Page 11

Chapter Eleven

“Swiss diplomats would obviously be the preferred party for diplomatic neutrality, but in this imperfect world,” Pennybacker confided to June, “it’s challenging to find Swiss diplomats. It’s challenging to find Swiss citizens at all. There’s not as many of them as you would think! Only four million, even in Switzerland. And they already gave up two of them to the Greenbrier for their liaison.”

Midway through the first week, the Avallon welcomed four new arrivals at the station, blustering into the lobby with dry flakes of snow swirling in their wake. Pennybacker knew the first two: Rudolf Reiff, a chiseled harpsichordist whose salt-and-pepper hair rendered his age impossible to fathom, and Felix Rufenacht, a boy-faced conductor with sculptural hair, two members of a chamber orchestra whose return to Europe had become unpleasant to contemplate after Pearl Harbor. They had just finished a five-day crash course in diplomacy in Washington, DC, making them only slightly more informed than June.

Pennybacker said, “So old Rudy and Rufey it is!”

The Swiss men had brought twenty-five thousand dollars in a briefcase chained to Felix’s wrist; this was to be distributed to the Japanese nationals while they dealt with the matter of their frozen bank accounts. They accepted their room keys, claimed the Glass Room (not to be mistaken with the Glass Studio; the latter producing the objects filling the former) for their office hours, and told Pennybacker they were looking forward to catching up.

That left the other arrivals: two members of the Gilfoyle family.

Stella, the eldest Gilfoyle daughter, stomped in with her droopy smile and a caged parakeet who filled the entire lobby with its urgent, repetitive cheek cheek cheek cheek . It had been months since June had seen her, but she was as she always was: earnest, messy, scented with lavender and sweat. She had gotten right to the edge of childhood’s country and then somehow remained at the end of the dock, waving as others left her behind.

“Goon,” Stella said, flinging the parakeet down in order to damply press herself against June. “The train was so hot.”

“Stella, what are you doing here now?” June asked. It was disorienting to be facing a Gilfoyle without warning. Ordinarily their arrival would have been something of a state affair. She felt a sudden twist of misgiving; the eldest Gilfoyle daughter would not ordinarily set off alone. “Is Madeline with you?”

Stella plucked at an identification badge that had been hung around her neck. “Do you have one of these?”

June did. “Stella, surely you didn’t come alone.”

“Of course not,” Stella said. “I came with Sandy.”

Sandy?

As June remained fixed in place, her hands clasped together as permanently as a gravestone angel, she watched the regular drivers of the house Caddies bring the youngest Gilfoyle inside. He had not been able to return in time for the funeral (Able? Or willing? He and Mr. Francis had been fighting until the end), so the last time she had seen him was in a photograph he’d sent of himself in uniform ( Goon — Look at these shabby rags! All my love, Sandy ). In it, she’d been shocked to see that he’d finally completed that conjurer’s trick that young men perform, one day a lanky, large-headed boy, the next a man with sinewy arms and mountainous shoulders. He had always been a friendly-looking boy, his eyes curved as if he was smiling even if he wasn’t smiling, his thick blond eyebrows tilted into a question even if he wasn’t asking a question, and he had grown into a friendly-looking young man.

Today, he reentered his father’s hotel in a wheelchair. Above his left ear, a one-by-three-inch area had been recently shaved close and a line of sutures was visible. That side of his face was also pebbled with red, healing abrasions. Although she was ordinarily undeterred by blood, June’s stomach clenched; it was one thing to see wounds, it was another thing to see Sandy with them. And his affect—this was the most devastating one of all. Sandy didn’t move. As T. J. and Lewis B. carried the chair up the stairs with a slow crab-shuffle, he sat motionless, wearing a mildly perplexed frown, hands resting on his knees. His ears were red with the cold, but he didn’t seem to notice the weather. The dachshunds implored him to no avail.

Three hundred Axis internees had come through June’s door a few days before, but that was nothing compared to this.

Something had thrown a balcony rung to the ballroom floor; something had laughed within the mayor’s wife’s earshot. June had said it wasn’t the water, because the water didn’t work that way, but what did she know? Francis Gilfoyle dead in a box and Edgar Gilfoyle alive in bed with her and Sandy Gilfoyle robbed of his smile—all these things were true now, so anything could be true. For just one moment, small enough to fit between breaths, June thought she would never be happy ever again. This alien thought was both pure and painless. She had been happy yesterday, but she would not be happy tomorrow. Or tomorrow. Or tomorrow. The version of her who grinned was in the past.

