Four and Twenty Beds

To my surprise, the woman seemed glad to see me. "Oh, never mind, your wife will know what I mean," she said. With a dismissing sweep of her eyes she brushed Grant out of earshot. When he had gone back to his weeding she said, "It's so hard to talk to a man, isn't it? You can't call a spade a spade for fear of embarrassing them."

I was still a little suspicious of her. "What was it you wanted?" I asked, my tone aloof.

"I stayed here overnight last Tuesday, and my figure hasn't been the same since! I left my–oh, I can't think what they call them in the stores, but–you know, cheaters!"

The woman turned crimson again, as she saw that I didn't know what she meant. She glanced at Grant, busy pulling weeds out of the ground, as though she were afraid that he might overhear.

"I'm tired of trying to explain what I left!" she cried. "Have you got a mail order catalogue?"

I brought out our catalogue and handed it to her. She flipped through the unmentionably medical section, through the lingerie section, and finally pounced with triumph on a page that displayed brassieres. The color in her face deepened still more as she pointed to an illustration, at the bottom of the page, of bust pads.

"Have you found any of those, left in one of the cabins?" she asked.

I remembered vaguely that Mrs. Clark had mentioned, recently, finding a pair of "funny lookin' satiny things." I could well imagine that the robust cleaning woman would have had only a vague, thoroughly vicarious idea of their use.

When I had found the bust pads, which were in the linen closet in the stack of left-behind articles, and returned them to the woman, Mr. Buxley, the owner of the Westward Motel, stopped in to talk to Grant. I sat in the living room with them, working on a rag doll I was making for Donna's second birthday, and listening idly while they discussed business and advertising.

The conversation turned finally to short stops. Motel owners are so accustomed to short stops, and to discussing details about them, that they never consider mixed company a deterrent to such a conversation. Mr. Buxley, it seemed, had built up a small, substantial short stop trade. Far to the west of town, his motel offered the privacy and seclusion that most short stop customers wanted, and apparently the grapevine kept his lowered quickie rates on file.

Mr. Buxley was a short, plump, amiable man. Settled comfortably on the davenport, he polished his glasses with a hanky while he told us how his short stop customers, aware that they would get reduced rates if it were known that they wouldn't stay long, identified themselves.

"Most of 'em," he explained, "say they just want to clean up, and won't be there long. Some of 'em come right out and say they want a cabin for a couple of hours–how much?"

He held his glasses up, squinted through them critically, and huffed his warm breath onto them.

"Sometimes they come an' don't say anything. Maybe they don't want anyone to know what they're comin' for, maybe they just don't realize they'd get the cabin cheaper if I knew. I'd like to know so I can give 'em the reduced rate so they'll come back, but I don't dare give 'em the reduced rate if I'm not sure they'll leave, 'cause that might tie up a cabin all night for half price. Like one young fella last night, came in about ten, they sat out in the car for a few minutes before he came into the office, and when he came in he was all smeared with lipstick. Been drinkin' a little, too. Well, I figured sure that was a quickie, so I let 'em have the cabin cheap. Next morning they were still there, pulled out about noon, and I found out they were married and had a couple of kids with 'em. The kids had slept on the floor all night."

Mr. Buxley put his glasses back on. "I've got a new system I'm going to try, starting tonight," he said. "If I'm not sure if they want to stay all night or not, I'll just tell 'em I have two cabins left, but one's reserved for some people coming in at three a.m. An' I'll tell 'em they can have the cabin half price if they can manage to pull out that early. Otherwise they can have the other one, full price. That'll save their face in case they're only goin' to be there a little while and would like to do it cheap."

The office bell rang, and I left the men talking and went to answer it. A grey-colored, fat-cheeked man–a complete stranger to me–came breezing into the office.

"Hello, hello!" he cried. "Well, here I am back again! You didn't expect to see me again so soon, I'll bet!"

I forced a cordial smile. "No, I certainly didn't," I exclaimed, matching his tone.

