A Hitch at the Fairmont Page 2

  “Time we went back in,” Schultzie said. He held the door to the viewing room open.

  Jack walked to the display to retrieve the picture of Mom from the pedestal. He began to remove the frame. George’s big hands covered Jack’s. They felt warm and rough. “Please, Jack, keep it,” he said. “My good will is great, though the gift small.”

  George removed his hands. Jack’s own still felt cold.

  “Shouldn’t your aunt be here by now?” George asked.

  What followed was a procession of Mom’s friends, the ladies in gloves and the men in dark hats. They filed past Jack sporting careful smiles and grim eyes, with many a squeeze on his shoulder and promises to help. Jack felt bottomless again, so it was Mr. Schultz who said thanks on his behalf, while Jack gave a small nod of his head.

  Soon everyone was gone, except Jack, George, and the Schultzes. The four stood by the door of the funeral home, in the light of its stained-glass window. A single dust mote floated through the multihued beams, looking for a place to land.

  “I thought my aunt would be here for the funeral,” Jack said.

  “Better she were three hours too soon than a minute too late,” George said.

  “Maybe he could stay with us,” Schultzie said to his father.

  Mr. Schultz put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Maybe . . .”

  The door flew open, slamming against the wall. The stained glass shook in its frame. A shadow fell across all four of them. Jack swallowed hard and clutched at the silver charm beneath his shirt. Standing on the threshold was Aunt Edith, waving around some legal-looking papers. Her hips pressed against the doorjamb on either side. Dressed in a black silk suit with fur trim too hot for the weather, she blocked out the sun— an eclipse in a feathered hat. Her eyes fell on Jack’s shoulder, where Mr. Schultz’s hand still rested.

  “Unhand him,” she said. “That child is mine.”

  AUNT EDITH’S 1953 PACKARD CONVERTIBLE was deep green with pink leather interior. Two wooden crates occupied the rear seat. One had a strip of beige packing tape stuck to the top with the word “boy’s” written on it. The other, “hers.”

  “Get in,” said Aunt Edith.

  When Jack opened the front passenger door, she held up her palm to him.

  “Tsh,” she said, then waved her hand toward the rear seat. “In back.”

  Jack squeezed into the sliver of space between the crates, twisting sideways to avoid a nail that stuck out from “boy’s.” He clutched the framed picture of Mom and leaned his head against the top edge of the “hers” crate. It bit into his scalp, but that was fine.

  Aunt Edith unpinned her hat and set it carefully on the front seat next to her. A curl of white fur was perched right on top of her head. This she removed and held up to her face, making little kissy noises. She placed it tenderly next to her hat. Jack wasn’t sure, but he thought the fur thing blinked at him as she set it down.

  Aunt Edith scratched the back of her neck. Her finger slipped under her blond wig. A tiny lock of gray stuck to her neck when she returned her hands to the steering wheel. She turned north when they pulled out of the funeral home drive.

  “Our boardinghouse is the other way,” Jack said.

  In the rearview mirror Aunt Edith’s pale blue eyes shifted to regard him. “Do you know my name?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Jack.

  “Then use it when addressing me,” she said. “I’m Aunt Edith, dear.”

  “Yes, Aunt Edith,” said Jack.

  “I’m Aunt Edith, dear,” she barked.

  Jack was confused. Had he said something wrong?

  Oh.

  “Yes, Aunt Edith, dear,” he said. He slid his mother’s photograph beneath his jacket.

  “That’s better,” his aunt replied. “And we aren’t going to your former home.”

  “But all my stuff is there,” Jack said. “And Mom’s.”

  “What’s important is in those boxes,” she said. “The rest will be sold to cover my expenses for this little pickup trip.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  Her eyes shifted again to him, the brows slanting sharply down toward her nose. Jack corrected himself. “I mean, I see, Aunt Edith, dear.” But he didn’t see. How could his life with Mom fit into two wooden crates? Laughter was big. Love was bigger.

  They sped north along the Pacific Coast Highway. Aunt Edith wanted to “make San Francisco by midnight,” so Jack was alternately squished between the crates as she careened around one bend after the next, or thrown against the back of the front seat when she braked at the small villages dotting the route. There was an inertia to the drive that Jack couldn’t defy.

