Page 24

Chapter Twenty-Four

The first time Edgar Gilfoyle told June he loved her was in the Lily House.

Edgar Gilfoyle: playfellow, playboy. After pulling Sandy from the well, June had first been invited to dinner with the Gilfoyle family, then to play board games in the apartment, to take lessons with the other siblings, to accompany them to plays, to films, to other hotels on holiday, to be one of them. How she loved them all. The rest of them as family; Edgar as something else, always something else, even back then. It was in the Avallon III that Edgar first kissed her, after months of going mad with accidental and then purposeful touches in halls, under tables, in the pool. Then she kissed him again in the Conservatory, and he kissed her again in the service elevator down to the Grotto. They played cards with the rest of the family at the coffee table, their knees pressed together beneath it, waiting for night to fall and for everyone to go to bed so that they could meet in the Tower, a solitary one-room folly that rose an additional story from the apartment. They spent every moment together, him reading or knocking a croquet ball or winnet around, her studying her notes or beating him at croquet or Winnet. I think about you all the time. Then he went away to boarding school and June became enmeshed in her apprenticeship with Mr. Francis, but when Edgar came back on break, it was as if no time at all had passed. The only difference was that his mouth and his hands grew craftier, more practiced. Where did you learn this? June whispered to him, and he whispered back, What do you think they teach us boys at school?

Edgar Gilfoyle: playfellow, playboy. June had seen exactly what he became as he grew older: handsome, confident, passionate, desired. Unlike what the papers said, though, it was not that he moved callously through relationships. He felt each deeply; by senior year, June was hearing all about it in chummish weekly correspondence and calls. He courted, caught, loved, lost quicker than anyone else June knew. He suffered weekly heartbreaks and titillation and agonies and enthrallment, the Diana Goelets, the Mary Rockefellers, the Irma Goldbergs, the Eugenie Vanderbilts, all of them emergencies.

The problem was that, when she was younger, June had assumed that when Edgar grew exhausted with his Dianas, Marys, Irmas, Eugenies—and he would, because they did not know him, and she did—he would return to the Avallon and realize, with a sigh of relief, that June was still there.

Second floor of the Lily House, home on break. A summer thunderstorm growling on the other side of the mountains, not yet arrived. The water had been newly balanced and everything felt like the first day of life. By then, June was staff captain, newly installed in her basement apartment. Mr. Francis was lying somewhere in the dark, recovering from the burden of absorbing the troubles of an entire hotel, and Madeline sent June and Gilfoyle to the Lily House to hang new curtains before an aunt’s visit. June could have easily redirected maids in order to enjoy her day off, but she accepted the task to give Madeline her space.

Gilfoyle put on a record while she dragged a chair to the windows to reach the curtain rods. June, arms stretched above her, felt Gilfoyle’s hands on her newly exposed back. She let him lower her to the floor. Kate Smith sang sweetly in the background (“ I’ve waited long in vain for you, dear ”) as they danced in slow circles over the forgotten new curtains strewn across the floor. In her ear, cautiously, he tried it out: “I love you, June.”

She remembered that she just grinned at him. She didn’t doubt it.

Ah, the bittersweet gift of the Lily House! She was only one person. It was ever so much larger than a limousine.

···

“I didn’t know you were coming,” June said. “Nothing’s ready for you.”

Ordinarily, when any of the Gilfoyle family was at the Avallon, they required a full contingent of staff assigned just to them. A battered ledger in the office listed the full protocol for meals, cleaning, laundry, leisure, as well as each family member’s personal requests (June was ashamed to admit she had once written a pretend version of what her requests would look like if added to the ledger, but she had long since crumpled it up and thrown it away).

(Bed warmers prepared

Honeysuckle powder in the bathroom

Yellow roses on the table

Fresh stationery in the sitting room)

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Gilfoyle said. “We need to talk, June, later, we need to talk.”

June not Miss Hudson , and with everyone in the lobby staring at them, some still hidden behind masks. Her name nailed her feet to the floor.

“When?”

Gilfoyle looked at his watch—it would not be right, his watches were never right—and then at the clock behind the front desk. He seemed to realize the staff were watching, because he frowned. “Tonight, Miss Hudson.”

Between now and tonight was Pennybacker, who summoned her to his suite, an airy, teal-blue set of rooms that looked out at the mountains to the west. A single winding horse trail led across the fields and into the woods on this side of the property; if one followed it long enough, they’d end up in Casto Springs. The suite itself had fallen into the sort of personal chaos only possible in a long-stay hotel room; folding socks was the least of Pennybacker’s problems. Pennybacker was sat at the desk, a pen in his balled fist, his shirt wrinkled many times over and his hair unkempt.