This was an old, old refrain to me. The routine was so familiar to me I went into it automatically, straining my ears to catch any stray spicy bit from the living room. When the man asked if I could give him the same cabin again for that night, I said, "No, I'm sorry, but number 7 is already taken for tonight."

"Seven!" he exclaimed. "I had ten last time."

"You did? Well! I could have sworn we put you in 7. When you first came in I thought, 'Oh, oh, he's going to be disappointed that I can't give him 7 again!' We have so many people coming and going all the time, you know, I get mixed up sometimes about who has which cabin." And so on, ad nauseam, ad extreme boredom.

I slid a registration blank toward him, still acting as though I remembered him. Actually, though, as time goes on and we see more and more people, most of whom we have never seen before, it becomes harder and harder for us to recognize customers who have been here before–unless they come on several close-together occasions, or possess some unusual and striking characteristic; a white beard braided and tied with pink ribbons, for instance, or a tendency to stand with one leg draped across the desk while they fill out the registration card; or a pyramid of a hat which ends at the top in a bird's nest, complete with eggs and proud parent.

When I went back into the living room, Mr. Buxley was just taking his leave. "Those signs," he was saying, "read: 'We take your license number. If you leave something we send it to you. If you take something we send for you.' An' believe me, if one more towel gets stolen from my place, I'm going to buy some of those signs and put one up in every cabin."

We have been fortunate in that very few things have been stolen from our cabins. And the few people who do decide to steal something seldom set their sights on anything higher than a towel or two.

The Banning police, we discovered, are not willing to interrupt their checker games (or whatever it is that occupies their time in this peaceful little town) to recover anything so trivial as towels–even if they are notified of the theft while the culprits must still be in the vicinity. They can be freely quoted as saying, "That's one of the risks of being in the motel business. You've got to expect to lose a few towels now and then."

In view of their lassitude in this respect, I have composed a classic letter, designed to simultaneously make the thief ashamed, to save his face, and to persuade him to return at once what he has stolen. To make him ashamed, I lead off with a paragraph about how hard we are working to make our motel a success, and how vital our linens are in carrying on our business, and how expensive to replace; to save his face, I mention my certainty that no doubt the missing article was somehow mixed up with his own belongings and taken away by mistake. To persuade him to return what he has stolen, I insert a few casual sentences of highly unmerited flattery about the local police department.

This classic letter of which I am so proud has never, I might add, never once resulted in the return of a stolen article.

The weather was growing more and more summerlike, with the gaps between hot stretches fewer and fewer. The warm, indescribably sweet scent so characteristic of Banning grew stronger every day. Grant was finding out about the various types of air conditioning and their respective prices. He didn't want to install and advertise air conditioning until the summer was so well under way that we wouldn't be apt to get competition this year in that field from other motel owners who would notice the improvement in our business.

Palm Springs trade had fallen off because of the tapering off of cold weather, and the rental rates in that celestially exclusive village had been cut in half. The press agents of the little desert town were going wild cooking up rodeos, fiestas, and everything else they could think of. Big organizations were enticed, by various means, to hold meetings there that could be played up in the papers; the Shriners had an initiation ceremony there that was the talk of the surrounding cities for weeks. When John Payne and Gloria De Haven spent a weekend in the village they received enough newspaper mention to satisfy a conceited President, with their activities detailed, and the suggestion explicit that many other even more glittering Hollywood personalities were about to descend upon Palm Springs, where the lowly vacationist could rub elbows with them at the neighborhood grocery store or bar. The cream of all the publicity stunts, though, was the appearance in Palm Springs of a "divine healer," the greatest on earth for centuries! Those who had feasted their eyes on his rotund majesty were whispering, it was reported, that he was Buddha reincarnated. Newspapers throughout the west carried stories of the marvellous cures he was effecting left and right (neglecting to list traceable addresses of the curees), and at last the whole publicity campaign built up to a crescendo of suspense when a "famous" European millionaire brought his adolescent daughter, supposedly afflicted with epilepsy since babyhood, to Palm Springs, to see whether the great healer could cure her. The healer didn't bring his divine powers to bear on the daughter until there had been time for the papers to play up the coming event and create suspense, and for readers of the papers to develop a proper attitude of interest and excited anticipation. When at last the case had aroused enough attention, the healer healed the "epileptic" girl, completely and dramatically, in one treatment.

