The Pink Hotel Read online

  The Pink Hotel

  Dorothy Erskine & Patrick Dennis

  By the Authors

  Books by Dorothy Erskine

  The Crystal Boat

  Miss Pettinger’s Niece

  Books by Patrick Dennis

  Auntie Mame

  Guestward Ho! (with Barbara Hooton)

  To Dew and Mike

  Check In

  The hotel sprawled pink, serene and drowsily elegant in the early dawn. No ripple disturbed its turquoise pool. No gush of filtered water sprang from the golden lion masks at the deep end. The striped cabañas stood shrouded at the water’s edge, the flags of the Departments of France hung flaccid in the breezeless Florida air.

  The orange trees, the lemon trees, the magnolia trees sparkled in the halfhearted sunshine, glinting dimly with dew. The hotel limousine stood empty at the marzipan porte-cochere. The day had not begun, nor had the season, but the hotel waited in readiness, as it had waited every morning since the Florida Boom.

  And as Florida hotels went, this one was unique. Nobody remembered exactly how old it was, exactly how many styles of architecture and decoration it had undergone. All that anyone remembered was that it was the hotel; a Mistinguett, a Magda Lupescu among hotels—old and slightly raddled, perhaps, but still jaunty, still elegant, still imperious and still very, very expensive.

  It was what Claridge’s was to London, what Shepheard’s had been to Cairo. It was old and decrepit and ridden with debt, but it still bore its soft-spoken message of sheer class to anyone who still cared.

  And so it lay this morning, a big, pink, rococo X set down in its tended gardens, waiting patiently for the chosen few who could afford its haughty hospitality.

  The town stirred in its sleep as the Chicago-Miami Nonstop flew over it, again too low. The Chamber of Commerce had complained so often and so vociferously about the noise of the planes that the pilots now took a childish delight in gunning the motors to make as much racket as possible in the still of the early morning.

  “Ha’ pass six, Mary,” Mr. Baldwin wheezed carefully through the door.

  “Thank you, Mr. Baldwin,” Mary Street told her pillow.

  “There’s ole Flight Two-three-three goin’ over again, Mary. Ole Blunderbuss, I call it,” Mr. Baldwin said.

  “Yes, Mr. Baldwin,” Mary said yawning.

  “Regular disgrace, that’s what it is, Mary,” Mr. Baldwin said.

  “Isn’t it, Mr. Baldwin,” Mary said.

  “ ‘Nother sleepless night,” Mr. Baldwin said. “Heard the clock strike four again.”

  “That’s a shame, Mr. Baldwin,” Mary said. She yawned again and stretched, knowing that her landlord was about to say Another Day, Another Dollar. Mr. Baldwin was given to asthma, insomnia and platitudes and his conversation through the door every morning was always the same, except for the day the Chicago-Miami plane had crashed at Orlando and hadn’t disturbed the town’s sleep. But even then he had hardly been more stimulating.

  “ ‘Nother sunny day, Mary. Feller on the radio says they had more’n six inches of snow in Los Angeles.”

  “Imagine!” Mary said, getting out of bed and going to the window.

  Palm Frond Avenue looked the same as always—a row of identical Spanish-type bungalows owned by people just like Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin; older couples whose dentures gleamed from newspaper advertisements announcing that they had been provident enough to put aside their money (only pennies a week!) and retire to sunny Florida. Because Christmas was close at hand a few of the lawns were decorated with artificial snowmen, replicas of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and one papier-mâché Santa in a sled, looking jovially forlorn among the plaster flamingoes, the rattling palm trees. She shut the window and turned away.

  Mary wished she could remember last night’s dream, but then she never could remember them. This dream had involved that nice Mr. Purcell who worked at the hotel. The dream had had something to do with Mary’s quitting her job at the hotel and going back up North—back home—on a motor scooter with Mr. Purcell and being chased by Mr. Wenton and. . .

  “Ornj juice an’ Grape Nuts, Mary?” Mr. Baldwin called.

  “Oh! Oh yes, please, Mr. Baldwin,” Mary answered.

  Say what you would, Mr. Baldwin was right. Another Day, Another Dollar and if Mary didn’t get going there probably wouldn’t be a job waiting for her at the hotel. Mr. Wenton would say awful things and call her—well, she didn’t know what—and then she’d be fired and then . . . “I’ll be right down, Mr. Baldwin,” she called.