June stepped in, eyeing a breakfast tray at the end of his bed; a crumpled piece of paper was half dipped in dried egg. “Mr. Pennybacker, I’m sure the Grotto would be happy to run you down a meal.”

He just flapped his hand for her to shut the door and said, “You were right about the third letter. She woos me. My wife. Mrs. Pennybacker.”

“Congratulations.”

“To you, as well,” he said. When her face showed confusion, he added, embarrassed, “I assumed Mr. Gilfoyle had raced here to tell you the news. We have a train scheduled. Tomorrow, at midnight. It’s done.”

June had been so certain that he’d summoned her to talk about Sebastian’s arrest that she didn’t immediately understand him. She found she needed to take his statement apart into individual words. Train. Tomorrow. Midnight. Done.

Train.

Tomorrow.

Midnight.

Done.

“I know,” he said. “After all this time. I can barely believe it myself. But everything is finally in order, much thanks to you. Without Hertha, who knows how long this would have gone on.”

June wondered how Sabine would take the news. Or perhaps Pennybacker had already told her. Come to think of it, she hadn’t seen Sabine Wolfe at the wedding reception, although the ubiquitous trio of Friedrich, Dr. Kirsch, and Lothar Liebe had been in attendance, of course, scrutinizing the German legation. “How will this work with Hannelore staying behind?”

Pennybacker carefully put his pen down .

He did not have to say anything. The unspoken words bellowed at her.

“No!” June said, “No, I don’t accept it. Why not?”

He did not meet her gaze.

“You jaspers came in here and just about ruined my hotel. My summer season is in shambles. The draft’s gutted my staff and I haven’t had a week of certainty to know when I should be rehiring. You just arrested my head waiter. All at a discount rate, which means we’re paying you lot for the privilege of housing people who mock my staff while they bring them coffee. All I’m asking from you is to make this happen, to make one girl stay here. I gave you Hertha. You can give me that.”

He was abashed. “The State Department just won’t have her.”

“No,” she said again. “I know you have bureaucratic power. I know power. I can smell it on you.”

“Miss Hudson, she has no guardians here,” Pennybacker said. “The Wolfes are not wealthy enough to leave a fund for her care. And there is the matter of her parents—do you want to see her file? This is what I have to contend with.”

Rising from his desk, he shuffled through a stack of papers that turned out to be entirely covering his open luggage cases, then tossed some onto her lap. One, a newspaper clipping, was an op-ed Friedrich Wolfe had written in defense of the Nazi Party. Another was an invitation to a party Sabine Wolfe arranged in honor of Hitler’s birthday the previous April. Here was a statement from a senator’s wife, saying Friedrich Wolfe had discussed Hitler’s opinion that German businessmen who felt sympathy for Jews were devoid of conscience. Here was a photo of Sabine Wolfe during a state visit to Germany, attending a party rally. Here was a list of their bosom family and friends back in Germany, with their various positions within the Nazi Party to the right of their name. A vibrant and hectic social calendar; June had seen lives like this before. There was one crucial difference. The Gilfoyles’ web was full of people with old money and influence.

The Wolfes’ web was full of Nazis.

Hannelore’s unusual personality hadn’t changed the Wolfes’ lives; it had simply complicated them.

June thought about how Sabine had never asked to stay behind with her daughter.

Her ears hissed, water rushing through caverns. She had comforted Sabine on the bench by the Winnet field. Delivered promises, the same as she would to any other guest, not questioning if Sabine deserved it. Who were the Morgans outside the hotel? Who was Sabine Wolfe? It wasn’t supposed to matter.

But it mattered. She didn’t know how it could not matter ever again.

Pennybacker sounded tired. “So you see that the State Department has little sympathy for Hannelore Wolfe.”

No, June saw nothing. What was June at that age? A silent half-orphaned maid in the back of a hotel, no longer a mountaineer but not yet an honorary Gilfoyle. Hannelore had her entire life in front of her, no matter her pedigree.

“But Hannelore is a child,” June said.

“Which is why I tried my very best.”

“And you sleep at night?”

“Sleep! I work against that murderous mistress, time.” Pennybacker threw a letter at her; as it sailed to the carpet beside her feet, she was reminded of that long-ago day in the ballroom, when Erich, Paul, and Sebastian were flying paper airplanes into her fountain. Erich, who, in very short order, would be shooting Americans out of the sky; Sebastian, who, in very short order, would be tried as a traitor for helping a German out of a hotel. Pennybacker went on, “I can tell you, in extreme confidentiality, that there are American spies in that German hotel, and if they are found out, they will be killed for it. Time is not a kindness. Miss Hudson, what does that letter say?”