  The ocean glittered on their left most of the way. Jack stared over the top of “hers” at the water’s vast, never-ending movement. He’d tried to draw it many times. His renderings were accurate in every detail but could never capture the ceaseless change of its surface. The afternoon sunlight sparkled and danced on it, like flashes from a hypnotist’s watch, trance inducing. Jack found his mind slowly drifting and shifting, then diving deep below the ocean’s skin. Through the murk around him enormous shadows swam, singing of a slow life of falling and rising and finding and losing. Jack let himself be swept along in their wake, protected somehow from the pressure and depth. He knew that a person lost down here would be nothing, so small and unprotected. Doomed. Down they went, until the murk became gloom, and the gloom became pitch. And the only things darker than the water around him were the shadows that sang and pulled him farther down, to a black mountain at the bottom of the sea. There Jack, swirling in the shadows’ wake, plunged into the mouth of the mountain and came up inside, in a mer-cave similar to the land caves he had often explored. But this one had a floor of glass holding back the ocean, and different, ominous shapes swam below, their shrill voices not quite penetrating the glass. At the cave’s center an island glowed orange and yellow. Seated on the island was a woman, her long legs stretched out before her, her wavy hair obscuring her face. Mermen had built her a driftwood fire, and mermaids had given her shells filled with food and drink. Jack crawled carefully across the glass floor to the island. The woman heard and turned toward him. Her eyes were green.

  “Mom?” Jack said. “You’re alive?”

  But the only answer was a rising scream from the creatures below, their cries like the screech of tires on pavement. The woman’s eyes turned pale blue, and the glass floor exploded upward in ten thousand shards. One pierced Jack’s shoulder. Then the screamers rushed all around him, wrapped him, squeezed him, the intense pressure crushing his sides.

  He awoke, smashed again between the crates, the protruding nail pressed into his shoulder, drawing blood. He pushed hard against the crate and managed to move it across the back seat.

  “Don’t scratch the upholstery, boy,” Aunt Edith said, staring at him in the mirror.

  They stopped for dinner at a surf-n-turf restaurant north of San Luis Obispo. Aunt Edith ordered. She had the turf. She gave Jack the surf, though after his dream he had no desire to eat anything from the cruel ocean. Each time he picked at the flakey fried fish, he heard the shriek of tires and the shattering of windshields and felt lonelier than ever before.

  Aunt Edith sawed into a rare porterhouse, trailing bloody red streaks on the plate as she speared each chunk of meat.

  “I suppose we’ll need to enroll you in school,” she said. “Public, of course.”

  Jack nodded. He liked school, but wished he could go back and finish the year at his old one, living with Schultzie and his dad.

  “They’ll need your birth certificate,” his aunt said. “Do you know where that is?”

  Jack shrugged. “Mom always had those kind of things. I don’t know where . . . um . . . ma’am.”

  “Well, they’ll be in her crate, then,” Aunt Edith said. She looked at Jack quite intently. She even put down her fork. She pointed her knife right at him. “Sometimes they want other identification as well. Like they might call for a special
ID number. Did your mother ever mention a special ID number for you?”

  “Like Social Security or something?” Jack asked.

  “Sort of,” Aunt Edith said. “But not exactly. But a string of numbers, yes. Maybe your mother made you memorize a special set of numbers once?”

  “I know the addresses of the last three places we lived, and the phone numbers too. She always made me memorize those,” Jack said.

  Aunt Edith looked cross, so Jack added, “Aunt Edith, dear.”

  “Never mind that,” she said. “Maybe she told you it was a code, just for you.”

  Jack was at a loss. If he said the wrong thing, would she turn him over to the state? He’d been with her only a few hours, but already he knew she required specific answers he didn’t seem to have.

  “No codes,” he said.

  Aunt Edith looked at him for a moment longer. She picked up her fork. “Eat your fish,” she said. “The waitress won’t ask what I want for dessert until you’re finished.”

  Aunt Edith ordered two pieces of chocolate cake for dessert. She told Jack she would give him some if he could remember a time when his mother gave him a paper with numbers on it or if he ever saw such a thing. Jack pulled forth every numbered paper he could recall, but none seemed to satisfy her. In the end she asked for a doggie bag for the half slice of cake that remained.