It was a feeling that would have been terrible for anyone to experience inside the Avallon, but was especially terrible for June—June, who listened to the sweetwater, who the sweetwater listened to.

The staff watched her.

June swallowed it down.

“I couldn’t push him up the stairs,” Stella babbled, as June automatically reached into Stella’s jacket pocket to find a few dollars to tip T. J. and Lewis B. on her behalf. Stella lifted her arms, the better for June to pickpocket, saying only, “Poor Sandy Dandy.”

Poor Sandy Dandy had an envelope addressed to JUNE HUDSON tucked into his wool jacket. Inside was a typed letter from Ernest Schwartz, the Gilfoyles’ family physician, explaining that Sandy had been the victim of a training accident. The explosion had given Sandy the obvious physical injuries, which Dr. Schwartz was sure would still be in evidence by the time June read this letter, but had also left Sandy with the symptoms of shell shock, as he had been unresponsive ever since. Treatment had been attempted—sodium amytal, sedatives, and counseling—to no avail, and after discussion with Madeline, it was determined the best course of action was to send him to his childhood home to recuperate. Dr. Schwartz was aware the Avallon was serving their country at present, but arrangements had been made with the appropriate federal agencies for Sandy to spend his days inside the hotel itself, as the stimulation would be better for his condition than being alone in the family apartment. Stella would care for him; at the time of the letter-writing they were still trying to get ahold of Edgar, but he would be informed as soon as possible. Yours truly, regards, my condolences, I miss the Avallon every day I am not there, Ernie Schwartz.

June tried, “Sandy?”

His eyes remained fixed beyond her.

That Stella had been sent to care for Sandy was a mark of how little anyone felt could be done for him. Nothing to do but wait. June thought about how her mother and she had waited for her father when he returned from the Great War. But he had never really returned, his last burst of feeling a self-inflicted gunshot. Those greedy Germans , her mother had snarled. They can’t help themselves, taught from birth to take the world, to chew it up, to spit it out. They don’t care a lick about their own sons and husbands so of course they don’t care about anyone else’s. Fully a quarter of June’s father’s patients had been German immigrants, and despite growing anti-German sentiment, her mother had never said a word against them. But that day, standing over the fresh square of soil that contained her husband’s body, June’s mother had gone on and on. There’s no cure for that, the lot of them need to be shot. Give that land to all the mothers and wives whose hearts they’ve broken!

“It’s all right, Sandy-O,” Stella said, voice agreeable. She patted her brother’s motionless shoulder. “Don’t worry about a thing. Junebug’s not mad, is she?”

“I ain’t mad.”

June didn’t know what she was. Something raw and unpracticed. Like the sweetwater, she had become durable, rarely startled, but Sandy had followed different rules in her heart since the day she’d met him. He’d been drowning in the Avallon IV. She’d opened the door to the scent of sulfur and the sight of a single hand emerging from the square of black water. Many years later, when Sandy was old enough to talk properly, he’d told her that for quite some time, it had been two hands, not one. Two hands were required to hold a little boy’s head above water. But it was just the one by the time June arrived, and when she pulled him free, sodden and motionless, head-lolled like a slaughtered pig, that single hand was the only thing that convinced her he wasn’t already dead. Dead little boys couldn’t cling, surely. Luckily for them both, she had just read about the Schafer method of artificial respiration—demonstrated in a cigarette advertisement designed to both save lives and sell Ogden’s cigarettes—and there was a wheelbarrow leaning against a nearby outbuilding. This was how she, a young maid with a nearly incomprehensible mountain accent, came to be wheeling Sandy Gilfoyle, the beloved baby of the Gilfoyle family, up to the Avallon. When the head of housekeeping demanded to know why she was all the way out at Avallon IV, June said, I told you I could hear the water.

They hadn’t ever asked Sandy why he was out there. But June knew.

That day changed both of their lives, didn’t it?

June whispered that incident in Sandy’s ear now, looking to see if it provoked a response. It did not.

