Page 5

Chapter Five

But she went to look at the water anyway.

After the Border Patrol had been sent to the staff dormitories to make beds in the hallways, June left the dachshunds behind the front desk ( I’m taking a gander at the waters, don’t let them out ), put on her fur coat (a gift, like the bees), and headed into the frigid January night. Outside, the swiftly installed floodlights rendered the Avallon’s landscape strange and heightened. Long, precise shadows of skeleton trees marbled the frostbitten lawns in all directions. The temporary guard towers muttered her name as she walked beneath them; she remembered, too late, that Griff had mentioned something about an identification badge being left on her desk. Something living and fluttery (A bat? It was too cold for bats) capered through the air above her. Ah, but it was chilly. Every breath scraped her throat on its way in and dampened her scarf on its way out.

The floodlights did not quite reach as far as June was going, but it did not matter. She knew the entire property like the back of her hand.

She still recalled the first time she’d climbed the drive to the Avallon, her mother long gone, nothing but a paper sack of walnuts to her name. The window trim and roofs of the bathhouses glowed white against the dark green mountain gloom. Beyond them, the century-old hotel seemed to grow from the mountains, constructed from the same stone it was built on. Roofs steep as the surrounding peaks pitched every which way. Nothing was symmetrical. Architecturally, the hotel’s form didn’t make sense, but if one thought of it as a living entity—? The walls climbed the velveted lawns as organically and opportunistically as honeysuckle. Wings, conservatories, porches, and turrets jutted anywhere the land seemed gentle enough to support more growth. Instinctively, June had known it was a place that had to be fought for.

It called her; she listened.

They say it’s turning.

June used her enormous ring of keys to let herself into the first of the bathhouses. The Avallon had four of them: Avallon I, Avallon II, Avallon III, and Avallon IV, named for their proximity to the hotel itself, rather than their age. The brochure boasted their attributes:

House physician

Full-time nurses

Live music

Mud baths

Mineral treatments

Electric cabinets

Detoxification

Purification

Intoxication

Inside, the scent of the Avallon I was both metallic and medicinal, the latter associated with the electric cabinets—a bleachlike smell that was not bleach, invoking the sterile efficacy of an operating room. Unlike the other bathhouses, it was a clinical place. One came for procedures. For regimens. Avallon I was for men of science, not men of magic; it shrank the sweetwater to something logical.

June had been raised to be both respectful and afraid of the sweetwater. Afraid was perhaps twisting it too tight. Superstitious. That was the word. Like many of the children of the holler, June absorbed a set of beliefs about the sweetwater. The water would give you good if you gave it good, and it would give you ill if you gave it ill. The water took a liking to some people and a hating to some others, but mostly kept to itself. If the water turned, a place would be ruined for years. Everyone knew a ruined town. In her younger days, she used to imagine that the sweetwater housed person-shaped entities. Mermaids. Nymphs. When her mother wasn’t looking, she would whisper sweetly to the water’s surface, cajoling them: Show yourselves, please! She knew better now. Only children and pedants tried to put human faces on the ineffable.

Could her mother have imagined that June would one day be Hoss , in good part because of the sweetwater ? Surely not. When June looked back at herself, she remembered a blank person, an empty mirror. Other children loudly explored the world to discover who they wanted to be, but June had been as silent and featureless as the surface of a mountain lake. She just listened.

In the dim light, the Avallon I’s two vast electric cabinets looked like coffins. A poster on the wall exhorted one to please be careful when the floor was wet; another asked bathers to dry themselves completely before climbing beneath the bright lights of the electric cabinets.

June spidered her fingers above the mirrored surface of the soaking pool. As the wind rattled under the eaves of Avallon I, the water murmured fleeting impressions against her skin. Staffers shaking out tablecloths. Landscapers trimming dormant branches. A convoy of dark cars gliding up the drive. Bagpipers playing a single rendition of “Amazing Grace” before heading back to New York so June felt she’d gotten something for her money. It was difficult to tell which of these were her thoughts and which belonged to the entities in the water; they were shaped exactly the same.

She heard no signs of trouble.

On to the next.

