Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

Leora said, with an angry laugh, “They’re gentlemen, at least. Not like some bastards.”

It was no secret that the Tap Room bartender was a friend of Leora’s who’d introduced her to some of these “hotel friends” over the years.

He had approached Rebecca, too. But Rebecca had told him no .

Not even for a fifty-dollar tip, honey?

No, no !

(In fact, Rebecca didn’t allow herself to think whether a fifty-dollar tip was a possibility, or one of Mulingar’s jokes. For her six-day, eight-hour workweek she was paid precisely forty-eight dollars, counted out into her hand by a smirking Amos Hrube.)

Rebecca felt revulsion, at the thought of being touched by a stranger. The prospect of sex-for-money was not one she wanted to think about since she knew (but had to pretend not to know) that both Katy and LaVerne sometimes took money from their “dates,” as well as Leora. As Katy said with a shrug It’s just something that happens it ain’t like it’s planned .

It was so, such encounters seemed to be unplanned. If you were a girl, young and seemingly alone and unprotected. A man would return to his hotel room claiming to have forgotten something, while Rebecca was making up the room. A man would glance up smiling at her in the corridor as if he hadn’t seen her until that moment and begin speaking with her with an air of nerved-up intimacy and Rebecca would smile politely and continue pushing her maid’s cart along the corridor shaking her head as if uncomprehending and except if a man was very drunk or very aggressive he would not follow.

“All right, honey. Have it your way.”

Or, weirdly echoing Amos Hrube: “Eh! Sor- ree .”

No predicting how Rebecca might be tipped after such an encounter. She might be left a few pennies scattered among soiled bedsheets, or a five-dollar bill folded on the dresser. She might be left a ravaged room. A filthy bathroom, an unflushed toilet.

Even so, Rebecca understood that it was nothing personal. It did not mean anything.

Even when there’d been no encounter, when she had not glimpsed a hotel guest, nor he her, Rebecca was sometimes wakened from her chambermaid trance by a room left in a disgusting state. As soon as you entered, you knew: a smell. Spilled whiskey, beer. Spilled food. Sex-smells, toilet smells. Unmistakable.

There were bedclothes dragged onto the floor as if in a drunken frolic. There were stained sheets, cigarette-scorched blankets, pillowcases soaked through with hair oil. Stained carpets, brocade drapes ripped from their fastenings and lying in heaps on the floor. Bathtubs ringed in filth, pubic hair in drains. (Each drain in each guest bathroom had to be clean. Not just clean but what Amos Hrube called sparkly-clean. Hrube was known to spot-check the rooms.) The worst was a filthy toilet, urine and even excrement splattered onto the floor.

Yet in this too there was the perverse satisfaction. I can do this, I’m strong enough . All chambermaids had such experiences, eventually. To be a housewife and a mother would not be so very different.

As the hotel room was cleaned, as Rebecca mopped, scrubbed, scoured, vacuumed, re-made the bed, restored order to what had been so ugly, she began to feel elated. As the harsh odor of cleanser replaced other odors in the bathroom and the mirror and white porcelain sink brightened, so her spirits revived.

How easy this is! Surfaces .

She would live like this, unthinking. From day to day she would drift. Her mother’s mistake had been to marry, to have babies. From that mistake all the rest had followed.

Wanting to exhaust herself so that, at night, she could sink into sleep without dreaming. Or, if she dreamt, without memory. Damned lucky and you know it! You, born here! Some days making her way like a sleepwalker scarcely aware of her surroundings in the high-ceilinged corridors of the General Washington Hotel into which, in life, Jacob Schwart had never once stepped.

“A chambermaid, Pa. That’s what I am.”

It was her revenge upon him, was it? Or her revenge upon her mother?

She’d left Rose Lutter abruptly, she felt guilt for her behavior. One night when the house was darkened she slipped away, furtive and cowardly. It was a few days after Easter. Never would she have to hear one of Reverend Deegan’s sermons again. Never again, see Miss Lutter’s look of hurt and reproach cast sidelong at her like a fishhook. She had made secret plans with Katy and LaVerne, who’d invited her to stay with them and so while Miss Lutter slept Rebecca made up her bed neatly for the final time and left, on her pillow, a brief note.

This damned note had been so hard to write! Rebecca tried, and tried, and could come up with only:

Dear Miss Lutter,

Thank you for all that you have given me.

I wish that

This was stiffly written in the schoolgirl “Parker Penmanship” that Miss Lutter had instilled in her pupils in grade school. Rebecca tried to think of something further to say and felt sweat break out in all her pores, damn she was ashamed of herself and she resented this, wasting time on Rose Lutter while her friends were eagerly awaiting her in their place on Ferry Street and she was impatient to join them for already it was past midnight. She was taking with her only her special possessions: the prize dictionary she’d won, and a very few items of clothing Miss Lutter had purchased for her that still fit her, and weren’t too young-looking, and silly on her tall rangy frame.

At last she ripped up the note she’d written, and tried again.

Miss Lutter,

Thank you for all that you have given me.

Jesus will be nicer to you than I can be. I am sorry!

Rebecca Esther Schwart

“First time I saw you, girl. I knew.”

These would be Niles Tignor’s words. Delivered in Tignor’s blunt deadpan manner. So that you gazed up at the man knowing yourself off-balance as if he’d reached out to poke you, not hard, but hard enough, his big forefinger into your breastbone.

It was August 1953. A sultry afternoon and no air-conditioning in most parts of the General Washington Hotel and the interior corridors airless, stifling. Rebecca was pushing her maid’s cart heaped with soiled linens and towels on the fifth floor when she saw, to her annoyance, a door at the far end of the corridor being pushed open with teasing slowness. This was room 557, she knew: the man in that room, registered as H. Baumgarten, was one who’d been giving her trouble. Baumgarten had paid for several nights at the hotel in advance, which wasn’t typical of most guests, but then Baumgarten wasn’t typical. He seemed to have little to do apart from lingering in his room, and drinking in the cocktail lounge and Tap Room on the first floor. Always he was lurking in the corridor hoping to speak with Rebecca who tried to be courteous with him though she hated such men, she hated such games! If she complained of Baumgarten to the hotel manager, he would want to blame her, she knew. From prior experience, she knew.

“Bastard. You have no right.”

Rebecca was seventeen years old, three months. Not so young any longer. Not the youngest of the female workers at the General Washington any longer.

She liked her work less. Brainless labor it was, mechanical and repetitive and yet the solitude was still a kind of drug to her, she could move through her days in a waking sleep like an animal that has no need to glance up from the ground before it. Except when she was wakened rudely by the unwanted interference of another, like the man in room 557.

She saw that the door had ceased opening, at a space of about two inches. Baumgarten must have been watching her from inside. And he would want Rebecca to know, to be uneasily aware of him watching her and her not able to see him not knowing if he was fully clothed or in his underwear, or worse yet naked. Baumgarten would be enjoying the chambermaid’s embarrassment, her very dislike of him.