From the other side of the room, she heard a spattering of German as two of the internees walked to the dining room. Deep inside her, something scratched and clawed, an unpleasant instinct to blame and to rage. The greedy Germans —

She pressed this thought down at once. She had been caught by surprise earlier, but it wouldn’t happen again. If Toad could clean these folks’ rooms, she could stand straight and get on with her own work.

June delivered the order: “Please get the Gilfoyles settled.”

All the nearby staff leapt into motion, but for one. In a low voice, Griff said, “I’m so sorry, Hoss.”

···

June did her best to push Sandy out of her mind over the next few days, throwing herself into her work. There was plenty of it, both the ordinary (“spills ’n bills,” as Griff called it) and, thanks to the peculiar nature of their guests, the not so ordinary.

The stress of the journey had provoked appendicitis in a German consular secretary, a condition too severe for the benevolent old hotel physician to treat. June had to fight with the local ambulance men before they would agree to transport him to Malden, the closest hospital, and she already knew by the time they’d left—accompanied by a contingent of Border Patrol agents—that the altercation would invite press to their door later.

Toad summoned June to find out if she had more sheets hidden somewhere in the hotel; several of the senior-most officials had demanded to swap suites when they found out a few of their maids and butlers had ended up with larger sitting rooms or better views. Laundry was working overtime to clean all the sheets to turn over the rooms to their new masters. June, grudgingly, released some of her secret wartime stock from the storeroom and had the Grotto send mints to the ejected maids and butlers.

One of the Italian diplomats accidentally set fire to his bathroom while trying to destroy an embassy document he had forgotten he’d hidden in his shoe. When June delivered the wet, blackened paper to Agent Hugh Calloway at the office, he determined it had been a list of Washington families who had hosted the Italian diplomats during their stay. “I meant to send them thank-you letters,” the Italian pleaded.

Griff Clemons said the boys in the Grotto were desperate to get Erich von Limburg-Stirum in a plane, in a car, on a bicycle, on a horse, anywhere he could demonstrate his derring-do. June said it was not her job to keep the Grotto boys in line; it was Chef Fortéscue’s. With a sigh, Griff admitted that it was Fortéscue leading the charge.

And Angela Bickenbach, wife of the German commercial attaché, asked to leave the hotel. She was an American citizen, she said, and could not be forced to go back to Germany with her German husband. They had talked it over and decided to separate so that she could return to her American life. “Is that possible?” June asked Pennybacker. He replied, “It’s going to take a lot of paperwork.”

But as the days passed, June’s thoughts kept returning to Sandy Gilfoyle, whom she kept seeing out of the corner of her eye, parked in various sitting rooms in his wheelchair. Like Mr. Francis, she hadn’t wanted him to join the navy at all; she didn’t want his faith in humanity ruined. He’d just finished university, they were still at peace, there was no whisper of a draft. You don’t want me to do the right thing, Goon? Ironically, she’d suggested he go into diplomacy; he’d continued his intent study of foreign languages all through college and was fluent in several. But he was obsessed about joining. He and Carrie and Mr. Francis were all quite obsessive, actually, unable to put down a thought—the opposite of Edgar and Stella, who had to work hard to hold one for very long at all. Specifically, Sandy had recently become fixated on the story of a German immigrant, Robert Prager, who had been lynched by a mob in Illinois during the Great War. He’d written to June about it— they wrapped him in an American flag, June, they made him walk down the street on broken glass, they thought he was a spy —and then he’d told her more about it when he’d come back to the Avallon, how the mayor had tried to stop them, how they’d made him lift himself up to the noose, how they’d asked him if he wanted to write a final letter to his parents and he had. June could tell the gruesome story had roosted in his mind, and that he wouldn’t be rid of it without action. When June had pointed out that he’d be fighting the Germans, which seemed the opposite of the point of the story, he’d leveled that earnest expression at her.

“This will be a war about how we mete justice, June,” he’d said. “This is a war about the collective will. What do we do with the power of the many? Are we better or worse when we all move together? Do we wield justice? Do we wield vengeance? Do we give a handful of folks a really nice summer holiday? Prager tried to join our navy, but he had a bum eye; he believed in the collective will used for good. Yes, I’ll be fighting Germans. The right way. So would he have been.”

