Four and Twenty Beds

CHAPTER ONE

ANYONE CAN MANAGE a motel successfully–anyone who can subsist on meals snatched a mouthful at a time, and requires no sleep; anyone who is a mechanic, gardener, publicity agent, handyman, psychologist, carpenter, and midwife combined; anyone who can cheerfully greet as "Mrs. Beaulabottom" each of the various women who accompanies salesman Mr. Beulabottom on his frequent trips; anyone who is gregarious to the point of welcoming the strangers who will witness, interrupt, and discuss the intimate details of his life.

I'm shy, poor at dealing with people, helpless, lazy, and definitely the clinging vine type. The extra-curricular activities of the average husband shock me. I like to eat leisurely meals, and to sleep nine or ten hours a night; and the prime requirement of my soul is privacy.

I love the motel business.

My husband, Grant, is the one who possesses the qualifications that make our partnership in this business a success. He is efficient, patient (if there is money in it) and ingenious–and buying a motel was his idea in the first place.

It was all very sudden.

For a month Los Angeles had been having the kind of weather the Chamber of Commerce members mention only in whispers. Grant and I and our two children had colds, already a month old, which the fog and dampness were cherishing lovingly. Memorial Day and a weekend had been courteous enough to get together and arrange a three-day holiday; and so we decided to take a trip to the desert.

We stopped in Banning, a little town on the edge of the Mojave desert which boasts both altitude (2350 feet) and dryness, and which is popular with sufferers from all kinds of bronchial and respiratory troubles. Banning is about ninety miles from Los Angeles, and has a population of under eight thousand. It has a lot of motels, and of these we selected the one we considered the most attractive, and engaged a cabin for the next three nights.

The Moonrise Motel was a big, new, sparkling-white, green-shuttered structure, shaped a little like a horseshoe with its open end toward the highway. Wide graveled driveways curved in front of the cabins and around three central islands of grass. The interior of our cabin–artistically plastered, carpeted, well-furnished, and with superlatively rich details–was in keeping with the exterior. From the beginning I was awed by the beauty and the size of the motel, but no premonitory tickle hinted to me the incredible fact that within two months it would be ours. After unloading the car, we put David and Donna into the back seat again and drove around idly exploring Banning. Trees and flowers flourished everywhere, and high, rocky, beautiful mountains towered close toward the north and south and more distantly in the east.

"Let's move to Banning," I said. "Perfect scenery, perfect climate–what more could we want?"

Grant looked at me. He has a habit of simply looking at me on the occasions when he thinks I am more stupid than usual–a look that any fair-minded judge would consider ample grounds for divorce. Fortunately his endearing qualities so far outweigh his annoying ones that I have never considered testing any judge's fair-mindedness. The last time Grant gave me that look was when I came home from an antique shop with five perfectly matched silver deer bookends. The deer were bent forward in attitudes of straining, so that when their antlered heads were placed against a row of books they appeared to be holding them up by sheer force of muscle.

"But why five bookends?" Grant had asked, exasperated.

He is very unimaginative and practical. There's no use in trying to explain to a person of his type what effect the contents of an antique shop can have on a susceptible browser. Besides, I always get too mad to say anything at all when he looks at me like that.

And now he was giving me that same look.

"I'll speak to the manager of General Motors about moving the Los Angeles factory to Banning," he said.

It was hot, but there was a cooling wind all afternoon, and when we went to bed it was so chilly that it felt good to snuggle under the blankets. The children were asleep in their bed, and we lay there and talked–or, rather, I did.

"How much do you suppose a motel like this is worth?"

"Uh . . . uh . . . mm h'm."

"Let's see, they have fourteen cabins," I went on. "I counted them. The owners live in one, so that leaves thirteen to rent. There are eight other cabins that seem to be as big as this one, with two rooms, and they must get six and a half dollars a night for them, like they do for this one. And then those four cabins in the back; they seem to be smaller, just one room and one bed, probably, but they must bring in at least three or four dollars a night. Why, this place must earn about seventy dollars a night! Why, that's over two thousand a month!"

"Uh."

