Chapter 31
Early Friday morning, as the smell of good coffee filled the kitchen, I sat down to read the Oxford Eagle.
I’d bought it the day before and the front page read: “RECORDS brOKEN AT UNIVERSITY” and under that: “Twelve hundred students due to arrive in Oxford Friday by train, automobile, and even a mule cart or two! The stationmaster will be on the sharp lookout for anyone breaking rules in his station. Hooligans and pickpockets will be arrested. Soliciting is NOT allowed except for porters and taxis.”
Today students would start arriving and tomorrow night we’d be open.
I felt like I was standing on a precipice, peering over the edge.
I was glad to have the kitchen to myself this early so I could think about what all I needed to do.
I had meals to plan, food to buy, drinks and ice to order for the front.
I needed to tell Silva to arrange for Mr. Binny to come talk to Charlie—that alone was enough to make me want to go get back in bed.
But most important was I needed to send a telegram to Frances.
They’d been gone nine days and I’d heard next to nothing, so I planned to say I was checking to see how they were doing.
But really it was to make sure they were not coming home soon.
I was afraid if I called her on the telephone, she’d hear the truth of what we were doing simply in my voice.
Charlie’d come in, and I was just about to show her the newspaper when we heard a distant tap on the front door.
We both went still and looked at each other.
It was merely a matter of time before somebody drove out here, one of Mrs. Tartt’s bridge club friends, or Pripp, or Garnett to say Mrs. Heidelberg had telephoned Welty because I’d checked on Meg.
As we crept up to the front door, I thought we should’ve had a drill for this, like tornado drills at school: Take cover, socialite approaching.
Charlie tightened the bathrobe around her, and I peered through a slit in the curtains in the sitting room. “I believe it’s for you, Charlie.”
When she opened the front door, the woman put out a white-gloved hand. “Hello again, it’s Esmeralda. We met yesterday.”
Charlie didn’t shake her hand or speak, and Esmeralda lowered hers. She didn’t seem surprised. “I hope you’ll pardon my appearance. I had … an unusual night.”
The green silky dress from yesterday now bore a black stain blooming across the front like somebody’d thrown a drink at her.
Her short dark waves were still rolled perfectly to one side, but her eyelashes were mostly gone.
She had tired lines around her wide, catlike brown eyes.
She looked older, not that it defiled her at all—even in my lushest youth I never looked as good as she did right now.
And that car, somehow it added to her good looks, parked out on the road.
The long black nose looked animal-like, crouched and ready, with a whitewall tire mounted to the side with polished chrome spokes.
“What brings you back here?” Charlie asked. Crispy, cool.
“I took a drive up to a place called Sweetwater yesterday, but, uh—” She tried to give a careless shrug, but there was weariness in it. “As it ends up, she wasn’t hiring, or at least not me. I was wondering if, by chance, you might still be looking for somebody?”
“We’re pretty happy with who we’ve hired already,” Charlie said.
“I see.” Esmeralda nodded, deflating a little. “That is unfortunate.”
Good Lord, Charlie. I wanted to pinch her. She knew we needed more workers, and more like Esmeralda and less like Ruby and Flossy. Nobody’d suspect a thing if they saw this woman dancing in the backyard, and on top of that, we wouldn’t have to run the dang advertisement again.
“Look,” Esmeralda said, “I realize I left in a bit of a hurry yesterday, but I’m a hard worker.
I don’t mind working six or even seven days a week.
I keep to myself and to be honest, the customers are very fond of me.
So perhaps you’d reconsider?” She raised her chin and seemed to look past us at nothing, as if to say, Look me over, decide if I’m worth it.
The whole thing was gravely humiliating.
Charlie waited a second longer than I thought was kind.
“There’s no drinking and no dope,” Charlie said.
“I don’t do any of that. I never have.”
“It’s a five-dollar upfront, three bucks a week for your room, we’ll only be open a month. If you think you’re going to walk out before that when things don’t suit you, I keep your week’s pay, and you can find another house.”
“You have my word,” Esmeralda said. She opened a shiny black pocketbook and fished out some bills but kept them in her hand. “I do have a few requests of my own, though.”
Charlie waited, raising one eyebrow at her.
“I won’t do the cooking or the cleaning, and I’d like my own room.”
I looked at Charlie. Hire her, I said with my eyes.
“How do you feel about her taking the last room?” Charlie asked me.
“It’s fine,” I said. If Mrs. Tartt came home, I highly doubted Esmeralda staying in her room would be what doomed us.