June had a feeling a lot of this talk was to needle Mr. Francis rather than convince her, but she didn’t know how to defuse the tension between them; neither of them argued with anyone else in the world but each other. Instead, she told Sandy she was right proud of how he’d turned out, and he had told her he’d stay if she absolutely wanted him to—a generous offer he had not previously extended to a frustrated Mr. Francis. But June wasn’t about to stop him. This was the agony of trust, wasn’t it? If Sandy believed it was the right thing to do, it probably was.

By the end of the week, June gave up and let herself have a little wallow. Leaving the dachshunds behind the front desk, she told the clerk on duty she’d be back in an hour. At first, her feet started taking her to 411, but she wasn’t sure that the designer’s brand of searing comfort was what she wanted, so she veered to the ballroom. She had a thought she would hide away in the orchestra alcove and just take a moment to collect herself.

She unlocked the grand doors, stepped inside, and locked them behind her. The poetry had not yet been dismantled; the pages spun lightly in response to the current of her entrance. She crossed the floor to the fountain and sat on the edge. Gently touching the rim of one of the carved rhododendrons, she let out a long, long, long breath. That rotten balcony rung had fallen just a few feet from here. She thought about the laugh the mayor’s wife had heard.

She put her hand into the water.

Comfort seeped through her, a decade of comfort. Two decades. Her entire adult life. Ordinarily, when June put her hand into the water, really put her hand in, she was balancing some negativity. Putting in comfort of her own to counteract some ill a guest was experiencing. But today, she used it like a guest would, selfishly. Soaking away her bad feeling, letting the sweetwater heal her.

The hotel was doing well, wasn’t it? Better, even, than she had hoped. This old barge had seen a lot, she thought fondly, and even some wobbling on the part of its general manager wasn’t enough to shake it, not after a decade of pleasure and contentment. The Avallon was in the habit of happiness. How funny, she thought, that Gilfoyle had been right; this assignment was within her capability. Her staff would tend to the diplomatic legations, then put them on a train and get ready for a spring season of war weddings and tasteful parties. The surveyor would finish his work of parting off the Lily House and June would receive a deed. Sandy, young and strong, would recover; unlike her father, he had the healing joy of the Avallon in his sails. And maybe, just maybe, the next time Gilfoyle took her hand, he wouldn’t let go.

Whhhhhsssssst!

June startled as something skidded across the stone and right into the fountain. Something light and bright and slowly sinking. When she pulled it from the water, she discovered it was a paper airplane, folded out of a piece of poetry.

She shielded her eyes against the bright cold sunlight coming through the huge windows and, through the twisting sheets of paper, spotted three figures on the balcony above.

One of them let out an abbreviated yelp. Another said: “Achtung! Hoss!”

Then came a further spattering of German.

“Do not move an inch,” June told the figures.

The balcony dwellers had plenty of time to make a clean getaway as June crossed to the hidden staff staircase in the corner, but she didn’t expect them to disobey her, and she was right. On the third-floor balcony, she discovered two of her waiters, Sebastian Hepp and Paul Eidenmüller, and one celebrity trick air-show pilot, Erich von Limburg-Stirum. Littered around them were squadrons of paper airplanes and stacks of stolen poems still waiting to be folded into service.

All three blinked up like raccoons under a car.

None of them were supposed to be there. Sebastian and Paul should have been getting the dining room ready for service. Erich von Limburg-Stirum, an internee (Pennybacker had wheeled back when June had called them “detainees,” which they were not allowed to be under international law), was forbidden from both the ballroom and the balcony.

June gazed upon them—large-eyed Sebastian, sitting cross-legged with a poem in his hands; gaunt, gawky Paul, kneeling prayerfully for leverage as he sharpened a wing crease; generous-faced Erich, who sprawled propped up on one elbow—before tugging her linen pant legs to more easily join them on the floor. She held out a hand, and Sebastian put a poem in it.

Gin a body meet a body

Coming thro’ the rye,

Gin a body kiss a body—

Need a body cry?

“Is this what you’re trained in?” she asked Erich as she began to fold. The thick paper turned from one kind of art to another beneath her fingers; as the words folded partially out of sight, the poem said first one thing and then another.

“Yes, of course,” Erich said. He had a surprisingly deep voice. “This is what I am famous for.”

“Don’t copy that one,” Sebastian protested when he saw how closely she was modeling her plane on its neighbor. “That is a failed model. Deeply flawed. Never intended to see the sky.”

