war. Who they knew in the war. How they got to the war. Who they served under, who served under them in
the war. Things they had seen in the war. How men had been killed in the war. Sometimes – not too often – it
would be high-stakes poker instead of just talking about the war. Five or six men sitting around one of the
glasstopped tables 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.
“But mostly it was the war.
“For men who seemed like they loved it s’much, they sure – God puked a lot when they talked about it.”
11
Delores said she was surprised the management hadn’t kicked the man out, famous writer or not – they were
fairly stiff about such goings-ons 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 thinking the man and his
friends carried on like one of those rock-groups that like to tear up hotel suites and throw sofas out the
windows. Peter Jefferies was quality. He wasn’t no ordinary grunt in World War II, like my Pete was in his;
he’d been to West Point, went in a Lieutenant and came out a Major. He came from an old Southern family.
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.”
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,” Delores said.
“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.”
“Was he-”
“I don’t know. He had plenty at the end, God knows, but they were all the kind with prescription labels on
them. I’m just saying that quality calls to quality. He’d been coming there a long time, and you may think it
was important that he was a big famous author, but that’s only because you haven’t been here as long as I have.
It was important to them, but what was more important was that he’d been coming there a long time, and even
more important that his father, who was a big landowner down in Alabama, had come here before him. The
people who ran the hotel back then were people who believed in tradition. Oh, I know the ones who run it
now say they believe in the same thing, and maybe they even 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 pals to keep it down if they could.”
Delores shook her head slowly. “That’s amazing.”
“You don’t believe it, honey?”
“I believe it,” she said, “but it’s still amazing.”
That bitter, derisive smile resurfaced. “Ain’t nothing too much for quality . . . or didn’t used to be. Hell, even
I recognized that he was quality, in spite of the way that he might tell a Rastus the Coon joke to his friends