Work of Art

33

Like Deacon Wheelwright of the Connecticut Inn, Mr. Henry Fiesel was a vestigial remnant of the rustic tradition in hotel-keeping. He was as crafty and secretive as Wheelwright, but more boldly speculative, and considerably meaner. For years he had kept hotel in New York, but he remained a suspicious, penny-pinching, country innkeeper. He still wore rubbers and long woollen underwear. Though he was actually smooth-shaven, you remembered him as wearing sandy side-whiskers. Spiritually, he did wear sandy side-whiskers. They had merely grown inside.

He had risen from working in a lodging-house in New York to the sole proprietorship, now that he was sixty-eight, of the nine-hundred-and-fifty-room Fiesel Hotel, a respectable, cheap, yet lavishly gilded pile which made much of its income from the cut-rate drug store and the 'beauty-shop' off its large lobby, and from its bustling Gothic Coffee Shop, where business men saved time (it was never explained for what they saved it) by lunching on stuffed eggs, toast Melba, and coffee, and their stenographers in a more leisurely and elegant way trifled with a bacon-and-tomato sandwich and an ice cream soda.

The Fiesel Hotel was a railway station minus anything so romantic as trains destined for Key West or Seattle. And of this camp under a roof, Myron was made manager-in-chief in the autumn of 1928, eight months after quitting the Black Thread Inn.

He had, for his share in the Black Thread Inn, theoretically worth $130,000, been able to get only $60,000, and he had been glad enough to have that. He had diligently lost $15,000 in his only stock-market gamble and, back at real work, awakened from nightmare, he was relieved to have so much as $45,000 left, invested in bonds.

In the eight months, a little sick of a career of hotel-keeping that could wind up in Dick Pye's drunken party at the Inn, he had wandered, he had peeped into other dodges, such as starting a chain of garages and, not altogether content yet no longer feeling futile and ridiculous, no longer awakening at five to crouch and brood, he had gone back to his last, at the Fiesel Hotel.

Old Fiesel was snuffling and sniffling about his need of a vacation after years of unrelenting work, and a month after Myron took charge, he went off with his wife to Los Angeles and rented a bungalow for the winter. He had stayed in New York just long enough to give Myron an appreciation of his quality, which was that of decaying ragweed.

Myron's systems of food-cost-finding were as naught beside Fiesel's natural genius for getting raw materials at a seventh of a cent per ounce cheaper. He loved to save pennies even if it cost him pounds. When canned vegetables were cheaper than fresh, Fiesel convinced himself that he preferred the taste of the canned ones. He had the lights cut off in the servants' rooms at ten-thirty. He never permitted a new carpet to be purchased so long as the old one could be painfully stitched together. He spent hours of joyful energy in working out codes of fining dish-washers for broken dishes, chambermaids for missing towels, no matter whether they were stolen by guests or otherwise lost, cashiers for shortage of petty cash, bell-boys for being one minute late in the morning or for smoking cigarettes in corridors.

He was an enthusiast about 'the value of fraternal organizations,' which value, to him, was providing banquets and conventions for his beloved fraternity brothers. He was astounded to find that Myron was such a novice at inn-keeping as to belong only to the Masons and Elks, and pointed out that the manager of the rival Hotel Bonnie Claire (also a large and gilded stable for human cattle) was no less than Monarch of Ramadan Grotto, Occult and Brotherly Order of the Winged Warriors of the Cretan Caravan. He insisted that Myron become a Monarch, or a Perpetual Potentate, or at the very least a Princely Prophet.

Myron said he'd look into it right away and, for once, didn't. He grumbled to himself that he was an innkeeper, not a pedlar, and he was altogether unimpressed by Fiesel's long-winded tale about Myron's predecessor who, as Past Worshipful Master of Israel Putnam Lodge, 'had captured a lodge banquet for twelve hundred at seven dollars a plate, though a rival hotel had quoted $6.90 and had included squabs, whereas the Hotel Fiesel had given them only Long Island duckling, at a time when duckling was going begging at twelve and fourteen cents a pound'.