Paul muttered something in German, and they all laughed, and then Paul realized his mistake and said, in English, for June, “I told them not to make fun of my plane.”

When she was done, Erich inspected the plane, his light eyebrows furrowed deeply, as if there was nothing more important to him than its functionality. He folded some stabilizers into the wings and bent the nose downward.

“Permission to launch?” he asked.

“I think as general manager, I better,” June said.

She sent the plane over the balcony railing. It flew straight and true for a dozen yards before taking a sharp turn for the floor. From up here, its collision was soundless. It looked like a dead swan.

“Should have let the expert do it,” Sebastian murmured.

“Expertise performs better than rank,” Paul added.

Erich said kindly, “It was a good first effort.”

June ducked her head in acknowledgment. “How are you enjoying the Avallon, Mr. von Limburg-Stirum? Herr von Limburg-Stirum?”

(Her two waiters delighted at this, immediately mimicking to each other her pronunciation: Hairrrrrrrrrr. Hairrrrr vond Limburg steeerum. )

“It is very nice, it is very good,” Erich said. He ticked off his fingers. “I enjoy the coffee, I enjoy the very comfortable bed, I enjoy the hospitable service.” When she raised her eyebrows at him, he admitted, “I have been told, they have told me, that it is appropriate at a new location, to tell your host three aspects of their care that you enjoy, and they will find that very satisfying.”

“I find it very satisfying.”

He nodded, pleased.

Her next question was probably not very polite, but she had wanted the answer since she’d learned he was coming. “Are you angry that you’re here?”

“I knew I was taking a risk, staying in America,” Erich said. “I did not know that our countries would find themselves at war, but it was clear relations—this is how you say it, yes? Relations? It was clear relations were not good. But I love to fly like this”—he piloted his hand acrobatically above the floorboards, like an air-show ace—“not for fighting, but for happiness. And I love my country, but America has been my new home.” At this his easy face broke into a faraway smile, as if picturing the crowds he had impressed here. Then, just as quickly, it vanished. “In Germany, I will be dropping bombs. This is very difficult for me.”

Sebastian and Paul studied their fingers and their poetry stacks pending manufacture. This was obviously not conversational ground they had tread before June arrived, and they didn’t know how to reconcile it with their bombastic hero.

Erich began a new plane, but after just two folds, he crushed it flat again. He didn’t lift his eyes from his hand pressed hard on the paper.

Good manners , said Mr. Francis in June’s head, are about making the world a more beautiful place. Sometimes that means you have an unbeautiful thought, but you don’t say it. Sometimes it means you have an unbeautiful need, but you don’t ask for it. The moment it leaves your head, it makes the world less beautiful, do you understand? The well-mannered will go to all kinds of trouble to make sure their unbeautiful thoughts are well hidden. They train in this skill for their entire lives.

June: You’re going to tell me now it’s our job to guess what other fellers’ unbeautiful thoughts are so they don’t have to say them, is that it?

Mr. Francis: Very good, June.

She prodded at Erich’s unbeautiful thoughts. “There’s something else. Isn’t there?”

Immediately, he replied, “Yes, but…I have already told the State Department man, so that is all I can do. I do not think my fiancée knows that I am here; it is possible she thinks I have just disappeared. I do not know if I can expect her to come back with me, but it is hard to think about…I do not like her thinking I went on a tour and simply left her.”

(Why do you say “unbeautiful” instead of “ugly”?

Just because something isn’t beautiful doesn’t make it ugly. The necessary is very rarely beautiful.)

“What did Pennybacker say?”

“He is working on it. Patience, he says. Everything is slow,” Erich said. He suddenly grew tired of not being the blustering hero, too, because he plucked up one of the discarded planes, put his easy grin back on, and declared, “If not for that, I would be quite happy here at the Avallon; you can keep me until next year and beyond.”

June had learned from Gilfoyle how important it was to give people exits from conversations. With deliberate cheer, she said, “I will keep on him. Short sheets for him until you get satisfaction, how about that?”

Quite abruptly, all three smiles slid from their faces. The mood was so thoroughly chilled that June turned to look behind her.

There stood Agent Tucker Rye Minnick. This was not Coal Tattoo Tucker Rye Minnick. This was Federal Agent Tucker Rye Minnick, the law personified, this-area-is-forbidden personified.