We helped Esmeralda unload her things from the car.
It was a Pierce-Arrow, maybe only a year or two old, with a shiny chrome ornament of an archer pulling back his bow at the tip of the hood.
On the back seat were several white suitcases with brass corners and a stack of slim wooden boxes with wooden handles.
Loaded into a black trunk tied up to the tailgate were boxes from stores in Jackson, New Orleans, Mobile, and New York City.
When Esmeralda saw the mattress on the floor and the sad, single upright chair in the corner of Mrs. Tartt’s room, she didn’t complain. She just said a simple, “Thank you.”
At nine sharp, as Charlie’d asked me to, I knocked on Flossy’s door.
Flossy opened it full-blown naked. By this point, I’d seen Flossy naked several times, her privates (hairless), her knees (permanently bruised blue), her flaccid banana-shaped bosoms, but this morning she didn’t have her teeth in either, which I had not seen yet.
Her cheeks collapsed inward, and her top lip curved down.
I looked up to the ceiling. This felt more private than naked; it was a glimpse of Flossy when she was dead.
“Don’t you know waking a prostitute at nine in the morning’s like waking a ordinary up at two a.m.?”
An ordinary was a non-prostitute citizen, as in, me. I was an ordinary. “Sorry, Floss,” I said to the ceiling, “Charlie wants everybody downstairs, if you don’t mind waking up the others.” I didn’t mention Esmeralda yet. She’d looked like she could use the rest.
As I set out coffee and biscuits, the girls filed into the dining room.
Esmeralda had joined us after all. The others seemed to’ve already decided she was one of them despite what set them apart—her looks, the clothes, that car—and she pulled out a chair between mine and Dixie’s.
Her hair was wrapped in a silky champagne-colored turban, and she wore a matching wide-legged pantsuit.
I had not seen trousers on a woman before, only in a magazine.
It seemed daring, modern. Esmeralda’s face was freshly scrubbed, and her lips were bare and yet the color of a plum.
Somehow she already looked rested. It was no trick of the hand, Esmeralda was simply beautiful.
I poured more coffee for myself, then stopped.
“Flossy, are those Frances’s good calling cards?
” She was snipping the top flap off Frances’s cream-colored cards that read Missus Roderick Beauregard Tartt, using Mrs. Tartt’s gold stork sewing scissors, and Charlie was writing in neat, square penmanship, Monday–Saturday, 6 p.m.–late.
Gentlemen welcome. Telephone 43 for appointments.
“I doubt she’s going to need them once she figures out where he’s been,” Charlie said. Which wasn’t nice, but I agreed with her. It still surprised me how much Mrs. Tartt had shared with Charlie in such a short time of knowing her.
Ruby came in last in a faded low-cut black chemise and sat across the table.
She had black kohl smeared up under her eyes—probably ruining our pillowcases too.
She snatched a biscuit off the platter and stared me down while she lit a cigarette with her coffee.
This time, I said nothing. If I had to choose my battles with Ruby, I decided her smoking a cigarette at the table seemed not that important compared to her, say, putting it out on someone’s face.
“Alright, I need everybody to pitch in today so we can be open by tomorrow night,” Charlie said.
“Who has widows and how many?” She looked around the table.
I didn’t know this word yet. All I could think of was my mother, Doris, and I didn’t think she meant her.
The answers around the table added up to about a dozen.
“We’ll need to buy another hundred or so today in town.” She wrote something in the ledger.
I whispered to Flossy, “What’s a widow?”
Ruby, who evidently had heard, barked a laugh. “You mean to tell me you’re running a whorehouse and don’t know what a damn johnny is?”
“It’s a papa stopper,” Flossy whispered to me.
When I showed no response, Ruby said, “Salami skin.” Nothing.
“Lover cover?” Flossy said. “Throbbin’ hood?” She blinked at me. “Wienerhosen? Cock sock?”
“I got it, I got it,” I said. “Isn’t somebody gonna notice you buying a hundred of those in town? Wouldn’t it be safer to order them to the post office or something?”
“Don’t you know it’s highly illegal to put a rubber in the mail?” Flossy said. “That’s against the Comstock law, Bird.”
“Oh, well, God forbid we break the law,” I said.
“I think buying a hundred at once isn’t as risky as buying ten every day for a month,” Charlie said.
“I want the drugstore kind, not the cheapos you get at the filling station,” Flossy said.