‘But I didn’t. I felt worse. I knelt down in front of the toilet and I did what you did, Darcy, only I did a lot more of it. I vomited until I thought I was going to pass out. I was crying and begging God to please forgive me, to let me stop puking before I lost the baby, if I really was quick with one. And then I remembered myself standing there in his bedroom with my fingers in my mouth, not even thinking about what I was doing — I tell you I could see myself doing it, as if I was looking at myself in a movie. And then I vomited again.
‘Mrs Parker heard me and came to the door and asked if I was all right. That helped me get hold of myself a little, and by the time Johnny came in that night, I was over the worst of it. He
was drunk, spoiling for a fight. When I wouldn’t give him one he hit me in the eye anyway and walked out. I was almost glad he hit me, because it gave me something else to think about.
The next day when I went into Mr Jefferies’s suite he was sitting in the parlor, still in his pajamas, scribbling away on one of his yellow legal pads. He always travelled with a bunch of them, held together with a big red rubber band, right up until the end. When he came to Le Palais that last time and I didn’t see them, I knew he’d made up his mind to die. I wasn’t a bit sorry, neither.’
Martha looked toward the living-room window with an expression which held nothing of mercy or forgiveness; it was a cold look, one which reported an utter absence of the heart.
‘When I saw he hadn’t gone out I was relieved, because it meant I could put off the cleaning.
He didn’t like the maids around when he was working, you see, and so I figured he might not want housekeeping service until Yvonne came on at three.
‘I said, “I’ll come back later, Mr Jefferies.”
‘ ”Do it now,” he said. “Just keep quiet while you do. I’ve got a bitch of a headache and a hell of an idea. The combination is killing me.”
‘Any other time he would have told me to come back, I swear it. It seemed like I could almost hear that old black mama laughing.
‘I went into the bathroom and started tidying around, taking out the used towels and putting up fresh ones, replacing the soap with a new bar, putting fresh matches out, and all the time I’m thinking, You can’t hypnotize someone who doesn’t want to be hypnotized, old woman. Whatever it was you put in the tea that day, whatever it was you told me to do or how many times you told me to do it, I’m wise to you — wise to you and shut of you.
‘I went into the bedroom and I looked at the bed. I expected it would look to me like a closet does to a kid who’s scared of the boogeyman, but I saw it was just a bed. I knew I wasn’t going to do anything, and it was a relief. So I stripped it and there was another of those sticky patches, still drying, as if he’d woke up horny an hour or so before and just took care of himself.
‘I seen it and waited to see if I was going to feel anything about it. I didn’t. It was just the leftovers of a man with a letter and no mailbox to put it in, like you and I have seen a hundred times before. That old woman was no more a bruja woman than I was. I might be pregnant or I might not be, but if I was, it was Johnny’s child. He was the only man I’d ever lain with, and nothin I found on that white man’s sheets — or anywhere else, for that matter — was gonna change that.
‘It was a cloudy day, but at the second I thought that, the sun came out like God had put His final amen on the subject. I don’t recall ever feeling so relieved. I stood there thanking God everything was all right, and all the time I was sayin that prayer of gratitude I was scoopin that stuff up off the sheet — all of it I could get, anyway — and stickin it in my mouth and swallowin it down.
‘It was like I was standing outside myself and watching again. And a part of me was saying, You’re crazy to be doing that, girl, but you’re even crazier to be doing it with him right there in the next room; he could get up any second and come in here to use the bathroom and see you.
Rugs as thick as they are in this place, you’d never hear him coming. And that would be the end of your job at Le Palais — or any other big hotel in New York, most likely. A girl caught doing a thing like what you’re doing would never work in this city again as a chambermaid, at least not in any half-decent hotel.
‘But it didn’t make any difference. I went on until I was done — or until some part of me was satisfied — and then I just stood there a minute, looking down at the sheet. I couldn’t hear
nothing at all from the other room, and it came to me that he was right behind me, standing in the doorway. I knew just what the expression on his face’d be. Used to be a travelling show that came to Babylon every August when I was a girl, and they had a man with it — I guess he was a man — that geeked out behind the tent-show. He’d be down a hole and some fella would give a spiel about how he was the missing link and then throw a live chicken down. The geek’d bite the head off it. Once my oldest brother — Bradford, who died in a car accident in Biloxi -said he wanted to go and see the geek. My dad said he was sorry to hear it, but he didn’t outright forbid Brad, because Brad was nineteen and almost a man. He went, and me and Kissy meant to ask him what it was like when he came back, but when we saw the expression on his face we never did. That’s the expression I thought I’d see on Jefferies’s face when I turned around and saw him in the doorway. Do you see what I’m sayin?’
Darcy nodded.
‘I knew he was there, too — I just knew it. Finally I mustered up enough courage to turn around, thinking I’d beg him not to tell the Chief Housekeeper — beg him on my knees, if I had to — and he wasn’t there. It had just been my guilty heart all along. I walked to the door and looked out and seen he was still in the parlor, writing on his yellow pad faster than ever. So I went ahead and changed the bed and freshened the room just like always, but that feeling that I was behind a glass wall was back, stronger than ever.
‘I took care of the soiled towels and bed-linen like you’re supposed to -out to the hall through the bedroom door. First thing I learned when I came to work at the hotel is you don’t ever take dirty linen through the sitting room of a suite. Then I came back in to where he was. I meant to tell him I’d do the parlor later, when he wasn’t working. But when I saw the way he was acting, I was so surprised that I stopped right there in the doorway, looking at him.
‘He was walking around the room so fast that his yellow silk pajamas were whipping around his legs. He had his hands in his hair and he was twirling it every which way. He looked like one of those brainy mathematicians in the old Saturday Evening Post cartoons. His eyes were all wild, like he’d had a bad shock. First thing I thought was that he’d seen what I did after all and it had, you know, made him feel so sick it’d driven him half-crazy.
‘Turned out it didn’t have nothing to do with me at all . . . at least he didn’t think so. That was the only time he talked to me, other than to ask me if I’d get some more stationery or another pillow or change the setting on the air-conditioner. He talked to me because he had to.
Something had happened to him — something very big — and he had to talk to somebody or go crazy, I guess.