Excerpt from Women's Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter One
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 fourteendollar 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-byfourteen-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.

The rest were happily won over to the great and delicate game of scrounging, whereby every girl cadged food—whether a box of chocolates from a date or covered plates from church suppers, bingo hall refreshment tables, gallery openings, employers, women's City Club lectures, or high school cafeterias (a sweater set, in either tan or navy, and an innocent expression being sufficient for entry in many of the public schools downtown, though any interloper who tried the same institution two days in a row or more often than once a month did so at her own risk)—then laid out the spoils of war for general consumption during visiting hours. Anything short of fishing out of the garbage was considered legitimate, and special acts of brazenness or ingenuity were a sure route to long-term popularity. This cooperative and piratical approach was nowise countenanced for either breakfast or dinner, only the midday meal. Biedermeier residents took great social pride in belonging to that class which considered certain types of theft as fair play and even a mark of distinction, while regarding thefts of desperation, or hitting the same target too many times in a row, as a humiliating admission of ineptitude. To score an elaborate sampler of chocolates off an inept date was a triumph, especially when he might otherwise make his own score off you. To meddle with the boss's punch clock or secretly rig an attendance system to add fifteen minutes to the employee lunch hour, to feign the loss of a token in front of a soft-eyed subway station clerk, to scrounge among friends and relatives when necessary, to abuse honor systems, to capitalize on an idling delivery truck or lodge an invented consumer complaint, to recycle a nickel on a long-distance call—all fell under the perfectly appropriate remit of getting one's own back in an unfair world. Even to steal from a high traffic newsstand or drugstore, once in a while, was no more than a good woman's fault. But there were inviolable limits to such broadmindedness. Breakfast and dinner were bailiffs to the rule of law. No self-respecting Biedermeier girl stole before eleven or after dark.

Excerpted from Women's Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery and reprinted with permission from HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2024.