Walton Joseph Remfrey, Engineer and Inventor, Dies Suddenly
Walton Joseph Nectan Remfrey, a regular visitor to our city, died yesterday at the Butler Hotel apartment of his partner, Victor Maslingen. He had been ill for several years.
That much, at least, was true.
Mr. Remfrey, well known in the scientific community for his forthright views and honest practices, was born sixty-three years ago in Perranuthnoe, Cornwall, and quickly orphaned. He came to San Francisco in 1868, later making his way from the silver mines of California and Nevada to the copper mines of Montana and Michigan. Mr. Remfrey was an inventor of many devices and a part owner, with Mr. Maslingen, of several mines in the Transvaal. At the time of his death, his properties included investments in Chile and Mexico. He is survived by a brother, Christopher John Remfrey of Pachuca, Mexico; two sons, Winston Austel and Walter Selevan Remfrey, both of New York City; and two daughters, the misses Clarissa Mabena Galatea and Leda Cordelia Dulcinea, who attended him in Seattle at the time of his death. They will accompany his body back to Westfield, New York, for burial at the Old Saint James Cemetery.
Walton, who didn’t believe in God, had been fond of Cornish saints’ names, Shakespearean names, pompous names. His own hated namesake had been Nectan, a Cornish saint beheaded by pig thieves. Dulcy’s older brothers Winston and Walter (sons, after all, of a woman named Jane) had gotten off lightly in the naming wars, but when Jane had died giving birth to a third son, Walton, unfettered, named the blue baby Gabriel Maximus. After he married a woman named Philomela-nightingale!—he completely lost his mind. Galatea! Dulcinea! His last children, Philomela’s kitten-sized twins, needed an outsized headstone to hold their names: Perdita Dido Isolt Victoria and Edmund Orlando Pelleas Albert.
Dead Jane was not on Walton’s conscience. She’d wanted more babies, and things went wrong all the time, the child a little turned, the leg a little in the wrong position. A little this, a little that; so much of the world ended or began that way. Philomela was another matter. She’d been short like Dulcy, willowy and silky and blond like Carrie, and she really did have a beautiful voice, even if she’d been named for an uncle named Philo instead of Ovid’s nightingale. She died a few years after the twins, ruined by and ruining Walton. But everyone had been ruined by something; that was the great lesson of following Walton to destroyed cities.
Now Dulcy sat in a parlor with his body, thinking of a different sort of end, listening to sanctimonies. They might as well have been in John Wesley’s pit in Redruth. Home to his dear sweet Lord. Such a wanderer. Such a thinker. A genius, a saint in his way. Even Victor looked queasy. Walton would have said avoid these pretentious fucks (a phrase that brought back the lost accent: praytaintseeous fooooks); they brim with fecal matter. Most of them knew she had once been engaged to Victor; what did they think when they heard him refer to his fiancée and gesture in her direction?
What she thought: fear and alarm, like the flash across Henning’s face. But she decided this was just another panicked way to save face, and so she sipped tea, nodded endlessly, tried to ignore the cloud of bad toilet water and tuberose, the scent of Walton’s body (not rot, but a breaking-open), the smell of the city’s coal fires and horseshit that swirled through the open window. She took her meals alone in her room, which had once been the custom when a dead man lay in a house; no one used to eat near a body. Carrie claimed to not eat at all, but at night, Dulcy heard Emil pad down the hall, bearing something that smelled like melted cheese. And later, other footsteps in the hall, but now he just stood in front of the new lock on the hall door. It was over, she thought; there was no point to him trying anymore, because he’d only ever wanted the money.
At night, to keep from listening for footsteps, she made herself hear Walton sing through the bedroom wall, and in the dark she felt like she saw him clearly for the first time in years. From a distance, he’d seemed pale, tall, and fragile: a gentleman. He’d loved clothes and dressed well, with a fondness for soft gray wools and silks that didn’t abrade the imagined sores on his back or legs. But closer up, the face had seen sun, whiskey, death, and long dark hours, God knew what female parts; the hands, however beautifully manicured, were miner’s hands, down to the flattened left little finger. How did you get that? asked the girls when they were little, on a trip to Michigan. It takes talent, said Walton. It takes an affinity with a fulcrum.
He’d never once been in a fight, and he’d seen no need to manufacture violence. No broken bones beyond the tip of that finger, no whorehouse brawls, no other injury to the body beyond syphilis until he hit the sidewalk on Second Avenue at a hundred miles an hour.
???
A religious sect had heard that a man had defenestrated from the Butler. They believed that flight was a route to rebirth, and the placards the members carried as they marched on the sidewalk below the hotel read Float High in His Heavenly Kingdom and We Are His Birds.
Dulcy and Henning followed the show from above while they smoked on the parlor balcony a few feet from the casket. The men wore brocaded shirts, the women smock dresses, and the placards were peacock blue. “What religion do you follow?” asked Henning.
“Nothing.”
“What was he?”
He cocked his head toward the open window behind them, and the casket. “Methodist, geologist,” said Dulcy, trying to drag out her cigarette. “Catastrophist. Please let me take him home.”
Henning flicked two pennies from the balustrade without any reaction from the marchers below. “You don’t want to kill anyone, do you?” asked Dulcy.
He’d reached into his pocket for more coins, but now he looked at her: not a warm look, but she hadn’t spoken with innocence. “What cow shit did your father tell you?”
Henning still got phrases wrong. “That you killed your brother in-law.”
“Oh.” He flicked another penny.