“Perhaps someone should speak to the binder,” said Dulcy. “He must have spent a good deal of time with the man.”
Victor dabbed at his mouth. “Would he really chat with an Indian?”
Victor’s cocoon was absolute, but Walton would have talked to a Martian, if a Martian could bind a book or cut a suit or whisper about a vein of ore. Henning elaborated: they had wired Walton’s hotel, his engineers, his doctor, but they needed to be circumspect, and could finally only ask if payment had been satisfactory, if all was well. Could she perhaps wire her father’s partner, Mr. Woolcock, and suggest that Walton was ill but improving, a little confused? No one could know the full disaster.
Walton and Robert Woolcock had been friends since the workhouse, which meant that Woolcock had known everything there was to know about Walton since approximately 1846. Dulcy ground pepper onto her chowder and decided not to puncture the impression that this worked in one direction: Woolcock likely knew everything about Victor, from his physical aversions to his poor understanding of smelting. “I’d say Dad was ill on his return, and I wanted to make sure there were no loose ends, and that I asked in greatest confidence.”
“As if you were not telling us?” asked Henning. He sat across the table from her, watching a sleet storm bash the grand windows.
“Yes.”
“But will you tell us?” asked Victor. He’d finished his glass of wine and stared pointedly at the bottle on the sideboard, but Henning ignored him. Now he looked at Dulcy directly, a small but ugly flare of self-pity and old longing.
“Yes,” she said.
“Please pass the pepper,” said Henning calmly.
“He tried to get into his trousers this morning,” said Dulcy. “If I were you, I would freeze any joint accounts. But let him walk a bit, or he’ll just keep trying to run.”
“I suppose he was the one who taught you how,” said Victor, reaching for the wine bottle.
???
That night, as Walton watched her glue the two account pages back into the brown book—he insisted it be remade, though she had copied the information and tucked it into the brocade jewelry bag—they listened to Victor hurl things in his office, and heard Henning talk him down. A half hour later, they heard the elevator.
“They’re out to find a girl,” said Walton. “He’s soused enough to try that now. They could have had me along.”
Dulcy tossed the brown book in his lap.
“I’m sorry,” said Walton. “I’m sorry I said that, and I’m sorry you ever met him.”
Too late, but he couldn’t have known, and apologies were rare. She kissed him good night, went into her room, and locked the door to the hall.
???
Years earlier, after Walton had introduced them, Victor would sit near her without quite touching, and this containment made her head reel. It seemed like a promise, and of course it was one. When they walked, he would touch her elbow and no more; when they sat together at parties, he was always two inches away, heat instead of touch. He was so handsome, so smart, so painfully shy: she daydreamed a revolution, a revelation, a man reborn, but that had been before the clarity of their first physical encounter.
In 1901, Henning had only been in the country for two years—he was slender, young, and silent, more of a servant than a cousin—but as he circled in the background, he was already vigilant for something Dulcy hadn’t quite understood. She was a veteran of Walton’s world, and she knew Victor loved her, could tell that he desired her, but whatever difficulty he had—not entirely mysterious, as she watched his ramrod parents across crowded Manhattan ballrooms—so much of him was considerate, and literate, that she didn’t pause to worry. Dulcy was fond of saving people, and the sense that Victor was somehow suffering within his phenomenally handsome skin, and the idea that she might change his life by allowing him even a small loss of control, was powerfully tempting.
In early November of 1901, they set a wedding date for the following spring—sealed with a peck against her hair—and started into the fall season of dinners and dances. She was a horrible dancer; he steered her with glancing fingers. But just before Thanksgiving, after people opened cases of champagne at a city mansion, and Victor, who never drank, had several glasses, he argued with some Princeton friends about who had enlisted, and who hadn’t, in the Spanish war three years earlier. Victor had his hands up to box, but another man simply swung a bottle. He missed, and Victor was on him.
Dulcy hadn’t really comprehended what followed; she’d only wanted it to stop. A few weeks later, as she sailed to London with Walton, he pointed out that “murderous rage,” in a sentence, was a very dry thing, and the sound and vision of it was quite wet.
After the men were pulled apart, Dulcy tried to calm Victor down in a side room, forced him to let her touch him for the sake of sponging blood off his face and his hair, and suddenly he was on her, saying he loved loved loved her, rubbing his face against hers as if he thought he were kissing her, ripping her skirt up, forcing himself inside her, with a hand against her mouth. She wasn’t sure if it was to hide her voice or hide her face. Minutes later he wept, he apologized, he was unable to look at her, clearly revolted by the naked, sticky, panting moment. He said that she had to understand that everything would be different when they married; now that they’d done this, everything would be easier, and sweet. He’d never been so happy in his life; he’d never been able to do this thing before.
She said she had to clean herself, but instead she walked out the door without her coat. In the morning, lying in bed in the crowded top floor of the 19th Street house, she thought it through with mounting nausea and found no intellectual way around the problem. Was this something that happened to other people, all the time? She didn’t think so, but how did she even start the conversation with city friends, people she saw twice a year? On the other hand, it was a simple decision: she didn’t want to marry someone who was insane, who was violent, and who would apparently never want to make love in the way she assumed people made love. She felt sympathy for his ruined mind, but it was coupled with a profound aversion, and fear.
She wrote a letter saying that she released him from his promise and hoped that he would have a good life. They had misled each other. She slid the emerald engagement ring in the envelope and had one of the Germans from the corner hotel take it up to Victor at the Braeburn. She packed for Westfield while Carrie raged at her: Carrie thought Victor was wonderful, and wonderfully well connected. She was finally of the age when she could go to dances, and Dulcy was ruining her life. Dulcy showed her the bruises on her neck but didn’t elaborate.
Over the course of the day, a series of pleading notes and apologies arrived by messenger, and then a clichéd screed: he would spit on her grave; he would treasure the knowledge of her regret and loneliness. You cannot live without me, he wrote.