The Avallon II was the second-oldest bathhouse, just a minute’s walk from the Avallon I. On the outside, the small, delicate building was charming as a wedding cake tier, but inside, it was an intimate tropical dream in the Appalachians. Potted ferns and berry-toned Moroccan tiles surrounded two circular pools. One, steaming, was called the Simmer; the second, the temperature of the cold spring, was the Soak. Guests were encouraged to climb from the Simmer to the Soak, as navigating the contrast between two opposing extremes was more life-changing than simply enduring one—as with many things in life. June loved the Avallon II. How many times had she come to these pools after-hours with the Gilfoyle siblings, kicking legs in the water and playing poker with cards stuck together from damp?

Outside, the sky had begun to spit freezing precipitation—not snow, but something a little meaner, a little ruder. As she dipped her fingers into the Simmer, Mr. Francis’s death suddenly struck her fresh; the reality of it kept coming in and out of focus like something floating just beneath the waves. He had had the greatest laugh, the most inclusive laugh, that always sounded as if it was for you rather than about you. The moment she’d heard it, she’d known that was what she’d wanted her own laugh to sound like. June had first met him during one of his biweekly lunches in the staff canteen, a ritual that had helped him earn “Mr. Francis” instead of “Mr. Gilfoyle”; when he joined them at the housekeeping table, it had felt as if God had personally come to hobnob with his priests and nuns. Casually, he’d mentioned how instrumental housekeeping was to the Avallon— pass the salt, Miss Hudson —and she had glowed with the sense of being part of something bigger than herself.

(Later, Mr. Francis had confessed that he didn’t remember this meeting. Unlike June, who was able to remember each staff member, Mr. Francis had to hastily memorize the names of the relevant parties right before sitting. June Hudson , he would have recited before sitting. Hudson like the river, June not Jane. )

Her staff thinking he was haunting the place! But why not? Belief was contagious. When you believed in one intangible thing, why not a second, why not a third. If God, then why not the listeners in the water, if the listeners in the water, why not ghosts, if ghosts, why not unicorns—

With a sigh, she shook the untroubled water from her hand. Time to go.

The Avallon III was located inside a copse of coyly draped weeping willows. It was the most audacious of the bathhouses. The most romantic. The most sensual. Pick your descriptor; what did you want from your lover? For the right price, one could enjoy the stimulating embrace of both the cold spring and a scantily clad loved one, a titillating encounter shielded by thousands of shielding blossoms cascading from planters and vases.

The water here showed June a rippled memory, imperfectly reflected.

Head of housekeeping: June Hudson, you think you’re a Rockefeller, is that it? Why do I keep catching you in guest areas?

June: The water told me to, ma’am.

Head of housekeeping: The water, eh? I knew you took a shine to Mr. Francis.

June: Ma’am?

Head of housekeeping: Never mind. You so eager for the guests to see you, go beg at Slater’s door.

June had gone to Slater, who managed the elevator operators, once, twice, three times. Each time he heard her mountain accent, he said no. She would never be front of house. Did she hear what he was saying? She would never be front of house . June had heard what he was saying; she had just heard the water more clearly. She had given up working on Slater, used the cover of one of the infamous Napkin Raids to pinch an operator uniform, and ridden the elevators before and after her cleaning shifts. For months, she’d accompanied the regulars. The older operators, hired before the Great War, were all men; the newer operators, all women, were hired when male labor had been drafted. Slater must have figured it out pretty quickly, but he didn’t interfere. After the Sandy incident, word had gone round that the water had taken a liking to one of the little maids. You didn’t come between the water and the hotel.

As sleet rapped fitfully against the windows, June lifted her fingers from the silky water of the Avallon III. All that remained was the Avallon IV, which was only barely visible from the windows of the Avallon III, and only then because she knew to look for it. It would be a cold walk to an inhospitable destination. Unlike the other bathhouses, the Avallon IV was a rough, dark green building the size of a pantry. The only indication of its contents was a nearby boulder covered with snail-shaped spirals; the carvings predated the hotel itself. The inside was rustic, unadorned, unheated. The pool was a small square opening in the wood floor. These days, when June lowered herself into it, feet first, there was just a hand’s breadth between her body and the sheer straight walls. If she were to kick her legs in the column of warm water (she wouldn’t dare), she would feel that it opened up after just four or five feet, but who knew how much. Anyone who saw what it looked like down there wouldn’t be telling the tale anytime soon.

