Читать книгу The Widow Nash - Jamie Harrison - Страница 13

chapter 3

The Deep Yellow Book of Cures

•

Walton may have told Victor that he’d been cured by a fever treatment in Italy, but he knew better, whether or not he’d speak the truth out loud. Syphilis killed everyone, fast, slow, showily, invisibly. It had killed Dulcy’s twin brother and sister soon after birth, and it had killed her mother Philomela a few years later. The yellow book was filled with happy theories—written with a flourish, in a large hand—that Walton later covered with crabbed rage, big black hindsight X s, and brutal details: cock oozes, chancre on tongue, the lump on my ass cheek tells me their lie . He’d attempted lymph and blood inoculation, fever treatment, platinum, tellurium, vanadium, gold, every purgative in current use. He read historical accounts of the guaiacum cure and had Woolcock buy a lignum vitae plantation in Nicaragua near the harbor of Bluefields, where they’d first landed to cross the Isthmus in 1867.

Walton had either been lucky for twenty years or his energetic search for new treatment had been at least partially successful. He had recovered from palsies, bouts of mercury poisoning (ointments were the recognized treatment, but he’d tried older methods of inhaling or injecting; mercury always worked, after a fashion, but it deafened him, damaged his kidneys, and ulcerated his mouth), and a considerable amount of what was known as “excitability.” He had yet to experience a stroke, blackened teeth, blindness, meningitis, or—until now—memory loss. Unlike William Lobb (a fellow Cornishman), Calamity Jane, Oscar Wilde, Paul Gauguin, Randolph Churchill, or the thousands of other men and women who died from syphilis each year, he was still alive.

But the symptoms of tabes dorsalis—spinal neurosyphilis, wasting, and paralysis—had begun. Before, whenever Walton fretted about numbness while traveling, they would abandon a disappointing earthquake (or an earthquake that disappointed Walton’s theories) for a progressive clinic staffed by intelligent men. In Zurich, Berlin, Madrid, Walton was always reassured that there had been no measurable change. Dulcy would remind him that the numbness in his hand might have been caused by a binge of rant-writing to geology journals, or that the tingling in his foot had first appeared after a slide down half an Ottoman mountain, but a doctor was always more convincing with the same explanation. But now movement gave Walton away: some atrophy of the nervous system gave him a herky-jerky walk, so that he misjudged distance and slapped his feet down, and he had a strange way of moving his jaw when he was thinking.

In Seattle, Victor, a Princeton man, sought out Ivy League talent. The doctor was elegant but spent more time talking to Victor than to Walton. After her father left the room, Dulcy, on the far side of the room—she always took the far wall with Victor—watched as the doctor laughed—ho , ho , ho—patted Victor’s arm, and brought up a promising new treatment involving cobra venom.

Victor jerked his arm away. “My father’s tried that,” Dulcy said. “I would like a realistic appraisal of his condition.”

The physician shrugged and looked for his hat. “He’s dying.”

The next doctor to visit the hotel apartment was a frayed mess from Philadelphia, a Swarthmore man who insisted on talking to the patient directly, and he very tentatively suggested that Walton was doomed. He had gray sponges of hair above each ear, and nothing on top.

“Fool,” said Walton. “Find someone who knows their business, Henning.”

The doctor’s smelly bag made her think of an English expatriate who’d tended to Walton in Greece. That doctor had just come from the amputation of a tumorous foot, a souvenir he’d forgotten by the time he’d asked Dulcy to reach into his bag for a set of calipers. Her first feeling had been surprise, even a little wonder and humor, but the ragged filaments of tendon had done her in, and before she could budge she’d vomited into the bag.

“Serves you right,” Walton had said to the doctor.

Dulcy had knelt in the mess, focusing woozily on her lunch of greens and orzo, and threw up again: shreds of lamb and dark red bits of hot pepper. “Miserable girl,” the doctor had said. Walton had slapped him.

This new doctor, who staggered whenever he turned his head and steamed with the afternoon rain, wasn’t capable of giving an insult. “Mr. Remfrey, have your hands always shaken like that?”

“Of course not.”

“If your daughter wouldn’t mind leaving the room, it would be helpful to examine other areas.”

“Fuck yourself,” said Walton. “I am intact and unsored.”

The doctor, showing a bit of spine, marched over to the open French window and latched it.

“Well, what shall we do?” asked Dulcy.

“Morphine,” said the doctor. “With a regular emetic.”

“Your mother was an inbred whore,” said Walton, ratcheting himself out of bed to reopen the window. “Heal thyself, cretin.”

Walton worried about his eye falling out, but he had no notion that his brain was losing control of his limbs. He stalked up and down the halls of Victor’s apartment like a marionette. Dulcy made his nurses take him outside, and though he moved along with some of his old pace, the foot slap continued. “But I’m dead if I don’t walk,” he said. “I need the air.”

Victor insisted on interviewing staff personally, probably with an eye for spies, and chose a dimpled redhead for a nighttime nurse. “This won’t do, will it?” asked Henning, his eyes sad.

