Mrs. Woolley moved toward the front of the room with the look of a woman in search of a weapon. Lewis folded his papers. “My father was Mr. Blake, and he was married to Mrs. Blake, née Weyden, and the Weydens do in fact all have a great talent for money, and have been invaluable to my father’s career. But my mother was a Frenchwoman who died when I was quite young, and the Blakes took me in, and while I can’t say it was the world’s most affectionate situation, it was bearable. I went to good schools, and I have several half-siblings I enjoy, and I doubt I’d have found my calling if I’d come from a more typical background.”
Well. Dulcy could feel the surrounding minds zigzag. Braudel meant nothing to her, Blake and Weyden quite a bit. She knew this story, even without the novel: French whore and sad marriage; smart, bitter, wastrel son; a bad engagement involving a banker’s daughter. She very much wished she could talk to Carrie about this.
Mrs. Woolley had paused a moment in disbelief, but now picked up speed toward the lectern. Mrs. Whittlesby blurted on regardless, as if Lewis somehow had his own story wrong: “But I thought you were Mrs. Blake’s nephew.”
“No,” said Lewis. “As I explained, I’m her husband’s bastard son. He met my mother on a business trip to Paris, and I eventuated. Braudel was my mother’s family name.”
No one moved a finger, though every eye in the room pivoted to the floor or ceiling.
“Should I leave?” asked Lewis.
Dulcy made a sound, then went mute in a great wave of blush. “Has anyone heard the Widow Nash laugh before?” asked Lewis. “Maybe I have done something with my life, after all.”
The world is filled with bad luck, surrounded by bad dreams, but if you see a woman three times, in three very different places, you have to be curious.
—Lewis Braudel’s notes
chapter 13
The Brown Book of Invisibility
?
Something had slipped away: she stopped waking in dread. She bought a six-burner stove and an icebox and a long table with cherry legs and a tin top, some tidy painted chairs and an armchair to tuck next to the west-facing window in the corner of the kitchen. Irina, who hadn’t feigned grief over Dulcy’s pending departure from the hotel, suggested relatives for plastering and woodwork, fences and roofs, and by the end of the day three had been hired. Now they swarmed through the house, shifting boards and buckets like loud, wiry ants. A cousin named Davor repaired the plaster walls, chipped by the banker’s ancestral portraits; an uncle named Sabon would sand and varnish the floors; and another cousin was in line for garden work.
She took the rough diamond from Walton’s medicine box to Mr. Hall, on Lewis Street. He was aquiline and bony in a way that made her think—pleasantly—of Walton, and he picked up the pebble, looked at it, looked at her, put it down. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“I don’t, either,” she said. “A business partner owed my husband money, and gave him one of these. They bought a horse together, a race horse, with another stone.”
“What breed?” Hall’s blue eyes were almost aqua. He didn’t believe a word.
“A Thoroughbred,” she said. “Though perhaps with some Barb. The man was an Englishman who’d spent time in Morocco, but I don’t know where he came by the diamonds.”
He put the gem down and spun it with a fingernail. “You couldn’t know for certain until you cut it, and that would not be here, but it’s very fine. A thousand, even if flawed. If you have more like this, go to New York or Amsterdam.”
“But if my husband’s other investments disappoint, I might have some relief?”
“You would.”
“Well, that’s lovely,” said Dulcy.
“And a real pleasure to see,” said Hall. “Let me look it over again.”
It gave her a little more bone for her back, even given the money from Butte: perhaps she’d keep finding these tokens from Walton until she was rich enough to buy a house in Italy, too. She telephoned the Persian in Butte and asked him to deliver the carpet she’d liked best, rather than second best, and she decided to replace all the windows in the house. When she asked around about who was best for this job, people told her to use Durr, who’d glassed his own studio. Margaret was especially enthusiastic.
???
Dulcy loved lists, to an unhealthy degree, and every night during her last days at the Elite she made a new one: the names of housepainters, books Margaret or Vinca suggested, a story she might try to write, paint colors. Sometimes she included tasks she’d already finished, for the sake of a horizontal slash. A few nights after Lewis Braudel’s reading, she settled into a chair by the east window and arranged her writing board, her pen and ink and green notebook, a glass of wine, and one of Walton’s hundred half-used pieces of blotting paper. Tonight’s list would be the useful sort, the How to Get Walton Into a Clinic sort, with a new twist. She should be leery about this urge to codify things, but she needed to be organized, now that she was dead, and had a life.
Nursery in town? Rootstock via Salt Lake?
Soil & manure
Cedar boxes? Or dig down? Terrace hill?
Rock walls? Espalier?
She added seed catalogues before she moved on to more practical topics:
Mattress
Bedding and linens
Fry pans, Dutch oven, sauté, sauce
This wasn’t very organized. She started to write second sofa , then felt silly and profligate, crossed it out with too much of a blob, and reached for the blotting paper. She spun it slowly while she listened to the racket in the lobby from a fresh load of train passengers, trying to decipher Walton’s mirror writing, all the lost shadows of his live mind. She could make out accounts and temperature, clinic and ship , medicine and meter and mine , all and my and love and rock, jews or jewels. Walton had no issue whatsoever with the one, a great love for the other. She squinted and guessed jewels, the repetitive topic in the rosy book of poetry.
She eyed her half-empty wine glass, then wrote:
Everything.
Miss Randall was weeping again, and the sound ground against Dulcy’s fragile new love of life. The weeping wasn’t a new problem, and when Dulcy had tried knocking on the door of 324 at other times, everything had gone quiet. Still, tonight’s noise was a wail, and now she glared in Leonora’s general direction, put everything aside, and opened the door to the hall cautiously, leery of Lewis suddenly appearing on the stairs. This didn’t, of course, happen, but the sounds deepened to the kind of keen she’d wanted to make when Martha had finally stopped breathing.
Dulcy tapped on the facing door and called out, “Miss Randall,” and a tentative, “Leonora?”
Miss Randall stopped; the door stayed shut. Dulcy knocked again.
“I’m fine,” said Miss Randall. “Thank you, Maria, but please go away. Please don’t bother me.”