Work of Art

35

During his two years as manager of the Alfred Hotel, Milwaukee, Myron was not discontented. The Alfred, with its four hundred and fifty rooms, had been built in 1900. It was astoundingly ugly: a vast cracker box, broken only by lines of bow-windows from second floor to top. The dull lobby was on the second floor; the ground floor was taken up by shops--a cut-rate tailor shop, a 'book store' which sold Easter cards and Christmas cards and newspapers and magazines of Western stories and almost everything except books; a jewellery shop with a gilded clock that was a veritable antique for a sign.

The hotel lobby smelled, ineradicably, of soap.

No Milwaukee fashionable ever entered the Alfred, except on the unfortunate occasion of a country relative's coming to town. The guests were travelling-men, merchants from small towns in Wisconsin and Southern Minnesota, dolorous widows come to help bury cousins.

It was an American House magnified ten times--and Myron was happier there than he had been since his first days with the Pye-Charian Company.

For the Alfred was genuine. It was exactly what it purported to be: a city inn for ordinary people. It had no gilt, and the honest menu did not do agonizing things with pineapple. The old German brewing family who owned it did not expect extravagant profits; they trusted Myron utterly, and had him and Effie May and Luke in for enormous dinners with Rhine wine. Myron ran the place as efficiently and as simply as a veteran engineer runs a locomotive, and his self-respect came flooding back like a spring freshet. 'I am an hotel-man, after all, by God!' he crowed, sure that he knew the whole craft, from carpet tacks to truite sauce bleu. And in their pleasant midwestern flat, with its sun-porch where she could sit and embroider and listen to the radio from the living-room, Effie May felt only a little bewildered and lost, and the tall young Luke played basket-ball in school, and told his respectful new friends about the glories of New York.

And all the while Myron had a feeling like the strained waiting before a thunder-shower, and he knew that he was again going to do something exciting, and he began, for the first time since the Black Thread Inn had opened, to put down plots in his little note-books.

Large summer camp not for older kids but 2 to 8. Appeal to parents going Europe summer. 1st consid, safety. 'Less danger of kidnapping than at home.' Guards keep every visitor out. And safety re health: resident pediatrician & full trained nurses. Visiting oculist, dentist. Regular weekly health examination. Every provision fun--wading pool, ponies, fish pond, & regular toy town--miniature houses, stores, rr. station & train. Sleep in sep dormitories, not over ten kids to dorm, & nurse sleeping in each. All bldgs one story for fire safety? Encourage kids compose and act own play?

He was certain that he wanted to do something a little different, but what it was, he did not know. It came to him quite simply, on an evening at home when the radio was playing the lush sentimentality of the 'Tales of Hoffman'. He would buy, own altogether by himself, and build up a small hotel in a country town . . . without any 'beauty shop' by thunder! Then, if he was successful, he might go on, might some day own a whole Elphinstone chain of hotels urban and rural. But that wouldn't matter if he could, for once, make a Perfect Inn!

The instant the Barcarole was finished, he strode across, turned off the radio, and cried to Effie May and to Luke--doing his 'home work' at the centre table, as once a small Myron had done it at a dining-room table in a rustic hotel--'Listen, you two! How'd you like to go out to some town farther west, and own our own hotel, and run it to suit ourselves?'

'Grand!' exulted Luke. 'Then I'd ride a horse!'

Effie May looked frightened. She clutched her chair-arms, as if to save herself from being dragged away. 'Oh! To move again! And to have to make new friends!' she whimpered. But she folded her hands in her lap and thrust her head back and whispered, 'All right, of course, dear.'

He had no particular, fanatic, escapist desire to tuck himself away in a country town just for its own sake. He did not believe that all the denizens of small towns were necessarily friendlier and nobler than city people. As an hotel-keeper, he had found all people everywhere much alike. It was simply that, with the reduction in the value of securities during the present depression, his holdings now were not worth much over twenty-five thousand. If he had had ten millions, he would have taken a large city hotel. He hadn't. And if he was ever to have a place of his own, he could not wait much longer, for he was fifty-two now, in 1932.

