Page 17

Chapter Seventeen

This was how June Hudson became Hoss:

It was an excellent spring day in the mountains, redbuds and dogwoods spattering clouds of pink and white through the forests. The lawns were densely green. The birds sang wedding songs. The Avallon grounds were newly alive with work that wasn’t possible as long as there was a danger of snow. Landscaping, exterior paint, roof repair. June, however, was trapped inside, hard at work in her current position in the direct mail department. Her desk was strewn with her gray-covered ledgers and Avallon stationery. She was meant to be simply addressing postcards and stuffing envelopes with brochures, but she couldn’t resist using the opportunity to remind some of the most influential guests what specific pleasures awaited them at the Avallon. Using notes from the ledgers, she composed letter after letter, tucking them in with the advertising materials.

She liked how the letters were written from the hotel’s point of view. We are looking forward to you. We remember what you like. We cannot wait to make your year memorable. June, on her own, was just a teen girl with a barely controlled mountain accent. June, in these letters, was the Avallon, teeming with vivid, lovely power. She commanded them to come; they obeyed.

She was working far above her nominal position; she suspected Mr. Francis meant her to. When he’d moved her from the print shop to direct mail, he’d said, merely, “Learn what you can.” She was unworried about failure; she was secure in her place with the Gilfoyles now. What was the worst that could happen? In the sitting room tartan chair in the family apartment, he’d give her a look over his glasses as she played a board game with Carrie and Edgar with one hand and drew a funny face on Sandy’s palm with the other, and he’d say, June, I heard you were overreaching again. She would say, Yes , and that would be the end of it.

It was not the Gilfoyles’ wealth that intoxicated June. It was their trust in her.

That spring day, the one when she became Hoss, she worked with the window open, not because it was warm enough for that, but because the idea that one day soon, it would be, was sufficient to crack it. That was how she noticed the change at once. One moment, the atmosphere was idyllic.

The next, everything stank of ramps.

Ramps were hard to explain to those from outside West Virginia. They were a wild, onion-like root found on hillsides, and pretty much every poor family in the state had subsisted on them at one time or another. They were not particularly palatable at first, but one got a taste for them, especially when there wasn’t much else. The problem with ramps, however, was that they began to make everything else smell like them, too. Those who ate ramps smelled like ramps. Clothing and bedsheets stored near ramps smelled like ramps. Hair, skin, breath, everything ramps. Garlic thought it was powerful until it had to do battle with ramps. It was a nostalgic odor, though. A proud odor. It was the smell of West Virginia. There was a recent fashion to inject perfume into newsletter inks, and June had heard a story of a printer who had once had the bright idea to invest the newsletter’s words with the smell of ramps for their West Virginia readers. Postal workers collapsed in back rooms and went on strike rather than load the offending documents into their delivery vehicles. Ramps was a smell that always won.

That day at the Avallon, the smell originated from but was not contained to the swimming pools. The drinking water tasted of it; the air smelled of it; every font on every floor burped ramps. June made her way from the direct mail department to the lobby, where she stood, surrounded by the scent of her pre-Avallon childhood, and watched porters flee with handkerchiefs over their noses.

For the guests, the stench was merely horrible. For the staff, it was fearful.

They knew the water was turning.

And where was Francis Gilfoyle? In New York, picking up Edgar from boarding school at the term’s end. Phones did not reach him and, in any case, what would a conversation do? His staff didn’t need to know what to do; they needed Mr. Gilfoyle to do it .

June took control. No one else had.

She called for the portable dance floor to be fetched from storage, for the Grotto to assemble a picnic, for the landscape men to set a bonfire by the Winnet fields to drive away the last of the spring chill. The porters would sing a rousing tune in the hallways to lure guests from their rooms, out the door, to where the orchestra was already serenading the picnic blankets. With the guests taken care of, the pools would be doused with salt and chlorine, the hotel windows thrown open, the fireplace flues set to gaping, the snails collected from the walls of the pool room.