“No,” said Dulcy.

Henning hired the next applicant, a stout Bavarian with bottlebrush hair. She carried her own metallic thermometer, and Walton, without his glasses, went into a frenzy: the giant woman would put the giant needle in his cock, kill it for good.

Not such a bad idea, dozens of women too late. He moved quickly; she rarely had a chance to warn them.

•••

Long, dark, still days, such large windows and so little light. Dulcy had Walton’s bed moved closer so he could watch gulls and pelicans, and once he claimed a falcon brought a fish to the sill. No one believed him. People hid in corners of the apartment. They were all very quiet—Victor had a problem with noises. He liked some voices, notably Dulcy’s and Henning’s, but as Walton’s grew weak and hoarse, it grated despite the English accent. Victor had told Dulcy that he’d never liked his mother’s voice, even when he was a baby, and maybe he hadn’t liked to be touched, even then. Some of his fitness mania had to do with his pleasure in not having clothes against his skin; on the other hand, he couldn’t bear people seeing that skin. He liked soft, light fabrics, which worked well with his Byronic profile. It was all very misleading.

Their truce continued, careful indifference. Victor and Henning disappeared most evenings, and Henning shrugged when she asked where they went: banquets, the opera, dinners with nervous investors for new hotels. Victor inevitably sent Henning back up the elevator for things he might have forgotten, a neuroticism she’d once found charming. She learned to wait to make the run to the kitchen or to search through the papers on Victor’s desk, where she found doubt and rage, half-written letters to creditors and debtors and unions and commands to Henning:

Tell them I’ll use them for ink if they threaten a stoppage.

Tell Monty we ’ll find him, wherever he goes.

And:

Tell the doctor to give us some hope, or I’ll break the old fool’s cranium myself and dig my money out.

Victor’s aversion to laying a hand on another human was now reassuring. She wondered how far Henning’s duties went. His only free nights came when Victor visited his new fiancée, whose existence had dripped out over the course of the week. The girl’s name was Verity; her father, predictably, owned a dozen Western newspapers. Walton, in a stage whisper: “He’s found someone perfectly unhaveable. She looks like a tall goat, a thin stoat, a human moat.”

His language had become obsessive, unaware. If he said “putting on the dog ” in the morning, someone later would be lying doggo, being dogged, suffering through dog days, and (eventually) acting dodgy, which then led to Dickens and daggers and digging. It took a night’s sleep to break into a new letter of the alphabet. She couldn’t imagine that he’d really met the fiancée; Victor wouldn’t have allowed that to happen.

Victor’s chef, a tiny, dun-colored man named Emil from Strasbourg, liked to put capers in every dish and sent a menu of dinner options to the captives each afternoon. Walton always requested the same few things and ate little of what arrived. After the first week, once Dulcy heard the chef’s tiny lurching footsteps move above her bedroom in his attic quarters, wine bottles clinking gently, she went to the kitchen and made Walton the things he truly liked, despite the enthusiasm for greens and lean meats he claimed when he spoke to doctors—potpies and veloutés and puddings, nothing fresher than parsley or an apple. She snuck a glass of wine from any bottle Emil hadn’t emptied.

On a pretty night after days of rain, when Victor had stayed home with a head cold and she could hear him droning at Walton in the library, she grabbed an open bottle and climbed out the window onto the fire escape where she’d seen Emil smoke. The steps hung only a story over the hotel’s central roof, not as scary as the full drop. She pushed the bottle out, and then a glass, climbed up on a chair and crawled out, and turned to see Henning perched a few feet away, smoking a cigarette.

“Get another glass,” he said.

•••

According to Walton, when Henning had left Sweden at seventeen, he’d been about to start his second year of university, with the intention of teaching literature like his parents. But his brother-in-law beat his pregnant sister, and when she miscarried and nearly bled to death, Henning set out to find him, then took the ferry from Malmö to Copenhagen before anyone fished the brother-in-law’s body out of the harbor. He sailed on to Hamburg, then to Galveston, where he sent a telegram to his cousin. He’d worked for Victor ever since, moving up from an errand boy to an emissary and negotiator, working in his spare time and investing some of his own money in the growing number of film studios in Queens.

By the time he had to abruptly board a ship again late in 1901, this time to England after Victor had responded poorly to his broken engagement with Dulcy, Henning had begun to wonder at the point of returning. Victor had been drinking heavily, which always made him a little looser, a little likelier to act directly, and had started a fight at a friend’s wedding party that continued at the bars in the Village. The next morning a dead rich boy was found frozen into winter mud in an alley off of Bleecker Street, and Henning was perceived to have the least to lose as an inquiry began. Victor’s parents put him on a merchant ship to Southampton with a chunk of blood money in his pocket; Victor offered more if Henning found Dulcy in London and reported back.

