Chapter Seven
January
Tom always
knows beforehand just what is going to happen and who he is going to see. It's
invariable with mere seasonal inflections of clothing, climate, and clientele.
Winter though, is unquestionably the most bearable time of year to work the
graveyard shift.
Somehow the
spotlights on the rusting gold and white awning over the Jefferson Street door
render the night realer in the icy hot whiteness of a crisp January evening.
The passing Cadillacs and Continentals gleam dully though his vaporizing breath
as he strides into the lobby.
Tom’s
second-hand tweeds and woolens open up as he passes the lilac marble counters
of the front desk, watching pink and blue Qiana dresses under unextravagant furs float down
the burgundy plush of the grand staircase. Pin-striped escorts, hypnotized by
gold and silver evening sandals, tumble along behind them out into the cold
night air. The General Assembly must be in session.
Dudley is too
busy counting up his 3-11 take to talk, so Tom strolls on back to punch in. Mr.
McDougherty is searching for smokable stogies buried in the sand-filled
ashtrays placed between pieces of murky furniture sitting at regular intervals along
the walls. Stomping to scare the rats upon walking into the doorman's closet,
Tom records his arrival at 10:56. Out of the doorman's closet, past the plastic
boxwoods ringing the back conversation parlor, he whizzes past the copy of the
Monroe Doctrine and walks into the switchboard room to be greeted by Marilyn.
Her bared flabby arm is holding a smoldering Kent and a smile breaks across her
face unhappily. She complains: she hasn't gotten one wink of shut-eye for three
days now, her “laigs” hurt, Fritz thinks she's been up to no good, prob'ly
sleeping with the Third Fleet, she don't know how she's goin' to pay this
month's rent, Saunders's been drinkin' and on the phone all night, Dudley's
been playing obnoxious jokes and on the phone all night as well, leaving the
front desk to talk to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that's walked into the Lobby,
and there's been some goshdurn party in the ballroom since seven and the
drunken fools want their toilet paper delivered on a silver platter. Worst of
all, she has to leave the switchboard and go up to her room alone for another
sleepless night.
Marilyn is
just plain in bad straits: divorced by her husband, disowned by her son, and
deserted by her youth. She's still attractive enough to catch a man's attention
(provided he's over 60) but her Austrian boyfriend's paranoid attacks of
jealousy prevent most of the human race from trying to get close to her.
Marilyn's real problem is that she is convinced that reality has cornered her
into utter subservience to the male of the species. The only sanctuary left is
vodka (or bourbon or whiskey or Valium or beer or unemployment).
“Where's my
goil?” a voice gurgles from the front desk.
“That's Mr.
Mordecai - could you watch the switchboard for jest a secont Tom, Thanks.”
Marilyn
rushes out, plastic pocketbook, mandarin short sleeves and plum double-knit
pants pulled taut over her emaciated legs. Her pretty face dominates the rest
of her body, a potato which a child has stuck swizzle sticks into for limbs.
Tom wonders if Mr. Mordecai will invite her up to his room for drinks.
Eventually
Dudley (Hushpuppies, ostentatious pewter cross, and short sleeved navy blue
Dacron shirt with scarlet topstitching along the collar and all available hems)
comes back and recounts his problems while admonishing Tom to count up the cash
drawer carefully.
“It's $7.32
off and I don't know where it went to - I'm sure you'll find it in the audit -
Gosh I’ve got to run Tom - See you tomorrow.”
What a wimp.
Dudley never does his job with an iota of consistency or even concentration.
Lay all of that Jesus jam of his on top of the mess he already is, and you’ve
got Dudley, Richmond’s archetype of employee incompetence complete with
apology. As Tom finishes counting out the cash drawer, it's apparent Dudley
overlooked a house bill for $7.32. That he even keeps his job alarms Tom; but
of course, Dudley means well.
By now Mr.
Mordecai is holding Marilyn's hand across the gray striated marble, telling her
what a pretty woman she is and what a sweet voice she has. No small wonder
Fritz is such a suspicious lover, what with the way Marilyn makes up to most
any man that makes up to her. She's smiling and demurring and really putting on
a show.
“I'm gonna
run upstairs if that's all right Tom. If Fritz calls, be sure and put him
through to my room.”
Tom doesn’t
even think about what she and Mr. Mordecai are going to do in the next half
hour, which may well be nothing. She too, means well, after all's said and
done.
