Most people in Galen would have liked nothing better than to see the Hospitality Inn go up in flames. There’s no denying the place was an eyesore. Years of neglect had taken their toll, and the sorry state of the guests we attracted didn’t help matters any.
Jewel was prone to romanticize innkeeping, but for me, there was nothing romantic about having a hoard of strangers regularly tramping through your house. “But we meet such nice people,” she’d insist. As for me, I lived in fear that one night one of those nice people would slit our throats for cigarette money while we slept. I bolted my door every night, though Jewel and the girls refused to do the same. Jewel thought the best way to protect yourself from something was never to think about it, to never even consider the possibility. Whereas I was certain that the best form of self-protection consisted of imagining every dark thing of which humanity was capable and putting a sturdy barrier between yourself and it.
I never forgot any of the guests who passed through over the years, which isn’t to say I remembered them either. Instead, they floated in some kind of limbo in the back of my mind, and from time to time, one or the other would step forward.
When Norma and Leon came to mind, I always had to laugh. They’d discovered the inn on their way to find factory jobs in Pittsburgh. One day, a pounding came at the door that was so powerful and immediate it rattled the hinges and shook the casing. I opened the door to find Leon on the stoop
“Open then the door,” he proclaimed grandly. “You know how little while we have to stay, and, once departed, may return no more.” As it happened, they stayed for a year. They were strange people, or I should say, strange for the world, but ordinary for the Hospitality Inn. Of course, they didn’t have enough money to pay, so Jewel told them about the Inn’s Special Savings Program, that only she herself had ever heard of before. Norma and Leon had the distinction of being the only couple whose failure to pay didn’t bother me. I figured that what they provided in entertainment more than made up for what they lacked in cash.
Norma was fat and fortyish, but she had a pretty face which is what everyone always says about fat girls, but she really did. Leon was thin and had a homely face and a querulous disposition, not unlike my own. Naturally, I liked him immediately. There were enough bones of contention between them to keep a dog chewing for years, and we all wondered how they had ever gotten together in the first place.
Norma hated Leon’s mother, and though she hadn’t seen the woman in more than three years, just knowing that she continued to draw breath was enough to vex Norma. “Go to your mother, Leon!” she’d say. “She’s waiting for you with open legs—I mean arms.” Then he’d go for her throat and Jewel would step between them.
Leon complained that Norma never kept up with her wifely chores, and it was her neglect of the laundry and ironing that particularly annoyed him. In spite of their limited funds, Leon was quite the dandy when it came to dress. “I never got no clean socks,” he lamented. So one day, when Norma had had enough of his sock talk, she marched upstairs, filled the bathtub, threw in Leon’s dirty socks, sprinkled them with powdered soap, removed them dripping wet, and flung them over the banister, where they landed across his upturned face. “Here’s your socks,” she announced, “clean as a whistle.”
For Leon’s part, his major crime in his wife’s eyes was the gold front tooth he proudly displayed when he smiled. Norma was convinced he had chosen gold over porcelain just to spite her by making himself look like a farmer. Most people harbor no ill will against farmers. Some are even grateful to them for feeding humanity. Norma was not one of these. But as with all our likes and dislikes, loves and hates, there was a reason for it.
Norma had grown up on a farm in Kansas where her father used to wake her at five each morning to feed the chickens. It had gotten so that Norma not only hated her father and chickens, but farms and farmers, and feathers and dirt, and anything that could even remotely remind her of the whole experience. When she came of age, she fled to New York City where she met Leon, as far from being a farmer as she could imagine. He’d been selling insurance at the time and always wore nice clothes, with his hair neatly slicked back with pomade. “Now here we are, twenty years on, and the bastard’s gone and gotten himself a gold tooth and started parting his hair down the middle just to drive me insane!” she cried.
They quarreled about Leon’s drinking, or as Leon preferred to call it, his “love of the grape.” Leon made his own wine and brandy and drank it faster than he could make it. And when in his cups, he would recite verse at length; we girls were an appreciative audience to his recitations, but Norma would just role her eyes and call him Count Shit-in-the-Sink.
The worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes—or it prospers; and anon, like snow upon the desert’s dusty face lighting a little hour or two—is gone. This he read from