June told Sam Redford, the now long-retired staff captain, that he ought to gather all the staff members who had just gotten engaged.

He didn’t ask why. In a room of uncertainty, confidence wins.

As the guests enjoyed a spontaneous dance festival on the Avallon’s Winnet fields, the newly engaged staff members plucked all the pennies out of the ballroom fountain. For the better part of an hour, the happy young women plunged their arms into the sweetwater, investing it with their joy, giving it what they wanted to get back. Reciprocity.

After that, June told Griff Clemons, then head valet, that she’d be in the Avallon IV, and that she didn’t want anyone to disturb her.

Less than an hour later, the air cleared.

June had emerged from the oldest of the bathhouses, a little wobbly on her feet.

The head of housekeeping had hurried to steady her on one side. The head valet had come for the other.

Griff said, Nicely done, Hoss.

···

“What is this game exactly?” Johnny Hosokawa asked.

“Winnet,” June replied. “It’s only played here.”

It was a beautiful day, unseasonably warm, a tantalizing promise of a beautiful spring, right around the corner. Ladybugs had suddenly multiplied in every window, and even outside, the bright, cheerful bugs kept alighting on shoulders and in hair. Erich von Limburg-Stirum and Johnny Hosokawa had the intent bearing of midwives as June threw open the doors of the white-clad, copper-roofed storage building colloquially known as the Winnet Cabinet. She found what she was looking for, a long, stiff cardboard case with reinforced corners. On the side of it was written in stark letters: HUDSON.

“That’s you,” said Erich.

“That’s me.”

Ordinarily June would not have employed guests to transport Winnet cases, but the Avallon was finding itself even more short-staffed—in a single week, half her porters and most of her landscapers had left for induction—and also, Erich von Limburg-Stirum and Johnny Hosokawa were not exactly like guests. Erich was of course the popular and lovelorn pilot, and Johnny was a bright, hectic young man born in Japan but raised in the United States. Outside of the hotel, he had been a Washington staff correspondent for the Dōmei News Agency, which had recently turned its journalistic priorities toward Japanese nationalistic propaganda.

“I have always wanted to write,” Johnny had told her a few days before, “and I have always been Japanese. I can’t change either. What does a singer do when she is in a convent? She sings about God. I wrote what they wanted me to write about Japan.”

Robert Prager, the lynched German Sandy had been obsessed with, had told his tormentors that he was German only by “an accident” of birth. Johnny was Japanese by accident of birth. June was American by accident of birth. On the right side of the war by accident, the side of—as Sandy had said—using collective power for something good. Sandy had made his accident on purpose by joining the navy. What was June doing with her American accident?

“Are you good at this game?” Erich asked. His tone was competitive.

June grinned at him. “You boys are lucky I ain’t playing.”

She flipped open the case’s lid. Inside were the supplies to play Winnet. The spell resembled a shoehorn, covered tightly with coarse but handsome leather. The billies—of the same family as golf clubs or croquet mallets—had intricately carved handles. One even had a bird head that matched one of the sweetwater fonts in the hotel. And the winnets! They were beautiful, polished wooden eggs of every color. The newest of them were a single, pure color. The oldest of them were patchwork jewels of uneven sizes, their wounds repaired, painted, lacquered anew. Erich and Johnny both wanted to hold these in their hands, so she let them as she retrieved a few more cases from the cabinet.

The two young men had taken to each other at once, forming an unlikely friend group that included June’s waiters Sebastian Hepp and Paul Eidenmüller. June had a sense that such a thing was dangerous—what would happen after the diplomats were gone, when Erich and Johnny had been replaced with the Morgans and the Delafields?—but she didn’t have the heart to break it up. Sebastian had only a few more weeks of his boyhood.

“Bring all of them?” Johnny asked, lifting one of the cardboard cases.

“Bring all of them,” June replied.

