A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies Read Free

They were German. The original American Heaths had a German name lost to history: they’d settled in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where they operated slaughterhouses and sausage factories, long since sold. The Heath migration east took place years ago, even before there were railroads. There’d been a Heath bank in Boston, but that had been sold. They had left the city and settled a bit to the south; they’d turned their new town into a Heath town, but the Midwest was where they still were making money.
    Hays spoke German and French and some Italian without an American accent. Men from those countries, in the East on business, were often turning up at the household for dinners, card games, musical evenings, billiards and gambling with dice in the games room, and Sunday afternoons on the lawn, resting off a night-before of God knew what. Hays had been to college in Michigan, but he’d spent two years in Paris, which he felt had shaped his core, years before Charlotte knew him.
    In the presence of those visitors, his European alternative self would emerge in a clear, vivid way, as though he had changed into a costume, and rearranged the lines of his body, and even, perhaps, put on some sort of a mask, which resembled his own face, but was someone else’s. This was not something Charlotte had ever found disturbing, not even when the part he played carried over—after the guests had left—to their own rooms upstairs.
    Hays didn’t take part in the Players, partly because he could never be counted on to be in town for rehearsals and stagings, and partly because (few people knew this) he suffered from a terrible form of shyness. He’d go rigid, like a whole other version of himself, changed into a man-shaped wood block. He could not give speeches at meetings, could not perform anything that required an audience.
    In college he was part of the debate club, but only as a coach. The one time he was called upon to deliver a eulogy at a funeral—of another Heath uncle, who in fact was childless and a bachelor, and had left Hays his money—he made it to the pulpit of the church, but all he could do was bow his head and say, weakly, “I am too filled with feeling to speak what I came here to say.” When he returned to his pew, the Heaths said he was just like Antony in Shakespeare’s
Caesar,
but a modern-day American one, who’d decided to keep his words to himself. He was a tall man, pole-thin. He was dark-brown haired like all his family, but his skin was fair.
    He blushed sometimes like a girl. Spots of pink rose up in his cheeks, out from the ends of his mustache, when he defended Charlotte at that awful Heath dinner. He obviously agreed with his family that
Antony and Cleopatra
was all wrong for them, but he seemed surprised and pleased that his wife even knew who Cleopatra was. “Charlotte has the right to make suggestions and take part in this family as she wishes,” he said. Everyone admired him for his loyalty. Everyone thought, Hays loves Charlotte, for some reason unapparent to us. He’d married for love. Everyone said so.
    And his lawyer uncle, who now lay dead in state in his elegant, wide front room, had leaned toward Charlotte and patted her hand with his plump, spotty fingers. He wasn’t unkind to her; he seemed to feel sorry for her. “Look at it this way, my dear Charlotte.” Would she care to know what he was offered to write on years ago for
The Bar
?
    The Bar
was a national monthly magazine, now defunct, for lawyers. It was not concerned with legal matters only but had articles, stories, anecdotes, drawings, and personal essays and remarks pertaining to the lives of men in law. Uncle Owen had been a regular contributor. He rarely went into the courts himself; his specialty was business law. But for
The Bar
he wrote jokey pieces about unusual details of court proceedings, family backgrounds of criminals, outfits people wore to cheer on disturbers of the peace, and things people ate at afternoon tea in