Bed, breakfast, and maybe a little more
A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies
By Ellen Cooney
Pantheon, 304 pp., $23.95
It was Mark Twain who warned that anyone attempting to find a moral in ''Huckleberry Finn" would be banished. It could just as well have been Lewis Carroll in the whimsical anarchy of the Alice novels. Ellen Cooney sends her Alice-like protagonist on a kind of Wonderland venture, but she has a moral in mind, though for the most part one that is attractively distracted.
For a while ''A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies" appears to be a realistic period piece: the story, set in and around Boston circa 1900, of a young woman struggling with the oppressiveness of her wealthy in-laws and a seemingly distant and perhaps unfaithful husband. Nothing quite behaves, though. Gravity and the laws of cause and effect operate erratically, the improbable comes as a matter of course, and it is not until the reader accepts seeing things as part fable that they begin oddly to work.
Charlotte Kemple, a charity student at a private school, is spotted by John Hayward Heath, a young tycoon and cosseted scion of the lordly Heath family of Boston's Back Bay. The princeling rescues Cinderella and takes her home, but it is not long before she finds herself relegated, glass slippers and all, to figurative ash status. Her mother-in-law tyrannizes her. ''Dismount," she orders, when she comes upon Charlotte sitting on the lap of her still new and still affectionate husband.
Hays (as he is called), though not without sensitivity and a touch of secret rebelliousness (he loves Walt Whitman), has been generationally stiffened in his starched dynasty. He sleeps in a distant bedroom, refers to his conjugal visits as crossing the desert, and suspends them monthly during what he calls Charlotte's ''unclean" period.
Her status droops further when polio relegates her to bed for nearly a year. Near recovery, she decides to surprise her husband, out on a visit, by galloping a two-horse sleigh -- she is a zestful horsewoman and heart-stopping driver -- to meet him. Instead, she spots him on the street with his arms around a woman. She flees.
The flight begins her Wonderland adventures; the rabbit hole equivalent is the Beechmont on Beacon Hill, the title's ''private hotel for gentle ladies." What it actually is, in a broad, fantastical, and often comical sense, is a kind of rehabilitation center. The patrons (or patients) are upper-class women suffering in various ways from the gender oppressions of the day: a society that expects submissive female decorum while the men avail themselves of full freedoms, sexual and otherwise.
The cure, of sorts, is a protest, of sorts. Under the management of a magus -- the amiably solicitous Henry Alcorn, invariably dressed in a white linen suit, and a master of humorous self-deprecation -- a staff of beautiful young men administers a regimen of admiration and sex. The purpose is to stitch up shredded self-esteems through an undeniably unorthodox form of equal justice, providing each client courage to change the terms of her life.
Among the guests are two from the Heath domain. One is the family's prized cook, who has escaped to go independent as an assistant to Fannie Farmer, creator of ''The Boston Cookbook." The other is a formidable aunt who needs more than the chilly domestic comforts to give her strength for her work -- grueling and all but unheard of for a woman -- as an emergency-room doctor.
Charlotte moves through the hotel's bafflements, by turns comically bewildered, shrewdly practical, essentially innocent, and steadily growing wiser. She avails herself of one of the hotel's charmers and soon, her confidence forged, outgrows him and it, able to confront what she will go back to. Two transformations have been at work, we come to learn after a great deal of additional story. The hotel has changed not only her but, indirectly, Hays as well.
Far-fetched, all this; but Cooney makes little effort to do any fetching. She conducts her revels off afar, and we are free to travel to them or not. It would be ''not" -- and sometimes it is (undigested lumps of plot, dead-end side trips) -- except that these revels are done with wit and gaiety, along with a grain of chastening sense. They require only that a reader shift from novel-drive to fable-drive. Admittedly, the clutch occasionally slips or grinds.
The author writes with light grace and disconcerting unexpectedness. She dresses her story as if for a play: The color is white. There are snow and cold everywhere. As Charlotte speeds her sleigh, ''hard white sunlight was in the trees, in every branch, like an extra layer of ice." Like Shakespeare's ''A Winter's Tale," Cooney's, with its own haunting improbabilities, moves its characters indistinctly but with allure, like fish beneath that ice.
Richard Eder reviews books for several publications. 
