Page 7

Chapter Seven

That evening, while dusty snowflakes made shifting bright patterns against the dark, June and Griff Clemons accompanied Pennybacker to the final task before the diplomats’ arrival the following day, a town hall meeting. Lewis B. (sixty-seven, too old to draft) took them in one of the Avallon’s three house Cadillacs; Griff moved his newspaper from the passenger seat to join him up front. June and Pennybacker sat in the back like dignitaries. They descended into Constancy, a mountain settlement made sweet and comfortable and pretty by the money flowing downhill from the hotel. It was a company town, like many in the state, but the Avallon was a gentler company than most.

Pennybacker fretted with paperwork, clearly uncomfortable. Not with being driven—June was right, he was used to power, to having a chauffeur—but with his upcoming address to the locals.

June said, “Mr. Pennybacker, you’re making the angels nervous. Why the fidgeting? You don’t strike me a shy public speaker.”

The Cadillac cleaved the crowd in front of the town hall; Pennybacker tugged his disgruntled bow tie, which only gruntled it further. “I had a run-in with the locals when I first set up this meeting. We didn’t get along.”

They wouldn’t have, would they? Wealthy intruders had been interfering with West Virginia for as long as the state could remember. Pennybacker exemplified the Outsider. The man from Washington imposing his will in exchange for ten dollars a head a day.

As Lewis B. ducked into the harsh mountain wind to get Pennybacker’s door for him, June advised, “Don’t take it personal. I didn’t like you, either, when I met you.”

Griff laughed.

Inside, at the podium, Pennybacker delivered a speech that would have roused other Pennybackers. A healthy diplomatic trade, he declaimed, represented an intention among participating countries to find solutions in language rather than violence. To obey international rules of warfare, to strive toward an ever more civilized and peaceful world. June had too recently received a version of this speech to remain attentive; her mind drifted instead to Ulcie Leta Crites. How infuriating it had been to find the roles reversed in the sound booth. Agent Minnick felt like a champion sent to provoke her, just like Mr. Delafield, only this time she had failed to get across the most basic truths:

What June believed and what needed to be done were not always the same thing.

What she wanted and what the hotel needed were not always the same thing.

Who she was and who she had to be were not always the same thing.

Every day she drank four glasses of that dissonance and swallowed it.

Could she fire Ulcie? Francis Gilfoyle was so recently deceased; it didn’t yet feel right to dismantle what he’d built. She still kept waiting for the switchboard to patch through a call, to hear the familiar voice saying, June, you terrific thing, how’s the hotel? She wasn’t even sure what she could dismantle. She had lost the opportunity to ask him which of his policies were meant to please the guests, which to please the staff, and which to please the water.

“No way, mister!”

Pennybacker’s speechifying was going badly. Tough, loyal, hardheaded, suspicious, unsentimental, these mountaineers had no patience with or fondness for the sheltered guests at the Avallon, even when they weren’t enemy aliens. The locals were survivors. Not just survivors of harsh conditions, but also survivors of the sort of people who came to the Avallon and the sort of people who came to West Virginia to build factories or mines. Or to deliver Axis diplomats.

The speaker clarified for Pennybacker, raising his voice to be sure everyone else heard, too: “I ain’t delivering groceries to Krauts or Japs.”

This fellow wasn’t the only one to feel this way, just the first to say it. The room hummed with raised voices. Pennybacker appealed this one, and the next, and the next, with humor, kindness, and then, finally, with a smile at half-mast. But his manners only hindered him; every bit of gentleness was a weakness. His principles belonged to an America this audience would never see, one where people starved to death less often.

“You gonna rescue him, Hoss?” Griff whispered to June.

