to herself. When Chiang missed his sand pan, made a mess in the bathroom, Gracia stood on her seniority. “A doot, booful darling,” Gracia would say happily from her hands and knees. “A poor,
sick baby boy.”
He was so beautiful, Gracia told herself, transcending with his garnet eyes the ephemera of sex. And he was so sweet when his food pleased him, his emasculated rumble echoing through the big rooms. Privately, Gracia admitted to herself that Chiang preferred her to Alicia. The way he rubbed his back against
her
leg. The way he huddled, mewing, against
her
for protection when a room-service boy entered the room could hardly be misinterpreted. It was all so plain that sometimes she felt a little sorry for Alicia.
She fondled the deep scratches on her forearm tenderly, as a martyr might touch his wounds or a happy bride her bruised lips. “He wud a mudder’s booful boy,” she said. “See
what a ole mudder’s boy do to he mudder,” she patronized Alicia, exhibiting a recent gash with proud satisfaction.
Alicia hardly had a mark on her!
“He wud a baddy boy,” she admonished Chiang with a reproving forefinger.
Chiang circled the room, pausing occasionally to sharpen his claws on petit-point chairs. “Come to he mudder,” she said. “A big, booful ole baby boy come to he mudder,” she purred. Chiang sprang, knocking over a lamp, and with a sheathed paw took little practice swings at the spotted breast of Gracia’s dressing gown.
“I shink at shing what I always do shink about he,” she crooned. “I shink he wud a booflat. I shink he wud nicest most booful ole baby boy what I ever did see in whole nassy ole world.” Chiang acknowledged these blandishments. “I shink he wud a sweet ole babykins what he mudder could eat up,” Gracia said as she buried her face in his soft underbody, reveling in the sudden, swift slice of his claws, giving him a scarred thumb to chew.
“Do you suppose we could get him to eat some salmon?” Alicia interjected anxiously. The sisters discussed it at length in conspiratorial whispers, friends again. It was true that Chiang sometimes ate salmon when he wouldn’t eat anything else. It was his one common taste, his one low habit. They regretted it, tempted him with smoked turkey, with boned chicken, with snaky little curls of anchovy, but Chiang was adamant. He sometimes preferred salmon. They accepted it between themselves as they had, perforce, accepted the Mellott label and other scapegrace family derelictions but they wouldn’t admit it, except to each other.
“I could order a salmon sandwich,” Alicia said tentatively, anxiously. “No one would know. We could throw the bread to the birds. We could flush it down . . .”
Gracia considered. “Did a mudder’s baby what she did love want nassy ole salmon samwich?” she asked. The answer, to her ears, was in the affirmative. Chiang mewed plaintively and Alicia crossed the room with an air of great resolution to the phone.
“This is Miss Mellott in 801-2-3 and 4,” she told Room Service. “Send me a salmon sandwich. No pickle,” she added severely. “Did a mudder’s baby want nassy ole salmon sam-wich?” she asked Chiang indulgently. She seized the cat jealously from Gracia and draped him, clawing and spitting, around her neck. “I shink he wud a dreat big booful baby-doll cat-boy,” she chanted, quite mad in the benison of
Gracia’s approval.
“Alicia!”
Gracia said with considerable dignity. “I’m the one who says
shink
to Chiang.” There was an uncomfortable silence and Chiang stole away from Alicia, posted himself by
the door.
The sisters had hot words and Alicia was in the bathroom in tears when the room-service boy knocked. He wheeled the cart in, removed the cover from the sandwich with a flourish, and waited for his tip. Gracia couldn’t find her purse.
It was certainly funny the way Alicia disappeared when there was tipping to be done.
“Pay waiter ten cents, Gracia P. Mellott,” she wrote in a small, firm hand far down at the bottom on
the waiter’s stub.
Miz Dukemer would give him fits, Ernie figured unhappily, havink to copy all that stuff off of the check and write him an OK. He hated to put Miz Dukemer to exter trouble, but he just couldn’t ask old Miz Gracie Mellott to sign the check again, farther up. She was a Tartar, he told himself,
and no mistake.
Chiang’s fear, his hatred of the uncastrated male, prompted him to bolt. He prowled the corridor, aloofly investigating this and that distraction. An open door intrigued him.
“Here, kitty-kitty-kitty—” little Jane Jeremy called. Chiang advanced, feinted, sprang, permitted himself a savage nibble of her outstretched palm, inflicted a long, red gash on little
Jane’s arm.