In London, Henning did find Dulcy, and followed her long enough to understand what had happened, though he did not telegram Victor for weeks. He walked around the city, thought things through, and ended up buying himself a job at Clarendon Studios. He held the cameras for Alice in Wonderland, and he even did well writing the scripts, because his very direct English had a good pithy ring. He read—he still read—all the hours of the day he wasn’t working or sleeping around—and decided that he’d been born to record beauty: Shakespeare, fables, history. He didn’t want to film a stage—why limit yourself if you didn’t have to? Why not film The Tempest on a beach, or A Midsummer Night ’s Dream in a forest; why not give the words of the whole play underneath, while the image spooled out? If Henning could keep up, even with an immigrant’s English, surely the average schtuck could manage.

“Schmuck,” said Dulcy, as Henning explained all of this to her on a bench at the British Museum and promised that he wouldn’t tell Victor about the pregnancy.

“I worry he’ll kill you,” he said. “If he knows, he’ll kill you.”

Victor also left New York in the wake of the fight, and he took the train west. He bought the Butler in Seattle, and when the Maslingen family deemed it safe for Henning to return to this fresh coast, the balance had changed between the two young men. Henning had a key for every lock in the apartment and the padlock on the wine cellar, the combination for the safe, the numbers for all bank accounts. Henning had said no to selling his stake in the London film company to help Victor through the African mess. He had planned to use his 5 percent of the African profit to begin filming plays in London in April.

“Does this ruin things for you, too?” Dulcy asked now, out on the balcony in Seattle.

“I’ll be all right,” he said. “I’m patient.”

Henning liked to scribble down all of Walton’s mythic memories, and twice during their stay in Seattle, he set up a camera and showed them some English films: How to Stop a Motor Car, Alice, The Mistletoe Bough. Walton wanted to watch them over and over, the projector overheating. On other nights, Dulcy and Walton would play rummy or cribbage, though he had trouble holding cards or pegs, and sometimes she set up a skittles game, though he couldn’t pull his own top. Sometimes she read to him, and sometimes she gave him extra medicine and hid in her room. Sometimes he was himself, wandering from topic to topic: a plan to move to Veracruz to grow coffee, a consideration of his ultimate vindication by the Royal Society. When she got him to talk about the last few months in Africa, he seemed more or less coherent, but if she surprised him with a question about the money, he’d flinch, a little shard to the brain, and then they’d wade through confusion.

Did he want to see Carrie? she asked. Let her dance, said Walton. The Boys? Let them bank. “Carrie eventually,” he said. “I can do without a lecture from my sons.”

Eventually was an admission, which might help in the end, but he veered away. “Let’s have a game: If you were a bird, which?” He’d never cared a thing for birds, but Henning had given him an illustrated Swedish guide, all the colors cheerier than nature, and the names broke him out of that morning’s echo chamber: bats, battery, butter, bitter.

“A nuthatch,” said Dulcy. The only bird that tended to eat upside down.

“Sanglarka or notvacka!” He was delighted. “Carrie, all tall and pink, would be a flamingo, or better yet a roseate spoonbill, but there’s no good translation, naturally. Skedstork. Spoonbillen .”

He rattled on: owl was uggla, crow was kraka, bluebird was blasangare, curlew was spov. Gull was gratrut, which sent him spinning off to Gertrude, and Shakespeare. He summoned Henning for a copy of the plays and, dithering over which to read first, flipped the volume open to The Merchant of Venice . Dulcy, who was curled in the chair by the window and had fallen into her own fascination with Swedish bird names, knew the volume would be too heavy for Walton to hold, but Henning was so transparently happy she said nothing.

“It’s an ugly play,” said Henning. “And not fair. Have The Tempest or Much Ado.”

“Ah, but it’s the way our world works,” said Walton. “Cunning, dunning, haunting, hunting, Henning, lending, lemming.”

Henning sounded the last word out, and his face burned.

“I’m sorry,” said Walton, suddenly sane. “My mind goes at its own pace. Please accept my apologies. You will outthink us all by the end. Tell Dulcy the word for hawk.”

“Falk ,” said Henning.

•••

Two weeks after Dulcy arrived, Walton demanded a dressing gown, insisted that they all dine together, and took Henning’s seat at the end of the table facing Victor. He lifted an empty wineglass with an arched eyebrow. The staff hustled; Dulcy began to daydream of her own disappearance and tried not to watch her father talk and eat at the same time. Walton’s newest topic was the Rift Valley, which would surely be the site of the next great hard-rock rush after Namaqualand. They should buy now, before the fucking Germans figured out the fucking truth . Victor, who hated swearing, chose his battles. “I have nothing left,” he said. “You have lost my money.”

“Don’t fret,” said Walton. “Your money is in New York, practically speaking. I had it wired.”

“To which bank?” asked Victor.

“The bank you told me to use.” Walton dabbed his mouth, lurched upright, and left the room.

Dulcy started to follow, but Henning stopped her: he’d hired an agency to search for a wire, but so much money traveled into and out of the Rand that the task had proved impossible.

