Page 27

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The day the hotel changed forever began as any other. Elsewhere, Americans were being asked to turn in their old tin toothpaste tubes if they wanted to buy new ones, the Philippines had fallen to Japan, and Toad’s husband had just sent a letter home saying he was still alive; but here, the orchestra was tuned, the Grotto was in fine form, and the guests were emptying their drawers.

June woke before dawn in her basement apartment in the staff cottage closest to the springs. She climbed out of bed, displacing three dachshunds (two smooth, one wiry), who poured from the bed to follow her at a polite distance. She ducked beneath the clothesline hung the short way across the room and unclipped her shirt and underwear before hanging her quilt in their place to air all day.

By the light of a single bedside lamp, she dressed in her usual attire: waist-high wide-legged slacks, a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up neatly, a delicate wristwatch, a swipe of lipstick. Her dark hair was bobbed just below her ears, and when she was working, she slicked it back elegantly with some grooming cream. After she stepped into her low-heeled Mary Janes, June went to the basement kitchenette and drew a glass of sweetwater. She set it on the counter and regarded it. The water looked no different than it had before.

June poured the undrunk water into the dachshunds’ bowl, fed them some meat scraps from the icebox, and then got to work.

Work, work. In eighteen hours, the train was due to arrive to take the diplomats away. Up, up, up, to Jersey City, where they would hurry up and wait once more, spending just a few nights in (far less glamourous) hotels before boarding a one-thousand-passenger ship bound for Portugal. June’s gray-jacketed ledgers contained lists of the tasks that were to be done, all the frantic final work of departure. Every legation would want their last-minute shopping packaged for travel; they would want haircuts; they would want their confiscated luggage. The front desk was already unofficially checking out guests who didn’t intend to add any more shopping, drinking, or room service to their tabs. The kitchen was organizing the final meals to hopefully use up all the perishable goods, since they could not book any guests until they were quite certain the train was not delayed. Waste not, want not; boil the jam jars for their sugar. The driveway hummed with activity as trucks traveled up and down the road, taking luggage and supplies down to the guarded train station.

Spring shrilled all over the hotel grounds. There was nothing like the sight of the stone-clad building bursting from the deep green lawns as blossoms exploded in yellow and white up and down the drive. The Avallon, the Avallon.

She had loved it so much.

Before she went to the office, she visited the first-floor storage room where Sebastian Hepp was being held; it was the only room available that locked from the outside. When Hugh opened the door for her, Sebastian was sitting on a cot beside shelves stacked with pickled vegetables, but he stood to greet her. Even though he looked very young, she resisted hugging him; his situation would have seemed hopeless if she had. Instead, she just handed him the paper airplane she had folded out of a purchase order and said, “I’ve put Dennis Hinkman on your case. He’s the only attorney Mr. Francis would ever give the time of day.”

“Thank you.”

“Sebastian, I—”

With considerable gallantry, he said, “Today’s too busy for you to be giving me any more of your time, Hoss.”

He was right, but she made one more stop on the way to the office, finding Sabine Wolfe at the edge of the breakfast room, watching the other diners murmur excitedly about repatriation. She looked brittle enough to break; June would not have embraced her, either.

Guest.

Nazi.

Woman.

Mother.

June touched her elbow lightly; she started. “Mrs. Wolfe, about our earlier talk—”

Sabine’s eyes darted to the diners; undoubtedly, Lothar Liebe was somewhere among them.

“—I know it’s the last day, but I’m still considering the menu,” June said. “I’m guessing you still find it unsatisfactory.”

Sabine nodded tightly. June nodded back, once, and the women parted.

Now June really did have to decide if she was going to do something about Hannelore.

She was running out of time to decide.

···

“They said you were in here,” Gilfoyle said.

He stepped into the cluttered office, looking worlds away from her staff members in his light double-breasted jacket, his tailored slacks, his carefully expressed hair. As he pressed his long fingers against the edge of her desk, scanning her papers—as if he had any idea of what he was looking at—she felt a lurch of uncertainty. Her heart had begun beating double speed as soon as she’d stepped into the hotel, and it showed no signs of slowing. “I need to talk to you,” he said.

