Into the Night

And then, as so often happens in this unpredictable world, when she least expected it, and from the quarter it was least likely to have come from, the inspiration was dropped into her lap. Or rather placed in her hand. Ready-made, complete, and practically foolproof.

One night she went down to dinner in the hotel dining room, as she did most nights. But this one night she discovered she’d left her handbag upstairs in the apartment, which she did not do other nights. There was no great predicament involved — the meal was always charged to her bill, and so could the tip be if it had to — except for one thing. Her room key was in the handbag, so she found she’d locked herself out. Here again there was no difficulty, the hotel always kept duplicates at the desk for just such an eventuality.

She therefore stopped at the desk, a thing she rarely had occasion to do, for she never received any mail or messages, and to her surprise the desk man put an unsealed envelope with her name and room number written out on it into her hand.

It was a form appeal for contributions to a multiple-sclerosis fund, and looking up at the mail rack she could see that a similar envelope had been placed in every single letter slot. They all showed evenly white, as though a diagonally slanted blizzard had struck them.

On the back flap, partly printed out and the rest filled in in handwriting, was the notation: “Kindly return this with your contribution to your floor monitor, Mrs. Richard Fairfield, 710.”

Madeline had what she’d been looking for, and she recognized it at sight. She took it upstairs with her, let herself in with the emergency key, took twenty-five dollars out of the repossessed handbag, and put it inside the donation form. Then, conceding that it was extremely important for her purposes to get into Mrs. Fairfield’s good graces and win her confidence as fully as possible, she added a second twenty-five to the first, making her total contribution a generous and impressive fifty dollars.

She left the envelope unsealed, so there would be the least possible obstacle to Mrs. Fairfield’s almost immediate discovery of her munificence, preferably while she was still present. Then she patted her hair a little and went down the hall to 710. She tipped the knocker, and in a moment a strangely composite type of person was standing before her. She was both youthfully old and oldly youthful, a peculiar blend of overage flapper and vivacious dowager. She hadn’t jelled right; one hadn’t been able to submerge the other. Artfully waved silver-blue hair. Triple ropes of pearls the size of Chiclets, which couldn’t have been anything but genuine, they were too large. Some sort of trailing garb with lots of satin and lots of lace. She was even carrying a cigarette in a short jade holder, a thing Madeline hadn’t seen anyone do since her own childhood in the fourth Roosevelt Administration. She was completely unlifelike, she seemed to have stepped out of a cartoon in The New Yorker. Madeline almost wanted to look down around the floor under her in search of a signature.

“Mrs. Fairfield?” Madeline said smilingly. “I took the liberty of bringing this to you myself, because I—”

“Miss Chalmers,” Mrs. Fairfield said, reading the name on the envelope. “How d’do. Very kind of you.”

Madeline’s strategy had proved well advised. It now paid off handsomely. Mrs. Fairfield had managed to deftly project and compute the bills in the folder without seeming to do so at all, just by a trick of the fingernails, much in the way a practiced card player scans his cards by the merest tips of their corners while he holds them close in to him.

Madeline suddenly found herself high in favor, high beyond mere cordiality, high almost to the point of unbridled enthusiasm. Mrs. Fairfield gave her a dazzling electric smile with teeth that must have cost a fortune. “Won’t you come in for a few moments and chat?” she invited.

“If I’m not taking up your time,” Madeline said apologetically, but moving forward even as she was saying it.

“I’m expecting my husband to take me to a violin recital,” Mrs. Fairfield informed her as they seated themselves, “but he’s late. He always seems to be late at times like this.” Then she added archly, “Sometimes I wonder about that.”

Madeline wasn’t interested in the surroundings, she wasn’t there for that, so she took no notice of them. But she inescapably received a blurred off-center impression of ornateness all around her, and at least one detail came through clearly: a large oil painting on the wall of Mrs. Fairfield herself, some twenty-five or thirty years ago. Irreproachably beautiful, but irreparably dated by the peculiar flat hairstyling of the early thirties, always worn with a part far over to the side of the head, the way men wore them. Madeline recognized it from movies she’d seen.