“But if you’re not all right, you need to get word to me.”
He gave her a stepsister’s address and took off half of everything for another ten minutes, and when he ran for the train he let the door slam in daylight despite Brach’s prying eyes. Dulcy lay on the wrinkled bed in the gray light, endless fat snowflakes twirling slowly past the window, and felt bereft: he would not return. She thought of his skin cooling as he moved toward the station. She thought of how altered she felt, and wondered if she looked as strange.
???
By the time Hubert Fenoways died on the night of May 3, he was a pus-filled mess, a stinking pillow of blisters. Macalester had resorted to giving shots of morphine in Hubie’s head and neck, and everyone assumed that he’d quadrupled the last few doses.
Dulcy heard this after Margaret rousted her for a meeting of the Sacajawea Club, throwing pebbles at her bedroom window until Dulcy opened the door. The Sanborn Insurance men were in the lobby of the Elite when they arrived for the meeting, surrounded by boxes of equipment as Irina checked them into rooms above the bar. They would begin surveying the town the next day, and though Eugenia tried to look miserable about Hubie’s death, she radiated joy. The Sanborns would pay, would eat, and were unmarried: for Eugenia, it all came down to cash and appetites.
After days spent helping Hubie die, Vinca Macalester was cross, and she brought the topic back to the parade. Dulcy, thrumming along in her new private world, supposed such things had to be dealt with in advance, but thought she might be coming to a parting of the ways with the civic-minded ladies. The theme would be the Lewis and Clark centenary, the inescapable duty of any town on the explorers’ route: Clark, at least, had camped somewhere below Dulcy’s garden, though not until 1806.
“That doesn’t mean we can’t march as Liberty,” said Mrs. Whittlesby. “We can’t all wear skin hats and carry paddles.” Despite a lack of visible collarbones, she had been fixed on the idea of marching in a toga-style drapery for months.
“I suppose not,” said Vinca, too tired to argue. She passed around a list of entrants. Dulcy had never heard of the Improved Order of Red Men or the Knights of the Maccabees, and she hadn’t known the cigar-makers had their own union.
“One hundred and twenty entries, not counting our ladies,” said Margaret, looking for the bottle of port. “A gross.” She was in a fine mood, bearing down on the end of her first year of widowhood without any pretense of grief. She’d planned photography lessons from Durr, and she’d talked Dulcy into the idea of tennis if the rain ever paused. “I will be free of so much,” she said. “Black, keeping a straight face, stuff I hated even before Frank died, for God’s sake.”
Samuel had given Margaret a book called Widows , Grave and Otherwise , and she loved to offer up the quote of the day.
May 1: Widowhood is true freedom. (A nugget from Mlle . Desjardins .)
May 2: Easy-crying widows take new husbands soonest; there is nothing like wet weather for transplanting. ( Oliver Wendell Holmes )
May 7: Widows are a study you will never be proficient in. ( Thomas Fielding )
May 9: Why is a garden’s wildered maze Like a young widow, fresh and fair? Because it wants some hand to raise / The weeds which have no business there. ( Thomas Moore )
The sane part of the Sacajawea Club cackled with glee and had another glass. The other half looked sour, and ate extra cake.
???
Immediately after Hubie died, Gerry Fenoways asked around, calmly, about his brother’s last days, but he asked for no firsthand accounts, and almost immediately, no matter how truthful the version Rex or Macalester or Samuel had given friends when they reached town, the story mutated according to resentment, amusement, alcohol. Durr (arrogant immigrant) had been supposed to jump in the pool, and somehow sensed the problem, and let Hubie go without warning him; Rex (spoiled brat) had told Hubie he’d be fired if he didn’t jump; Samuel (sissy boy) had promised to be Grover’s actor at the outset, and had been so unmanned by the earthquake that he walked away from his duty. There was no mention of Hubie blackmailing his way into the job, and Grover’s role as conductor of the tragedy was suspiciously absent from all accounts.
Gerry’s theories remained unclear, because once he collected accounts, he began to drink so much he couldn’t often talk or walk. He made no pretense of living in his empty house, and Irving was constantly dragging him down an Elite hallway.
“I bet he can crawl,” said Samuel. “Don’t throw your back out, Irving. Try rolling him.”
The wake had to be postponed. Hubie waited in an iced box at Hruza’s, which was only fitting.
???
A few nights into Gerry’s binge, Siegfried Durr was woken by Joe Wong’s wife, Ruby, and he jumped to his feet gasping in a room of smoke. The fire was out by then—Joe had assumed the smoke came from an iron, and then traced it to the cellar he shared with Durr’s studio, where he poured tubs of laundry water on a pile of smoldering rags. Everyone imagined Joe Wong was the target, and his wife told Dulcy she wanted to move to Butte, where they wouldn’t feel like darker pebbles on white sand. Durr could move, too—they were good at sticking together, and Butte had almost one hundred thousand people, some large percentage with money and the need of a photograph.
But Durr didn’t want to move. He told Samuel that he was fond of a woman in town, and Samuel told Dulcy that Durr and Rusalka had spent one night a week together for at least a year. “I would not call it a romance,” he said, and he nodded toward Margaret, who’d just entered the ruined studio with Durr. “And I wouldn’t say it’s just one woman.”
Margaret was oblivious; she studied the stacks of smoked glass and told Durr he was lucky. His paper stock and portraits were ruined, and the cameras needed to be taken apart and cleaned. It was the cusp of his busy season: graduations, weddings, spring dances. Dulcy told him to sleep in the loft of the framed side of the greenhouse, and said he could use it for his business until he made repairs. Her cellar could serve as a darkroom.
She didn’t have to bully him. Durr bought an old chalkboard from one of the schools to hang photos, and he put up shelves and drapes. He brought his old carpet, a very nice Persian piece, but it stank of smoke until Rusalka, arguing with him over every detail of the move, blotted the whole thing with waxflower water and worked on the back with vinegar and lemon; Rusalka, who Dulcy now noticed came late and left early on her cleaning chores. Durr put a sign on the street and posted a forwarding note on the old studio, and soon she could see a steady procession of clients from her upstairs window.
“Is this a good idea?” asked Samuel.
“I trust Siegfried,” she said.