With a sick, dull feeling in her stomach, June returned the letter to its place on his desk. “That the Americans are starving.”

“Diplomatic reciprocity is a sham, whether through a lack of principle or a lack of supply. The Americans at Bad Nauheim have been losing weight since December. The Americans in Japan are—it doesn’t bear thinking about. You understand. They must come back. I care deeply about the fate of that peculiar girl and I would go so far as to put her under my own roof if the issue of her housing was the only one, but the diplomats in this hotel are only one of innumerable moving parts. A train comes for them; a hotel in Jersey City waits for them; a boat survived wolf packs of U-boats to meet them there; a documented and timed route for their safe passage back to Europe has been communicated to an ocean full of nasties who agree to pause their nastiness; hotels full of Americans in danger wait on the other side of the ocean in a mirrored staging process. If any of it falls apart now, who is to say how long it will take for this confluence of events to happen once more? I am, and have been, trying to save as many lives as possible.”

June was aware that this room would forever contain this conversation. Never again, for as long as she was at the Avallon, would she be able to walk into this suite without remembering the letter describing how much weight the American diplomats and their families had lost while waiting for the negotiations to be completed. There were innumerable rooms in this hotel that were now permanently encoded with war. And the playhouse with Tucker—whatever was she going to do about Tucker? One day. One day left for all of this.

“Miss Hudson,” Pennybacker said, sympathetically. “It is not all bad. I persuaded the State Department that Lieselotte Berger’s suicide attempt was the gesture of an innocent woman, and Hertha made the numbers work. You gave her a life in America. You’ve done a magnificent job. It is not your fault that war is hell, and in hell, they compromise.”

Train.

Tomorrow.

Midnight.

Done.

“And Sebastian?” she asked him. “Sebastian Hepp?”

“Mr. Hepp will travel on the train with them as far as Washington,” Pennybacker said. “Miss Hudson, we can only keep doing our best.”

What had Sabine Wolfe said so many days ago? There is absolutely nothing you can do, Miss Hudson.

She realized that Pennybacker was saying the words for himself, too.

June took up the breakfast tray, just as she would have back when she was a maid, and said, “I’m having the Grotto send you up a proper dinner.”

···

News of the approaching train broke across the hotel in the way barely secret news always did. Back of house carried it to front of house who eventually seeded it among the guests, where it blossomed into lurid, ripe gossip.

She needed to talk to Tucker.

But first, she had to hold a meeting with her shopkeepers, who wanted to know if they had to continue to enforce the strict limits on some goods now that there was only one more shopping day left. Then she had to convene with Griff to coordinate a staff plan for the actual departure; the train, scheduled at midnight to avoid journalists and crowds, was also scheduled to avoid the day staff. The State Department budget didn’t allow for extra pay; they’d give the porters a day off instead. After that it was a meeting with Friedrich Wolfe and Takeo Nishimura; the diplomats wanted drinks to flow freely in the hours leading up to their departure and were willing to spend the cash to make it happen. Keeping her bearing as professional as possible, she reassured them that she would coordinate with the Grotto and beverages manager. Then it was the meeting with Fortéscue, to coordinate the final meals and food orders, then the Swiss, who wanted to make sure several important pieces of mail regarding the sale of embassy assets got out before the diplomats had left.

The evening was getting away from her, but she caught a glimpse of Tucker’s silhouette outside by one of the guard towers and thought that if she used the staff elevator Mr. Francis had cursed, she could probably get to him without being snagged by staff once more.

She only made it two floors. The doors opened prematurely on the third floor; commotion flowed in. A knot of maids filled the hall, their voices at fever pitch.

Mattie Howard was the one who had called the elevator; her finger still hovered over the button. When she saw June, relief filled her expression. She asked, “Are you going up or down, Hoss?”

Clearly, the only right answer was out . June stepped into the hallway.

The center of attention was a maid known as Carol Carol Carol, so named as she was the third Carol June had assigned to housekeeping since she was manager. Carol was currently on her knees, her forehead pressed to the carpet. It was a huge and honest gesture, performed for no one but its owner. The other maids pressed hands to mouths, wrapped their arms around themselves, clung to one another—more mundane and acceptable forms of shock and grief.

Silently, they passed a parcel to June for inspection.

The offending package was a bundle of about forty beat-up envelopes, all tied together with twine. June could see the topmost letter had Carol’s real name girlishly written in the upper left corner and was addressed to Carol’s husband, whom she’d married the year before, in a quiet service June attended. It had been very nice. Carol and her husband already had a child together, and the toddler, just this side of walking, had been persuaded to bring the ring to them, even though he stumbled multiple times. June had the rustic invitation in a drawer somewhere.

