She had not mentioned Victor. “I don’t know that my father really had Mr. Maslingen in mind,” said Dulcy. “I’m only doing as he asked.”
“Well, there are four separate joint accounts in each of his children’s names.” He pushed a sheet of paper toward her. Not more than five thousand in each, and all of it deposited around 1900; this wasn’t what they all had been looking for. Dulcy gave him New York addresses for Carrie and Winston and Walter, but she asked for hers in cash. While Mr. Schaub shuffled papers, she stared down at the little bit of blood visible on her wrist, above the glove, and she thought about the other banks in other cities. He may take revenge —she wondered if Victor was anything but a victim, but she veered away from doubt. She wanted to believe Walton on this particular day.
She took the trolley to the next bank, the Metropolitan on Seneca ($2, 100 per child), walked on to Washington Trust on Pine ($ 845) and First Columbia on James ($1, 319). At each, she had her brothers’ and sister’s money mailed, and she took her own in cash. Rain began, a sprinkle and then a deluge, soaking through her coat and overwhelming her boots. She tried not to focus on faces, because all the people around her looked stretched and strange, but she started to melt on Western Avenue, and she ducked into an alley near a hop basement. Twenty feet away some drunks watched her from under an awning. She pushed Walton’s notebook against her face to block their view and wondered belatedly if the ink had transferred, if it looked like calligraphy on her cheek and lips.
She was still two blocks from the Butler when Henning ran toward her and circled, a large, frantic herding dog. He’d lost every shred of his Viking aplomb. “Why are you out here?” he said. “Why would you be walking around this city at such a time? We thought you’d thrown yourself in the ocean.”
The notebook was tucked inside her coat; the new money was in her bag. Henning wrapped an arm around her. She burst into tears and truly couldn’t stop.
???
Grief: it was really just a swim in and out of love. That night, Dulcy heard someone on the sidewalk singing a song Martha had loved:
What do I love? I love you.
Why do we love? I don’t know, but we do.
Tell me true, love you blue, tell me why we do these things we do.
When Dulcy’s mother died, Martha put the big, bent farmhouse through a ritual cleansing. She stripped the windows, sold the bed, painted the walls robin’s-egg blue, and installed an art desk, a piano, and a set of the Britannica ninth edition in what had been Philomela’s bedroom. And when her husband, Elam, died—still fond of Walton, still not understanding his daughter’s illness—Martha’s reaction was similarly abrupt: she leased the pastures and sold the prize hogs and cattle. She dyed her hair back to black, then to a hennaed black like nothing in nature, and wore it down. She looked like a native witch woman, which fascinated some of the children of Westfield, and terrified others. Older women usually took on a watered-down look, but Martha’s expression was still terribly sharp. She stopped doing anything she didn’t enjoy: no more church, or excessive cleaning, or visits to neighbors she disliked. She turned more fruit into wine and brandy and cider than jam, and she started to drink the results.
It drove Dulcy’s nervy aunts, Grace and Alice, to fits. They’d spent their lives teaching at Miss Porter’s and had moved back to Westfield to help care for their addled father; they hoped to relax after the trauma of his raving deathbed. Martha, the reliable presence in life, was supposed to comfort. “What’s wrong with you?” asked Grace.
“Nothing at all,” said Martha. It was years before she tipped face-forward into her peonies. She wasn’t a faddish woman, but peonies and clematis were her weak spots, and she never asked her farmhands for help with “frippery gardening.” She’d gone out to deadhead the spent blooms, and had been about to say something about Carrie’s beaux, or the cooking stains on Dulcy’s skirt, before she turned toward an excitement in a flock of cranes and dropped. She made a small recovery, but her heart faded, and her lungs weakened, and with the next attack, she sank like a fish with a broken tail, silently and quickly.
???
The next morning, Dulcy was sure that Walton’s note was another delusion, and as he was being prettied up for his box, she showed Victor the Seattle accounts and the scrawl she’d taken to Schaub.
“Schaub may take revenge?” asked Victor. “Little Schaub in the Gold Building?” The brown journal was open on his desk; she’d once again removed the Butte and Denver pages. His nice green eyes were red and bruised-looking, and his hands vibrated while he turned the pages one more time.
“No,” said Dulcy. “You.”
He looked down at his hands; she did, too, and felt sick. He pushed the notebook back toward her. “None of it was mine, Dulcy. Put it away for a trip.” He tapped the desk an inch from her fingers. “I’m ready to try a ship again, myself.”
On the other hand, he seemed to think a magic box would open up now that Walton was dead. He asked the coroner if Walton might have swallowed a tube with paperwork. He had every book in the library shaken. He ordered Henning’s youngest, blondest brother to search the bedrooms, rip up the carpets, crawl the floor for loose boards. Everything Dulcy and Carrie owned was spread across the music room floor while they watched another Falk cut open the trunk linings. Victor fidgeted.
“Please don’t be offended.”
Dulcy thought Carrie might spit at his feet. “How would we manage that?”
“I’m not suggesting you’ve hidden anything. I’m hoping that he did.”
Victor insisted on a wake and had Walton’s coffin placed in the parlor. The January windows were open, and there was little need for ice around the casket. There was really no need for a viewing, either, since though Walton had always been good company at a dinner party, he’d known few people in Seattle. This wake was being held to prove to investors that the cause of death was a rumor, despite an item in the paper about an unnamed man leaping from an Elliott Bay window. The unnaming was all Victor’s doing; he was still a part owner of the Intelligencer , and he’d insisted on an open coffin for the same reason—how could a man fall so far and look so untouched? The mortician had been paid one hundred dollars to make a flat man look round and full and youthful. Nevertheless, Walton was bleached to the color of the inside of an oyster shell, no layer of fat to turn him candle-colored like Martha.
People Dulcy had never met circled the coffin. Victor, who disliked talking to people at the best of times, had given up whiskey for port, but he was drinking quite a bit of it. The women circled him, too, but he stood near Dulcy and only paid attention to what the men suspected. He’d designed the black-rimmed memorial card—a globe in one corner and a pickaxe in the other, nothing about the ultimate earthbound man taking to flight—and he’d written the Intelligencer obituary: