The Lonely Hearts Hotel(119)

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SHE WENT BACK TO HER OFFICE. It was the end of the business day. She spent a few moments completely lost in thought. That was her favorite time, right at the end of the day, when she would reflect on the control she now had over her time. Framed behind her was a creased and stained piece of paper that had the original blueprint of her whole life, drawn in the handwriting of a child. Her most prized possession. It was the beginning of her enterprise.

She lit up a cigarette and listened to the conversation between Fabio and Tiny outside her door. Tiny had never gone back to New York City. He had taken a fancy to the Valentine Hotel and the Montreal winters. She needed him for when sailors got out of hand, or a pimp showed up looking for a girl. He had become more and more bohemian. He had recently fallen in love with a chorus girl, who was giving him a hard time.

“Last Tuesday she told me that she had been waiting for a man just like me since she was five years old,” Tiny was saying. “She said that it would be a tragedy if we didn’t end up together. And then I went to see her Wednesday and she says, ‘Go away, even looking at your face suffocates me.’”

“Would you ever consider dating a girl who was less erratic?” Fabio asked.

“Never.”

The two men were interrupted by the sound of a very soft voice asking for Rose. It was followed by the sound of a small sneeze, one a child might emit.

“Come in,” she called out abruptly. She had no idea why she did that. Except that she had the irrational feeling that she recognized that strange sneeze. It seemed to have come from a long, long time ago. She felt as if she were hearing the voice of someone she had known a long, long time before, when she was a child.

When the door cracked open, she was surprised to see not a child but Sister Elo?se. Rose hadn’t seen her face since Rose was fifteen years old. Pierrot had sometimes imagined that he’d seen her and would jump, but he had always been mistaken. Sister Elo?se had come to seem, in Rose’s mind, like some villain who belonged strictly to childhood, like the Big Bad Wolf. Something incorporeal, like a monster in a closet, but which in adulthood turned out not to exist. But here she was in the flesh, looking exactly the way Rose remembered her. She seemed to have gotten even younger. When Rose was a little girl, a woman of twenty-seven seemed to be ancient. But now that Rose was that age herself, a woman of thirty-eight somehow didn’t seem old at all.

Rose was shocked that Elo?se would even come near her. It was like a mouse striking up a conversation with a cat. Didn’t Sister Elo?se realize the extraordinary reversal of fortune that had befallen Rose? She could not be ignorant of just how dangerous and powerful her old foe had become.

“Hello, Rose. Do you remember me?”

Rose didn’t answer. She would not allow Elo?se to know the enormous influence she had had on her and Pierrot’s sad youths.

“I had a child brought into the orphanage,” Elo?se continued. “His mother was a prostitute. She had every manner of disease that you can imagine. She died, you see. From what, it doesn’t matter. The child himself came to us with tuberculosis, though he’s got over the worst of it. We thought it had affected his mind. It’s hard to say because he has a very peculiar disposition, which we don’t know what to make of. But perhaps he’ll turn out all right. I mean, we did always think that his father was a complete idiot, but he turned out to be a clever, affectionate fellow, didn’t he?”

Rose looked at her. She was confused. She realized that she had missed a very important part of this story. “I’m sorry, but who in the world is his father?”

“Joseph. Or as we all used to call him, Pierrot.”

Rose looked at her, now completely shocked. She felt her cheeks burning. She crushed her cigarette in the ashtray on her desk. The smoke furling out of it seemed to be revealing too much.

“His mother was a strange redheaded girl, rather likable. She told the priest she had had an affair with Pierrot years before. She didn’t want to tell Pierrot because she knew he was so happy with you. But I just thought that you would want to know that this little guy was out there in the world without a soul to look after him. I don’t even rightly know whose responsibility this child is, seeing that his mother was Jewish and his father was Catholic. We didn’t immediately know which orphanage we’d send the boy to, and then I thought of you.”

She handed Rose a small photo of the child. Rose stood up from her chair. She didn’t doubt the veracity of the story, as the child looked so much like Pierrot had at the same age. She moved around the desk toward the nun. Here was a child that fortune would spare from Sister Elo?se and her kind.

“I know I was harder on you than I should have been,” Elo?se said. “Maybe it was because of a certain amount of envy, as I could tell that you had an extraordinary future ahead of you. We all could.”

Rose touched the woman’s hand. Then there was another tiny and wonderful sneeze from the hallway.

“Is he here with you?”

“Yes.”

“Let me see him. Bring him in to me.”

Sister Elo?se hurried into the hallway. She reached out and grabbed a hand and brought the little boy into the room. And there he was, standing in front of Rose only feet away. The tip of his nose was bright red—he probably had a cold—and his blond hair stuck up on top of his head. Rose smiled. She got down on her knees in front of the little boy. She turned her head upward and looked into Sister Elo?se’s eyes.