“If he kept the profit as cash or a check,” said Victor, “if he did not deposit it in some forgotten bank, it may have been taken from him on his way home. He talked of diamonds, but we can find no evidence he changed out the money. While I recognize his love of the symbolic, gold is hardly portable. He said something about a friend, a man named Penlawy who advised him, but our detectives haven’t managed to find him. Have you met this man?”

Dulcy stared down at Emil’s spongy fish. “Penlawy?”

“Yes. Charles, I think.”

“Penlawy was his childhood friend. He was sliced in half by a rock fall when Dad was a boy. A fall of quartz, before he even went to Ireland.”

She watched Victor’s mind go dark. In the corner, Henning hummed. It sounded like a lullaby, and she tried to imagine his mother, singing to her little boy. “He’d have said if it was stolen,” said Dulcy. “He’s never shied away from assigning blame before.”

Later, after Emil had tottered off to bed, she gave Walton a whiskey and made potatoes poached in cream, with a little sharp cheese. He ate like an ardent man for the first time since she’d arrived, and when he’d wiped the plate, he said, “Ah, well, I found out that someone from the bank had contacted wreckers, and they would have been lying in wait. I changed my plans.”

“Lying in wait where?” If he had wreckers on his mind, land wreckers rather than the people in his childhood who’d raided foundering ships, he was back in Cornwall.

“Jeppestown,” he said. “A man named Brahn oversees these grabs, and he kills.”

She telegrammed Robert Woolcock again and learned that he’d heard of a highwayman named Brahn, but when Brahn was found, he didn’t have a fortune, and when he was beaten, he didn’t produce an answer.

The next day, Walton said, “The Hindu had seen everything in terms of hiding and thieving money. Wonderful stories.”

The Hindu was the bookbinder named Iyer; he and Walton had become friends over the course of the expensive rebinding of the notebooks. Dulcy said she imagined Iyer must have plenty of his own money to hide, given his fees; she said the journals looked like pillows at an Indian wedding, gaudy wrapped gifts.

“You must be back to loving Mr. Maslingen’s subtle high-society style,” Walton said.

Vague to vicious in seconds. He complained of shooting pains in his eyes, and the next day the doctor visited and whispered that the right eye was bulging. Dulcy sent Carrie a telegram:

Afraid you need to come. Dad quite ill . Don’t tell boys yet.

And Carrie wrote back:

After Christmas. Very busy, in fact engaged! I don’t believe a thing about him.

That night, while Dulcy lay in a bathtub, the room shuddered, the bathwater moved in a new direction, and the buildings across the street swayed. She watched the window glass move and thought about what might happen next: she’d fall, more or less intact and still wet, through the six floors below her, crushing the innocent beneath her cast iron, cushioned by water and bubbles and the fact that right now, feeling the ground throb, she felt a great indifference. People who cared the most were struck down in a disproportionate ratio; death would only happen to her when she no longer wanted it to.

When everything stopped moving, she slid down into the water so that only her face and knees showed. Even underwater, she could hear Walton howl in happiness through the wall. An hour later, when she went to say good night, his bed was empty. Henning found him at midnight at a tavern near the station, a ticket to Sacramento and a suitcase in hand, four whiskeys into his escape. Walton had never been much of a drinker, and he was sick on the way back to the hotel, ruining Victor’s car. He told Dulcy he’d been on his way to Lone Pine, to relocate a successful mine, and when he managed speech over the next few days, he said many other things: that he had sold the African mines, that he hadn’t, that he’d been paid, that the buyers had refused to pay him, that there were no mines to sell, that he had been in Chile, not Africa, that his head hurt terribly, that someone should tell his mother he’d be home soon.

•••

Woolcock’s account of tracking Walton through Africa arrived in seventeen numbered telegrams. Number fifteen was missing, which put Victor into spasms of paranoia; he and Henning had been off courting money when it arrived, and Dulcy was in the habit of checking his desk. It had alluded to her illness in Africa three years earlier, and it was nothing Victor needed to know. She burned it while she sat on the fire escape, smoking another cigarette.

The sale of the mines had been scheduled for September 12. Walton had asked the purchasers to draw up a single bank check, without percentiles to the partners (80 percent to Victor, 15 to Walton, 5 to Henning), and said he’d carry the check to Johannesburg himself. On September 10, he delayed the transfer of ownership by requesting gold and an escort in lieu of paper; such a request wasn’t out of the ordinary in post-war southern Africa. He had asked Woolcock about who would be safe to hire but insisted that he not worry about coming for the transfer.

Now, Woolcock learned that the Bengalis he’d suggested as escorts had never heard from Walton, and people allied with the new owners said that Walton had arrived with five black men and left with gold. Nothing more, nothing less, everyone in a fine mood. The staff at the Mount Nelson said Walton had arrived alone on the evening of September 16. He seemed tired and carried a satchel. No one at the stations in Johannesburg or Cape Town had seen an escort of blacks, or heavy freight.

