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But for the past month and a half he had been aware of the ebbing of her interest. She was increasingly reluctant to hear anything about the CSW. And Miles Drummond was alarmed. He had pictured Gloria Garvey at his side, helping him run it. Without her, he did not see how he could cope. He wished himself back in the quiet times, the morning paper along with egg so carefully poached by Felipe, a spot of sketching in the morning, some chess with Walter Breidbeick after his siesta.

People had paid their money and were actually going to arrive, and Miles wished he could quietly and inconspicuously drop dead.

“Gloria?” he said plaintively.

“What is it now?” she asked impatiently, continuing to read.

“Gloria, I don’t think the Volkswagen is going to be ready
in time to go up and get Mr. Torrigan. Antonio says it is, but I don’t believe him.”

She pushed her paper aside, drained the glass of beer. “Is that a calamity, for God’s sake? Gam Torrigan will get here all right. No doubt of that. He knows he’s getting a free ride, and that big bastard is too cheap to take any chance of missing out on it. Let him take a
turismo
.”

“I want it to start off right, Gloria. He’s the first one arriving. Do you think he’ll be any good? I mean as a teacher?”

She shrugged her big strong shoulders. “He knows all the yak. He’s done a lot of teaching. I haven’t seen him in … six years anyway. In Maine.”

“Gloria, if the bus isn’t ready … would you drive up and get him Sunday? You’ll know him by sight. We could go up together. It would be easier for me to meet him that way. With somebody who knows him.”

“What time does he get in?”

It took Miles Drummond a good five minutes to answer the question. He found that he had left Gambel Torrigan off his master list, and so he had to locate the last letter from him.

“Four-thirty in the afternoon.”

Gloria sighed. “All right, all right. We’ll go get him. But you pay the toll and buy the gas, understand?”

Miles smiled his relief. Then his nervous frown returned. “I don’t think there’s enough coming, Gloria. I don’t think it’s going to work.”

“How many are coming for sure?”

“Well, as you know, we got fifty-three answers to the ads and …”

“Don’t give me the whole picture, Drummy. You’ve got the money from how many? The total fee from how many?”

He got out his master list again and, biting his lip, counted these who had
Pd
. “Eleven,” he said at last.

“So what’s wrong? You’ve taken in fifty-five hundred dollars. I can remember the expense figures we worked out. Twenty-six hundred dollars. So you’ll have a net of twenty-nine hundred anyway. I’ll tell you where to put the money so you’ll be able to count on another two hundred dollars a year income, Drummy. Call it twenty-five hundred pesos. That’ll put you over the hump, won’t it? Have you arranged how to meet the students you have to meet, and when?”

“I certainly wish I could figure things out so quickly. Eleven isn’t really too bad, is it? It really isn’t bad at all.”

“Where’s your list of the ones coming?” She started to paw through his papers. “Good Christ, Drummy, you are hopeless. Got any clean paper in there? Fine. Now give me your pen. Let’s see who we have coming. When I call off the name, you find me the application form.”

It took fifteen minutes to get a new list of the eleven students, along with date and method of arriving, and the separated application blanks.

Mrs. Hildabeth McCaffrey, 64, widow, was driving from Elmira, Ohio, with her friend Mrs. Dorothy Winkler, 65, also of Elmira, and would arrive on Friday, June 30, in Cuernavaca and would go directly to the Hotel Hutchinson.

Mr. Parker Barnum, age 33, of New York, would arrive by air but did not have to be met as he had friends in Mexico City who would drive him to Cuernavaca.

Miss Mary Jane Elmore, age 20, and Miss Bitsy Babcock, age 19, both of Forth Worth, were driving down.

Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Wahl, both aged twenty-two, were driving down. From Syracuse.

Miss Monica Killdeering was flying down from Kansas, arriving at six-twenty in Mexico City on the evening of the thirtieth, and expected to be met.

Mr. John Kemp expected to be met a noon at the airport that same day.

Mrs. Barbara Kilmer, of Akron, would apparently be on the same flight.

And Colonel Thomas C. Hildebrandt, U. S. A., Ret., would drive down.

Gloria rechecked the list and said, “How about the other teacher, that bag from California?”

“Oh! Agnes Partridge Keeley. Let me get her letter. I think she’s driving. Yes, I know she is. I suggested she arrive early to … uh … familiarize herself with the setup.”

“Okay, Drummy. Now pay attention. We get Torrigan on Sunday. Then your bus has to make two trips on the following Friday, or else you can keep Kemp and Kilmer amused until … what’s her name?… Killdeering gets in.”

“But I should be out at the hotel to … welcome those arriving by car.”

