“It’s not Siegfried I worry about,” said Samuel. “It’s Gerry. Who do you think’s trying to burn the town? He can go from dead to walking in an hour or two, and then drop again.”
A night later, a four a.m. fire damaged Samuel’s rooming house. His ancient landlady nearly died, but he hadn’t been home when he heard the fire bells. He took a room at the Elite, on the premise that it would be the last place Gerry tried to burn down, and he told Dulcy he sometimes kicked the police chief when he found him down the hall, sleeping in front of Eugenia’s door.
???
Despite having lost a small fortune, despite having done nothing to egg his blackmailer on, and despite having been splashed by the water that had boiled the blackmailer, Rex insisted on going to Hubie’s much-delayed wake, and he insisted that Samuel go with him. He’d spent time on the piano in the Elite lobby, playing songs like “All Going Out and Nothing Coming In,” then passed into a less charming phase filled with wonder at his many misfortunes. Rex didn’t drink often, but when he did, he drank badly, and he did so now out of sheer guilt over Hubie’s untimely demise. It brought out a kind of defensive pomposity that probably wouldn’t mix well with Fenoways-style grief. Samuel said he’d stick close to him. He said that if Gerry was going to do something, he’d find a quieter, darker place, because he was going all the way back to his ancestors on this one—he was angry at Rex for allowing himself to be blackmailed; he was angry at Durr for siding with Falk and Macalester about what Hubie had done to the dead girl. He was angry with his mother for dying, so that both brothers needed to be drunk that day. Samuel said Gerry was angry, period, but nothing would happen in a church with fifty weepy old ladies on hand.
But Hubie Fenoways’ funeral was scheduled for May 10 at the Elks Hall. Gerry had argued with the priest at St. Mary’s before he argued with the minister of his wife’s church, Dulcy’s neighbor Brach. Gerry didn’t want anyone talking about damnation, or suggesting that Hubie’s death had some greater point. He didn’t want any goddamn bells. When the men of God resisted these conditions—Dulcy could imagine Brach’s response—he said he didn’t give a fuck what they wanted, or what God wanted, and Hubie certainly didn’t care anymore, either.
Samuel told the story very slowly when Dulcy and Margaret met him the next day in the Albemarle lobby. He said that the few women who toughed out the funeral left before the wake. Samuel and Rex and Grover sat together, and everyone drank. Gerry stood up front for the duration, a master of ceremonies. He forgave those who were responsible for his brother’s death, no names specified, but he toasted in the direction of their table: it was over, nothing to be done. More toasts followed, some earnest, most dirty. Gerry sang bad opera in tribute to Hubie’s good voice, and three dancers appeared. One was especially stunning, with thick black curls and long kohl-darkened eyes, the rest of her face and stray body parts covered by veils. She could swivel , said Samuel, who didn’t usually notice. She was just amazingly mobile. It made a person’s eyes pop out. Grovy said he had to have her on film for his other movies.
“What other movies?” asked Dulcy.
Samuel waved the question away. The performance was so extreme, especially as the veils dropped away, that he’d forgotten to be vigilant, and only belatedly worried when Gerry gave the girl a five-dollar bill and pointed at Rex.
“What was the girl wearing, by then?” asked Margaret, a little squeak to her voice.
“A kind of loincloth,” said Samuel. “Gold and very small, with paste jewels sewn on.”
“And above?” asked Dulcy.
“Gold disks on the tips of her lovelies,” he said. “Rosettes. She swayed over...”
He paused, thinking his way through.
“Just say it,” said Dulcy.
The girl with black curls swayed over, danced around Samuel and Grover with little caresses, and bent over Rex, rubbing her breasts against his face. Then she knocked him over with one sharp heel, and kicked the chair away as he lay on his back, and jumped in the air and landed right on his face, right with her fundament on his face, and bounced.
Dulcy and Margaret waited, their coffee and pastries cooling. “Broke his nose,” said Samuel. “Flattened that delicate thing, blood everywhere. You should see him. Not that his mother will let anyone near him for weeks and weeks.”
???
Dulcy was mostly comfortable with the way memory fell away. But on Walton’s birthday, as she passed a mailbox on the corner of Geyser for the hundredth time, she missed Carrie like a body blow and almost wailed out loud.
Some days, the real didn’t stay that way; some days, now that she had a house, she talked to herself or to her lost people, floating through time and wandering at midnight. The dead were kept in boxes in her mind, and she tried to open them gently. But that night she dreamed them: she was in a kitchen, putting food on a table for Walton and Carrie and for a naked man. No one seemed to notice he was naked, except for her; they joked, and passed food, though instead of plates some sort of board game covered the table. Green-yellow light, storm lighting: Martha walked in, smelling like lily of the valley, and Dulcy worried she’d notice the man. A moment later she was alone, and she panicked—she hadn’t touched Martha when she had a chance, and Martha was dead.
She jolted awake in her new bed, to a burning rubber smell, and after she understood that it was a headache, not Gerry burning down the house, she dragged herself to the bathroom and poured some aspirin powder into a glass.
One of Walton’s clinic nurses, a Breton woman, had insisted that all dreams were a mixture of the past and the future, and that one had to decipher which was which. Back in bed, the true memory gave her something to play with, to soothe her twisting head. She tried to remember what food she’d put down for the man—she could not begin to see his face, and now she wasn’t sure she’d really seen Martha, either. Instead, her mind landed on a memory of Walton in his underclothes on a leather couch, having his reflexes checked with a little hammer, surrounded by the smell of soap and poison while a doctor bent over him and a nurse stood to one side and hummed Martha’s song.