“A chambermaid, Pa. That’s what I am.”
It was her revenge upon him, was it? Or her revenge upon her mother?
She’d left Rose Lutter abruptly, she felt guilt for her behavior. One night when the house was darkened she slipped away, furtive and cowardly. It was a few days after Easter. Never would she have to hear one of Reverend Deegan’s sermons again. Never again, see Miss Lutter’s look of hurt and reproach cast sidelong at her like a fishhook. She had made secret plans with Katy and LaVerne, who’d invited her to stay with them and so while Miss Lutter slept Rebecca made up her bed neatly for the final time and left, on her pillow, a brief note.
This damned note had been so hard to write! Rebecca tried, and tried, and could come up with only:
Dear Miss Lutter,
Thank you for all that you have given me.
I wish that
This was stiffly written in the schoolgirl “Parker Penmanship” that Miss Lutter had instilled in her pupils in grade school. Rebecca tried to think of something further to say and felt sweat break out in all her pores, damn she was ashamed of herself and she resented this, wasting time on Rose Lutter while her friends were eagerly awaiting her in their place on Ferry Street and she was impatient to join them for already it was past midnight. She was taking with her only her special possessions: the prize dictionary she’d won, and a very few items of clothing Miss Lutter had purchased for her that still fit her, and weren’t too young-looking, and silly on her tall rangy frame.
At last she ripped up the note she’d written, and tried again.
Miss Lutter,
Thank you for all that you have given me.
Jesus will be nicer to you than I can be. I am sorry!
Rebecca Esther Schwart
30
“First time I saw you, girl. I knew.”
These would be Niles Tignor’s words. Delivered in Tignor’s blunt deadpan manner. So that you gazed up at the man knowing yourself off-balance as if he’d reached out to poke you, not hard, but hard enough, his big forefinger into your breastbone.
It was August 1953. A sultry afternoon and no air-conditioning in most parts of the General Washington Hotel and the interior corridors airless, stifling. Rebecca was pushing her maid’s cart heaped with soiled linens and towels on the fifth floor when she saw, to her annoyance, a door at the far end of the corridor being pushed open with teasing slowness. This was room 557, she knew: the man in that room, registered as H. Baumgarten, was one who’d been giving her trouble. Baumgarten had paid for several nights at the hotel in advance, which wasn’t typical of most guests, but then Baumgarten wasn’t typical. He seemed to have little to do apart from lingering in his room, and drinking in the cocktail lounge and Tap Room on the first floor. Always he was lurking in the corridor hoping to speak with Rebecca who tried to be courteous with him though she hated such men, she hated such games! If she complained of Baumgarten to the hotel manager, he would want to blame her, she knew. From prior experience, she knew.
“Bastard. You have no right.”
Rebecca was seventeen years old, three months. Not so young any longer. Not the youngest of the female workers at the General Washington any longer.
She liked her work less. Brainless labor it was, mechanical and repetitive and yet the solitude was still a kind of drug to her, she could move through her days in a waking sleep like an animal that has no need to glance up from the ground before it. Except when she was wakened rudely by the unwanted interference of another, like the man in room 557.
She saw that the door had ceased opening, at a space of about two inches. Baumgarten must have been watching her from inside. And he would want Rebecca to know, to be uneasily aware of him watching her and her not able to see him not knowing if he was fully clothed or in his underwear, or worse yet naked. Baumgarten would be enjoying the chambermaid’s embarrassment, her very dislike of him.
It was early afternoon and Rebecca had been working for hours. She was bare-legged, stockingless. Damned if she would wear ridiculous stockings because the hotel management wanted her to. In this heat! She would not, and did not. If Amos Hrube had noticed, he hadn’t yet reprimanded her.
The Schwart girl Hrube spoke of her. Not to her face but within her hearing. He didn’t like her but he had come to respect her, as Leora had predicted.
She was a good worker. Her arm-and shoulder-muscles were small, hard, and compact. She could lift her own weight. She rarely complained. In her sobriety and concentration on her work she appeared older than her age. In hot weather she partially plaited her thick hair and wrapped it around her head to keep it out of her face and off her neck, that was strangely sensitive in the heat as if the skin had been burnt. Now her white-rayon uniform was sticky with sweat and a film of sweat shone on her upper lip. She was very tired and there was a sharp ache between her shoulder blades and a sharper ache beginning between her eyes.
The man in room 557 had introduced himself to Rebecca as a frequent guest at the General Washington who was on “friendly terms” with the management and staff including several of the chambermaids for whom he left generous tips-“When merited, of course.”
Rebecca had noted the sweet sickish odor of whiskey on his breath. And a quivering of his hands, making exaggerated nervous motions as he spoke. Another time he’d tried to waylay her when Rebecca was cleaning the room next to his, eager to inform her that he had crucial business in the Chautauqua Valley-“Some of it family, some of it purely financial, and none of it of the slightest value.”
Pronouncing the word value he’d fixed Rebecca with a yellow-tinged stare. As if this should mean something to her, suggest some link between them.
Baumgarten had been barefoot, which looked very wrong, very offensive to Rebecca’s eye, in this setting. He’d worn a festive Hawaiian-print shirt partly unbuttoned to show grizzled-gray chest hairs. His soft, flaccid jaws had been clumsily shaved, with a myriad of tiny cuts. A man in his forties, a drinker, unsteady on his feet and his yellowish eyes snatching at her in shameless yearning. “My name is Bumstead, dear. You have seen me in the comic pages. I am not an actual man which is why I am smiling. Would you believe, dear, I was once your age?” He chuckled, and swiped at his flushed pug nose.
It was then that Rebecca saw, Baumgarten’s rumpled trousers were only partway zipped. He must have been naked beneath for boiled-looking flesh and pubic hairs were visible. Disgusted, Rebecca ducked past him pushing her maid’s cart into the room and quickly shut the door behind her so that Baumgarten couldn’t follow. Yet he dared to rap on the door for some minutes, speaking to her in a plaintive, pleading voice, words she couldn’t hear as she began work in the bathroom.
She hadn’t yet cleaned Baumgarten’s room. His privacy please card was always looped over his doorknob. Rebecca dreaded the pigsty that would await her. But so long as the sign was up, she could not enter the room even if she knew that Baumgarten was out; and she would not enter it, so long as Baumgarten was in the vicinity, even when he invited her. She had hoped that Baumgarten would be checking out that morning, but he’d hinted he might be staying longer.
Now, the following day, Baumgarten was playing another of his games. No escaping him!
As Rebecca approached room 557 she saw that the door was still ajar. But Baumgarten had stepped back from it. (Unless he was hiding behind it, to leap out at her.) A fattish hulking figure she dreaded glimpsing naked. Yet she had no choice but to glance inside the room.
“Mister? Is anyone…?”
The room was a pigsty, as she’d expected. God damn there were clothes and towels scattered everywhere, a single man’s dress shoe overturned on the carpet just inside the door. Though it was midday the heavy brocaded drapes were drawn tightly shut. A lamp with a crooked shade was lighted. A smell of whiskey and hair pomade prevailed. The man himself lay on the bed, on his back. He was breathing with difficulty, eyes shut and arms flung out at his sides; he was wearing trousers, haphazardly zipped up, and beltless, and a thin cotton undershirt; again, he was barefoot; his head was turned at an awkward angle and his mouth gaped open, damp with spittle. On the bedside table was an empty glass and a near-empty bottle of whiskey. Rebecca stared, seeing what looked like blood dribbled across Baumgarten’s throat and torso.