The Paragon Hotel Read online

  “You’re such a comfort, you know, Miss James. Forgive me for being this direct, but so many young women have abandoned the ideals of motherhood and child-rearing. Anyhow, I wanted to tell you that I trust in you, truly, to find a proper mate. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, dear, being a tad plain, a bit forgettable. That requires moral courage, you know, and someday the right man will take notice. Just you trust in God and in His timing.”

  The genuine smile that pools over my face pleases her. I’m recalling sitting at the Tobacco Club with Mr. Salvatici, wearing a House of Worth gown. It plunged in great V’s down my chest and my back, neckline bordered in a thick stripe of golden beadwork that made my carefully curled hair gleam like Broadway at midnight. The loose bodice fell in pale sea-breeze greens and blues, dripping sequined bubbles into an underskirt of aqua tulle, and when I threw back my head and laughed from heavily rouged lips, only six or seven hundred people that night looked at me at all.

  If I’d wanted to get storked, I could have done it when I was seventeen. I wear a rubber womb veil, thank you—all the fast girls do, and the careless ones have been more than once to the lady doctor who solves their problems. She takes a vacation every Christmas to shore up her energies for the post–New Year’s stampede. No kidding. A lot has changed since the War. Since Prohibition.

  Since six days ago.

  If I must die, let it be in a city. Nobody dead nowhere is too much punishment. So let it be in Portland, I decide, wondering how far I can make it until dissolving into ocean foam like some mermaids of note who weren’t loved in return either.

  * * *

  —

  When we arrive, it’s still dark.

  Clash-ring. Grate-scrape. Whistle blast.

  Now my head is pounding, and I dread what happens next with all that’s left of my heart.

  Here’s mud in your eye.

  Sitting up, I use my arms mainly, and I don’t shriek over the sensation. Markedly unpleasant though it is.

  “Well, you simply must contact me when you’re feeling better, Miss James,” Mrs. Snider fusses. “I think we could be great friends despite the difference in our ages. My husband, Fred, is a member of the Arlington Club, and you seem of such good stock, I imagine he must know your parents already. Which is their congregation?”

  “Oh . . . my parents are poor farmers some sixty miles outside the city. I send them whatever I can from my own income as a music teacher. In fact, I’m still very new to Portland. I miss them, and the farm, just . . . just terribly.”

  When she raises her eyebrows, it’s as if a cardboard box lifted its lid. “You dear, sweet soul. Please look me up—the right connections mean everything. And there are a great many young bachelor gentlemen of our acquaintance with sober and pleasing ways! Here is my card—”

  As I’m taking it, resenting the extra weight of carrying so much as her printed name, a polite knock sounds.

  By now my pulse is too feeble to blaze up into genuine panic and gives a flicker of dismay instead. But it’s Max again. He’s wearing a chocolate-brown hat that suits his lighter complexion and a beige trench that matches the pale leather of his luggage. His eyes dart, identify the olive coat I’d hung and forgotten, and he snatches it up, draping it respectfully over my shoulders.

  Mrs. Snider looks as if someone just slapped her on the ass. It’s dreadfully unfair I haven’t the energy to be amused.

  “Aw, Miss James, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this here favor you’re doing me.” Max’s grin is blinding. “You’re a model Christian, I tells you. I’ll carry your bags like they was my own firstborn.”

  “You—I—whatever is the meaning of this, George?” Mrs. Snider splutters.

  Max whisks off his hat and rests it over his heart. “It’s like this, see. I was looking sorta down as we passed in the corridor earlier, yeah? And Miss James asks what’s wrong, and I own up that my mum’s been sick, and times is hard. Not feeling too jake herself, Miss James here offers to pay me to carry her things. She a genuine example of piety and charitableness, says I.”

  Max is fibbing like a born grifter.

  That means Nobody the sweet flapper can fib too.

  “Oh yes—I do feel so weak, and George here needs everything he can scrape together for his family.”