“It’s gonna have to wait, Ed.”

So many times Mr. Francis had said the same thing to one of them, or all of them. He would be late for dinner, he would not be able to join them at the Avallon II, he could not answer their question: Go ask Madeline, sorry, child, I have been up since four. The Avallon owned him. The Avallon owned her.

“It can’t wait.”

She looked up at him. He tapped his fingers lightly at the edge of the desk, as if playing a piano, as he glanced all around her office, eyes flitting over the tools of her trade as if he was seeing them for the first time. He was nervous, she realized.

Suddenly, she was nervous, too. Words spilled from her. “Take a look at this desk. You want me to put this down? You want me to put off my meeting with accounting? You want me to wait on my Grotto rounds? There’s a party out there that needs my eyes on it. You want—”

With great agitation, he said, “June, I want you to marry me.”

On her desk were twelve preliminary invoices. One glass of sweetwater, one-third full. A glass snail, antennae pointed curiously toward the wall of key fobs. Two pens. No, three. An incorrectly filed guest folio waiting for rehoming. A stale cracker broken into three pieces, waiting for the dachshunds to earn it. A quarter sandwich taken from a tea tray.

“Did you hear what I said?”

She moved one of the invoices over the top of the other, and then back again, then peered up at him. He was holding his right fist in his left hand and twisting them against each other, as boyishly uncertain as he ever was.

June was watching herself from above, just as she’d watched herself when she was a girl. Safely removed, puzzled by the feelings she saw outside herself. The woman at the desk sat proper and upright at the desk chair. The heel of her hand was smeared with ink from her writing and there was a dent in the skin at her wrist where it had been resting on the edge of the blotter for too long. Her hair was freshly washed and tucked behind her ear; she’d had to scrub the smell of the fourth-floor sweetwater out of it. That room was still tearing itself apart behind a closed door. So was she.

Gilfoyle said, “I tried to do it before, at a better time. Then the moment wasn’t right.”

The hotel bar. He had been getting around to it. Yes. She knew that. Maybe not exactly what he was going to say, maybe not exactly this, but she’d known the shape of the unspoken. This was why she had sat in the booth for a long time, even after Gilfoyle didn’t return, trying to decide if she would go to the Gilfoyle apartment, knock, say, Finish your sentence.

She had gone to the fourth floor instead. She hadn’t been ready to hear the rest of it then, and it turned out she wasn’t ready to hear it now, either. “I can’t do this now. Tell me later, when they’re gone, when I can listen to what you’re trying to say.”

“I’m trying to say be my wife!” Gilfoyle said. His voice was loud enough that she was sure they’d heard him at the front desk. In the lobby. In the ballroom. On the lawn. In the town. In the capital, across the ocean, on the battlefields, in Bad Nauheim where the Americans waited their turn to come home. “June, you’re always doing this. Stop fussing over those papers, stop fussing over that work. You did hear me, you do know what I’m trying to say. You always did this, when you were a kid, too. Be right here. Forget about the old dower house, forget about your old apartment, come to the North Wing, let’s just have it done with. Wasn’t it always going to be this way?”

June’s ears hissed again, that sweetwater running through her mind. She was thinking about the New York trip. The New York trip, the only New York trip that had mattered and would ever matter.

Here was the story:

Three weeks of visiting, sightseeing, dancing, meeting with other denizens in the Gilfoyles’ world, all while staying in the Soria, a hotel owned by one of Mr. Francis’s friends. The Avallon, placed on indulgent hiatus, was executing all the noisy repairs incompatible with guests . The girls had their pearls, their dresses. June had been fitted for several new ones, including a slinky, low-backed number that shocked and delighted her. Where was she supposed to wear this? Everywhere. To drinks. To cocktail parties. To dancing, oh the dancing. While Carrie and Madeline attended teas and other social events during the day, Mr. Francis took June to hotel after hotel, introducing her to this manager and that, leaving her to shadow them back of house, explore their kitchens, interview their head of housekeeping, read their shipping manifests, listen to amiable lectures by senior accountants. By night, June went to parties. A string of young men far above her station was somehow always at her table to dance with her, but her eyes were always on Gilfoyle.