Stamped over all the handwritten words, in block print, was:

RETURN TO SENDER

DECEASED

The next envelope looked the same. And the next. The next. Slowly, June realized what she was looking at and why Carol was lost to silent supplication. For how many months had she been writing to a corpse? How had this parcel beaten the official telegram?

June stood for several long seconds, just looking at the letters, the bold words, the weeping maids, holding Mattie’s knowing and somber gaze. There was nothing to be done, but that wasn’t good enough.

So she made a plan, as she always did, although it would change very little.

June said, “Mattie, go find Toad and get Carol’s leave taken care of. Wilma, Joan, make sure she gets home. Girls, clean your faces, get back to work, we’ll talk about this later.”

Sinking beside Carol, June gently turned her face from the ground. Carol’s eyes were dry and dead and blank; she looked like she had just pulled herself from Avallon IV. Brushing the young woman’s hair away from her forehead, like Carol was a small girl, June said, “It’s not all right. It’s not going to be all right for a long time. But you need to go home and be brave for your little boy.”

All around them were the sounds of the hotel doing its ordinary work. Distant vacuuming. Room service trays tinkling. Voices murmuring in bright conversation on floors not yet touched by death. Carol climbed to her feet and stared at the hall as if she didn’t recognize it. June knew how she felt.

The elevator doors opened. June and the remaining maids looked at the place where Mr. Francis had died.

Mattie whispered, “Hoss, the water…”

June replied, “Leave the water to me.”

···

Edgar Gilfoyle: playfellow, playboy. So now it was night, finally, and June found herself with Gilfoyle again, this time in the large hotel bar. They had it to themselves except for Tucker, who, despite Gilfoyle clearing his throat territorially when they entered, did not take the hint. He was at the end of the bar poring over documents, drinking a club soda with a lime gripping the edge. She had expected that he’d be at the Trillium House, but perhaps he, too, had been trying to find a moment to talk to her. Now he was so engrossed that he seemed to be in a room of his own.

Gilfoyle claimed a far-off corner booth for himself and June. He was a handsome cliché here in the bar that he owned, lanky arm draped over the back of the leather booth, hair tossed, profile finely etched as if by sculptors. The darling of the society pages, Edgar Gilfoyle, fast car, fast life, fast man. Purchaser of mink overboots.

An impeccably dressed waiter was already at their table, setting drinks in front of them, a Peter Dawson for June, a plantation sidecar in front of Gilfoyle.

Gilfoyle marveled, “How do they remember after all this time?”

They remembered because there was a piece of paper stuck behind the bar that said Gilfoyle Family and listed their favorites, just as there was in nearly every department, but June said, “Magic.”

“Tell me something only you can tell me. Tell me a financial bedtime story. A story of rationing, of the summer season. How are we doing?”

“Do you really want to hear it?”

She suspected he just wanted to give the appearance of utility, but she gave him the same briefing her managers had heard at the end of the quarter, the same one that she went over with the accountants and the event coordinators and everyone who was ordinarily involved in pitching the circus tent that was the Avallon’s financial landscape. He listened, swirled his drink, lit a cigarette.

Finally, he said, “Do you know a woman spit on me the other day?”

So he had not really wanted to know. She said, “That can’t be as shocking an occurrence as you’re making it out to be.”

“I was just walking down the street out of the New York office and she walked right up and spit on me. No, stop, don’t make a joke; she said, ‘Don’t you feel ashamed?’ She meant because I wasn’t in uniform. Everyone outside of the Avallon is in a uniform, every man who can walk in a straight line. ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ she asked, and she meant that they were fighting and I was not.”

“And you were.”

“I was.”

She imagined it. The woman lifting her voice to address him as she approached him. Gilfoyle’s chin jerking, old habits never dying, only sleeping, as humiliation jerked his ligaments. It was a bad image on top of many bad images that day, but she kept her voice light. He wanted to be soothed; this was how she soothed him. “This your first brush with shame?”

“You’re not funny.” Beneath the table, his leg touched hers. Memories burned through her. He’d called her June in front of the staff, not Miss Hudson . They sat together at the hotel bar, where anyone could see them. She was not imagining that things had changed.

“Says you. They tell me you broke it off with the Goelet woman.”

“God. Yes. Diana. What a shame. But it’s all for the best, because you…” He broke off. He tipped his cigarette at the waiter, who brought him another drink. Gilfoyle said, “This tastes like nostalgia. Do you remember that hideous Fourth of July do at the Palmers’?”

