Had a Good Time Page 2

  “There hasn’t been a good Cuban crop since 1908,” he says, as if he knows I’d know something about cigars.

  I look at him.

  “They’re charging seventy cents for the good ones downstairs,” he says.

  Now I understand. Let the anarchist bellboy know how much money you’ve got, that you can spend better than a worker’s daily wage on a couple of cigars.

  “My mother does that,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “Hangs out the window. She talks to her friends and watches the street.” I regret this at once. Trying to show him he’s not so different from us, I’ve just made Mama look bad.

  Barnhill flips his head to the side a little to acknowledge the window and he doesn’t even crack a smile, much less a sneer. Instead, he says, “There’s elms out there on the Common that John Hancock planted.”

  “You related to him, are you?”

  Now I get a little sneery smile. “John Hancock is ...”

  “I know who he is.”

  Barnhill laughs. “Of course. No. I’m not related to him.”

  “So you like looking at trees.”

  “You want a drink?” he asks, and I think he’s dead serious.

  “There’s easier ways to get me fired,” I say.

  Bamhill laughs again. He moves to the reading table and I back off a step. He touches the bottle but goes to thinking about something instead. His hand just stays there holding the neck of the bottle, and he’s looking at it, thinking. I back up another step. It’s time to get out of the room. I turn, and he says, “Not so fast.”

  I stop and face him again and he’s digging in his vest pocket. He holds out his hand with a dime lifted by the thumb and forefinger. “Your tip,” he says.

  It’s two steps away. It’s twelve and a half cigars’ worth of work. He’s not moving. Neither am I. He gives the dime a little up-flip with his hand, like to say, Come and get it.

  I lift my chin just a bit and I say, “Put it toward your next Cuban downstairs,” and I’m out of that room in a flash.

  Not that John Stanford Barnhill struck me as somebody real different from a dozen other guys I’d seen around the Touraine already, living in a hotel when they could so easily have what Papa had wanted all his life. A few of them even had wives with them, so they weren’t all just helpless bachelors gagging on a silver spoon. They lived in a hotel so guys like me could hop for them and they could have a chambermaid come in and take away their soiled linens and they could just stroll downstairs and eat a fancy dinner with a little orchestra playing, but of course they could have that in homes of their own if they wanted, except for maybe the orchestra, so I just couldn’t get myself to understand. Still can’t.

  Anyway, later in my sixth day at the Touraine, a bellhop from the next shift sent word he was sick and the manager asked me to stay on for a few extra hours and I said okay. And I run into Barnhill in the early evening while I’m at the front desk gathering up the bags of a man and his wife in automobile dusters. Barnhill is going out and he sees me just as I stand up straight with my arms and hands full and he tips his bowler at me going by, trying to get my goat. I just keep my face hard and steady and he puts his hat back down on his head and gives it a little tap as he goes out the door and into the night. A few minutes later I forget to talk like a servant to the guy in the duster, I guess—he asks me where the electric call bell is and I say, “Over there,” and don’t mention anything about sir or madam or let-me-lick-the-dust-off-your-boots—and I get a glare from him that I recognize for what it is right off, and still I don’t say anything respectful to try to make it up. I don’t get a tip and I don’t blame him, I guess, seeing as what he’s used to from a guy in my place, but I’m still working up an anger that I hope will stay put till this day is over. Then about ten or so the manager tells me things have slowed down enough, I should go on home, and I haven’t popped anybody yet, so I’m glad to change from my bellhop suit fast and get out of there.

  I don’t cut through the Common but go up the mall along Tremont. There are lots of people around. That’s good. I walk along among all these people, some in fancy dress and some in work clothes and some smoking a bummed cigarette and some a Cuban cigar, and we all just go on along together and there’s a sharp breeze blowing, the first little whisper of the winter ahead, and then I’m coming up to the subway entrance at Park Street. The one-armed man with his two fox-colored dogs who walk around on their back legs is still selling the late edition. I pay a penny for it and then I see a crowd over by the little building where the steps go down to the train. I fold the paper and put it in my pocket and stroll over.

