“Did you ring my bell to say it was steep?”
“Oh no.” I laughed and hurried to say it. “I rang your bell because I saw your ad in the paper. About the rooms. Could I see them?”
“Oh, cer’n’y, cer’n’y, you can see the rooms.” She stepped back. Her voice was slurred; not a Southern speech, more a careless speech, eliding sounds.
I stepped into the hall. And thought I should step out again.
The hall wasn’t inviting. It smelled of old gas. It smelled of animals confined to cellars. The ghosts of long-fried dinners, the acridity of long-burned cigarettes haunted the air, which was a thicker, foggier dark than the gray day outside; a murk that might have been the grime of the outside walls floated loose and suspended in the hall.
Ahead a rectangle of lighter gray outlined the door of a room on the right; farther ahead on the right glowered a doorway into pitch-blackness. The only window, shrouded in musty red curtains, was far ahead on the left.
“Oh,” I gasped, turning. “I’m afraid I made a mistake. I—”
“No, no, miss.” The woman took the sleeve of my coat in a light grasp. “This is the house. And the rooms are right down the hall. First-floor rooms. Very fine rooms. Very clean rooms.”
There was urgency in her voice.
“Well . . .” I said uncertainly, thinking: She’s poor, she needs the money.
She limped a little as she went down the hall. It seemed heartless not even to look at her rooms. She was a big woman; heavy bones showed through her sagging flesh, but from the back she looked very old, her head hunched forward so that her black crepe shoulders rose above her neck. She limped straight down the hall, stopping at the blackened double doors at the end, lifted a key from the casing, threw the doors open, and stood there in the opening, nodding, smiling, beckoning, in some odd way furtive.
The hall, as I went toward her, didn’t improve.
The walls were hung with thick red paper. Red? It was again the red-brick black of the walls outside. Against the left wall stood a davenport and chair upholstered in black leather; huge things, such as you still see sometimes in old hotel lobbies. A bookcase of grimed golden oak stood next; behind its dirty glass I could see book agents’ sets of unreadable authors, shelves of cheaply bound novels.
As I stepped past the door on the left I had an even stronger whiff of cellars. Suddenly a slack gray female alley cat shot out from that door, across my feet, flattened herself, and crawled under the bookcase.
“What the . . . ?”
“Kitty, kitty?” asked the woman fondly. “That’s my puss. I’m very fond of cats.”
“I’ve never known any intimately.”
“You’d like ’em. Show me a person likes animals, and I show you a good person.”
Stairs rose beyond the room from which the cat had come; then I was at the doors to which the woman beckoned me.
I had a surprise.
The room into which I looked was nice.
The woman—she hadn’t told me her name yet—had sense enough to close the double doors behind me quickly. And this room didn’t smell. Not after the hall, anyway. It ran the entire width of the house and was extended at each side by bays of three windows. The back wall, opposite the doors, was filled with shelves and drawers; it was an old-fashioned built-in buffet, but it was exquisitely done. It, and the rest of the woodwork, had been ivoried; the paper was soft rose; the rug had been a deeper rose, its flowers long stepped into their background. A new brown studio couch, a good one, along the wall beside the doors. White curtains. Gateleg table and dining chairs in one bay; green upholstered chair, table, and lamp in the other.
More astounding—it was almost clean.
“This is really nice.” I hoped I didn’t sound as surprised as I was.
“Oh yes, yes, indeed. Very nice. And you have to think about the neighborhood. An exclusive neighborhood. Only the best people live in this part of town. It’s a privilege to live in this neighborhood. And walking distance. You could walk downtown, a healthy young girl like you.”
She laughed ingratiatingly, a high, sharp, old woman’s laugh.
“And the other room?”
“Yes, yes, indeed! The other room!” She limped toward a door beside the buffet, swung it open.
The kitchen made me forget the hall.
The good old American kitchen, celebrated in song and story, reminiscent of pumpkin pies, stuffed chickens, applesauce, and gingerbread. Cupboards around the walls, bright linoleum on the floor, a big table against the back window, green rag rug in front of the table, a family-size gas stove, a cavernous icebox. This was a kitchen still holding the furnishings of its heyday, when a dexterous cook had ruled over the feasts of some early great.
It was no dirtier than a little scrubbing would remedy.
“Where do the three doors on this west wall lead to?”
“This middle one, that’s a lavatory.”
I hadn’t expected that. Chalk one up for a private toilet and washbowl.
“The first door’s locked. It goes down cellar. We don’t ever use these back cellar stairs anymore.”
“I see.”
“You wouldn’t ever use that. And this here door . . .” She paused, and her eyes seemed to focus on a point three inches east of my face. “This here is a closet I keep some of my things in. There ain’t any closets in the front of the house, and seeing the back has so many, it seems like the people back here don’t need it. I used to live in this part myself. I used to live on this whole floor, but now I rent out the back, except I always keep this closet.”
It was true I wouldn’t need that closet; the short passageway from the kitchen to the other room had drawers on one side, a deep, narrow closet on the other.
I stood uncertain. The place was surely better than I could have expected, from the price. But that hall!
“I’d like to think about
