Durr walked her to Thompsons to buy new boots. He was handsome, but his eyes were a little too open. “When will the mud dry?” she asked.
“When the temperature hits ninety. Then it turns to rock,” said Durr, watching Thompson lace her up. “Other than that, I highly recommend the town.”
Dulcy made her way back to the house on Eighth Street and found the cart in the yard had been replaced with a sale sign. She stood tiptoe near the wraparound porch, but she was too short to see anything beyond a dangling electric light. The foundation seemed sturdy, and an old poplar at the gate barricaded it from the only other house on the block, where a man had begun to yell—useless dirty woman eggs with feathers lick them off. God dear God how could you have created her.
She scurried around to the far side and sat on the steps next to a withered grapevine while the roar next door continued. A handful of scraggly gooseberry bushes ran along a low wall that marked the drop-off to the river bottom, next to a ruined shed. She walked down and scuffed the soil, the same pale clay that had sucked her boots off downtown. She looked up at an osprey nest in a bottomland cottonwood, down at willow and dogwood and paths snaking through the Fleshman Creek marshes and ruined beaver dams to the river.
She wanted it all, despite the neighbor. When she walked into the Elite lobby, Samuel Peake was waiting for Irina to finish with a guest. “You look happy,” he said.
“What do you mean?” asked Dulcy.
“Just that. No need to be alarmed.” He handed a note to Irina. “Don’t read that,” he said. “It’s for Lewis. Rise above your nature, just this once.”
???
Samuel talked her into joining him again at dinner with Margaret Mallow and Rex Woolley, and they all drank too much. Rex talked about investment ideas—dams, resorts—and Samuel worked to keep bringing him back to newspapers. Gerry Fenoways, the police chief, was in the far corner with his wife, who looked like a nominally healthier version of his mother. They didn’t seem to be talking: Gerry’s face was red, and his wife’s was rigid. Eugenia swept into the room, ushering in a group of fur-coated travelers, and Samuel crooked his finger. “Eugenia,” he whispered, “perhaps you could go over and reassure Mrs. Fenoways that Gerry loves her, and loves her alone.”
Eugenia turned a roasted pink, but instead of fleeing she began going from table to table, filling glasses herself, floating around the periphery of the room like a swollen butterfly.
That night, Dulcy woke to the sound of a man howling in the halls and a woman shushing him, and she felt the hotel shudder. A rumble, a shift: Dulcy listened for a train, but there wasn’t one; she watched the ceiling, but it didn’t fall on her face. Here she was in a brick hotel during an earthquake again—why did this always happen? It happened because she only slept in hotels.
In the morning when she left her room, Irving and Rusalka said they hadn’t felt a thing, but Dulcy guessed that everything felt like a passing train to them, now. They were scrubbing the hallway near Eugenia’s private apartment; Chief Fenoways had urinated up and down its length. “Until she let him in,” whispered Irving.
Dulcy slid her way to the office of the property agent whose name had been posted on the fence of the house on Eighth Street, a man named Nesser. She’d seen him eating in the Elite dining room. His face was bland, but she’d been impressed by the wine on his table, and now she also approved of the way he didn’t stare at her mud-splattered coat or her windblown hair, or question her taste in houses. But when Dulcy said she didn’t need to see the inside before putting in an offer, he pulled on his hat and coat and signaled his assistant to bring a car, one of the only ones she’d seen in town. “I won’t take advantage of a widow,” he said.
The widow cringed as a crowd gathered to watch the assistant tinker with the Reo engine, but they spun through the mud, and she found the house was solid, built in 1885 and plumbed and electrified later by a junior banker with a finicky wife. It had fir trim and floors, tall windows and a bathroom with a tub and water closet and sink. The kitchen had a tin counter, a hole in the floor for draining an icebox into the cellar, and a stove space under a large vent, which warbled, in the wind. The two bedrooms upstairs were wallpapered in a pattern of lumpen indigo grapes. The banker’s wife hadn’t liked light anymore than she’d liked snow, and the couple had lacked children, and so the sunniest room had been used for storage, while the owners had used the dark room that faced north, and the neighbor currently stared at Dulcy and the realtor from his front porch. When the realtor waved, the man walked into his house and slammed the door. “I don’t mind not being social,” she said.
“He’s a minister,” said the realtor. “He can’t be that bad.”
A realtor had to be an optimist. Dulcy thought the neighbor could be that bad, but she still made an offer. They discussed bank transfers, workmen, and weather while she worried about money and whether she’d lost her hold on her circumstances.
???
The Widow Nash perked up and continued her social hatch: Margaret talked her into a meeting of the Sacajawea Club at the Albemarle Hotel, where Frances Woolley, Rex’s mother, was hosting a meal. Mrs. Woolley usually waited to come north from Pasadena until spring, but here she was, eager to slum with the hoi polloi. Who were naturally happy to slum with her, even Eugenia, who was miffed by the choice of the Albemarle instead of the Elite.
Frances Woolley, mother of Rex and aunt and benefactor to Samuel Peake, was tall, with a long neck and a cloud of what Eugenia Knox called “auburn ” hair (Dulcy noted that the same color was described as red on a maid like Rusalka). She was still handsome, with an eye-popping figure, and Margaret said that she was fond of her chauffeur, and that a contingent of men would follow her through the summer season. Frances made Dulcy think of a bored carnivore in a zoo, but she talked intelligently about books, and she’d drummed good wine out of the Albemarle basement, and she worried about Rex quite openly.
The problem with Rex: every idea had to be his, and new. Established good ideas—say, the newspaper business with his cousin (poor Samuel was so patient), or real estate in boomtowns like Los Angeles—didn’t hold his attention. He schemed about water and dams, highways and hospitals; he wanted to run the world without knowing how it worked, and his mother had sent him to spend time with Samuel in Montana because Rex had bought some land in the Sierras—water, again—and his partners were being sued.
“Boys will be silly,” said smug Mrs. Whittlesby.