“He wud a mudder’s baby!” Miss Gracia cried, entering the room breathlessly, her face working as she gathered Chiang up into her arms. “He wud a baddy boy what he mudder did love.
“Scat!” she said to the child.
The Lobby
Mr. Mather had been sitting in the lobby waiting for the dining room to open at eight, when Dukemer came in, and he had thought then that she was a very pretty girl. The women that he saw all about him in the hotel had frightened him. Their skins were coarse. It had seemed to Mr. Mather that there was something wrong with the color of their hair, and their eyes had reminded him of Violet.
He was particularly afraid of the Social Hostess, Miss Furman. He ignored the invitation in her flecked, hazel eyes, rejected politely but resolutely, her efforts to drag him off on beach parties and bus rides and fishing cruises. Mr. Mather was lonely, of course, but he was wary of Miss Furman’s wealthy widows, her gay divorcees, her youngish bachelor girls. He was particularly wary of Miss Furman. He was forty-seven, he told himself, not a child in a paa-a-k to be taken here and there and returned by Nurse at stated intervals. Not at all.
He liked, on the contrary, Dukemer’s crisp bearing as she rounded the cigar stand, found her studied incivility as she gave change for five wholly admirable. She looked tired, he told himself, but she looked nice, too, and Mr. Mather for all that he was short and portly, for all his long submission to Violet’s stern embrace and his duties as Treasurer, had had his own rosy daydreams of gaiety and good fun with a nice girl.
It was, really, why he had come to Florida, although he had been able to present a reasonable show of business necessity. Mr. Mather wanted one last, delicious fling before he settled back for the rest of a gray lifetime, and in just a few years he might be too late. It might already be too late. The Tartar hordes were swarming again on their shaggy ponies and there was not even a Pax Romana to keep the peace. He would go down unrealized with Violet and civilization.
Oh, he was fond enough of Violet and Violetta. But Violet
was a little trying at her time of life; not that it was her fault, but it was hard on him. And Violetta would be a nice enough girl if she weren’t, quite so consciously, an Artiste.
The Artiste part, though, had been Violet’s doing. Violet had determined, before Violetta had been conceived, before he and Violet had been so much as properly married, that she would have a beautiful daughter with golden hair, and that the daughter would be a great virtuosa on the sackbut and the viola.
Mr. Mather had never understood just how Violet had hit on the great virtuosa part unless it was because it was so unreasonable. Neither he nor Violet had any taste or talent for music, but that had only been a fillip to Violet’s noisy determination. Even when Violetta arrived at last, Violet had not been daunted. Violetta had been a colicky baby and, in spite of Mr. Mather’s natural affection for her, an unprepossessing child, with lank brown hair and gray, uneven teeth that had had a distressing tendency to decay.
But Violet had changed all that, and there Mr. Mather could only feel an uneasy admiration for her. He had paid the bills, of course, but it was Violet who had made Violetta into a great beauty as well as a great virtuosa.
Mr. Mather hadn’t minded Violet’s bills, the fantasy of Violetta or her periods of unreason, for Violet had, after all, been a Peabody, and the Peabodys, as everyone in Waltham knew, had always been a little queer. Violet was congenitally entitled to certain eccentricities. But on the other hand, Mr. Mather had never quite got over his surprise at finding himself married to Violet in the first place, when he had at the time been, really, almost in love with a pretty little Irish girl from South Boston. He had been quite mad about her when he had suddenly found himself engaged to Violet who, even in a virgin state, already contemplated Violetta.
The sackbut and the viola were forgotten now. They had been abandoned in a corner of the drawing room when it had been discovered that Violetta had an acceptable coloratura, and now Violetta’s teeth were white and gleaming and her rippling hair was as provocatively molten as her golden voice.
Mr. Mather admired Violetta, but he would have preferred, in a daughter, something a little more comfortable.
Mr. Mather ate breakfasts at the hotel because his ulcer was hungry in the early morning, when iceboxes were locked and pantries bolted against transgressors. Bismuth tablets were all very well, but Mr. Mather’s ulcer wanted carrot juice and hot milk and zwieback, and he broke his fast, frugally but in state, in a corner of the dining room near the dumbwaiter.
At noon and in the evening Mr. Mather frequented the Oasis Cafeteria, where were served the watery soups, the thin stews fortified by onion and great chunks of potato that made a little gravy go a long way, the innocuous salads of cottage cheese and gelatine, the bland custard puddings, to which almost a lifetime of Violet’s cooking had accustomed him. It had been the alarm clock all over again.