Things had been different since the night the journalists attempted escape. The rumor of an early departure had ruined the diplomats. In their minds, they’d already packed their bags, taken the train to New York, boarded a ship, survived the U-boats, landed in Portugal, waited for another train, and then, in their ultimate destinations, prepared to survive the rest of the war. Now the slightest issue at the Avallon vexed them. The beds were uncomfortable, the elevators too slow. The Italians were too loud; the Germans too scathing; the Japanese too contemptuous. At the Greenbrier, the Japanese had thrown such a fit about the Germans that the State Department had to move the Greenbrier’s Japanese legations to an entirely different hotel in the Carolinas. June’s diplomats had not yet reached this level of disorder, but she could taste its sourness in her two glasses of sweetwater in the morning and two glasses at night.

That night had changed her, too. The journalists were desperate. Lieselotte Berger had intentional scars on her face. Sabine Wolfe was picking up a phone and setting it back down without saying a word. Who else in her hotel was afraid?

June either had to balance the souring water, or balance her souring guests, and she didn’t want to go into the Avallon IV.

Chattering all the while, Erich and Johnny joined the other gathered diplomats on the spring-lush Winnet fields, which rolled as far as the eye could see among old-growth trees. Based on an archaic game that had long ago lost to golf in popularity, Winnet existed nowhere else in the world. That the game could not be practiced elsewhere due to the need for such vast courses only added to its appeal; some guests came to the Avallon each summer because they could not otherwise improve their game. How many times had June walked out onto these fields? The Gilfoyles, like everyone else at the Avallon, were Winnet-mad. Endless afternoons, never-ending matches. At night, they all dreamt they were still swinging billies at winnets, still hearing the crack of the winnets against the scoreboards secured high on the trees.

“You playing, Agent Calloway?”

Hugh Calloway had detoured from his walk to investigate the event. He shielded his eyes with his hand. “Just looking, ma’am.”

She once more considered firing Ulcie. But that sour water in the morning, that sour water in the evening…She asked, “How is the post office treating you?”

“Just fine.”

June wanted to say, Ulcie’s out the door the moment this is over , but she knew it would be to make her feel better, not him. Instead, she said, “I hear you play a mean hand of poker.”

He gave a braying laugh. “That’s right, Tuck said you had ears all over this place. Speak of the devil—” Hugh lifted his hand to Tucker, who was a small figure in front of the hotel. He did not return the gesture; his eyes drilled into them both. “Cheerful as usual, I see. I got to get running. Enjoy your game, Miss Hudson.”

Since June’s actual Winnet instructor, an ex-cricketer named Thomas Hammerfield, had shipped out two weeks before, the diplomats had to make do with the most patient and presentable of her other staffers. Room service waiters, plumbers, plongeurs, maids, janitors, Luellen her guest history manager, and Zachariah Hatfield her chaplain—they were all out in the sun in their gray-and-gold uniforms gleefully teaching swings, placing spells, tossing winnets back and forth with diplomats from five countries. June felt a bittersweet pang. Front of house, back of house. The very best Winnet players had always been those who had access to the fields year-round. She took great pains to conceal this from the guests, who would not have liked to be bested by the help.

But for now, they just played Winnet.

Just as inside the hotel, the legations remained separated by nationality. The small Italian legation participated enthusiastically. The austere Japanese legation mostly watched from a safe distance, enjoying the sun on blankets and benches. Sebastian Hepp held court over the vast German legation, splitting it up by gender and age, performing his task with Olympic gravity. Sabine Wolfe stood at the edge of this group, watching them play. She wore a dark green hat with a half veil that made her red-gold hair positively luminous, and a silk blouse to match. She held her coat crumpled in her arms like a dead infant.

Do not approach her , Tucker had said, and she had wondered then why he would bother saying such a thing.

