And so while Walton was being sucked dry at the jungle clinic, the three women took overnight trips to the mountain abbeys, to tombs and catacombs, to beautiful cave-lined beaches. They snickered at obscene frescoes and flipped starfish with bare toes, and in one marsh town they wandered around a drowned, ancient villa, where they’d been told they’d see the world’s loveliest clematis, a white montana, and some grapes planted in Nero’s time. Dulcy had never been to a more beautiful place; she would never see anything that could equal it. They passed the clematis without noticing it and ended up sitting on the massive stone heads of animals (a rhino, an elephant, a horse, an ox) at a fountain in the warm sun, while lizards scuttled around them and Miss Nadsonova talked about ways of avoiding babies. It was a moot point for Dulcy after London, but she enjoyed the knowledge, anyway.
At the catacombs of Rome, she counted shinbones in one room, lace-dressed infant mummies in another cavern. It was horrible but soothing, this ancient and overwhelming death. Everybody died: in the presence of thousands of bones, any idiot had to acknowledge defeat. Dead Etruscans (nameless), dead Romans (Scipio and Agrippina), dead Christians (beyond number), and at the English cemetery, dead Anglo-Saxons (Keats and Shelley and Constance Fenimore).
Enid Poliwood, who’d studied literature at university, began to weep. She was very tall, with a harsh laugh and a great mind, and spent much of the trip trying to talk Dulcy into rebellion. Dulcy would love college, even at this late date; she would get so much more from her future travels, and do so much better than the usual student in class because of the experiences she’d already enjoyed. Her self-reliance might even force Walton to be more competent. But Enid described herself as absolutely lost: not only married to a mess, but also possibly infected. Life was not as either woman had pictured it: Dulcy circled the topic of her misadventure, and Enid hinted that she’d had her own similar trial. One of the points of higher education was to meet people like oneself, to realize that these things happened all the time.
???
On the day Dulcy saw Edgar Nash, she and Enid had gone to view gardens near Frascati, where cold and hot springs were routed through the orchards according to the season and the needs of the fruit. Palm trees and bougainvillea on one wall, white grapes on another, growing near espaliered lady apples. In the terraced garden area, an old woman peeled invisible scale insects off the citrus trees with a long ivory needle, following these individual murders with a perfume sprayer of alcohol spirits and water. They ate sardines and a chickpea cake and figs and drank sharp white wine, then made their woozy way back to Gaeta.
A nurse was waiting: Walton needed to see her; he’d had a difficult day. Dulcy wanted a bed, but she climbed into a carriage, put on her jungle gear, and plunged into the swarm. Walton was in the midst of being plumbed. She dropped her bag onto a bench and lingered in the hall, fixed on the notion of an empty room with an open bed. A breeze swirled down the long hall, thirty yards of marble and open windows. The air that day smelled of fruit and seawater and was nothing like a miasma, let alone mal aria, and she peered inside each doorway. If she made out a figure, she let her vision blur.
None of the rooms proved to have an empty bed, but at the last one she stopped anyway. This room had a balcony framed with a jasmine vine and a laden plum tree. The fruit was dusky dark purple and looked as if it would taste better than anything she’d ever put in her mouth; she took a step closer and gave the still, sleeping figure in the bed a sidelong look. His head was tilted away, but otherwise he could have been a tomb effigy: a high forehead, folded hands, long legs straight under a thin sheet. The whole effect—the high ceiling, the flowers and heavy overripe fruit, the man on the bed in filtered light—reminded her of a painting or maybe, more ominously, of a fable. She took another step before she paused, thinking of how these fables usually ended, and turned to look again at the man on the bed. He was young, with curly blond hair, a long straight nose, full lips, dark eyebrows and lashes. Or singular: half of his face was perfect, a Botticelli, but the far side was gone, a pit loosely covered by a black bandage. A harlequin, with a slipped face: she could see the edge of what was hidden underneath, a pitted eye, a rim of dying skin.
She edged on toward the plums, gathering her skirt a little to make a pouch. She could eat, she was alive, she was everything this man would never be or touch again. She reached out to the tree and dropped a dozen plums into her skirt, then retreated. She’d made her way halfway back across the room when a peacock in the garden screamed. The man’s untouched eye flapped open, light blue and blind, then closed slowly. He hummed, a hurdy-gurdy sound.
She reached the hall bench, dropping the plums into her bag just as a nurse came out of a room. Dulcy asked, in bad Italian, about the patients who never left their rooms: the man at the end of the hall, for instance. The nurse said that it was all terribly sad: Mr. Nash had been infected very young, and had drunk heavily instead of mounting an assault upon his disease; he had also been fond of hashish. He was a wealthy orphan, an unmarried only child whose account was administered by a London bank and whose relatives seemed untroubled by his accelerated demise and their eventual inheritance. He would not be mourned, and even when he’d been able to talk, in the first week after his arrival, he’d only instructed the staff to dose him for pain. If the mosquitoes worked, so be it.
It was horrible, said the nurse, to have no family to sit with you, and to not mind the lack.
???
When Walton did contract malaria, he suffered the consequent high fever, cramps, and pains; he poached and writhed and moaned, but his syphilis plodded on. When the cure’s failure was apparent, the staff used quinine to bring the malarial infection to heel, and it left Walton even more addled and temporarily deaf. He threatened to throw himself off the balcony one steamy night, and Dulcy pointed out that his room was only on the second floor, and above a little lily pond; he said he’d drown himself, then, and she explained that the water was only three feet deep. She told him he was the only one of five patients who’d checked in during July who was still alive. He stared at her for a moment and found his inner Protestant, his silent, suffering childhood self, and she reloaded the medicine chest for two diseases and a hundred symptoms.
Enid Poliwood’s husband died at the clinic a week after Walton and Dulcy sailed away. A few months later Enid met a magazine publisher and remarried. She was very happy, and Dulcy had seen her twice more, the last time in Chicago, to congratulate her on her new husband, and her pregnancy, and her clear, almost unnerving happiness. Two months later, the pregnancy killed her, but Enid’s husband wrote to say that the stroke had happened before labor, before worry: She had walked into her kitchen and dropped, gone. No pain, no warning—a rock had fallen, the earth had opened up, and everything had stopped.
Dishes Dulcy has learned to cook, listed on the occasion of her fifteenth birthday:
Sauces: béarnaise and hollandaise, espagnole, velouté, tomato and cream reductions. Potpies and en croutes. All meats, all game in most forms (stews, sautés, and roasts, fresh and cured). Dumplings, noodles, puréed and rustic soups, eggs, breads, gratins, timbales. Fish whole and filleted, frogs’ legs fried or sauced. Potatoes, all forms. Vegetables, boiled or creamed or Italian style, fresh or pickled. Tomatoes, salads and slaws. Puddings, cookies, cakes, fools, pies, crumbles, soufflés.