  Mrs. Snider’s brows lock. “My dear, this is—”

  “No time, Mrs. Snider,” I insist, knowing Max can’t. He picks up my flowered carpetbag and valise. “I’m expected by my roommate, and she worries over the smallest delays. I’ll go much faster with George’s help. Thank you for your kindness. I just know we’ll see each other again when I’m better!”

  With my last reserves, I follow Max’s deliberately slow strides. Not used to being abandoned like an empty tuna tin, Mrs. Snider doesn’t yammer over it. Which might be proof of the existence of a Higher Deity after all.

  Every step is torture. The aisles fill with strangers squeezing past one another, pinstripe suits, fedoras, silk skirts under wool cloaks, flat cloth caps. I concentrate on Max’s broad back until we reach the exit and I falter at the handrail, eyeing the steps as if they’re Niagara and I donned a barrel this morning.

  Max turns. “Right this way, Miss James, steady as she goes.”

  A red-hot railroad tie is lodged in my side, and this time I can’t help it. A pleading noise escapes my nose as I descend, and Max takes my arm. Quickly releasing it, he hovers. Not touching me, wouldn’t that be simply scandalous, but ready to catch me should I go the way of the high pop fly ball. A chill April breeze brushes my damp skin.

  People are probably staring now.

  Well, if watching me die is their brand of flea circus, I’m not giving them a curtain call.

  “Miss James, you gotta get through the station, and then I’ll help,” Max says under his breath. “Ready?”

  I don’t answer.

  I walk.

  Union Station is bigger than I thought it would be, more elegant. In fact, it’s altogether jazzy. Marble walls the color of sand with pretty etched arches, a high coffered ceiling painted a warmer yellow, stone floors in the same beach-bright tones. Dignified metal chandeliers hang over the benches stretching away, away, away as my vision tunnels. It’s no Penn Station, but it’ll serve.

  Concentrate on the floor.

  Concentrate on your shoes.

  Max’s hand is three inches from my left elbow.

  Concentrate on that.

  When we emerge into star-spangled night, my jaw unhinges. There are so many galaxies strewn like fistfuls of seed pearls behind the station’s clock tower with its pointed peak. Shockingly, achingly beautiful. I wouldn’t mind its being the last thing I see.

  “You ain’t used to the light.”

  “The what?”

  “One thing I’ve learned from trains is the less city you’re in, the more stars there is. That there’s science, Miss James.”

  As we step away from the glow of the station, I stumble, Max says, “Easy now, scrapper,” and his hand wraps around my forearm, warm and comforting, and tears are making fast tracks down my cheeks because I can’t hold down the fort any longer.

  “Where are we going?” I choke.

  Max looks down. “Aw, none of the waterworks, Miss James. A tough bird like you? Put a dab of mustard on it. On our way, you can tell me where you’re from, ’cause it sure as hell is summery ain’t Yonkers.”

  If I weren’t so compromised, I’d be flabbergasted. It’s impossible to see through Nobody’s personas.

  She isn’t there.

  “Harlem. But don’t bother sending back my remains, the river will do. I presume you have a river here—any city that’s of any consequence simply must have a river. Crooked police department and working sewers likewise impressive features.”

  “Speakeasies. A good deli.”

  “Maybe even a fo
untain, if you’re terribly posh.”

  “Sure, we got a river. There’s even a fountain.”

  “Max, you amaze me.”

  “I’ll show ’em to you.”

  “Some other time.”

  “That’ll be swell. Harlem, you say. Born and raised?”

  “Bred too. Established eighteen ninety-six.”

  “Well, that explains it,” he mutters.

  “Please say where you’re taking me, the suspense is altogether too decadent for five a.m.”

  “I’da thought you’d have that much figured by now. We’re going to see the doctor.”

  I fight him, wild with terror, until he folds me up using his coat like a straitjacket.

  Sucking in air despite the burning hurt it causes, I nestle there with my head on his chest. Rain starts to fall, a cool pitter-pat of moisture mingling with the tears on my cheeks, gathering on Max’s shoulders. I like the sensation, feel as if I’m being washed away someplace cleaner. Someplace new that God just slapped the serial number on. Maybe that’s what Portland is like, I can’t tell yet from inside this lovely cave where I gasp and shiver. Max smells of sweet cigar smoke and something like cinnamon and the clean starch in his pressed shirt.

