The Washing Woman of Double Tree

Down in the security office, the CCTV monitors scan the corridors, stairways, lobbies, and meeting places of the Double Tree Hotel and provides 24/7, 360-degree confirmation that the hotel is an integrated whole, rather than a multitude of separate cages, each filled with its own individualized horrors. I peer out of the catacorner windows of my little night kingdom at the procession of daybreak. All of the unfolding routines bring my thoughts back to my sick wife Beth, really showing now, and the child I hope will be a boy.

It is early spring in Philadelphia in my story. Out on Market Street, the vendors’ carts are opening in the pre-dusk. They are covered in Phillies baseball flags. Like every Thursday, the delivery trucks pull into the loading bay by the security office with weekend fare. I watch the two delivery men break a little sweat unloading boxes of tilapia, red-skin potatoes, rapini, ossa buco, and other delicacies.

Next to the trucks stand a fenced-in pair of lindens, transplanted from the park. Our double trees with their heart-shaped leaves crossed akimbo. Tonight, they sway in a gusty morning gale. There will be rain. Maybe my wife will just be waking up for work when the first drops fall, and I walk in the door. I hope her fever has broken and she’s ready to go back to her catering job. We need the money badly. Still, my thoughts are light, and I know the money will come.

In fact, I feel God-like in the heat of the spring morning and the cool of the ruffling breeze. I tell myself how soon the lindens will send off seeds, how the gusts will carry those seeds through the city streets. Soon they will land in some yard in Oaklyn or Haddonfield. It is as if I myself am conducting their birth—a fertility god—a watchman—sure that nothing can interfere with youth’s passions. It is easy to have these thoughts, in spring, alone, at sunrise.

Then the security monitor flickers. She stands naked before my eyes, banshee-like in a silent scream. Her creamy torso looks like a sculpture that has been misplaced in the hallway of the thirteenth floor outside room thirteen-sixty-two. In the black-and-white of the monitor, her angular body is spectral, revealing below the firm breasts a pair of ribs on an emaciated frame. The ribs protrude from her skin in varicose curves like two blood-drained sides of beef hanging from hooks in a meat locker. I am in love with her and terrified of her at once. Here carmine lips form a bilious ‘O’. Her hair falls in a graduation of yellows and tawny golds. Her bony fists clasp those strands, webs of tears. The eyes are sea foam, unblinking emerald gems lined with red spider webs. Her shoulders point forward in the lamplight and scrawl a twisted shadow on the opposing wall. The shadow reveals the shriveled figure of the old decrepit hag that lives somewhere in the supple young flesh.

I rush out to the service elevator.

There is Matthew, the queer French barman turning down the stools. Eric, the doorman, with a cigarette burning, in the repose of all doormen fighting off boredom on the curb. Through the back hallway is Leydi’s cart. Leydi, the housekeeper, from the Yucatan, who sends money to her grandchildren in Chemuyil. A place with a name so strange you cannot believe it is real.

There I stand in the hallway of the thirteenth floor. I turn the master key into the door of room thirteen-sixty-two, staging a mental scenario for the use of force.

I peak in where the spindles of sun-up reveal a snoring man with a walrus mustache.

Nothing unusual except a bottle of Macallan empty on the nightstand, which is not so unusual.

* * *

Charlie radios on the two-way and I go down to meet him. Charlie, just turned fifty, with his bulbous nose and ruddy cheeks, is Kavanaugh to me—Kensington Irish to the core. He’s a retired marine and the graveyard supervisor, or as we say “manager-on-duty”.

He clasps me by the shoulders in greeting, which is something to get used to with a man of his size.

“Hey, what’s the alarm for?” he asks.

“There was a naked woman on thirteen, but she’s gone now,” I say.

“Now how do you like that? Let’s go have a look,” he says.

I wait for the tape to rewind and look out at the early spring flowers, the same ones in my wife’s garden on the balcony of our townhouse. The first to bloom in the sidewalk gardens is the witch hazel with its drowsy yellow pom-poms cheering on the season. Next will be the chrysanthus, with yellow shoots and crimson-striped mouths.

Later, there will be bleeding heart, bloodroot, and primrose. All of them seem to draw the blood out of the soil and paint their buds with menstrual reds. And in the pre-dusk, in the daybreak breezes, they all seem to shout a silent warning.

Kavanaugh lights the red cherry of his imported Bolivar Cuban cigar and chomps the end with his fat lower lip, causing evil spirals of smoke to reach for the sputtering fluorescent overheads.

A big-bellied fly buzzes by his ear, and he slaps his own head, killing it instantly. “That’ll show that little son-a-bitch,” he says, and continues, “Let’s see the tape.” Everything about Kavanaugh screams, ‘I’d rather be a killer than a victim.’

