The Desk
Mr. Moxley made old Mr. Tilney nervous, standing there and shifting his eyes around the way he did, and sniffing a little through his nose. Mr. Moxley made Mr. Tilney feel as if he was doing something wrong all the time, even when he wasn’t. He
was
having a little trouble with his sheet; his rooms wouldn’t come out, and he supposed that Moxley knew it, but you’d think that Mr. Moxley would have more consideration for a person than to stand practically over them while a person was trying to get his rooms to come out and a person’s relief hadn’t showed up. Mr. Wenton hisself would have more consideration. Mr. Wenton was a real lovely man, Mr. Tilney thought, a real gentleman, with a real sweet hello, and five dollars extra in his envelope last Christmas.
Mr. Wenton had the artistic temper-mint, and no denying. Look at that clock, if you thought he didn’t. A beautiful thing, egs-
quis
-it, with all that gold and all, real gold too, he’d bet your life, that Mr. Wenton had picked up at old A. J. Fleughler’s auction. That was the artistic temper-mint for you. Little touches that nobody else would of thought of was what gave the hotel its class.
Mr. Tilney wished that he had a nice little business with a person like Mr. Wenton, who would have some consideration for a person. A nice little high-class haberdashy, say, with hand-painted ties and all like that, or a lovely tearoom, nothing but the very best, for people who was willing to pay for the very best. Not that the people at the hotel wasn’t willing enough to pay, but they didn’t have the artistic temper-mint like he and Mr. Wenton.
He could see it now, could Mr. Tilney, with tapers on all the tables and monk’s hoods over all the lights, and the walls would be fishnet with sea horses and starfish and conchs and them scalloped sea jellies that looked like an old-fashioned glass fruit bowl underneath.
It would be very artistic because Mr. Tilney had the artistic temper-mint too, but he had that pain in his head again; his rooms wouldn’t come out and his relief hadn’t showed up.
“Tsk-tsh!”
Mr. Tilney said. “The least a person could do is be on time. Seven and five is twelve and two is twenty,” and the pain in his head grew suddenly until it felt like a great big bleeding heart, and the drops gathered like hot jelly on a spoon and slipped down through him in fierce little slivers of pain.
“They must be something terrible wrong with me,” he said. He didn’t know. He’d never felt like this before. He was tired, he guessed, no time to hisself, and a person’s relief always late because they thought they could get away with it. Fear gripped him. If a person was to get really sick, why it would be as much as their jobs was worth. And then goodbye to the gold flannel sport jacket in Beaver Bros, window and them new brown and white moccasin-type oxfords, not to mention being in debt all over again, maybe even having to go live at his sister Margaret’s, and just when he had thought he was going to look like a regular sport for once, be a credit to Mr. Wenton and the hotel.
Mr. Tilney himself was never late, never absent. That was one thing you could say for him, he thought, a person never had to wait for
him.
He was always there a good hour, hour and a half, before he was due on. But it stood to reason that if a person was sick, they was going to be replaced because naturally they had to be somebody on the Desk.
Thinking of somebody else on the Desk made Mr. Tilney
feel so faint that he dabbed at his forehead with his good, show handkerchief, the one with his initial and the Eau de Cologne. He felt so funny that he figured he couldn’t be bothered getting the mussed one out of his hip pocket. A person liked to make a nice appearance and all like that, but if a person was dead, Mr. Tilney realized suddenly, it didn’t make no difference if he had a fresh pocket handkerchief or not, although Mr. Tilney
did
like a real neat-appearing corpse.
The pain in his head throbbed sluggishly with his heart and Mr. Tilney sighed. Unless he’d made another mistake, he was six dollars out on the tenth floor.
“Them day clerks!”
he said suddenly in a passion. “So careless it’s a mercy they don’t forget their heads. Leave early and get there late, that’s all them young noodles think about. They don’t care if a person works theirself to death or not.