“Hmm. So send Gam Torrigan up with your driver to meet
them. They’ll be his students anyway. How are things coming out at the hotel?”

“Well, they’re supposed to have the water fixed by now. And there’s twenty rooms ready. I’m going out right after lunch to check up on everything.”

“That old crock of a hotel is going to scare hell out of this arty-farty bunch of happy students.”

“Gloria … do you think you could come out for a few days when they start to arrive … to help me get things going?”

“Drummy, I will come out and take a look at them because I want to get a look at the types who fell for the pitch we made, but I am not going to hang around.”

Billy Delgarian came trudging up to the table and sat down. “Hello, Miles. Hello, Gloria. Excuse me. Miles, I’ve been hunting all over for you. I’ve got a rental for your house. A pair of old creeps from Nebraska. They don’t look as if they’re strong enough to bust up the furniture. The trouble is, they want a place right away. Today. And they want it through September. How about it?”

Miles felt slightly nauseated whenever he thought of strangers in his little house, sleeping in his bed, sitting in his chairs, eating out of his dishes. “I don’t see how I possibly could move out today, Billy. I really couldn’t. And just as soon as the Workshop ends, I want to move back into …”

“Will they pay his price?” Gloria asked.

“They didn’t even try to haggle. I got their check right here and their signatures on the lease, but they understand that the owner might not be agreeable …”

“He’s agreeable,” Gloria said.

“Now, Gloria, really. How about September?”

“So rent a room for September. Drummy, you just don’t
want
to rent that house. Get off the dime. Billy will be happy to cart you and your duffel out to the Hutchinson, won’t you, Billy?”

Billy looked at his watch. “Be ready about three, Miles.”

Miles looked at Gloria and then at Billy and gave a helpless nod of agreement.

“Those clowns we hired will get the place in shape faster if you’re living there, Drummy.”

Miles stood up. “Well … I guess I better go pack.”

They watched him head for the
zócalo
and nearly get run down by a battered Land Rover.

“Poor little guy,” Billy said. “He’s going to have a hell of a summer. How did you ever talk him into this deal, Gloria?”

“He needs some money.”

“So why didn’t you just give him some? You’re loaded.”

“Hah! This is good for Drummy. It’ll stir him up. He’s been in a rut all his life. Anyhow, Billy, you damn bandit, think of the fun we’ll have watching his mixed-up school operate.”

“Even to three it doesn’t last through July.”

“I’m not about to give you any money either. Buy me a beer, Billy.”

The Hotel Hutchinson was located four miles north of the center of Cuernavaca, on the east side of a deep barranca which successfully isolated it from the main highway and all transient tourist traffic. It had been built in 1921 by a Texan named Homer Hutchinson, with moneys acquired by selling the same oil leases to many different persons. Their reaction to his ingenuity made it advisable for him to leave the country.

The hotel was designed by Hutchinson. It was a grandiose, putty-colored building, two stories high, with twenty-foot ceilings, built in the form of a hollow square and surrounded by a high wall into the top of which had been set a great deal of broken glass. It looked somewhat like an abandoned prison. It had forty guest rooms, an owner’s apartment, a building in the rear for storage and staff quarters, ten primitive bathrooms in the main building, a ballroom-dining room that could seat two hundred, and a metropolitan cockroach population.

The ceilings were high and the windows narrow, so it was a place of gloom and hollow echoes. The kitchen facilities were barbaric; the lighting was early Edison; hot water was generated by devices in each bathroom called
rápidos
. They were not misnamed. Once kindling had been shoved into the firebox and a good fire started, they were rapid indeed. The long corridors,
floored with an odd khaki shade of tile, were haunted by the long-ago screams of paying guests who had not expected boiling water to jet from the lean and deadly faucets.

It was not long after his grand opening that Homer Hutchinson discovered that he was attracting very few guests. To remedy this situation he had monstrous and sturdy letters placed on the roof spelling out HOTEL HUTCHINSON, letters so large they could easily be read from the main highway. And still the hotel did not prosper.

In 1927 Homer Hutchinson passed away suddenly of a heart attack while being entertained in the owner’s apartment by one of the hotel maids. After that sudden demise, local residents lost track of the number of times the hotel changed hands. In every case the new owner, intent on renaming the place, would clamber to the roof and take a long look at the monolithic letters and decide to retain the old name. At one point in the forties a new owner, more ingenious than the others, and desirous, perhaps, of giving the establishment a more Latin flavor, employed a work crew who, with sledges and crowbars, managed to remove the HOT, leaving EL HUTCHINSON.

