The Rose Garden Page 16

  “How’s my girl?” he shouted, as though they were miles apart. His voice was hard in the emptiness of the house. He had been drinking, she could hear it in his voice, but she would say nothing about it this time. He threw his head back and stretched his arms wide, clowning in his unaccustomed happiness, but she was not touched by his emotion. She stared down at him in astonishment and fear.

  “What’s the matter?” he shouted, throwing himself down on his arms on the banisters. “Were you afraid I wasn’t going to come? Were you afraid I might leave you at the church? You can get that idea out of your head. You’re not getting away from me that easy.”

  She wanted to scream at him that he was beneath her, and that she despised him, and that she was not bound to him yet and never would be bound to him, but instead she spoke civilly, saying that she would be ready in a minute, and warning him not to come up into the room, because her wedding dress was hanging there and she didn’t want him to see it ahead of time, for fear of bringing bad luck on the two of them.

  The Holy Terror

  She was the ladies’-room lady in the sedate Royal Hotel in Dublin. Mary Ramsay, rough-voiced, rough-handed, rough-mannered in every way. Her tongue would take the skin off you, they said in the hotel. They were all afraid of her.

  In the ladies’ room, if she happened to turn her back on you (maybe to get a towel, or the coat brush) you would see how that great swollen rump of hers rolled and heaved across the floor. She was tormented with arthritis—legs, arms, everywhere. It pained her to stand, and it pained her to sit down, and when she was still for any length of time the stiffness forced her to get up and move about. Her loose men’s slippers, slit at the sides for further comfort, left her flat-footed; and then the great big legs began; all wrapped in black wool stockings, they pressed up under the skirts and out of sight into unimaginable depths and darkness of folded, petted flesh. She was well fed, that one.

  It was a miracle, they all said later, how she lasted so long at the hotel, especially in that job, where you usually look to see someone neat and tidy, even if she isn’t so young. But on the day the blow fell, everything in the ladies’ room was as it had been for twenty years, which was the length of time Mary Ramsay had been queening it there. She had been with the hotel for thirty-seven years, doing one thing or another. There was no denying the fact that she had given her life to the place.

  She had a shabby, low-seated bamboo chair set in beside a screen in the corner of the outer room, where the mirrors and dressing tables were. Sitting in that chair, with one cushion under her and one at her back, she had a full view of everything that went on, and yet she was screened from the door. There she sat the better part of the time, and there she took her meals, too, between the rush hours, from a tray on the table beside her.

  She had collected privileges with her years of service. She still had her own little comfortable room on the top floor, although most of the hotel employees had to board out, with things as crowded as they were. That room of hers contained everything she owned, but she had money in the bank. She delighted in saving, and the tips mounted up.

  In her bedroom she slept, and conferred there occasionally with her crony Mrs. Bailey, the oldest switchboard operator. The rest of the time, from ten in the morning until ten at night, she sat down among the mirrors and washbasins of the ladies’ room. She seldom if ever took her day off. The ladies’ room was her theater and her kingdom. She hated to miss a minute there. The power she had.

  Her thick gray hair was done up in a bird’s nest on her head, and underneath, those bland mean eyes of hers looked you through and through. As you faced the mirror, combing and powdering, she would come to stand near you, watching every move. She had the right to be there, in fact it was her duty. There was no getting away from her. There she stood, one hand on the back of a chair, perhaps, the other in her apron pocket, where it chewed the day’s tips. Her conversation was personal and uncharitable. She was all eyes and ears. She enjoyed this daily vigil. She took a merciless pleasure in watching women as they passed before her in their most female and desperate and comical predicaments. She said often and often, “I can price anyone,” and her heavy, derisive glance scoured you up and down.