Relations with Constancy and those who lived in the hidden hollers around it had become more productive but more complicated when June took over as GM. Mr. Francis, a wealthy Outsider disinterested in local traditions, had presided over an unpleasant but familiar dynamic: a one-way flow of luxury and power. It was not what the locals would have chosen, but they knew how it worked. June Hudson, on the other hand, understood them in a way Mr. Francis could never; she empathized in a way Mr. Francis could not. The agreements she negotiated between town and hotel were more nuanced and equitable, but when feelings did get hurt, the hurt was deeper. It was always a betrayal when circumstances forced the locals to remember that the flow of power had not been reversed. No matter what June sounded like, she belonged to the Avallon first, the mountains second.

June asked, “Should I?”

Griff said, “I’ll hold your coat.”

So it was to be dinner and a show.

(Every social situation has a social cost, June. In a good conversation, everyone takes turns paying it. In a bad one, one or two unlucky fellows have to keep paying out the nose while everyone else has a good time for free. Who do you think pays the social bill at the Avallon?

Us, Mr. Francis.

Yes. Every party must be the best they have ever attended. You see someone being made to pay up, you rescue him in any way you know how.)

Without warning, June climbed onto the town board’s table. One foot was perilously close to a cup of coffee, another an inch away from a pile of documents. John Stackpole, the town undertaker, gazed up at her; she smiled her small smile down at him.

She had their attention.

To the newly silent room, she said, “The Avallon is the best.”

Click, click, click, click went June’s Mary Janes as she paced the length of the table to the mayor. She asked him, “Gary, has your daughter had her baby yet?”

Gary Foglesong’s chin was tipped up to look at her. “Last night. A boy.”

“What’s his name?”

“Gene Ray.”

June addressed the entire town hall: “Gene Ray!”

The hall seethed with congratulations, a few hip hip hooray s, some he’s a jolly good fellow . Gary Foglesong’s back was pounded. Gene Ray.

Lightly, June jumped off this first table. One, two, three strides took her to another along the wall; the occupants pounded the surface in time with her steps. On this new stage, she stood above men whose sons and brothers and fathers worked at her hotel, men who could not be made to tolerate the Avallon’s ideals, but who were part of its story nonetheless. She stood straight as Griff, as if her knees weren’t shouting after two days on her feet, and she wore an easy smile, as if she were not longing for sleep.

Pennybacker, now invisible, collapsed against the podium, exhausted from holding the weight of the room’s attention.

June carried it all now.

“We are the best,” she repeated. “We’re also Americans.”

A whistle from the back of the room. Someone else called, “ SAME THING. ”

June nodded, allowing it. She stepped to the table’s edge, where, magically, an empty chair was shoved into place for her to step onto, and then another, and another, keeping her in the air. When she ran out of empty chairs, a row of locals rose to their feet, their seats an offering. She crossed the room without touching the floor.

This wasn’t the first time she’d addressed them this way. They’d heard her speak in more ordinary formats, sitting with the board, pen poised over contracts. But they knew that when she climbed onto a table, it was theater. She was not June Hudson in these moments; she was Hoss, something bigger than June Hudson. And they were not simply passive listeners; they were penitents, ready to be flayed or lifted. They performed together. There was a direct line between June’s early days at the Avallon and what she was doing tonight.

This was just a bigger elevator, and a slightly longer ride between floors.

June went on, “As Americans, we have lived with blood and dirt and hunger and cold and the devils that live in the mountains to make it the best. Y’all say yes if you agree.”

Y’all said yes, noisily. “Take us to church, Hoss!” They hooted, they hollered. Pennybacker couldn’t help it if he’d never been to a mountain service, if he’d never had to bury a child, if he’d never been hungry for more than a day. He couldn’t help that he was too soft for this. As he sagged against the podium, his face held both wonder and gratitude. There was no ego. This was another reason he was opposite to these people; humility cost him nothing. Pride was all these folks had, some years.

June said, “Now I want you to forget everything this State Department jasper’s just told you. Listen to me . I know you don’t want these people here, but I need you all to look at them when they get here and think this: we are the best.”

