A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies Read Free Page A

murder trials.
    “My dear Charlotte, knowing my interest in Shakespeare, they asked me to write an article speculating on a scene in which Hamlet, the killer of his butler, not to mention his mother and his king, is put on trial for murder, and I, as his lawyer, must defend him. Can you think of anything sillier than that? No wonder that magazine went out of business.”
    Charlotte had not seen the point. “But how would you do your arguments to defend that poor man?”
    “Ha-ha!” Uncle Owen cried. “There could not be a case!”
    She felt she would have defended Hamlet on the grounds that, one, he was no murderer, and two, everything he did, he did honestly, thoughtfully, and morally. He was the most honest, thoughtful, moral man she ever heard of. “Charlotte would never stand for anyone speaking badly of her favorite dramatic hero, even if he was insane and hated his mother,” her husband said. He seemed to think he was helping her out.
    Charlotte said, “Is it out of the question logically to have a defense because, at the end of the play, there could never be a trial, as Hamlet has died?”
    And Uncle Owen leaped in with his thrust. “Died or not is immaterial. We’re talking about the difference between truth and fabrications. There could be no case against Hamlet because
he wasn’t real, he was only a story
.”
    Well, Falstaff wasn’t real, historically, she should have argued. But Uncle Owen had yet to play that role.
    She wondered if he’d changed his mind about stories. She wondered if he caught a glimpse of death, like some sort of shapeless, strange thing coming toward him as he sat in his armchair with his ideal last breath gathering up in his old-man’s lungs. She wondered if he believed that actual death was something history could prepare you for—or history plays. She would think it would not.
    She would think it would resemble ghosts, witches, stories, inventions. Maybe she’d had an ulterior motive when she decided to come out for the wake. Maybe she wanted to be looked at as someone who did a remarkable thing. She was never supposed to get well. She was supposed to have been an invalid, period.
    Here is Charlotte and her horses. Charlotte and her horses. My wife, up from a sickbed to go to a wake. Isn’t that
odd
?
    Hamlet wouldn’t have thought so. And Charlotte remembered what it was like to be still in her twenties, newly married, seated at a table in candlelight in her husband’s family’s dining room, the only one in the house awake, reading Shakespeare for the very first time.
    She had sat one night nearly till dawn reading
Hamlet
and for weeks afterward her heart would feel clenched up, at odd moments; and she’d feel a wholly new, powerful, tender affection for her husband.
    Maybe she fell in love with Hamlet himself. Or maybe, in her husband, buried somewhere, she saw traces of him. She had told him as much. “You don’t have an uncomplicated soul, Hays, although you would like to pretend to.” He blushed at that, but he didn’t disagree.
    Her husband’s family’s household was at the opposite end of town from the lawyer Heaths. Hays had gone out that morning with one of his brothers-in-law and had not taken his own sleigh.
    She’d wanted to bring him home herself. She’d pictured the drive, her husband beside her, in dusky air and mild windblown snow: a ride away from death. She’d thought they might bypass home and turn out into the old roads for a while. She’d thought, I miss my husband, and I’ll tell him so.
    They had not shared anything for so long. It was as if she’d turned into another of her husband’s sisters or the wife of one of his brothers. Or a stranger. One more member of the household who could never be turned out.
    You couldn’t be a Heath and turn out your wife. Her illness had terrified Hays. She knew this. And she had thought, back at the house, putting on her coat, sending for the sleigh and the horses, that a death in the family would be