Bellweather Rhapsody (8 page)

The hairs on the back of Natalie’s neck stand up like spikes because this is a very insane thought she is having. Danny would probably say that it is “willfully self-destructive” and “pointlessly violent,” and while Danny is usually “full of shit,” for once Natalie would agree. But it is a thought that feels good, and she is a fan of feeling anything good at all these days, even if it is also insane. She senses a big smile pushing up from deep inside, from the bottom of her stomach. It surfaces on her face with something like a tiny laugh.

The elevator has reached the lobby. The doors open.

Natalie’s more disappointed that she would like to admit.

There is no pretense of politely summarizing their elevator conversation—no blathering on about enjoying the festival, that perhaps they’ll see each other at dinner, which will begin in a few short hours. Viola Fabian moves quickly to be the first off. She glances over her shoulder and looks straight through her former pupil, pinning her to the back of the car.

“Get over yourself, Natalie,” she says.

5

H
AROLD HASTINGS NEVER
forgets a face. He’s seen them all: the faces of businessmen checking in, florid and bright, clearly meeting their mistresses. The faces of their mistresses checking out, hollow-eyed, leaving the businessmen to their wives. He’s caught the frozen, silly-surprised eyes of housekeepers smoking dope in the penthouse suite on eleven and housekeepers and bartenders groping each other in the service passage in the sub-basement, pushing their friends in laundry-cart races from one end of the low concrete tunnel to the other. Children crying in the library, pale cheeks shiny with tears, unclaimed by blank-faced parents—paged immediately—until they’d finished their highballs in the bar. Local high school kids booking rooms on prom night, blinking virgins on the verge whom he’d later catch streaking through the halls in the middle of the night, wide-eyed with their first taste of sex.

Hastings has also seen twenty-nine Statewide music festivals (and this one, the thirtieth), every one since the Bellweather began hosting the event in the late sixties. As other conferences and festivals, intimidated by the Bellweather’s palatial resort grounds, moved on to newer hotels, cheap but charmless chains in towns more accessible from major highways, Statewide continued to book at the Bellweather. Probably because it was easier than finding another facility large (and, to be truthful, empty) enough to host more than two hundred guests for an extended weekend; to feed them breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a banquet on Saturday, all with vegetarian options; to provide the auditorium, ballrooms, conference rooms, and lounges for rehearsal and performance spaces. In fact, Statewide is the only annual event of its size the Bellweather has on its booking schedule. Without it, Hastings doubts the hotel would be open at all.

He’s been the Bellweather’s concierge for forty-six years, since he was twenty and the previous concierge, his Uncle Chester, died of a massive stroke in the hotel lobby: on his feet behind the concierge desk one minute, jotting a note in his appointment book, and dead on the carpet the next. Hastings has stood behind that same desk and watched his hotel get older and shabbier, the guests following suit. Where once the businessmen wore three-piece suits and hats—always hats—now they showed up in rumpled shorts and polos dotted with coffee drips. Families that had looked crisp and excited about their vacation in the Catskills were now tired and distracted, making a quick stopover on their way to other, more thrilling destinations when they bothered to come at all. He can mark the decades through the kids’ appearance alone. The Statewide students began as a sea of impossibly shiny, straight hair, puka shells clicking and bell bottoms flapping. Their hair got higher and puffier, their concert ties skinnier, and their shoulders broader, and now they look as though they barely bothered to bathe before swaddling themselves in plaid and flannel.

But this girl—this girl standing at the check-in desk. She doesn’t belong to any of those memories and yet she’s familiar. He’s seen her before. Where? How? If she’s here for Statewide, she’s late, though he doubts she has any connection to the festival. She’s young but not a teenager. Her blondish-brownish hair is pulled back in a sloppy bun and she’s unzipping a dark blue field coat that makes her look like an enormous blueberry. She’s large. A big girl, not just tall but round. She has the look of acquired fat, of sadness weighing on her in the form of flesh. A whisper of tenderness mixes with his déjà vu.

Sheila at the front desk is greeting her, welcoming her to the Bellweather, and asking politely for her name. Sheila Czeckley, his check-in girl extraordinaire, is the only other person at his hotel who has the slightest comprehension of what real customer service looks like.

Hastings points his good ear in their direction, but the girl’s voice is too low, too quiet for him to make out. He hears a gentle jingling instead.

