Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel Read online

  Having left the room, O’Shea decided that he would make up a bed for Mrs Eckdorf and then go out and buy fish for her luncheon and for Mrs Sinnott’s, a piece of plaice or a fresh mackerel. The family would come for the birthday, and he would tell them a visitor from Germany was staying in the hotel. They might see her on the stairs or the hall, they would turn to one another and say that a new era was beginning.

  Ten minutes ago he had entered the hall from Thaddeus Street to discover that Mrs Eckdorf, sitting on one of the tall chairs, had dropped into a doze. Her mouth was open, her eyelids, carrying long curled lashes, were down, like blinds, over her eyes. The greyhound had sniffed her legs and the handbag that lay on the floor beside them, not causing her to wake. Her arms were drooped over the arms of the chair, the palms of her hands facing upwards, the fingers splayed. Looking at her, O’Shea had recalled the coarseness of Agnes Quin. Once in the early morning he had seen her combing her hair as she came down the stairs. She had pulled at it, forcing the comb through the matted strands and speaking to him with her mouth full of hairpins. ‘You’re looking great, O’Shea,’ she had said, showing darkened teeth.

  Hurrying now, he passed the room where she had spent the night and through the open door saw the bedclothes strewn all over the floor. He closed the sight away and mounted to the next landing, where he took two sheets and a pillow-case from a large wall-cupboard. With these in his arms, he entered a room that faced Thaddeus Street, the room that Enid Gregan had occupied during her girlhood. He opened the window to clear the air of the smell of fust. Across the street he saw in white writing on the windows of Keogh’s grocery information about a reduction in the price of butter. Sunlight glared from the stucco of the houses, a dog slept on the pavement. He wondered if Mrs Eckdorf would look out of the window at all, or even lean out, and be seen by the people passing below in Thaddeus Street. It was certain, in any case, that people would see the taxi-cab arriving with her luggage. ‘She preferred O’Neill’s,’ he would say to anyone who asked him. ‘The quiet homeliness of it.’ He had suggested to Eugene Sinnott one time that it would be a good idea to have cards printed with a message on them, something like: O’Neill’s Hotel, Thaddeus Street. Best for Meals and Service. ‘I could pass them out on the street,’ he’d said, but Eugene Sinnott had replied that the whole operation would be costly and a waste of time.

  O’Shea moved from the window and proceeded to make the bed. He wondered if there might be dampness in the blankets, for it was more than two years since anyone had slept in the room. Mrs Sinnott had always been anxious that no one should be put in a damp bed. There were hot-water jars in the kitchen, he remembered; he would fill a couple and put them between the sheets.

  As he completed his preparations, covering the grey striped pillow with the pillow-case, smoothing and tucking in the sheets, O’Shea felt a tremor of unusual excitement ‘Stay there,’ he said to his dog, and abruptly he left the room and crossed the landing. In the hall below he could see the figure of Mrs Eckdorf on the tall chair, her legs crossed, the camera about her neck, her handbag still on the floor. He gazed down at her, at her pale hat and all her pale clothes: she was not at all like Mrs Sinnott, he thought, without knowing why he had thought that. ‘That is beauty,’ said O’Shea, whispering to himself, still looking down at the sleeping woman. ‘That is the most beautiful woman who has ever sat in our hall.’ He returned to the bedroom and completed the making of the bed. For a moment he placed the palm of his hand on the pillow where her head would rest and then his hand went between the two sheets and lay where she would lie. He felt a ticking in his stomach that never in his life had he felt before, he felt his heart gathering speed, his mouth seemed dry of saliva. ‘I have waited,’ said O’Shea. As he stood with his right hand between the sheets of the bed that the photographer was to occupy, there came into his mind an image of himself and Mrs Eckdorf in the kitchen of the hotel, she occupying the chair of Eugene Sinnott. O’Shea did not understand that, but the image was none the less there. ‘Something funny is happening,’ he said aloud, withdrawing his hand and smoothing the surface of the bed. His dog came near to him and whimpered. He would ask her if she’d rather have plaice or mackerel, he’d buy peas and small potatoes, and eggs for her tea. He would cook everything carefully, he would heat the plates.

