Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel Read online

  Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel

  William Trevor

  I

  ‘I’m Ivy Eckdorf,’ said Mrs Eckdorf as the aeroplane rose from the ground. ‘How d’you do?’

  The person beside her, a stoutly made red-cheeked Englishman who happened at the time to be reading of unrest in Syria, lowered his evening newspaper and smiled at Mrs Eckdorf. He did not give his name, since he saw no cause to barter names with a stranger on an air-flight. He displayed further goodwill by nodding. He lifted his newspaper again.

  ‘Now what are we going to take to drink?’ said Mrs Eckdorf. She reached above her and turned on the little orange light that indicated a desire for attention. ‘I loathe being up in the sky,’ she confessed. ‘Especially at night. Cognac for me,’ she said when the hostess came.‘Now what for you, my dear?’

  Amazed that he should be so addressed by a woman he did not know and thinking that he was clearly going to have to pay for her drink, the man asked for whisky. He glanced at Mrs Eckdorf and saw the face of a woman in her late forties, with blonde hair hanging from beneath a cream-coloured hat with a brim. She had eyes of so pale a shade of brown that they were almost yellow, and two reddened lips that were generously full and now were parted in a smile. There was a gap between her teeth, precisely in the centre of this mouth, a slight gap that an ice-cream wafer might just have passed through.

  Mrs Eckdorf talked. She took the newspaper from the man’s hands and neatly folded it. She placed it behind the flap of the rack in front of him while saying that she had been educated, if you could call it that, at St Monica’s School for Girls, an academy at which she had had the misfortune to meet Miss Tample. Her own mother, Mrs Eckdorf said, had been a most dislikeable person, given to hysteria and lovers. Her father had disappeared one night, saying he was going out to post a letter and not ever returning: who could blame him, Mrs Eckdorf asked the man beside her, the circumstances being what they were? On the other hand, she added, he might have taken her with him.

  ‘I turned to Miss Tample, having no one else to turn to,’ continued Mrs Eckdorf, ‘and she proved, quite monstrously, to be a snake in the grass. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Well,’ said the man.

  ‘To this very day I’m haunted by the sordid propositions of Miss Tample. “Have cocoa, Ivy,” she said to me. “Come up and have cocoa: you’re looking peaky.” An innocent girl, I followed her up those stairs. “Such fun,” she said, handing me a mug of stuff with a skin on it. “Take off your tie,” she said, “if you’re feeling hot, Ivy.” And as the hand of this vulturous woman went out to seize mine her sour breath struck my cheek.’

  The man beside Mrs Eckdorf began to say something but Mrs Eckdorf gesticulated, indicating that she’d rather he didn’t interrupt.

  ‘Miss Tample,’ she said, ‘with her brown knitted cardigan and her support stockings, the soft moustache on her upper lip, two panting eyes behind spectacles – my God, you should have seen Miss Tample!’

  She continued to speak of her life. She ordered further drinks. She was a photographer, she said: she had discovered the world of photography when she had gone to Germany, while still a girl. She had married two German businessmen, yet was herself entirely an English woman, having been born in London, in Maida Vale. ‘I do not advise you,’ she said, ‘ever to marry a German.’

  The man shook his head, at the same time stating that he was contentedly married already.

  ‘The one who was my husband last,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, ‘gave me a taste for cognac. Hans-Otto Eckdorf.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Indeed.’ She paused, and then she said: ‘That has been my life. A mother, a father who walked away. And then Miss Tample. And then two German businessmen. The only light in my life is my camera.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We are the victims of other people.’

  ‘It’s often so –’

  ‘Hoerschelmann was my other husband. He had glasses and no moustache. Hans-Otto had a moustache of sorts. Hoerschelmann was sandy and fatter than Hans-Otto. Hans-Otto was dark.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You see me as a brash woman. Well, yes, I’m brash. I’m a brash, hard, sick kind of woman: I have no illusions about myself. My marriages failed for unfortunate reasons. I left England because of its unpleasant associations for me: soon I shall have to leave Germany too.’