They
can’t even be bothered to relieve a person on time so that they could get their sheet done instead of answering them eternal phones!” He banged his ruler, his freshly sharpened pencil on the marble desk. “Young Pup,” he said savagely. “Eight o’clock! One whole eternal hour late!” It was enough to try a person’s patience, that’s what it was.
The blonde girl who was not Mrs. T. J. Sturt III was very nervous, the arm holding her purse went suddenly limp, but she set herself and tilted her chin. A blonde in a black linen suit ought to be able to get out of pretty nearly anything. She didn’t look like a tramp, she told herself, and thanked God she’d never done anything to her hair.
A man who seemed to be a manager or something surveyed her from the Desk. He wore a knowing scowl, and the blonde girl held her breath as she hurried past him into the pale yellow sunshine. She’d made it. The morning clouds were flamingo pink, and there was still a trace of night-blooming jasmine in the air. Dukemer snorted briefly into the bills she was filing according to room number. “Mrs. T. J. Sturt III, my foot,” she said.
Purcell and Moxley changed shifts with the shortest possible exchange of civilities. “Anything new?” Purcell asked.
“Nothing doing,” Moxley told him. He said nothing about his suspicions of Mrs. T. J. Sturt III. If Moxley got an in with Mr. Wenton on something like this, it was possible that he might do Purcell in, get off the graveyard shift.
The pain in Mr. Tilney’s head swelled again to a crescendo, a roar that reverberated in his ears, dropped a gray veil before his eyes. The pain in his head was a taste like blood in his mouth, a sick wrenching of his entrails.
“You look like hell,” Purcell said. “Go up to 1016 and get some rest, I’ll take the desk. Your reliefs an hour late now.”
“My sheet,” Mr. Tilney faltered.
But Purcell said, “Your sheet, hell,” and put the key to 1016 in his hand. “If there weren’t any mistakes in your sheet, the Old Man would think your job was too easy,” Purcell told him. “Probably dock you. Go get some beauty sleep and put on a fresh hair ribbon. Get the hell out and let the girls in Accounting earn their next permanent.”
He would check the sheet himself, of course, and if he couldn’t find Tilney’s mistake, he’d throw in enough compensating errors to make it come out for the time being. The Old Man liked a fast answer, nothing was deader than yesterday’s House, and what difference did it make? All that he wanted to do was keep the Old Man off until Tilney had a chance to die a natural death.
Poor old Tilney was nine-tenths dead already, he figured. Tilney must have, he didn’t know what, but his face and hands were putty colored and he seemed to know what he was doing even less than he usually did.
Even on his good days old Tilney didn’t have the intelligence of a smart eight-year-old, and Purcell figured that he was as sick as hell now. He was damned if he didn’t think he’d call the house doctor. Mr. Wenton would raise hell of course, if he did it for an employee, but he could explain it to Doc Carling and, if necessary, slip him five of his own. Purcell was annoyed with himself suddenly. Old Tilney wasn’t worth
a good goddamn dead or alive. Hell, he wasn’t even good-hearted, but illogically Purcell felt that even Old Tilney ought not to die meshed in his own mistakes, that he too should have some dignity in death.
1016
Mr. Purcell could be real sweet, Mr. Tilney thought, as he locked 1016 from the inside. Real sweet, even if he was sort of a roughneck. If a person’s language wasn’t nice and refined, Mr. Tilney was inclined to be censorious because Mr. Tilney liked everything nice and refined. He supposed, hanging his coat and trousers neatly over a chair, that he had sort of inherited liking everything refined and artistic from Auntie.
Auntie had had the artistic temper-mint all right, and Auntie had wanted him to have everything real nice, too. “Them children!” he said suddenly again in a passion,
“That Margaret,
breaking a party’s will: saying Auntie was in-com-pe-tent. Undue influence!” He snorted. After a person had give the best years of their life to a party, that Margaret had to step in and ruin everything. A person had hardly even had a chance to stand up for their rights what with a closed hearing and all like that.
