The Lonely Hearts Hotel(19)

The more effusive a mother’s instructions were, the more likely the child was never to lay eyes on her again. Or so the Mother Superior believed. It wasn’t love that was making those proclamations. Love was a paltry, meek thing; it was guilt that spoke in such operatic statements. Their instructions went into the fire, along with the letters Pierrot kept sending to Rose.

There was a small boy who spoke a language nobody could understand. He seemed to be saying that he was missing his pet goose, though they weren’t sure. He came with a suitcase filled with bone china that looked a hundred years old. The nuns took all the dishes out of the boy’s suitcase. They gave the suitcase to Rose to pack her things in.

The suitcase was blue and had green and yellow stripes on the inside. It had a funny smell to it. Rose stuck her head in the suitcase and inhaled. It smelled of another country. It smelled of a large family.

Rose liked the idea of traveling, though she knew that she wasn’t going very far. Still, she wanted to leave the orphanage. She felt humiliated because Pierrot had abandoned her without a word. She thought all the other children in the orphanage were looking down on her. And that she couldn’t tolerate. She didn’t care what sort of environment she was in, so long as she wasn’t seen as someone who had been jilted by her lover.

She put on her coat and packed her fur hat and gloves. The other children gathered around her to say good-bye. She kissed them on their cheeks and hands. She did a final little backflip before leaving. The children applauded sadly, knowing that the circus had folded up its tents and left the orphanage.

Rose climbed into the car waiting for her outside. The car bounced like a raft going over rapids. She was driven around and around a circular road to the top of a hill. The houses became more and more magnificent as she got closer to the peak. They were high enough above the ground that they didn’t know anything about the rising tide of poverty. They were by and large unaffected by the Great Depression. The driver got out of the car to open a gate in front of a house, then drove through. It was a large redbrick house that took up a whole block. It was very pretty. It had a small blue flag waving from the top of one of the turrets, its own little kingdom.

The driver honked the horn and a maid in a uniform came out through the front door to meet them. A small pug was standing at her feet, looking up at Rose.

“Hello, my dear,” said the maid. “Let me show you to your room and you can get settled in.”

The maid shooed the pug through the door and closed it behind the dog. She and Rose then went into the house through the back entrance. They walked up a narrow, white staircase that led up from the kitchen. Her room was on the top floor of the house, where the children’s rooms were.

“You will be looking after the children for most of the time. I hear you’re quite good with the younger children.”

“Yes, I guess. I mean, I like to make people laugh. Children laugh very easily. But I also quite like the idea of making adults laugh.”

The maid looked her over. Rose looked at the maid with a blank expression that she knew made her impossible to read.

“They also told me that you were a rather peculiar girl.”

The maid opened the door onto the bedroom that was to be Rose’s own. It was sort of amazing to her, as she had always slept in a row of children. The girls woke up in the morning and climbed out of their identical beds, wearing their identical nightgowns. They resembled paper dolls that had all been cut out at the same time. And it was a question of mathematics as to whether they were one person or one hundred and thirty-five identical people.

The room was tiny and the walls were white, as if to remind the girl that she was to remain chaste. There was a little bed and a little white desk in the corner. There was really only enough space in the room to kneel down at the side of the bed, to pray at night. The only ornament was a mirror with a charming steel frame soldered into the shape of flowers. She leaned in to look at it but immediately felt vain, as though she were checking in on her own appearance.

? ? ?

ROSE WAS GIVEN a light blue dress with a bib that she was to wear every day while she worked in the house. She was also given a white starched hat that made her look like a nurse. After she dressed, she went down to the kitchen to meet the maid, who had promised to give her a tour of the house.

She followed closely behind the maid, who looked to be about thirty. The house was so big that if she got lost, she would never find her way back to her room, not without a map. She was introduced to each room as if it were itself a charismatic resident of the house, with its own particular needs.

There was the smoking room, where great cigars were smoked by important people. The walls were a khaki green, but were you to remove the paintings, you would see squares of emerald green, the color the room was initially painted.

There was a library filled with valuable information and statistics about the world in leather-bound volumes.

“Will I be allowed to borrow some of these books?”

“Oh, don’t be an idiot. These are just for show. No one actually reads them.”

There was a room that was especially for drinking tea after one o’clock. There were blue flowers on the walls, and there was a grandfather clock. Its loud ticking sounded like a suicidal man cocking his rifle over and over again.

There was an art room with an easel in the middle. There was a little table with a vase of dried flowers on it. There were all sorts of containers with every shape of paintbrush, to re-create virtually any object in the world.