have just insisted on something very firmly. You’ve never expressed yourself to me so openly before.”
The nose stroking, when it happened, came out of the blue and took me completely by surprise. I searched long and hard, but never found it in any book of psychoanalytic, therapeutic, or mesmeric techniques.
It is, however, the only reliable method of hypnotizing a shark.
Thirty years later, I am still invisible. Returning with my bulldog from his lunchtime walk, I step out of the elevator in our building and notice a musty smell in the hall. The carpet is covered with plastic. Two contractors emerge from a doorway, pulling a cart loaded with trash bags.
“Does somebody have a leak?” I ask.
“A leak? No,” the younger guy replies. “We’re just putting the plastic down to protect the carpet.”
“Oh. Did somebody die?”
The older guy laughs.
“Don’t worry. If he did, it wasn’t here,” says the younger guy.
They’re cleaning out Mr. Becker’s apartment.
I spoke to Mr. Becker only once. He’d introduced himself to me in the elevator about a year ago. I remember thinking that he looked like Martin Luther. Or at least, he looked like the image that came to mind when I thought of Martin Luther—a Flemish portrait of a thin-lipped, ruddy-cheeked man in black robes and a black hat. Mr. Becker had the same thin lips and suspicious feline eyes.
A week after meeting Mr. Becker, I was about to step into the elevator when I saw him again, walking through the lobby. I held the elevator doors open, smiled at him, said hello, and pressed the button for the fifth floor. Unsmiling, not meeting my eyes, he went to press it again right after me, even though, when he’d introduced himself to me just a week earlier, we’d discussed the fact that we both lived on the fifth floor. It was not that he was politely ignoring me, I realized, the way people will sometimes do when your presence is inconvenient to them. He seemed too young to have dementia. No. Mr. Becker had forgotten me already. Even the presence of my dog did not remind him. My cloak of invisibility had made everything around me vanish, even the bulldog at my feet.
It is a kind of contagion.
On the fifth floor, the musty smell lingers in the hallway for about a week after the contractors have left. When it has finally disappeared, I walk down to Mr. Becker’s apartment. The door is slightly ajar. I don’t knock; I just push it a little. It swings open, and I can tell at once the apartment is empty. It’s a corner apartment, like the one D. and I share, with windows facing the back and the side of the building. It’s been stripped to the bone. Even the carpet has been pulled up, exposing the bare concrete floor. Not a sign of life remains.
Well, Mr. Becker, I think. Who’s invisible now?
II
THE YEAR BEFORE Rey Rivera went missing, D. and I took possession of our newly purchased apartment on the fifth floor of Baltimore’s Belvedere Hotel. This grand building, whose doors opened in 1903, is one of the city’s oldest and best-known landmarks. It is 188 feet high, configured in a shallow “U” shape, with the opening to the south, and it stands at the corner of North Charles and Chase Streets, on the top of a hill overlooking the city.
Its architects designed the hotel in the grand style of the French Beaux Arts. The exterior, built of a beige-pink brick, has a two-story-high rusticated base and two cornices: one at the third floor and one at the eleventh. Graceful embellishments in terra-cotta— quoins, balustrades, a row of carved lion heads—adorn all four façades. At the top, elegant dormer windows project from a thirty-five-foot-high slate-covered mansard roof.
In its early days, this once-stately establishment hosted gala dinners for five hundred, grand balls, fireworks, symphony performances, dancing girls, kangaroos. Prominent jewelers, society dames, company presidents, traveling salesmen, bank chiefs, and clubmen all used the Belvedere as their Baltimore pied-à-terre. In 1905, on a tour of the East Coast, Henry James stepped off a train at the city’s old Union Station and took a horse-drawn taxi up Charles Street to the Belvedere, which he described as “a large fresh peaceful hostelry, imposingly modern yet quietly affable . . .”
Postcard from the Belvedere Hotel, 1906
At a cost of $1.75 million, this spectacular edifice was designed for wealthy tourists and socialites rather than the commercial travelers who make up the majority of the hotel trade, and while the restaurant and banquet rooms were always busy, most of the hotel’s three hundred luxury suites stood empty even as early as 1905. The Belvedere struggled financially from the beginning, with frequent changes in management and five different owners between 1903 and 1917. Only four years after it was built, it went into receivership and was purchased by the Union Trust Company for $1 million, including furniture and supplies.
Crowd outside the Belvedere during the Democratic National Convention, June 1912
In 1917, a popular and sociable fellow from Virginia named Colonel Charles Consolvo bought the Belvedere, still sinking in value, for $450,000. The rank was honorary—in 1913, Consolvo had been made a “colonial” on the staff of the governor of Minnesota—but he was a genuine hotel baron; among his other properties were the Monticello Hotel in Norfolk and the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond. A former circus clown, the colonel stayed in touch with his pals from the big top, and was known to impress the ladies by walking on his hands in the Belvedere lobby.
Consolvo owned the building for the next fifteen years; under his ownership and with the guidance of managers John F. Letton and William J. Quinn, the place finally started to turn a profit. This was also due to the war. Celebrities like Mary Pickford would come to the Belvedere to help sell war bonds, and after the opening of Fort Meade a contingent of dashing British and French officers, sent to instruct Americans in the art of modern warfare, would drink in the hotel bar in their off hours, attracting a steady stream of female attention.
Consolvo spent most of the year traveling on business; nonetheless, he took over the entire second floor of the Belvedere and stayed there whenever he was in town, along with his second wife, the former Blanche Hardy Hecht, an opera singer thirteen years her husband’s junior. When she was in town, this bohemian lady had the habit of walking around her rooms in the buff while singing the “Habanera” from Carmen (her mezzo-soprano voice was, according to the Virginian-Pilot, “smooth, and of good quality and range”). Accompanying this interesting pair was the colonel’s “mentally subnormal” “adopted” son (who may have been Consolvo’s natural child).
In Italy in early 1922, Mrs. Consolvo, thirty-seven, drew the admiration of Count Manfredi Cariaggi, thirty-two, a major in the Italian army. On May 8 of that year, she obtained a quickie divorce in Reno, Nevada, and was married in Fredericksburg, Virginia, five days later, thus progressing from an honorary American colonel to a real Italian count. She left with her new husband for Italy, sailing on May 23.
All ties between Colonel Consolvo and the Belvedere ended in 1936, and although it continued to operate under the able management of Albert Fox, ownership was turned over to the bank. In 1946, the financially troubled Belvedere was offered up in an arranged marriage to the Sheraton Hotel Corporation, making her the Sheraton-Belvedere. It was a match made for money, not love—nobody liked to see the grande dame becoming part of a corporate chain—but, like many arranged marriages, it worked surprisingly well. For the next twenty-two years, business was good and finances stable. The week before Christmas 1954, Albert Fox opened the doors to African-American guests. His decision was a bold one, but it was felt to be the right time, and business increased—despite pressure from the conservative Baltimore Hotel Association. Two months later, after media scrutiny, the hotel association changed its restrictive guest policies, and other hotels in the city gradually