  Located, as it was, between Palm Beach and Miami, the town had the distinction of neither, detested each and strove to imitate both. While it damned Palm Beach as being decadent and chi-chi, the town touted its own luxury hotels, its glossy seaside villas, its modest roster of names from Who’s Who, the Social Register and the Almanach de Gotha. As it sneered upon Miami as crassly commercial and pandering to Undesirable Elements, the town was busily constructing an airport, a shopping center and a synagogue. The Chamber of Commerce, writhing in its feeling of inferiority, had invented and discarded a hundred mottoes: “A Shady Place in the Sun”; “Your Home in the South”; “A Nice Place for Nice People.”…

  “The Armpit of Creation,” was what Mrs. Dukemer said. This morning she called it the goddamned armpit of Creation.

  Mrs. Dukemer had had a rough morning—not that they all weren’t. She’d mashed her thumb in making up her Hideabed. She’d discovered that she was out of toothpaste and had chosen an unappetizing substitute in Lux soap. And now, now she had just missed the Number Six bus for Tropicayne Boulevard. That meant a taxi and a dollar if she was to get to the hotel on time.

  “Taxi!” Mrs. Dukemer called hoarsely. The taxi sped past and disappeared around the corner.

  “Armpit of Creation!” Dukemer said aloud. “Taxi!”

  In room 711 of the hotel the telephone jangled longer and louder than seemed necessary. Purcell had a thundering hangover, a headache and a throat so dry that he could barely speak.

  “Ulpf?” he managed to say.

  “Get up!” the operator said nastily and closed the key with a noise that sounded like a pistol shot. That would have been Rosalie on the switchboard. Sweet to the point of nausea to the guests, Rosalie took out her frustrations on the staff.

  “Bitch!” Purcell muttered and hung up the telephone. He thumped his pillow, propped it up against the headboard, lighted a cigarette, went into a paroxysm of coughing and then lay back to observe the room around him. It was awful. He closed his eyes and took another drag of the cigarette.

  It had all sounded too good to be true when Purcell had been interviewed for the job up North. The sales pitch had been full of blarney like “Assistant to the Director . . . salary commensurate with ability . . . own private quarters in one of America’s most luxurious seaside hotels.”

  Number 711 was private all right. It was as small as it was undesirable. Purcell’s room was a thin wedge of discomfort between the service elevators and the supply closet. It lay directly across the hall from the Room Service pantry and its single slim window looked out onto a bleak airshaft and down onto the kitchens below. Its furniture—and there was quite a lot of furniture for such a small room—was a hodgepodge of leftovers from the Auto-da-Fe period of the hotel, when the building had first sprung up, pink and Spanish, a monument to the Florida land boom. The wallpaper, what could still be seen of it, dated from the hotel’s Moderne period, just before the place went into receivership, just before that engaging ex-night clerk J. Arthur Wenton had seen fit to propose to the Widow Schwartzhaupt and used her considerable equity in Mr. Schwartzhaupt’s estate to make the hotel his own. The hotel had changed a great deal since the depression, but not
711. Purcell and the telephone were the only new things in it.

  Purcell endured another severe coughing fit, snubbed out his cigarette into the acrid ashtray on the night stand and put a cold bare foot out onto the cold bare floor. It was the beginning of another day in the hotel.

  Yes, a sunny December day in sunny Florida. A day for cooks to quit, for children to drown in the pool, for J. Arthur Wenton to have hysterics, for private detectives to raid rooms occupied by couples named Smith, for rich, insane old Miss Libya Hall to lose a fortune in dirty diamonds—a day for Purcell to be glad he was alive and serving his term as headmaster in this home for rich delinquents.

  In the Executive Suite J. Arthur Wenton squirmed voluptuously in the big white and gold bed. It was the bed Mr. Wenton and Eric had picked out together, the very bed Madame Pompadour had once slept in. (Of course the mattress was new.) Mr. Wenton wriggled again, reveling in the slithery caress of the satin pillowcase on the nape of his neck, the clinging sheerness of his crepe de Chine pajamas. He opened his rather puffy eyes and, squinting in the brightness, admired for the thousandth time the splendor that was his bedroom.