Dulcy had a fantasy: They would put her on a boat. Having proved herself with Woolcock, she would sail off, find the money, save the day, and disappear. Over the next few days, while telegrams darted back and forth and Victor roared directly at Walton about bankruptcy, humiliation, ruin for the first time, this fantasy—of running away being a useful thing, instead of a convenient act of cowardice—took hold, and during longer daytime walks Dulcy headed up Second Avenue for useful travel items, and up an even greater hill on Pike for the sake of character improvement and fitness.

On a windy day after the delivery of telegram seventeen, she turned to catch a section of a newspaper that had just blown from her hands and thought she saw Henning. Looking like Henning was not an average thing. She waved, but the man disappeared.

The next day, she left a bookstore (a new Baedeker for Sicily, Tunis, and Corfu) shadowed by the same sort of man, but this version of Henning had red hair. She walked on to the post office with letters for Carrie, her aunts, and Walton’s brother, Christopher, who was the Methodist minister of Pachuca, near Mexico City. When her follower didn’t have the sense or nerve to come in with her, she left by the side door, shedding him and trying to leave behind a crushing but nonsensical disappointment at the idea that Victor and Henning did not trust her. She should be flattered: they thought her capable of running away, maybe even of stealing a million dollars.

When she reached the apartment and the hall to the bedrooms, she saw Henning come through the door to the servants’ stair. He slept at the other end, the guard dog near Victor’s bedroom, but he was straightening his shirt, and when he saw her he looked away.

“You’re a busy man,” said Dulcy. “It’s good that you have brothers to help with chores. What are their names, again?”

Henning met her eye as he fixed his tie, and behind him, in the stairwell, she heard a maid’s footsteps. “Carl, Martin, Ansel, and Lennart. I believe you saw Martin.”

“Where do you think I’m going to run away to?”

“Anywhere, I suppose,” said Henning. “But he’ll keep you here until the money’s found or your father is dead. Make the best of this.”

“Send me to find the money, then,” she said. “I can’t bear this.”

He walked away without answering her.

Dulcy spent the next three days walking miles, losing her Swedish tails behind produce stands, in the museum, and—cruelly—on the ladies’ underthings floor of the Bon Marché. The bone from her childhood break still hurt sometimes, but she embraced this bitterness, too. On the fourth day, Henning drove two of his brothers down to the harbor for a reversed version of Walton’s travels—Seattle to San Francisco to Hawaii to Melbourne to Cape Town. She wanted to snap out a Walton quote—They couldn ’t wade through hummingbird shit in boots —but she ran out into the rain for one more walk, and when she returned, she stayed in her room or in Walton’s, and listened to Victor walking the hall.

A few days after the Falk brothers departed, Walton announced that the proceeds from the sale of the mines would arrive with a man named John Viram Singh, on a packet ship called the Silver Moon , in the form of a check from the Bank of Cape Town, a different branch than the one he’d first remembered. He should have told them earlier. He had forgotten.

No such ship was scheduled into Seattle, but a Silver Star was due into San Francisco in five days, carrying a passenger named V. Singh. Dulcy, sensing misdirection and envisioning the debarkation of an elderly Sikh cloth or curry merchant, grew queasy when Victor reacted with elation. Henning decided to go to San Francisco himself, and Victor insisted that they go to the station together. At the platform, though she knew Henning was watching her, she studied the times for the eastbound Empire Builder. He did not look worried—Henning looked however he liked—but he leaned down and whispered, “Don’t hook it, Dulcy.”

“No one says that anymore,” said Dulcy.

“Your father does,” said Henning.

•••

It rained; with Henning gone, Dulcy again stayed in her room or in Walton’s unless she knew Victor had left the building. They’d gone two days without having to see each other when there was a knock on her door.

“Let’s go out,” Victor said. “We should have a conversation.”

“I’d rather not,” said Dulcy.

“I’d rather we did,” said Victor.

One of Henning’s remaining brothers drove the car to the feeble new botanic gardens. It wasn’t raining for the first time in days, and as they walked, not talking, Dulcy peered at plant labels.

“I’m engaged again, you know,” said Victor, finally.

“I had heard. I’m happy for you.”

“No, you’re not,” said Victor, smiling. “But I can live with that. I can’t imagine being happy for you with another man.”

A covey of older women fluttered by, eyes on Dulcy, who preferred to let that sentiment slide away. During their engagement, Victor had planned gardens for her: a greenhouse on the roof of his Manhattan hotel, walled gardens at the Hudson Valley house. He had never shown an affinity for live items, either flora or fauna, but he’d understood this about her. Now she tried for something like a normal conversation. “Does your fiancée like to garden?”

“I haven’t heard her mention it.”

“What does she like to do?”

He frowned. “Now you’re worrying me. Perhaps I’m better off without her. She isn’t curious, or experienced; she doesn’t understand the world.”

Dulcy turned back to the waiting car. “I believe he’s lost the money,” she said. “There’s no point in keeping us here.”

He kicked a stone off the path. “There’s no point in letting you go, either.”

