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?”