17
“Mr Buckley was on the desk that day and I told him Mr Jefferies was thinking of extending his stay. Mr
Buckley said he didn’t think that would present a problem even though Mr Jefferies had been planning to
check out the very next day.
“Then I went down to the room service kitchen and talked with Bedelia Aaronson – she died just last year,
God rest her sweet soul – and asked her if she’d seen anyone out of the ordinary around that morning. Bedelia
asked who did I mean and I said I didn’t really know. She said ‘Why you asking, Marty?’ and I told her I’d
rather not say. She said there hadn’t been nobody, not even the man from the food service who was trying to
date up the girl who was short-ordering then.
“I started away and she said, ‘Unless you mean that old Negro lady, the one that got lost looking for the john.’
“I turned back and asked her what old Negro lady that was.
‘Well,’ Bedelia said, ‘I imagine she came in off the street, looking for the rest room. Happens once or twice a
day. They’re afraid to ask directions because the hotel people are just as apt to point them at the door as at the
can. She probably came downstairs, turned left instead of right, ended up here, and . . .’ She stopped and got a
look at me. ‘Are you all right, Martha? You look like you’re going to faint!’
“‘I’m not going to faint,’ I said. ‘What was she doing?’
“‘Just wandering around, looking at the breakfast trolleys like she didn’t know where she was,’ she said. ‘Poor
old thing! She was eighty if she was a day. Looked like a strong gust of wind would blow her right up into the
sky like a kite . . . Martha, you come over here and sit down. You look like the picture of Dorian Gray in that
movie.’
‘What did she look like?’
“‘I told you what she looked like. She looked like an old woman. The only thing I remember is that she had
the most awful scar – it ran all the way up her nose and her forehead and into her hair. It-‘
“But I didn’t hear any more because that was when I did faint, right into a big bowl of chef’s salad she was
making for lunch.”
18
“They let me go home early and I no more got there when I started feeling like I wanted to spit again, and
drink a lot of water, and probably end up down in that john again, sicking my guts out. But I just sat there by
the window, looking out into the street, and gave myself a talking-to.
‘What she’d done to me wasn’t just hypnosis – I knew that. It was more powerful than that. I still wasn’t sure
if I believed in any such thing as witchcraft, but she’d done something to me, all right, and whatever it was, I
was just going to have to ride with it. I couldn’t quit my job, not with a man that wasn’t turning out to be worth
a damn and a baby most likely on the way. I couldn’t even request to be switched to a different floor. A year or two before I could have, but I knew there was talk about making me Assistant Chief Housekeeper for Ten
to Twelve, and that meant a raise in pay. More’n that, it meant they’d most likely take me back at the same job
after I had the baby.
“My mother had a saying: What can’t be cured must be endured. I thought about going back to see that old
black mama and asking her to take it off, but I knew somehow she wouldn’t – she’d made up her mind it was
best for me, what she was doing, and one thing I’ve learned as I’ve made my way through this world, Delores,
is that the only time you can never change someone’s mind is when they’ve got it in their head that they’re
doing you a help.
“I sat there thinking all those things and looking out at the street, all the people coming and going, and I kind