  In the car she opened the bag. Jack thought she was going to give him the leftover dessert, but instead she set it down next to her on the front seat. “Dinner, Poopsie-Muffin,” she said. A series of satisfied chirps came from in front.

  As they traveled north, the warm sunny coast of beaches and sand disappeared, replaced by rocky cliffs and patches of tall trees, where night fell before it came to the rest of the world. Wisps of fog became fingers of fog, and eventually the gray clouds sat like a funeral pall over the land. The change didn’t bother Jack. It suited his mood. What right did the world have to warmth? What right the sun to shine? The gray was as it should be.

  Still, when they finally pulled off the highway late at night and topped a hill overlooking downtown San Francisco, Jack couldn’t help being moved by its beauty. The sparkling lights of the city were like the Milky Way, come down to play on the hills. Maybe a city where the fog could block out the real stars needed to make its own galaxy of light.

  “Beautiful,” Jack said.

  Aunt Edith crossed her arms. “Don’t be fooled by the bright lights,” she said. “You can hide a lot of darkness in the folds of those hills.”

  JACK PERCHED ON A SEAT at the Merry-Go-Round Bar, rotating slowly but going nowhere. As his little booth turned, he imagined all the territories represented on the first floor of the Fairmont Hotel: the African beasts that roamed the murals of the Cirque Room’s walls, the South American flowers at Podesta Baldocchi Florists, the Garden Room entrance with the flags of all the countries who had signed the UN charter here a decade before. The whole world came to the Fairmont Hotel. But Jack was all alone in it.

  The pocketknife he carried in his back pocket made an uncomfortable lump beneath him. It was an artifact of an old life. Aunt Edith had let him keep it, and most of the things from his wooden crate, after she had carefully inspected it. She ran the same inspection on all his mother’s belongings, turning them up, over, inside out, and back. Then one day all his mother’s things and both crates vanished. Aunt Edith said nothing about it.

  Jack pulled his sketchbook from his pocket. He flipped to the image of Mom and Dad he’d drawn at the funeral. Mom was laughing. He missed that. He hadn’t laughed much this past month. But seeing the laughter in the image of his mother, he knew it was still inside him. He’d captured her laugh in his art. And his art was a part of him. So her laughter was a part of him.

  He’d long since erased the head of his father, the one that had looked like Mr. Schultz. But a ghost image remained, featureless and tantalizingly out of reach. Jack turned to the first page of the book and reread Mom’s description of Dad. “Brave. Very brave.” Jack tried again to draw his father. He could use some bravery now. Otherwise why was he sitting here, afraid to return to Aunt Edith’s suite? If he could capture his father’s image, he could capture his courage, make it part of him. But when he closed his eyes, nothing came to guide his pencil. And when he looked at the paper, only that ghost image stared back at him.

  Jack sighed. He could put off his return no longer. He grabbed the peanuts he’d been sent to get, and crossed to the elevator. The lobby was vast and intimidating. Its marble columns frowned down from the heights as he navigated his way. The ornate ceiling was white and gold, the carpet and furniture red and black, as if all the room’s blood had pooled at its feet. Charcoal-colored walls absorbed what light the chandelier threw on the scene. Groups of ladies, businessmen, even a few late-night families bustled about him, coming for a stay or going home. Jack’s home was the hotel now—unless Schultzie could get his dad to let Jack move in with them. And a lonely home it was.

  His letters to Schultzie had gone unanswered in the month since he’d moved to the Fairmont. His aunt was one of those few permanent residents, whom the head bellman described as “a bunch of rich old dames who moved in as children when their families lost their mansions to the Great Quake, and won’t leave until another one shakes them loose.” Jack himself had heard old Maud Flood say the only way she would leave was “horizontally in a box, feetfirst.” As Jack stepped onto the elevator, he thought Maud was old enough that she might go soon, but not exactly as she planned. The elevator was so small, they’d surely need to stand her on end.

  A Chinese man in a beige porkpie hat stood in the corner. That was strange. because usually the elevator emptied at the lobby.

  “Going up,” said Shen, the elevator operator. She was a young Asian woman like all the other operators. With her dark hair bobbed six inches below her cap, and her crisp red uniform jacket, she matched the hotel décor. Jack wondered if that’s why they’d hired her.