When Old Fiesel had gone off to California, nervously leaving Myron in charge, he wrote to Myron every day the treasures of his travel observation--which had nothing to do with mountains and sea. ('And serve me damn well right,' admitted Myron. 'Didn't I go to Europe, and see nothing but hotels, all for the purpose of making a private joint for Dick Pye? Next time I go, I'll look at nothing but art galleries and the damn scenery, I will!') Fiesel wrote to Myron, on a faded picture postcard, that hot tamales ought to be featured on the menu, because they cost approximately nothing to make, and could be played up as a Mexican Delicacy. Again he wrote that the east had not begun to appreciate the cafeteria. And Myron hated his busy meannesses more than he had the jolly scoundreldom of Jimmy Shanks.

He was confused, still, and he told himself, not quite accurately, that he was coming to dislike everything connected with hotel-keeping. Unreasonable and complaining guests. Dishonest and thievish guests. Oily guests who wanted favours. The incessant headachy effort to save tenth-pennies on food. The clever Jewish girl public stenographer with her desk on the mezzanine balcony, who asserted, 'I'm some little kidder--I certainly know how to handle the fresh guys,' and who, when she said 'Good morning, Mr. Weagle,' sang it, crooned it, coyly narrowing her eyes at him in invitation. He did not the more like her because he knew that she was the owner's private spy, and was reporting to Fiesel about him and the rest of the staff daily.

He particularly, now, disliked the whole cosmetic-beautyparlour-manicure-hairdressing-perfumestinking-powdersmeared business that was increasingly important in urban hotel-keeping. He was glad that Effie May was out of it--back in Mount Vernon, while Luke impressed his Mount Vernon schoolmates by possibly fanciful tales of hunting bear, wolves, and moose in the shrieking wilds of Connecticut. He detested the new fashion whereby women had their nails stained so scarlet that they looked like the harem. 'That's what hotels are getting to be--harems!'

Yet he was guiltily dreaming again of the Perfect Inn. . . .

He saw it now as a small and simple place, for small and simple people, but with pleasant rooms, and food that should be an event--the real descendant of such inns as the Cat and Fiddle, with no bastard union with the Riviera. He began to wonder if the Black Thread Inn had not been too ornate, and, still more, too dependent on the fickleness of that brazen-hearted tribe, the Rich--began to wonder if, in his first epic, there had not been too many Purple Passages.

And in particular he wanted an inn that he should really own by himself, and manage by himself, so that if it should fail, he would be honestly responsible, and not the victim of collaborators with too lush a style.

His life, in 1929, was complicated by Ora's falling into an immense success--call it success.

Working night and day for six days, with a well-known Hollywood actor, clever but now out of favour, Ora had written a play, the play of the hour, with all the right condiments of the moment: a dash of racketeers and murder, a spoonful of sarcasm about Washington politicians, a delicate suggestion of Lesbianism, but under it all a sturdy romance and a lovely ending which combined a passionate kiss with a funny slap at all passionate kissing.

It was accepted immediately. It was rewritten in collaboration with a standard playwright. It was tried out in a summer theatre, brought into New York in September, became the sensation of the autumn, and was sold to the movies for eighty thousand dollars. It is true that Ora had to drop both his collaborators because, as he explained to Myron, they were crooked and did not keep their promises, but he found a new one and, late in the autumn, was writing another play, with a two-thousand dollar advance. Ora's picture was in every paper, with accounts of his lonely boyhood, struggles in earning his way through Yale, his three years hidden away in a Florida swamp while he wrote and tore up sixteen plays.

None of these accounts mentioned the manager of the Fiesel Hotel.

Ora had a suite at the Victor Hugo, where he often entertained his friend Dick Pye, he had a Lincoln car, an autographed set of the works of S. S. Van Dine, and sixteen suits of clothes. He took a good deal of light exercise in the way of walking from the Victor Hugo to the Fiesel, to tell Myron why he had failed at the Black Thread Inn. He explained that Myron was right enough in his way, but he ought not to try to associate with the smart friends of Dick Pye.