  At the center of the crowd is an old man with a telescope on a tripod and he’s got a sign up saying TEN CENTS TO SEE THE MOON. I stand watching for a minute. Some guy makes a big show of pulling out his ten cents for the girl he’s with, and she sits on the little stool beneath the telescope, smoothing out her dress and pushing back her hat piled high with muslin roses, and then she looks into the telescope and she cries out like she’s seen somebody jump off a bridge. The crowd all goes to muttering in wonder at her shock and somebody else steps forward to pay a dime. For all I know, the guy and the girl in the big hat are confederates of the telescope man and they’ve been put up to this little show just to get the crowd going. But I find myself wanting to look, all the same.

  And then Barnhill is at my elbow. “You ever want to just go to the moon?” he says.

  I look at him. I get the feeling he’s putting the needle in me again, but if he’d like to have a go at me, I wish he’d just do it straight, more like a man. All I know to do is keep my mouth shut.

  Then he says, “I figure I owe you a dime. Go look at the moon, on me. Okay?” He’s got that dime up between us again. I take it.

  “Good,” he says.

  We both square around and wait for some guy to finish with his look, and I’m not even thinking to give the dime back. I’m not sure why this telescope makes it different, about taking money from John Stanford Barnhill, but it does. Then I get my chance. I step forward and give Barnhill’s money to the telescope man and I say, “I want to see something different.”

  The old man holds up a forefinger like he’s got just the thing. He crouches behind his telescope and looks in and swivels it around and then moves aside. I step over and bend down and I look. Against the dark is a small white globe, and it’s ringed all around. “The planet Saturn,” the man says to me. Then he tells the crowd, “This gentleman is now on the planet Saturn, the sixth of our sun’s eight planets,” and he goes on with his pitch. I just ignore him. I watch this other world moving along out there millions of miles away and I wonder who it is that lives on Saturn and what makes them tick. Then the telescope man’s hand is on my shoulder and he says, “Time’s up.”

  I straighten, and it takes a moment to get my bearings. I move off toward the Common, away from where I’d left Barnhill. The ring of gawkers opens for me and I’m into the dark, and then Barnhill is beside me again. “You went farther than the moon,” he says.

  “I went to your home planet,” I say.

  He laughs, though it sounds forced. “I’ve got my ticket back,” he says.

  He’s walking with me now and it seems there’s more to this than just trying to show up the bellhop. He smells of whiskey, but he’s walking steady. “You don’t like me,” he says.

  “Liking the guests ain’t part of my job,” I say.

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” he says.

  We’re into an open part of the Common and the breeze has picked up pretty fierce. It’s got a sting to it now.

  “I’m finished at the Touraine anyway,” Barnhill says.

  I’m not paying any real attention to him. I’m just thinking about getting away from him. “I’ve got to get on home,” I say, though the word catches in my throat: home. I’ve never had to call the tenement Mama and me live in by that name, and it makes me angry at Barnhill, his forcing me to say this.

  We’re both stopped now on the path, the empty field before us, the stars and the planets whirling around overhead. What he says about leaving the Touraine finally sinks in.

  “Finished?” I say.

  Barnhill kind of shivers. “You should wear a hat in this weather,” he says, and I’ll be damned if he doesn’t take off his bowler and put it on my head.

  It settles in perfect. I can feel the soft inner rim of it ringing across just below my hairline and on around my head and the hat’s light there and it’s even made it like the wind has stopped blowing, though I still can feel the bite of air on my face and hands if I try. But I’m fine inside the hat. I let it stay there. “You buying yourself a house?” I ask.

  He runs a hand through his hair and lifts his chin a little. “Not quite,” he says. “My aunt’s cutting me off. She doesn’t think much of me either, as it happens.”

  I’m not proud of it, but the first thing out of my mouth is, “I can get you on as a bellhop.”