They returned to find that Henning had met a Mr. Singh, who did in fact carry a package for Walton, but it was a last rebound notebook, rose-pink poetry. Dulcy burst into tears—it was a bad habit, but an honest one—and retreated to a balcony off the sitting room. If she went to her room, she’d hear Walton warbling “Skip to My Lou ” or a stunningly filthy sea chantey, and if she ran to the fire escape, she’d hear Victor beating his own mind to death in the gymnasium. Henning joined her a few minutes later, and they smoked in silence while he studied the women at a party on a balcony below them, guests of the hotel proper. Dulcy watched his face and thought of fishing birds, crows on fences, cats on rodents.

And in the morning, Victor introduced a new plan: since nothing stirred Walton’s memory in the apartment, perhaps they should get him out and about. If he were given the “illusion of freedom,” of fun and play, would he rediscover his mind?

Victor was flushed, and Dulcy didn’t immediately understand. “I suppose he’d love the theater,” she said. “And we could use some games here. A dart board, or billiards.”

“I do not enjoy billiards,” said Victor.

This meant that he wasn’t good at them—if he wasn’t good at something, he couldn’t enjoy it. Dulcy thought she’d enjoy being bad at many things, if she could only try. “You’re good at Ping-Pong. And if you dislike it, you wouldn’t have to play. You’d just have to buy the table.”

“And watch you play, with Henning.”

Henning was pulling on his coat, taking time over his scarf. She almost said yes, and then she took in Victor’s face. The nurse was yammering about rain and inappropriate shoes. “I had a trip to the outside world in mind,” said Victor, “though I fret about the dangers. He’s not well.”

“I’ll keep him alive,” said Henning. “I’ll keep everyone alive.”

He had the nerve to look at her, though she knew it took an effort. “You’re taking him to a woman ?” she asked. “What about the poor woman?”

Victor gave a fake laugh. “I’ll find the right person,” said Henning.

Dulcy had a pen in her hand and thought of throwing it like a dart; her interior monologue was pure mining Cornish. Henning, prowling the misty streets—he might be stuck here with maids six days a week, but there was no question that he fucked himself silly in the off-hours.

“Everyone will be safe,” he said. He looked happy, and young, a little wide-eyed, wild to be out of the building. If she could have painted a human state, she’d have called this Vigor . He was going to make his Grecian marble physique move in a variety of warm, soft directions, after he handed over a giddy Walton to a hag with a dozen gold coins. “But I agree about the games,” he said. “Something pleasant in these dark months.”

“Go away,” said Dulcy.

•••

Happiness, safety: she thought through the range of definitions as the men set out for Chinatown, Walton with his head high in a dove-gray coat. But he responded to his outing by sleeping for twenty-four hours, and when he woke he told Victor he hadn’t been to Africa for ten years, and that something was growing in his stomach. A new doctor was summoned, a cold, calm Presbyterian, an advocate of the Graham school. Decades of hydro—and electrotherapy had left Walton underwhelmed by such approaches, and he was fractious from the beginning. In the absence of female comfort, he believed in opium, alcohol, and mercury. Dr. Dagglesby believed in bran and cold surfaces and—weirdly—large quantities of shellfish. He asked Walton to take some steps (“note the tabetic gait ”), looked at his hands and feet, ears and eyes, and asked him to stand naked and perform certain exercises. Walton said that he would attempt these after a quick trip to the toilet, but once inside he locked the door.

“Mr. Remfrey does not have long,” said Dr. Dagglesby.

“Please keep your voice down. Please think of something to help,” said Victor. “We would like him to be as relaxed as possible. Peace of mind may help his memory.”

“Where would he store that memory, might I ask?” said Dagglesby. “His brain has shrunk to the weight of a web.”

They all knew Walton had been able to hear this through the door. Later, when she heard him pace on the other side of her wall, she left him to it and turned out her light, and later still, when she woke to the sound of a woman laughing, she rolled over, trying not to think of Henning. Another resonant croak brought her into the next bedroom, where she found a heavy woman, a bouncing billow of flesh, seesawing on top of Walton’s frail body.

They gaped at Dulcy. “The floral flouncing floozy flummoxed me,” said Walton.

Dulcy slammed the adjoining door, slammed her own door, and ran out in the hall and slammed Victor’s library door so hard that the pretty bronze knob came loose and bounced away, which brought enough relief to allow her to head to her room to pack a valise. She took the servants’ stairs and was just short of the hotel mezzanine when she faced Henning, who’d taken the elevator all the way down and run up. “No,” he said. “You can’t leave him.”

Which it, she wondered. Run away with me, then. But she let Henning take the valise, and she walked back up the stairs, knowing he was just inches behind. They opened the door to a wail: Victor, bellowing for help, because Walton was having a seizure.

Victor stayed pressed into a far corner while Dulcy held Walton’s foaming head on her lap and Henning tried to buffer his jerking body. But by the time Dagglesby reached them, Walton was peaceful and smiling. “I’d appreciate it,” he said, “if you could manage to make these episodes stop. They’re quite embarrassing.”