He even paid back all he had ever borrowed from Myron, with interest at five per cent.

It is true that his figures did not agree with those kept through the years by Myron. Always, Myron had been willing to let 'the kid' have money when in need, but he had never been able to keep himself from setting down the exact sums in his private account book--along with every five cents he had ever spent for an apple. But Ora did not know this, and Myron did not tell him, even when Ora chuckled (in the presence of Myron's secretary), 'The joke of it is that you've always thought I was too much of a wild, dreamy poet to be accurate, and you've always hammered me for it, whereas, you can see, the fact is that I'm much more considerate and exact than you are.'

Indeed, as he said, Ora was considerate. For he waited till the secretary was gone before he added, 'You're an interesting case, Myron. Take this matter of your going haywire at the Inn, and getting sore at others because you failed! You spent half your life doing things for people out of weak good-nature, and now, apparently, you're going to spend the next half, out of weak resentment, kicking about their doing you!'

Myron did not answer. He did not, though he longed to, shake Ora as he had shaken Dick Pye. He was tired of quarrelling.

'Am I losing all my grip?' he whispered to himself. 'I'm cranky to guests. I can't get myself to care when some fool woman complains her chambermaid has been rude. I'm suspicious of Fiesel, who's a decent enough old codger, after all. I'm getting lazy, I guess.'

He was kept from too much fretting by his routine duties--and actually, he rarely was 'cranky to guests'. The routine duties were about all he could find, so frozen was the Fiesel Hotel in Fiesel's cold breath. The principal changes he could make were to add his old sergeants, Gritzmeier and Clark Cleaver, to the staff.

Even in these days of 1929, the height of prosperity (yet obviously only the beginning of a new and unexampled prosperity, now that America had secured the financial leadership of the world) Gritzmeier and Cleaver were going badly, and were glad to come to the Fiesel for no great salaries. They were of doubtful repute, for Mr. Richard Pye had let it be known that they had 'let him down' at the Black Thread Inn. Myron felt responsible for them and, in interminable nagging correspondence, made Fiesel pay them quite a percentage of what they were worth.

And Myron went on, day after day, with the details of middle-class hotel-keeping which he had thought to give up forever. Yet if by some miracle Fiesel should decide to stay in California permanently, he could make something a little different and interesting of the hotel.

He was just beginning a day's work with plans for a children's playroom, to tempt parents who come to New York for shopping, when he was conscious of someone standing by his desk, waiting, and looked up to see the goat-like smile of Henry Fiesel.

'Why, I thought you were . . .'

Myron got no farther. Fiesel tittered, 'Yeh, I been here since six this morning. I came in by the delivery entrance. They bought some new ash-cans when they could of repaired the old ones. I caught a chambermaid eating candy in a linen-room. That new clerk, Cleaver, was two minutes late. I checked up on some of the stock in the storeroom. They was two boxes of corn flakes shorter than their figures. There's too many floor-brushes in the broom-closet on the twelfth floor. There's six guests that--I know their financial standing--they're paying four dollars for rooms that you could get five dollars from 'em, and what I always say is, hotel-keeping ain't a charity.'

He giggled, laid his umbrella on Myron's desk, sat down, carefully pulling up his faded old blue serge trousers, fondly stroked a small wart on his chin, and rattled on: 'This high-toned new Dutch chef of yours, Gritzmeier, ain't so good. He's only had hash on the breakfast bill of fare twice in ten days, and what I always tell my boys is, Hash is what pays the taxes. You been advertising too much in charity programs. The hotel detective smokes Havana cigars--where'd he get the money, that's what I want to know. There's a busted soap-dish in the bathroom in 676. There's a cobweb in elevator seven. That Dutch chef of yours uses too many mushrooms in a mushroom omelet. The Do Not Disturb card in 892 has fly specks on it. Your tie ain't quite straight. Way I figger it, it's details that make good hotel-keeping. Probably you up-and-coming young swells never think of it that way, but it's attention to details that does it, and that means work and hours and not going out dancing or looking at theatre shows every night. Good morning. I'll be seeing you.'