That, as it was supposed to do, gave Palm Springs' trade a powerful shot in the arm. There were many skeptics, but also many who were awed by the healer's powers. Grandma was one of the latter. "I swear'n," she said defensively, "he's a sight better'n any fortune teller, that's a cinch." With the reduced rates, and the added attractions, Palm Springs built up a fairly good business again, in spite of the heat.

But there were still Palm Springers who stayed in Banning, where the climate was cooler and the rates were, even now, cheaper.

A middle-aged couple who had spent one night in Palm Springs and had, according to what they said, suffered from both the heat and the rate, came into the office one Saturday night when we had just one vacancy. All the other motels on our end of town happened to be full before us.

The woman, a slender, small-boned creature, stood in the office regarding me with somber eyes while her husband went outside to see what his license number was.

"Your cabins got a potty?" she demanded suddenly.

"Oh no," I said uncertainly. "We have well-equipped bathrooms, one to each cabin," I elaborated.

The woman was not appeased. Her gloomy eyes swept over the nearby "no vacancy" signs, visible from the office windows, and she sighed. "In Palm Springs, we had a potty, right outside da door," she stated.

Her husband came back to write his license number on the card, and she didn't say another word.

I felt a little uneasy after they had gone to their cabin. It is a policy of ours to give extra service and courtesy to every single customer, as the best insurance for our future business. Even to shoppers–those infuriatingly bland creatures who ascertain the price, inspect the cabin, and depart to look for something better–we are unfailingly polite.

The greatest strain on my politeness occurs when shoppers test the potential comfort of the bed by feeling it violently with their hands or by sitting on it and bouncing. To straighten up, before their eyes, the havoc they cause, would be too pointed a reproof; therefore, if they decide to "look around" a little, I must trot back later to the cabin to rearrange and smooth the bed.

One of my favorite daydreams is made up of the many satisfying retorts I could give to irritating customers and shoppers. When one of them is rude about our rates, it is an effort for me not to say something like "You'd better look for a cheaper place–a shack, in fact. You'd feel more at home there." But instead, habit and good sense force me to murmur something sweet and unresentful.

The only customers–or, rather, people–who unfailingly make Grant angry are those who use our driveway as a traffic circle. Several times a day a car from the east will swing into one of our driveways, making us think we have a prospect–only to swing out the other driveway and head back toward the east. Or a young fellow plummeting along the highway from the west will belatedly heed the words of Horace Greeley, and will splash gravel in all directions as he whirls into our driveway.

Such use of our driveways makes Grant seethe, but there doesn't seem to be anything he can do about it.

I knew that I could, if I wanted to, satisfy the strange longing of the woman who had just rented our last cabin. As I took the cover off the "no," fighting to keep my balance against the insistent thrust of the wind, I decided that I would do it.

I took Donna's little pink potty, and marched back toward their cabin. I set it just outside the door. I tapped on the door, and when the woman's voice called "Yes?" I answered, "Here's the potty you wanted!"

All evening I pondered the woman's strange whim, and in the morning when they brought the key into the office I waited for her to thank me for accommodating her. She didn't speak, so as they were about to go out the door I called, "Was everything satisfactory?"

"All except we didn't have a potty," the woman replied glumly. "I vanted a sun bath dis morning."

"My dahling, you mean a pahtio," her husband corrected her.

"Dat's vot I said–a potty!" she snapped.

If the potty incident made me feel a little foolish, I got over it quickly. Since we have been in the motel business we have learned to take everything in our stride. There is always something happening. During a typical one-hour period, for instance, a man–a suave, superior creature–tried to talk us into selling or leasing to him part of our land, so that he could put up a cold fruit juice stand on the highway; a carpenter came to ask permission to measure the exterior of one of our cabins because, he said, his client wanted a house built just like it; and we were embroiled in the first stages of what was to be a bitter commercial battle between the local laundry we patronized, and a laundry in Beaumont, a town six miles away.

