“Ah, the joys of college tuition,” he said. “Thank God for my commercial. Two days of work paid for a whole year at NYU. I’d better get another one or I don’t know how I’m coming back.”

It was impossible for Scarlett to ignore that Eric needing to earn money fit nicely into the promise she had made to Spencer about rich guys.

They had reached the laundry. Eric carried the bag in and set it on the counter.

“I look forward to hearing the stories,” he said. “Promise me you’ll tell me when I see you. And I will see you. I’ll make a point of it.”

He gave her one final, devastating, and unlikely smile, then went off in search of his sandwich.

It was at that moment that Scarlett fully accepted her new employment.

ACT II

The very last room completed in the Hopewell refurbishment of 1929 was the Empire Suite. J. Allen Raumenberg worked for weeks on its composition. It was perhaps here, in this hotel room, that he developed his concept of “bringing down the moon”—the principle that would guide the hundreds of Broadway and film sets he would design over the next twenty years.

Raumenberg felt that the most magical time of day was twilight, when the moon hung low and the sky split with color. He had his glassworks create a spectacular moonlike mirror, and he carefully manipulated shades of light and dark in all aspects of the design so that the room would “constantly appear to be suspended in that magical hour when the night is about to bloom and the curtains on every stage rise.”

Fittingly, the room’s first inhabitant was Clara Hooper, a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, and the mistress of a wealthy Wall Street banker. She was sitting at the dressing table in the Empire Suite looking into the moon mirror when she got a call saying that the stock market had just crashed. Hours later, her boyfriend vanished, never to return. She realized that the six dollars and forty-seven cents she had in front of her could now be the only money she had in the world. She certainly couldn’t pay the twelve dollars a night the room cost. She tossed her things out of the fourth-story window to a friend who waited in the street below, and then slipped out quietly during the night.

So from the start, the Empire Suite had a strong (if somewhat dubious) connection to the theater world…

—J. ALLEN RAUMENBERG: DESIGNER FOR AN AGE

THE INHABITANT

“How do you write a life?” Mrs. Amberson asked from the window of the Empire Suite. “The tangled web. So many stories…”

She blew some smoke up. It floated back down and settled around her head, like a halo of smog.

“I feel like we’re missing something,” she said.

Words, Scarlett thought. Words, on a page, written by you. That’s what we’re missing.

But she sighed to herself and said nothing. She just absently read her e-mails from her friends. It looked like work—not that there was any work to do.