Ask the Dust by John Fante Page B

to say. “What’s your name?” I asked her. She told me unwillingly. “Mrs. Hargraves,” she said. “Why?” But I was honoring her, and I had no time to answer questions, and I wrote above the story, “For a woman of ineffable charm, with lovely blue eyes and a generous smile, from the author, Arturo Bandini.”
    She smiled with a smile that seemed to hurt her face, cracking it open with old lines that broke up the dry flesh around her mouth and cheeks. “I hate dog stories,” she said, putting the magazine out of sight. She looked at me from an even higher view over her glasses. “Young man,” she said, “are you a Mexican?”
    I pointed at myself and laughed.
    â€œMe, a Mexican?” I shook my head. “I’m an American, Mrs. Hargraves. And that isn’t a dog story, either. It’s about a man, it’s pretty good. There isn’t a dog in the whole story.”
    â€œWe don’t allow Mexicans in this hotel,” she said.
    â€œI’m not a Mexican. I got that title after the fable. You know: ‘And the little dog laughed to see such sport.’”
    â€œNor Jews,” she said.
    I registered. I had a beautiful signature in those days, intricate, oriental, illegible, with a mighty slashing underscore, a signature more complex than that of the great Hackmuth. And after the signature I wrote, “Boulder, Colorado.”
    She examined the script, word for word.
    Coldly: “What’s your name, young man?”
    And I was disappointed, for already she had forgotten the author of The Little Dog Laughed and his name printed in large type on the magazine. I told her my name. She printed it carefully over the signature. Then she crossed the page to the other writing.
    â€œMr. Bandini,” she said, looking at me coldly, “Boulder is not in Colorado.”
    â€œIt is too!” I said. “I just came from there. It was there two days ago.”
    She was firm, determined. “Boulder is in Nebraska. My husband and I went through Boulder, Nebraska, thirty years ago, on our way out here. You will kindly change that, if you please.”
    â€œBut it is in Colorado! My mother lives there, my father. I went to school there!”
    She reached under the desk and drew out the magazine. She handed it to me. “This hotel is no place for you, young man. We have fine people here, honest people.”
    I didn’t accept the magazine. I was so tired, hammered to bits by the long bus ride. “All right,” I said. “It’s in Nebraska.” And I wrote it down, scratched out the Colorado and wrote Nebraska over it. She was satisfied, very pleased with me, smiled and examined the magazine. “So you’re an author!” she said. “How nice!” Then she put the magazine out of sight again. “Welcome to California!” she said. “You’ll love it here!”
    That Mrs. Hargraves! She was lonely, and so lost and still proud. One afternoon she took me to her apartment on the top floor. It was like walking into a well-dusted tomb. Her husband was dead now, but thirty years ago he had owned a tool shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His picture was on the wall. A splendid man, who neither smoked nor drank, dead of a heart attack; a thin, severe face out of a heavy framed picture, still contemptuous of smoking and drinking. Here was the bed in which he died, a high mahogany four-poster; here were his clothes in the closet and his shoes on the floor, the toes turned upward from age. Here on the mantel was his shaving mug, he always shaved himself, and his name was Bert. That Bert! Bert, she used to say, why don’t you go to the barber, and Bert would laugh, because he knew he was a better barber than the regular barbers.
    Bert always got up at five in the morning. He came from a family of fifteen children. He was handy with tools. He had done all the repair work around the hotel for years.