Among the places advertised for sale in the Hotel Era, he was most tempted by the very banal notice of the Commercial Hotel in Lemuel, Kansas. Though he had so firmly stated to himself that he was not, like a movie fanatic, tempted by the alleged romance of the west--he was! He had never forgotten the exhilaration of going from Connecticut to St. Louis, as a youngster.

The Commercial Hotel had exactly the same number of rooms and baths as the American House in Black Thread Centre before Myron had enlarged it.

'But will you be satisfied in a little place like that? After New York and Philadelphia and Long Island? Will you be satisfied?' begged Effie May.

'Of course I will! I like small towns. Why, certainly, I . . . Hell, no, of course I won't be satisfied! I guess I never will be, you poor kid!' said Myron.

Luxury Chinese restaurant, N.Y., charge five bucks for dinner, make it a Chink garden, real birds in trees (but screens over table then because of little fault of birdies), river flowing thru garden, on which Chink musicians in boat singing Chink songs, not too often. Also: for hot New York summers, a real 'winter garden': artificially chilled so have real snow for sliding, ice for skating & serve grub in a New England farm kitchen. But probly both these too phony--better for a Jimmy Shanks.

They drove out to Lemuel in the summer. Effie May lost her fear of new environment as she saw the enormous sky benign above the living corn. (It was just as well, for her, that she did not see a cyclone or a dust-storm.) 'The folks at hotels and garages', she admitted, 'are awful friendly.'

'You'll be the most popular girl in Lemuel', said Myron, and not till he had driven for miles did his Rotarian enthusiasm strike him as a little comic.

Luke was bouncing with love of it. As his father once had done, he saw himself a real Cowpuncher on a Pinto (he wasn't quite sure whether a pinto was a hoss or an herb, but it certainly sounded swell) and when they got back to Mount Vernon (as of course they would, when his dad got over his funny ideas about going west) what stories he would have! . . . Catamounts. Yosemites. Rattlesnakes. Deppities. Gentlemen nicknamed 'Two Gun'. Oh, won'er-ful!

Lemuel, Kansas, when wearily and dustily they came into it toward evening, after driving four hundred and fifty miles since five that morning, was no great city. It looked exactly like a hundred other towns through which they had driven: the same Main Street, the same two-story, wooden, transitory-looking stores.

'It seems--kind of--kind of small!' squeaked Effie.

'Oh, no, ma, it's dandy country to ride in!' bubbled Luke.

'We-ull,' said Myron.

The Commercial Hotel had been solidly built, by leisurely country carpenters: a white wooden cube, with a long porch giving on the cement sidewalk. The giddiest thing about it was the pot of geraniums on the sill of the large office window. The hotel was badly kept. The porch was dusty, with loose boards. The office, as they reluctantly trailed into it, was dirty; the inevitable brass spittoons were smeared; the inevitable leather upholstery of the row of rocking chairs was scarred and torn; the proprietor, behind the pine desk, was in his shirt-sleeves, and that shirt had not had attention from a laundress.

Myron was in a panic.

He thought of telegraphing to Carlos Jaynes about a job in New York. Surely he could always get one, now that he could again endure it.

His name was not known to the proprietor, because he had dealt only with an hotel-broker's office, bidding them keep his interest secret. When he registered, the gentleman in shirt-sleeves yawned 'Kind of hot for driving to-day', with that listlessness that only a country hotel-keeper can show.

Their two bedrooms were fairly dreadful. The beds squeaked. The lights were unshaded globes in the centre of the ceiling. The pine bureaus were tilted. The rooms smelled.

'Oh, I can't do it!' wailed Effie May.

'I know. Pretty lousy. But think of the fun of making a first-class place out of this!' said Myron. 'Look. Take this room. Put on a sort of old-fashioned wall-paper with little springs of flowers. Paint all the furniture a glossy white, and use a screw-driver and a little elbow-grease on that bed to keep it from squeaking. Put in a floor-plug, and have a bedside lamp, on a bedside table, with side-lights by the bureau. Chintz curtains. One easy chair--it could be just cane, with a bright cushion. Chuck out that filthy cotton comforter on the bed and put on a decent silk one. Whole thing wouldn't cost much over twenty-five dollars a room--and some intelligence and industry, which are obviously what this fellow here lacks.'

