All of the women were costumed but Dulcy and Abigail Tate, who resorted to widowhood for an excuse, and old Mrs. Ganter, who’d resorted to a heart attack. Two Demeters, grain braided into their hair and belted around their waists (Margaret looked quite nice), two matronly Sacajaweas, and three Valkyries (which made no sense at all). The realtor Nesser’s knife-nosed fiancée was a cornucopia: Indian corn for a crown, green tomatoes and currant strands dangling in her deep cleavage. One tiny woman was a firework, but they talked her out of lighting the sparklers threaded between patriotically dyed plumes in her hat. Eugenia Knox was Liberty, held together by pins that threatened to give way, suddenly and painfully. The float was designed to look like a Lewis and Clark – era dugout, but it wasn’t as beautiful as Joe Wong’s, a ship with dragons and fireworks painted on junk-shaped sails. Mrs. Whittlesby, a rigid Manifest Destiny at the prow, hissed down at the spinning ring of candy-seeking, costumed children as the parade began to move: pirates and Brownies, a dragonfly, princesses and Caesars and one very skinny Joan of Arc with a fringed skirt designed to look like a pyre. They darted around the floats, rolling smoke bombs. The horses were wild-eyed, in a trampling mood, and the wails from phosphorus burns would begin soon.
Dulcy walked up Second Street toward the depot, bunting blurring the town. The world was a swarm: people on the sidewalk, pigeons over the depot arch, insects, the wind that didn’t quite dislodge the mosquitoes from her neck but made her hat swivel violently and ripped her hair out at its roots. Lewis appeared in his window at the Elite, and she watched him take in the crowd. He saw her and cocked his head; she shook hers, but she began to warm up to the idea.
The lobby was packed with men having five variations on the same political argument, all of them already spilling beer, and no one noticed her climb the stairs. It was strange having her old view of the street while being had from behind, pressed and panting against the window frame while the parade began to roll below.
“Bagpipes,” wheezed Lewis. “How fitting.”
She curled up with him for a few minutes, then left him flopped on the bed. She’d planned to watch with Samuel, who’d said he’d find a spot in the shade of Sax and McCue’s awning. She crossed Second in a gap between shiny backfiring autos and threaded her way between the people who lined the street, and when she turned to look back, she saw that Lewis had roused himself to the window again, and was watching her, smiling and looking beautiful. The bands clashed, block to block, as she made her way, almost catching up with Durr, who paused off and on for shots. And then Samuel called Maria from across the street in a lull between drums, and she turned toward him.
Through a gap in the marchers, Grover Dewberry trained a camera on her. “Smile!” yelled Samuel, thinking it was funny, thinking this moment was light.
Her ears roared. Grover kept the camera focused on her as she crossed toward them. She could imagine her own eyes on film, looking out at Victor. Samuel read her face and seemed to draw back as she approached without moving his feet. “No, please, you must take that out,” she said. “Please take me out. Can you do that?”
“Of course I can, but why on earth should I?” Grover asked, moving on to the deafening brass band that was marching by. “Don’t you know that you’re lovely? Not showy, but handsome. Don’t you like the way you look?”
“That’s not it,” snapped Dulcy. “I’m a widow, Grover.”
“Which is why you often wear black.”
She wanted to smack Grover’s face, but he kept it down, an eye on the lens. Her cheeks burned. “Which is why I’m quite embarrassed to have gone to a parade, all happy and waving, and would prefer my husband’s family to not see me doing so.”
“Are they modern sorts of people? What are the odds they would see something like a film?”
Horribly likely, she thought. “Of course he’ll take it out,” said Samuel.
“Of course I will,” said Grover, looking peeved. “I imagine you’re unrecognizable, but I’ll do it. And if you’re really so worried about your reputation—”
“Why leave the house?” asked Dulcy.
Samuel roused himself again, eyeing the street. “She asked you politely,” he said. “But see who’s coming up on you now, Grove.”
Grover lifted his head and took in the scene he’d been attempting to fit into focus: the police in blue and black, sweating alongside the paddy wagon and the new black-and-yellow automobile, Gerry skipping around from the far side, six-guns glinting in the sun while he waved his arms. The police were trying a new fashion, smocklike shirts with pointy hats, and they looked like Prussian medical assistants, or butchers, or pregnant bakers.
“Film me,Mr. Dewberry! Just don’t ask me to jump in a river! I have no family left!”
The crowd laughed, with some nervous high notes.
???
During the rodeo that afternoon, with Lewis pushing his knees into her back in the row behind, Dulcy covered her eyes like a child when a bull trampled a downed rider. Everyone wore their best summer hats, but no one had plumes like Clara Dewberry. At dusk, during a baseball game played in high wind between teams from Spokane and Idaho Falls, the Livingston women watched Clara’s egret and flamingo plumes swivel like a bug’s antennae, and by the time the hat was silhouetted by the fireworks show, the feathers were broken strings and straws. Everyone drank gin and lemonade and beer and ended up sticky and dusty at a dance in the new fair buildings, which did not yet smell of shit like the old barns in Westfield.
At the house later she was woozy in the bathtub while Lewis reassured her: Grover would take her out of his idiot film, he would make sure, she needn’t worry ever. He washed her hair, her toes, fitting dirty lyrics to patriotic songs. Hands everywhere.
???
The weather stayed hot for a week after the rodeo, and the river level dropped. On July 11, she planted more green beans, and popped a first cherry tomato into her mouth. Lewis left for Portland to do an article on the Century , and when he returned on the midnight train she listened while he dropped his things and walked directly to the stairs, his hat whirling against the bedroom wall. To fall asleep in the middle of the night now, Dulcy could shut her eyes and see Lewis sitting in the kitchen, reading in the sunlight with his legs akimbo, his face tired and shirt crumpled.
A few days later, a trunk arrived, made out to Lewis at her address. The delivery boys were oblivious, but the people at the station had to be buzzing. When Lewis arrived that evening—he still took the alley to evade Brach, an easier task now that the grapes had grown wild—he was happy to see it, this final gift from his father. He handed her a letter from one of his sisters and lifted out photographs, books and a black cashmere coat, cufflinks and watches and thick portfolios, a sword, a pistol—he checked to see if it was loaded, and when it was, he muttered—an oil painting of a port town, children’s books, journals.
He sat back. “That’s it, then. We have money, a gun, and a house in France. Not bad.” He put the sketch on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. “We could go this winter.”
“All right,” said Dulcy. “Just this once, I won’t argue.”
???