Grant and I have almost never left the motel together that something didn't happen. Once it was the truck that swerved off the highway and crashed into the garage of cabin 16; once it was a careless smoker who, having fallen asleep with a lighted cigarette in his hand, set the blankets on fire. Another time there was an enormous oil tanker, Mrs. Clark related, which turned sharply off the highway to avoid hitting a child, and came plummeting up to within fifteen feet of the office before the driver could stop it. Another time we were driving home from a short trip we had made, during which we had left Mrs. Clark in charge. As we approached the motel we began talking about how something always happened while we were gone, and wondering whether anything had happened this time.

And then we saw, beside the edge of the highway in front of the motel, what looked like the smoking remains of charred furniture and mattresses.

Grant couldn't get out of the car fast enough, to run inside and ask Mrs. Clark how bad the fire had been, and in which cabin or cabins.

It turned out, though, that there hadn't been a fire in our cabins at all. It had been a house trailer that had caught fire on the highway, and the Negro family to whom it belonged had stopped their car quickly–directly in front of the motel, as it happened–to detach the trailer from the car.

Even when we stay home, there are innumerable small tragedies occurring on the highway. Dogs and cats are run over frequently, and–interspersing the few really serious accidents, there are many minor ones. Although a little further into town there is a twenty-five-mile an hour speed limit, there is no speed limit in our immediate neighborhood. There should be, because of the many motels, restaurants, and other places of business that make a great deal of turning in and out of the swift lanes of traffic inevitable. The scream of brakes has become a familiar part of the daily refrain of life.

I had been promising Grandma for some time that I would invite her "boy" friend, Hellwig, out to Banning. At last we settled on the time–it had to be a Saturday night because of his work. Although he is past eighty, he still works half-days in a printing plant.

Hellwig and Grandma arrived on the bus in the early afternoon, and Grant drove to the station to pick them up.

Hellwig was laden with several of the familiar brown-wrapped packages which, I knew, contained paper. His pockets were bulging with chocolate bars. Now that I have a family of my own, he brings three times as many chocolate bars when he comes to see us, knowing that if he brought candy enough for just me, David and Donna wouldn't leave me much of it.

Hellwig gathered me and Donna, whom I was holding, into his feeble embrace. The odor of mothballs was almost suffocating, but I was so glad to see him again that I didn't mind.

"So here is little Donna!" exclaimed Hellwig, his pale blue eyes twinkling. "Well, how do you do, what a nice little girl! And how she has grown!"

"Godfrey Mighty, but that's a long bus ride," Grandma exclaimed, shedding her purse and hat and sinking onto the davenport, her black eyes, bright in their setting of smooth, unlined skin, running over the house in a swift search for dust. I went out to wait on a customer then–a short, heavy set man whose glasses made his eyes look huge, misshapen and threatening.

"I'm driving on to Thousand Palms tomorrow," he remarked, as he paid me.

"Thousand Palms? That's going Twenty-Nine Palms one better, isn't it?" I said brightly.

His magnified eyes rested upon me for a moment.

"No," he replied, "that's going Twenty-Nine Palms nine hundred and seventy-one better."

When I went back into the living room Grandma was darting about with a dustdoth, peering into crevices and crannies, looking for dust. Hellwig was being entertained by David, who was showing him the report card he had just brought home.

"Well, how do you do!" Hellwig exclaimed. "An A in reading! Is that because you get so much practice reading the funny papers?"

David smiled, displaying the gap where his two center lower teeth had been. I watched Hellwig while he and David discussed David's school work. Although he had been "going steady" with Grandma for over twenty-five years, ever since her husband died, he had never popped the question. An unfortunate experience with a fiancee, when he was twenty (according to what he'd told Grandma, it was something about his advice concerning the use of cosmetics being scornfully rejected) had resulted in his snatching off her engagement ring, throwing it furiously into a river, and vowing never again to propose marriage to any woman.

It occurred to me suddenly that maybe a mere technicality stood in the way of his marrying Grandma. Maybe, since according to his vow he couldn't propose to her, he was waiting for her to propose to him. I'd have to suggest that to her before they left.