  “Hush now, hush,” I think he’s saying, “I’ve got you. You need to hush.”

  We’re in an alleyway, streetlight from draperies of electric bulbs bathing us and the rain glistening on the pavement, Max and his coat and me inside it. Because Max isn’t an idiot, and this is the sort of thing, in every place in the slow-spinning world except for Harlem, that could get him killed, and why he’s decided to risk his life for nobody at all, I haven’t the faintest idea.

  I only calm after Max starts singing “Avalon.” His voice is a low purr.

  I found my love in Avalon

  Beside the bay.

  I left my love in Avalon and sailed away.

  I dream of her and Avalon

  From dusk ’til dawn.

  And so I think I’ll travel on

  To Avalon.

  ◆ Two ◆

  Oregon is a land for the white man, and refusing the toleration of negroes in our midst as slaves, we rightly and for a yet stronger reason, prohibit them from coming to us as free negro vagabonds.

  —“ALL HAIL! THE STATE OF OREGON,” Oregon Weekly Times, Portland, Oregon, November 14, 1857

  The road is muddy. Puddles swell and shimmer. The crying jag left me hollow as a shell casing. Max navigates roads I can’t see save for rain scattering like shattered crystal, humming with his hat pulled low. Finally, he guides me into a side street littered with broken bottles and cracked bricks. A featureless door confronts us, as does the happy stink of fry grease.

  “Miss James, welcome to the Paragon Hotel.”

  Max pushes his way through.

  We’re in a clean, spacious kitchen with a white-and-black tiled floor and copper pots hanging from the ceiling. An extraordinarily thin colored woman with biceps like braided rope and a red kerchief tied ’round her hair marvels at us.

  “Maximilian Burton, who do you got there, and what are you doing in my kitchen with her?” she demands.

  “Miss Christina.” Max makes a little bow without letting go of me. “Don’t you look swell this morning? I’d stay and chat, but I needs to get Miss James here to a room.”

  Thunking a spoon against the pot she tends, Miss Christina crosses her arms over her chest, hunching as if to see me better. She must be well over thirty, but her small size lends her a youthful quality. She’s lean jawed and plain but very lively—the sort who make out spectacularly as flappers, with a few spangles and an artful smear of lipstick—and she appears to suppose I’m some kind of cheap floozy when really I’m an awfully expensive thug.

  The fried fish I smell sits on a wire rack, a staff meal for the maids and the doormen. It’s so familiar, it’s heartbreaking—I’ve lived in hotels for my entire life, I know how they operate just before dawn. Bread rises in the oven and beans bubble in the pot with some sort of pork oozing into them. I wonder when I last ate and can’t recall.

  “Oh, she needs a room, does she?” Miss Christina’s face screws up. “And whoever done heard of a stray cat, not to mention a white one, following you home, Max?”

  “There’s this type of situation known as an emergency,” he hisses.

  “Oh, you figure?”

  “Yeah, I figure.”

  “Your emergency, is it, personally?”

  “How many crises you suppose you’ve handled without a direct stake, Miss Christina?”

  “My share. But you ain’t right in the head if you figure we can take her in, things bad as they are. She’s unlucky.”

  “So’s a white girl’s corpse in one of my sleeper cars. What’s your opinion on broken mirrors?”

  Her eyes widen. She shouts out the kitchen door for help. Rainbow spots dart to and fro across my vision. Before I can be so bold as to request a chair, a sturdy blue-black matron charges in with a prim, pretty maid and a pair of half-dressed bellhops who gape at me with varying levels of astonishment.

  Then every eye flies to the older woman. As if she’s a high priestess or a queen, possibly both.

  “Max, child, there had better be an explanation forthcoming, and I mean at this very moment,” the woman drawls with a peach-dripping Georgia accent.