And yet here June’s feet went, taking her toward the cultural attaché’s wife. Perhaps it was because of how coldly she had told June that there was nothing she could do to help. Perhaps it was because of how she had not tried to punish Hannelore for her screaming. Perhaps because she had caught June’s notice that first day by being the only woman to have walked up the driveway with the men. Perhaps because of how Sabine had just now lowered herself onto an iron bench among the old-growth trees—as if her knees had given way in defeat. Or perhaps because she wanted to know: What were the words Sabine Wolfe was leaving unspoken?

Whatever it was, June sat down beside her and said, “I hear you are an artist.”

“How would you know that?” Despite being German, she spoke English with a classy Mayfair accent. This was a woman who, until war broke out, belonged securely in the world of the Gilfoyles.

“You mentioned it to one of my staff in the Tapestry Room. The Portrait Gallery has some good works if you haven’t been into it.”

Sabine smiled small at her. It was gentle, but not genuine; she knew what June was doing. “I used to be very interested in nature figures. When I was younger, I studied birds and painted the different species in diagrams. In watercolor. Their movement and their behavior, what they ate. I created one page for each species, sometimes two, if the male and female were very different. Often two. Often they are very different in the ways they present themselves to the world. I discarded it when I met Friedrich, but I do still sometimes think, in my imagination, about how I would paint a bird. But you…you are an artist, too. The Avallon is your canvas.”

Sabine had seemed contemptuous the last time June had seen her, but this seemed earnest. It was possible Sabine, like June, was a piece of furniture covered with a sheet that gave very little away.

“The Avallon is a game that is different each day, that’s for sure,” June said. She hesitated; the crack of winnets and sound of voices filled the gap. “Mrs. Wolfe, the other day, you said there was nothing I could do to help. I’m not used to being told that in my own hotel.”

Sabine’s cheeks immediately colored. “Miss Hudson, I was distressed, I should not have—”

June waved this away. “Mrs. Wolfe, I had fits like Hannelore’s. I was a lot like her.”

Sabine’s brow knit.

It was a difficult journey to picture unless you’d taken it yourself. For many years, June had thought she was the woman she was despite who she’d been as a child. Now she knew she was the woman she was because of who she’d been as a child. Only a person who understood nothing about others had the patience to so thoroughly study them.

Eventually, Sabine said, “Surely your fits were not that severe.”

June only remembered the bystander reactions. Did she judge her mother for wordlessly leaving her in Constancy? It was ’18 or ’19, and in West Virginia, everyone was hungry, unless you were at the Avallon. Her father had retreated into a bullet. Her mother was alone, and June was not an adorable beggar. June would not be the only abandoned child of the time. Her mother would’ve been the same age as June now, wouldn’t she? But it was not fair to compare them. Her mother had had no one, and June had a family of hundreds.

June said, “Don’t you doubt it, my turns were right awful. But Hannelore’s a watcher, just like I was. I saw her that first day. Taking everything in. She just needs time.”

Sabine started to say something, then stopped. This was the thing about Mr. Francis’s gilded royalty and their gorgeous restraint. There were so many things they could never say. Impossible to know what she was really thinking, but for June, one image loomed large: that syringe, Hannelore’s chemical sleep.

June guessed, “You don’t think Hannelore has time.”

Sabine’s eyes gleamed and then cleared just as quickly; as swift as she was to tears, she was swifter to banish them. She tucked a loose thread beneath a button and said in a perfectly neutral tone, “The ambassador’s son, did you hear about him? He was recently given a mental diagnosis. He is sixteen? Seventeen. No, sixteen, certainly. I believe it is schizophrenia. He is in a facility here in America, getting treatment. When the ambassador is repatriated to Germany, his son is supposed to go with him, of course, but…” It took a moment for Sabine to develop a strategy for ending this sentence with diplomatic ease. “In Germany, schizophrenics are being euthanized. It is a program for those who are cognitively compromised. Its reach is…comprehensive.”

A little shiver danced across June’s skin, quite unbidden. The phrasing, clinical and dispassionate, made the statement more disturbing, not less.