I told Hellwig that his cabin would be number 14. It was a double, but all of our singles were taken.

Picking his suitcase up carefully and slowly, he followed me to his cabin. He carried the suitcase into the back bedroom of the cabin, and announced that he was going to take a nap.

Grandma was sweeping around the edges of the carpet when I went back.

"Where in Tarnation's the vacuum cleaner?" she demanded. "I'll be swear'n if they ain't too much dirt here to get up with a broom. Them children must lug sand in all day."

"They do," I admitted. "Here, you sit down. I'll vacuum."

While I vacuumed, Grandma hurried about wiping fingerprints off the doors. Her energy inspired me, and we cleaned house for about an hour. Grant rented two cabins while we were working, and then he stuck his head in the doorway to inform me he was going across the street to talk to the owner of the Blue Bonnet motel.

"Old Wagonseller come over to see me twice last week," Grandma remarked, when we were alone. "He sure spends the dough, too. Both times he brought me a big box of candy, and the last time he brought me a real orchid! Thunderation, I never see anything like it!"

"He must like you," I observed.

"Ayah, he sure must. He must like me a sight better'n anyone else he ever met. Godfrey Mighty, I could catch him like a fly, if I was a mind to."

"Why don't you, then?"

"Well… Hellwig'd be pretty plaguey mad if I did anything like that!"

"He's had his chance. You've given him twenty-five years and he hasn't asked you to marry him. He hasn't any right to object now if you marry someone else."

"No…" Grandma said doubtfully.

And then I told her the idea I had had about Hellwig–that maybe it was his vow never to propose again that had prevented his popping the question; that maybe if she'd do the popping … "He wun't never marry me," she said gloomily.

Grandma peeled potatoes while I added beaten eggs to a bowl of hamburger.

"Wagonseller . . . what a H. of a name," Grandma mused, scooping potato peelings into the sawed-off milk carton we used for a temporary garbage container. "An' he's the spittin' image of a pert little bird, ain't he? But he can sure spend the dough!"

"Oh, Wagonseller isn't a bad name," I said soothingly. "You should read some of the names on our registration cards. Last night, for instance, there were two or three outlandish ones. Let's see–well, Tinklingwhiskers for one. Mr. Tinklingwhiskers. How do you suppose the poor man ever gets to sleep at night?"

"Speaking of sleeping, I never see anything like the nap Hellwig's taking. Do you suppose we oughta go wake him up?"

"Oh, no. He's probably tired after the long bus ride. Let's just let him rest until dinner is ready."

Grant wasn't home by the time dinner was ready to put on the table. I went out into the office and looked through the window, across the street. He was standing on the porch in front of the office of the Blue Bonnet motel.

I pressed the switch, turning the "Moonrise Motel" sign on and off several times rapidly. It was one of the systems I used to break up his talk-fests, which might otherwise last for hours and hours. When he was at the grocery store, immersed in conversation with the plump Mr. Bertram, I could motion to him through the kitchen window that I wanted him to come home. (If he happened to be looking toward the kitchen window!)

When Grant came in I called to him, "Go wake up Hellwig and tell him to come to dinner, will you? He's in 14, you know."

Grant picked me up and swung me into the air. "Dinner? Good! I thought you were calling me home because you had some work for me to do." Then he set me down abruptly.

"14! Nope, you must be mistaken. I rented 14 to two girls while you and Grandma were cleaning house."

Grant showed me the day's list of cabin numbers and people's names. "Scoville" was written after number 14.

"Oh, I did forget to write Hellwig's name down," I said. "Grandma asked me for the vacuum cleaner as soon as I came in, and I forgot all about writing his name after 14. But you must have rented some other cabin to those girls, and accidently written their name down after 14 instead. You couldn't have rented them 14, because Hellwig was lying right there on the bed taking a nap."

"I rented the cabin as a single," Grant said. "The door to the back bedroom was shut, so I quick locked it–see, here's the key."

He brought a key out of his pocket. The little tag attached to it confirmed his story that this was the key to the back bedroom of 14.