  It was quiet in the room except for the continued low whimpering of the greyhound. O’Shea gestured at it to be silent. He had a sudden urge to take off his uniform and enter the bed himself so that the warmth of his naked body would air it for her, so that she would lie on sheets that he had lain on. ‘My God Almighty,’ said O’Shea, his face reddening, sweat breaking out on the calves of his legs.

  He stood for several minutes until normality returned to him, and then he left the bedroom and descended to the kitchen, tiptoeing past Mrs Eckdorf in the hall. He put some water on to heat. He took from a cupboard two brown hot-water jars and placed them on the edge of the table. He swept the floor, he put coal into the range, he drew away the ashes and emptied them in the yard. When he returned to the kitchen, Mrs Eckdorf was standing in the doorway.

  He said that he had made a bed up for her and was about to air it. She interrupted him, questioning him about Eugene Sinnott and the hotel. She suggested with a laugh that Eugene Sinnott had struck her as a chap who enjoyed raising his elbow. He enjoyed sherry and cigarettes, O’Shea replied; he hadn’t touched food in the middle of the day for twenty years.

  ‘You look after him.’ She smiled at O’Shea, her eyes fixed on his until he felt he had to look away.

  ‘I look after both of them,’ he said.

  ‘Both, O’Shea?’

  ‘His mother is ninety-one. She never had hearing or speech. I carry her food up. I make her bed and clean her room.’

  Mrs Eckdorf said that was kind of him. She had noticed when first she saw him that there was kindness in his face. She could quite imagine it, she added: his kind face bent over an elderly person’s bed, his hands smoothing the sheets.

  ‘I thought a mackerel for your luncheon,’ O’Shea said quickly. ‘Or a bit of plaice. With parsnips and potatoes, and rhubarb afterward. Which would you prefer, Mrs Eckdorf, of those two fish?’

  She smiled again, not answering the question. She touched his left hand with the tips of her fingers. Then she moved away, towards the two windows.

  ‘You have a hornbeam tree in your yard.’

  ‘And a little flower-bed that I made myself.’

  He poured boiling water into the earthenware jars, banging the corks safely home with his hand.

  ‘An interesting tree, the hornbeam,’ she said. She turned to look at him again, standing with her right hand resting on the side of her camera, which was still suspended from her neck. Her eyes were yellow, he said to himself, which was a colour he had never seen in the eyes of a woman or a man before. He could see the tip of her tongue between her upper and lower teeth.

  ‘I like this place,’ she said. ‘I like this whole hotel.’

  She walked about the kitchen, picking up knives and spoons and plates. She looked at them and put them down again. ‘What is happening tomorrow?’ she enquired. ‘Mr Sinnott said something was happening.’

  He told her, adding nothing to the information she already possessed.

  ‘How fascinating,’ she remarked when he had finished speaking. ‘A family birthday.’

  ‘I put up a paper-chain, like you have at Christmas.’

  ‘A paper-chain,’ said Mrs Eckdorf softly. ‘And the family chats about the year that’s been. Is that it?’

  ‘They don’t say much.’

  ‘Show me the whole hotel, O’Shea. I’m interested in it.’

  He nodded, thinking slowly, trying to come to a conclusion. She was here for a reason: he’d felt it the moment he first heard her voice, he’d felt it when he imagined her sitting with him in the kitchen, and he had felt it ever since. He was staring at the soap with which Eugene Sinnott had shaved himself that morning; he would
like to draw her attention to this soap, to the fact that the inheritor of the hotel shaved himself with kitchen soap. He had this desire, to discuss the soap with her, but felt he should not. He’d have liked to repeat the conversation that had taken place that morning in the kitchen between himself and Eugene Sinnott, explaining to her that for the past three years Eugene Sinnott had insisted on giving his mother a pencil-sharpener for her birthday and was again insisting on it, that he had gone on about a greyhound race instead of devoting thought to the question of the birthday present. He’d have liked to explain that the hotel was not always as she saw it now, that once upon a time actors and commercial travellers had spent comfortable nights in it and had eaten well-cooked food in the dining-room. He wanted to explain that it was all of a pattern, Agnes Quin and Morrissey and the empty rooms and Eugene Sinnott caring about nothing except sherry and the dreams he had, and the racing of animals. Was it a sin, he wanted to ask her, for a woman or a girl not to cover her head at Mass? She wore a hat herself; it was the first thing he noticed.