"And what wouldn't I do with two thousand dollars a month," I went on reverently.

Grant, it seemed was more than half awake, after all. "I don't know what you wouldn't do," he said, "but I know what you would do. You'd quick go to some junk shop and buy three earrings. You'd come home with half a pair of scissors, or one giant size bronze shoe tree."

"Seriously, though," I said, "Why don't we buy a motel–this very one, maybe? It would pay for itself in a few years, and then–"

"Uh. Mm h'm."

While he slept, I lay there and thought about going into the motel business. Grant could quit his job at General Motors, and together we could keep the cabins clean and the place looking its best. The more I thought about it, the more excited I became.

In the morning we drove into the business district of Banning, about a mile from the Moonrise Motel, and went into Pillyer's cafe, for breakfast. Pillyer was a thin, stooped old man with an embittered expression and a few lonely hairs on a broad expanse of skull.

"What's he mad about, Mama?" David whispered, when Pillyer had taken our orders and disappeared into the dim regions beyond the counter.

"Probably because everyone calls him Pill," I ventured.

Grant shifted Donna onto his other knee, feeling her diaper gingerly. He took a sip of water, and drummed his lean fingers on the counter.

"How would you like to go into the motel business?" he asked me.

I gasped for air.

"I've been figuring," he said. "Why, I'll bet a horned toad the Moonrise takes in two thousand a month. Say they want fifty thousand for the place, it would just about pay itself off, interest and expenses and all, in three years. It sounds pretty good to me. What do you think–shall we look into it?"

As I said, our going into the motel business was all Grant's idea.

While Donna took her nap that afternoon, and David alternately dug in the gravel and drew out from his mouth for inspection a long string of gum, we lay in the sunshine on one of the green islands and talked feverishly. Grant had been wanting to get away from factory work; for a year he had been looking around in his spare time for a profitable business. He had wanted an automobile agency or a farm implement agency, but now he was willing to give up those plans in favor of getting a motel. Ever since our marriage six years ago we had saved our money; aside from our house and furniture, our only big expenses had been David, born five years ago, and Donna, born one year ago. We hoped that what we had saved–five thousand dollars–would be enough for a down payment on a motel.

When I saw the manager of the motel digging weeds out of the gravel I sauntered up to him and engaged him in a long conversation that dealt with everything from black widow spiders to the cost of living, and worked itself slowly to the subject of motels.

I told him frankly that we were thinking of going into the motel business, and asked if the Moonrise happened to be for sale.

He was a handsome, stocky man whose face dripped water continually. Sweat rolled in oily beads from his eyebrows, from his chin, and from the end of his nose, and it ran in a rivulet down the vertical wrinkle above his nose.

"Yes," he said, wiping the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand. "We've just decided to put it up for sale. The income varies from fifteen hundred to over two thousand, depending on the season. Wonderful climate, here in the San Gorgonio Pass, even if it is a little windy sometimes. It's a new motel, six months old; all the furniture is maple, everything brand new. Sixty-seven thousand."

I gulped. "And–how much down?" I asked timidly.

"Thirty thousand."

It was my turn to wipe away perspiration.

We spent the remaining days of our vacation haunting real estate offices and discovering that there was nothing new and nice for less than thirty thousand down.

We went back to Los Angeles, but we hadn't given up the idea of getting a motel. Every day for nearly a month, while Grant was working, I studied the classified sections of the papers and called real estate brokers. We even went to look at a few motels that were within our means, but they didn't seem to be worth the money–and, after the Moonrise, everything looked cheap and shabby and old.

It was exactly a month after we had first seen the Moonrise that we left the children with Grandma and took another trip to Banning. Perhaps somewhere in that lovely little city, we thought, we might find another motel that would satisfy us–and that we could afford.

But first, before driving around, we had to see the Moonrise again. Grant drove slowly as the Moonrise Motel came into view, and I looked wistfully out the window. The sun gleamed on the white stucco, and the bright green shutters were magnets to the eye.

"Isn't it beautiful?" I asked sadly.

"Look!" Grant exclaimed. "There's the manager, out digging weeds! Let's stop once and talk to him."

