At The Breakers: A Novel

Part Two: November

November part two 55 ONE From the room she was painting, on the third floor, there was a glimpse of ocean at the end of the long block. The air was full of gulls, shrieking on the November wind, roosting on ledges up and down the street. She and Irv Brewer had arrived at a decorating scheme: every room a different color, but all the bathrooms white. White woodwork , white curtains and bedspreads, white lampshades—then on to the next room down the hall. This simple plan had a soothing effect on Irv. He was approving, appreciative. He trusted her instincts, he gravely confided. Her instincts were trustworthy when it came to color, it was true. She rested the roller in the pan. She took her notebook out of the pocket of her painter’s pants, stood on the middle rung of the ladder, settling the notebook on the top, smoothing the page. Over a month since she had shown it with such eagerness to Victor Mangold. And he had said, “A blank notebook is just a blank notebook.” It wasn’t exactly blank now. She’d used it to record the color of every room she’d painted, and the date of the painting. For other pursuits, she’d been too tired. Once she had passed the painting test, once she and Irv had agreed on a wage, once she had signed a paper guaranteeing the job, she had packed up the house in New Brunswick in three days, with the help of her excitable, energetic waitress friends, who brought pizza, washed floors, wrapped dishes, humped mattresses down the steps, painted the wall she and Nick had patched. “That asshole,” they exclaimed from time to time. One or two of 56 them had managed to be around all the time, including every night. Her last New Brunswick act had been to put the gold necklace in the mail, with no return address. She’d found the hotel on Friday and moved into it the following Wednesday, exactly a week after Hank had kicked her into the bedroom . She spent the first day getting Nick enrolled in the middle school and unpacking. And calling her dumbfounded parents to tell them what she had done. She began painting the following morning, and hadn’t stopped since, except to sleep and eat. No one but Ramona and her parents knew where she had gone. Her parents were close-mouthed by long habit, and she trusted Ramona to keep a secret—“I’m still keeping secrets from when I was six,” Ramona swore. Nor had she let Nick invite his friends here, as she’d promised she would. She felt terrible about that. She’d sworn him to secrecy about where they were going, too. “Just for a few months. Until the hotel opens and we’ve got a lot of people around. We’re still pretty hush-hush, Nick. We absolutely can’t let him know where we are.” “By the time we’re not hush-hush anymore, nobody in New Brunswick will remember me,” he said sadly. “Oh yes, they will—nobody’s going to forget you.” Still, as she’d hoped, his new life began to spring up around him. And also, to make up for what she’d done to him, she persuaded Irv to let Nick have a dog. It seemed a necessity for the hotel, anyway—eventually an alarm system would be installed, but in the meantime the place was vulnerable to break-ins. And besides, she assured him, there were little hotels in places like Vermont and Cornwall where it was part of the charm to have some old Lab ambling around. The three of them went to the animal shelter together and found a young male, a mix of German shepherd and chow, made for joys of the doggiest sort, big, frolicsome, with some incipient nobility in his manner. Also, he had a deep convincing bark, along with tall alert ears and beautiful lightbrown eyes that missed nothing. He was immediately Nick’s dog, leaning against him trustingly, ecstatic to be let out of that pen. Irv 57 made the Humane Society look up the dog’s records to be sure he hadn’t been abandoned because of aggressive behavior. “We’ll have to find someone to train him, pronto,” he told Nick sternly. “I’ll train him,” said Nick. “You don’t...