The sleek
evening dresses and three piece suits continue to trickle down from the
Mezzanine in an ever increasing alcoholic stupor. Every once in a while some
inebriated head of frosted hair asks Tom if this is where they filmed Gone
With the Wind, and he explains away that myth, but just enough so they can
continue to believe if it that's what they intend to do. When you take people's
delusions away when they’ve been drinking, they become hostile and Tom doesn't
feel like hassles off a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from Amelia county tonight.
At last he
can start the audit. Every night between 11 p.m. and 7 am, the front desk clerk
audits and puts into order all the accounts for all business transacted on the
previous day. This basically means finding all the mistakes that everyone has
made and correcting them to the proper debit or credit balance on the
appropriate folio or account sheet. As a result of completing the audit, the
night auditor catches up on how much further the debtors are indebted and how
much closer the Hotel has inched toward financial collapse and bankruptcy.
Just as he
starts the Restaurant receipts, the night engineer Erec pokes his
Pre-Raphaelite head between the glass and mahogany paneling of the cashier's
desk. It's the dead of winter and this fatuous teenager is only wearing a
tie-dyed tank top and jeans. It does show to advantage his axillary hair and
compact pectorals, which is how he manages to make enough money to keep body
and tank top together. His long blond locks and youthful flesh take various
people to ecstasy for a half hour at the least, and twenty dollars at the most.
“Uh, Tom, Uh,
if any girls call, I'm not here, okay? I'm going to go down to the boiler room
for a while.”
This last
statement means that Juanita will call in about twenty minutes and say that she
has to talk to him and Tom will ring him amongst the broken furniture in the
basement and he'll talk to her for a half hour, hanging his head, and then
he'll get drunk. He's going to be worthless for the rest of the night, Tom can
see that right now. But, who are we to judge anyway? It can't be easy to have
an illegitimate daughter before not graduating from high school. One supposes
he meant well. One supposes.
Tom starts to
audit the folios. It never ceases to amaze him how Miss Tolliver (139) manages
to maintain a debit balance of 23 cents, while MacFlecknoe (462) nourishes a
debit balance of $2,768.56 and increasing. The paradox is that they both worry
about their bills with the same intensity, although those 23 cents probably
concern Miss Tolliver more. The management on the other hand, displays Mac's
same degree of apathy in both cases. It’s all part of meaning well.
Sure enough,
here comes Mac right now, his portable body tailored into a three piece suit,
nose a-gleaming like an August cherry tomato. He dresses like this on purpose
so that he looks like Santa's elf in charge of life insurance. He'll talk to
Tom about all the people with money that he knows and the big deals he's just
about to break through with. He can barely even fool himself any more. By
paying attention to the audit Tom will be able to shake him in five minutes.
The last of
Saturday night's sybarites have left the ballroom and finally the lobby quiets
down. Juanita has called and Erec has passed out downstairs amidst the wrenches
and oily wood. Marilyn is in her room talking with Fritz on the telephone. The
audit is finished and on balance and now Tom goes and sits in the palm
mausoleum, staring up at the ceiling to watch the dust sift down. The Era of Dust
reigns from 11 to 7, for now it finally has the chance to settle. All day long
people have been stirring it up, moving it around, off the marble counters onto
the floor, and ragged cotton slippers have been scoffing it in and out of the
Main Street entrance on the way to the liquor store and the downtown tea rooms.
But this is the hour best suited to sit and watch the dust waft in descent from
the ceiling, because now the motes can finally come to rest and compose
themselves for the new day.
The ceiling of
the lobby is about the size of a petite football field. Sarah Bernhardt palm
fronds define the square and oblong panels that softly vault upwards in their
elaborate maroon moldings, between the four pendentives bolstering the corners
that make the gentle curve of it all possible. This olive green and dark red
stand in muted contrast against the tawny beige of the background. At regular
intervals at the base of the square panels, laurel wreathes emanate behind
blank cartouche palimpsests. All of the individual panels meet at the center to
outline a rectangular Tiffany skylight which has been concealed with sandy
stucco since the non-existent air raids of World War II. Hence, the only real
light in the lobby either comes from the lamps hanging between the columns or
the fluorescent bulbs which line the lowermost cornice of the ceiling. At least
three, no four bulbs, are flickering, and two are out. Of course, the ceiling
looms far too tall to ever think about cleaning it; the most they manage to do
is keep an undefined number of the light bulbs replaced.