We’re quiet and watch the scene of the screaming woman unfold again. Her ghastly silent wail. Kavanaugh stumps out his cigar in a ceramic ashtray and takes over control of the monitor, pulling his chair close to the grainy display and leaning almost into the screen. “I don’t recognize her as a trick—and you say she wasn’t staying in the room with the open door?”

I shake my head. The mystery of the nudist on thirteen is drying up. We pour our coffees from the carafe and sit luxuriantly—enjoying the wisps of air coming through the catacorner windows. And we are kings then, so to speak, of those nighttime halls, every door open to us, all under our protection. It is nearly seven in the morning.

Our multitude of eyes witness all the daily risings of our city of waifs and strays. There is Gloria, the stockbroker, hustling to another sales meeting in her white suit and pink blouse—leaving behind a new man in a lavender hotel bathrobe who comes out of the room for a tray of orange juice and eggs. There is Nadia the Russian flight attendant reading a novel by Vladimir Nabokov in the lobby. The handful of bent torsos reaching out into the hall for their papers—but what we see is extended disembodied arms coming into view like prosthetic limbs.

It is strange how something that is a part of us can be so foreign and detached.

Kavanaugh, as I said, has his roots in Kensington. He had moved by this time to a nice Irish Catholic Community outside of Philadelphia. Raised his children in the burbs until they were grown and then by mutual agreement, split from his wife. Without the children to worry about she couldn’t take the danger of his profession and the sleepless nights waiting up for him. The cold bed in winter.

It was the stabbing three years back that really did her in. I’d been out there a few times with my wife. He had one of those porches my wife and I talk about getting one day on one of those roomy places so far off the beaten path, you have to bribe close friends with a feast just to get one or two couples to show up.

I can’t see him out there like any other middle-aged man, in a patio chair, watching children playing in the street. He doesn’t have the softness for it. Sitting here in his black suit and tie with his longstanding affair with Leydi as public as a billboard, the silent confidence of having killed a few men written in the creases of his brow, I can’t imagine him setting foot outside the city.

Instead, I believe he is some kind of nocturnal spirit—a creature coming to life in the evening shadows that turns into a specter at daybreak.

* * *

Kavanaugh puts down his coffee and turns in his chair. “Could be a washing woman. You ever hear that old wives’ tale?”

“No, is it anything to worry about?” I ask.

“You ain't Irish. But if you’re Irish it is. My grandmother told me about the night our grandfather died. He was in his bed and ill. He’d been ill plenty, so it wasn’t a big worry. Nana was taking a walk down by the river on Kelly Drive and she’d seen a woman in a white robe screaming in the night. The woman ran behind some lindens and disappeared. Nana was scared by it and ran back to my grandfather’s bedside, crying. He was breathing hoarsely. Then there was a knocking on the door. Three knocks, like this—knock, knock, knock [he rapped the desk]—loud thumping knocks, like combat boots running down the halls of an army barracks. And she opened it. No one was there. An hour later he passed. That’s how this washing woman business goes—it’s the banshee—a herald of death—you’ve heard of that? Only comes for the Irish. Always seen by the river. Always seen three times.”

“So what? You’re saying that lady is a ghost?” I ask.

“All I’m saying is what my Nana used to tell me is all,” Kavanaugh says.

You know how those conversations are where the mystery of some paranormal tale is almost real in the twilight or daybreak.

And then we hear piercing shrieks and rush almost on top of each other into the back alley. Not two feet from the offices is the sleek black body of a hearse pulling a K-turn in the enclave, its silver trim catching in the light. Behind where the hearse has pulled through is a beggar woman with a white cassock draped over her—the costume of those Italian panhandling women who invoke the sympathy of the image of the virgin.

She is staring at us, wisps of red hair under her hood—clapping her hands—hollowed eyes—caramel teeth specked in green—screaming and clapping. She has a little barber’s basin by her knees in which she plunges a white jumpsuit with coca-cola-colored stains on it into a tub of lathered ochre suds.

I see the phlegm-filled vacuum of her mouth open in a coarse moan. That mouth utters a single inaudible word, a name that could be “Dillon.” She says it three times.

Kavanaugh yells at her, “Out. Out! Cursed demon,” and she scurries from the tub, clutching the white lathered jumpsuit, and she waddles down the corridor that connects the alley to Market Street.

Her white cassock trails after her and the twirl of body traffic on the boulevard swallows her.

Kavanaugh turns back to me, but there are no words to describe it. I walk to the tub and see the saccharine bath of crimson dye, or—which is more likely—from the coppery smell of it—blood.

“No need to put any of this in the log,” Kavanaugh says. The full light of morning now beats in and shocks our weary pupils, making of the daily parade a burlesque spectacle—touched, as it is, by those twin retches.