She leapt to a table on the west wall, scattering bulletins. The locals whooped. When she had first become GM at the Avallon, this was how she addressed the staff, too. Now, she didn’t need to. You didn’t need theater when you had trust.

She loved her staff. She respected the locals. Everyone involved could tell the difference. The locals didn’t trust her, and they shouldn’t.

June went on, “I want you to think about how we up there at the Avallon are going to give these people the best time they’ve ever had in their lives. The best food. The best drink. The best music. The best beds. The best of everything. Americans are the best, and the Avallon is the best American hotel. We’re going to ruin them with the best, do you hear? We’re going to make them miss us. Make ’em talk for the rest of their life about the best hotel in the world, an American hotel they’ll never see again. Who is the best? People will ask them. America. Chew on that.”

The head of housekeeping had once taken the maids to a circus all the way in Lewisburg ( I’m putting my neck out for you girls, don’t get knocked up ) and June had been captivated. Not by the acrobats—by the audience. They were impressed not by the most dangerous or technical moves, but by the most deftly packaged, a lesson June had never forgotten.

Now, she leapt from the last row of chairs to a wide window ledge; she knew she was silhouetted against the streetlight-bright snow outside. She raised her voice one last time. “We can’t control who they are, but we can control who we are. We are the best, and we are—tell me what you are. You are—”

“AMERICANS!”

Every voice in unison. It buzzed all through her, a chord perfectly struck. As the locals began to bluster to each other about their upcoming role, she told Griff, “Get Pennybacker out to the car before he says something right foolish and ruins my work.”

Behind Griff was Gary Foglesong, the mayor; he drew close and shook her hand. For a moment they talked about his new grandson, tire rationing, and the weather, but they were really talking about what she’d just said, unspoken words jammed in tight among the spoken. Finally, he said, “Don’t get cocky, Hoss.”

June was well aware the people of Constancy would be something she’d have to balance again and again, a challenge that would only grow as the war intensified. These mountaineers would give you good if you gave them good, and they gave you ill if you gave them ill. They took a liking to some people and a hating to some others, but mostly kept to themselves. If they turned, a place would be ruined for years.

No, she wouldn’t get cocky.

“Remember 1937,” the mayor said. His small eyes glittered. “1922.”

He was talking about the great floods of 1922 and 1937, but both of them had been far away, different sweetwater with different problems. Well, the flood of 1937 had been far away. 1922 was a different matter altogether, but it still hadn’t had a thing to do with the sweetwater running beneath the Avallon.

“That hotel was a ruin when Francis Gilfoyle bought it all those years ago,” he added. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to add something else, something that might qualify how he felt about the Gilfoyles resurrecting the hotel and, by extension, the town, but instead, he busied himself running a thumb along his suspender, and then said, reproachfully, “You know my wife heard it laugh the other day.”

“That ain’t how the water works, Gary,” June told him.

“And you know everything there is to know about it?”

“Yes,” she said.

···

She didn’t sleep that night.

She tossed and turned and then got dressed and sat at the table with two of her ledger books. June had dozens of these enormous gray-jacketed volumes from over the years—the first, of course, the gift with the handwritten inscription. Each contained observations of the Avallon’s guests, assembled by various departments. Individually, the details were meaningless, but collectively, they painted a useful portrait. How did one delight the rich, who could so easily delight themselves? By having the room set up just as they liked it last time; by recalling their favorite drink; by prompting them to tell a favorite joke or anecdote. By knowing them. Luxury. The ledgers belonging to the Avallon’s usual guests were dense with detail, years of detail, some of them old enough that the edges were yellowed. These two ledgers, however, were brand new. Empty.

They were for the diplomats.

Luxury felt like a different game when the people involved were officially enemies of the state. Good morning, sir, here’s your coffee just as you like it, did you know they were going to bomb Pearl Harbor? Good evening, ma’am, the quartet will be playing the Liszt piece you commented on yesterday, does your husband by any chance know where my Polish waiter’s missing mother might be? But June knew, deep down, that it was still the same game. The Avallon had never been for those who deserved it. The Avallon had to present itself the same to everyone who came, or the entire illusion collapsed.

