Twilight's Child (Cutler 3)

"I'm just trying to learn everything as quickly as I can, Jimmy. You saw Randolph and how terribly distracted he is.

He doesn't do anything to help run the hotel, not really. It's fallen on Mr. Dorfman, Mr. Updike and me," I explained. "But I'll always have time for you."

"Don't make promises you can't keep," he admonished. "I won't. Jimmy, you're scaring me. Now stop it," I said. He laughed and kissed the tip of my nose.

"All right. We'll take it as it comes, Mrs. Longchamp," he said. I smiled at the sound of that, and we talked about our wedding and about our honeymoon. Jimmy wanted us to go to Cape Cod.

"It will be nice at that time of the year, spring, and I remember how Daddy used to talk about going up there all the time," Jimmy said.

"He talked about going to a lot of places, Jimmy," I reminded him. Daddy Longchamp was full of dreams in those days, dreams and hopes.

"I know, but this one was kind of like the magical place for him. Well, he and Momma never got there, but we will. Okay?"

"Yes, Jimmy. I can't wait."

And I couldn't, but I buried myself in work, and time did pass more quickly. That summer both Philip and Clara Sue went abroad on student programs. I was glad Clara Sue wasn't around; I could never forgive her for what she had done with Christie. I let it be known that I thought it had been cruel and sick. Of course, she continued to deny she had done it. Whenever she did return to the hotel for a weekend the following fall, she didn't miss an opportunity to mock my upcoming marriage to Jimmy.

"Is he going to get married in his uniform?" she taunted one day, "and say 'Yes, sir' instead of 'I do'?"

One of her favorite things was to belittle my engagement ring. "It looks like a piece of glass," she would say, "but I'm sure Jimbo thought he was buying a diamond."

"Don't you dare call him Jimbo," I flared, my eyes full of fury. She would just throw her hair over her shoulders, laugh and saunter away, satisfied she had gotten a rise out of me.

I thought she grew meaner and meaner with each passing day, and I found it hard to accept that we shared any blood at all. True, we had similar hair color and eyes, and there were characteristics in both our faces that resembled Mother's facial features, but our personalities were like night and day. And Clara Sue continued battling her weight. Though her figure was fuller and more voluptuous than mine, if she wasn't careful, she put on extra pounds. She had no self-control when it came to sweets and was constantly on a diet. She never lacked interest from the opposite sex, and because of her increasingly promiscuous behavior—so I heard—she had a following of boys at school.

Philip rarely came home. He was doing exceedingly well at college, making the dean's list, becoming president of his fraternity and captain of his rowing team. Occasionally, when Mother decided to act like a mother, she would show me and Mrs. Boston some of the clippings about him in the college newspaper.

Neither Philip nor Clara Sue seemed concerned or interested in their father's increasingly bizarre behavior and physical degeneration. I could tell that they both viewed him as an embarrassment. I tried bringing him out of his depression by asking him to do real work from time to time and bringing-him real problems, but he rarely completed any task, and eventually someone else had to do it.

The only time he seemed to snap out of the doldrums was when Sissy or I brought Christie around to see him. He would permit her to crawl around his cluttered office and touch everything. By the time she was fourteen months old she was picking things up and holding them out, saying, "Waa?" We all knew that meant she was asking, "What is this?" Randolph had great patience for her. I realized she was providing him the only respite in his otherwise dark and dreary day. He would answer every time. She could spend hours in his office questioning him about every single item, from a desk weight to a small baseball trophy he had won in high school. He would sit there and talk to her as if she were twenty years old, explaining the history behind everything, and Christie would stare at him, wide-eyed, her body still, listening as if she understood.

Mr. Dorfman had been right about the hotel running itself. It was as if Grandmother Cutler had tossed a ball into space and it continued to fly under that initial momentum. Of course, guest after guest pulled me aside to tell me how much he or she missed her. I would have to pretend I did, too. What did interest and fascinate me were some of the stories the old-timers told about her. Some of these guests went back thirty years or more at the hotel.

The woman they described was clearly a different person. Their descriptions were filled with adjectives like "warm" and "loving." Everyone talked about how she made that extra effort to make him or her feel at home. One elderly lady told me that coming to Cutler's Cove was like "visiting with my own family." How could she have put on one face with these people and another, drastically different face with me and with Mother? I wondered.

Despite my distaste for her, I couldn't help being intrigued, and I would often spend hours thumbing through papers in the file cabinets, reading letters from guests and copies of letters she had sent to guests, searching for clues, for an understanding of the woman who loomed so hatefully in my mind even now, nearly two years after her passing.

No one except Randolph—not even Mrs. Boston—had gone into Grandmother Cutler's room upstairs in the family section of the hotel after her death. Her things remained just as they had been the day she had died—her clothes still hung in the closets, her jewelry was still in the jewelry cases, her perfumes and powders were still on her vanity table. I never passed her closed doorway without getting a chilling feeling, and I couldn't help but want to go in and look at her possessions. It was like being fascinated with the devil. I resisted the temptation for as long as I could, and then one day I tried the door impulsively and was surprised to discover it was locked. When I asked Mrs. Boston about it, she told me it was what Randolph wanted.

"Only he has the key," she said, "which is fine with me. I don't fancy going in there," she added, and she shook her body as if just talking about Grandmother Cutler's old room filled her with bad feelings.

I left it at that. I had too many other concerns now that I was forced to take on more and more responsibility in the running of the hotel. The staff heads grew more confident in me, too, and came to me more often with their problems and questions. One day Mr. Dorfman came into my office purposely to compliment me for how well I had taken on my duties.

"I heard the guests talking about you," he said. "They said you were very warm, very personable, and very much like your grandmother."

I stared at him, not sure I was happy with the compliment.

"And all the older guests just love the way you bring Christie around to greet them. You make them feel as if they're all her grandparents. That's a very nice and a very smart thing to do," he added.

"Christie loves people," I said. "I'm not doing it for the sake of business."

"That's good. You're doing just what's natural. Mrs. Cutler was the same way—not afraid to share her personal world with her guests. It's a large part of what made this place so special to them and continues to make it so."

"How are we really doing now, Mr. Dorfman?" I asked.

"We're doing all right," he said. "Not breaking any records, but holding our own real well. Congratulations," he added. "You've almost earned your diploma at Cutler's Cove University."

I had to smile. For Mr. Dorfman to attempt a joke, it had to be something special. Despite myself, despite how I wanted things to be and what I wanted to become, the hotel had a way of taking over. Was that another part of Grandmother Cutler's legacy, or was it just the way things were destined to be?