Grant is of Holland Dutch ancestry, a fact which shows itself principally in his tendency to insert a "once" or a "quick" into as many of his sentences as possible. He doesn't fall back on the superfluous "yet's" and "already's" that sprinkle the speech of his relatives, but his method of expressing himself is rather quaint.

(It was in a very quaint way, in fact, that he proposed to me. "Let's get married once," he said. I was so intrigued by his way of putting it that I agreed.)

The manager of the motel took out a large, clean handkerchief and mopped his face and neck when we drove in.

"You folks bought a motel yet?" he wanted to know.

"Nope," Grant said. "We've been looking around, but we can't find anything we like as well as this."

The stocky man wiped his face again, and I noticed that under the moisture of his skin there was a yellowish pallor.

"Got to sell now," he said. "I'm sick; going to a sanitarium the minute I get this place off my hands. You can have it for sixty-three thousand, five hundred."

"But the down payment …" I said.

"You got fifteen thousand?"

Grant and I looked at each other. During the last month we had asked a real estate broker what we could get for our home, if we wanted to raise some money in a hurry. Eight thousand, he had told us.

That, with the five we had saved, would make thirteen thousand. Our furniture should bring close to a thousand, and we could borrow the rest from Grandma.

After six years, we were able to read each other's thoughts pretty well.

"Yep, we could raise fifteen thousand," Grant told the motel manager.

And that was the beginning.

When the deal was in escrow we advertised in the local newspaper that we had furniture for sale. The manager's apartment at the motel was completely furnished, and we intended to keep only our washing machine, our book-case, and the children's beds.

It was to be a thirty day escrow, but we wanted to begin selling our furniture immediately. Last minute sales usually bring low prices, Grant pointed out, and we needed every penny we could get. We could only hope that non-essential furniture, like rugs, end tables, and lamps, would be the first to go.

When I was a child–a typically selfish and demanding one–Grandma used to remind me "it ain't what you want that makes you fat, by gorry, it's what you get."

What we got, immediately after our ad was printed, was a fat, heavily perfumed woman who bought our dining room set and our kitchen table–items which we had hoped to keep until the last week before we left. Her husband, she said, would bring a trailer and get the tables later in the afternoon.

I stood in the doorway a while after she had gone, looking at the quiet little street where we had lived for six years. Palm trees rose majestically from the parkways, one in front of every house. The houses were neat, stucco squares set close together behind green lawns, and a brooding afternoon quiet hung over the neighborhood.

Our own house, too, was white stucco set behind a green lawn. The white stucco was trimmed with violet where Donna had rubbed it with a crayon, and there were patches of dirt in the grass where David and his friends had staged a "rasslin match." But it was home; I had come here as a bride, and my babies had been born here. Life at the motel would never be as smooth and peaceful as life here had been.

A wail from the bedroom announced that Donna was awake. It was time for David to come crashing home from kindergarten. I was busy with the children for about an hour, and then I heard heavy footsteps on the porch.

A round little man was standing there. "I come for the tables," he explained, taking the cap off his small basketball of a head.

"Oh, yes–come in."

He clumped into the house and began loading the two tables and the chairs onto a trailer. When he had gone Donna pointed to the spot where the kitchen table had stood.

"All gone," she mourned.

"All gone is right," I said grimly. "But at least we still have your high chair." I lifted her into it and tied a diaper around her fat middle, pulling it around the bars of her chair so that she couldn't climb out.

The doorbell rang.

"Hawve you a bedroom set for sale?" asked the tall, thin woman who stood at the door.

I showed her the bedroom set. She examined it through a lorgnette, thumped the mattress with a long, bony hand, and demanded to know how much I was "awsking" for it.

I told her.

She bought it.

"The moving vawn will be along in an hour," she informed me briskly, and she was gone.

I addressed the kitchen sink bitterly. "Is there any particular reason," I inquired of it, "why they have to buy our most necessary possessions first? Somewhere in this city are the people who are going to buy our lamps and end tables; what are they waiting for? I suppose they're going to be sweet about it and let us have the use of them until the day before we leave."