After the incident with Sandy, June’s relationship with the Avallon IV developed alongside her relationship with hotel operations. Shadowing the elevator operators, she’d learned quickly that they did not merely say Which floor, sir? They judged whether a guest wanted the silence preserved or broken, whether the guest wanted the gap between their social classes emphasized or erased. How natural their patter seemed! And yet, June heard the operators recycle conversational pieces, swapping out this phrase here or this topic there for something more suited to their current carload. A script for the play of life. This was allowed? Every trip in the elevator scribbled words onto blank, silent June. They let her try her voice, and she realized that if she made a performance of her accent, the guests didn’t mind hearing that she was from the mountains; in fact, it made sense, someone like her, serving someone like them. She was improving herself; they liked being part of it.

(It had not occurred to her then that this might have been exactly the lesson the head of housekeeping and the water alike had hoped she would learn, but it certainly did later.)

Slater offered her an official position, but it was too late. The hotel called her; she listened.

Now, in the dark, bitter cold, June hesitated. She had not decided if she would visit the Avallon IV when she saw headlights at the top of the hill.

Under these circumstances, the vehicle could have belonged to anyone, but June simply knew it was Gilfoyle. His headlights were illuminating the low, dark cloud cover as he reached a steep section of driveway the Gilfoyle children had always called the Widowmaker as they panted up it on foot to the main hotel entrance. He was leaving the family wing under the cover of darkness, without a word to her.

June did not think; she just hitched up her fur coat like a dress and ran . Adrenaline lent purpose to her strides, and she reached the circular drive just as Gilfoyle’s Auburn looped around it. The car was striking, yards and yards of cream and chrome, gliding through the Avallon’s lamplight like a postcard for the high life. For a moment she thought he did not see her lift her hand, and for another moment, she thought he would see and carry on as if he hadn’t, but then the car stopped.

Gilfoyle lowered the window. Illuminated by the unsparing light of the new floodlights, he was a carved stone version of himself, handsome and immutable, playboy hair sculpted, hollow cheeks chiseled. The air that came from the automobile’s interior smelled of the spicy Dunhill he often wore, more strongly than he himself ever did, as if he stored the essence of himself here, in a space no one else ever shared.

He said, “Don’t be cross with me.”

She was out of breath, like when they used to chase each other as kids. “I’m not cross. I’m strung out like a pack of hounds at the end of an eight-day week. You’re leaving? Not even a goodbye?”

“That sounds cross.”

“Give me a moment to get cross and you’ll hear the difference straight off, Mr. Gilfoyle.”

In this context, the formality made him wince.

“Look,” he said. “Look. Sit in the car; it’s sleeting.”

“I don’t have the time.”

“You have a minute.”

“You don’t know how many minutes I have.”

“For crying out loud. You have a minute.”

She would not glance at the hotel to see if this was theater; there were members of staff who would make hay with it no matter what. She simply passed through the headlights and opened the passenger-side door. Inside, it was humid, warmer, closer. How strange it was that Gilfoyle the boy had grown up into Gilfoyle the man, that she had grown up from June the girl to June the woman. The time since she had first come to the Avallon felt compressed, folded on itself like an invitation. It had been ages since she had seen him; no time had passed. How monstrous he was; how much she missed him, how much she missed them all. There had been an era when it had been every day with the Gilfoyles, dawn to dusk, June as one of them. How much time had it taken to crush this complex feeling into something small enough to swallow in the morning with her two glasses of sweetwater?

“See, you’re shivering,” Gilfoyle said. “I brought you something.”

“Was I meant to run after the car to receive it?”

“I was waiting for you to be in good temper. Look, it’s there. You moved it off the seat when you got in.”

“What is it? Don’t give me something you bought for one of the others and say it was for me.”

He looked wounded, but June did not believe for a moment that this large, light parcel had been meant for her. He had already been leaving when she caught him now, on his way to somewhere—someone—else. She knew who Gilfoyle was outside this hotel. She felt a fool even opening the parcel, playing along with the charade, but she did, carefully unfolding the paper and tucking it down in the footwell.

“Oh,” she said.

“You’re size seven, right?” he said.

“Yes.”

“That’s mink.”

“Is it?”