“They’ll stop,” said Dagglesby. “You’re on your way. You’ve put this off a good long time, but there’s no getting around it.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” said Walton.

Dagglesby had a dark, cropped beard, and his face had gone brick red. “Well, you’re dying. The thing’s winnowing through your cerebellum. Have you heard me at all? What did you think would happen, twenty years in? Tell your children you love them. Write letters.”

“Devil,” said Walton. He gestured Henning to help him up, and he propped himself on the teak changing bench and said, “I am reminded of the words the great painter Turner directed to his physician: please go downstairs, have a sherry, and then look at me again.”

Dulcy picked herself up off the floor. Walton, who’d never been good with punch lines, had managed to remember the quote, but not what had happened after the sherry.

“I don’t drink,” said the doctor. “And you’ve been dead on your feet for years. Try to meet the end with some relief.”

At four a.m., Dulcy opened her eyes. Victor was sitting in a chair by her bed with his head in his hands. She shut her eyes again and pretended to sleep. When she heard him leave, she locked the door, though she knew she’d done this before; he had a key. Now she wedged the chair he’d been sitting in under the knob. She stared at the door into Walton’s room, but it was hinged out, and there was no way to block it. She doubted it mattered: Victor had never entered Walton’s bedroom, and she thought he never would.

•••

Walton said the seizure was a mild thing, a shit burlesque . He wrote a succinct note.

Dear Dr. Dagglesby:

Your suggestions for my treatment are ludicrous and outdated. Finer doctors on several continents have elaborated on the flaws in these techniques. Your comments that I have reached a “nadir,” and that this is my “final struggle,” are equally misplaced. I feel quite well, and believe my recent troubles might be put down to the effort of a Pacific voyage and adulterated medication. That having been said, I appreciate your brevity, and your personal bravery in making these statements to my face.

W. Remfrey (as dictated to my daughter, Miss Leda Remfrey)

Walton managed outrage in the letter, but once he’d finished dictating, he curled onto his side and shut his eyes. “Would you like to talk, Dad?”

“No, dear. I would rather not even think.”

Dulcy left him alone. It was a strange, warm day. Victor was in the gymnasium again—tadoom , tadoom , tadoom , a tribal drum from the world’s least primal human. Henning would be with him, trying to talk his employer through the end of things; she’d heard some of it at breakfast. If Victor sold the newspaper, and one of the hotels, they might slide through.

“I don’t want to sell,” said Victor. He’d acted as if nothing had happened the night before, but she knew he was no sleepwalker. He stirred spoon after spoon of sugar into his oatmeal. “I want to buy. I want to crack his skull open and pull the memory free.”

Henning poured fresh coffee into Dulcy’s cup. She watched the liquid, not his face.

“You and I will go out tonight, Hen,” said Victor.

They wouldn’t bother following her through the city that day. Dulcy wrapped up and took the staff stairs all the way down. Fluttering leaves, seabirds, blue sky: she stopped at the pharmacy and a newsagent, studied shoes in a shop window, and eventually found herself in a pier restaurant with fish and chips and a beer, postponing a first effort at a telegram with a three-day-old New York Times . And there was Carrie, far down a society column:

Mr. and Mrs. Philip Lorrimer of Philadelphia announce the engagement of their son, Alfred, to Miss Clarissa Remfrey of Westfield, New York. A wedding is planned for summer, after Miss Remfrey’s period of mourning for her late grandmother, Mrs. Elam Bliss (née Martha Wooster).

Wise of her not to bother asking for Walton’s approval. Carrie loved this world, even though she was only attached by Martha’s threadbare family. Dulcy’s telegram would ruin all of this.

C— Must come. No choice. You needn’t stay till the end.

Dulcy scratched this out. She needed to take a firmer line.

C— No chance of improvement. You must come now.

She ordered a second beer and read items she never bothered with: business pages, household tips, politics, sporting columns. James Jeffries was considering retirement. Victor had taken Dulcy to a Jeffries bout during the last summer of their engagement; Jeffries had won against a New Zealander named Fitzsimmons while Dulcy held her fingers over her eyes, chugging champagne and queasy with the subtext: Victor had killed a boy, Stinson Vanderzee, in a boxing match at Princeton, and she couldn’t imagine why he’d want to see this. Vanderzee had officially died of nephritis six months later, but he’d been simpleminded after the fight, and everyone knew he’d drunk himself to death out of despair and befuddlement. But Victor watched the Jeffries fight like a child watches fireworks, and every day in Seattle he either pounded the big bag or the chauffeur. This was one task Henning, who coached from the side, flatly refused. “Have you ever practiced with him?” she’d asked once.

“I used to. I began to dislike it.” Henning was good at letting a world float away, without explanation.

Victor had no spots, no visible scars or unbalanced physical feature. During the Jeffries bout, he boasted that he’d never bled during a boxing match, which made her skin shimmy. A few minutes later, she managed, “But what about the boy?”

“Oh, Vanderzee never bled,” said Victor. “He barely bruised. Who knows what really happened.”