  In a different kind of conversational way, the man said he had never been to Germany. Mrs Eckdorf shook her head, seeming to imply that whether or not he had been to Germany was irrelevant.

  ‘My last completely happy memories,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, ‘had to do with the dolls I had as a little girl. Can you imagine me as a little girl? Is it easy to imagine a woman of forty-six as a little girl at a dolls’ tea-party? For all you know I might be drunk. Are you thinking that? If you’re interested, what I’m saying is that despite a nicely groomed exterior I have a heart like anyone else.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Of course.’

  ‘When Hoerschelmann said he would have to divorce me I couldn’t bear it. I walked around our apartment holding his shirts to my breast, weeping for hours and hours. Someone telephoned Hoerschelmann after the third day and told him that every morning after he left the apartment I wept noisily. He couldn’t understand, because what he left behind was a nicely groomed woman who seemed also to be tough. It wasn’t that I loved Hoerschelmann all that much, it was simply that his wishing to divorce me was another nail in the coffin of my life. In the end, naturally, I hated him. Have you been divorced?’

  The man said he hadn’t. He said he knew very little about divorce. He had married, he said, when he was twenty-two and had remained with the same wife since.

  ‘On balance,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, ‘Hans-Otto was crueller. You understand why I have thrown myself into my work? I haven’t had much luck with human relationships.’

  ‘I’m sorry –’

  ‘And still I have a needy heart. Let’s talk about something else now.’

  There was a pause. Then, as though reciting a practised piece, Mrs Eckdorf said:

  ‘I flew this morning from Munich, which is the city where currently I live. About the city we’re approaching I know extremely little.’

  ‘It’s a good business town these days,’ the man informed her.

  ‘A fair city,’ murmured Mrs Eckdorf more romantically. ‘In Dublin’s fair city: that’s a line in an old-fashioned song.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Some cities are fairer than others. In my work I notice that.’

  Mrs Eckdorf went on speaking, saying she knew as little about the inhabitants of the city they were approaching as she did about the city itself. She had read somewhere that they were litter-bugs and disputatious, but she didn’t at all mind that. Revolution had taken place in the city, she knew, and was glad that it had: it showed spirit to rebel against status quo, it lent a certain pride to a people. She knew that the country of which the city was the capital was a land of legend and myth: she had seen a television programme about that, a programme that had shown old men talking and priests talking and children dancing in the stiff local manner. Vaguely at the time she had thought that she herself could have made more of it than the television people had, but it was not until years later, as a result of a meeting with a barman on an ocean liner, that she had been moved to think about the city again. This man, telling her much besides, had said he hadn’t been attracted by the place. He had walked through it in the rain, apparently, seeking solace and finding it hard to come by. A motor-car, moving gently in the night-time traffic, had struck him as he crossed a street and the driver had smiled and waved, as though the contact created a friendship
between them. The barman had wandered about until a man approached him outside a public house and offered to guide him to the solace he sought. He had walked with this man for a very long time, until they came to a person called Agnes Quin standing in a doorway, and the guide, whose name was Morrissey, had remained with them until they arrived at a yellow hotel.

  ‘My work dictates the order of my life now,’ Mrs Eckdorf said. ‘I do what my work tells me to do.’

  She continued to speak, talking about her work in such a passionate manner that the red-cheeked man came to the conclusion that she was a little odd. When she had said she was a photographer he had at once thought of photographs in an album and photographs in newspapers and on picture postcards, but it seemed she wasn’t interested in this kind of photography at all. She said to him that her camera was an all-seeing eye. She was a merchant of truth, she said; she practised an art. She spoke of Marrakesh and some peasant family there with whom she had once lived for several months, absorbing the necessary background for a book of photographs that had eventually won for her a coveted award.

  ‘A picture tells a story,’ explained Mrs Eckdorf. ‘The lines on an old face, broken teeth in a jaw, scars of a lifetime.’ She paused in thought, as if viewing these images in her mind. ‘An eye-patch where an eye should be,’ she said. She had travelled the entire world, she added, seeking faces and the stories they told, laying bare the unvarnished truth.