The hotel had been empty for two years when Miles Drummond leased it for six hundred dollars for the two-month Workshop. The current owner estimated that it would take about half the rental to get the utilities functioning.

Miles hoped to operate the hotel with a staff of six. He was explaining this to Billy Delgarian when they arrived at the hotel in Billy’s sedan at three-thirty. The big iron gates were wide open, and Billy drove in and parked on the baked earth near the front door. He leaned on the horn for a long five seconds.

“We ought to get one of the six,” he said.

“I don’t understand this at all,” Miles said. “Oh, here comes Alberto.”

“We woke him up,” Billy said. Alberto was a stringy and weathered man who did not pick his feet up when he walked. He was employed as gardener and janitor and handy man. He approached the car slowly as Miles got out, and on his sleepy face was a look of utter idiocy.

“Alberto, you are not taking the broken tiles out of the yard here as I am telling you five or six times,” Miles said.

“First I will put beautiful flowers in the patio,” Alberto said.

“No. First you will remove the tiles.”

“What will I do with them, Señor Droomond?”

“I don’t know. Throw them in the barranca.”

“How will I carry them to the barranca?”

“On the wheelbarrow.”

“It is now broken.”

Miles stared at him in helpless exasperation. “Now carry all these things to the room where I will live.”

Alberto went to the car, picked up one small suitcase and shuffled sadly off with it. When he was fifteen feet away Miles called to him. “Where is Rosalinda?”

“She has gone someplace to purchase a hen.”

“And the maids?”

“The rooms were clean so they both went home.”

“And Pepe?”

“He has gone to the city.”

“Mind if I look around?” Billy said.

“Not at all. Not at all.”

Billy wandered off. Miles picked his largest suitcase out of the car and struggled into the hotel with it. The central patio, through the doors that opened off the shadowy lobby, looked scurfy and beaten. It contained a flagstone walk in the shape of an X, three cement benches, one sundial with the end broken off the blade, one cement birdbath and one small defunct fountain. And fifty kinds of weeds.

After he was unpacked and settled in, and after Billy had left, without comment, Miles went into the patio and began pulling weeds.

Gloria Garvey picked Miles up at the Hutchinson at two-thirty on Sunday afternoon in her powder-blue Jaguar sedan. Cars were Gloria’s single expensive vice. She kept her car garaged near Las Rosas, but gave it no other care. When it ceased running properly, she would order another one.

Gloria wore her Mexico City costume, a black suit, white blouse, white gloves. But the skirt of the black suit was shiny in the seat, and the lapels of the jacket were tinged gray with cigarette ash, and the finger seams of the white gloves were split. Her careless hair had the look and texture of lion mane in thorn country.

As Miles got in beside her, she said, “For Chrissake, Drummy, stop jittering. Gam Torrigan is absolutely nobody. What happened to your hand?”

Miles looked down at the bandage. “I cut my fingers on some broken tile I was throwing into the barranca.”

“You know darn well that if you potter around doing manual labor, they’ll let you do it all.”

She yanked the Jaguar around and plunged through the gate, making it skitter sideways on the road before it leveled away and roared by the military barracks where a lone Sunday soldier, lounging on guard, caught a glimpse of long fair hair and responded with the expected whistle, a mechanical and customary courtesy.

She pulled the Jaguar to a shivering halt at the toll gate of the
autopisto
, took the five-peso note from Miles and gave it to the man. She accelerated smoothly, keeping the tach just under the red until the car was climbing toward Tres Cumbres at a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour and the wind roar made conversation impossible. She saw that Miles was firmly holding his own frail knees and staring dead ahead in hypnoid alarm, and it amused her. She took pleasure in driving. She had always had a knack for it, an instinctive ability to judge distances, a sense of timing. But the finishing touches had been added one summer in Italy. It took a few seconds to reach deep into memory and pull the name out. Rufino Cellero. A very, wiry, arrogant little guy. And that great beast of a competition Mercedes that made a noise like a runaway sawmill, and when you had it up there, really up there, you lived on the dirty edge of disaster, and it was very fine. She remembered the misty morning, fighting the gear box, sliding into curves, booming down across the mountain bridges, while Rufi, beside her, yelled with joy and banged the side of the door with his brown fist. Rufi had told his manager how good she was and the manager had taken a trial ride with her and then had gotten all heated up about the idea of having her enter some of the road races coming up. And that had seemed good too. But one day she had looked at Rufi in the morning light at that inn and knew that it was finished. Rufi had wept in rage and disappointment and the look of him with his face all twisted up had made it even more finished for her. But she had kept the driving skills he had taught her.