“For Chrissake,” he says, “A goddamn washing woman. I’ll be damned,” he says. “It’s got to be for me—you ain't even Irish. You’d think I’d lost enough by now,” he says.

This story could well end here. As Kavanaugh explained, I had nothing to fear. I wasn’t Irish.

Only, in the same way that I did not truly know my wife in those early years, in the good times before a series of misfortunes drove us apart—making of our union two new people that bore no resemblance to the two who had fallen in love—it turned out that I did not know my own origins as well as I might have thought.

* * *

Kavanaugh was shaken and he said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t be opening my door if you hear a knocking in the night.” I thought little of his warning. My thoughts turned instead to my wife who was four months pregnant and who was home worrying about me, no doubt.

She was sleeping late. The iron of her hair covered her pouting face. I roused her and brought her a cup of coffee and some of those delicious chocolate chip cookies. She had a cold going on a week and had slept in a lot of mornings. Today her forehead was hot, and I told her she needed to see a doctor.

She goes out on the balcony to check the progress of her garden. She smiles at me when she walks back in. I am lounging on the couch nearly asleep, our schedules opposite. And I doze off.

In my dream, I am a field mouse, which in the hinterland of dream-stuff seems perfectly reasonable. I am pursued by a large silver-haired owl with yellow eyes, until, at last, venturing out from a nook in an oak tree and looking about, I am overtaken. All I see is the image of white wings, and then I am awoken with a jolt.

Knock, Knock, Knock. I habitually run to the door and open it. I have already forgotten Kavanaugh’s warning and open the door without thinking. My father is there in a rain-soaked trench coat with a pack of papers in a manila folder and a look on his face of a man marked for death.

“I really need to tell you something—and there’s no easy way to do it—you’re not an Ashley,” he says.

“What? Is this a prank? I’ve got mom’s hair and your stupid nose!” I say.

“When I went to see your grandfather down at the parsonage at Bethel this weekend, he asked me a lot of questions about if I’m living right, and then he laid it on me. He says that when he emigrated from Ireland, a man had paid his fare, a man named Ashley, and he’d taken his name in honor of what he’d done for him. As a young man, he’d been named O’Brien.”

I looked at my father. The weight of the news landed lightly on my shoulders. Nothing had changed.

With the little I’d invested in these details; I was only ruffled by the feeling of being suddenly displaced.

* * *

My two lindens are out in the cool spring breeze, their heart-shaped leaves making a clapping sound in the whoo, whoo of the wind cutting through the alley. It makes me shiver until I get used to it. And then, while Kavanaugh is roving, comes the knocking. Knock, knock, knock.

It is like someone has taken a battering ram to the door… the metal casing shaking with the blows… a faint sob trailing in… a rattling wind. 

The knocking goes on a long time, and I just sit in my swivel chair and play a game of solitaire and try to drown it out and take a pill I take sometimes for anxiety—and go definitely, quietly, insane.

Finally, the knocking stops.

I feel brave in the twilight, the big-bellied moon in view just over the clock tower on Market Street by City Hall.

I peer first out the catacorner windows. Then I open the door and look outside, fully expecting to be torn apart by some phantasm with the body of an owl.

All is still.

I rove around the yard for a sign of anything out of the ordinary. I inspect the two lindens like a gardener. The leaves of the one are a shriveled brown, and its long backbone is crumpled in a heap of decay. A shot of terror crawls up from my legs into my stomach.

I walk as if in a dream back to the security desk and scribble a note to Kavanaugh. I wonder what will become of him—if Leydi and he will be happy together—whether two people who were not young together can grow old together—and I have a feeling I will never be returning to the Double Tree again.

* * *

I burst the door open and hear the sobbing, there, in my house.

I go to Beth’s bedside and see her flushed face marred by tears. Her red eyes look charred by hot coals and the eyelids are a bright swollen purple. “What is it? Honey, what’s wrong?” I ask.

I see the blood on the sheets.

I rush to the bathroom to get some of my pills for Beth.

Looking down at the white diamond-shaped tiles, I see drops of blood, and there, in the toilet, is the ochre red of the washing woman’s tub.

There are translucent pink ropes of tissue, floating like mangled flagellating tadpoles.

On the tiles is a crumpled white jumpsuit, the pant legs showing coattails of red.

I do not know when I will stop crying, how I will pass the night—if I will ever sleep soundly again.

When she came into my life—and I mean death, though she has many names—and when she took my son—I knew the truth at last that all of spring’s vernal yellows and pollen-soaked dreams are only playthings in an immortal blood-drenched hand.

A hand that you can feel about your body, in the winter, alone, at midnight, squeezing you so hard that you can hardly breathe.