  Her companion inclined his head. ‘It must be interesting,’ he politely remarked, ‘travelling about, doing that.’

  ‘It is,’ Mrs Eckdorf agreed, and went on speaking about the books of truthful photographs she produced: expensive volumes, beautifully bound. They were often to be discovered, she revealed, on the coffee-tables of the well-to-do.

  ‘In this present instance I don’t quite know what I’m after. I can’t be sure. D’you understand that?’

  ‘No,’ said the man.

  ‘I’m going now to photograph a tragedy that took place nearly thirty years ago.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘If you’d care to listen to me, I’ll tell you how all this has come about.’

  The man sighed inwardly. He tried to smile at Mrs Eckdorf. She said:

  ‘I had it from a barman on a ship.’

  She reached up and again switched on the little orange light above them. A hostess came and Mrs Eckdorf ordered further drinks. She waited in silence until they came and then she thanked the hostess. She drew a street map from her handbag and opened it in front of her, asking her companion to hold one edge of it. With a red, shapely finger-nail she indicated an area of the sheet. ‘Somewhere there,’ she said. ‘Near that place called Dolphin’s Barn. Thaddeus Street.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man, pretending to see the street she mentioned, in fact not bothering to seek it.

  She folded the map and returned it to her handbag. It was a short street, she said, as he’d have noted, and a number of the houses that once had stood in it stood there no longer. ‘That barman described it vividly,’ she said. ‘Corrugated iron hoardings with torn posters flapping in the breeze, a wasteland where children play among the rubble. Someone was going to build something but the money ran out: it’s always happening down there in that city, apparently.’

  Mrs Eckdorf closed her eyes, and her voice continued to describe Thaddeus Street. At one end stood the dingy yellow bulk of O’Neill’s Hotel, once a flourishing commercial establishment, now forgotten more or less. Opposite there was a shop that sold groceries and next to that a turf accountant’s. Two houses were empty and had fallen into disrepair, two others were occupied by several families, a fifth contained a priest. At the other end of the street stood a public house.

  ‘The woman Agnes Quin pointed it all out to the visiting barman, as someone might proudly show off a local place of beauty. And then, or later, she told him about Mrs Sinnott, a woman of ninety-one who owns O’Neill’s Hotel. It’s now a disorderly house.’

  The man fidgeted with his hands. He drank some whisky. He had been hoping on this journey to catch up on a little lost sleep. Mrs Eckdorf said:

  ‘She’s deaf and dumb, this woman. She sits there in an upstairs room high above Thaddeus Street, conversing with people by writing everything down in exercise-books. She knows nothing of what her hotel has become. Her son, Eugene, has let that happen, not caring apparently, or allowing it deliberately, I don’t know which. She is a woman who was famous in her time because of her love of orphans and even still a few orphans hang about her, grown men and women actually. Agnes Quin’s herself an orphan, and so is Morrissey and so is O’Shea, the hotel’s solitary porter. They go to her and sit conversing by means of an exercise-book: in the silence of that room, I dare say, her goodness soothes them. It soothes Eugene, and Philomena the woman Eugene married, and Eugene’s sister and his son and Eugene’s brother-in-law. All of them make the journey to receive what she offers them and I have made this longer journey in order to photograph them all together on her birthday, which is the day after tomorrow, August 10th. Ideally they won’t even know what’s happening. Don’t you think it’s a beautiful thing?’

  The man looked at Mrs Eckdorf in astonishment. She did not seem drunk, he thought. ‘Beautiful?’ he said.

  ‘You’ve been to houses like that, I dare say,’ Mrs Eckdorf said. ‘Have you ever thought as you pleasured yourself that the house could also contain a person like Mrs Sinnott?’

  The man protested vehemently, but Mrs Eckdorf explained that she knew about the desires of men and did not hold the desires of men in any way against them.

  ‘The barman was moved. He thought it extraordinary that Agnes Quin should show him the houses of Thaddeus Street and tell him all about an elderly woman who was deaf and dumb, and about Eugene Sinnott who allowed her hotel to go to seed. What do you read into that?’