  To a woman like that who is pleasant you give a tip. Since Mary was so unpleasant, you gave her twice that amount, and left apologetically, with her sardonic gaze burning a spot on your neck. Of course she knew who to be nice to. The more important guests, and the Americans, rejoiced in her favor. With the passing of the years, she had acquired a sort of name for herself. She could hardly fail to. Her rudeness passed for independence, and even for wit. Women smiled ingratiatingly at her contemptuous face in the mirror and then turned to smile again and extend their hands gratefully for a towel. They inquired about her health and asked her advice about one thing and another. This was especially true of American visitors, who made her almost famous as an Irish character. She was even mentioned in some American lady’s newspaper column as a “real Dublin character, possessed of dry Irish wit.”

  They courted her and quoted her and brought her lipsticks and nylons. She hoarded these gifts, which were of no use to her, and bribed the hotel maids to do little odd jobs for her. There is no telling what she might have done, if she had been possessed of more brain or of more ambition. But the ladies’ room satisfied her and suited her. Her dislike of the women she served possessed her completely, and she watched their posturing with a hard, avid pleasure. Her curiosity about the secrets of their dress never ended, as her eye pondered up and down. Nothing escaped her. One of the bolder hotel maids, a malicious, observant thing herself, said one time that she thought there was a man under Mary Ramsay’s skirts, she was that queer.

  It was well said, and nothing escaped her, and she forgot nothing. The things she heard (and the things she guessed at) washed about forever in her sour, secretive mind. She bore in her heart a long, directionless grudge, a ravenous grudge. The church, she knew, was on her side, for did it not forbid and condemn all vanity and the sins of the flesh?

  Those tray meals were a great thing in her life. She fed herself with appetite and liked to feel her mouth full of food. The appetite she had had from a child, and had never had reason or necessity to stint it. Stout was her drink.

  Her breakfast she used to have alone, after all the others had finished, since her duties started late in the morning. She had a snack—a glass of milk or a cup of cocoa—during the course of the morning. During the slowest hour of the afternoon she had a lunch tray. Tea came later, and supper last of all. Before going to bed she had a little something. What bit of good will she had, she spent on her food. She felt solicitous and kind and tender toward the heaped-up food, before she set on it, to devour it. She ate very quickly, and the tray was usually whisked in and out within twenty minutes or less. She hated to be disturbed with her tray.

  The others at the hotel were afraid of her and of her petty, inescapable revenges. They thought she got away with a lot. She and her friend Mrs. Bailey at the switchboard had a corner on all the gossip in the place. Placed as they were at two strategic points for gathering information, they knew everything that went on. If you kept on the right side of them, you might be in the know too. Miss Ramsay also maintained a grim companionship with the chief doorman, who had come to work at the hotel the same year as herself.

  The Royal was a gracious, comfortable, old-fashioned hotel that had started to go down and was now flourishing again with the big tourist trade. Near the newsstand, not far from the switchboard, at the back of a glass showcase filled with linen tablecloths and lace collars and poplin ties, the entrance to the ladies’ room was hidden, and there Mary Ramsay lurked in the deeps of her bamboo chair, renewing her contempt for life both in and out of her kingdom. At the same time, or at a similar time, her archenemy, Miss Williams, the new assistant manager, was nerving herself to take a bold step.

  Miss Williams, from Belfast, had an economical little body, a strong undaunted stomach, a
nd a very thin nose, shaped like the blade of a scythe. She ate very little and slept only an hour or so at a time, but she walked a great deal. She had been at the Royal only six weeks—having been brought in to pull it together before the summer season—but they said that she had already walked around the hotel more often than any other living soul. When she walked she hurried, never without reason, but if she had anything to say she said it standing still.

  Everything was of enormous importance to her. To her, the hotel was a large engine, and she inspected its workings tirelessly. She loved order. She liked the hotel best at night, when all the bedroom doors were closed tight, the lounge empty, the newsstand shuttered, and the dining-room tables laid for breakfast. It would have given her great satisfaction to go from room to room straightening the guests out in their beds, like knives and forks. She often played with this notion before dropping off to sleep, starting with the big suite on the second floor and working up bed by bed to the top of the building, where the image of Mary Ramsay’s humped huddling and harsh snoring drove all order and patience from her mind. Then the ladies’ room would rise up before her, with that creaky bamboo chair, those trays of food, the smeared mirrors, and above all that garrulous, greedy heap of a woman.

