Women's Hotel Book Tour

Why not come out and see me on the Women’s Hotel book tour this month? Provided you are in Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, or Iowa, that is, or can easily get there. If you live elsewhere, we’ll likely miss each other (unless you’d like to encourage your local library or university to invite me to your city for a visit).

In the meantime, why not read the first page of Women’s Hotel here? I include it free, at no cost to you, the reader. From the first chapter, “The End of Breakfast”:

It was the end of the continental breakfast, and therefore the beginning of the end of everything else. For thirty-five years, every Biedermeier girl whose rent for the coming week had found its way to Mrs. Mossler’s crocheted lantern-bag could go to sleep secure in the knowledge that she would wake up with a breakfast tray slid into the recess of her door, delivered just as advertised, “silently and gratuitously, no waiting—no waiter!” During the war the fourteen-dollar rent was raised to eighteen dollars, then again to twenty-five dollars after Carmine DeSapio replaced Hugo Rogers as the head of Tammany, Mrs. Mossler certain that a non-Irish Tammany boss was a harbinger of the rising prices, social upheaval, and general chaos soon to come. But the Biedermeier’s daily rendezvous between tray and door never failed, not even on Sundays, and aside from a wartime substitution of Postum for coffee, the menu had remained implacably untouched by time. One’s choice of either sliced grapefruit or tomato, a Vienna roll or brown buttered toast, a shirred egg, and a cluster of grapes sustained plenty until dinner (new girls learned quickly not to speak of supper within the walls), as lunch was not included in the weekly rate, and fewer than half the inmates were so reliably employed as to be able to comfortably commission a week’s worth in advance.

Possibly by way of consolation, lunch had become a slightly unfashionable meal at the Biedermeier. The girl who paid for hers sometimes discovered that she had hung an albatross around her neck. It was a daily custom for residents who considered themselves “at home” enough to receive visitors to leave their doors ajar between the hours of ten and two. Since no more than twenty of the Biedermeier’s more than two hundred rooms were larger than the original ten-by-fourteen-foot floor plan, only visitors of supreme or long-standing intimacy were entertained all the way inside the room, usually given pride of place upon the bed while their hostess perched against the desk. Ordinary callers were received in the doorway, sometimes several at once, depending on the attractions of the inmate, but the girl who received her lunch from the hotel often found that her floormates treated the sight of the tray as a NO VISITORS sign. Then, no matter how charming her conversation, no matter how ingenious her tricks of arranging hair or repairing handbags that might have otherwise endeared her to them, no matter how invitingly open she propped her door, she could not tempt a single straggler to her threshold. The girls whose jobs occupied an entire working day took their lunches, if they had any, at their desk or in company cafeterias, luncheonettes, or at a coffee stand, but as they ate them properly in public and therefore out of sight, no one held it against them. (The Biedermeier had a cafeteria, but for six years had not been able to support the staff required to prepare and serve lunch.) To eat in conspicuous privacy, in full view of your fellows, was generally understood as selfish, antisocial behavior that required immediate checking, lest it spread and infect the whole population. The record holdout, a girl named Sylvie who had possessed an immaculate brow, had endured six weeks of freezing out in 1958 and ultimately resigned her tenancy rather than give up her lunch, her loss regretted by none.

Next week will be a bye week while I’m out on tour, but the Chatner will return.