“We don’t just like each other. It’s not as if I don’t have emotions, Dulcy.”
“I know.” She could have ended it, but she said, “It’s not just that. But no.”
He had an odd look on his face: excited, smug. “You could do as you like.”
“You deserve better.”
“No,” said Victor. “I don’t. I deserve you.”
His hand closed on her skirt and pulled. She jerked back, and he knocked her down on the couch, a sweep of the tweed arm, no skin involved, and pinned her with the same arm while he worked on their clothes, a pillow over her mouth. He clubbed her on the side of the head when she kicked him; in the end, she turned so she could breathe while he slammed into her, and his breath streaming over her skin was the hardest thing to bear.
Afterward, to prove the point, he pushed her down the hall to her bedroom and lay down next to her, “as lovers should.” He pretended to sleep while she sucked the blood off her teeth and felt her body ache. He kept his shoulder against hers, and she could feel a shiver whenever he moved, but when she heard Henning return and jerked upright, he pushed her down and kept his hand in place, right on the skin of her chest, while he talked and talked: he would follow her to New York, they would marry without waiting for the end of mourning, this roughness was only an anomaly, because she should have understood, she’d forgotten how hard things were for him; if she screamed, if she lied, he’d throw her out the window and tell her family she was a whore. She should think of how fine it would be, how easy always ever onward. She should understand he’d do this to her until she loved him again.
She lay back in the dark and let him talk, and talk, more hot breath poisoning her skin. What he said had nothing to do with her, because she would leave the next day, and he would never see her again.
MY IMPORTANT TRAVELS
1862: Falmouth to Allihies (one visit home, 1864).
1867 – 1868: Falmouth to Bluefields, Chagres, Valparaiso and Cerro Blanco, Panama City to San Francisco.
1869 – 1872: California, Nevada, Arizona.
1872 – 1877: Between Michigan and New York,ad infinitum; to Redruth with Jane, and back.
1878 – 1879: Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Chile.
1880 – 1882: To Plymouth, retrieving the Boys; Keweenaw and Butte and Colorado.
1883: To Cerro Blanco and Pachuca and Paris.
1884 – 1890: Keweenaw and Butte; Arizona, Idaho, Pachuca, Cerro Blanco; the Transvaal (several trips to each).
1891: To the Transvaal and New Zealand and Australia.
1892, March: To Keweenaw and Montreal; August: To Persia and Syria and Hungary.
1893: To Paris and Berlin and Vienna.
1894: Pachuca, Chile, Hawaii.
1895: Madrid, Seville, Lesbos and Izmir, Constantinople, Trieste.
1896, February: The Transvaal; June: California and Montana and Minnesota.
1897, January: Pachuca; April: Barcelona, Florence; August: Japan, the Transvaal, Assam.
1898, January: Butte; March: Iceland, Amsterdam, Berlin.
1899, January: Crete, Damascus, et cetera, Vienna and Copenhagen; October: Johannesburg,et cetera.
1900, January: London, Paris; June: Butte and Seattle; October: Cape Town,et cetera.
1901, January: Cuba, Pachuca, California; India, Cape Town, et cetera.
1902, January: England, Lisbon, Cape Town, et cetera, Sicily, Salonica, Naples, Pachuca.
1903, January: Cairo, Alexandria, Turkey, Munich, Bucharest; August: Cape Town, Santa Barbara.
1904, February: To Nice, Athens, Paris; July: Cape Town, et cetera.
—from Walton Remfrey ’s gray notebook
chapter 5
The Sea-Gray Book of Travel
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When Dulcy was fifteen, Walton decided she should come along on his trips. He needed an aide for his work and his health, and he argued that while she had finished all the schooling Westfield offered, she was too young for university. He had to argue, because Martha was in charge.
Dulcy wanted to go, despite misgivings about a life of uninterrupted Walton. Her aunts thought this was an awful idea: if Dulcy was too young for Vassar, she was too young for Walton’s life. Martha had mixed feelings; she was worn out by Elam’s illness and worried about a neighbor’s bored sons: one had impregnated a doctor’s daughter; the other had bombed a Civil War memorial in the town square. Dulcy was the closest game in sight. So she gave her blessing, with the understanding that Dulcy would begin college the following year.
On that first trip, Walton assessed ancient, derelict tin mines in Spain before they sailed east toward a Turkish earthquake. Dulcy began her collection of cracks-in-the-ground snapshots and averted her mind from the almost visible stink coming from under a collapsed rug factory. Walton sometimes claimed parity of carnage, but that was an illusion: palaces stayed upright; huts collapsed. When cholera broke out they retreated to Constantinople, where Walton disappeared for three days, then made their way to Trieste for a hastily arranged clinic.
Walton, who aimed for places in the habit of collapsing, almost always ended a trip with his own collapse. He thought he saw a sore begin in Trieste, and nearly killed himself with mercury; after they came back to Westfield to recover, he traveled to Africa and ruined himself all over again. The next summer, after wandering around the West, he stalled at a clinic in Minnesota until Dulcy missed the beginning of another college year.
Dulcy the traveler: she had spent more than a year of her life on a boat, and easily another year on trains or other wheeled conveyances. Though most subsequent summers were spent with Martha in Westfield while Walton traveled to southern Africa or South America on mining business, every fall they’d set out together for destinations selected more for disaster than commerce. They’d each board with a steamer trunk, a valise (novels for Dulcy, his own prose for Walton), and a grip for her toiletries and one for Walton’s potions. If Walton planned to test new equipment, or hoped to bring back specimens, he brought an extra trunk. The family apartment on 19th Street bowed under the weight of samples.
Dulcy usually stopped being sick after a first day’s diet of crackers and coffee beans. Walton, despite testing lemons, chloroform, creosote, and weevily biscuits, always persevered, eating breakfast and blustering up to the deck as if there were no issue, then rushing to the side. His stomach always settled at cocktail time. “Why don’t you just drink all day?” she asked once.