Dulcy’s era began with recipes—everything from session pie to chop suey (she’d crossed it out after it proved to taste nothing like Chinatown)—and a first menu from Sherry’s on her birthday in 1894 (huitres et caviar Russe, selle d’agneau de lait avec sauce Colbert, glaces des fantaisies). The next menu came from the ship home from India, a simple English typescript with innocuous descriptions like poached chicken and green beans in cream that had meant dishes howling with small vicious green chilies, thick coconut milk, mysterious salted fishes, toasted yellow pastes and nuts and a soapy, strange parsley. A third menu was from the Savoy during an early, happier stay in London. The meal had been caviar-laden but very simple, perfectly balanced, and Dulcy drove Martha batty trying to re-create the salade Duse when she returned. She began to eye the leghorn chicks, weighing the advantages of caponhood against the disadvantage of not knowing how to get the job done.
She’d never written down thoughts or a record of her day; she didn’t see the point, especially now, since she tended to change her mind, and the world changed around her, and who was she writing it for, anyway, since she was dead? But she was possibly disingenuous, or simply disorganized. She’d pasted down letters, corsages and theater tickets, bits of ribbon and Brownie snapshots, lists—Italian verbs, rose varieties, addresses—in lieu of memories. She still had Victor’s calling card from the morning after they met in 1900. Before, destroying it would have meant everything had been a loss, no matter how pompous the card looked, no matter how vicious the memories:
Victor Bouwer Maslingen
The Braeburn, New York, Ph. Br 129
Now she ripped it into tiny spiteful pieces, turned to the new end sheet in the front of the green book, and added Penelope Maria Dulcinea Nash to Walton’s inscription. The married name, without the mourning, using the pen that had belonged to the suicide from the train. It felt right; she was a pragmatic widow.
She pulled the medicine box from the valise, fifteen pounds of glass and wood and poison. She took out a dozen vials and dumped the most toxic and least useful in a small wastebasket. Pink pills, mustard-colored pills, horse-choking lumps that looked like they’d been made from ashes and hay—she scraped Walton’s name from the labels. She lined up the liquids she wanted to throw down the sink, then had a vision of killing all the fish in the river, of poisoning the livery horses pastured just downstream from the town’s new sewer. She put the liquids back, even the arsenic, but the bottle of ipecac wouldn’t fit flat, and she reached gingerly into the narrow slot to see what was in the way. She felt a pebble, too small to be another Goa stone, too heavy to be a magic lump of ambergris. She stretched her finger and tried to drag it up the velvet-lined slot, and on the third attempt she retrieved a lumpy marble-sized rock, rough and opaque on one side, icy gray on the other. She carried it to the sink and made a tentative scratch on the enamel; she took off her mother’s diamond ring—now her wedding ring from Edgar Nash—and tried it against the pea’s translucent side.
Walton the packrat, bringing an uncut diamond home, an expensive token of the last trip to Africa. He’d probably looked for it in Seattle, not caught the rattle in the clatter of his glass vials, or maybe he’d forgotten it, along with everything else, by that time. She held the diamond up, but she was no judge, and she tucked it into the brocade bag with the bank keys, kept next to the Seattle money she hadn’t deposited. She rearranged the notebooks according to color—yellow to red; red to pink to blues and black—but she was sizing them as well. They were too bulky for a normal bank box, and she didn’t want to stand out by asking for an extra-large anything. She might not need to hide her own book, labeled with a nickname no one would know, but the others, signed Remfrey and damning, posed a problem, and she squeezed them into the new valise with the medicine box, tucked the valise inside the larger bag from Denver, and slid the lot to the end of her bed. She threw a traveling rug on top, then one of Mrs. Knox’s comforters, then a stack of library books, sliding them into a pattern she’d remember. Irina was a nosy girl.
At dinner, Dulcy looked over the Elite’s menu—bad pork and fried potatoes or fishy gray cream sauces over suspicious chicken, all served with variations on tinned peas or corn—and gave up the delusion that she could live in a hotel. This was Livingston’s nicest restaurant, and no one cared that the food tasted like sawdust and pickles and rancid fat. She pushed a horseshoe of gray gristle—perhaps a literal horseshoe—around the plate, watching the sauce ridge and fail to relax again in a natural fashion. She was starving to death, melting away, beginning to look like a consumptive or a real widow. She needed a kitchen.
???
And so Dulcy looked around with a clearer mind, trying to decide what, given the wind, made this place worth keeping. The brick downtown was flamboyant, the houses on the west and north side were sober and Protestant, the painted bungalows on the southeast smaller and Catholic and immigrant. The grocers were either Italian or Czech, and the bar owners were German or Irish, but no one but the French owner of the burned cigar factory seemed to be truly rich. There were far more taverns in town than churches. The owner of the best wine and tobacco store was Jewish, and there was a kosher butcher on Lewis Street, though no temple. A dozen Chinese, a single Persian couple, a handful of real gypsies, a dozen blacks who’d mostly moved up from Texas with the big ranchers. Members of the local tribe, the Crow, were largely invisible. Most of the clear-cut prostitutes lived on B Street, but a large middle ground of compliant maids and sales girls lived in the rooming houses on Clark and Lewis. Rusalka lived there, above a storefront advertising a fortune-teller who charged astronomical prices, and Dulcy wondered if people were willing to pay so much because of the sudden-death way men made a living out here, mining and dodging trains and trees and errant cattle. Walton, Man of Science, had loved having his palm read, but Dulcy had always assumed there was more to the arrangement than palms.
The point of the game was to pick the most livable house on every block (not unlike a menu, the best blouse on a catalogue page, the most interesting man on a train). The old farmhouses on the east side were too close to the prostitutes’ cribs on B Street, a stone place with pretty windows on Yellowstone was too public, a stucco on Third was downwind from a laundry. On South Eighth Street she studied a yellow two-story frame house that sat on the high point of a long clearing—a garden-sized clearing—that faced south to the mountains and river. There was a cart in the yard, and an open door; someone was probably unpacking, and her life felt mistimed.
But she persisted. The temperature rose to a heady forty degrees, and the slush that had seemed to melt away proved to be held in suspension by the clay of the streets, which took on the look of bad paté, pink slime whipped together with cow and horse shit. During a sleet storm, an algae-green lather formed. Half the sidewalks were still only warped boards, now glazed with slick clay, and little old ladies slid backward regularly into the street mud, umbrellas upright. Some joker made a small fortune using a sleigh to take travelers from the depot to the hotels. When Dulcy stepped off the warped boards of the sidewalk on the fourth day of thaw, one leg simply disappeared into the muck; the photographer Siegfried Durr helped pry her out, an intimate act that was apparently customary in the town.