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She packed Walton’s trunk. The velvet lining had been restitched badly. Soft suits, shaving kit, five pairs of glasses, the lumps of copper and gold and silver, all the journals, even the green one, her book. She closed the lid as Victor watched, and she changed the label from Wm. Jos. Remfrey, The Butler, Seattle to Remfrey, 109 East 19th St., Manhattan . She used this address on her own trunk, too, though a welter of messages had landed from her brothers, grief giving way to rage and recrimination, avoidable telegrams to the telephone. They would meet their sisters in St. Paul and travel with them up to Westfield for the funeral. Dulcy said that Carrie had to go to the city first (Carrie, who had already locked herself in her room for the night, who had such belated remorse about her father that she said almost nothing to anyone), to see Alfred as soon as possible. “Nonsense,” said Winston. “She’s in mourning. They can talk later. You must both keep your heads down.”
The Boys had been joyful and loud until they’d finished college and shrunk into life as it should be led, away from their father the libertine. Their wives were sweet but stupid, their politics basted with religion and money—they tended to conflate the two. They said Dulcy had made it possible for Walton to continue on his ludicrous path to ruin, allowed him to spray money every which way, allowed him to die. The money could have gone to charity or power, instead of whores, quack doctors, and first-class cabins. They didn’t give a shit for the great wide world Dulcy and Walton had waded across, and the hint—she’d only hinted—that Walton had lost any mining proceeds added to their rage. She should have followed him to Africa, once Martha was gone, “instead of flirting in Manhattan,” said Winston. “Just as you’re flirting now, in Seattle.”
Dulcy tried to imagine the dialogue once they knew the truth. Victor’s financial loss was huge, but the Remfreys had stood to clear more than one hundred thousand dollars. During this last telephone call, an experience like dragging her face over gravel, Victor paced in the library, ostensibly because he fretted about the connection, possibly because he worried that Dulcy would open her own window. Henning came in and out; Dulcy tracked them both while she listened to the rage on the other end of the line. “These accounts—did he have the numbers wrong?” asked Winston.
“Not according to small Schaub.”
“And this ‘do as the journals say’—we have to read all ten thousand pages?”
“No,” said Dulcy. “I have. I assume he meant the words he added at the end.”
Boil me , burn me. The last page in every journal, written within minutes of the window, funeral wishes Walton might have borrowed from his fables. Dulcy thought of an officer they’d met on a long-ago visit to Yellowstone Park, who’d described what it had been like when a soldier had fallen into a boiling spring and had not been found for four hours. “Boiled shin,” said the officer. “And the meat smelled as if someone had dressed it with mustard and vinegar.”
Maybe they were meant to drop Walton in a caldera, so that he could erupt anew like a steaming, randy phoenix. Dulcy tried the word cremation .
“That’s nonsense,” said Winston. “Had he become some sort of addled Buddhist? We’ll bury him like a good Christian, just as soon as we can get his spotty body in the ground. ‘Boil me’? How far gone was the old idiot, anyway? Jesus suffering Christ.”
Far gone enough to jump out a window, thought Dulcy. She let the tinny shrieks echo, but Winston wasn’t in the mood for reflecting on his own cruelty. “You gave him too much morphine. You wanted to keep him there,” he said.
“If he’d had too much, he’d never have reached the window. And I’m not sure he cared to go anywhere, ever again. What was home, anyway?”
“He had my home whenever he wanted it,” Winston snapped. “And real doctors. Why aren’t you on a train yet?”
“We’re finishing up. Dad left things a mess. We’ll make the noon train tomorrow.”
Victor, who’d had a bottle of wine at his very healthy dinner, had been quiet on the couch, but he now twitched out of a daydream. He disliked her brothers, and Dulcy found this no longer offended her. Henning was reading a telegram in the doorway, shushing a maid.
“Bring the contracts,” Winston barked.
“We’re sorting them out.”
“‘We,’” snapped Winston. “That’s how it is again?”
She shut her eyes, but when she opened them, Victor was still staring at the ceiling. “Go to hell,” said Dulcy calmly. “You believe in it, after all. Don’t meet us in St. Paul. I don’t want to have to talk to you.”
“We don’t care what you want,” said Winston. “What you want has been entirely unsuccessful for the last ten years, and you allowed Da to run himself into his seedy little grave. We’ll meet you Monday morning and ride back with you. Then we’ll set up an income with what little’s left, and you can do what you like.”
She put the phone down and thought: I can’t bear this. She couldn’t stand her own skin, all the things the Boys could and would say to Victor, the future that kept bobbing into sight. Her sense of dread was elephantine. She didn’t want to be herself anymore.
Henning, in the hallway, met her eyes and pointed in the direction of the elevator: some problem. Stay, she thought.
“Don’t leave Seattle,” said Victor. “Don’t leave me.”
“I have to get Carrie home.” And Walton, she thought.
“Marry me.” He touched the cloth of her skirt.
She snapped it away. She could hear Henning’s voice fading in the hallway as he talked to the maid; she could hear the elevator climbing toward their floor. “You’re asking again because you think I have the money.”
“No,” said Victor. “I’m asking again because I love you.”
His head was thrown back on the divan. In the past, when he’d say something like that, and look right at her, just an inch away, she’d want to change it all. She’d want him to feel some extreme, she’d want to seduce; she’d want, as Walton would have said, to light a fire under his fucking ass. But now her skin crawled, and she felt clammy, and she could hear the elevator retreat. Henning and the maid were gone. “No,” said Dulcy.
“With you, now, I don’t need to explain. Can you imagine what a relief that is? I hadn’t seen it that way, when I knew we had to bring you out here—so much anger, you can’t imagine—but now it is so lovely to simply be, and it makes me understand how close I could be, with a little effort, with someone who did understand.”
She watched his fingers edge closer; she had to pass him to reach the door. “You know it’s not right,” she said. “You know we wouldn’t be happy. You can’t seem to be happy, not that way, and I want a little joy, Victor. Think about it. We like each other. We don’t want to make each other miserable.”