Alma

Alma is a sex worker whose illness, religious devotion, and death expose the distance between private suffering and public judgment in Beech and Herndon. Johnny Gordon recognizes that her condition is not what others suspect, tries to keep her from working, and seeks to provide for her; nevertheless, she dies in the room where she has been staying. The town’s lasting nickname for The Inn turns her death into a mark of disgrace, one that also falls on Rose Gordon Burbank for having shown her care.

Identity and Circumstances

Alma’s history is marked by poverty, displacement, and a fraught memory of family discipline. She had begun working in a good house in Salt Lake City. After the bloom was gone and she had quarrelled with others, she took the train to Herndon and worked in the Red-White-and-Blue Rooms. Her current madam noticed signs she took for consumption and, wishing to keep a clean house, sent Alma to Beech, where a girl was needed and the customers were considered less demanding.

Her journey to Beech is rendered through the small inventory she carries: a cardboard suitcase, several kimonos, a carton of Milo Violets, and an old photograph of the father who had thrown her out. Looking at the photograph, she imagines that if he had not loved her, he would not have disciplined her. The thought holds affection and injury together, without resolving the contradiction between being loved and being expelled. Alma arrives with this history rather than as a figure defined only by the occupation other people use to judge her.

Illness and Johnny Gordon’s Intervention

In Herndon, Alma had begun praying frequently. She was found kneeling beside her bed and went out at night to churches that were never locked. This conduct led people to think she was out of her mind. The narrative places that reputation beside the madam’s practical suspicion of consumption, but neither judgment establishes what is actually wrong with Alma. When Johnny Gordon examines her in Beech, he recognizes from her eyes, complexion, and mental state that her trouble is other than consumption. The exact condition is left unnamed.

Johnny’s attention is both medical and personal. He has come in for an early drink when he notices Alma’s condition, takes her aside, buys her a drink, and tells her that she should not be working. Alma answers that God has told her to work. Johnny insists that she knows what God wants, while Alma touches her temple and wonders what she will do if God has lied to her. Her exchange with him shows the strain between her religious conviction and her evident physical vulnerability; it does not settle whether her belief is faith, illness, or both.

Johnny tells her to avoid contact with anyone for the time being. The instruction is followed by the passage of another month, with many nights and dawns, but Alma remains seriously ill. Johnny later tells Rose Gordon Burbank that Alma may need another week or longer and will never get out of bed. The people caring for her do not want her to die where she is, in the little room. His uncertainty about the timing and outcome contrasts with the remarkable diagnostic gift attributed to him: he can identify that the suspected illness is wrong, but the narrative gives no definitive diagnosis or treatment that can save her.

Death and Social Aftermath

Rose has already arranged a room for Alma, responding to Johnny’s concern that she should not die in the place where she has been kept. Their conversation also reveals a difference in how they respond to Alma’s predicament. Johnny remarks that some people would say she does not deserve much; Rose rebukes his coldness and has acted to offer her shelter. Johnny’s affectionate gesture toward Rose and his teasing reference to her as Mrs Vanderbilt do not erase that contrast. Rose corrects him by asserting her married name, Mrs Gordon, while her practical decision remains centered on Alma’s need.

Alma nevertheless dies at The Inn. The town thereafter calls it the Whorehouse Inn because a mad, praying sex worker died there. The label compresses Alma’s illness and religious life into a scandalous public identity: her prayer, which had already made people think her mad, becomes part of the story attached to the building. Her death is not accompanied by a stated diagnosis, and the account does not say that Rose’s proposed room was where Alma died. It instead makes clear that Rose’s offer did not prevent the death or the stigma that followed it.

Narrative Significance

The consequences extend beyond Alma’s own brief appearance. In Herndon and Beech, many respectable women feel free to cut Rose dead in the street, although Rose is married to a doctor. Their rejection follows her association with Alma and sits alongside the narration’s account of Rose’s beauty, quick smile, and proud carriage as qualities difficult for others to forgive. Alma’s death thus becomes a social instrument: the town remembers the sex worker through a degrading name, and transfers the stain of that memory to a woman who tried to help her.

Alma also makes visible a limit in Johnny Gordon’s otherwise striking medical perception. His son Peter Gordon later inherits Johnny’s gift for diagnosis, but Alma’s episode does not turn suffering into a solvable case: Johnny sees that the initial suspicion is mistaken, yet the cause remains unspecified and Alma dies. The narrative grants her a few defining particulars—her prayer, her suitcase and photograph, her exchange with Johnny, and the room in which she dies—while showing how the community replaces that difficult individual life with a dismissive label.