  Mrs Eckdorf coughed to arouse the porter from the reverie he had entered. She’d noticed that a piece of soap beside the sink had caught his eye. He continued to stare at it. Loudly she asked the name of the dog, which was looking up at her, its head cocked to one side. O’Shea did not reply.

  In the silence he heard his own voice speaking to him: his lips, he knew, were not moving, no sound disturbed the stillness in the kitchen. ‘She has come to buy the hotel,’ his voice said in private to him, and then repeated it again. People were going about, a man in a shop had told him, buying properties that no one had thought of putting up for sale. No one had ever thought of putting O’Neill’s Hotel up for sale, but wasn’t it the only thing that could happen now? Meticulously, O’Shea considered the facts as they were: an old woman whose heartfelt desire was that her father’s hotel should be as once it had been, Eugene Sinnott given up to sherry, he himself waiting. He had said prayers, he had wished, he had willed, he had written that one day O’Neill’s Hotel would rise like a phoenix-bird. Being too old now to make demands and it being foreign to her nature to seem a nuisance, she had passed her heartfelt desire from her soul to his, so that her desire might become his duty. God is looking after us, he thought: she would have said that He had never failed them.

  ‘The dog,’ said Mrs Eckdorf. ‘What is the name of your dog?’

  O’Shea’s eyes moved from the piece of green soap. He spoke slowly, saying that the dog had no name. He explained that the dog had wandered into the hotel yard one evening six years ago and that neither her nor Eugene Sinnott had been able to think of a name for it.

  ‘My God,’ murmured Mrs Eckdorf quietly.

  Her face was like a pearl, he thought. He moved towards the door with the greyhound behind him. ‘I will show you the room I have for you,’ he said. ‘And I will show you everything else.’

  They crossed the hall and entered the dining-room, a low-ceilinged room with a central table and smaller tables arranged around it. A mirror stretched the length of the mantelpiece, reflecting the sideboard opposite and cane chairs and bottles of sauce on a dumb waiter. There was an unpleasant smell, she noticed, of stale food and of cats.

  ‘They don’t have the birthday party here?’ she said, and O’Shea replied that the birthday party was always held in the kitchen since that was what Mrs Sinnott wished. He closed the door. They went upstairs.

  On the first-floor landing, above a leather sofa that sagged untidily, there was a mirror that was larger than the mirror in the dining-room. In this they were reflected: she with her hat still in place, smiling slightly, her legs in their finely meshed stockings seeming slight and slender, he towering behind, bent within his uniform, the top button open to ease his neck, the greyhound’s head at his knees. She saw this picture of them and stopped. He was staring like a man caught up with religion: a Christ could get away with eyes like that. The red and blue and gold of his clothes ran into the whiteness of her suit, their movements were confused in the reflection. The camera rose, her fingers made fast adjustments, the shutter snapped.

  ‘This is his,’ O’Shea said.

  She peered into Eugene Sinnott’s bedroom and saw the sacred picture on flowered wallpaper and the bed unmade.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  He attempted to lead her past the room in which Agnes Quin had spent part of the night, but Mrs Eckdorf was insistent. An ornamental candlestick had been knocked from the dressing-table, a sheet was torn.

  ‘Disorder,’ she murmured. ‘Disorder everywhere.’

  She heard him whispering to himself that he would rather that two wolves had spent the night there. His eyes were fixed as absorbedly on the fallen candlestick as they had been on the soap in the kitchen.

  ‘I would love to meet Mrs Sinnott,’ she said, fearing that he was again about to become entranced. ‘Shall we?’

  ‘I will show you the ledgers of the hotel in the past.’