The problem of Victor, besides everything else: he wanted; he didn’t want. She tried again to remember how it might have been that she’d found him interesting, before the world had swiveled and stopped giving him what he wanted, before he killed another boy, before he sent his proxy to London after Dulcy, out of longing but primed for revenge. He had looks, and money, and what she had assumed was just an edge of the strange. She had enjoyed the way other women watched him, and she’d liked the fact that he paid such close attention to her without descending into sappiness or obvious, ardent manipulation. He was observant about politics and finance and things that didn’t include emotion. He read books, and when they’d talked about history and culture and countries, she only gradually realized he’d never see any of them, that he truly hated travel. He thought this would be no problem for Dulcy, who’d tired of tagging after her father around the globe.

“But I love to travel,” said Dulcy. “I simply don’t want to travel with him anymore. I don’t want to have to take care of someone. I don’t want to have to worry.”

“Well, then, I’ll do it,” said Victor. “I will do anything for you.”

Victor believed in other types of activity: sit-ups, push-ups, pullups. He was a good tennis player, but any sport had to be planned out, nothing impromptu, variables limited. He would swim, but in a pool, not an ocean; he would walk, but not happily in tall grass. And he would box, wearing gloves: boxing had begun as therapy gone wrong. Touching another body, even in a game, was a struggle. He had wild urges and crawling skin; no one had worn his surfaces down. He needed a cocoon to muffle the world, and she guessed that he believed knowing her well would make key parts of life—her body, for instance—approachable. If his mother had been locked in a bin before he turned one, things might have been different, but Dulcy thought he’d been born this way. He could dust a kiss on her hair, touch her through cloth, but any moment of real contact was a little like a stabbing, an act of will, body over mind.

She’d caught Victor reading romantic novels as how-to manuals, with palpable disbelief. There was always a tension between what he wanted and what he knew was expected. Above his desk, he’d pinned a handwritten quote from Lafcadio Hearn:

Everyone has an inner life of his own, which no other eye can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed, although occasionally when we create something beautiful, we betray a faint glimpse of it—sudden and brief, as of a door opening and shutting in the night.

“Very private,” said Dulcy to her friends. She’d liked his intelligence and his obsessiveness and his looks, and it wasn’t as if she knew if the novels were right, anyway.

•••

On Thanksgiving, Emil drank and turned the turkey to leather. The potatoes had raw bits, the scalloped oysters were dotted with shell and sand, and the pumpkin pie was stringy and vegetal. Victor sent word to fire him, but a maid said that Emil had found out that morning that his brother was dying, crushed in a logging accident.

Walton wondered if the falling tree had been a sequoia, and had perhaps been weakened by an earthquake. Could Emil afford a hearse, would Hearst write this up, was it all hearsay?

Henning walked up to the market and returned with fresh Olympias and spot prawns. Dulcy found butter, and a wizened lemon, but there was no bread in the kitchen, no greens, no fruit. They all drank too much, even Victor, who headed into his office to have a fuddled, screaming telephone call with his parents in New York before he set off to charm his fiancée Verity and her family at dinner. Dulcy and Henning heard parts of the conversation while they leaned out the window, sharing another cigarette in the sleet.

“Have you seen some of the crabs in the market?” asked Henning. “Three feet across, still moving. Sea spiders; nothing like this at home.”

She shivered. Cigarettes made her feel terrible after the first puff or two. Walton had tried to tell her once that some of Henning’s side of the family had been wreckers who lured ships to the shoals, salvaged the cargo, and stripped passengers’ bodies of belongings.

“And flat fish as big as Walton’s fattest nurse, with larger eyes.”

He’d bought some herring, too, and they waited until Victor slammed off, then found another bottle of wine and tiptoed around the kitchen. She dusted the herring with flour and fried them and dressed them with raisins and sweet vinaigrette, as if they were sardines. Pickled herring by way of Sicily, she told Henning, who ate twice as much as she did while they drank brandy. They were playing gin at the kitchen table, dirty plates pushed to one side, when Victor returned, complaining of the alien smell.

“I didn’t expect you to be here to be bothered,” said Dulcy. “I’ll rinse the plates when I’m done with this hand. Why was your dinner so short?”

“I do not enjoy those people,” said Victor. He picked up Henning’s empty plate and smashed it on the floor.

Dulcy fled to her room and turned her key in the door, wedged the chair, and then knelt next to it, listening, listing. The room spun from too much brandy, and she finally gave up the fight for balance and lay flat on her back on the carpet, listening to the footsteps in the hall. Pace, pace: she admired the dangling crystals of the light fixture above her, the novel nature of the bulb and its soft, yellow, fascinating glow—where had Victor gotten such a thing? She turned and watched the shadow of his steps pause near the doorsill.

A second set of footsteps approached, Henning trying to fix the problem. “I know what I want,” said Victor.

Well, no, thought Dulcy. No you don’t, not at all, no matter how often you say it.

The key turned, a push against the chair. “You’re a fucking fool,” said Henning. “Go to sleep.”