It was stunning what a person could hear in such a hubbub. Dulcy listened hard; so did Irina and the head maid, Rusalka Havic. They were from Trieste and Bucharest, either end of Eastern Europe, and were forced to speak English with each other. Irina was tall and malicious and meant her comments, and Rusalka, a redhead who looked like a curvy peppermint stick, parroted everything she heard. Beyond their contrasting appearances—sulky and dark, bright and sunny—they were alike in being resolutely shallow, with no thought beyond a new man in the lobby, dress, the police chief’s bad marriage. They talked about the guests, though Dulcy was never fernlike enough to catch them talking about her. The accountant in Room 204 might be an axe murderer (Irina, disputed by Rusalka); one man long absent from Room 423 (Dulcy, below him in 323, paid attention to this) might have managed to kill himself in Butte or Helena or even further afar; the colorless Leonora Randall in 326, another lobby stalwart, received monthly wired payments from New York and was either in the process of being jilted or fleeing a violent suitor. Miss Randall’s lips were thin and chapped, her eyes flat, and her papery sobs itched their way through Dulcy’s west wall. They had tea together one day, but Miss Randall didn’t volunteer tragedy; she talked quite a bit about nothing: dresses, stationery, and Very Nice People in town.
Dulcy was interested in ruin and duplicity, and she sorted people in her own way: the dishonest (Irina, for example, and the unfaithful police chief Gerry Fenoways, a bullheaded drunk who always seemed to be whispering in the ear of Eugenia Knox, who was his aunt), the mental wrecks (Leonora Randall, young Rex Woolley on a bad day, a man wearing armor who’d stood in the street and screamed about God until Gerry Fenoways bundled him off), and refugees like Samuel Peake and the German photographer, Siegfried Durr.
Dulcy understood that she currently fit in all three of these categories, but she aimed for the last group; they seemed to keep secrets well. No one knew what to whisper about Durr, a Berliner with stiff dark hair and wild blue eyes, a bad limp, and an elegant ebony-and-silver cane. He kept a military bearing, and Dulcy watched Gerry Fenoways size him up and stay away. Dulcy did the same with Fenoways, who was theoretically handsome, meeting his eyes over a newspaper: they dismissed each other. He strutted on thick, too-short legs and brayed, and might as well have been another species.
According to Eugenia Knox, who had purchased the hotel two years earlier, Samuel Peake had come to Montana for his health, like half the town: sufferers of asthma, or tuberculosis, or the pressures of city living. One day he sat next to Dulcy in the lobby, and after a diffident conversation about her past and her reading, he asked: “My condolences, but do you need to be in absolute mourning, if no one here knew your husband? Are you still in the mood to mourn, or has grief begun to come and go?”
It took her a moment: “Some days are difficult.”
“Well, hide on those and go out on others. Life is short.”
This wasn’t the tenor she was looking for: she needed a buffer of tragedy, time to get her past in place. But she couldn’t manage outrage, and she was bored, and they started having lunch together. Samuel Peake explained the town in a roundabout way, confirming most of the impressions she’d made and dissolving mysteries about men who might have been interesting: this one beat his wife, another owed more than he owned, a third was dull beyond all imagining. Gerry Fenoways and his brother preyed on female inmates, Peake’s assistant Rex Woolley needed to escape his mother, Siegfried Durr was talented but drank more than most, in a town that drank more than most. It was good Dulcy felt widowy, said Samuel Peake, because her options were limited.
He was funny, and sweet, and he did not pry or suggest he was an option. When they talked, when they looked at people together, she began to feel giddy again: the world was rich, and interesting, and survivable. Eugenia Knox tried harder for information, foisting tea and cakes on the widow, sliding a chair close. She seemed to be built out of joined pillows like a Rubens rag doll, not obese but nowhere bony, with a general look of placid exhaustion. She moved ceaselessly but sedately around her empire, scooping surfaces clean as if her languorous arms were magic wands. Her questions seemed equally idle, and as she answered as vaguely as possible, Dulcy fell into Mrs. Nash, and ironed out the story she worked to believe: her husband, Edgar, had been tragic and flawed and lovely, though she left a sense of a dark side. He had volunteered in New York at the beginning of the war but had quickly fallen sick and seen little action, and had never fully recovered. Dulcy implied that his relatives were wealthy and distant.
You’d have to be an ass to insist on details, and Mrs. Knox would float off toward another dusty surface or difficult guest. But a few days later she invited Dulcy to her apartment for tea, and she surprised her with other guests: a widow named Margaret Mallow; the watery Leonora Randall, who kept the rooms across the hall from Dulcy; and Vinca Macalester, the doctor’s wife. Eugenia Knox’s quarters were as padded as their owner: festoons of velvet flanked doorways and windows, and the floors were so laden with carpets that walking through the parlor felt like crossing a sandy beach. Dulcy arrived on a bright, snow-blasted afternoon and felt like she’d opened the door to a séance. She made for the crack of light near a window, next to Margaret Mallow, who gave her a reassuring, sidelong look. Vinca Macalester nattered away, and Leonora Randall agreed with everything anyone said. They talked about the weather, about Mrs. Knox’s prospective new chef, about Rex Woolley’s business prospects, and about Crime (some murmurs from Mrs. Macalester, whose husband had just mended a man who’d been shot at a “seamstress’s” house on B Street).
A pause—they didn’t know Dulcy well enough to do more than dabble in the risqué, and perhaps it was shallow to discuss misbehavior rather than death. Eugenia Knox struck out for a fresh topic—where had Dulcy taken her husband while trying to cure his illness?
Margaret Mallow squirmed in the only gap of light. “Our last stop was in Santa Barbara,” said Dulcy. “An excellent place, but visited far too late. Forgive me, Eugenia, but I don’t know—are you a widow, too?”
“Oh no!” said Eugenia. “Drop the thought ! Errol travels the West. We have too many investments, and very little time together.” She gestured toward a shelf with two photos of a slight, balding man. “Perhaps you would allow us to see a photograph of your late husband.”
“I’ve put them away,” said Dulcy. “They hurt me, and I keep Edgar in my mind’s eye.”
Their faces pinched in sympathy. Dulcy felt she said too little, too much. She didn’t want to be sucked into this world, but she knew that loneliness was liquid, and she was drowning. Sometimes she had the sense that she was tipping off the earth, that she could feel it spin. Her moments of elation, her sense that she could escape alive, would falter.