“I remember you vomiting.”

“Sorry about that, I know you liked those shoes.”

This back-and-forth patter was familiar, easy. But it left too much room for her mind to wander. To Hannelore, to Carol, to Sebastian, to Tucker behind his mask. She asked, “What were you going to say, earlier? After Diana. ‘Because you,’ that’s what you said. Don’t tell me if it’s boring or disgusting.”

He laughed. “You’re such a June Hudson. I always forget how June Hudsonny you are.”

“I never do. That’s my secret.”

“I’ll try to be more June Hudsonny, then,” he said. “I was just thinking about what happens after all this. Father told me about the Lily House, you know, and I just thought, maybe this whole affair is…maybe it’s simpler if we just…it’s all on account of Sandy, you know. He’s made me rethink how I do things. That’s what I was going to say before. It’s so rotten, how he is. What happened.”

Movement caught the corner of June’s eye; at the bar, Tucker turned his head. He was still looking down, his chin pressed against his shoulder, but she knew the look; he was listening.

“When that woman spit on me, I was thinking about Sandy,” Gilfoyle said. “ He joined up. He might have been drafted by now anyway, but that doesn’t matter, what matters is he joined up. He was always so good. Why couldn’t he have been a little rat? Then we could all be saying ‘It’ll do him some good being stuck like that’ and other uncharitable sentiments.”

“Instead, we’re the little rats,” June said.

“Not you. Me, though,” Gilfoyle said. “Does it bother you to talk about him?”

June blinked. She did not think she was crying, but blinking still felt a little perilous. It bothered her. Dutiful Sandy, saying that he would stay if she asked him to. This entire thing, coming to an end. The regulars, back again. The limousine, the Lily House. Sabine being right that Hannelore didn’t have time to become better at navigating the world. Lieselotte Berger wanting to die rather than return to whatever awaited her in Germany; Sebastian Hepp giving up his freedom in exchange for a maid’s uniform. Carol’s and Erich von Limburg-Stirum’s futile weddings. The harpsichordist touching the conductor’s hand with one day left. Gilfoyle saying, I was just thinking about what happens after all this. She knew what he was saying. After all this time. And yet—she blinked again. Damn this whiskey!

“Ah, Junebug,” Gilfoyle said. He took her hand and pressed it in both of his. Palm to palm, enclosed by him. She could smell the citrus of his plantation sidecar and the spice of his Dunhill cologne. This close, the physical magnetism of him was silkily immediate; he had always been very good with his hands. He murmured, “I miss him, too. I keep asking myself what I can do to help him. How did he get like this? How does he feel now? Is he suffering? If only I—”

A loud scraping sound drowned out whatever he said next; both looked up to discover Tucker had shoved his stool aggressively back as he stood. He braced his palm against the bar, the way a drunk might steady himself for launch, but he had had nothing but that club soda.

Approaching their table, Tucker looked somewhat unfamiliar with the dramatic, dim lighting of the bar casting half of him in shadow and half in infernal neon red. He looked sharper, younger, more unsafe. His body was remembering it had been born here; the sweetwater was remembering him.

Tucker said tersely, “Mr. Gilfoyle, I need to speak to you.”

“It’s coming on three a.m., Agent,” Gilfoyle said. “I’ll find you tomorrow.”

Anyone else in this hotel would have deferred to Edgar Gilfoyle, but Tucker simply stood, legs wide, arms crossed, like a boxer. June could have identified that silhouette in any light. His gaze was on Gilfoyle’s hands enclosing June’s.

“Read the room,” said Gilfoyle.

There was hot coal dust ground into Tucker’s tone. “You should be glad it took me this long to.”

Gilfoyle released June’s hand. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do not try me at this hour, Mr. Gilfoyle, it’s been a very long day,” Tucker snapped. He shifted his attention to her. “Miss Hudson—”

June, aching, battered, peered up at him. She felt the size of the umbrella in a mixed drink. Gilfoyle, playfellow, playboy, had knocked back the rest of his sidecar and risen to stand beside Tucker, to go. Gilfoyle had said he needed to talk to June, but had he said what he was going to say? She knew he hadn’t. She could feel the shape of the unspoken right alongside the spoken. His hand around her hand, her face pressed against Tucker’s coal tattoo, the days until the train arrived counting down to zero. She wanted, she wanted, she wanted, would it ever stop, this wanting, this never getting, this never-shrinking chasm between need and reality. Damn this whiskey; she could feel her eyes burning once more.

“Miss Hudson,” Tucker said again, “you’ll have him back shortly.”