Half-pint h, the youngest in his family, slipped through the arms and legs of his huge older brothers as they hurtled around the house, snapping towels at one another—Mrs. H howling and Mr. H hectoring and growling. Nothing h had was his own; if it was his, the big guys swiped it. The little brother rarely had a towel to himself for eighteen years, let alone a pillow he could claim—they were all hurled in the fights. Diminutive, but big of heart, he longed for harmony.
Where was it? All the half-pint knew was that the battles got hairier as the brothers got huger. Mr. H grew humorless, and Mrs. H grew haggard.
Once a week, after Mrs. H got down on her hands and knees and cleaned the only bathroom, h charged in fast for a shower, watching the dirt from his toes swirl down the drain. Then he got to be first to use the navy blue towel that his mother said hid the grime.
Home became a dash between harrowing and hazarding.
The food fights took on guerilla tactics. The brothers and father faced off. The house became hell. h slipped out, forgotten. He hid and did his schoolwork on the laundry table in the basement, even spending the night draped across three plastic baskets of sweat pants when things upstairs got too hot.
Homework made h strangely happy: hypotenuses, hypotheses, hierarchies, horizontal vectors, heptagons, hexagons, and the breathtaking height of lines, especially if they were attached by a horizontal.
Upon high school graduation he left to dodge Heineken cans in hallowed halls and got a hard-won degree in hydraulic engineering.
At last H came to live in his own grownup habitat, a starter house where one bathroom spilled with his wife’s girlie stuff and the other overflowed with his twins’ disposable diapers. Plus, as a beginning specialist in floods, bridges, and sewage, H had a hectic new job—now he would travel for a living. His parents were no longer healthy and his brothers too busy brawling to care.
Harmony rested on a ledge between the heights of love’s responsibilities.
As he packed for work in the next city, then kissed his wife and baby boys goodbye, a thought announced itself: You need a religion. He confirmed his reservation in the taxi, got on the plane, and before he ate his peanuts, the thought became his own: I need a spiritual life. Later, he slipped his roll-aboard into the complimentary van, and arrived at his hotel, a mighty fortress of towers with a horizontal marquee.
Hark! The bellmen heralded his welcome with to-ing and fro-ing. The wheels of the luggage cart sang a kind of hymn. He made his way to the reception desk, presided over by a man in a gray suit with a stand-up collar. The altar, H realized, the holy place the visitor never gets to go behind. Readily he signed the register—a certificate of confirmation—then signed his credit card for incidentals—a pledge of tithes.
Chandeliers hung from the vaulted ceiling. Humongous urns of hibiscus overflowed. The height and space were like a hemisphere of childhood, free and protected. Well, like the childhood he hoped his twins would have.
You don’t need to bring a thing to a hotel, H marveled. It’s the respite every sinner from the street deserves. (Not that H was much of a sinner.)
The hush of the carpet led him down a nave of a hall to his own heavy door. There, a king-size bed awaited him with at least six pillows, all his own. For such is the mansion I enter, H said to himself, plopping his overnight bag on the luggage rack and hanging up his coat.
White towels lined the marble and mirrored bathroom. Hosanna! Clean lines marked all his ablutions. He attended to his beard in the backlit makeup mirror. He lifted up his washcloth as if he were lifting his infant sons from the arms of his wife. Fear not. Hallelujah! Share not your blessings this once.
Refreshed, he strolled out to explore the offerings. At the hotel buffet a cantaloupe square dissolved on his tongue. At the rail of the bar he drank the hotel’s wine. A telephone, like a saint in a niche, rang with his client’s voice, confirming his morning appointment. The sacred music the elevator played was Mrs. H’s favorite old song, “Heart and Soul”.
That night, the service was room service. He ate in bed, then called his wife and heard the twins gurgle on the phone, turned out the light, and slept the sleep of the temporary hermit.
In the morning, he was called to wake. When he sauntered over to pee in the vast bathroom, bigger than his bedroom at home, the incense rose from tiny soaps. If not home, why not have a haven?
After he dressed, he called his wife, who said, “You sound so peaceful, honey.” And as he placed a hefty tip in the small wicker collection basket on top of the mahogany chest of drawers, H noticed the hotel’s evaluation checklist, printed on the heaviest card stock. Pressing characteristically hard on his pen, he wrote in block letters his one-word comment, “HEAVEN.”