A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies Read Online Free Page A

meanwhile as you try out your new, out-of-isolation self, on wobbly legs, squinting, squeamish, as pale as white paper, everyone around you is clamoring to know why you don’t seem glad. No one knows that the outside of your body—or what can be seen of it—is the same as a container that seems to be made of something durable. But it’s no more dependable than a water glass, if the glass were placed in a fire.
    Because you know what it’s like to be not in charge of yourself. To be at the mercy of confinement. To want out. To stare at a window and wish yourself as thin as a curl of smoke, slipping out through a crack. Get out, get out! And you come to believe that getting out might take place in only one way. And you’d not be afraid of it.
    Maybe she had wanted to look at Uncle Owen because she wanted to find out if she envied him, was that it? Because maybe she was afraid of being well?
    “Save dark thoughts for bright days.” Where did she hear that? Not from Mrs. Petty. Her father-in-law? Standing in her doorway, gazing past her at some robin that pecked at the glass, trying to destroy its own reflection, thinking its reflection was an enemy bird, a perfectly normal thing? Well, she knew what that was like, hating your own reflection.
    “Save dark thoughts for bright days.” It must have been something from the mouth of some king, at the edge of the Town Hall stage, in some battle or some inner-castle mess, trying to put on a brave front. He would smile at her. An old man’s smile. As if he knew what she was thinking. As if it weren’t abnormal to want to die, if the alternative was to not be able to live.
    The thing was, there were no bright days. For so very, very long.
    “I don’t wish I was you, Uncle Owen,” she suddenly said out loud, quietly, like a prayer, as if he could hear her. Maybe he could. “Listen, Uncle Owen. Wherever you are, I’m glad not to be there.”
    “Charlotte!” shouted Hays. “Where are you going?”
    She had an urge to tell the truth, to just throw back her head and shout out “Boston!” But she didn’t answer him. Did her father-inlaw know about the woman? Did everyone? She remembered the afternoon she was carried into the front sitting room, the yellow one. It was a consultant who had carried her: a hearty, big doctor; she didn’t recall his name. He had picked her up in his arms spontaneously and said, “Time for tea, my dear,” and there she was, appearing to a room of Heaths, six or seven of them.
    Hays was talking to one of his sisters, bending his head close to hers, gravely, confidingly. He was the last in the room to notice that Charlotte was there, and when his eyes met hers—as she was placed in a chair, as someone ran to get a blanket—she saw that he looked like a man who had a secret. He looked at her as if he thought she was an intruder. He was holding a teacup. He set it down quickly, roughly, and tea splashed out, and two bright spots rose up his cheeks. And he told her, in a shrill, breathy way that wasn’t like him at all, he’d spilled his tea because he was so happy she’d got up, what a good surprise. He said that he was only just talking about the excellence of the new shade of paint in the room, now that they’d finally completed it. It was the voice of a man talking to someone who didn’t have the right to truly know his thoughts.
    The walls were dark yellow. The painting job had been completed a month ago, which Charlotte knew because one of the painters had stopped by her room on the last day to ask, did she want to be carried out to see it? But that hadn’t been possible; a maid had been with her, putting up her hair. The new paint was exactly the same shade as the old one. Did Hays think that being sick had rearranged her memory? Did he think she didn’t know all the ways to read his face, to understand the tones of his voice, to listen to the things he wasn’t saying when he spoke to her?
    A maid came in to change the tablecloth.