Chapter 5: I Come Here All the Time

The lobby of the Wexford went up twelve floors and did not stop.

Nell came out of the service corridor with four sets of hands on her, and she got as far as the middle of the floor and stood still and looked up.

The ceiling was mirrors, in panels, set in brass. Where the panels ran out there were lamps in glass globes on brass stalks, and the light came down and the marble took it and gave it back, so that she could see the lamps over her head and the lamps under her feet and the palms in both, standing in their brass pots with their leaves still.

“Would you look at that,” she said.

“Miss Corrigan’s coming up with me,” said a woman behind her.

“She is coming up with me, Mrs. Ott. I said so first.”

“You said so first at the door of a storeroom.”

“That is where she was.”

Nell turned her head to see who had won, and it was neither of them. It was a woman in dark green with a fur over one arm, and the fur had a head on it, and the head had two little glass eyes.

“That will do,” the woman said. “Miss Corrigan is coming up with me and she is going to eat something hot. Were you at the dinner, Miss Corrigan?”

“I was underneath it,” said Nell.

“Then you had the worst of it. I was at it, and mine was spoiled, and I do not mean to have my whole evening spoiled with it. Mrs. Nolan,” she said, and put her hand out. “Greta Nolan.”

Nell shook it. Mrs. Nolan’s glove was thin as paper and warm from her own hand.

“Was anybody hurt?” said Nell. “Up there. In the dining room.”

“Nobody is saying.”

“Somebody must know.”

“Somebody always knows.” Mrs. Nolan turned her toward the elevators, and the hands on Nell’s sleeves let go one after another, unhurried, like a knot coming loose. “The kitchen is still open and there is terrapin. Come along.”

On the way to the elevator stood a bird.

It was wood, carved, painted, and it came up to Nell’s shoulder, with its tail spread out behind it like a fan that had been left open. A peacock. The blues and greens of it did not agree with one another. The beak was gold. One eye had been set in crooked, so that the bird seemed to be considering something off to the side.

Nell stopped again.

It is a wooden bird, said the voice. In a room full of mirrors.

She had stopped asking who he was. She had asked him once, in the corridor, and got nothing back, and she had other things to do.

“Look at the tail on it,” she said, under her breath, to the bird. “It’s bigger than a door.”

Yes.

“Somebody sat and carved every one of those feathers.”

Somebody was paid to.

Then all at once her fingertips went hot inside her gloves, all ten of them, and a warmth came up the back of her neck and over her scalp, and she heard herself make a small noise.

It had happened in the storeroom. It had happened in the corridor, twice, and once over a plate of bread and cold beef, which had seemed to her the least likely thing in the world to set it off.

It is like fireworks in a dark room, said the voice, and I would take it kindly if you would give me notice first.

“Notice of what?”

Next time you intend to be happy, tell me beforehand.

“Don’t be foolish,” she said, and then shut her mouth, because Mrs. Ott was looking at her.

At the elevator there was a boy in a blue coat and a brass cage with a lever in it, and the boy slid the gate back and said, “Going up,” to four women who were all standing there to go up.

“Twelve,” said Mrs. Nolan.

“Twelve it is.”

Nell went in last, because she was the only one who wanted to see how the gate shut, and Mrs. Nolan put a hand out and drew her in by the sleeve.

The floor pushed up against the soles of Nell’s boots.

“Miss Rusk, you look green,” said Mrs. Nolan.

“It’s the car.”

“It’s the twelfth floor, and you will feel better when there is supper in you.”

“I felt better on the ground.”

The gate was a lattice of brass, and the brick of the shaft went by behind it, close enough to touch, and then it was not brick but white tile, and then the car stopped with a knock and let them out onto a red carpet.

“There is terrapin,” said Mrs. Nolan, to nobody in particular. “A dollar the plate.”

“A dollar,” said Nell.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Nolan, and looked at her. “A dollar.”

A dollar, said the voice, in the tone of a man asked to admire something.

A dollar is four knives off a peddler’s tray, and the peddler throws in the sheath.

A dollar is a day at the looms before the fines.

A dollar is four swill buckets.

Nell waited.

Why, said the voice, after a moment, do I know what a swill bucket costs?

“What’s a swill bucket got to do with anything?”

Nothing. Nothing in the world. A pause. You have not washed.

“I washed at the pump Tuesday.”

It is Friday.

“It’s March.”

March.

“You want me standing in a cold room with my sleeves rolled up and my hair wet? In March?”

Does the tub go to sleep for the winter, then? Like a bear?

“You’ve never once been cold,” said Nell. “That’s the whole of it. You’ve never been cold in your life.”

I have been cold.

“Not the kind where it costs you.” She had her hands folded in front of her and her eyes on the carpet and she did not care who thought what. “Coal comes up three flights a bucket at a time. You heat the water, and then you stand in it in a room with a window that doesn’t shut, and then you’re wet in a cold room, and a chill goes to a fever in a week, and a fever takes a house. There’s families in the mill row don’t wash from November to April, and they’re the ones still standing in the spring. Poorer than that and a family goes years.”

He said nothing.

Years, he said.

“Years,” said Nell.

He had been taught everything a man of his name was expected to know, by tutors who by the end had nothing left to teach him, and had found none of it worth the trouble; once, he had arranged to end his own life and take another man’s with it, and had been happy for the length of an afternoon.

“You don’t know the first thing,” she said. “You don’t know how people live.”