“And they’re made of velveteen rubber. They said you won’t be able to get that anymore now, with rationing.”

“I imagine not.”

“They’re overboots,” he said. “I thought for your walk into the hotel each day—”

“I know what they are.”

“Do you like them?”

The overboots, like all of their species, were designed for the wearer to slip their entire shoe inside for protection from the mud. But these were deliciously indulgent. Unlike the clear plastic or homely plain rubber of other offerings, these were marvelously finished to look like suede. They were trimmed not with faux fur but rather with sleek black mink. Practical. Beautiful.

“I’m going to try them on,” she said.

“Past time for that, really,” he said.

The boots fit so perfectly around her Mary Janes that it seemed likely he had considered not only the size of her feet but what she always wore upon them. The mink was soft, delicate, warm against her cold ankles. Already she could imagine her daily walks to and from her apartment with them; she could picture the silhouette of them, so much nicer than the bread bags some of her staff used or her own neglected basic plastic galoshes. She was unused to receiving a gift she wanted.

She had convinced herself so thoroughly that the night had meant nothing to him.

He said, “Like a glove!”

“Like a boot.”

“I thought they looked like a thing you would want,” Gilfoyle said. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“And reach the switchboard girls? Put me through to Miss Hudson ,” he said. “I want to whisper to her about her marvelous body.”

June’s marvelous body warmed. Gilfoyle, at a distance, had no particular magnetism, but Gilfoyle, in close quarters, had a certain mannered eroticism that affected most people. Something in the intensity of his gaze, the balletic gestures of his hands—it all formed a subconscious promise of a physical experience that would be both worldly and tasteful. Of course, for June, it was no mere promise; it was memory. That foolish, wonderful moment after the funeral, when the others gave up and went to bed, but she and Gilfoyle stayed up talking at the bar; when Gilfoyle lightly pressed his thumb into the very center of her palm; when she asked, What happens to us now ?, and Gilfoyle said, Thank God for you, June , and then they had gone to bed, with a sense of inevitability, of recursiveness. It did not matter how long it had been. The mind forgot; the body didn’t.

She said, “You would have left without giving these boots to me if I hadn’t already been out in the rain.”

“I didn’t think you’d speak with me.”

“It ain’t right for me to take fire for a version of me you’ve invented. Of course I would’ve spoken with you. We have unfinished business, don’t you think?”

Gilfoyle reached for her.

“—not in front of the children,” she said, even as her skin thrilled at the suggestion. “I ain’t ready to forgive you. And I have to face them in the morning. Them, and several hundred Germans, it seems.”

“And some Italians,” he added.

“I ain’t ready to laugh at your jokes, either,” she said. “Maybe the hotel’s a toy to you, but it’s my life.”

He sobered. When he spoke again, his voice was different from before. “I’m too old to be shot at, June.”

“What are you worried about—the draft? They won’t take you.”

“They will. It’s coming. I talk to people. It’s not going to be as easy as they say.”

“Who is they ?” But June knew who. Everyone. The radio, the kitchen chatter, the talk down in Constancy. The war had dragged on for years, but now that America was involved, they thought this thing would be over by St. Patrick’s Day.

“I know who I am,” Gilfoyle said. He was dead serious, unusual for him. “I knew I couldn’t do it. Father knew it as well. I did what I had to do.”

June began to put it together even before he finished the sentence; the unspoken words between his spoken words were noisy. A bargain. The hotel and everyone in it to keep him out of the war. She remembered, quite suddenly, 411 saying with absolute assurance that a man like Francis Gilfoyle mattered to the State Department.

“You gave up the Avallon, is that what you’re saying? You offered it to them? Horsefeathers, are we doing all this to save your skin? You Judas!” Somewhere, Sandy was already in the thick of it, having joined the navy far in advance of Pearl Harbor. Mr. Francis had told June that at the very least, Sandy would have rank, which was safer than if he’d just been drafted or enlisted without any college. When Sandy heard him say this, he’d said, contemptuously, It isn’t about that! Then he’d said something in Greek, which Mr. Francis didn’t understand, and then in French, which Mr. Francis did, and there’d been yet another fight.

“Don’t be hyperbolic. I know what you can do.”