  Like most of the rest of the hotel, the Executive Suite had progressed from Spanish to Market Crash Modern to Neo-Classic to Chippendale to French. These changes corresponded not only with the whims of Fashion, but with Mr. Wenton’s even more capricious moods. Over the years Mr. Wenton had felt like a Spanish grandee, like the Spirit of Tomorrow, like a Praxiteles faun, like Beau Nash. Now Mr. Wenton felt exactly like Marie Antoinette, the last living symbol of chic frivolity in a barbarous, revolutionary world of functional architecture, self-service elevators and the American Plan.

  Yes, this bedroom—the whole hotel, in fact—had caught Mr. Wenton’s spirit exactly: the glittering lusters, the tufted walls, the bombé chests, the Boucher and Watteau copies, they were all pure J. Arthur Wenton. How perfectly Eric, darling Eric, had caught the spirit that was Wenton, not only here but in the Fontainebleau Room (Dinner, Dancing and Supper), in the Madame de Sévigné Writing Room, in the Galerie des Glaces (Balls, Banquets and Public Functions), in the Bar-Oque and the Trianon Club des Bains (Olympic Pool, Cabanas and Lifeguard). And the fun Mr. Wenton and Eric had had, picking up a set of boiseries here, a sedan chair there; bidding feverishly on crystal chandeliers and marble mantels in dim auction rooms; choosing just the right nylon damask for the bergères in the Du Barry Suite (Intimate Private Parties), the perfect plastic for the rococo bar stools. Of course it hadn’t all gone smoothly. What ever does? Mr. Wenton and Eric had had some terrible tiffs. Would the hotel be painted white or remain pink? Mr. Wenton had won that round, hands down. Would the old Oak Tap Room be done in citrus colors and called the Orangerie or bleached and rechristened the Bar-Oque? That had been Eric’s victory. And an argument over lampshades had brought about a three-day feud. But it had all been such a lark and the reconciliations had made their quarrels worth while. Well, no need to think of Eric now. The hotel was redecorated and Eric had flown; flown right out to Beverly Hills to do over a motel in the Venetian manner. And only God and Mr. Wenton knew what temptations attended Eric in Beverly Hills. Yes. Eric was gone and he had Mrs. Wenton to thank for it. How like Eleanor to bide her time until the very moment he and Eric had decided to run off together and open an antique shop and then lure Eric as far away as possible with a fat decorating commission!

  Eleanor! Mr. Wenton thought. He glanced at the door which led to his wife’s room. “Thank God she’s gone,” he sighed. “Three beautiful weeks while that old sow takes the cure at Warm Springs. Beautiful!”

  At any rate beautiful was what Mr. Wenton hoped these weeks would be. He wouldn’t think, right now, of just how or with whom they would be beautiful, for Mr. Wenton’s immediate prospects were dim, to say the least. The aching void left by Eric had been inadequately filled by a roguish bellhop who had waited until the next morning to announce that he was a minor and to quote the Florida law—a chilling recitative filled with pungent phrases, such as “imprisonment not exceeding twenty years.” Even now the boy was attending law school at Mr. Wenton’s expense.

  “Well,” Mr. Wenton sighed, “something will turn up. Something or someone. At least Eleanor’s gone.” An involuntary shudder passed through Mr. Wenton as he thought of his wife, of the dieting, of the chin straps and frown plasters, of the superstructure of bone and elastic, of the countless artifices she employed to lessen the dozen years’ difference in their ages. The very idea of Eleanor’s grimace across the breakfast table, Eleanor’s cooing endearments, Eleanor’s occasional forays into his bed, made him almost ill. Twenty-five years ago when he was still a night clerk, when Eleanor, a widow of forty, had been almost as attractive as her tax-free holdings, the prospect of cohabitation had not been wholly repulsive to lithe Art Wenton. Fair was fair and the control of Eleanor’s money had more than made up for the revulsion Mr. Wenton often felt. But now that Mr. Wenton owned the hotel, now that he was rich in his own right, Eleanor had become a burden rather than a prop. He had naively expected that by the time she reached forty-five, Eleanor’s wanton demands of the flesh would have subsided into a happy memory. But no. Here she was at sixty-five, still flirtatious, still plucking at his coverlet, turning a short sentence into a life term.