I was in a bad mood when Grant got home from work. He started to put his lunch bucket where the kitchen table should have been. He put it on the sink instead and asked me why I looked so unhappy.

"They bought our kitchen table and our dining room set and the bedroom set," I wailed.

"For the price we wanted?"

I nodded miserably.

"Wonderful!" He seized me in his grease-stained hands and swung me above his head.

"You won't think it's so wonderful after you've slept on the floor a few nights," I prophesied grimly.

The doorbell rang. "Ah," I said, "it must be the moving vawn."

While two muscular men dismantled the bedroom set and carried it out, I prepared dinner. I had no idea how or where we were going to eat it, but I decided not to face that problem until it came.

It came soon enough. The moving van had gone, taking with it all hope for the next month's nocturnal comfort, and the potatoes were done. The pork chops were brown and sizzling, and the peas were steaming.

I pondered.

Should we put the plates on the kitchen floor and squat around them?

That wouldn't be very comfortable.

I could put the breadboard over the bathroom sink, making a small table out of it. David and I could sit on the edge of the bathtub, and Grant could sit on the–

No, that wouldn't do.

I settled it by filling our plates and carrying them into the living room. Grant's and David's plates I set on each arm of the davenport. I put my own plate on an arm of the overstuffed chair. The salt, pepper, bread and butter were in the middle of the living room floor.

"Are you still glad we sold our tables?" I asked Grant, when we had started eating.

He's always willing to put up with a little inconvenience if there's profit in it.

"Yep," he said. "If we hadn't quick sold them the first day, it might have turned out that no one would want them at all, and we'd have to come way down in the price. Please pass the bread."

"Just the same," I said, getting down on my hands and knees to get him a piece of bread, "I'm going to add twenty dollars to what we planned on asking for the living room set. If anyone wants it tomorrow they're going to have to really pay for it!"

"You split your infilitive, Mama," David said.

There's one thing that must be said for David. Maybe he does usually sound more like a herd of elephants than like one small, agreeable little boy, and maybe he does create a very reasonable facsimile of chaos when he gets hold of a piece of gum–but he recognizes a split infinitive when he hears it. My friends all think he's an infant prodigy–in that one respect, anyway. But sometimes I wish I'd never taught him anything about grammar. I didn't know what a split infinitive was until I was in high school, and I got along just as well without knowing. I never made Grandma want to swing me by the heels and smack my head against a wall, either.

"I'm very sorry I split an infinitive," I told David. "I'll try to be more careful in the future. But just the same," I went on, turning back to Grant, "whoever buys that living room set is going to really pay for it!"

"Fine," Grant said, getting up and going into the kitchen; "the more money we can raise, the better." He came back carrying a jar of horseradish; he sat down and put some horseradish on his plate, and proceeded to mix it thoroughly with his peas.

One of the strangest things about Grant, hardly compatible with the efficiency and practicality of his nature, is his passion for weird combinations of food. I have learned to look the other way while he improves upon what I have prepared; if I were to watch while he mixes and eats his little gastronomical horrors, I doubt if I'd be able to do much eating myself.

I slept–or, rather, spent the night–on the davenport, and Grant slept in David's twin-size bed with David. In the middle of the night I sat up and felt the welts across my back that the ridges in the davenport cushions had made. I went through the empty bedroom where our lovely, comfortable bed used to be, into the children's bedroom.

Grant was lying slantwise across David's bed, with David draped across him. The baby was sleeping peacefully on her stomach in her crib. I considered crawling in with her, but I was afraid the crib wouldn't hold an additional hundred and twelve pounds.

I went back into the living room, put another blanket over the davenport cushions to cover the ridges more thoroughly, and lay down again.

After breakfast I felt more kindly toward the davenport, though. In our hour of need it was serving as table, chairs, and bed. What were a few welts in the face of all that?

Just then the doorbell rang. It was a short, dark, bristling man who actually tinkled whenever he moved. I was so fascinated by this discovery that he was inside the house punching at the davenport before I realized that he wanted my precious living room set.

"How much?" he shot at me suddenly.

I told him, adding twenty dollars to the price we had originally planned to ask for the set.

