Yet: Rebecca had missed something, again. God damn it all passed so fast, she could not see.
The crucifixion of Christ, that was a mystery.
The crucifixion of Christ, she came to detest.
Listening stony-hearted and unmoved as Reverend Deegan preached his Good Friday sermon. That Rebecca had heard before, and more than once. The man’s bulldog face and whiny, blustering voice. Betrayal of Judas, hypocrisy of the Jews. Pontius Pilate washing his hands of guilt with the excuse What is truth? And afterward at the house she’d wanted to escape yet could not for Miss Lutter must read aloud from the Book of St. John as if Rebecca were not capable of reading for herself. And Miss Lutter shook her head, sighing. Cruelly Rebecca thought It’s for yourself you feel sorry, not for Him. And Rebecca heard herself ask, with childlike logic, “Why did Jesus let them crucify Him, Miss Lutter? He didn’t have to, did He? If He was the Son of God?”
Warily Rose Lutter glanced up from her Bible, frowning at Rebecca through silver-rimmed bifocals as if, one more time, to Rose Lutter’s disgust, Rebecca had muttered a profanity under her breath.
“Well, why? I’m just asking, Miss Lutter.”
Hating the way the older woman was always looking so hurt, lately. When it wasn’t true hurt but anger she felt. A schoolteacher’s anger at her authority being challenged.
Rebecca persisted, “If Jesus really was God, He could do whatever He wanted. So if He didn’t, how could He be God?”
It was supreme adolescent logic. It was an unassailable logic, Rebecca thought.
Rose Lutter gave a moist, pained cry. With dignity the older woman rose, shut up her precious soft-leather Bible, and walked out of the room murmuring, for Rebecca to overhear, “Forgive her, Father. She knows not what she says.”
I do, though. I know exactly what I say.
That night Rebecca slept poorly, waking often. Smelling the damned potpourri on her bureau. At last, barefoot and stealthy, she carried it out of her room to hide in a hall closet, beneath the lowest shelf where, to her chagrin, Rose Lutter would discover it only after Rebecca was gone.
29
She was free! She would support herself, she would live in downtown Milburn after all. Not at Mrs. Schmidt’s disreputable rooming house but just around the corner on Ferry Street, in a ramshackle brownstone partitioned into a warren of rooms and small apartments. Here, Katy Greb and Katy’s older cousin LaVerne were living, and invited Rebecca to move in with them. Her share of the rent was only a few dollars a week-“Whatever you can afford, Rebecca.” For the first several weeks Rebecca slept on a pile of blankets on the floor, such exhausted sleep it scarcely mattered where she slept! She worked as a waitress, she worked as a merchandise clerk, finally she became a chambermaid at the General Washington Hotel.
It was Leora Greb, now Rebecca’s friend again, who helped to get her the job at the hotel. “Say you’re eighteen,” Leora advised. “Nobody will know.”
Rebecca was paid in cash, counted out into the palm of her hand. The hotel would not report her earnings to Internal Revenue, and so she would not be taxed. Nor would the hotel pay into her Social Security fund. “Off the books, eh? Makes things easier.” Amos Hrube, in charge of the cleaning and kitchen staff, winked at Rebecca as if there was a fond joke between them. Before Rebecca could draw back, Hrube pinched her cheek between the second and third fingers of his right hand.
“Don’t! That hurts.”
Hrube’s expression was pouting, playful. As an adult might pretend to sympathize with a child who has hurt herself in some silly inconsequential way.
“Well! Sor-ry.”
Hrube had an ugly flat face, a mashed-looking mouth. He might have been any age between thirty-five and fifty-five. On a wall behind his desk was a framed photo of a young man in a U.S. Army dress uniform, dark-haired, lean, yet bearing the unmistakable features of the elder Hrube. His office was a windowless cubbyhole at the rear of the hotel. Leora said not to mind Hrube for he tried such behavior with all the female help and some of them liked fooling around, and some did not. “He’s basically good-hearted. He’s done me some favors. He’ll respect you if that’s what you want and if you work hard. See,” Leora said, as if this was good news, “they can’t fire us all.”
Rebecca laughed. In fact this was good news. Her previous jobs had brought her into an unwanted proximity with men-who-hired. Always they’d been aware of her, eyeing and judging her. They had known who she was, too: the daughter of Jacob Schwart. At the General Washington there were many employees. Chambermaids were mostly invisible. And Leora had promised not to tell Hrube, or anyone, who she was, whose daughter. “Anyway that’s old news in Milburn. Like the war, people start to forget. Most people, anyway.”
Was this true? Rebecca wanted to think so.
Always she’d been aware of the General Washington Hotel on a hilly block of Main Street, but until Leora took her there to apply for a job, Rebecca had never entered it. The busy front lobby with its gleaming black tile floor, its leather furnishings and brass fixtures, potted ferns, ornamental chandeliers and mirrors, had to be one of the largest interior spaces Rebecca had ever been in, and certainly the most impressive. She asked Leora what the price of a room for one night was and when Leora told her, Rebecca said, shocked, “So much money just to sleep? And you have nothing to show for it, afterward?”
Leora laughed at this. She was steering Rebecca through the lobby, toward a door marked employees only at the rear. She said, “Rebecca, people who stay in a hotel like this have money, and people who have money leave tips. And you meet a better class of men-sometimes.”
She was hired off the books, and in her naiveté she thought this was a very good thing. No taxes!
She liked it that there were so many employees at the General Washington. Most of these wore uniforms that indicated their work, and their rank. The most striking uniforms were men’s: head doorman, doorman’s assistants, bellboys. (Not all the bellboys were “boys”: some were quite mature men.) Managerial staff wore business suits and ties. There were only waiters in the better of the hotel’s two restaurants, and these were elegantly attired. Female staff were switchboard operators, secretaries, waitresses in the lesser of the restaurants and in the boisterous Tap Room; kitchen workers, chambermaids. A small army of chambermaids. The oldest of these was a stout, white-haired woman in her sixties who proudly claimed to have worked at the General Washington since the hotel had opened its doors in 1922. Rebecca was the youngest.
Chambermaids wore white rayon uniforms with skirts that fell to mid-calf, and short boxy sleeves. The uniform issued to Rebecca was too large in the bust and too tight in the shoulders and beneath the arms and Rebecca hated the slithery sensation of the fabric against her skin; especially she hated the requirement that, as an employee of the General Washington, she must wear stockings at all times.