The Lonely Hearts Hotel(118)
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SHE WAS ON HER WAY from the audition of a new brother-and-sister act for the Rose Theater. The eighteen-year-old boy played the ukulele with such an odd solemnity. The sister sang a letter to a sweetheart who was overseas. She had a squeaky voice, slightly off-key, but confident for no reason. Only an act as awkward as this could dare to convey the tragic events that had occurred overseas, so Rose booked them on the spot.
The pair threw themselves into each other’s arms and wept when Rose offered them a job. In the three years since Rose had returned to Montreal, she had turned her clubs and hotels into vibrant, lucrative businesses. Her most magnificent accomplishment was the cabaret on the corner, the Rose Theater, which she had constructed out of an abandoned ballroom. The building itself was beautiful, but it was the acts that were extraordinary, universally regarded as the best in town. No one ever quite understood where she was able to find them. There were always lineups around the block to get in.
There was also something romantic about the atmosphere. It was the place to go on a first date. People often found themselves proposing to their partners there.
Rose stopped to chat to four young girls sitting on a bench. They weren’t any better looking than other girls. The prettiest thing about them was that they were nineteen. But there’s always something eternally lovely about being a girl. They had fixed their hair in various waves on top of their head with bobby pins. Two of the girls were looking at a magazine together. Another girl, dressed in a beige coat with beige socks, was eating french fries out of a paper bag, looking straight ahead. You might not think that the girls were prostitutes if it wasn’t for the fact that the girl at the end, who was wearing a light blue cotton dress with puffy sleeves, couldn’t seem to keep her eyes open and her head kept jerking up and down.
The city’s nightlife exploded in the 1940s, with all the sailors and army ships docking in Montreal before heading out to Europe. Montreal became world famous for having pretty girls you could fuck for cheap. But Rose refused to ever make a cent off an unfortunate girl. She never operated any brothels or allowed any in her buildings. She never had a back exit at her clubs that led to a brothel across the alley. She never allowed pimps to prey on young girls at her clubs.
Of course, it all happened regardless of whatever Rose did, but she wouldn’t be a part of it. There wasn’t anything she could do about the heroin either. People used heroin when reality was starkly different from their dreams. Thus there would always be heroin addicts, like the lovely girl on the nod at the end of the bench. And the drug connection between New York and Montreal was growing stronger and bigger every day. Rose paid the gangsters the tax they demanded of all the businesses in the red-light district, because she wanted to make herself psychologically free of them. Or pay some sort of penance. In any case, she had as little to do with that lot as she could.
Rose offered the girl eating french fries her business card and told her that if she needed help, she ought to come by the Valentine Hotel. Because although she couldn’t stop the economics of poverty, she did encourage women who were in predicaments or who were down on their luck to come by her office and ask for her advice or mentorship. She often got them jobs in her clubs or hotels, or spoke to other proprietors on their behalf. She paid their doctor bills without asking questions, and paid their tuition when they took courses. She thought all girls should be independent and should have money in their purses. She wasn’t afraid to speak up to an abusive husband or a pimp.
She was that rare person who gave without expecting anything in return. Many girls rented rooms in her Sweetheart Hotel, which was exclusively for single women. The laughter that came out of the windows during the summer was one of the most beautiful sounds in the world. It was like the percussion section of a children’s orchestra, in which a musician was hitting the triangle with a steel rod in the most charming way.
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AFTER SPEAKING TO THE GIRLS, Rose walked into the lobby of the Valentine Hotel. Completely renovated and transformed, it was now a place where artistic and bohemian types converged. Poets sat at the tables, trying to put into words things that they themselves didn’t understand. The walls were covered from top to bottom with wonderful abstract paintings that artists brought in. Over the fireplace was a large oil painting composed of white and black chunky squares. It reminded Rose of the huge yard in front of the orphanage, and the ocean of snow that had separated it from the city.
Everyone knew to find her at the Valentine Hotel. She had a schedule that she kept to. She had her own office on the second floor. She had a desk. It was piled with account books and receipts. She was often booking out-of-town acts, as well as local ones. She was known to enjoy talking on the telephone.
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BUT ALTHOUGH SHE INTERACTED with so many people during the day, no one could actually say that they were close to her. There is an aloofness to the permanently heartbroken, a secrecy. There was something impenetrable about her. There was a door that she had closed, which no one could get in.
There were rumors that Rose had been the one who had had McMahon killed. Instead of making her unlikable, it made her seem deeply romantic, wonderfully other and untouchable. It gave her an aura of respect. She was a woman who had done what she needed to get free. Men discovered that they had no trouble relating to her as an equal. The men who had ridiculed her when she was dating McMahon found that they had changed their minds about her.
People also talked about how she had been a performer herself once. The clowns from the Snowflake Icicle Extravaganza would talk about the fabulous show she had directed and starred in, which had won over the American crowds. But nobody in Montreal ever got to see a Rose production. Despite the success of her first, Rose never staged another of her own shows. And she never graced the stage again, in any capacity. In fact, she never even went out dancing. She never balanced an egg on the tip of her nose. She was too old and dignified to do a cartwheel. If there was a puppet lying on a chair, she never picked it up to bring it to life.