The Lady in Residence - Allison Pittman Page 0,104
massive and empty. There was literally one employee working as a makeshift bartender, food server, and room-service runner. I roamed the halls—every hall, at all hours—without encountering another human being. My air-conditioning unit had a sharp little knock sound at the end of each cycle, which brought me out of a dead sleep the first night and kept me wakeful from that point on. The second evening, I heard conversations outside my window and looked down to see the ghost tour crowd. That’s when I realized my room was directly above the spot where Sallie White was murdered. I was all alone that night, so—yeah, I prayed and read until the wee hours and slept with a light on.
Both Hedda and Dini, of course, are women crafted purely from my imagination. And I promise I included a line about Hedda knitting during World War II long before my research uncovered hotel guests claiming to see a woman in a blue 1940s-style dress sitting in the lobby, knitting. If you find Hedda a bit unreliable as a narrator, that’s fine. So do I. Lots of authors will tell you that their characters speak to them, but that’s not usually the case for me. I tend to keep my characters on a pretty tight leash. I know what the story is and how it’s supposed to happen. I tell them what to say and they (with a few exceptions) say it. Dini, in fact, sounds a lot like me. She tells some of my jokes. But not so Hedda. Of all my heroines, she is the first to come with her own voice. I heard her almost audibly as I typed. Even as I wrote her, I questioned—is this true? Did this really happen? Are you lying to me, Hedda? But then I wrote it anyway.
On the final morning of my stay at the Menger, I was in its massive lobby—again, all alone—working on my edits. The space was filled with swoony big band music, and my mind began to wander, thinking about this same place during the previous months when night after night after night after night there was nobody. Not a single living soul (as we say). And then I thought about all the living souls that passed through these halls, walked up and down the stairs, drank in the bar, ate by the fire in the dining room. All the lives and all the stories—all of them ghosts spread far and wide. Generation to generation. And right there, in that moment, I was among them, separated only by time and space and breath.
Allison Pittman is the author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed novels and is a four-time Christy finalist—twice for her Sister Wife series, once for All for a Story from her take on the Roaring Twenties and most recently for the critically acclaimed The Seamstress, which takes a cameo character from the Dickens classic A Tale of Two Cities and flourishes her to life amid the French Revolution. Allison lives in San Antonio, Texas, blissfully sharing an empty nest with her husband, Mike. Connect with her on Facebook (Allison Pittman Author), Twitter (@allisonkpittman) or her website, allisonkpittman.com.
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