“You’ve done this before,” said Lewis, sitting on the freed rock.
“I have.” She handed it back.
“In the secret time before your life of married luxury?” he asked. “Did you ever play games?”
“I did.” She sipped the whiskeyed lemonade and thought of kites and tag, tennis and running like a boy at dusk. She hadn’t had enough of it, and she missed her brothers, at least as they’d once been. If she’d said that Edgar had died earlier, she could be silly now, done with mourning, done with constraints.
“And how long ago did your husband die? How long do you have to wait to play again?”
Was she so transparent? “That’s very insensitive of you, Lewis,” said Samuel, who had asked the same question earlier.
“Even if it was less than a year, you saw it coming for so long,” said Margaret. “And Frank made sure I remembered he was dying every day.”
For a moment, there was only the sound of the pick. “Well, don’t extend the martyrdom,” said Lewis. “Don’t hide your light—what’s the phrase?”
“Under a rock,” said Samuel.
Lewis handed him the pick. Margaret, who still hadn’t developed a head for alcohol, bubbled in: “My husband died on May 30. I win the race.”
“What killed them?” asked Samuel, watching Durr maneuver glass. “Gardening?”
“Frank had a bad heart,” said Margaret, with a sliver of irony. “And Mr. Nash had several issues.”
“A variety of things, in the end,” said Dulcy. “Meningitis. Pneumonia.”
“And your father, the doctor, couldn’t help?” asked Lewis.
“He was ill himself, and a specialist, anyway.” She finished the glass, thinking of the mental flaw that had led her to tell Samuel or Margaret that her father had been a doctor.
“What sort? Heart? Liver? Brain?”
This had to stop, and a dose of truth would be key. “The male sexual organs,” she said. “With a stress on how they interact with the nervous system. He specialized in wealthy syphilitics.”
Samuel’s face turned a hot red, and Margaret’s eyes glazed over. Lewis, on the other hand, crowed: pure glee. “This is fascinating,” he said. “A cock doctor.”
They ate on the porch steps; Dulcy bullied Durr down from the greenhouse roof. At dusk, it was still sixty degrees, and for the first time in weeks there was no wind. The chicken had been roasted with most of her new tarragon plant, and she’d picked most of her first lettuces. She loved the way Lewis ate: a little wild-eyed and abstracted, thinking about what he put in his mouth for one intense second before he swallowed and asked another question. Had she read any Russian writers, and had she ever been to the southern latitudes? Did she like horses, or did they make her sneeze? Or both? Did she follow a religion, and had she ever slummed to Coney Island?
Sometimes Dulcy lied pragmatically and with ease, and sometimes she loathed herself an hour later, but she was enjoying this dance. He clearly knew that some of what she said wasn’t true at all, but he let her say it. She wondered what he’d done, and who he’d done it with; she wondered how different the women seemed to him when he was touching them, or if it was all the same, at least in hindsight. She wondered if he’d slept with the woman in the story before he’d seen her blow up, and if she was now part of his body, ink for the tattoo on his cheekbone.
Mostly, she wondered how to become someone who did things, rather than trying to imagine them. How did it all start? Not sitting at the house in Westfield, never again with Victor, and if she hadn’t managed much of her own drama while traveling with Walton, maybe she was hopeless, and she’d sink into this town like she’d sunk into the mud that spring. She’d be left to only care about bad novels and food and the people she’d never see again.
???
On April 23, Easter Sunday, Mrs. Woolley gave another party, ostensibly for the benefit of Grover O. Dewberry, moving-pictures cameraman. For the occasion, Dulcy shifted from black and gray to the nicest of the marginal widow’s weeds she had purchased in Butte: a lilac hat with smoky feathers, a matching dress that at least showed her collarbone. There’d been another soft snow, and the early-budding trees in town were draped. They passed children carrying bright Easter eggs, others hurling egg-shaped snowballs. In the untrampled snow of Mrs. Woolley’s yard, protected from such children by a forbidding iron fence, Dulcy made out bursts of narcissus glowing under the ice.
The man of the hour had worked since the war making actuality films, and now he wanted to form his own company. Mrs. Woolley and Samuel wanted to invest, though Dulcy guessed it might simply be a way to redirect Rex, who was still intent on his spa project. Dewberry was handsome like a Gibson boy: his thick hair had a soft curl, his jaw jutted, his lashes were long, and he said things that were witty. He’d taken Miss Randall’s apartment in the Elite, Miss Randall having taken Dulcy’s, and Irina was probably peeling herself off his door nightly. He was shiny and fervent and everything he said was meant to be amusing—he didn’t stop, or allow for a pause, or realize that the relentless nature of his personality was not entirely to his advantage, at least not in Dulcy’s eyes. She realized her dislike was largely competitive: people swarmed the cameraman rather than talking to Margaret, or watching the poor freezing children outside, looking for eggs in snow banks, and Mrs. Woolley’s impressive buffet cooled while her staff grew irked. Within an hour, the guests all seemed to call him Grow -vy. Even Margaret turned a dusty pink in his presence despite Grovy’s constant references to his beautiful, beautiful, quite absent wife.
They ate, which was at least part of what Easter was supposed to be about, and the snob in Dulcy had to admit it was all wonderful—silky dauphinois, salmon en croute with a capered sauce, a lemon soufflé. Mrs. Woolley had real wine, and even the cigars smelled delicious. Dewberry talked on and on about what he intended to film as he established a new company: the growing cities of the West, the wonders of the national parks (particularly the wonder of Rex’s new empire in Yellowstone). The point, said Grover, was that there was no war on: “And it’s very hard to catch an earthquake or a hurricane in the act. I am moving on to narrative. I must do whatever’s necessary.”
“Grover believes in drama,” said Lewis, who had arrived late. “If warfare fails, he’ll provide. His friends worried about how he’ll cope with peacetime, but he’s managed to be creative.”
“Travel,” said Grover.
“There’s the other stuff,” said Lewis. “Will you show snippets of Mary , Queen of Skirts ?”