A drunk in Missoula accelerated a green Rambler toward the tracks in an automobile on January 8. We do not know his last words, either, though the three people with him presumably heard them.
A bereaved girl threw herself from the window of the Empire Builder on January 16 or 17, and chose the least comforting landscape possible in which to die: namely the area between Butte and the Dakota line.
Young Alexander Tuck, heir to a ranching fortune, dropped between the cars just outside of Billings on January 27. He had been wronged financially by his partner and could not face his family.
The mangled body of another girl was found near the tracks east of Livingston only yesterday. We have no idea when she took her last ride.
All of these people acted on what could only be profound despair. Our long winter exacts a toll.
These were the people she’d decided not to be. Dulcy thought of Alexander Tuck’s beautiful eyes, the way he’d dropped his pen and the pages of explanation. She wondered again if Walton had fallen with his eyes open, and if he’d focused on the sky, or screwed them shut to everything but memory and wind.
She heard a muffled crash and craned her neck to see out of the library window. A cart had blown over on the street, and men ran to help free the horse from its harness, hopping over unfurling rolls of canvas. The tail of the struggling horse whipped the men trying to cut the traces, and their coats pillowed out in the wind.
She flipped back to the front page. The unidentified girl found the day before was described as likely one of the town’s “unfortunates,” a euphemism that made her brain ache. The cold weather made it hard to be specific about the time of death—she may have lain in the snow for weeks—but the unfortunate had been in her mid-twenties with an average build and dark hair, and an undated chit from a Spokane restaurant in her coat. Dulcy wondered if they’d been on the same train on the same night, two suicides waiting for the right moment.
Darling —I should have been patient, but you always wanted me to be capable of impulse, and strong feeling, out of my head and free with delight. I can only do better, and you surely know I’ve never loved anyone as I love you, and I will continue to try. Your touch and your voice are what I long for; I have proved that now, haven’t I? A safe journey, and I will join you at the funeral.
—Your beloved V, 14 January
chapter 9
The Jade Book of Elite Observations
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I n her first week at the Elite, Dulcy spoke to no one but hotel staff, the librarian, and store clerks. She had most meals sent up and spent her time reading in the sun of her south window. She read books that annoyed her, about people who (not being real) could die with meaning, and she moved to the east window whenever a train arrived, to gauge its passengers for Victor’s spies. When the lobby seemed quiet, she’d slip outside and slide on frozen clay streets, mummy-wrapped in woolen scarves as she zigzagged toward the river—snapping ice and steam and eagles—wishing she’d never left the Elite, wishing she’d never left anything. She would begin to bawl (silently, but this was no polite ooze from a pretty corner of the eye), keeping her eyes down on the black ribbons on her skirt, the warped, icy sidewalk boards.
When these spasms passed—Carrie was better off without her, Walton was better off out of pain, and Victor would ideally spin on a pike and die alone—she would feel like she was holding her breath. She wanted to burst into movement like a child, like a horse losing its head and bolting. No one can make me do anything, thought Dulcy. Running away was childish, but was it cowardly to run into a new world alone? It made her feel tired, and it made her feel lonely in a new, hard way. Aloneness had always been finite: Walton would be discharged from a clinic or die, and she would go home to both Martha and a future. She hadn’t considered the oddity of not even being able to write a letter to another being, or the implication: she no longer existed.
This thought took her to Vogt Liquors, and then to bed. After two sodden days, she cleaned herself up, smuggled the empty bottles out to an alley bin, and took to the lobby, an invisible widow who kept her face plain and pointed in books. Mrs. Knox’s desk girl, Irina Dis, spilled tea onto Dulcy’s plate without apology, letting her know she knew Mrs. Nash was a dipsomaniac.
The chair Dulcy liked best was near a frayed Boston fern, and the people who moved through the room gradually assumed she was one, and went back to their own dramas. Watching and listening chipped away at the problem of having no actual life, and little idea of how to begin one. The fern chair gave her a view of the teatime crowd, and the beginning of the cocktail hour; a corner table in the dining room, perched near the kitchen door, gave her breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One of the newspaper’s doors opened into the lobby, which in turn opened onto both a dining room and a saloon, and she watched the paper’s staff ply sources. The editor, Samuel Peake, was a slight man with dark hair, a sad voice, a long nose, and putty skin. He’d been the one to write about bodies dotting the plains, but he always looked amused as he and his assistant, a slender young man named Rex Woolley, wined and dined everyone: beer and sausage for police and railroad contacts, whiskey and cheese toasts for businessmen and doctors, claret and oysters for the bankers and lawyers. When the newspapermen were in the restaurant, words like divorce and insane and blackmail and fiend left a kind of vibration in the air.