Let me let me let me; the idea that she’d laugh about any of it. They lay without moving for an hour before he left, and in the morning she found Henning in the kitchen. He had new locks placed on both doors. Victor spent the day in his room, claiming a headache.
A few nights later, Victor went to dinner and the opera with Verity and friends. He drank too much, and Verity chided him in front of the others. Victor said nothing but drained another bottle. When she commented, he broke his glass against the edge of the table; when one of their dinner partners remonstrated him, he beat the man bloody, and when others stepped in, he left Henning to deal with the mess.
It was the end of the engagement. Victor began to jump rope instead of box, and he talked about going to plays, going to movies, going to concerts. At meals, he droned on about mineral prices and lumber prices, things that he only half understood. He’d had a better grip on newspapers, his main topic in the past, but now he would talk without pausing about everything that came through his mind—about his day, his past. He had no sense of sarcasm, or much humor at all. It made for dense, maddening conversations, heavy like bad bread, cream soup without salt. Carrie was willing to listen to him—they gossiped about New Yorkers—and Dulcy escaped to Walton, who wanted to hear Melville, The Tempest, and The Golden Bough, with little blasts of silliness from Edgar Nash and Wilde. She guessed his vision was failing.
One night they all (not Walton, left with a nominally female nurse) went to dinner and a play, and seeing people who might be sane, all out enjoying their lives, pushed Dulcy into a thrum of longing. She felt as if she were in the middle of a dream where she couldn’t run. All these lives; all these men who weren’t Victor. A tall man leaning against a doorway, a man with a red angry beard and dark blue eyes who stroked a woman’s arm. Anyone, almost: the world was hysterical with possibility, women she might have been, men she might love. Tall, short, smiling, strange—she studied them with a sliver of revulsion, a shiver of pleasure.
In the car after dinner, Victor touched her elbow, a pinch on the bone. “I am comfortable with you again,” he said.
Bully for you, thought Dulcy, pushing against the door. But the giddiness lasted: back at the Butler he brought out brandy and bowed when he handed Walton a glass. “To your health,” he toasted, and he refilled their glasses.
“To business,” said Walton, all sunshiny. “And travel. When will we leave to meet Christopher?”
Victor turned slowly to Dulcy. “Leaving?”
“His brother will be in New York in the spring.”
“No.”
“The spring. Months away.”
He threw his brandy glass past her head. Dulcy turned to see it hit the wall, then made herself stare at his blank, flushed face while she finished her own glass. Walton looked more like a bird than ever, swiveling his neck to take in the room.
“That won’t do,” said Henning.
“She knew that would upset me,” said Victor. “She said it deliberately.”
“She said it because she’d like to believe the world will go back to normal.”
Victor left the room, and Carrie laughed. “Love blooms eternal.”
But Henning, stitches still in his forehead from mopping up the end of one more Victor engagement, was less sanguine. Out on the fire escape, bundled up with the remnants of the brandy and cigarettes, he told her she should take Walton east. Victor might protest, but if she asked when he was sober, he would be forced to allow it. “You need to be away from here,” he said. “You see how he looks at you again.”
That night she heard a key in Walton’s door, and she could feel Victor’s confusion. A moment later, the same sound in the hall, and then one great blow against the door before he walked away.
???
At New Year’s dinner, Walton toasted Victor and Dulcy as if they were engaged—to your love, to your multiplication, you can pick up the mine proceeds when you reach Manhattan for your honeymoon—then turned to Carrie and proclaimed, “I know they are still in league against me. I know they meet at night and suck and fuck and plot. She forgets that he’s a murderer.”
Carrie blinked virginal eyes. Victor headed off to smash things in his office. Dulcy finished her wine and watched Henning tap Walton’s hand. “Don’t be such an ass, old man. We want to be able to miss you when you finally die.”
On Twelfth Night, Dulcy baked a king cake, and Walton, who got the slice with the bean, was the Lord of Misrule. Carrie, aptly, found the pea. Walton seemed to enjoy himself, then became enraged: this bean and pea thing was English, he said. Dulcy should have included a thimble and a ring and a sixpence. She wanted to forget that she was Cornish.
He made less and less sense. His right eye began to cloud, and his left hand turned into a claw. One ear suppurated, and a front tooth was going gray. His muscles twitched, and his voice was hoarse from a mercury overdose. He moaned, babbled, lectured Dulcy on the hotel they should use in Constantinople. He knocked over inkwells and refused to try modern pens. He went back to dabbing ink in patterns on his skin, stars circling imagined sores; never a good sign. “They’re trying to find their way out,” he said. “Perhaps if I dig a bit.” He discussed Carrie’s rushed wedding logically and fired off sane instructions to the Boys about some property in Michigan. But on the topic of what had happened to the proceeds of the Berthe or Black Dog or Swanneck mines, he made no sense: he had or hadn’t sold them, they had or hadn’t existed. There had been a fire, a collapse; Victor had owned diamond mines, not gold mines, and diamond mines were difficult to sell. He’d deposited the money in Durban; he’d hidden it in his pants. Had they checked his pockets?
Whatever end-stage syphilitic unraveling was happening in his brain and spine, the changes came faster. He’d had X-rays the previous spring—crackling green light, what smelled like cooked meat—which had miraculously shown pristine bones, but she knew he had passed a point. He cried out, his fingernails digging into the bedding or their arms, and even Carrie took to reading to him in between bouts of morning sickness. No one could take pain forever, and he wanted more and more morphine, too much morphine, but who was anyone to judge. Dulcy hoped it would end with a vessel in his brain, a kink and an explosion rather than slow rot or a tumor or an utter loss of mind. She didn’t want him to worry, and he didn’t: on any given day, Walton might be found looking for his clothes, “looking for a ramble.”
“You’re very weak.”
“I’m not a zoo animal.”
A circus animal, then. He was in the sense that he was putting on a show, but she didn’t say this, and she didn’t remind him that he was dying. Walton had made it clear he didn’t want to know the truth, and she went along. She didn’t tell him to do anything anymore—take walks, eat apples, take medicines other than morphine, stop trying to touch his nurses. She was a bad daughter, but the definition of good was faulty.
Walton noticed, and it seemed to worry him. “You haven’t been carping at me lately.”
“You haven’t done anything carpable.”