  For six weeks she plotted. Mr. Sims, the manager, told her very plainly that he washed his hands of the whole thing. Miss Williams smiled and primly said to leave it all to her. Suddenly one morning, on her way to the dining room, she wheeled around and walked in the opposite direction, in search of her prey. The prey was sitting in state, looking over the morning death notices and sucking sweet tepid cocoa out of a cup. She rolled a menacing eye toward the intruder, till she saw who it was.

  “It’s a lovely morning, Mary,” said Miss Williams in her rapid whirring northern accent.

  She stepped quickly over to the nearest window and threw it up as far as it would go. She had great strength in those thin little arms of hers. By the time she turned back, the cocoa cup was in its saucer among the wet biscuit crumbs and the newspaper had vanished behind a cushion. Mary lumbered over to the washbasins, where she snatched up two used hand towels, bundled them together, and began to wipe over the mirror.

  “Take your eye off this place for a minute,” she said, rubbing round and round, “and it gets to be a pigsty. Some of the ones that come in here, you’d think they’d never been in a decent place in their lives. D’you know that, Miss Williams? You feel like saying to them, ‘Where have you been accustomed to living, I’d like to know?’ And the airs they put on.”

  Miss Williams pressed her two little lips tightly together and stretched them slightly, producing a disagreeable smiling effect. She put her head a little to one side and her heels together and said nothing. She was a great believer in giving people enough rope to hang themselves, so she kept still now while Mary rambled along from one complaint to the next. Mary was relieved. She expanded as she talked. She had never seen Miss Williams in a chatty sort of mood until now. The soap cupboard was reflected in the mirror, and Miss Williams methodically counted the bars and boxes, while Mary talked herself out of a job.

  Miss Williams finished counting. She exhaled and looked Mary in the eye.

  “You have a lot of work here for one person, Mary,” she observed. Mary’s head was still swimming pleasantly with a wash of grievances. There was her health, the bad conduct of the public, and the negligence of the rest of the staff. Every time she paused for breath something new floated to the surface of her mind and kept her talking. She took Miss William’s remarks to be merely a polite interpolation.

  “Ah, sure I manage the best I can,” she said with a deprecating fall to her voice. “I’d work till I’d drop. That’s the sort I am. I know we’re shorthanded and for the sake of the hotel’s good name I’d keep going day and night, if I had to. No matter what—”

  “We’re not shorthanded at all, Mary,” said Miss Williams, sweetly.

  Mary gaped at her.

  “Sure and we are, then, Miss Williams. They can’t get the people. Sure we all know that.”

  “You’ve been misinformed, Mary. Any shortage that may have existed is gone, and there’s no need for you to continue working yourself to death as you have been. It seems to me, and Mr. Sims is in full agreement with me, by the way, that there’s work here, more than enough, for two pairs of hands.”

  Mary turned from the mirror with a face full of truculent suspicion. Miss Williams smiled at her, disclosing a perfect set of tiny false teeth, seed pearls, as alike and as dainty as peas in a pod. The pod was Miss Williams’s smile, her suave, ready smile of annihilation.

  She continued, “In the six weeks that I’ve been here, I’ve been very much aware of your long hours, and of all that you do, Mary. This morning I had a talk with Mr. Sims about it. As a matter of fact, Mr. Sims and I have discussed you many times.”

  Mary listened in fascinated silence.

  “We’ve decided that you simply have to rest, Mary. That’s all there is to it. It’s absurd, all these long hours, every day of the week, week in, week out, year in, year out. So beginning on Monday, you’ll divide your time with Mona Casey. And you’ll take your full day off, Mary, and no ifs or buts.”

  “I don’t want that young strap in here with me, getting under my feet, annoying the people,” said Mary, with knots in her tongue. “Mr. Sims knows that, so he does.”