And it wasn’t like Auntie hadn’t tried to do the right thing, Mr. Tilney thought, taking out his teeth, creaming his face, shaking out his socks. He looked anxiously through his pain to the top of his head, but his eyes were still blurred. “Them treatments,” he said. “Them treatments. Take a person’s good money, that’s about all them treatments was good for!” He couldn’t see that his hair was no thicker than it had been before.
And Auntie had always said that he had the prettiest hair
she’d ever seen. Poor Auntie, she wouldn’t know him now,
and Mr. Tilney thought of the days when he had been slim
and straight. Mr. Tilney thought of his eyes as they had used
to be, blue and fringed with heavy lashes, of his hair, a silvery gilt, of the vanished glory of his teeth, his coral cheeks. Auntie always said that he was as pretty as a picture, and he
had
always been a real neat-appearing boy, but Mr. Tilney’s head swelled again in a blurred cacophony of sight and sound and color.
Auntie, Mr. Purcell, the gold flannel sport coat, Mr. Wenton hisself, impinged themselves upon his mind, dwarfed but accurate. The pain in his head grew suddenly fiercer, as if a giant hand held it and squeezed out the slivers of pain. He had to get to bed.
That Margaret,
he thought as the pain in his head exploded into a dull roar, a blow shivered through him and his whole left side died and turned cold upon the solid magenta rug.
That Margaret,
Mr. Tilney thought, and did not think again.
711
In his own room Purcell drank, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and sighed. Old Tilney had been found in 1016 deader than Kelsey’s nuts, but everything had been taken care of. It was all over now. The windows had been opened for two hours, the bed changed, the furniture rearranged. There wasn’t a smell of old Tilney left. He could sell 1016 tonight.
Everything had gone off very well too. Dead, old Tilney was so small that he and the bell captain had put the body on a room-service cart, covered it with a tablecloth, and taken it out through the kitchen. There hadn’t been a break in the service. J. Arthur had raised hell this morning when the transcript was late but Purcell supposed that he would be desolated by tomorrow, inaugurate a blanket of roses by popular subscription. A blanket of roses would be a hell of a handy thing for old Tilney to have around in Potter’s Field or the local equivalent.
Purcell felt lousy. He wished that he had time to run over to Miami and watch the unreconstructed Seminoles stalk majestically barefoot, Aztec ruins, through the five and ten. It always amused him to observe their dirty dignity and to remember that the Seminole nation did not recognize the sovereignty of the United States. He liked their attitude.
The sun smiled on the water. The wind soughed sweetly with a gentle susurrus through coconut palm and Spanish pine, and Purcell found himself thinking again of little Mary Street. It was funny how, no matter what he started thinking about lately, he always came back to Mary. She was innately sweet, Purcell told himself again, and there was a sort of golden shimmer to her, yellow high lights in her hair and flesh tones, the amber sparkle of her eyes. Mary was like a yellow rose, she seemed so . . . and Purcell squirmed uneasily in his chair. . .
good.
Why, he would almost bet, he thought with a kind of awe, that Mary was a virgin. Probably the only one over fourteen in the whole goddamned state, he supposed.
Yes, if he were a marrying man, Mary Street would be just what he wanted. It always got him when people were decent, not that he had been bothered much that way lately. A good guy was just a chump, he told himself, but he thought again of what he would do if he were a marrying man. He would send Mary Street the biggest goddamned bunch of flowers in the world, he supposed—but he was interrupted by a tentative knock and then another.
Purcell gave his face a dry wash with his hands, ran his fingers through his hair, and opened the door. It was only Peggy Furman, the Social Hostess. “Hello, honeh,” she said. Furman came in, sat down, and managed to look busy even in repose. If appearance counted for anything, Purcell told himself, Furman was the busiest girl south of where they drew the line. All the guests, except the young unmarried women who were inclined to be uncharitable, felt terribly sorry for Furman because she worked so hard at giving them a good time. Furman was particularly good with middle-aged women, made them feel almost her own age.