He was gone, and Myron's chief concern was that he had not shown resentment of this snooping driveller, as he would have done in days when he was more sure of himself.

Never, from that morning, did he quite feel himself manager of the Fiesel. The old man--he lived now in an apartment in Jackson Heights--came in anywhere from once a week to thrice a day, any time from four in the morning to one in the morning, and he never failed to find flaws, no difficult feat of scholarship in a hotel of nine hundred and fifty rooms which he deliberately kept a little understaffed. He used his criticisms as a water-dripping torture to keep Myron nervous and busy--only he, who always and most tediously boasted of possessing a 'kind of gift for seeing right through folks' did not see that this was not the best method of getting the most labour out of the particular sort of wage-slave that Myron was.

Myron did not want to resign again, not so soon. But he thought about it enough.

Then the catastrophe.

Fiesel dashed into Myron's office, shrieking, 'You hired this Gritzmeier!'

'Yes. Why?'

'Yes! Why! That's what I want to know--why! Max Sussman, of Sussman Brothers, the wholesale butchers, has been to see me. God! I've known Max for years. He's an honest man. If he gives a commission to a steward or a chef, it's only what's customary. And your Gritzmeier has been trying to hold him up for five per cent over the right amount of graft! I heard it this morning, and I've been looking around. Gritzmeier and your other man, Cleaver, have been stealing from me by juggling their food accounts. Cleaver worked the cheque in the front office. And them two have padded the kitchen pay-roll and drew down money for help that don't exist! Well, Mr. Smarty Manager, you and your pets, what do you propose to do about it?'

Myron knew that Fiesel was not the kind of fool to have his accusation wrong.

'What do their stealings come to?' he said heavily.

'I figure about thirty-seven hundred dollars, so far.'

'I'll fire them, of course. And I'll see the money is paid back.'

'Oh, ain't that sweet of you! But that ain't enough, Mr. Manager! I'll not rest till I see those two dirty crooks behind the bars! Stealing from me!'

'Then you'll never get the money back. I didn't know they were stealing. I don't know what they've done with the swag. But I do know they're both clean broke. It isn't worth all that money to you to see them in jail. Three--thousand--seven--hundred--dollars!'

'Well, yes, mebbe something to what you say. But no man ever put nothing over on Henry Fiesel! No, sir, I . . .'

'I understand just how you feel, sir, but three thousand, seven hundred dollars!'

'Well. All right. I'll be merciful. I'll be merciful if you guarantee the return of the money, personal.'

'I do.'

'All right. Have 'em in, and I'll give 'em such a talking to . . .' Fiesel rubbed his dry hands together so that they rasped.

'No, I've got to see them alone. Otherwise I can't be responsible. Who's got the exact dope, if I need it?'

'The hotel dick and that public stenographer on the mezzanine.'

'All right. Let me talk to them.' For the first time his tone said distinctly to Fiesel, 'Now get out.'

Myron sighed, as he waited for the traitors. He thought nothing. There was nothing to think.

Otto Gritzmeier shambled in trying to look jolly. It was a ghastly look of jolliness--like the face of a Santa Claus coated with thick flour. Clark Cleaver was trembling.

Myron sat still, waving them to chairs.

'Well, what about it?' he said.

Gritzmeier's great red hands fluttered about his chin. 'Vat about vat?' he demanded belligerently.

Myron merely looked unhappy. 'I thought you two were loyal! You alone.'

Gritzmeier's eyes were damp, with the rheumy, undignified grief of old age. He sobbed.

'What happened?' Myron said more sharply.