"Fine! Sold!" he barked, tinkling as he peeled off crisp green bills into my hands.

"What are you staring at?" he cried.

I backed away timidly. "It's just that–that noise you make," I said. "I was just wondering–"

He put a thumb under the watch chain that was draped against his vest and thrust it out where I could see it. There was a tiny golden bell attached to the chain.

He let go of the chain suddenly and strode to the overstuffed chair, picking it up as though it had been a child's chair.

"Open the door, please."

He loaded the chair and davenport onto his pickup truck and drove away.

I sat down in the middle of the living room floor, my hands full of the crisp green bills, and burst into tears.

The rest of that month crawled by. I visualized the angel in charge of time chortling and slowing down the time machine so that he'd have longer to watch us sitting on boxes and eating from boxes, and to watch me sleeping on the floor–which I chose in preference to sleeping with David and being kicked all night.

The general inconvenience, and living in such a state of upset and excitement, didn't seem to bother Grant very much. What annoyed him most about the whole proceeding, I think, was the fact that since a part of our savings was in small government bonds that had to be cashed, he'd had to sign his name and address seventy-five times. He learned from experience what the term "writer's cramp" means.

We had sold our home, of course, getting all cash for it and retaining possession of it until the day we were to take over the motel. Actually it was the real estate broker whose advice we had asked about its value, who bought it. The rise in prices that followed the war had made it worth a lot more than we paid for it, and we knew that the realtor too would make a profit on it. But we needed the cash in a hurry, so we were glad to sell it to him.

Grandma had lent us two thousand dollars. Grandma is a short, sturdy widow without a lazy bone in her body or a wrinkle in her face. Her eighty-year-old "boyfriend," Hellwig, had offered us five hundred dollars more, but we thought we'd be able to get along without the bachelor's mite.

That made our fifteen thousand. What we got for the furniture, and Grant's weekly paychecks from General Motors, would have to see us through the moving and whatever extra expenses might come up.

Our furniture kept selling steadily, and I put a lot of our accumulated, surplus household goods on display, too. We wouldn't have room for it in the new place; I was resolved to get rid of as much of it as I possibly could.

The woman who bought our lamps and rugs, a Mrs. Alexander, kept coming back to see what else I'd brought out from closets and drawers in the way of household goods. Every time she came, she bought several armloads of things. Toward the end of the month, when nearly everything was gone, she even bought our half-empty cans and jars of spices and cereals, and on her next trip she bought Grant's rusty tools and half-used cans of paint. She bought at least twenty dollars worth of junk that we would otherwise have thrown away. I couldn't help wondering what her house must look like. She had probably been acquiring things as avidly as this ever since she got married. I even sold her the five silver deer bookends!

We were all getting very tired of eating and sitting on boxes.

"I never want to see another box, once we get away from here," I said. "Just think, some day all of this will be only a memory. Some day I'll sleep on a bed again, and we'll have chairs to sit on, and a real table to eat from. Someday, this will all be over."

And then, suddenly, it was. Suddenly it was the day before we were to leave, and there was a flurry of last minute packing to do, and a last night of sleeping on the hard floor, and then it was the Saturday we were to take possession of the motel.

Grant hadn't given up his job. Our monthly payments on the first and second trust deeds were to be three hundred dollars each (one of them would be four hundred after the first of the year) and he didn't dare to quit his job until we had a little money saved. We'd get settled this first weekend, and after that I'd have to manage the place alone, while he came back to Los Angeles to work. He would live with Grandma, in her apartment.

I had been so busy selling things and packing, all month, that I hadn't had time to become frightened at the prospect, but now, putting the last of our things in the two-wheeled trailer Grant had borrowed from a friend, I found myself dwelling upon it more and more, and feeling more and more certain that I'd never be able to do it. Even the average woman might not succeed at a new job of such proportions, and anyway, the resemblance between me and the average woman is purely superficial. I am the type who would call in a plumber to put a new washer in a faucet. I remember that on one occasion when, with unusual brilliance and energy, I tightened a screw with a knife, it was weeks before I finished telling people about my exploit.