The suicidal Leda Cordelia Dulcinea Remfrey continued to appear in the newspapers, but her middle names were rarely mentioned. In a week-old New York Tribune, Dulcy found the photograph she’d dreaded on an inside illustrated page. Her hair was flossy and long, body skinny inside a jumper. She had not yet grown into her nose. The Remfreys had gathered, even the Boys—tall and fake-grim like Walton—because Dulcy and Walton had been about to leave for Mexico, to see his brother, Christopher, in Pachuca, a city that managed to combine agave and copper and white Cornish houses. It had been her first true trip.
There are two dueling theories. The first, whispered by friends of Mr. Maslingen’s parents in New York, is that Miss Remfrey had always been unstable and eccentric, a tendency that strengthened during her strange, unchaperoned jaunts with her father. How else to explain the way she broke things off with Mr. Maslingen years ago? These people suggest that she is somewhere in the West, having now utterly lost her already eccentric mind; they also deny that Mr. Maslingen had again proposed.
The second theory is that she quite deliberately committed suicide, in despair, despite her renewed engagement with Mr. Maslingen. This rumor comes from Seattle, from people who have recently seen the man himself: he is unstrung with love and claims that only death would keep them apart. He vows to search until he finds her body; he has hired teams of detectives to scour the country.
Why would she think she could hide? He would kill her if she didn’t kill herself: why wait, in dread? Some things were not survivable. All the adrenaline—whatever fear and love that had gotten her through Seattle, Walton falling, Victor, and her own flight—evaporated.
That evening, after more spendthrift wine, Dulcy dressed carefully and walked into the hotel’s balconied hall, open to the lobby seven stories below. The irony of the floor had not passed her by, and the stained-glass roof was almost close enough to touch. She leaned out over the balcony, and her breasts started to slide out of her dress at the same time as a child ran across the floor far below, and a table of men happened to look up.
Poor people. No one but her had seen Walton hit, and the people who craned in afterward deserved the image that lodged in their brains, a man whose body looked like a badly judged pressing, a flower too thick-petaled and moist to be preserved. She pulled back, woozy and abashed. If she could have walked off a train during a warm storm and been incinerated by lightning, she might have managed it, but there was no way around leaving a mess.
And in the morning, despite a hangover, Dulcy found she didn’t want to die. She emptied one of Walton’s two Denver bank boxes—two keys, two imagined names in two different handwriting styles—stuffed her old clothes into a church charity bin, and headed north to Billings, an arbitrary choice, under one final, sentimental name: Martha Wooster. She’d steamed her face, scrubbed her mouth, taken some Walton pills, but her eyes still felt like they’d lost their curve, and her balance was off, and the people on this last train seemed to speak a foreign dialect.
That afternoon, when the porters offered drinks, she was the only woman to accept. She told herself she didn’t care; she told herself that the young man sitting kitty-corner was worse off: he reached to his whiskey with a shaking hand but never quite brought it to his mouth. He had huge brown teary eyes, and between attempts at the drink, he used a Parker filigree pen—Walton would have killed for this pen—to fill pages with dense, crooked writing.
At the ten-minute warning for Billings, she watched as he put the pen and paper down, belatedly drained his glass, and left the lounge car. A moment later, the train braked, and a woman began to scream, and Dulcy, blind to her book, understood. The people around her milled to the window and said well of course and anyone could see he was a drinker and bits of him everywhere—he dropped straight down. They’re still looking for pieces of that girl on the prairie. And: one wonders how many delays are due to people who do this to themselves? You can’t stop for every lunatic, but any lunatic can stop commerce.
Suicides were inefficient; suicide was selfish: they’ll be sorry when I’m gone, rather than they’ll be better off without me. She roused herself and picked up the man’s papers and warm pen and sat in his warm seat while she waited for some sort of authority to fetch them. She hated these people: who were they to judge the difficulty of a leap, any leap, how hard it had been to stand between cars in the cold and noise, willing the end. When the conductor came through, looking for the man’s belongings, she held the papers away from her fellow passengers; it was none of their business.
“Well, aren’t you a special lady,” said a woman in purple velvet.
Aren’t I, thought Dulcy, who hadn’t handed over the pen; Walton wasn’t the only one with a fondness for strange talismans. When the train finally rolled again, and the fatuous turds around her stopped talking long enough to detrain in Billings, she decided she wouldn’t stay in this place. On the next westbound train, she kept her valise with her. The express followed the Yellowstone River upstream, barreling through a half-dozen scrawny towns. It slowed for Livingston in the failing light, and when she saw the railroad’s massive brick machine shops, she realized that this was the town with the champagne crowd and the boastful depot, the place she’d once stayed with Walton, the place where she’d stopped being herself. The buildings looked raw and wet in the just-lit streetlamps, and a group of children skittled down an alley. Perhaps five hundred houses, none very large: it surely wasn’t big enough, but she stood anyway, and walked off.
Get your facts, first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
—Mark Twain
chapter 7
Another Country
?
Walton, who managed to believe devoutly in the end of time without lending it a shred of religious significance, had come by his own revelations, and ultimately to the American West, in a salvo that began after he sailed out of Falmouth Harbor with Christopher in 1867. Walton was four months free of a six-year apprenticeship at the copper mines in Allihies, Ireland, and two months free of an engagement to a girl named Ellen, whom he hadn’t seen for three years. He’d returned to Cornwall from Ireland to find that she was dying of tuberculosis. She let him go gracefully, having greater concerns.