In the corner, the little wooden desk was still there. It was another amenity that added to the value of the room in the eyes of the tenants, despite the fact that no one had written a letter in the Sunshine Hotel in over thirty years. The desk chair was there too, looking as old and upright as the gentleman down the hall.
It may have been the saddest room that I had ever seen.
* * *
Down in the lobby I made sure that Woolly was still waiting in one of the chairs by the window. Then I went to the front desk, where a fat man with a thin moustache was listening to the ball game on the radio.
—Any rooms available?
—For the night or by the hour? he asked, after glancing at Woolly with a knowing look.
It never ceased to amaze me how a guy working in a place like this could still imagine that he knows anything at all. He was lucky I didn’t have a frying pan.
—Two rooms, I said. For the night.
—Four bucks in advance. Another two bits if you want towels.
—We’ll take the towels.
Removing Emmett’s envelope from my pocket, I thumbed slowly through the stack of twenties. That wiped the smirk off his face faster than the frying pan would have. Finding the change that I’d received at the HoJo’s, I took out a five and put it on the counter.
—We’ve got two nice rooms on the third floor, he said, suddenly sounding like a man of service. And my name’s Bernie. If there’s anything you want while you’re here—booze, broads, breakfast—don’t hesitate to ask.
—I don’t think we’ll be needing any of that, but you might be able to help me in another way.
I took another two bucks from the envelope.
—Sure, he said, with a lick of the lips.
—I’m looking for someone who was staying here until recently.
—Which someone?
—The someone in room 42.
—You mean Harry Hewett?
—None other.
—He checked out earlier this week.
—So I gather. Did he say where he was headed?
Bernie struggled to think for a moment, and I do mean struggled, but to no avail. I began to put the bills back from whence they came.
—Wait a second, he said. Wait a second. I don’t know where Harry went. But there’s a guy who used to live here who was very tight with him. If anyone would know where Harry is now, he would.
—What’s his name?
—FitzWilliams.
—Fitzy FitzWilliams?
—That’s the guy.
—Bernie, if you tell me where I can find Fitzy FitzWilliams, I’ll give you a fin. If you’ll loan me your radio for the night, I’ll make it two.
* * *
Back in the 1930s when my father first became friends with Patrick “Fitzy” FitzWilliams, Fitzy was a third-rate performer on vaudeville’s secondary circuit. A reciter of verses, he was generally shoved out onstage in between acts in order to keep the audience in their seats with a few choice stanzas in the patriotic or pornographic vein, sometimes both.
But Fitzy was a genuine man of letters and his first love was the poetry of Walt Whitman. Realizing in 1941 that the fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s death was right around the corner, he decided to grow a beard and buy a floppy hat in the hope of convincing stage managers to let him honor the anniversary by bringing the words of the poet to life.
Now, there are all manner of beards. There’s the Errol Flynn and the Fu Manchu, the Sigmund Freud and the good old Amish underneck. But as luck would have it, Fitzy’s beard came in as white and woolly as Whitman’s, so with the floppy hat on his head and his milky blue eyes, he was every bit the song of himself. And when he premiered his impersonation at a low-budget theater in Brooklyn Heights—singing of the immigrants continually landing, of the ploughmen ploughing and the miners mining, of the mechanics toiling away in the numberless factories—the working-class crowd gave Fitzy the first standing ovation of his life.
In a matter of weeks, every institution from Washington, DC, to Portland, Maine, that had planned on marking the anniversary of Whitman’s death wanted Fitzy. He was traveling the Northeast Corridor in first-class cars, reciting in Grange halls, liberty halls, libraries, and historical societies, making more money in six months than Whitman made in his life.
Then in November 1942, when he returned to Manhattan for an encore performance at the New-York Historical Society, one Florence Skinner happened to be in attendance. Mrs. Skinner was a prominent socialite who prided herself on giving the most talked-about parties in town. That year she was planning to open the Christmas season with a glamorous affair on the first Thursday in December. When she saw Fitzy, it struck her like a bolt of lightning that with his big white beard and soft blue eyes, he would be the perfect Santa Claus.