She sometimes forgot how selective his mind had become. He reached for the gray notebook. “I’m happy he’s bringing his lazy ass north, but I’d thought perhaps we’ll visit him instead. I’ll even sit in his silly church for one of his rants. Remember how lovely that route is, Galveston or the Keys to Veracruz and then up the mountains?”
Walton loved Christopher, despite seeing no point in God. That night when Dulcy brought his medicine, he talked about how fragile his brother had been as a motherless little boy (as if Walton, three years older, had been above all that) and how given to visions, but how brave. Once they ran away from the workhouse with Woolcock and a few other boys and hid in an old tin mine on the outskirts of Redruth, diggings so old—Roman, at least—that they reached the tunnel through a crack under a churchyard wall. Christopher was only five, but he was the best and fastest at finding food or water or wood to burn—he would slide into the rector’s house for bread, into the church for water from the font; he would light bits of wood and walk down into the old mine to see the things from stories, and once he came back with an amber bead that looked like a dog’s head. One of the older boys had tried to take it, and Christopher had bitten the boy’s hand. The next morning, they were plucked out of their cave and returned to the workhouse, and a week later the older boy’s arm was amputated for infection.
Dulcy imagined Christopher, a good Christian, had felt guilt. “Not a moment of it,” said Walton. “Even when the boy died. He’d tried to crush Chris’s little head. Bitten, a bitter pill, but the boy was a rabbit, then rabid. Rapidly.” He laughed, surprised at himself. “Chris has the bead still. Do you remember the thing dangling in his kitchen window?”
He turned his head to his own windows now, a wall of Puget Sound sleet. He had a fever again. Dream, memory: she found more retellings in the notebooks, stories about men being steamed to death, a man engine rising on a cable like a flaming bird cage, a note from Walton’s uncle describing, as requested, the manner of Walton and Christopher’s father’s death, when Christopher was not yet born: badly, burning underground. Finally, next to a clipping about a boy’s death from blood poisoning, she found a story from a Penzance paper, about six small boys who’d run from the workhouse, hidden in an abandoned mine, and nearly died before the elder found a way out.
Nothing was ever quite the way he told it.
???
A week later, on December 10, Clarissa Mabena Galatea Remfrey arrived in Seattle. Carrie was tall, blond, and twenty-two, customarily cheerful and beautiful and soulful; she aimed to please, and she often took the unhappiest person at a party to one side. Other people saw pure empathy, but Dulcy recognized curiosity, and some of Walton’s love of disaster and despair.
But now she was in a state of tamped-down rage over her ruined holiday season, the delay in her engagement planning, a problem she had yet to confess. One meeting with Walton, who maundered on about thousand-year-old Persian earthquakes, put her facedown on a bed. “If he’s going to die anyway, I wish he’d get it done with, and we could go home, and I could reason things out with Alfred.”
“What do you need to reason about?”
“I’d like to shorten the engagement. I’d like a winter wedding.”
So many things made Dulcy angry. “Why on earth would you rush into a bad idea?”
And Carrie told her. The whole notion that watery, soothing Alfred could impregnate someone in advance of Episcopalian marital bondage was so stunning—Alfred wielding his tremulous nib, Carrie actually willing to touch it—that Dulcy (who’d never told her sister anything about what had happened with Victor) laughed in disbelief, and Carrie, her father’s daughter, promptly locked herself into the bathroom.
Dulcy talked through the door until Carrie emerged and took her through every bad option. The truth might stun Alfred, too, though as a physician Dulcy hoped he understood cause and effect. He clearly lacked much talent for observation. During a week in Westfield that July, Alfred hadn’t seemed to recognize the nature of Walton’s illness, despite his future father-in-law’s shaking hands and metallic whiff.
But Carrie said she loved him. He wasn’t caustic or strange or ill. She couldn’t bear Walton (or Dulcy, probably) for more than a few days, and she couldn’t live with her aunts in Westfield, and she couldn’t endure her tight-laced sisters-in-law in the city. She hoped Alfred didn’t mind that this had happened. She said she wouldn’t consider ending the pregnancy because she was afraid of pain.
Dulcy wasn’t sure how the pain qualification would play out when Carrie found herself in labor for a full-term baby. Maybe she couldn’t remember their balloon-shaped screaming mother or the dead twins, but Dulcy did, and she could not imagine Carrie undergoing any of it. Everything about her sister was beautifully attenuated—fine-boned arms and high cheekbones and a dancer’s neck. Dulcy was four inches shorter and three years older. She was nice looking, but when she and Carrie were together, she was invisible. The same blood that made Walton look like a walking stick made Carrie look like a queen, while Dulcy was left with Walton’s coloring and the padded but quick frame of Martha.
Carrie’s presence made the apartment a little happier. Victor treated her to monologues on business and society, which gave Henning a little time away, and Walton talked her into endless gin games. Even the news (not shared with Victor or Henning) that Carrie was pregnant didn’t dent the mood—Walton stared at the ceiling for a few moments and then said, “Who am I to judge?” Emil the cook was still away mopping up his dead brother’s affairs, and Dulcy had real fun for a few days—sweet moist clams, crabs that rippled across the floor at Carrie’s ankles, beautiful smoked mackerel, the prettiest salmon she’d ever seen in her life. Walton and Victor both had trouble with the shape of things, and for them she made quenelles and soufflés and polite lumps bathed in cream, suspended in chowder, or fried crisp.
Oysters, caviar, abalone, Dungeness. “Dear,” said Walton. “You’ll give yourself gout.”
On nights when Henning and Victor were off banqueting, or threatening partners, or making peace with and promises to investors and Verity, she and Carrie would wait until the floor was quiet, the bottlebrush nurse and Walton both snoring, and pad down the dark hallway to the kitchen. Dulcy would make Carrie beautiful piles of food, and Carrie would eat all of it, and talk about how much she’d loved Martha, about how she wouldn’t know what to do with a baby without Martha.
“Don’t be a fretful mess,” said Dulcy, because she wanted to cry. “You’ll be a fine mother.”
“Not like Mama?”
“Not like Mama.”