It was only coincident that almost all middle-aged women had stalwart sons and husbands and nephews to keep them
company during the season when the music was maddest, the prices highest, the climate coldest and rainiest.
Purcell mixed a stiff drink for Furman, another for himself. “You’re all right, kid,” he said thickly, even if he didn’t believe it, and then they had been on the bed. But he found himself still thinking of Mary.
This was a hell of a note. He supposed maybe it was love, but it was ridiculous not to be able to enjoy an easy, legitimate lay. They were all alike, he assured himself. Ben Franklin was right. A pillow slip covered the difference.
But they weren’t all alike. Furman, he realized, bored him. She was a fair hostess but she was a lousy lay. It was possible, of course, that Furman wasn’t any more interested than he was, was only trying to hold her job, give him his money’s worth.
Still, if it had been Mary, he wouldn’t have been bored. He would have been content just to hold her hand, touch her hair. If Julie Templar herself came into the room, he wouldn’t even look up. Any farther than her knees, he supposed. Purcell tried to think of some plausible way of getting rid of Furman without hurting her feelings. So he told her finally that she was tired, all in, done out. He gave her the rest of the day off, peeled a five off a slim roll, and told her to go buy herself the biggest chocolate soda in town.
By degrees, Furman’s musky
Prenez Moi
was displaced by the odors of the pantry. Purcell sighed and wished that some enterprising
parfumeur
would come out with a flat-footed
Fornication. Forniquer. Fornicateur. Fornicatrice.
The French are a wonderful little people fond of light wines and dancing.
He opened a newspaper.
Buzzard in Chicago
the banner headline read, but he had heard that one before. The Psychic Reader, the Colonic Irrigation, the Church of Christ, Scientist, offered health, knowledge and power in fourteen-point caps to every lonely heart. Everybody wanted something for nothing. Even with three million dollars, old man Goodenow in 709-10 had to parlay four cups of coffee out of one Club Breakfast.
Mary wasn’t like that though, he told himself. She was different, not on the make at all. He wondered for a little why she was in Florida. Whatever it was, though, it was legitimate, he was sure of that.
Purcell wished that he had a date with Mary tonight. He would take her to the movies, buy her a milkshake. He might even put his arm around her. He was a hell of a fellow, he was. Christ, he’d be carrying her books home next.
He put on a fresh shirt, combed his hair with water for his Christmas conference with J. Arthur. He wanted to call Mary, but his certainty that the operator would be listening in made him sheepish and hesitant.
He’d try to catch her on her way out. Keep it casual. Between five and five-fifteen, he told himself. Just now, however, the Madam was paramount. The timekeeper had taken on a new pantrywoman. She was a little old, but she knew one end of a fish fork from the other and how to pickle artichoke hearts.
Purcell was worried about one of the elevator boys, too, not that there was much choice. George was over twenty-one and an experienced operator, but somehow George’s eyes made Purcell uneasy. Sometime, with a full cab, he supposed, and about eleven o’clock at night, George would decide that he was Jesus Christ and try to make the elevator go sideways. He had seen eyes like that before.
Oh well, what the hell. He would see J. Arthur, get it over with, and then he would try to catch Mary. His heart skipped and tripped awkwardly like a little boy at dancing school.
Yes, damn it, he supposed it was love. This would change everything and he had been fairly content with his life before. Nothing like this had happened to him since, let’s see, 1950. There hadn’t been anybody since Denise, and he cringed a little. Denise could still hurt.
Love was a hell of a lot more like a chancre than it was
like a red, red rose, this Burns to the contrary. He was, Purcell
admitted to himself, nuts about Mary Street. The prospect
appalled him. He’d be better off with tick fever, Purcell’s
common sense assured him as he straightened his tie for the last time and headed for the Madam and the elevator.