  The Chinese man got off on the second floor, tipping his hat twice to Shen.

  On the third floor a bellboy got onto the elevator. His luggage cart was stacked high with flat boxes wrapped in gold paper that was intricately folded and held by an embossed seal that read “Blum’s.” A thin pink string snaked out from each seal, tied at the other end to a card with a hole in the corner. The card on the top box read “Mrs. Edith Smith, Room 562.” Jack pointed to it.

  “That’s for my room,” he said.

  “Really?” the bellboy replied. “Wanna do me a favor and take it? I got a bunch to deliver and every little bit helps.” He handed the box to Jack.

  “What is it?” Jack asked.

  “Chocolates. From Blum’s. Part of the Festival of Progress in honor of the earthquake anniversary. Compliments of the hotel,” the bellboy replied. He pulled a cream-colored envelope from inside his jacket. “And, hey, take this, too. I was bringing it up to your room. That’s why I put your box on top. To remind me.”

  The bellboy exited, pulling his cart after him. As the wheels hit the little gap between the elevator and the fourth floor, the gold boxes bounced up and down like Jack’s own heart. He pressed the envelope to his chest. Was this finally word from Schultzie? He wanted to open it right away, but not in front of Shen, who stood frowning next to him.

  When he got off the elevator, Jack examined the envelope more closely. It was addressed to Aunt Edith, but it could still be for him. It was unsealed. Odd. He pulled out the sheet of paper from inside. It was a rich creamy color and felt like stubbly linen as he ran his finger along the fold. It was the kind of paper that marked its texture in the charcoal or lead as much as it was marked when the pencil was drawn across it. Schultzie would never use this. He was strictly a blue-lined-paper kind of guy. This was stationery. Hotel stuff. Jack drew in a breath and held it. He unfolded the letter.

  “Just a hotel bill,” he muttered. His stomach felt gourd-hollow. He let his breath out slowly. It tasted bitter, like he’d eaten raw
onions for lunch.

  • • •

  Aunt Edith lay on her bed. Her white dressing gown draped out around her. The bedspread was blue, so she looked like a map of Antarctica. She glanced at the hotel bill while Jack poured peanuts into the food bowl of her pet chinchilla, Muffin.

  “Hmph. I’ll just put this with the others.” She refolded the bill. “Everything in its place, I always say.” From somewhere she produced a small pile of envelopes held together by a blue steel paper clip. She slid the new bill in with the others, then read the card that accompanied the gold box. “ ‘In celebration of the fifty-year anniversary of the Great Quake and Fire of 1906. From the ashes a phoenix shall be born.’ Ha! That’s not all that was born that day. A survivor was born too. That’s me. A survivor.”

  Jack had already heard, several times, about the infant Edith, just one hour old, lying in the crib when the Great Quake struck. He secretly wondered if she had somehow caused it. He wouldn’t have put it past her.

  “Chocolates!” Aunt Edith said. “And not cheap either.” She took a napkin from her nightstand and popped two treats into her mouth. Muffin’s buckshot eyes greedily followed every move of her hand. A delicious raspberry scent filled the room when she bit into a third chocolate. Jack remembered the day he and his mother had eaten tart raspberries right off the bush at a little farm north of Simi Valley. Mom had gotten the red juice on her white blouse and pretended to be Juliet, dying from her dagger blade. Jack had laughed and applauded.

  “Can I have a chocolate?” he asked his aunt.

  Aunt Edith placed a protective hand on the chocolates. “May I,” she said. “It’s ‘May I please have a chocolate.’ ”

  “May I please have a chocolate?” Jack asked.

  “May I please have a chocolate . . . what?” she prompted.

  “May I please have a chocolate, Aunt Edith, dear?”

  “That’s better,” she said, “more polite. And orphans have no business being anything but.” Muffin glared at Jack from her shoulder. Aunt Edith gave a curt smile. Flakes of face powder fell onto her imposing bosom and caked up in her wrinkles like the pattern on a frosted windowpane. She plucked a spiky confection from the box. It looked like a small chocolate hedgehog in her hand. Jack knew the flavor. It was the most recognizable treat in the box. Nevertheless Aunt Edith speared it with her pink lacquered thumbnail and squeezed until the guts oozed out. This she offered to Jack.