  The man said he was not equipped to read anything into it. He repeated that he did not frequent the kind of house that Mrs Eckdorf was claiming this hotel to be. He would like, he said, to make that quite clear.

  ‘The barman was curious also,’ she said. ‘He asked questions. Eugene and his mother live alone in the hotel now, with only O’Shea to tend them. Twenty-eight years ago Philomena left Eugene, taking from him their baby son. Twenty-eight years ago the daughter of the hotel ran away also, although the neighbours say she loved her mother’s hotel. Why was all that?’

  ‘Mrs Eckdorf, I’ve absolutely no idea. I’ve never even heard of all these people, or O’Neill’s Hotel, or Thaddeus Street –’

  ‘Agnes Quin pretended not to know either. She shook her head when the barman pressed her. “They all come together for the birthday,” was all she’d say. August 10th. What happened once in O’Neill’s Hotel?’

  Tetchily, the man protested it was none of his business what had happened once in O’Neill’s Hotel. Mrs Eckdorf said:

  ‘Twenty-eight years ago a tragedy occurred, the results of which we see today.’

  ‘You cannot know a thing like that.’

  ‘When I close my eyes I can see the yellow hotel and Eugene Sinnott, a drunk according to Agnes Quin, a man destroyed. I think he’s an amazing figure, like a tree that’s dead. With a son somewhere, and Philomena his wife, and an old mother who watches over him.’

  The man shook his head.

  ‘Listen to me,’ continued Mrs Eckdorf. ‘This old woman sits alone, visited every day by a street-walker and by Morrissey. A priest comes also, climbing up the long stairs to bring her the sacrament.’

  ‘Look here, I’m sorry: I find all this distasteful.’

  ‘Distasteful? A priest climbing up –’

  ‘I don’t mean that.’

  ‘Distasteful?’ said Mrs Eckdorf again, speaking slowly, as though mentally examining the word for some meaning other than that usually implied by it. ‘Distasteful?’

  The red-cheeked man turned away from her and reached a hand out for the newspaper she had packed away. She seized the fingers of his hand and s
miled at him. She spoke quietly. She said:

  ‘I do not understand you.’

  ‘I’d really rather read, Mrs Eckdorf.’

  ‘When the barman was speaking, an intuition told me that the human story of O’Neill’s Hotel was a story that must be told.’

  The man said nothing. He lit a cigarette, hoping that his silence had a sourness about it. He imagined the kind of run-down place O’Neill’s Hotel would be. He imagined a family that had fallen down in the world, a family apparently who’d had trouble in their lives for one reason or another. For profit, it seemed, this painted woman was about to photograph their decay.

  ‘I have photographed tragedy before: I have followed every inch of a slaughterer’s footsteps in Colorado, the path that less than a week before he crept along, into the humble room in which he dealt out death to an erring wife. I have recorded greed and depravity and pride and grief and poverty, yet this is the human story that I feel is closer to myself than any other I’ve yet pursued. I have a separate intuition about that.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You don’t. Oh God, I must begin again. Listen to me –’

  ‘It isn’t necessary –’

  ‘I live,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, ‘in a cinder-grey apartment in the Lipowskystrasse, in Munich. A month ago, on a German ship returning from Africa, I sat alone in the bar one night, chatting to the barman. “I’m a photographer,” I said, for want of something better to say. “I photograph human stories of quality.” And in the chat that followed the ship’s barman told me of this hotel. He told me of that old woman there and of her love for orphans. He shivered in the hall of this hotel, passing through it. You see?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  Mrs Eckdorf lapsed into silence. The man reached for his newspaper and this time was not prevented from seizing it. He read again of unrest in Syria, but the words meant little as they came from the page. What was the matter with her? he wondered, and his thoughts went back to the first statements she’d made, about her misfortunes at a boarding-school and the trouble with her parents. She was one of those people who gossiped on and on so that you couldn’t in the end separate fact from fantasy. Did a woman like that ever pause to think that other people, casually met, were not just listening machines? He did not at all care for her.