“Boys will be stupid,” said Eugenia Knox.
It was one thing for Mrs. Woolley to complain, and another for anyone to agree. Dulcy didn’t think Rex was stupid, but this was a difficult compliment to bestow. The topic turned to the doom of both Mrs. Fenoways, the elder with a tumor breaking through the skin of her breast, the younger running from her marriage. Gerry’s wife had decided to visit family back East: the police chief was on a tear, a jag, a roll, a sodden Sherman’s march through town in premature reaction to his mother’s impending death or his imploding marriage. He’d broken a man’s leg the night before; he especially disliked wife-beaters, and one of the older women whispered that the Fenoways brothers had locked the door as teenagers and allowed their own abusive father to freeze to death.
“Gerald is a fine man and a loving son,” said Eugenia Knox. Her face was stiff, and she’d lost her soft pink look. “His brother is another matter. When Errol was ill, who came down to help us? Gerald, of course, the best nephew a man could have. He helped us in our time of need, and now, when he will be so alone, I will help him.”
It was a wide world in terms of nephews, thought Dulcy during the ensuing silence. “Well, of course you will,” said Mrs. Ganter. “And how is Mr. Knox?”
On the far side of Eugenia, Margaret was grinning. She didn’t mince around half-understood undercurrents with Dulcy; she’d told her that Livingston was crammed with ancient vicious southerners trying for their own kingdoms—Baptists and know-nothings, bigots and thieves—but many of the women had a lively, silly eye. They argued about novels, and ethnicities, and dogs: Vinca Macalester liked her dogs symmetrical; Abigail Tate liked random spots. Mrs. Ganter drove the polite women wild by mentioning Mr. Thompson’s long legs and Mr. Nesser’s large hands.
Maria Nash tried to pry out other people’s stories, but everyone always wanted to know about her dead man, and Dulcy had already ruined him: Edgar Nash had come into increasingly bland definition as an amalgamation (an amalgam? Dulcy had a bad habit of thinking in mining terms) of Walton and Victor’s least memorable traits, which meant he was mostly Victor. She hadn’t caught the tangent until the damage was done: Edgar had been well traveled but finicky, with difficult, wealthy parents. The shift from the dashing wounded man she’d imagined on the train was upsetting. She wished she’d stuck closer to Maximillian Cope’s novel and made him a drunken adventurer, a talented wastrel, but when the concerned women of Livingston faced her, refreshments tilting as they concentrated on her words, she’d only managed to solidify the bore: Edgar had been an opera buff and talented businessman, a fair shot and a good though reluctant soldier.
Dulcy had to survive these women; she had to make them believe her. Tonight, after too much wine, new details of the sad story of Edgar dripped out: he’d had malaria in Cuba, but he’d made an ill-considered return to service in the Philippines, where he’d had a close call with guerillas. On a visit to family in Cornwall, he’d fallen ill with pneumonia. He never fully recovered, and he’d ultimately died in California, of meningitis.
“Such awful luck!” said Margaret. “Nothing interesting ever happened to Frank.”
“Edgar had a rough time,” said Dulcy. “He was very brave, but one thing led to another.”
“His war experience sounds close to Mr. Braudel’s,” said Vinca. “Our first library speaker.”
Over dessert, with more sherry, Dulcy’s mind slid away from Vinca’s ominous comment. The crumb of the cake oozed butter, and the sugar icing smelled sharply of bourbon; Dulcy and Margaret planned a shopping trip to Butte. By the time the meeting broke up—with nothing substantive discussed beyond Easter baskets for the Poor Farm and whether bridge whist was worth learning—it was ten o’ clock, and as Dulcy sank into the mud on her way back to the Elite, she thought the clay might give her a better chance to stay upright. Fat flakes of snow spun around her head. There were still Masons and Elks and Woodsmen of the World about—on Thursday nights, every fraternal club seemed to have a meeting—most of them heckling a drunk who sang in a piercing, marginal tenor:
The wind it did blow high and it did blow low
and it waved their petticoats to and fro...
The song was a Walton favorite. She smiled before she remembered she was wearing black.
He tapped at the bush and the bird it did fly in
just a little above her lily-white knee...
She was crossing the street when the drunk changed his tone: “Here now, what the fuck do the two of you have in mind? Stop that shit!” A screaming bald man had rounded the corner of Second and Park at an awkward run, and another middle-aged man was chasing him, both of them sliding in the mud in a circle around the drunken singer. The second man had a long knife.
“You’re a fucking savage,” screamed the singer.
“I’ll gut you both!” No one in the crowd stepped forward. The bald man ran in circles in the mud, sliding and backtracking; the man with the knife lunged and then lunged again.
They’re not serious, she thought, scurrying for the hotel. Things like this probably happened all the time here—police pissing in halls, men in cages in the streets. She was tugging the door shut behind her when the bald man lunged through. Irving ran forward to slam it closed on the face of the man with the knife.
The glass door shattered; the pursuer recoiled, as did Irving in the opposite direction. Dulcy was intent on the stairs, but the bald man tottered toward her. She was about to say now you’re safe —though the man with the knife was already trying to rise—when she saw blood spilling out from under the bald man’s vest, splattering his fine shoes. He slowly lifted his shirt, and they both looked at the puncture in his stomach. It sucked and flowed with his breathing.
“Lie down,” said Dulcy, and the man did, dropping to his knees and then onto his back in his own puddle. She crouched down and tried to straighten out his legs. His hands fluttered, and he fixed his eyes on the far wall. The man with the knife struggled to his feet, some of the hotel’s glass door in his forehead, but the drunk who’d been singing “The Bird in the Bush ” reappeared and clubbed him with the hotel’s iron doorstop, and the crowd roared. Still on the floor, Dulcy looked back down at the man who’d been knifed, whose bleeding and breathing had stopped along with the piano music in the tavern.