  He looks at me and his face is white from the moon and I find myself wishing he had the guts to pop me. I deserve it and I won’t raise a hand back at him. But he just looks at me and he doesn’t say a word. So I reach up to his hat to take it off and he says, “No. Keep it.”

  That’s the last thing I’m about to do. I lift the hat and I put it on his head and he doesn’t resist. I feel the wind sharp on me again. We just look at each other and there’s no more words. Finally I say, “Good night then.”

  “Good night,” he says.

  The next day, my last at the Hotel Touraine, I’m thinking about John Stanford Barnhill all morning. Then I’m hanging around the front desk and you can hear the call bell going over and over in the office and the manager comes out and says Barnh
ill’s room number. “Ill take it,” I say, and the bell’s still ringing as I walk away and I figure he’s drunk and in a bad mood and something in me wants it to go like that, to make things simple again. All the way up in the elevator I’m getting ready for a blowup.

  Then I step off on the eighth floor and the chambermaid is hopping around waiting for me and she’s saying, “Come quick, come quick, he’s gone, right in front of me,” and I run down the hall and into Barnhill’s rooms and the sash is thrown open where he was yesterday and the curtains are blowing in and I dash through the smell of his cigars and I go halfway out the window myself and I take in the chestnuts and Hancock’s elms and the wide-open space with some guys out there playing baseball and people moving around, all this before facing what I know has happened. Then I look down, and Barnhill is there, far below, a crowd gathering around him, his arms open wide as if he leaped expecting an embrace.

  I pull back in. I turn. The chambermaid is peeking in at the door. “Go get the manager,” I say, and she vanishes.

  I stand very still for a long moment, trying to read that moonlit face from last night. But my brain has shut down. There’s nothing inside me except a clattering in my chest like horses’ hooves. And then my eyes focus. The reading table. Cigar butts, long gone cold, in the saucer. And beside them is John Stanford Barnhill’s bowler hat. I find myself panting like a dobbin. The room will be full of people very soon. I press myself to move. I take a step and another and another and I am at the side table and the hat sits there, the color of the night sky, and I put my hand on it, I touch my palm to its high crown, and then I pick it up. I put it on my head and it settles on me right away, like it did last night, like when he put it on me with his own hand. And then I’m out the door, heading by the back stairs to the changing room. There’s other things for me to do in this world. Other kinds of people. But he was right about me needing a hat.

  * * *

  THINKS HE’S SURELY INSANE

  Woman Says Her Husband Reads Newspapers Upside Down

  NEW YORK, AUGUST 6—Mrs. Belle Harper Hughes, who resides at the Plaza Hotel, is seeking through the courts to have her husband, Joseph B. Hughes, declared a mental incompetent, and to have a committee appointed to handle his estate, consisting of $300,000 in personal property, Mr. Hughes was one of the organizers of the tobacco trust and was Consul at Birmingham, England, under President Cleveland.

  Mrs. Hughes, in order to show Hughes is insane, asserts:

  That, with only $18,000 a year income, he imagines he is rich.

  That he reads newspapers upside down for hours at a time.

  That he always insists he has just returned from Cincinnati, whereas he has not been in Cincinnati in years.

  That he frequently wanders around the hotel getting into beds where he doesn’t belong.

  Supreme Court Justice Bischoff today appointed a commission to inquire into the mental condition of Mr. Hughes.

  Mr. Hughes is 61 years old and his wife is about 30. She was a member of Augustin Daly’s theatrical company before she went to Paris to study music, where she met Mr. Hughes.

  from the front page of The Detroit Free Press

  Sunday, August 7,1910

  * * *

  MOTHER IN THE TRENCHES

  Mother in the trenches

  With a world full of foolishly dangerous men, what’s a mother to do? Like all the mothers of the world I am stuck with the barbarian Kaiser Wilhelm, a man full of himself but as hollow as a souffle, and that well-meaning fool of a schoolmaster, Woodrow Wilson—I have known men like this all my life, being around preachers and teachers and also around my father, rest his soul, who was himself a bit of both, men who are certain they grasp things that no man can grasp for certain—and Black Jack Pershing, another kind of man, like the one I married, a man with quick, sure hands, I’d wager, and a single-minded bond with other men under whatever flag it may be—American, for General Jack and my own Jack—and there’s nothing in the world to weaken that bond or soften those hands. My son is a man too, according to the Selective Service Act, but God help me if I’ll let him be a man yet without a fight.

