Four and Twenty Beds. Nancy Casteel Vogel

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СКАЧАТЬ office, while I pondered over the inflection of his words.

      He filled out the registration card, paid me four dollars, accepted the key from my frigid hand, and turned to give me one last contemptuous glance before he stepped out of the office.

      I sank onto the davenport, weak with relief that my initiation into the horrors of cabin-renting was over.

      I suppose the affliction from which I suffered would be called customerphobia. Such a word, if it existed, would be defined in the dictionary as "a morbid fear of customers." No doubt in extreme cases the victim would run shrieking at the sight of a customer. (As a matter of fact, I had had to exert a lot of self-control to keep from doing that very thing!) I grace the ailment by the coining of a name only because I discovered others can suffer from it too. Grandma, later, was to go through a violent attack of it, with much more disastrous results.

      The next car that drove in that night disgorged a dark, trim looking man with big ears who demanded, "How mocha get two people?"

      "Four dollars," I said.

      "How mocha get three people, four people?"

      "Five dollars and a half; six-fifty for four people," I said. "I wanna to buy it," the man declared.

      "All right," I said indulgently. "Just fill out this registration card."

      "No, no–no, no no!" he cried, shoving the registration card away in horror. "I means, I wanna to buy it, I wanna to buy it to belong to me. I got thirty thousand dollars down pay. You wanna to sell your motel?"

      "Well," I hedged, "we hadn't really thought of selling. How much did you want to pay?"

      He fingered one huge ear, and I saw the glitter of a diamond on his finger. "Let's let me look at it, first. Then I make you offer."

      I showed some of the empty cabins to him and his wife, a meek little woman who clambered out of their car and trailed along after us. I led them out to the land behind the back row of courts. It was just a gigantic splotch of blackness at this time of night, but I described it to them. They were very much impressed.

      When we were back in the office Mr. Gorvane–for he had introduced himself by now–said, "I been looking around, this is nicest court in Banning. I wanna it to belong to me. I offer you seventy-five thousand."

      I gasped. By selling, we would make eleven and a half thousand dollars profit. That was a lot of money, especially considering the short length of time involved.

      I promised him I would talk it over with my husband the following weekend. I took his address–he lived in Los Angeles–and told him that Grant would stop in to see him in a little over a week.

      Every once in a while during the rest of that evening, I caught myself almost on the verge of tears. I tried to figure out what was the matter with me, and I realized that I was unhappy because I was afraid Grant would insist on selling the motel. I wanted to keep it, no matter how much we might be offered for it.

      Still, I was glad Mr. Gorvane had made the offer. My relatives and the few of our closer friends to whom we had told the price we were paying for the motel had insisted that we were being fools, that the motel couldn't possibly be worth it; that the business about the owner being sick and having to sell was an old, old gag, that we'd lose every penny. I had never really doubted the wisdom of our course, but it was nice to have my faith in the value of our motel upheld. And if some one offered to buy it for seventy-five thousand the day after we took possession, probably in a couple of months, with the beginning of the season at Palm Springs, (a popular winter resort twenty miles from us) and the influx of winter tourists into California, we'd be offered even more.

      After those two encounters, the edge wore off my customerphobia. I rented two more cabins before I went to bed. I checked carefully to be sure that all the neon lights were on. Then I locked the office door and the door that led outside from the living room, and lay down on the bed with my clothes on.

      The scrunch of wheels on gravel brought me off the bed several times, but it turned out to be cars going into the restaurant next door. The beam of the headlights of cars turning around in the restaurant parking lot shone between the cracks of our Venetian blinds, casting stripes of light against the wall, and made me think cars were coming into our driveway.

      There was no doubt, though, that the next car I heard was in our driveway. Besides the agitation of the gravel, there was a thud, and then loud, excited male voices.

      I hurried to the door and looked out. A battered roadster, which had apparently come from Williams street along our private road and entered the graveled driveway from the rear, had banged up against the curb of one of the grass islands. Two young men in the roadster were arguing in a heated and highly alcoholic manner.

      The idea of approaching two angry, unpredictable drunks didn't appeal to me, but I knew I couldn't let them stay there, making a disturbance that would be sure to annoy our customers. "Thish ish too the highway!" one of the men roared.

      "No, it ish not! Thash the highway over there, where the lightsh are! You better let me drive, you're drunk, don't even know where the highway ish."

      They struggled for a moment over possession of the steering wheel. Finally the one who had been driving said, "You're drunk yourshelf. Here, you better drive."

      They traded seats, with painstaking clumsiness. Then they sat quietly for a moment, apparently about to go to sleep.

      I was trying to coax my reluctant legs to carry me fiercely toward them when, to my relief, the new driver started the car and pulled out onto the highway. I hoped they would get safely wherever they were going.

      At last I relaxed and went to sleep. Anyone who drove up wanting a cabin would ring the bell by the office door, anyway.

      I couldn't have been asleep more than five minutes when the bell rang for the first time. I rented four more cabins during the night, each about an hour after the other. Nervousness and excitement kept me awake about half an hour after I rented each cabin, and I'd just be drifting into the sounder stages of sleep when the bell would ring again.

      It wasn't a very restful night.

      In the morning Mrs. Clark, the husky maid, came to work in the cabins. She was, in a bristling way, proud of her dark complexion and her Irish-Italian ancestry, and contemptuous of "them funny-lookin' foreigners that's always stayin' in your cabins," but she seemed to enjoy the work of cleaning the cabins, and did it with a zest and speed I could never have equaled. When I got the children fed and dressed and the baby in her playpen, I decided to tackle the mountainous heap of laundry. The laundry truck was due in a couple of hours; and I felt sure that, on the first day at least, it would take me almost as long to sort and count and list the dirty things as it would have to actually wash and iron them myself.

      In the garages between cabins number 2 and 3 there were several strips of leftover linoleum standing against the back wall. I rolled these flat on the floor and brought armfuls of dirty linens from a compartment in the linen closet, putting them on one side. Then I sorted the things into six different piles–sheets, slips, hand towels, bath mats, wash cloths, bath towels. My arms began to ache from lifting each sheet and shaking it to be sure no smaller articles were wrapped up in it. Then I stuffed the sheets into a laundry bag, counting them carefully. There were sixty sheets, and I had to get a second laundry bag out of the linen closet.

      The linen closet was a huge, roomy affair built against the back of the garage adjoining cabin 2, and it left plenty of room for a car in the garage. There were three gigantic shelves in it. On the bottom shelf were extra blankets and bedspreads, cleaning СКАЧАТЬ