The girl has a dog. Hastings grins, confused. A small dog, half fox by the look of it, with big pointed ears that flop when he shakes his head. He, the dog, is wearing a red vest with a white cross on it. His tail wags at the sound of his mistress’s voice.

Curiosity killed the concierge,
he thinks, and leaves his post.

The check-in and concierge desks are on the same side of the lobby, separated by the entrance hall to the west wing and its assorted ballrooms and business suites. A ghostly harmonic murmur wafts by as he crosses the open carpet: the sound of the Statewide chorus warming up. It lifts his steps. Hastings waits all year for this weekend, for his hotel to be full of life and song again.

“Welcome, welcome!” He hails Sheila and the large girl. “Have you come for the festival?” The feeling of having seen her, of knowing her—when Hastings looks into the girl’s face, the sense that he knows her is so powerful he rocks on his heels. The carpet bounces him back. “Hello,” he says, much softer. “Hello and welcome to the Bellweather.”

Her eyes are large, gray, and her face—it’s odd that she has any effect on him at all, because her face is as forgettable as blank paper. She looks like any young woman running to fat. Her cheeks are full, her chin pointed.

“Are you here for the festival?” he repeats. She blinks. “Statewide. The Statewide school music festival. I hope you’ll be with us through Sunday. That’s when they’ll hold the concerts, right through there.” He points across the lobby to the auditorium’s closed doors. “The orchestra’s rehearsing in there now if you’d like to hear them.”

Her dog shakes his head again, jangling his tags.

“What’s his name?” asks Hastings.

The girl bites her lower lip. “August,” she says. “He’s a working dog. I’m training him to be a working dog. For the blind.”

“That’s wonderful.”

She doesn’t respond.

Sheila smiles and hands over the key to 407. It’s one of the Bellweather’s nicest rooms, in a corner of the tower overlooking the rear grounds, the old Olympic-size pool and nine-hole golf course sloping low in the distance. Not that the pool or the golf course has been tended very well; he can’t remember when anyone last played a round. Nonetheless, he’s glad Sheila has recognized the importance of making this singular guest feel comfortable, special, and looked-after.

“We’re here for whatever you need,” Hastings says brightly. “Stop by the desk, give us a call any time, day or night. Enjoy your stay, Ms.—?”

“Graves.” The girl shoves the key in her coat pocket, looking down at the counter. “C’mon, Aug,” she says to the dog. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Hastings watches them disappear into an elevator car. Then he turns to Sheila, who shrugs.

“Made the reservation two months ago,” she says. “Credit card. E-something Graves.”

Hastings fiddles with his bow tie.

“What?” Sheila says.

“What what?” says Hastings, smiling.

He shakes his head. Sheila grins and dips her hands into the pockets of the hotel’s uniform maroon blazer. The elbows are shiny with age.

“It’s the damnedest thing,” he says. “The damnedest thing.”

Hastings is back in 130. He’s lived in this room of the hotel since—well, it’s been years now since Jess left him. It was supposed to be a temporary living situation (can’t beat the commute, he used to joke), but Hastings knows this single, smoking room is where he’ll spend the rest of his life. He’s put a few pictures on the walls, a few articles clipped from the newspaper. Detective novels, old library castoffs, fill the drawers of his nightstand. Hastings is a junkie for crime, for mysteries, particularly of the unsolved variety. The closet is full of his blue and brown and tan suits, the closet floor a jumble of his blue and brown and tan wingtips and loafers. The bathroom sink is speckled with reddish-blond hair from his beard, and his toothbrush is perched at an angle on the porcelain.

Every morning, Hastings inspects himself in the full mirror on the back of the room door, underneath the emergency-egress instruction placard. His face, the face of the Bellweather—unlike the Bellweather itself—has changed little in the past forty-six years. He is still vaguely boyish, blue-eyed, clean-shaven, and friendly, though his short hair is white at the temples. He hasn’t lost much of his six feet two inches and his teeth are all his own, though he has to wear glasses to read anything, big black frames he chose because they reminded him of a young Michael Caine. For all forty-six of those years, Hastings has tied his own bow tie every day. They are dark red and match the carpet of the Bellweather lobby, or they did years ago, before the carpets had been trod to mauve by hundreds of thousands of feet.