One night, two weeks in, watching Gilfoyle dance with yet another debutante made June excuse herself and leave the ballroom. She wandered the halls before talking her way to back of house and finally down to the big kitchen in the bowels of the beast. In that slinky dress, she sat out of the way and watched the commercial kitchen seethe, learning the rhythm of it, listening to the chef rage at his underlings, watching what worked and what didn’t. Eventually the kitchen wound down, the chef kissed her cheek and called her their angel, and June remained in the dim kitchen alone. It was there Gilfoyle found her.

He tugged her gently from her perch on the counter. Wordlessly, they began to dance, bodies fitting together with the perfection of two halves long stored beside each other. In that moment, June had never loved anyone as much as Edgar Gilfoyle, swaying back and forth next to the empty soup pots and the piled onions waiting for tomorrow’s service. She thought she might die of it.

Mr. Francis was waiting for them back at the suites. He was furious—June had never seen him angry. He dragged Gilfoyle into their room and, although the door was closed, she could hear the conversation clearly.

June is not to be played with , he snarled at Gilfoyle. She is not the help. She is not some scullery maid to throw away.

I’m not playing , Gilfoyle said.

When we get back, June is taking over as general manager, do you understand? She will be a part of the hotel forever. She is the only other person I trust with it. Do not toy with her!

I just said I’m not!

I thought I raised you to be honest. I’m embarrassed by you , Mr. Francis said. From now on, you treat her with the respect her position demands and paw an elevator girl if you can’t help yourself.

Understanding had crystallized in June’s mind: she was not the help, but she also wasn’t a Gilfoyle. She was too good to throw away, but not good enough for Mr. Francis to consider the relationship with the family heir anything other than a dalliance. She was not like Carrie; New York was never about her entering society. June was to become general manager so the Gilfoyles could finally be free; this was her last meal before execution.

June didn’t remember how she had gotten out of the hotel at all, or how she had gotten on the bus—although now, as a general manager of a very good hotel herself, she could guess at it. When she stumbled into the lobby, the concierge or a porter or a desk clerk would have intercepted her and listened to her story and—being concierges or porters or desk clerks and not Gilfoyles themselves—would have sympathized deeply. A bus would have been found. Money, if she did not have it on her in that slinky black dress, would have been found. A coat found, if she did not have one, and she knew she did not, because she still had the moth-eaten sailor’s coat someone had put her into.

She went home. The only home she knew—the Avallon. It took her three buses and nearly a full day to get there, stumbling with exhaustion and heartbreak, in only a very low-backed dress and sailor’s coat. God protects the foolish, she supposed. When she arrived in the middle of the night, the hotel was quiet, running on a skeleton crew, everyone getting a full night’s sleep because there were no guests to tend.

Well, no guests but one.

June haunted the halls of the hotel she was meant to manage, sobbing as she had never sobbed. It was this June who had encountered a cracked door on the fourth floor. It was this guest who had pressed her green eye to the crack as June slid down the doorjamb to cry on the floor beside her room. It was this guest, in room 411, who had stayed up with June all night, talking to her through a cracked-open door.

“?‘June is not to be played with,’?” June said. “New York. Do you remember?”

Gilfoyle frowned at her. “Oh. What a terrible night that was.”

Not terrible enough for him to defend their relationship. Not terrible enough for her to have spent the last ten years as June Gilfoyle, his wife. Only terrible enough to push him to Mary, to Irma, to Eugenie, to Diana, to endless public relationships that had scarred her heart until she did not feel things until it was nearly too late.

