Everyone studied the menu. The waiter came, and Dulcy pointed to a dish at a nearby table: it had real dried peppers, and what looked like spinach and fish. Margaret had a noodle dish, Samuel soup, Rex fried rice, and Lewis asked for duck. While Samuel argued with Rex—all of Rex’s idealistic business ventures removed money from the newspaper—Lewis studied the sleet outside and the trio of tough young Chinese at the table by the door. He tapped a chopstick against his water glass in an annoying fashion; he looked thinner than he had a week earlier, and Samuel had muttered about a wave of attacks. Dulcy didn’t remember what they’d told her in Walton’s Italian clinic, about how and why malaria came and went. She hadn’t heard him walk in circles on her ceiling during the last few days at the hotel, but she thought that the Sacajaweas who whispered that Irina still “ministered ” to him were wrong. Not so sure that she hadn’t asked Rusalka, in the most roundabout way possible while they were unrolling carpets.
“No,” said Rusalka. “She used to, when he very first arrived, but they are no longer fond of each other. I think Rina only thought he might be. He had a greater liking for a married lady or widow in Bozeman, but that is maybe over.”
“How do you know?” asked Dulcy, thinking of Lewis jumping onto the train platform back in January, buoyant and aimed for pleasure.
“That it’s done? Letters,” said Rusalka. “The lady writes very dramatic, according to Rina. But you can’t tell if that’s so true, because Rina is not a reader.”
Now Dulcy watched Lewis flip through a newspaper. “How are you?” she asked.
“I’ve been away,” he said, which wasn’t the same thing as answering. He looked a little green-skinned, though perhaps the ink of the paper in front of him, the St. Patrick’s issue of the Butte Independent , reflected on his face. The taverns in Livingston had served green beer the night before, and on their way to the restaurant, the gutters were still chartreuse.
While they talked the cooks dropped piles of noodles—roar, crackle, hiss—into the huge woks behind Lewis, the three-foot metal pans fitting into the round openings of the wood-fired stove, the wall behind so cured with fat it was almost metallic. A little boy threw a log in the side hatch every other minute, and the men at the stove, all of them with the polished skin of the perpetually roasted, dashed sauces in from the old whiskey bottles that lined the stove next to heaps of mustard and cabbage, onion and peppers, and smeared glass jugs of soy. The steam made an unlikely halo behind Lewis’s head. He had a nice, austere, saintly profile, but his mouth was a little too wide for the role.
The food arrived, and Margaret picked at her noodles with a worried forehead. Rex was angry and stabbed his rice, and Samuel scanned the Butte paper and made jokes about Irishmen. Dulcy tried not to eat too quickly, and she fanned her face. Lewis reached out and clicked chopsticks with her, as if toasting. “You’re good with those. I imagine you’ve had better Chinese than this in Seattle.”
“I have,” she said, before her words echoed.
But the others didn’t seem to notice. “Or New York, certainly. Or even Butte,” Lewis said a moment later. No hint of a smile, no sense that he was playing a game. “Try some duck.”
He reached out and she opened her mouth. She gave him a bite of the mystery fish and noticed that her hand was shaking. “What will you plant, Mrs. Nash? Flowers, vegetables, an orchard? You have a large yard to fill.”
“All of it,” said Dulcy, watching him stab another bit of fish off her plate.
“We’ll help,” said Lewis. “I know how to shovel.”
“You stun me,” said Samuel.
“Bodies,” said Lewis. “Yellow fever.”
“May I ask what happened to your hand?” asked Margaret. “Samuel says it wasn’t really a fireworks accident.”
Samuel signaled for another pitcher of beer. “You should ask what happened to my head instead,” said Lewis.
“Your head or your mind?” asked Dulcy.
“My head,” he said, tapping one of the metallic freckles on his cheekbone. “Unless you have some fresh insight.”
“No, I don’t,” she said. “But what happened?”
“A man blew himself up a few feet away from me in Manila. I was on the other side of a pillar, reaching for a drink. Nothing heroic. My dinner companion was not so fortunate.”
“Poor man,” she said.
“Woman,” said Lewis. “A recent acquaintance, but she seemed quite nice. She was tasting some wine.”
“Why do you tell people it was fireworks?” asked Margaret, after a moment.
“If I’m trying to find out something, it’s easier if some people think I’m a fool. I’ll usually never see them again.” He smiled and pushed a plate of sweet wafers in her direction. “That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”
“I don’t enjoy you as much when you’re arrogant,” said Dulcy.
“All right,” said Lewis. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
???
Livingston’s trees were either new and spindly or crippled and writhing in the wind, as tortured as the trees of what Walton refused to call the Holy Land. The dead gardens she passed on her walks were simpler, messier versions of Martha’s: wide rows, mounds for squash and corn, branch supports for cucumbers and tomatoes. The only thing that distinguished Livingston’s efforts was endless howling wind and the use of pretty red dogwood twigs for these supports.
Nothing could look bleaker in March. Mrs. Whittlesby, the most aggressive gardener of the library women, liked a fancier, faux European variation, patterns of zinnias or petunias interspersed with ugly pergolas and statuary; she didn’t mention that this collection, and her garden soil, came from the monument business owned by her husband and the Protestant cemetery managed by her brother: the angel a couple couldn’t quite afford for a baby’s grave, the dirt overflow from an especially bulky casket.
Dulcy’s garden would be different. After weeks of listening to the operatic wind spin around the Elite, she’d thought on new terms, anyway. The old cottonwood next door swiveled, and her neighbor, the minister Brach, swiveled too, lurking just beyond the fence when she was outside, plinking away at his piano until he heard her door. The Sacajawea ladies said Brach had a history of alienating his parishioners by sermonizing about a fast-approaching apocalypse with no mention of salvation opportunities or, say, Easter. Mrs. Brach, who would once have been a pretty blonde, seemed to exemplify the notion of I myself am hell without drama or arrogance. She didn’t speak, even utter a simple hello; she simply stared, a shriveled ghost. Her husband was openly malign: he dumped his stove ashes in her yard and talked loudly to himself about Rusalka being a prostitute. He kicked his dog, and probably did worse to his wife. Dulcy had taken to locking up, and she tested the lock by sliding a piece of paper at the top of the jamb, just as she had with Irina. It was there when she returned, but she didn’t feel like a fool for having done it, even though she imagined Henning would notice it from across a room.
She did not think of this possibility often, but it never left her.
From the north upstairs window, the Bluebeard room, Dulcy saw the minister pace his perimeter, and she thought: brick or stone. Another Irina relative, a spidery great-uncle named Abram, had been a mason in Trieste and had no problem with the idea of a six-foot garden wall, or any quibbles while Dulcy toured the corners of the brickyard for a shade she liked. “Like a blushing peach,” he said.
“Exactly,” said Dulcy.