Dulcy burrowed into her lair at the Elite, drowned herself under Mrs. Knox’s soft corduroy quilt. She admired the clear yet soothing quality of light, rather than getting back on the Great Northern to New York and a ship. Rather than many things. She beat back a childish urge to bolt for Christopher in Mexico, mostly by considering a life of church and bitter letters from the Boys and Carrie, Grace and Alice. Not to mention Victor. Not to even think of Victor.
She’d worked through a stack of books she’d bought in Denver, and the last in the pile was a roman à clef about the Spanish War by a man named Maximillian Cope. A History of a Small War was funny, and rude, and full of convenient detail. The narrator enlisted to escape an engagement, and was put to use as a sharpshooter; he discovered he reacted badly to killing people (he drank, he found women) and managed to escape that, too: he spent most of Cuba in a hospital with malaria, and most of the Philippines in a hospital because of a misfired shell. When he returned to New York he found his fiancée had jilted him, and so he got on a westbound train and seduced a married woman before he reached Chicago. The end offered a refreshing lack of redemption or punishment.
Dulcy, who wasn’t in a judgmental mood, finished the book that afternoon and daydreamed her way through it for another hour, reworking her own story.
She had dinner, a gristly pork pie, brought to her room. She’d sent the tiny bellboy out for a newspaper, and he found a Times, where she read of a massive blizzard in New York, snow three feet deep on Fifth Avenue, while she drank a bottle of Cahors and took a long bath. She saw a notice for the speedy Hamburg-American ship Deutschland, ninety dollars and up for first class, sailing from New York on February 7 for Genoa. Dulcy thought about the meals and the wind on the deck and the rocking, luxurious berth. She could have one if she got back onto a train immediately. Victor didn’t do well in boats, but he also didn’t do well in small towns with middling hotels. He’d hate the wind; it would muss his hair, and everything would be out of his control.
When she couldn’t sleep, she thought about the letter she’d sent to him.
By now you know I’m willing to die to be free of you, just as my father was. Perhaps you can find some way to be happy in your very unhappy body and soul, but I think no one can help you, no one will love you, and nothing will change you. You cause pain; you are unredeemable.
She hoped the words had ground down on his soul. It would have been so much simpler if he’d been the one to go, instead of her. She daydreamed about his end; it was like counting sheep. Sometimes she imagined the smug look on his face just before he was hit by a train, by lava, by falling rocks (it was important, in this vaporous revenge, for Victor to have moments of understanding that some pieces of the world moved without his approval; hideous pain and public shaming were included, revelations of his cruelty, his physical failures, the deaths that didn’t trouble him). In a favorite scenario, Victor was in the gym at the Butler, weeping over her supposed death, when the ground began to shake, and the building crumbled over him, and for weeks the investors who’d taken his money and kissed his ass (somehow in a way other than the way she and Walton and Henning, who always survived these daydreams, had kissed his ass), would have to smell his stinking, unlovely corpse under the rubble.
Victor crumbled, he burned. But that night, in the warmth of the Elite, she imagined him freezing to death in an alley, magpies prying out jewel-sized bites of green eye, and she slept well.
???
The next morning, she heard cows lumber through town and the occasional engine on the frozen street. The small porter, whose name was Irving, brought coffee and announced that the temperature was ten below zero. “Don’t go out,” he said.
“How cold might it get?” she asked.
“Thirty under tonight. Forty.” His eyes were uneven, and after he heard a question, there was always a lull, as if he were waiting for an invisible translator to make sense of the line. He wheezed and spat and was not long for this world; Dulcy tipped him well.
She draped herself in black and took the long hall to the stairs and the main lobby of the Elite, which looked like a different country in the daylight, after sleep: airy and high-windowed, but weighed down by trophies of moose and buffalo and Amazonian fish, all with glass eyes that followed her progress like bad actors, like the dozen guests who studied her with unapologetic curiosity and the tall, dark desk girl, who wore a filigree sign on her breast: Irina . Dulcy decided that this was not the time to place a telephone call. She walked through the doors as if she knew where she was going.
The illusion of golden warmth shriveled in the wind, and within two blocks she returned to fantasies of Italy. She opted for the first bank she came to, made her deposit with a shiny-faced banker, and took a medium-sized safety deposit box.
“Thank you, Mrs. Nash,” said the banker.
Mrs. Nash had a short name and a flowing signature. She tucked the account card and key into her blue bag, and she walked away, mind blinking.
The library was just a block away, so new that only the periodical room was in use, and a banner advertised a grand opening that spring. A long table of women looked up from pots of glue and virgin circulation cards while she selected a stack of novels, and continued to watch while she pulled on eyeglasses and searched the eastern papers.
She didn’t find a notice for Walton, but she did for Carrie.
Miss Clarissa Mabena Galatea Remfrey became the bride of Dr. Alfred Lorrimer, a cardiologist, on Wednesday afternoon, the 25th of January, at the Manhattan home of her brother, Walter Remfrey. All concerned are greatly relieved that a ray of happiness will shine upon the bride during her double bereavement; this happiness was her father’s dying wish.
Small miracles. Dulcy fished around for sadness, but though the idea of never seeing Carrie again always smacked her in the throat, the idea of missing the wedding only brought relief.
She scanned the local papers. In neighboring Big Timber, a smallpox patient had escaped the pesthouse in his nightshirt, danced down a sidewalk, and run into a busy saloon. In Livingston, Winslow Mercantile had both fresh oysters and nice oranges, and the town was going through a winter rash of divorces, dead children, and poisoned cats: this newspaper, lacking meaningful news, listed every drama. In the Billings Gazette she found an item about the search for Leda Remfrey, now firmly centered in Miles City, where a girl of her description had been seen singing dementedly by the river. Dulcy felt something close to happiness—a little smugness—but on the editorial page, someone with the byline S. Peake brought her out of a placid mood:
Why come this far on a train, to die under a train? The following souls have recently ended their lives in this way on Western lines, and it behooves thinking people to ask if the sheer emptiness of the region calls out to the suicide.