Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
My Towels, Folded by Someone
The porter who wrote the house towel standard arrives each morning to find his rule kept exactly, and one fold better than his own.
- perspective: first
I wrote the towel standard of this house in March 1974, and I have never needed anyone to remind me of that, because the gilt frame holds the card as well. Fold twice, square the edges with the flat of the hand, seam to the wall, twelve to a rail, fold-line to the light. I cut the gauge card myself, board and penknife, to the size of a pass: a towel passes if the card slips into the fold without a tug. Every floor porter this house has taken on since has signed for the standard out of my book, and the last page of the book is the card drawn at actual size, with my initials in the corner where a rule's initials go.
My rounds keep their own hours. At ten each night I walk the floors with the card in my breast pocket, straighten what the day has leaned, and re-square the three main stacks — bath, hand, and guest-size — with the edge of the palm, my palm, which is the palm the card was cut to. Then the linen room locks behind me at twenty to eleven, and the house goes to its own devices. I have had that hour since 1974. It used to be the cleanest half hour of my week. I now examine it the way you examine a receipt you were glad of at the time.
At six in the morning the stacks are folded to a different rule.
I set that line on its own because I want it read plainly, and plainly is the whole of my complaint. Not wrongly. Not crumpled, not hurried, not the wet jumble of a man clearing his trolley at the end of a shift. Folded — to a rule. My rule: fold twice, seams in, edges squared, twelve to a rail, fold-line to the light. Every measure named on my card passes, and then, past where the card has anything left to say, one motion more. A bevel taken off the top of each stack, half an inch, dead level. The edges brought forward to the rail as if presenting. The fold-line set against the window more truly than my card's own line — truer, I am willing to put in writing, than my card knew how to be. It passes my gauge and then it keeps going. Every stack. Every floor. Every morning since the summer of 1983.
You cannot book a query against it. I turned the fault column over in my head all of that first week, and there is no entry in any form we keep that would take the words folded better than standard, by person or persons unidentified. The laundry returns are flat; contractors do not bevel, they bale. The night staff are Mrs. Cryer and the kettle-man, and neither could fold a towel into a shape worth defending. I sat out one whole night in the linen room in my good coat, chair against the door, light off, quick at any latch from half ten — and nothing came, and nothing went, and at six the stacks answered to the half inch as usual, on the far side of a lock I had been sitting against all night. I note the experiment here so nobody else has to repeat it. I do not book it, because there is nowhere to book it.
I went so far as to measure. I borrowed the steel rule from the porters' drawer and put it to the bevel, being that kind of man. The bevel is half an inch. It is exactly half an inch on every stack, every morning, and here is the door that will not shut on the fact: half an inch is what my own card would call for — if my card had been drawn by a better hand. My standard may be the rough copy. Someone is keeping the fair one.
I have taught myself, on the ten o'clock walk, not to ask whose hands. I square what the day has leaned, I set the seam to the wall, I lock the room up, and I leave the question standing in the corridor behind me like a coat on its peg. What I have never settled, in five years of outdone mornings, is which of two things I could bear less: that someone is keeping my standard for me, kindly, and to a height I never drafted — or that my standard was always the copy, taken down from memory of a fold I was taught before I ever carried a trolley, and the six o'clock hands belong to the original, keeping it patiently, the way a man is patient with a note in his own old hand that he has long since outgrown.