The Lonely Hearts Hotel(22)

The neighbors all quite agreed with her diagnosis of insanity. He was spotted doing handstands in the yard every morning. He cycled down the street, his long scarf trailing behind him. He called out “Good day” to everyone. When Pierrot turned sixteen, Irving fired the chauffeur and gave him the keys to the car. Pierrot drove the car recklessly, right up onto the lawn. He honked his horn instead of ringing the doorbell.

But Irving did not choose to scold Pierrot or chastise him. The child had a madness to him, but it was indeed such an incredibly lovely madness. These were the marks of a genius. The boy was eccentric. He reminded Irving of all his own absurd antics. If he were a young man, he too would be brandishing a poker on the rooftop, demanding that the dragons show their ugly faces.

And what was more, Irving adored Pierrot’s piano playing.

When he heard the tunes, he would remember how it felt to be absolutely guilt-free. What it felt like to be a good person. He felt young again. There was no such thing as time when Pierrot played the piano. Irving would close his eyes and he was nine years old, in a striped bathing suit with just the tips of his toes in the freezing water. He had his eyes closed to make a wish on a birthday cake. He was about to wish that he would become prime minister.

No, he would not listen to any doctor condemning his dear friend. He didn’t like that Pierrot wasn’t treated with the respect the doctor would accord to Irving’s other children. So they went to the tailor to get Pierrot new clothes.

“I can’t stand to look at second-rate clothes,” Irving declared from the passenger seat. “I’m purchasing it for me and not for you.”

On the way to the tailor downtown, Pierrot managed to almost run over a line of schoolgirls, a couple of distinguished young ladies and seven cats. At the shop, Pierrot insisted on a roll of checkered multicolored material. The tailor was assigned to making a suit of the highest fashion out of the ridiculous material. He wore a yarmulke on his head and had pins sticking out of his mouth as he scurried about, furtively measuring Pierrot’s skinny dimensions with a piece of chalk. And a week later the suit was delivered to their door.

Irving was sitting in the garden drinking tea. Pierrot came out in his new suit with his arms spread. A swallow passed overhead, its tail feathers as thin as a seamstress’s scissors.

“It makes me very happy to see you walking around in that dapper suit. Who were your parents? I wonder. Surely it was some pretty girl from a very wealthy family, tempted at the Valentine’s Ball. You are obviously an aristocrat. You are my own young prince. You and I are in the same predicament. Nobody knows us for who we truly are. But we won’t be lonely anymore because we have each other. We will enjoy life together. Free from the preposterous names that people have attached to us. What does the past have to do with us? What does the past have to do with any of us?”

? ? ?

WHENEVER ANYONE ASKED QUESTIONS about the orphanage, Pierrot would tell them about the wonderful Rose. He told them nothing about the cold and Sister Elo?se and all the lonely children he had left behind in her care. That just filled him with a guilt impossible for the hardiest heart to withstand. Pierrot continued to send letters to Rose. He sent them every few days, but she never returned them. She must be furious with him for leaving. Perhaps it might be best to let her go. But thinking and obsessing about her allowed him to block out any other memory of the orphanage. It was as though she were the only thing that had ever happened in his childhood. The thought of her climbed and twisted around each of his thoughts like a rosebush.





12


    MR. BEAUTY AND MISS BEAST



Despite her entertainment value, Rose wasn’t an especially good governess. She didn’t care that the children were wild, and she seemed to have no intention of disciplining them or training them to be civilized. She was more of a kindred spirit to them than anything. She just played with them and took care of their general needs.

They set fireworks off the back balcony. They were supposed to wait until Christmas, but they couldn’t. They regularly ate dessert three meals a day. Once they ran into the kitchen with their faces covered in green face paint. Hazel stopped for a second and looked at the cook.

“Greetings, Earthling,” she said.

Rose never cleaned up after the children either, only pulling out her small lemon-patterned rag when the lady of the house passed by. One of the maids started screaming when she discovered the bathtub was filled with frogs. Hazel came in and informed her that she and Rose had kissed them but were waiting to give them the opportunity to turn into princes. Maybe it wasn’t something they could do at the drop of a hat.

“Maybe there are naked princes wandering the earth, looking for the damn girls who kissed them and then just took off.”

One night she was up late eating a bowl of whipped cream with the children. The whipped cream suddenly reared into a white stallion on its hind legs. Ernest was so hyperactive when he was finished eating all that cream that he ran down the street in his underwear and threw a baseball through a friend’s window.

On another afternoon, a snowman appeared outside the house with a knife in its chest and red food dye spreading down from its wound. And a large flat stone for a mouth that made him look as though he were screaming at the top of his lungs.

Although Hazel and Ernest were becoming even wilder under Rose’s tutelage, there was no way anyone would fire Rose because the children had clearly decided that she was going to stay. There would be a terrifying uproar if she left, the likes of which the house had never seen.