He naps every afternoon from three to four, the slowest time at the front desk, not that the front desk of the Bellweather exactly has busy times anymore, not even during Statewide. Rehearsals last until four-thirty. There’s an hour break before dinner, when Hastings will be back at his post before retiring for good at eight. But today he can’t fall asleep. Today he closes his eyes and sees that girl, that blurry girl he knows he knows.

Hastings looks at his watch. Three in the afternoon is the perfect time to call Jess.

His wife, after she left, moved back to England to be with her family. “So who are Caroline and me, some people you used to work with?” Hastings had shouted, and Jessica—God, he could still picture the look on her face: hurt, tired, and a little righteous—had picked up her suitcase without another word. Her father, a widower, had been a doctor in London and retired to a small village somewhere in Wales.

After years and years of silence, on an otherwise unremarkable Thursday, Hastings had picked up the phone and called his wife to say hello. There was never anything promissory about their conversations. Oh, maybe the first few times they spoke, Hastings thought they were taking tiny steps toward a new future. Over time it became clear that both Harold Hastings and his wife were settled and set, that neither of them had any desire to move or to change, but that both of them were lonely, and they knew each other well—too well to live together in the same place, but well enough to be able to pick up the phone any time of day and talk.

Hastings dials Jess’s number. As it rings, he pictures her tromping in from the vegetable garden she keeps outside the kitchen door, wriggling her feet out of large green wellies and tucking unruly strands of frizzy white hair behind her ears as she lifts the receiver from the cradle.

“Jess,” he says, and she laughs.

“Knew it was you.”

“How’d you know?”

“Who else would it be?” He can hear her smile, shrug.

There’s a long pause. Hastings unbuttons his collar and pulls his bow tie loose.

“So why are you calling?” Jess asks. “Something worrying you?”

How did she do this? She used to know everything without having to be told, but they’d been sharing the same bed at the time, which made it that much harder to keep secrets. How could she tell
now,
in another life and another country, all the way on the other side of the ocean?

“It’s Statewide,” he says. “Another Statewide.”

“And how do you think it’s going so far?”

“So far, so good. Except—well, one thing. No, two things. You remember Doug Kirk?”

“Isn’t he in charge?”

It’s been over two weeks and Hastings still can’t believe the phone call he received from Helen Stoller, Doug’s secretary, on behalf of the incapacitated president of the Association for School Music. Kirk has been the head of ASM for years. Hastings always held him in high regard, not least because he brought a bottle of excellent Scotch with him every November and wasn’t stingy about sharing it. Every Statewide Saturday night, right after the banquet, Kirk—who bore an alarming resemblance to a mustachioed Kirk Douglas—would plunk two tumblers down on the concierge desk. They drank to Statewide. They drank to the Bellweather.

This year, that toast isn’t going to happen. This year, instead of striding around the Bellweather like the captain of a galleon (the only captain Hastings would even consider being first mate to), Doug Kirk is in a coma.

“It was a coronary,” Helen had told him, her voice quavering. “And now he’s in a coma. They don’t know what brought it on, he was always so careful about his heart. Went to the doctor regularly, I booked all his appointments . . .”

“Helen. Helen, slow down—”

“What am I going to
do,
Mr. Hastings?” He had never actually met Helen Stoller, but she’d been Kirk’s secretary for as long as he could remember. In Hastings’s mind, she looked a great deal like his own mother.

“I’m sure there are other—” But there were no others like Kirk. Hastings felt a sudden terror of everything ending. “Please, Helen. This isn’t what Kirk would want. I’m certain he will be fine, and I’m certain you’ll be able to find a substitute for this year.”

Helen Stoller sighed. “Anyway,” she said, “that’s up to the advisory council. I was just calling to tell you—to tell you. I knew you’d want to know.” She sighed again. “I’ll be in touch once we know more.”

Helen was in touch, two days later, with the news that Kirk’s condition was unchanged but stable, and a Dr. Viola Fabian would be heading the festival this year. Something about the way Helen said her name—
Vi
ola
Fa
bian,
Doc
tor Fabian—made Hastings’s skin crawl. Helen, who looked like Hastings’s mother, wasn’t at all happy that this Viola Fabian would be serving in Kirk’s stead. And the fact that Fabian hasn’t introduced herself to Hastings yet has done nothing to change his first, albeit secondhand, impression of her.