In the dim kitchen, June entered the diplomatic legations—one page for each name—and then, since she still had room, added the three FBI agents, Pennybacker, and the two Swiss fellows due to arrive later in the week. Through the doorway, the dachshunds watched black-eyed from the bed, having ebbed back into the warm place she’d left.

The diplomats were coming. Gary Foglesong’s wife had heard a laugh. Agent Tucker Minnick had said, Francis Gilfoyle is dead. Edgar Gilfoyle had pressed his finger against her wrist.

She was not going to sleep.

She put on her coat.

She walked through the floodlit night to the Lily House, what the Gilfoyle family called the dower house. It was the grandest of the Avallon’s cottages, which were not truly cottages but rather small homes, most as sumptuous and precise as the layers of wedding cakes. Unlike the others, cladded with bright white wood, Lily House was built of the same stone as the hotel. Its steeply pitched roof was curiously assembled just like the Avallon’s, so that it looked like a piece of the hotel, or like a child of the hotel, one that hadn’t made it very far from home. Unlike the other cottages, which housed the hotel pharmacist, the head gardener, the head of housekeeping, the physician, the dentist, the shop owners, the Lily House was meant to house family, specifically the oldest Gilfoyle daughter and her family. But Carrie had marched her smart shoes toward Chicago’s wide avenues, and sweet Stella Gilfoyle would never be married or have a family.

At the bright blue back door, June scuffed her feet on the mat and put the key in the lock. She was about to press her hand against the door to push it open when she saw there was already a faint, oily handprint there, barely visible in the diffuse glow of the floodlights. The print was exactly the same size as the one she was about to make. She should have wiped it off last time, but she hadn’t, and she knew she wouldn’t this time, either. Instead, she fit her hand carefully over the top of the print, fingers splayed. She held her palm there for a second, prayerfully, and then she let herself in.

As she stepped into the wide, high-ceilinged hall, the dachshunds capering in before her, she thought that it had begun to have the feel of an unoccupied building. It smelled not quite of mold, but the potential of mold. The air was not quite cold, but still cooler than one would choose. It had a raw edge, despite the mannered furniture; a house too long without people became a little feral.

In the hallway opposite the stairs hung a family portrait, taken just at the time June had first been invited to dinner with them, after the incident with Sandy. She remembered how, at that first dinner, Mr. Francis had asked her a series of gentle questions, each light and undangerous, allowing her to make small talk if she liked, but also allowing her an escape hatch if any of the answers would be unpleasant. Madeline, Mr. Francis’s second wife (she had been a second wife for so long that most people didn’t remember to say second before wife anymore), had listened to June use her newfound elevator operator skills to answer each with a pocket-sized anecdote designed to delight her listeners rather than provide information, and had said, Why, Frank, I think you’ve found your equal.

Carrie, the aggressive and capable middle child, had seen her father and June locked in an amiable game of stories and hospitality and, instead of defusing it, had done her best to enable June’s victory by offering loaded prompts: June, were you ever terrified when you went with your father on his calls? Who is the oldest person you’ve ever met? When did you first notice you had an accent?

Stella, the eldest daughter, had been persuaded to leave off singing at her parakeet in order to share dinner with the rest of the family, and she’d laughed at the stories flying fast and thick, but before long, she slipped off again, unpunished, to play with the bird.

Sandy, the dutiful and noble baby of the family, had demanded to sit beside June. Every so often, he’d reached over to pat her hand, as if making certain she was still there. Even as a toddler, he was already on the inevitable, principled path that took him straight from university to the navy to a risky, voluntary deployment just after Pearl Harbor (a path that pained June more than she could say. Gentle Sandy! Going to war? But what of his gentleness?). He had years before he became the teenager locked in eternal battle with Mr. Francis.