Sabine continued to place her words with intention, careful as someone alphabetizing books. “The rumor is that the ambassador made a deal with the State Department for his son to remain in the United States when they go. I do not think it was easy. But I believe they have agreed to forget about the boy’s file.”

Her eyes flicked up to the rest of the German legation, where Lothar Liebe leaned on a billy, watching the two of them on the bench with his dark, silent-movie-star good looks.

Sabine made a show of smiling as if June had said something wonderful, and then she said, through that ghastly false smile, “The ambassador’s son was terrible just once before they made a diagnosis. A dreadful episode. But aren’t we all terrible just once? He is sixteen years old. When he found out what he had done…He is such a sensitive boy. When he was done crying, he agreed to whatever they thought best. He could have been convinced of a lobotomy, electric shock, a merciful death.”

Across the field, Sebastian crouched tenderly beside a frustrated child. For some reason, June’s mind put his face on the ambassador’s son. She did not want him to go to war. She did not want him to be trained to shoot Erich von Limburg-Stirum. She knew he didn’t, either, but he would go anyway, and he would do his best, out of principle. Like Sandy, he believed in the power of the collective. He wouldn’t be at the Avallon if he didn’t.

June asked, “Will they consider Hannelore ‘cognitively compromised’?”

Instead of answering, Sabine said, “Do you have any powder?”

June produced a compact from her pocket. Sabine used this to powder her nose and hide her dabbing a tear away.

June asked, “Does Hannelore know?”

Sabine shook her head a little.

Woman, mother, guest, enemy, superior, prisoner.

Sabine said, “My husband believes he can protect her in Germany. He wishes to believe he can protect her in Germany. She is our only daughter. But I…”

June gathered herself. Everything before this was going to feel small in comparison.

Tucker would be mad. Tucker could stuff it.

June said, “Is that what those phone calls were about?”

Sabine whispered, “You know Lothar is Gestapo now, of course.”

“Gestapo,” echoed June. The word sounded cruel, foreign, out of place.

“Secret police. Previously with the SD, our information-gathering agency. He watches everything we do. It is not just him, of course, it is…if…” Sabine gripped her elbows with her long fingers. “I wanted to call the State Department man to see if she could stay here. I kept losing my nerve. It is not done, to criticize Germany’s choices. Not for us. We represent Germany.”

June pictured her creeping up to the sixth-floor cloakroom, picking up the phone, listening to the hello girl on the other side, putting it down. A few calls right when she had gotten here. And then, once more, when she thought repatriation was near.

“Do you want me to speak to Mr. Pennybacker for you?” June asked.

Sabine nodded, just barely. “Discretion. I cannot emphasize that enough.”

“You can’t run a hotel any other way.”

Across the Winnet field, Lothar Liebe, a neutral smile on his face, gestured for Sabine to join him. The chill that ran up June’s spine was so thorough that she tried to imagine if his gesture itself had been sinister in any way, or if it was only in the context of what she had just heard. No, probably, if this had been an ordinary conversation, she would have thought Lothar Liebe was like Erich, a German citizen tugged into the Avallon by a too-zealous State Department.

Sabine waved lightly. In a tight voice, she asked, “What were we talking about? He will ask.”

“The menu,” June replied immediately. “What can be done about the Germans thinking our chef’s menu is not good enough.”

“Yes. Of course,” Sabine said, relieved.

June watched her stroll to Lothar, who took her arm and spoke into her ear. Both Germans turned in time to see Sebastian Hepp’s winnet carve a beautiful parabola that ended, with an excellent crack , on a scoreboard . Sebastian’s face was flushed with warmth and triumph. Erich von Limburg-Stirum shouted, “ Gut gemacht! ” Johnny Hosakawa called, “Stellar!” and even Luellen March from guest history shouted, simply, “ Mr. Hepp! ”

Lifting his billy above his head, Sebastian sang cheerfully:

Leb’ wohl denn, oh Hochland, sei Norden gegrüsst,

Wo Heimat der Ehre und Tapferkeit ist;

Wohin ich auch wandre, wo immer ich bin,

Es zieht zu den Hügeln des Hochlands mich hin.