With endless winding excuses, his accent almost unintelligible in his emotion, Gritzmeier told the story. Out of work after he had been discharged from the Black Thread Inn, his widowed daughter-in-law and three beloved grandchildren on his hands, he had got into debt before Myron had taken him on at the Fiesel. Then his grandson had infantile paralysis. He had spent thousands on the boy--and he did not have the thousands. He hated Fiesel, hated the sneakiness and the smirk of the old devil. 'He iss chust like a stale doughnut in a lunch-room, dat fellow!' wailed Gritzmeier. It angered him to think of working to make money for that human tin bank; angered him the more that Fiesel wanted none of his fine cooking, but only glorified hash. And the 'leetle boy' was so broken. He had felt that he was taking it out of Fiesel. He had never thought of injuring Myron.

He could not work out his happy plans of stealing without someone in the Front Office to falsify the accounts, and that one he found in his colleague at the Inn, Clark Cleaver.

'Yes. I understand, more or less,' Myron interrupted, not ungently. On Cleaver he turned with a terrible blazing: 'But you, you sanctified young pup! You turner on parallel bars! What the hell excuse had you?'

'Well, I just--I figured I could double it on the market and put it back. And Otto persuaded me . . .'

'All you characters in the Bible are alike! "Somebody tempted me and I did eat"! You make me sick, both of you. Either of you got any money left?'

'No-uh,' groaned Gritzmeier.

'Then I'll pay it, God damn you--I'll take it from my family for your damned families. What makes me sickest isn't you two, with your dirty little small-boy stealing--it's the fact that I'm supposed to be an executive, and I let this obvious stealing go on--that apparently you two didn't respect me enough to be loyal!'

'Oh, no, Chief, we . . .'

'Chief! Chief! Get out of my sight! I don't blame you. I that let you be weak. Only I'm not a superman. I simply can't stand the sight of you, or of myself. Get out!'

And he watched some large part of his honesty as a craftsman melt away, and he sat there in his prim, efficient office lonelier than he had been in all his life.

He paid to Fiesel the amount of the defalcation--slightly over thirty-five hundred dollars it came to, when the books had been checked.

He knew that Fiesel suspected him of having been guilty along with Gritzmeier and Cleaver. Why else, reasoned the good weasel, would a man willingly pay out money? Fiesel had never liked him, anyway; he felt, with justice, that Myron was a flippant fellow who had none of his own reverence for pennies. From now on, he bedeviled Myron in every little way. Fiesel's genius for observation would have made him a great journalist. For every torn towel or loose stair-rod that he had found before, he found a dozen, now, and he chattered to Myron about all of them.

And this time, Myron had no contract! He had at the beginning agreed to wait for a contract till they should 'see how they got along together'. Yet now he was not restrained and unresentful. The loss of Gritzmeier and Cleaver had shaken him into recklessness. He would growl at Fiesel, 'Kindly take that up with the housekeeper. I'm busy.'

He wondered slightly at the old man's simper. He knew that it meant something nasty.

In the late summer, he rejoiced in being able to slip away for a three-weeks motor trip with Effie May and Luke. He avoided equally the Lambkins and all hotels. They stayed at farmhouses, and for ten days camped out in a lakeside cottage.

He came back feeling calmer, surprised that he had ever let Fiesel make him jumpy. He'd just have it out with the old devil; really talk frankly. After all, Fiesel was a good hotel-keeper, at least in ingenuity about details. Yes. They'd have it out.

On Myron's first morning back in his office, Henry Fiesel came squeaking in, accompanied by a square-faced, youngish man with grave eye-glasses.

'Weagle,' peeped the old man, 'I want you to meet Mr. John Eggthorne, formerly of the Blakeslee Hotel Chain.'

'I'm pleased to . . .'

'Yes, you'll be interested in him, Weagle. Because he's your successor! As of this morning, Weagle!'

Mr. Eggthorne smiled.

Fiesel was watching Myron with all the affection of a copperhead.

Then, as when he had seen Dick Pye among the cobwebs in a closet, Myron laughed. His worried face cleared. 'Welcome, Brother Eggthorne! I'll have my personal stuff out of this desk in fifteen minutes. Be sure and inspect Room 504. There's a blown-out bulb there. Good morning!'