And of course Edgar had been there. She had been petrified at the idea of this dinner invitation with the hotel owner and his family, but as she’d been seated, she’d seen him for the first time. The eldest Gilfoyle son had had a book open at the dinner table, his elbow propped beside it, and a small relief had run all the way to her fingertips. It would be all right, she thought. Mr. Francis was her boss, breathtakingly above her station, but he was a boss whose son read books at dinner.

One of June’s earliest ledgers, from the 1930s, had a page about Edgar Gilfoyle. It was not in her handwriting, but rather in a tall, eager script:

Edgar Gilfoyle

Likes it very hot when he sleeps

Wants books by his bed, but only history books, and he will only read the first forty-two pages of each

Coffee is a must

Suit pants need frequent mending in knees

Hairbrush will never get used

Must have gramophone at all costs

A folded piece of notepaper was tucked in the ledger at this page. In the same handwriting as the list, the note said only: I think about you all the time.

Leaving the photograph behind, June walked through the Lily House as if it were new to her. Turning on only the lights she needed, she let her fingers linger over the carved snail hidden in the delicate stair railing. Stroked the heavy curtains in the living room. Took in the view of the glowing hotel windows from the upstairs sitting room windows. Put her hands on the back of the rocker in the unoccupied nursery. Knelt by the hip-high dollhouse in the twin bedroom. Nestled in the padded window seat in the hall, just wide enough for two people to read or to kiss. Stood at the top of the stairs and looked out at the mountains she knew were there, even if she could not see them in the dark. She considered each of Lily House’s attributes as if for the first time, weighing merits and flaws.

In the bathroom, she plugged the big-footed tub and turned on the tap (the dachshunds huddled in the hall, not wanting baths, but not wanting her to go where they could not follow, either). As the tub filled with the strongly scented mineral water, she let herself imagine a future where her days ended like this, climbing the stairs to the bedroom and turning down the sheets of the pretty four-poster. Waking with the sun bold on her face instead of in the dim half-light of her basement quarters. She had wanted to be part of the Gilfoyle family for so long. The Lily House had been waiting for so long. For her.

But everything was different now. It had been different even before the State Department arrived. The funeral, the war.

What was it Gilfoyle had said? I know what you can do.

It was true, she thought. She knew how to guide the Avallon through this.

June undressed, storing each item of clothing neatly as she did. Coat hung on the back of the padded chair in the corner of the room. Trousers and socks folded crisp as a shop display. Blouse unbuttoned and hung on the light fixture’s brass scroll to let out the wrinkles. Brassiere stretched on the back of the commode. Underwear slid off and draped over the sink’s edge.

She stood naked next to a mirror that looked only at her body, next to the uncurtained window that looked out only to the dark mountains, next to the sweetwater in the tub that listened only to her.

God, she wanted, she wanted, she wanted—

June cleared her mind of all the unpleasant things she wouldn’t want to give the water. She thought only of being June Hudson. The satisfaction of being June Hudson. The humanness of being June Hudson. How excellent and wonderful her staff was at the staff meeting. How lucky she was to have found herself here on that day long ago.

She did her best not to think about a hotel full of Nazis. Mr. Francis’s laugh. Agent Minnick’s coal tattoo. Gilfoyle and the gift of the boots. She especially did not linger on I think the world of you, June . The feeling his words had left her with would have been a dangerous gift for the water.

She thought of nothing but the best things. Of the first time she had seen the Avallon, looming above her, of the moment she’d fallen in love with this beautiful behemoth that could only survive with hundreds of hands supporting it. Of the staff’s genuine pleasure when they pulled off a particularly difficult event. Of the decades of thank-yous and smiles and embraces she’d enabled here in this place. She thought of everything the Avallon would need to remember about itself to endure what was about to come.

“Be gentle,” she told the Avallon.

Then she sank into the water and let it fill her.