  This is something I know like any mother knows. The boy is not fully a man if I can remember so clearly lifting his wee body up and placing it on a rectangle of cotton clean from the boiling pot and warm from the sun and I swaddle him up and hold him against me and he is gentle and he is quiet and I carry him away, carry him through the world, and all the while he is taking in the things I know as his mother, as a woman, but cannot say, cannot even put into words except to hold him close and whisper softly to him that he is a good boy and 1 love him.

  They eat rats. 1 have heard people speak of this. They live in foul water so their feet swell and rot away. They cannot sleep for fear of the guns. They kill each other. My son was taken away to this kind of life. And so 1 packed a bag because my husband Jack was dead of influenza now and could not stop me and I boarded a ship and went to Paris and I hired a man who had already paid for all this madness of other men—one of his arms was merely a stump, from the early days of this war—and he drove me in a cart into the countryside and we slept in the fields along the way and it was June and there was no rain and he spoke a little English, and on one of the nights as we neared the front, he said, from the dark a ways off, behind some other tree, “Madame. You look at your son, yes?”

  I knew what he meant. “Yes,” I said. “Out”

  There was a long silence, and then he said, “You are the mother of me also, yes?”

  “I have my hands full,” I said, which I’m not sure he understood. But he said no more.

  I could hear a very faint thumping on the horizon down the road.

  The next day there was a thin stream of civilians passing us. Most of them had already left this place up ahead, I assumed. These refugees had no sense of urgency, as one might expect, but moved with a terrible weariness about them. A mother on foot, carrying her infant, lifted her face as we passed, and her eyes seemed very old, though she was quite young. She was perhaps as young as my son. I could have been the infant’s grandmother. 1 glanced over my shoulder as we passed and she, too, had turned her head.

  I looked before me again. Edward was my only living child, Private Edward Marcus Gaines of the 108th Infantry, 27th Division, Company such-and-such. I had it written down in his letter. In a trench in a place in France. He had no infant child. He and I faced something together here in this foreign place. The end of our blood. I thought of the young woman we’d passed and of holding her child, just for a moment. Stopping the cart and she would have stopped too, and I would climb down and she would come to me and she would say, perhaps in her own language but I would know what she meant, Here, she would say. Hold him. And so I would and then I’d give him to his mother and I’d say, Carry him off now. Quickly.

  There was a smell of burning in the air. The cart creaked in the ruts of the road. With each turn of the wheel there was a sound as if it would break. This one-armed man next to me muttered under his breath, I assumed to his horse. The explosions had ceased up ahead. I drifted into sleep and for a time I was in Yonkers, tending my roses, and the morning was bright and quiet and it was hot already. It was summer. The air hung heavily about my shoulders. In the dream it was only me and the roses and I was clipping the faded heads. I worked steadily but the garden was full of dead roses. The scissors chinked and chinked with a sound like a turning wheel.

  And I awoke to tents passing and the rumble nearby of motorized vehicles with armor plating upon them and I got down from the cart and found my way through a trail of foolish men who were astonished to see me but compliantly helpful, and at last I was with an officer who had the authority to deal with my needs. We sat on reed chairs in a tent that smelled of grass and earth.

  My son had written, Mother the men suffer here greatly, those who have been here a long while. These are the French and the British and the Australians, mostly, where I am. I am filthy already, though it is all right because I feel like one of them. This colonel before me was not filthy at all. He was quite properly clean and starched and his uniform rustled with gentility as he leaned forward and offered me tea.