  “Mr. Sims is well aware of how you feel, Mary. He knows you don’t want anybody in here with you, and I know you don’t want anybody, but you’re going to have somebody whether you like it or not. For your own sake, Mary. Now you’ve got to be reasonable about this. You aren’t as young as you once were, Mary. None of us are.”

  That knocked the wind out of her, reflected Miss Williams, without regret. The direct approach, she thought, and this observation skimmed like a sweet bird across the sea of her composure.

  “Mona, is it,” said the stunned Mary. “That one.”

  And not even bothering to say pardon to Miss Williams, she made her way across the floor and dropped into her chair. When she began to come to herself a little, Miss Williams had gone. She was sitting alone in a rage. Her eyes wandered in disbelief, and she rocked slightly in agitation. In her cup, the cocoa had settled down into a dark puddle. It looked hard. Maybe the cold air from the window has frozen it, she thought, in a separate burst of pettishness, feeling the draft on her back. She dipped in a finger and it came away stained and sugary. She stuck the finger mechanically into her mouth, and just at that moment there was Miss Williams again, cool as a cucumber, nice as you please, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

  “Another thing, Mary,” she said smooth and fast, grasping the nettle again, “and this I sincerely regret, although I know that you will understand. It’s the crowds, you know, the summer crowds from England and America, besides the regular people coming up for their holidays. Things are getting out of hand. Of course it means more money all round, more work and more money.

  “To come to the point, I’m afraid you must give up your room. We’ll have to start redecorating in a week at the latest, but I’ve a couple of very good addresses here, not too far away, very pleasant rooms, I’m told.

  “I’m sorry about this, but now you’ve had your room longer than most, haven’t you? Let me know what arrangements you make, and then we’ll talk about hours and days off and get a timetable set up.”

  She had disappeared again.

  “They grudge me my bed,” said Mary aloud. “After all these years.”

  Her friend Mrs. Bailey barged in, with her hair still sticking up where the earphone had untidied it.

  “What’s this, what’s this I hear? I hear she’s taken your room away from you.”

  Mary nodded somberly, pursing her lips.

  “Out of my room,” she said, “and out of a job, you might say.”

  Mrs. Bailey leaned back against the washstand and gazed at the ceiling, treasuring this moment of astonishment. Then she bent expertly forwar
d in an attitude of horrified disbelief.

  “You don’t mean it,” she bleated greedily.

  “After all these years,” said Mary, rolling the calamity on her tongue. Mrs. Bailey’s horror warmed her and brought her to herself. She looked her old friend straight in the eye.

  “Mark you me, she didn’t get off scot free,” she said, nodding her head menacingly with each word. “I cut the ground from under that lassie’s feet. I turned her inside out. Inside out.”

  Mrs. Bailey’s surprise was over. A woman who had buried two husbands and several children, she was past being swept off her feet for very long, even by such an event as this. Now she sank into the rhythm of the interchange with a knowing smile. She crossed her arms and settled her plump behind against the washstand with a mirthful nod.

  “I’ll warrant you did. She came out of here as though all the hounds in hell were after her. Tell us, what did you say to her ladyship, Mary?”

  The glance they exchanged was palpitant with understanding, but Mary, in her new sensitive role as defendant, felt with dismay that something was missing. The glance had been used too often. This was a larger occasion. She thrust her head forward.

  “You know I have a tongue, Bessie.”

  She had that reputation.

  “I told her what I thought of her, all right. She was a different lady going out of here than when she came in, I guarantee you that. I didn’t spare her. I promise you. May God forgive me, the things I said. And Bessie, I told her what you said of her. I wish you could have seen the look on her ugly visage when I told her what you said. It would have done your heart good, Bessie.”

  Bessie was electrified. She leaned away from the washstand as though she had been stung.

  “Mother of God,” she gasped. “Are you trying to get me the sack, with your idle, malicious gab?”