The Oasis was deservedly popular with any number of people who had grown gray on bad cooking. They declared that there was no place quite like it, that it was just like home. And so it was. There were also large signs that read No Tipping, Please, so that it was at once possible to gratify a cordial attitude to the lower orders with conversation and cheery hellos, while maintaining the reasonable tenets of thrift that they had digested with their first bread puddings.
None of it had been very jolly, and Mr. Mather was essentially a jolly little man who liked a joke as often as possible and had an inordinate appetite for puns and limericks. He had brought with him from Waltham a large black silk umbrella with a silver-ringed handle and copies of Emerson and Plato and Lowell for rainy days. It had rained just once, in a sort of wild, warm hurry that made Emerson and Lowell and Plato seem almost as silly to Mr. Mather as his black silk umbrella.
Mr. Mather bought paper-backed novels and mystery thrillers at the cigar stand then, but he had been reading, he told himself, all his life and Mrs. Dukemer came to occupy a larger and larger place in his imagination. In his own way, Mr. Mather was a snob and it gratified him to see that
Dukemer was careless with great names and cordial to bus boys. Mr. Mather carried Dukemer with him in his heart, dreamed of her at night, regarded her image steadfastly at the Oasis Cafeteria, saw her face, not tired but smiling, in mashed turnips and beet greens and codfish cakes, caught briefly the arrogant little tilt to her nose in parsnip and rutabaga, meat loaf and fruited rice pudding.
Mr. Mather’s ulcer became hungrier and hungrier until even double lamb chops and baked Idaho potato left him with a gnawing, internal restlessness that communicated itself to his ulcer. Dukemer’s sleek head in her gilded cage was scourge and balm, and Mr. Mather found himself, too often for his dignity, at the Desk asking for mail.
As for his mail, there was so little of it that he was almost reduced to the extremity of writing letters to himself: and when he got it, it was dull enough—bills forwarded from the office, and occasional stately programs of recitals in which Violetta figured prominently.
Yes, he could have put up with Violet and Violetta and the habitual Peabody state of mind if Violet had not turned Theosophist. The Mathers had been Unitarians, of course, but he might have accepted Annie Besant or an occasional Mahatma. A constant procession of gurus, though, reaching their climacteric in Mumser Lai, had been too much for him. Mr. Mather felt that gurus, like Madam Blavatsky, were emotionally unstable, queer things from the wrong side of Queer Street. Gurus were infra-dig.
Mr. Mather would certainly have sent himself telegrams saying
Meet me Philadelphia (stop) Urgent. P.
or
Market rising await confirm your order. Markheim
, and gone decently back to Waltham if Dukemer had not decided suddenly to smile at him. It had a warm, this-is-between-you-and-me quality to it, and Mr. Mather had been so elated that he had asked her to dinner. When she had refused, Mr. Mather had been so dejected that he had coughed behind his hand, bowed, and said “Not at all.” He had said something about a chocolate frosted then, had coughed and bowed as before and said “Not at all.”
Dukemer was hungry, her meal had been bad to start and cold when she got to it, she would have settled for a beer and bed, but there was something about Mr. Mather’s round red face, his flat
a,
his blue and white polka dot tie, his neat blue and white seersucker suit, a little too small for him as if it had been washed oftener than was strictly salutary to seersucker, that had undone her.
When she had balanced the sheet and gone off at last, Dukemer had found Mr. Mather pacing shamefacedly, waiting for her at the very entrance to the hotel.
“Hi,” she said.
Mr. Mather bowed and coughed and made an uncomfortable noise in his throat.
“Will you really buy me a chocolate frosted?” she asked.
“Delighted,” Mr. Mather said. “Unexpected ah-honor. This-ah, this fel-low,” he began, “with whom you have ah-a dinner engagement. Very lucky,” he went on. “Very lucky ah-fel-low.”
“Don’t be silly,” Dukemer said. “You belong in a glass case. I always say no. About a million guys ask me to dinner. Are we really going to have a chocolate frosted?” she persisted.
“To be ah-sure.” Mr. Mather whistled a few sharp bars in E flat. “Quite ah-so.”
He had bowed and coughed and they had gone along together sedately until suddenly the whole conception of Mr. Mather’s waylaying a cashier and of Dukemer walking out for a chocolate frosted had become so immediately ridiculous that they had been obliged to stop occasionally to laugh. They had continued to laugh at the milk bar, tasting in the chocolate frosteds the unlikely flavor of Mr. Mather’s turpitude.