He said, “Out.”

The Germans were on their feet at once. The presence of an outsider immediately transmuted Sebastian and Paul from hooligans into waiters. Ingratiating smiles, graceful movements, demure gazes. They glided from the room, boyishness erased. Erich von Limburg-Stirum was once again the air-show pilot in an enemy country. He gave Minnick a wry smile and a sincere apology, then offered him the plane in his hands.

Agent Minnick took it like it was evidence.

Once Erich had left, Agent Minnick, his voice heavy with disappointment, said, “Miss Hudson.”

She was aware of their aloneness, their proximity, his maleness. He stood like a boxer, arms crossed, hands tucked in armpits, legs spread, a posture somewhat at odds with his suit. (This was not Federal Agent Minnick, but rather Coal Tattoo Minnick.) He seemed to take up more space on this balcony than the other three young men combined. She had not thought about the space between herself and them when she sat folding paper. She thought about the space between herself and Agent Minnick.

“They were just making airplanes,” she said.

He regarded the plane in his hand and then said, unsmiling, “Come with me.”

Just a few short yards down the hall, he pressed open a door to reveal that the sitting room desk on the other side was covered with technical equipment. June saw a headset, cables, a receiver.

“Is that—”

“Mr. Pennybacker would not say it in so many words,” Agent Minnick said, “but quite a few of the foreign nationals currently calling the Avallon home had wide access to important pieces of America’s infrastructure before Pearl Harbor. Some of them may have made intentional efforts to research that information for their governments back home. Discovering how much of a threat these individuals are before they leave this place is one of my jobs here.”

“They were just making airplanes,” she said again.

“Erich von Limburg-Stirum’s older brother is an SS-Gruppenführer back in Germany. Do you know what that means?”

She knew what it meant.

“If he came in here first, if he saw my listening equipment, then my entire surveillance is compromised. They might shut up altogether or they might feed me false information, knowing I was sending it back to Washington.”

“Unless they were just making airplanes.”

He peered at her until he saw that she took his point but was being difficult. “Is it true you hired a guest instead of sending her away?”

“Just one.”

“That feels like a deliberate circumvention of the rules.”

“You’re feeling correctly, then.”

“Miss Hudson, it is hard to believe you’re taking this seriously.”

In June’s gray ledgers, the staff had noted that Tucker Rye Minnick had taped a collection of tin can labels to the shaving mirror in his suite. Some of the can labels were years old, housekeeping noted, faded and retaped several times over. A few had notes written on them, but nothing that made sense to the maids. (One of the maids had also noted, with a certain emphatic press to her handwriting, that he had no wedding ring; this handwriting matched a similar observation on Agent Harris’s page.) It was difficult for June to reconcile a man with a collection of tin can labels with the man before her now.

June said, “I am taking my job seriously. My job is to keep this hotel running smoothly. My job is to make sure my staff’s morale stays good. My job is to make sure my guests are happy. It’s my job to ask them what they want, and give it to them. It’s your job to think of them as the enemy. You keep to your business. I’ll do mine.”

“I can’t agree to that. Sometimes your business will be my business.” Opening his jacket—how startling to see a man wearing a gun in her hotel—he pulled out a document and consulted it. She just had time to see that it was a handwritten call log before he tucked it back away and asked, “What does 6CRW stand for?”

“It’s a cloakroom in the west wing of sixth floor. Do you know what, Agent Minnick, folks normally find me right charming.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Why is there is a phone in a cloakroom?”

“We’ve got event space on the sixth floor. You ever discovered partway through the governor’s birthday party you’re short on pistachio ice cream? It’s a bad feeling, Agent.”

“Who has access?”

“People who need to call the Grotto for pistachio ice cream.” He did not smile. She went on. “It ain’t locked. Anyone could get up there. But it’s not a guest space; there shouldn’t be anyone there at all. Why?”

Agent Minnick merely buttoned up his jacket, hiding away his service weapon. Where did he put it, she wondered, when he slept? On the bedside table, beside the lamp; on the desk blotter, occluding the complimentary notepad; on the bathroom counter, next to the slots to discard used razor blades; beneath his pillow, dreaming violent dreams?

“Try to remember there’s a war on,” he said.