Three o’clock
in the morning and the silence of the tomb finally glides in like ebb tide.
There are no windows at all in the lobby and hence the minor truth of this hour
of the day is that this is precisely what it looks like through the entire 24
hour span; through wind and snow and sun. Three o’clock in the morning is the
moment when the truths of time and illusion overlap. And the dust continues to
fall (from nowhere).
You know,
it's not merely dust, but the ceiling that is slowly disintegrating and
drifting to Earth. A layer, thinner than the most diaphanous of Loie Fuller's
silken veils is peeling off those dusky palms and floating through the air of
the Lobby until it lodges between the Second Empire cracks of glass ring
stained mahogany. With each breath of air that Tom inhales and exhales, an
entire squadron of unimpressive verdigris atoms sifts off the gesso foliage
above, taking with them the outer definition of their leaves, so the branches
look like they belong in the masonry of a graveyard after centuries of eroding
rain have wilted delicately sculpted blossoms. Only it's not the rain that's
fading florist freshness, it's sheer downward force: gravity is dissecting the
branches and boughs like Vesalius, vein by vein, until they're shapeless masses
of unrecognizable ornament.
But it's all
so slow and gradual that you wouldn't even notice it if you looked for it.
There isn't any evidence of it happening, for by the time the scentless pink
powder has plunged aimlessly down to the floor, it has mixed with the forest
green dust until all you see is palpable soot. And so, an old T-shirt wipes yet
another layer of the ceiling off the leatherette tops of tables and into the
fissures of the mauve floor with no more thought than if it were dirt.
This
sophisticated little soliloquy is not about to drift into slumber for at 4,
Willie has appeared to start his work. There is no saint, not even a Calvinistic one, who ever more completely embodied the Protestant work ethic
than Willie does. As black as night, portly, bald, and chomping on a smokeless
cigar, he won't stop moving from the moment he tramps into the lobby until he
leaves. As ageless as the dust itself, Willie gets behind one of the six foot
brooms and cuts great swaths across the lobby, as if he were grooming a
baseball diamond. He'll stop to talk with Tom for a half-minute and leave just
as abruptly as he stopped.
“I'll tell
you one thing, dis hotel ain't worf much as it is, but it's worf even less if
dis lobby ain't clean, 'cause nobody wants to mess 'round in here if it's any
dirtier or more run down than it already is. An' th'ass a fack!”
Off he goes,
cutting a path in the dust past the high wing chairs, under the colonnade,
around the grand piano. The morning paper boy arrives and drops one at the
front desk. Tom now knows that he has survived another night audit and will
live to see the daylight.
“Willie,
could you please watch the desk while I go get a cup of coffee? Would you like
me to get you anything?”
“Well now,
doan you be long, 'cause I don't know nuffin' 'bout nuffin back there. Nossuh,
don't know nuffin' 'bout nuffin'. Say, you heard anything mo' 'bout them
sellin' dis Hotel? I declare, it jus' ain't right, leadin' people on thisaway,
it just ain't right.” And off he starts for another tour in the Byzantine
opulence of the dust.
By the time
Tom gets back, Birdie is scurrying around emptying ash trays and trash cans and
talking in her high sweet faint voice. “How're you. Fine, fine.” Emptying the
ashtrays with the gentle touch of years of service (and servility), she and
Willie carry on intermittent conversations of broken thoughts. In the most
fundamental sense, the world is being put into place and will be ready for all
the sleeping heads, thanks to them.
Attired in
black, Mr. Grasso pummels out of the elevator into the lobby, “Good Morning,
Sir,” and out onto Main Street. Brantley has shuffled down too, and has gone
over to the Fountain Room for Chesterfields and Alka Seltzer. Perk has just
arrived and lets Brantley in the Fountain Room while he goes to get ice. It's
almost seven and everything is in order, once again. It is time to go home and
forget what the inside of things looks like.
Back in the
doorman's closet Tom waits for the clock to strike 6:56. Lucille has rolled in
for switchboard duty, toting her cooler and the National Enquirer. Brantley is
rarin' to go and he conveys his white pomaded head to the cash drawer. Tom
leaves, tired but confident that yesterday is over and tomorrow has begun.
