Anything Is Possible(45)

Standing at the front desk, he did the registering with terrible penmanship, irritation oozing out of him, while Mrs. Small—who was very thin and had a look of general nervousness about her—glanced politely around the lounge, and then became interested in the old photographs of the theater that were on the wall, and she seemed to especially like a photograph of the library that was hanging near them. The photo showed the library back in 1940 looking brick-and-ivy old-fashioned, so Dottie had a sense about this woman—and her husband!—right away. Of course, in Dottie’s business she would have a sense about people right away. Sometimes of course Dottie had been very wrong. With the Smalls she was not wrong: Dr. Small complained immediately about the room having no luggage rack for him to place his suitcase on, and naturally Dottie did not say that’s what happens when you have your wife call and ask for the cheapest room. Instead she said she had another room at the end of the hall that might serve them better; it was the Bunny Rabbit Room—that’s what she called it due to the fact that in the past she’d had a habit of collecting stuffed toy bunnies. Her husband had given her one each holiday, and friends had too, so later Dottie put them all in one room, and, really, people went crazy for them sometimes. Women did. And gay men. They got quite imaginative with all those bunnies around, having them talking in different voices and so forth. Dottie used to have a Comment Book until people wrote things about seeing ghosts in the Bunny Rabbit Room and other foolishness. But the Bunny Rabbit Room had two beds and a low chest on which Dr. Small could place his suitcase, and that evening Dottie heard through the walls a constant thin-voiced monologue coming from Mrs. Small, with only once or twice a short answer from her husband. Dottie could not make out many words, but she understood that he was here for the cardiology convention and was not staying in the large hotel in town where the meeting was taking place, most likely, Dottie thought, because he was getting old and was no longer really respected. And he could not stand that, could not put up with seeing younger colleagues laughing together in the evenings, and so he had come here, to Dottie’s Bed & Breakfast, where he could be not noticeably unimportant. “A physician,” she imagined him saying at breakfast, because this is what all male doctors said when they didn’t want you to think they were academics, to whom, Dottie had come to understand, physicians seemed to feel very superior. Dottie didn’t care one way or another, anymore, whom anyone felt superior to, but in this business you did notice things; even if you kept your eyes squeezed shut, you would still notice things in this business. And the time of Dr. Small, Dottie thought, his own personal history in time, his own career, had passed, and he couldn’t stand it. She was sure he made huge fusses about computerized records, the cost of the practice, the fact that he no longer made as much money. Well, she did not feel sorry for him.

But his wife surprised her.

When Dottie saw couples like Mr. and Mrs. Small, she was sometimes comforted that her painful divorce years earlier had at least prevented her from becoming a Mrs. Small—in other words, a nervous, slightly whiny woman whose husband ignored her and so naturally made her more anxious. This you saw all the time. And when Dottie saw it, she was reminded that almost always—oddly, she thought it was odd—she seemed a stronger person without her husband, even though she missed him every day.

But in fact, Mrs. Small, during breakfast—her husband was not talking to her but instead looking through a binder that perhaps contained his materials for the day—broke into song. She had been glancing through a stack of old theater programs Dottie kept in a basket, and while she was waiting for her toast she called out, “Oh, I love that Gilbert and Sullivan,” and she started singing a chorus from H.M.S. Pinafore—with two other guests sitting a table away. Dottie thought Dr. Small would stop her, but he sang a few bars with her and that warmed Dottie’s heart. It did, though she was always nervous, naturally, about the comfort of other guests, but the others didn’t seem to mind, or even really to notice, people being, as Dottie knew, mostly very involved with themselves.

Oatmeal for Dr. Small and whole wheat toast for his wife—who Dottie noticed was wearing all black—and in a few minutes his wife said, “Richard, look. Annie Appleby! Look, it says right here, she was Martha Cratchit in A Christmas Carol, eight years ago. Look.” She gave the program a little punch with her finger, then he took the program from her.

“Everything all right then?” Dottie asked, placing the food on the table. Almost in a British way, she liked to say that, though Dottie had never been to England in her life.

Mrs. Small’s eyes were shiny as she turned to Dottie. “Annie Appleby used to be a friend of ours. Well, she was someone we knew. She was someone we—” Her husband cut her off with a subtle gesture of the sort that long-married couples can use with each other, and they finished their breakfast in silence.

Midmorning they left the house together. They left the house, which is what everyone who came there did: leave. Dottie was always reminded that people were there to visit others, or—as in the case of the Smalls—to be part of their business world, or, frequently, to see their children at the college. Whatever it was, they were connected to something in the little city of Jennisberg, Illinois; they stepped out into the street with a purpose. The big oak door closing, accentuating this, the muffling of voices the moment they were on the front porch, the inescapable whisper of abandonment—well, that was part of the business too.