Paul Eidenmüller broke off demonstrating for the Japanese to join him in the song, and so, then, did Erich, all of them amused with themselves, chanting like they were in a pub. After a few lines, June realized they were singing, in German, one of the Robert Burns songs from the ballroom. A moment later, the chamber orchestra recognized the tune and took over, transforming it for everyone else into the very recognizable “My Heart’s in the Highlands.” The sun glittered down on the spontaneous moment, perfect not because it had been elegantly designed but because it had not.

She was reminded of the very first moment she had seen the Avallon at the top of the hill. What a wonderful island, she’d thought, so far from the problems of the weary world. But she could no longer evoke that precise feeling. It was impossible to hear the orchestra crooning over laughter and not think about how, elsewhere in the world, the innocent were being sentenced to death.

She hadn’t moved an inch, and she missed it here already.

“Hoss—hey—”

June heard the unmistakable and mundane sounds of a fistfight. There was simply nothing like it, that combination of knuckles hitting meat and breath huffing between teeth and shoes tearing up ground and watches flinting against eyeglasses. When she saw the source, consternation turned to humiliation. Two of the Japanese diplomats, a Border Patrol agent, and one of her waiters (Chuck Curtis, mild scoliosis, safe from draft) were locked in an ugly, disordered fight.

When she took a step in that direction, she heard—and felt—a crunching sound beneath her feet. A snail. More than one, in fact. The ground was lousy with them, colors bright in the checkered sunlight through the branches. Had she missed them when she sat next to Sabine? She couldn’t have. Two of them, moving slowly with their peculiar horizontal shells, crawled on the armrest of the bench where Sabine had just sat.

The fight continued.

“No,” June called. When it didn’t carry far enough, she cupped her hands around her mouth and repeated, calmly, “ No! ”

Chuck stopped at once.

This earned him a slap from one of the two Japanese men, but when he saw that Chuck wasn’t reacting, he stopped, too. That left the Border Patrol and the other Japanese man, whose fight lost its own spark when they glimpsed the other two men holstering up. All four were motionless by the time June strode into their midst.

“What,” she said, “the devil.”

Chuck’s face was red and he was out of breath. He couldn’t meet her eyes. She’d been the one to convince Mr. Francis that he would make a fine waiter, despite his twisted spine. The tailor had made a custom pad for just the left shoulder of Chuck’s uniform jacket, and he’d never looked back.

June recognized the Border Patrol agent from the garage; she saw him recognize her, too. She asked, “Should I get Agent Minnick?”

She should not.

Bashfully, Chuck described the incident, starting with the opening volley:

Chuck: Can I take your drink?

Japanese clerk: If I can take the Lexington .

This was a reference to the USS Lexington , a carrier the Japanese had recently claimed to have sunk in the Pacific. The rest of the story told itself.

All parties were sorry, Hoss, sorry, ma’am . But June didn’t need them to be sorry. She needed it to have not happened at all. A fistfight, at the Avallon? Unheard of. It did not matter if Chuck had been provoked; they were meant to be unprovokable. Chuck was no neophyte; he was a veteran with many years under his belt.

June felt it all mounting. Mr. Francis’s death, the laugh down in Constancy, the splash in Avallon II, the snails beneath Sabine’s bench. Don’t get cocky , Mayor Foglesong had told her, but she had been a little cocky, hadn’t she? The water don’t work like that , she’d kept saying, but everything was changing these days. Mr. Francis was dead; she’d slept with Gilfoyle; the Gestapo was taking meals in her dining rooms.

“Hoss,” Griff Clemons said. As he joined her, her staff captain held up a muddy snail.

June sighed. “I saw.”

Vive l’Avallon.