Behind Gilfoyle, Griff Clemons’s face appeared momentarily in the door, eyebrows raised, assessing the situation with a glance. She gazed at him, dazed, long enough that Gilfoyle turned his head to find Griff there.

“What do you need?” Gilfoyle asked.

Griff Clemons lied smoothly. “We need Hoss.”

The burst of affection June felt for Griff Clemons, sweetly giving her the opportunity to escape and regroup, was immediately trampled by irritation when Gilfoyle said, “Handle it. Get out and close the door behind you. Now.”

The door had barely closed when June said, “I don’t speak to my staff that way.”

“June, you’re driving me crazy,” Gilfoyle said. “Yes or no. Just say yes.”

June remembered putting her hand in the bright, wild water beneath the church. She remembered her handprint on the Lily House’s door. She remembered Gilfoyle’s thumb pressed into her palm. She had loved him so much.

She said, “No.”

A thorough no . A no you could roll onto paperwork in a heavy wind to crush it to the ground. Gilfoyle’s chin jerked, as if no time had passed since they were younger, and then he slumped back against the door as if she’d shot him. “You must .”

She felt quite shot through the heart herself. Her voice was faint as she said, “I don’t have to do anything, Ed.”

“You don’t understand; you’re not a man,” he said. “You don’t know how they look at me. Every single man is in uniform. Everywhere I go. Everyone I stay with. Everywhere is the rumor that I’ve bought my way out of the draft. It’s—I can’t bear it.”

June’s heart broke. Not for herself. But for every single June she had been in the last twenty years, all those younger Junes who had sat up a little straighter when someone said Mr. Gilfoyle is on the phone. Poor thing. Poor, stupid thing.

She said, “You want to marry me to spare you the shame?”

“Yes—no. If I’m married, the rumors end, yes; if I was already married, I couldn’t have been drafted. But I don’t want to marry just anyone. I want to marry you . Aren’t we excellent together? Haven’t we always been good together? Don’t you want this hotel? Not just the Lily House. Marry me, you marry the hotel. It’ll be just the same, almost. I won’t interfere with your work.” He didn’t say the rest, but she understood it: And you won’t interfere with my life outside the hotel . “We would tell people we didn’t want to upset my father, but we’ve been married for ages. We’re madly in love. It solves everything.”

He was so earnest. She could tell that the last few months had been hell for him. The Avallon had taught him that all problems could be made to go away with enough money and manpower, but the Avallon had been wrong. Poor, insubstantial Edgar Gilfoyle, ever flinching away from a world shaped by conflict.

In a tired voice, she said, “I see what you’re saying. The rumor of you buying out of the draft goes away.”

“And the rumors that you’re a gold digger vanish, too,” Gilfoyle agreed.

June had to take a moment. She picked up one of the pens and drew a hard, dark square on the blotter, then put the pen down again. When she spoke, her voice was calm. “Only, I’m not marrying you.”

“June.”

“For starters, I don’t love you—”

“—sure you do—”

“—and there’s someone else.”

Now it was Gilfoyle who had to take a moment. He crossed his arms. Uncrossed them. Mussed his hair. Unmussed it. Then he said, “I don’t believe it.”

June considered her tryst with Tucker in the playhouse, the walk down Casto Springs’ main street. He saw the difference between Hoss and June . Unlike everyone else, he preferred June. Now that she knew that was possible, it was never going to be Gilfoyle.

“I loved you so much, Ed,” she said. “I was wild about you. If you’d asked me in New York all those years ago…”

He lowered his eyelids. She saw him snagging his line again and again on the memories of wrong choices lurking in the deep. Mr. Francis had once told June: They say youth is wasted on the young. Why do we hate the foolishness that made us unfoolish? She tested her own line for regrets, but she came up empty-handed. Every decision, heartbreak, and victory had brought her to this moment, after all, hadn’t it? The moment June realized she’d made her decision.

She saw Gilfoyle swallow.

He said, “There’s still time.”

With gentle pity, June said, “Shut the door behind you.”