They went along a corridor with a mirror at the end of it and a door with brass on it, and the man at the door had already got it open.

Mrs. Nolan stopped, and turned, and looked at Nell with her head a little on one side, the way the wooden peacock looked.

“Been up here before?” she said.

“Often,” said Nell. “I come here all the time.”

It came out fast and full and cheerful.

Mrs. Nolan’s face did not change. Her mouth moved at the corners, and she said, “Then we shall have the most expensive thing on the card,” and went in.

She did not believe you.

“I said it right.”

You said it fast. She asked it slow, and you had the answer out before she finished asking.

“What was I to say?”

Nothing. You were to say nothing, and let her wonder.

The Belvedere Room had windows on three sides and a smell of varnish and cold cigar smoke, and two tables had been pushed together and laid for four. There were roses on the cloth, in March. Nell counted them and stopped counting.

At the far end, a man in his shirtsleeves was on his knees with a penknife, working at a place in the floorboards. Nobody looked at him. So Nell did not look at him either.

“Here, Miss Corrigan. By me.”

Nell sat.

She watched hands, because hands were what told you. Hands told you when to sit and when to stand and which of the forks you were allowed to touch. All evening, in the lobby, the hands had been doing things she could not follow: holding a glove over a glove, laying a fur over an arm, giving a bag to a man without looking at him.

Mrs. Ott took her gloves off one finger at a time and laid her napkin flat across her lap. Miss Rusk had a piece of bread in her hand before she was down in her chair. Mrs. Nolan rested one finger in the wine card, between the pages, and left it there while she talked.

Nell shook her napkin out. It cracked like a flag. She looked at Mrs. Ott’s, and laid hers flat.

“You’ll want those off,” said Mrs. Nolan.

“I’ve a chill in my hands.”

Mrs. Nolan’s eyes went to the split at the thumb of the right glove and stayed there a moment and came away. “As you like.”

Under the cloth, Nell worked the gloves off and put them in her lap, and turned her right hand over so the back of it lay against her thigh, where the grey off the storeroom floor did not show, if it showed at all in this light.

“There’s the terrapin,” said Mrs. Nolan, to the waiter, “and the oysters, and the duck, and the asparagus, and a bottle of the dry. Bring it in the ice, not out of it.”

“Ma’am.”

“And what will you have, Miss Corrigan?”

The card lay on the cloth in front of her. It was a hedge of small black letters with nothing in it she could lift out and hold.

“The same,” said Nell.

“The same,” said Mrs. Nolan, and gave the card back.

“Corrigan,” she said then, and turned her glass by the stem. “I don’t place it. There are Corrigans at Harlan’s Mill.”

“There’s Corrigans everywhere.”

“There are,” said Mrs. Nolan, and smiled, and let it go.

Mrs. Ott had her back to the room. She had taken the chair with its back to the room, and when a party came in behind her she did not turn her head with the rest, and her hand came down over her gloves in her lap and stayed there.

“You’re not eating, Mrs. Ott.”

“I’ve eaten.”

“You’ve had two oysters.”

“Then I’ve eaten two oysters,” said Mrs. Ott.

Miss Rusk said, “Are we having the duck as well? I do like a duck,” and took the largest oyster on the plate without asking, and the man poured the wine, and the cork came out and every head at the table turned to it.

Nell drank. It went up her nose and behind her eyes and she kept her face perfectly still and her eyes watered and she did not blink.

“It’s dry,” said Mrs. Nolan.

“It is,” said Nell.

The soup came, and the oysters, and she ate them the way the others ate them, one at a time, and the terrapin was better than anything she had ever put in her mouth, and she ate it all, and did not say so. Somebody at the next table said the dinner upstairs had been spoiled by a woman, and somebody else said it was a man, and nobody said who had been hit, and they went back to their plates.

Then the fish came on a platter the length of Nell’s forearm, split and laid open, brown on top and white at the bone, with a smell of butter and lemon that went up into her head and made her swallow twice.

Her fork went in behind the head, where the meat lay thickest, and came up with a piece the size of her palm and two bones in it, and she put it in her mouth.

Beside her, somebody laughed.

It was Miss Rusk, into her napkin. Then a woman at the next table laughed too, a woman who had not been introduced, and put her hand up to her mouth to cover it, and did not cover it.

Nell’s fork came down and stayed on the plate with the fish still on it.

She looked at Miss Rusk. Miss Rusk looked at her napkin.

She looked at Mrs. Nolan.

Mrs. Nolan put her own fork down, and smiled at her, and reached out with two fingers and turned the platter a quarter turn on the cloth, so that the eye of the fish was facing her own plate. Then she took the little dark piece of meat from behind the gill, no bigger than her thumb, with the tip of her knife, and put it in her mouth, and chewed it, and smiled at Nell the whole time, and did not offer her any of it.

The platter stayed where she had turned it.

Bones, then. It had been the bones in her mouth that did it.

Nell took up the next piece in her fingers and drew the bones out of it one at a time and laid them along the rim of her plate in a row, and ate the meat.

Nobody laughed at that. Miss Rusk’s napkin came up to her mouth and stayed there.

“It is a great deal of trouble, fish,” said Mrs. Nolan, and said something low to the waiter, and the platter went away down the table.

“So it is,” said Nell.

Mrs. Nolan picked up her wine and looked at her over it and smiled, and did not say anything at all, and Nell smiled back at her, and waited to be told the joke.