Darcy nodded. You saw such creatures creeping down the street sometimes, with their brown bags under their arms or tucked into their shabby old coats.
‘He always stayed in 1163, one of those corner suites with the view that looks toward the Chrysler Building, and I always used to do for him. After awhile, it got so’s he would even call me by name, but it didn’t really signify — I wore a name-tag and he could read, that was all. I don’t believe he ever once really saw me. Until 1960 he always left two dollars on top of the television when he checked out. Then, until ’64, it was three. At the very end it was five. Those were very good tips for those days, but he wasn’t really tipping me; he was following a custom.
Custom’s important for people like him. He tipped for the same reason he’d hold the door for a lady; for the same reason he no doubt used to put his milk-teeth under his pillow when he was a little fellow. Only difference was, I was the Cleanin Fairy instead of the Tooth Fairy.
‘He’d come in to talk to his publishers or sometimes movie and TV people, and he’d call up his friends — some of them were in publishing, too, others were agents or writers like him — and there’d be a party. Always a party. Most I just knew about by the messes I had to clean up the next day — dozens of empty bottles (mostly Jack Daniel’s), millions of cigarette butts, wet towels in the sinks and the tub, leftover room service everywhere. Once I found a whole platter of jumbo shrimp turned into the toilet bowl. There were glass-rings on everything, and people snoring on the sofa and floors, like as not.
‘That was mostly, but sometimes there were parties still going on when I started to clean at ten-thirty in the morning. He’d let me in and I’d just kinda clean up around em. There weren’t any women at those parties; those ones were strictly stag, and all they ever did was drink and talk about the war. How they got to the war. Who they knew in the war. Where they went in the war.
Who got killed in the war. What they saw in the war they could never tell their wives about (although it was all right if a black maid happened to pick up on some of it). Sometimes — not too often — they’d play high-stakes poker as well, but they talked about the war even while they were betting and raising and bluffing and folding. Five or six men, their faces all flushed the way white men’s faces get when they start really socking it down, sitting around a glass-topped table with their shirts open and their ties pulled way down, the table heaped with more money than a woman like me will make in a lifetime. And how they did talk about their war! They talked about it the way young women talk about their lovers and their boyfriends.’
Darcy said she was surprised the management hadn’t kicked Jefferies out, famous writer or not
— they were fairly stiff about such goings-on now and had been even worse in years gone by, or so she had heard.
‘No, no, no,’ Martha said, smiling a little. ‘You got the wrong impression. You’re thinking the man and his friends carried on like one of those rock-groups that like to tear up their suites and throw the sofas out the windows. Jefferies wasn’t no ordinary grunt, like my Pete; he’d been to West Point, went in a Lieutenant and came out a Major. He was quality, from one of those old Southern families who have a big house full of old paintings where everyone’s ridin hosses and looking noble. He could tie his tie four different ways and he knew how to bend over a lady’s hand when he kissed it. He was quality, I tell you.’
Martha’s smile took on a little twist as she spoke the word; the twist had a look both bitter and derisive.
‘He and his friends sometimes got a little loud, I guess, but they rarely got rowdy — there’s a difference, although it’s hard to explain — and they never got out of control. If there was a complaint from the neighboring room — because it was a corner suite he stayed in, there was only the one — and someone from the front desk had to call Mr Jefferies’s room and ask him and his guests to tone it down a little, why, they always did. You understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s not all. A quality hotel can work for people like Mr Jefferies. It can protect them.
They can go right on partying and having a good time with their booze and their cards or maybe their drugs.’
‘Did he take drugs?’
‘Hell, I don’t know. He had plenty of them at the end, God knows, but they were all the kind with prescription labels on them. I’m just saying that quality — it’s that white Southern gentleman’s idea of quality I’m talking about now, you know — calls to quality. He’d been coming to Le Palais a long time, and you may think it was important to the management that he was a big famous author, but that’s only because you haven’t been at Le Palais as long as I have.
Him being famous was important to them, but it was really just the icing on the cake. What was more important was that he’d been coming there a long time, and his father, who was a big landowner down around Porterville, had been a regular guest before him. The people who ran the hotel back then were people who believed in tradition. I know the ones who run it now say they believe in it, and maybe they do when it suits them, but in those days they really believed in it.
When they knew Mr Jefferies was coming up to New York on the Southern Flyer from Birmingham, you’d see the room right next to that corner suite sort of empty out, unless the hotel was full right up to the scuppers. They never charged him for the empty room next door; they were just trying to spare him the embarrassment of having to tell his cronies to keep it down to a dull roar.’
Darcy shook her head slowly. ‘That’s amazing.’
‘You don’t believe it, honey?’
‘Oh yes — I believe it, but it’s still amazing.’
That bitter, derisive smile resurfaced on Martha Rosewall’s face. ‘Ain’t nothing too much for quality . . . for that Robert E. Lee Stars and Bars charm . . . or didn’t used to be. Hell, even /
recognized that he was quality, no sort of a man to go hollering Yee-haw out the window or telling Rastus P. Coon jokes to his friends.
‘He hated blacks just the same, though, don’t be thinking different . . . but remember what I said about him belonging to the son-of-a-bitch tribe? Fact was, when it came to hate, Peter Jefferies was an equal-opportunity employer. When John Kennedy died, Jefferies happened to be
in the city and he threw a party. All of his friends were there, and it went on into the next day. I could barely stand to be in there, the things they were saying -about how things would be perfect if only someone would get that brother of his who wouldn’t be happy until every decent white kid in the country was fucking while the Beatles played on the stereo and the colored (that’s what they called black folks, mostly, “the colored”, I used to hate that sissy, pantywaist way of saying so much) were running wild through the streets with a TV under each arm.
‘It got so bad that I knew I was going to scream at him. I just kept telling myself to be quiet and do my job and get out as fast as I could; I kept telling myself to remember the man was my Pete’s natural father if I couldn’t remember anything else; I kept telling myself that Pete was only three years old and I needed my job and I would lose it if I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
‘Then one of em said, “And after we get Bobby, let’s go get his candy-ass kid brother!” and one of the others said, “Then we’ll get all the male children and really have a party!”
‘ “That’s right!” Mr Jefferies said. “And when we’ve got the last head up on the last castle wall we’re going to have a party so big I’m going to hire Madison Square Garden!”
‘I had to leave then. I had a headache and belly-cramps from trying so hard to keep my mouth shut. I left the room half-cleaned, which is something I never did before nor have since, but sometimes being black has its advantages; he didn’t know I was there, and he sure didn’t know when I was gone. Wasn’t none of them did.’