“She was only a mess because Dad made her sick. It’s difficult not to hate him sometimes,” said Carrie, after a moment. She slathered chutney on her melted cheese. “I’ll be a grand bully like Martha, and Alfred will be a wonderful father.”
Martha would have eaten Alfred in a single glance, with a cream sauce, and forced Carrie to look for a better mate. Martha had disdain for “mental wrecks,” even her invalid daughter, and especially the neurotic engineer who’d married and killed Philomela. On her dressing table, she kept a silver-framed photo of a brother who had died in the Civil War. The photograph of the brother who’d fought in the same war and died ten years later of drink was kept in a drawer.
“We could go live somewhere else,” said Dulcy. “We could run away.”
“No, I want Alfred,” said Carrie. “You’ll see. He’s a fine man.” She’d popped out of her mood, and she read aloud from the Herald about a cotillion, rolling names like Orme and Stuyvesant. Parrots as party favors, a truffle-laden menu. She tried for ridicule, reading with long, fey syllables, but she would miss this life terribly. Carrie had brought along the dress she’d ordered for the season, but she knew the waist wouldn’t fit for long.
They heard the elevator churn, and they put down their plates. Dulcy pushed the light button and they sat in the dark, listening to the opening elevator door and Victor, drunk and in mid-rant: the Portland people should understand the situation had changed. Their precious exposition would have to find new moneybags, and Henning should retrieve his cash—
“There’s no point,” said Henning. “Perhaps if I leave it with them, I’ll have some profit.”
His Swedish accent came out when he drank, an up-and-down pattern to a sentence, ending at something close to a question. “And that ass from the Washington Hotel,” said Victor. “How dare he not trust me? Arrogant little Mick. I want you to throw him off a dock.”
“No,” said Henning. “It won’t do you any good.” He walked away, the long, thumping stride.
Dulcy thought she could still hear Victor breathing, hear rage, but this was impossible: the hall was carpeted, life muffled and smothered. Carrie, frozen in her chair, stared up at the glow of the skylight with wider eyes, and when the door at the end of the hall finally clicked shut, she said, “Where is the money?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know everything about Dad.”
“Never. No one does.”
“Maybe you are well away from him.” But she didn’t mean Walton.
???
Walton was dreamy and sluggish for a few days after Carrie’s arrival, and then he dropped into a higher fever and had a series of seizures. He muttered about mines, but he called them Wheal Charlotte and Tolvadden and Wheal Neptune, Cornish mines from his childhood. He asked for music, and Henning found a violinist, but the man did not know any Vivaldi and was banished after an hour. Vivaldi had been born during an earthquake in Venice, or so Walton had been told during a stay in a clinic in Trieste. Walton was peeved that Victor couldn’t hire Fritz Kreisler to play for him.
???
Henning roamed Seattle and returned with a cellist. They had peace, each in a different pocket of the sitting room, scribbling: Dulcy writing her aunts in Westfield to say that they should prepare a room for Walton, Victor writing his creditors, Henning taking notes on a Danish play, Carrie agonizing through a draft of a letter to Alfred about his impending fatherhood. They all scratched paper, but Walton, king of the notebooks, simply listened to the cello propped in a wing chair in the winter sunlight, tears rolling out of his closed eyes.
Dulcy’s heart surged, a stab of panic: you can know a situation won’t end well, and survive a slow, downward drip, but the moment, for whatever reason, was a jolt—Walton looked dead, and looked like he knew it. But everyone else was oblivious, buried in private miseries or daydreams. Carrie snuffled and balled up a sheet and began another draft. Victor had a finger stuffed in his ear. Henning hummed again, out of tune.
Henning didn’t know he’d always only be Victor’s attack dog, thought Dulcy. And a new thought: Walton didn’t know that Victor was only trying to keep him alive for the money.
???
At Christmas, Walton gave them poems he’d copied onto pretty paper.
To Carrie:
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you,
None has understood you, but I understand you,
None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself,
None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you.
To Victor:
Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave;
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn,
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on silver wheels.
To Henning:
I know how men in exile feed on dreams.
To Dulcy:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
A little bit of everything: Merry Christmas. Fifty years with a fountain pen, reams of blotting paper, but he might have liked his handwriting better than the poetry. Walton had always been self-referential, but this was sharper stuff than he usually enjoyed, and none of it came from the rose-pink journal or the stacks of Bullfinch and the Brothers Grimm on the bedside table. How could he still remember Shakespeare and not a fortune?
They were all in the sitting room again, trapped together with their cards, while Walton, having spread this wisdom, flipped the pages of an illustrated copy of Aesop. Dulcy jumped when Victor whispered, just a foot away, “Why is he reading books of fables?”
Except for Victor, who had turned to brandy, they were all reading fables. “Because he thinks his dreams are turning into fables.”
“Maleficent, malaprop, melon, mellow, melodious,” said Walton.
“What does that mean?” asked Victor. When he spent more than a few seconds listening to Walton now, his face beaded with sweat.
“Paddle, saddle, straddle, fiddle-faddle.”
Victor gripped his head. Dulcy headed for her room and woke an hour later to the sound of Victor and Walton howling at each other, Walton having evidently crept into the library for another volume. When the voices stopped, she stayed where she was, weighed down by wine and the notion that she could sleep through a murder, and woke again to someone lying down on the bed: Victor, on top of the covers, stiff and staring at the ceiling. He’d come through Walton’s bedroom.
“Let me stay, just like this. Let me stay. I won’t touch you. Don’t laugh that I even say that.”