“Now’s not the time to pretend you know what I do.” Gilfoyle had never understood the hotel, much less the water. Not like his father, not like June. He didn’t know how delicate the Avallon really was. June said, “What if you’d told me? What if I’d had time to prepare for that meeting? Springing a surprise party with the State Department just makes me feel like the help .”

He jerked. Physically. Left to right, chin seizing toward his shoulder. He’d done this as a child, too. Neither Mr. Francis nor Madeline could chastise him about leaving crackers on his bedside table for the ants, or for lazily done school papers, not without him doing that signature twitch. “You’re not the help.”

June wanted to ask, Then what am I? Was this a courtship? Was she meant to run, to chase? She didn’t want to be na?ve, but the boots fit her and only her. Out the car window, the Avallon’s innumerable yellow windows glowed with anticipation. It had been one thing to gaze up at it as a little foundling from the holler, in awe of everything it stood for. Quite another to look at it as a woman who made it what it was. She recalled how, after some time riding the elevators, one of the guests left her a gray-jacketed ledger book with a handwritten inscription: One day, you will run this place. —E. R. Norvell.

And here she was.

“I would do it differently. If I had to do it again. Regarding the State Department business,” Gilfoyle said. He picked restlessly at one of his hands. Perhaps he was right to avoid the draft, she thought; it was impossible to imagine him on the front, unbuilt as he was for suffering. Hadn’t he been the one to bury the dead chipmunk they’d found as children? He’d gotten damp-eyed as he laid the roses on its grave. What would he do when the chipmunk was a man, ten men, one hundred men? Kindness was a virtue, but in evil places, empathy punished the wearer. Edgar David Gilfoyle was a snowball that, when crushed tight into a weapon, would turn to dusty powder. War would scatter him forever. “I don’t know how to be my father. You and he made it look so easy, working together.”

“I don’t need to be managed, Goyle.”

Relief whispered across his face when she used Sandy’s old name for him. He said, “I wouldn’t know how to manage you.”

Finally, she gave him a smile.

“Ah, Junebug!” Gilfoyle slapped her thigh, boyishly. The conversation was no longer a prison, he no longer had to work pins in the lock hoping it would come loose. “When this is over…you and I…”

The pause dragged out; she refused the temptation to fill it.

“…let’s have a drink next time I’m here,” he finished. “Or you should come to me. Away from the hotel. We can’t talk properly here.”

She could feel her heartbeat in her wrists, at her throat, but she spoke quite calmly. “Not with the children watching.”

“Not with the children watching,” he agreed.

After the funeral, they’d come together on neutral ground, in the small but excellent Gallimore Hotel in New York, where they were simply two mourners, a man and a woman, Edgar Gilfoyle and June Hudson. Here, at the Avallon, it was very difficult to forget that they were two mountains with no roads between them.

Or at least that was what she had thought. But tonight, out of sight of any curious eyes, he reached for her wrist to simply, agonizingly, run a finger along the edge of her watchband, a cunning analog for fingers teasing more dangerous hemlines. A road, perhaps, could be found.

Gilfoyle blinked up. “Are those your dogs? They’re eerie as hell.”

The dachshunds had found her. They clustered in the headlights, their eyes flat, gleaming disks. They did not look eerie to her. They looked like three shivering little dogs. They served to remind her that time was passing; the shift at the front desk had turned from day to night. She did not want to go, but nothing that had happened in this car changed the truth of three hundred Axis diplomats.

She opened the door. Gilfoyle, solicitous, moved the empty boot box out of her way.

“I will get rid of it later,” he said. He knew as well as she did that leaving the car with an obvious gift would be a source of gossip for weeks.

“They’re very good boots, Ed,” she admitted. “Good job. I ain’t easy to please.”

This nearly made him twitch again; genuine compliments used to make him jerk nearly as badly as criticisms, but he’d worked hard in his college years to suppress this. Only June, who knew him so well, saw the spasm in his jaw.

“I know,” he said.

She remembered that long-ago gift, the gray ledger book. At first, she had not known what to write onto its first blank page. Eventually, she had written a little poem, mysterious even to her:

Upstairs

Downstairs

Inside

Out

She had not yet been Hoss —that was so many years in the future—but she was on her way.

Gilfoyle said, “You know I think the world of you, June.”