  “Women!” Mr. Wenton growled. “Surrounded by women! Eleanor. Miss Williams. That little slut of a Mary Street. That Furman tramp. Edythe Conyngham—although she’s a lady. Aaaaaaah.’”

  Mr. Wenton decided that he’d stop thinking about women. He’d think about something pleasant: something like Eric; something like Dave Purcell. No, not Purcell. It was wiser not to get, um, personally involved with the hotel staff. No, he’d think of. . . Mr. Wenton thought no more. He closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

  Mr. Mather lay fully awake in 818 listening to the rush of the waves on the beach below, the dry rattle of the palms and the clack-clack-clack of his big cheap alarm clock. He wished that the telephone would ring, that the operator would tell him it was time to get up. Mr. Mather was awake early today because he was awake early every day. He was geared to early rising. He would have liked to sleep until noon, have a leisurely breakfast in his pajamas, for Mr. Mather was on his vacation and sleeping was one of the things he had planned to do in Florida.

  Mr. Mather had lived in subjection to an alarm clock for twenty-five years and when it rang at 5:55, Mr. Mather had risen, heavy and sullen, and gone about the day, tired and yawning. But Mr. Mather with time on his hands had found himself a slave to time. He checked his wrist watch with the big gold clock in the lobby at increasing intervals and, to sleep at all, he had been obliged to buy the noisiest alarm clock he could find, its hollow clacking his familiar spirit through the laggard hours.

  Mr. Mather tried to read late and he left early calls with the night operator, but it was no good. He was always awake at 5:55 with better than an hour’s wait before the operator would tell him that it was “Sev-vin oh clock, Mis-tah Ma-therr. Gud mor-ninggg!” Mr. Mather privately thought that he wouldn’t waken quite so early if he could find something interesting to do, someone interesting to know, have a little better time the night before. But although Mr. Mather had promised himself a splurge, a final fling—was having, in the very fact of separation from his wife and daughter, a minor debauch—things hadn’t come off as he had shyly hoped they might.

  “Nobody’s fault but my own,” he said to the empty room. Unattached men were worth their weight in gold around the hotel. Miss Furman, the Social Hostess, had pounced on him before he had his bags unpacked. Mrs. Conyngham, the Public Relations Woman, had played Do-You-Know with Mr. Mather and had been more than satisfied with his business and social connections, his New England lineage. And Mr. Mather had run from both women and their steely attempts to lure him into organized play.

  Mr. Mather wished he could. . . Well, Mr. Mather didn’t exactly know what he wished he could do. Mr. Mather. . .

  The telephone rang. “Sev-vin oh clock, Mis-t
ah Matherr. Gud Mor-ninggg!”

  At last! Eagerly Mr. Mather rose to begin another day of play in Florida.

  “We-land-in-Miami-in-ten-minutes-fasten-your-seat-belts-please,” the stewardess chanted as she tittuped up the aisle. “We-land-in-Miami-in-ten-minutes-fasten-your-seat-belts-please.” She stopped at Seat 14-6, arranged her face into a smile of winsome American girlhood for the benefit of the old dame who was sitting there and said even more loudly, “We land in Mi-ami in ten minutes. Fasten your seat belt, ple-eze. Would you like me to help you with your belt, Miss Pomerantz?” The stewardess always singled out one passenger—usually someone very young or very old, or a couple of nuns or a mother with a baby—to overwhelm with special attentions. It showed what a swell girl she was, so sympathetic and tender, so good at remembering names.

  “I have fastened it, thank you,” Dr. Anna Pomery said. Then Dr. Pomery turned back to the window to gaze down upon the town.

  Undaunted, the stewardess plunged on. “Your first trip to Florida, Miss Pomerantz?”

  “I have been here many times before,” Dr. Pomery said. She was lying. It was her first trip to Florida, her first time in a plane, but she wasn’t going to give that offensive child the satisfaction of finding out and patronizing her any further. Again she turned and stared out of the window.

  Dismayed, but still game, the girl continued. “We are now flying over one of America’s most costly and exclusive hotels, Miss Pomerantz. You see that big pink hotel just off the tip of the wing?That is called the—”

  “I know,” Dr. Pomery said. “That is where I am staying.”

  The stewardess’ magenta mouth flew open. Then she closed it, turned on her smile again and switched on up the aisle. “We-land-in-Miami-in-ten-minutes-fasten-your seat-belts-please.”