Mr. Mather found Miss Dukemer’s stories about the hotel droll, really very droll: and his ulcer, his association with the firm of Finney, Winney, Goldbeck and Chotek, Violet and Violetta, the gurus, the Oasis Cafeteria and the alarm clock became unreasonable and a little hilarious with Miss Dukemer beside him, her legs wrapped around a stool and the corners of her mouth curled in a queer little satisfied half-smile.
“I was starved,” Dukemer said, and found herself telling Mr. Mather about Room Service. “. . . a soft-boiled egg and a pitcher of maple syrup and four cups and saucers. In case someone should drop in.” She had gone on then and told him about the bartender the Old Man had hired for the Desk because he’d had hotel experience. “. . . he checked them out all morning as fast as I could check them in, and then he went out to lunch and never came back.” 809-10 had been sold three times between 11:00 and 11:15. “Who’s been sleeping in
my
bed?” Dukemer piped in a squeaky treble.
Mr. Mather was surprised to hear a sprightly basso reply
“Goldilocks!”
“Goldilocks is an extra,” Dukemer pointed out. “Probably touched up, too. You’d better have a nice middle-aged couple, white, gentile.”
“No, thank you,” Mr. Mather said. “I, ah-damn it,
am
a
middle-aged couple.”
She told him about the Mellotts then and Chiang’s sterling silver sand pan, the Old Man, Maggie Alexandroff and the De Burke Cabochon. The genuine Drop of Blood, she said, was in the vault where it belonged.
They had drifted up the avenue then, stopped in at Doc’s Bar and Grill for a small beer, another and then another, and Mr. Mather was conscious of a profound sense of well-being. His ulcer had stopped hurting quite a long time ago, perhaps in the milk bar. The absence of pain and the small beers and the presence of Mrs. Dukemer were so stimulating that he had agreed at once when Dukemer had said dreamily that it would be fun to go wading, wouldn’t it?
They had had another and then another, and then Mr. Mather had actually found himself wading in a sort of delightful trance state, with the surf breaking coldly, but very agreeably, against his bare feet, and Mrs. Dukemer was delicious, the wind from the water blowing her sleek hair into curly little tendrils around her face and whipping her skirts about her slim, brown legs.
“Lovely,” Mr. Mather said of nothing in particular. “Lovely, lovely, lovely!”
“I’ve wanted to go wading since I was ten years old,” Dukemer told him seriously, “and now I
am
wading.”
“Lovely, lovely, lovely,” Mr. Mather said again.
“I really
am
wading,” Dukemer reiterated to her private gods.
Mr. Mather whistled tunelessly. The garish seascape, the small beers and Mrs. Dukemer’s lifted skirts were one in sudden content in Mr. Mather. “Lovely, lovely,” he said.
He hadn’t felt ridiculous even when he was putting on his socks. He had got some sand in his shoe, but Mrs. Dukemer only said that that meant that he would be coming back to Florida—Chamber of Commerce plug.
They had progressed then, hand in hand, from bar to bar, had found themselves quite accidentally at El Diablo and had wandered into a deserted alfresco dining room, to which the music of the orchestra penetrated in a sort of seminal whisper.
They ordered more drinks then under a galaxy of extraordinary stars, and it had seemed to Mr. Mather that he remained stationary, while people and places and events whirled up to and away from him. He was still holding Mrs. Dukemer’s hand, and then he had been eating something rich and delicious with faint undercurrents of cheese and thyme and onion and peppers and tomato.
And afterwards they ordered coffee and stingers, although Mr. Mather had proposed Postum. Mrs. Dukemer had been right, of course, and his ulcer purred with pleasure. Mr. Mather’s person seemed to expand; he had never, certainly, felt like this before. It is even possible that Plato, who was, after all, a good fellow, might have concurred in all this, for Mr. Mather had at last achieved
kálpós,
the unique moment of proper measure, in which there is neither too little nor too much.
They rose then, and although Mr. Mather had put his arm briefly around Dukemer’s waist in the position of the dance, he had whirled off suddenly, alone. An absurd moon had been looking down on them like a king orange, there was a waiter with sad eyes and bad feet lurking in an area-way, and it had seemed to Mr. Mather that their formal, impersonal embrace was somehow compromising to Mrs. Dukemer. “Infra dig,” he murmured as they rotated, facing one another gravely. He shook his shoulders. He appeared, at times, almost to rhumba.