Chapter 6: The Check

The Check

For a while nobody told her the joke.

Then they all began to be busy. Mrs. Ott rose with her gloves in her hand and said she had left something, and did not say what, and went out past the palms with her chin up. Miss Rusk said she would go down and see whether the carriage was standing, and took a roll with her. Mrs. Nolan folded her napkin and laid it down flat.

“The wine,” she said. “I want a word about the wine.”

She smiled at Nell and went.

The room was loud at the other tables. Nell sat with her fork up.

“Half a night in a police cell,” she said, to the table, “and not one of them can sit still through a fish. You’d think they’d be hungry.”

They are hungry. You gave yourself away.

“Gave what away? It was the bones.” She looked at her own plate. The bones she had taken out of the second piece were laid along the rim in a row, and nobody had laughed at that. “I had them in my fingers. I took them out one at a time.”

It was not the bones. Nobody in this room eats the fish. There is one piece of it worth taking, and it lies behind the gill, no bigger than your thumb, and the rest goes down to the kitchen or into the bin with the bones. Anyone who has had fish twice a week since he was born knows it. You went in where the meat is.

“Then what is the rest of it for?”

The kitchen.

She looked at the head of the fish. Her hand came down flat on the cloth and made no sound at all.

“A whole fish,” she said. “In the bin.”

The platter had gone down the table and along the wall to the sideboard. She got up and went after it.

You are making it worse.

“It’s paid for,” she said, and carried it back and started at the belly. She ate it down to the bones. Then she turned the bones over and got the meat out from behind the head and ate that too, and laid the spine on the plate in one piece, like a comb.

The waiter came and took the bones away and set down a dish of pork, a knuckle with the skin on it, and a spoon beside it, because a fork would not do.

Not that.

She picked up the spoon.

Pork is what this house gives the men who carry the coal up the stairs, he said.

“Then they eat better than you.”

It came apart under the spoon. The fat had gone to jelly; the meat under the fat fell into threads. There was salt, and something sweet, and pepper that came up the back of her nose.

Oh.

She put more on the spoon.

Again.

She laughed. “You said it was common.”

It is common. Have they got another one?

She put the spoon down and wiped her fingers and looked around the room. A waiter was going along the wall turning the gas down. At the far end a man in his shirtsleeves was packing chisels into a cloth, kneeling, one knee on the red carpet, and whatever he had been putting on the floor was still in the air over the cold cigars.

“Here,” she called. “What else is hot?”

The waiter came back.

“The duck, miss. The asparagus has been sitting out.”

“Bring it. Bring whatever’s hot.”

When the duck came she went at it with her knife and her fork both, and the skin gave under the knife with a sound like paper, and the fat under the skin was hot enough to hurt, and she did not stop.

There is a woman at the next table looking at you.

She did not turn her head. “Let her.”

She ate the asparagus with her fingers, and the mushrooms, and the bread that came with them. There was a small dark pot of something that turned out to be meat and salt and had no name on the card, and she ate that on the bread, and then the peas.

Again, the voice said.

“You’re not getting a vote.”

I am not asking for a vote.

Somewhere past eleven the last party went down. The room emptied by degrees, the way a mill empties: the noise thinning out, then a single laugh somewhere, then nothing but the sound of spoons.

When I was a boy there was a doctor who came in June and stayed until September.

She stopped chewing.

He was paid by the week. He sat at the end of the table and talked to me about the food, and I ate what he put in front of me, and it was the same as not eating at all.

She set her fork down.

I could tell a good kitchen from a bad one the way anyone can tell a good stair from a bad one. I could tell you what was wrong with a dish from across a room. I never in my life wanted a second plate of anything, and every summer the house sent for a man from the city to sit with me and coax me, and my mother stood in the doorway with her hands together, and I ate what I was given and did not want it.

This is hotel food. What a house sends up to people it does not expect to see again. And I want the next plate, and then the plate after that, and it is not the cooking.

It is your tongue. Nothing else at this table has been changed.

Do you understand what I am telling you?

She waited. Her hands were on the edge of the table.

“I understand,” she said. “You never were hungry either.”

He said nothing.

She sat with that a while. Then she pulled the last dish over, the veal, and ate it, and it was good, and she did not say so.

Afterwards she pushed her chair back and hooked her elbow over the top of it and put one boot up on the rung and let her stomach out. There was a tune she knew from the looms, three notes down and one back up, and she hummed it through her teeth and looked at the ceiling, at the plaster fruit and the gas jets and the one lamp still burning in the corner, and she was in no hurry, and her shoulders came down from around her ears for the first time since Harlan’s Mill.

She wiped her fingers on the cloth.

She waited for him to say something about it. He always had something to say about the way she sat, or the way she held a thing, or the way she said a word.

The voice said nothing.

She hummed the three notes again and looked at the ceiling and did not mind.

At the far end the man with the chisels got up off his knee and went out with his cloth bag, and the door came to behind him. Nell turned her glass by the stem and set it down.

A waiter crossed the room with a tray. There was nothing on the tray but a folded paper and a small saucer laid over it to keep it flat.

He took the saucer off. He put the paper down by her plate, square with the edge of the table, and stood back with his hands behind him. He had a clean collar and a wart beside his nose and he was perhaps fifty.

“Mrs. Nolan said it was seen to,” Nell said.

“Mrs. Nolan’s carriage is seen to.” He brought his hands around to the front and folded them. “This is the room.”

“Mrs. Nolan ordered the room.”

“Mrs. Nolan has gone down.” His mouth moved at one corner and came back. “The room is let for the evening, miss, and the account comes with the room, and the room comes with whoever is left in it.”

She picked up the paper.

Nine lines. She could read figures. The words on either side of them went by her like a fence in the dark, and the figures stood still, and she went along the paper with her finger and took what she could get.

Room at one end of the line, and $450 at the other.

Wine, and $610.

Carpet, and $95.

She went back to the top and did it again, the way she did the tallies at the frames, and got the same: four hundred and fifty, six hundred and ten, ninety-five. She got as far as eleven hundred and fifty-five, and then there were six more lines under her finger, in words she could not get at, every one of them with a figure at the end, and she was adding again before she had finished the first sum and the two ran together in her head.

Do not tell him what you earn.

Under the ruled line at the bottom, in a heavier hand, in ink gone thick where the pen had stood still:

$2,300.

She turned the paper over. There was nothing on the back.

“I never touched the carpet,” she said.

“It’s the room’s account, miss.”

She set the paper down on the cloth and put one finger on the last figure, and moved her finger off it again.

She looked up at the waiter. His hands were folded and his eyes were on the middle of the room, where there was nothing to look at.

“There’s a book,” she said. “Where I come from, the store keeps a book. You put your name in it and settle at the end of the month.”

The waiter waited.

“Put it in the book,” she said. “I’ll be in at the start of the week.”

“In whose name?” said the waiter.