  “I done found her in Chicago and was with her on the Denver leg, barely able to move from her bunk. She’s from Harlem. We can’t let her die alone on a train platform,” Max bites out. “Someone hurt her, bad. I can’t tell if it’s lady troubles or—”

  A storm of activity interrupts him. People call out instructions, feet vibrating through the tiles of the kitchen floor. I can feel this with marvelous accuracy because I’m on the kitchen floor. The back of my head is cold. There isn’t one place that hurts any longer, there are only vibrating waves of please stop, and I’ve lost the reason this is happening to me.

  Probably for the best.

  When the bellhops get back and a flat half-assembled cot is wedged under my back, I do finally scream. And figure I’ll keep at it even though the matron is trying to hush me.

  Next thing I know, I am indeed in a hotel room.

  The chandelier is thick with metal leaves, the walls neatly papered. Petite cobalt flowers on a grey trellis. Squinting, I see a basin and pitcher, a desk, a sapphire chintz bench with a cushioned armrest, carved posts at the end of my bed.

  My coat is gone, shoes missing, and my dress half shrugged off me. A man’s unsteady hands are setting the coverlet over my lower half.

  Then they’re lifting my chemise and I push them away.

  “No!” I snarl.

  If you ever must see a doctor in an emergency, you see one in our pay, or who knows how fast you would be in the Hudson, my dear young lady, a well-remembered voice that can’t protect me anymore says in my head.

  “Miss James, I think is your name?” a gravelly rasp inquires. “Or so Max tells us. I don’t really give a damn what your name is, but I am a physician and must adjust your underthings.”

  Blinking, I try to understand what sort of fellow I’m looking at. It’s not exactly duck soup. His face is pale mulatto and as blanketed in freckles as New York summers are populated with mosquitoes. His irises are green, peering from behind what some would call spectacles and I’d call a set of awfully sturdy beer steins. Wire-brush grey hair bristles from his pate. I smell cheap whiskey, a sweet-sour cloud, which may or may not be emanating from him. Since he wears only a robe and pajamas, he either resides at the hotel or else doesn’t plan on running for public office.

  “All right, I’m Miss James, then.”

  “Dr. Doddridge B. Pendleton. Whether or not you are in fact Miss James—as I said, I don’t give a damn.”

  “I’m awfully sorry to be so much trouble.” />
  “Trouble is the nature of my profession.”

  “Where’s Max?”

  “Sugar, this ain’t the time for a wide audience, agreed?” The matron sits on the end of the bed. Her thick hair is braided in proud hulking coils, upswept, and streaked with pewter. An upside-down tornado. “I calculate you’re wary of strangers, but so are we, and I can vouch for the doctor’s character. Now. Is it lady trouble?”

  A pause. Recalling I’m going to die, I lift my chemise myself.

  “It’s twenty-five-caliber trouble.”

  The twin wounds have turned monstrous. Fire-breathing dragons guarding a horde.

  Dr. Pendleton slides his glasses up and down his nose like a trombone. He exchanges a grim look with the matron, who shakes her head.

  Tension spreads in spider-silk patterns, fans weblike throughout the room. The vote against my being here seems unanimous so far, saving only Max. I’m not brainless enough to think we’re in Harlem, but from their faces, this is the moss-draped heart of Jim Crow Missouri with a right jolly banjo strumming in the distance. Not a Northern port city.

  “Miss James, was this done by accident?”

  Animal fear parches my throat at the slightest reference to Nicolo Benenati.

  “Of course it was an accident,” I grate. “This is what happens when a silly girl takes up with a real rat, and I’m paying the piper now. He was drunk, he’s always drunk, God, and he’d spilled me enough times before that I hated the thought of visiting the carpet again. So I ran, and I think he meant to scare me. He always says he loves me when it’s over, but after this—can’t you see? I could have died.”

  That’s an old story, and a good one.

  Dr. Pendleton blows air past his lips, and yes, the liquor perfume is definitely his brand. “Is this man likely to follow you here? Truthfully, now.”

  I force a laugh. “Not in his state—he passed out cold as an icebox. Missed me playing Red Cross, me packing, the whole onion. Doc, I never meant to get Max in hot water. He rescued me, and I didn’t have a vote. He seems dreadfully headstrong.”