  He led the way and they mounted to attics that were full of empty stout bottles and trunks and suitcases. Ledgers were stacked against a wall; there were stuffed birds, their glass domes broken, and cardboard boxes containing knives and forks. ‘I hid those,’ said O’Shea, ‘in case Mr Sinnott would sell them.’ There were mildewed sacks which O’Shea said contained cups and saucers, which he had placed there for safety’s sake also. Mice had eaten the labels on the stout bottles and nibbled their way through stacks of receipts. The floor was littered with shredded paper and with droppings. ‘Look at this,’ said O’Shea, opening a ledger and pointing at lines of figures. ‘February, 1933.’

  ‘Why was it?’ asked Mrs Eckdorf. ‘Why is it, O’Shea, that the hotel has fallen down like this?’

  He shook his head. Mr Sinnott was always drinking, he said, and then the words came flooding out of him like a torrent joyfully released. All he had wished to say to her in the kitchen came now. He told her about his life with Eugene Sinnott and his mother, he said that the disordered room downstairs would have to be scrubbed with Vim before any decent traveller could spend a night there, he mentioned the soap in the kitchen with which Eugene Sinnott had shaved himself, and the cigarette-butts that Eugene Sinnott scattered all over the hotel. He went to bed himself, he said, at nine o’clock every night, knowing that later Eugene Sinnott would return to the hotel in a state of drunkenness, and that Morrissey would come to sleep in the hall and would admit Agnes Quin and a stranger.

  He spoke at length about Mrs Sinnott and the red exercise-books that were full of conversations. He mentioned the day he had arrived in O’Neill’s Hotel and how Eugene Sinnott had shown him where the dining-room was. He mentioned the fly she had asked him to open the window for. He talked about the birthday party, about Eugene Sinnott’s wife and his son, and his sister and his sister’s husband. He spoke again of Morrissey and Agnes Quin, who came to Mrs Sinnott’s room in order to take what they could from her. ‘He’s a kind of devil,’ he cried emotionally. ‘He passes water on the flowers I have.’

  His eyes, inflamed with passion, saw her standing before him and it seemed to him that she was touched with light, as though her body had a flickering shroud about it, as religious figures have in pictures. She would not ever fail to wear a hat, he thought, and then he said things he had not meant to say; he gave up his secrets to the vision that was smiling at him. ‘You have come to buy the hotel,’ he said in the end.

  ‘Buy?’ said Mrs Eckdorf.

  ‘You have come to buy O’Neill’s Hotel.’

  Slowly she nodded her head. He had guessed, she said. He was right: she had come to buy the hotel.

  ‘It will be like it was.’

  ‘What happened to change it all, O’Shea?’

  ‘He is only interested in animals racing. I will bring you to Mrs Sinnott now.’

  She wished to press her question but considered it inadvisable: she had had experience of chaps like this suddenly shutting up like clams. She looked at him: he has adenoids, she thou
ght; that man, as well as everything else, is far from healthy. She saw him in black and white, a shot from low down, his white face in profile against shadows. He reminded her of a garage hand she had once noticed in Georgia, repairing a bicycle wheel by a petrol-pump on the roadside. She had obtained a photograph of the man: she remembered his hands on the spokes of the wheel and the bulk of the petrol-pump looming beside him, to the right of her picture.

  ‘You have come to buy the hotel,’ he said again, and she felt she almost loved him for giving her the role she had to play.

  ‘How nice you look,’ she said, ‘up here in your uniform.’

  Blood came into his face; he shuffled his feet, playing with the grit on the boarded floor. He wished she might remain there for the remainder of his life and that he might remain where he was also, the two of them standing in the gloom of an attic: two strangers, each thinking the other nice.

  ‘I’m dying to meet Mrs Sinnott,’ she said.

  ‘A photographer from Germany,’ said Eugene, ‘as mad as a hatter.’

  There was no speech in the Excelsior Bar for a moment, while Eugene’s tidings of the events in his hotel were absorbed by Mrs Dargan and Agnes Quin. Then Mrs Dargan said it was disgraceful the people who were about these days. She warned Eugene to be careful in case the woman didn’t pay up when the time came.