'Ye-es. And throw out those long tables in the dining-room--did you look in there from the office?--and put in small ones, and make that waitress I saw in there wash her hair,' considered Effie May.

She had, for the first time, become an hotel-man's wife.

Candy of the Week Club. Picture of ideal customer: She's old lady in New Eng village. Loves candy, but no place there to buy it, except stale quarter a lb. stuff. Her son in NY well to do. Sends her subscription to C of W club. Each week she gets lb absolutely fresh--mailed from factory, not over week old--and different kind for ea wk of yr: not only standard brands but Chink candy from S.F., those famous chocolates, what do they call em, from Victoria, B.C., cactus candy fr Mexico, even foreign imports, those swell Swiss candies I had in Paris, on which be willing to lose $$ for that week, to advertise. Ad: 'Make yr prest last fifty-two weeks'

In redecorating the Commercial Hotel, when he had bought it, Myron deliberately kept it as heavily simple as it had been. 'I guess probably the greatest lesson I ever got in hotel-keeping was when Ora razzed me for making the American House into a tea room,' he meditated. The bedrooms he changed as he had planned. It was surprising what a coat of white paint and ten minutes tightening up joints and a new mattress and eiderdown did to a greasy pine bed. He added six bathrooms. The office he kept much as it was--except that he had the chairs re-upholstered and the floor and walls actually washed. It was in the matter of food that he went revolutionary.

He had always believed, the more so after peering at Europe, that American country food could be at least as good as French country food, provided that the proud ladies who earned their living by it took the trouble to learn to cook. No country in the world had better raw meats and fruits and vegetables than America. And a good many years ago he had learned the apparently occult fact that there are guides called 'cook books'.

He could not afford a Gritzmeier. (He would have forgiven old Otto completely, and have given him a partnership, if the red-faced scoundrel had suddenly appeared!) He would have to depend on the local talent.

He picked out for cook not the most experienced lady in Lemuel who offered herself, but the one who seemed least resentful at being told that there were things she could learn. She was the skinny widow of a farmer West of Town; she did sing hymns, but she took chervil seriously, once she had heard of it. While he was redecorating the hotel, Myron closed it for four weeks, and during that time, he stood beside his cook, evening after evening, showing her precisely what to do . . . She even got over the notions that it was very comic indeed for men-folks to think they could cook and that cook-books were all written by crazy Easterners.

When he had bullied her into shape, the Commercial Hotel began to serve steaks, chops, roast beef, roast pork, soups, coffee, pies, fresh-water fish that would have enchanted Brillat-Savarin.

Myron's chief woe had been in persuading the local butcher shop that he really wanted the cuts he wanted. He solved that. He bought the shop.

His one complete innovation was to persuade the considerable number of old Lemuel couples who were tired of housekeeping to board at the hotel, in a special private dining-room made out of the frowsy billiard-room, and to persuade the few comparatively rich people in town to give their parties at the hotel, with special supper-menus prepared by himself.

For motorists he had daily new information about every road out of town. When he could not get it from the drivers themselves, he or his clerk or Luke--suddenly a man, and not discontented that if he had not become a glamorous cowboy, he was known as the 'best doggone automobile driver for a kid of his age in town'--drove out to inspect road-repairing and detours for a hundred miles around.

He had the greatest praise that any country hotel-keeper could have: The travelling-men told him that his was he best hotel in their territory, and they planned their routes so that they could spend Sunday there.

Effie May was elected president of the Ladies' Aid of the Lemuel Presbyterian Church, and a committee of citizens waited upon Myron to ask him whether he would care to run for Alderman of the First Ward this year, and for Mayor in another couple of years. He overheard a heavy chair-sitter outside the office say, 'Best thing ever happened to this burg was when Weagle came here and put a lil pep into it. Say, in less 'n a year, that fellow has become the most prom'nen' citizen in town!'

It was, by chance, on this same evening that his brother Ora saw him and wept over him as night-clerk of a country hotel.