She looked at the last real entry, made in Cape Town on September 22, 1904—The bookbinder’s wife, so beautiful in lapis silk, looked only at my right eye. She knows that it will fall out. Perhaps she could cure me— then toughened up and went to the beginning. She’d expected rants, but it wasn’t that way. A front section was given to short entries for people he’d never see again: the way a dead friend had looked after a cage accident in Ireland, his first sight of miners in Africa, the glimpse of a lonely little boy weeping with a nurse in Paris.
People Walton loved earned their own pages, with new leaves pasted in when he ran out of space. He wrote about only remembering his mother’s long brown hair. He recorded the Boys’ growth and commented on their brilliance. He described Carrie as an infant, swaddled and wrapped and placed in points of honor like an ornament, a silver dish. He liked listening to her play piano when he was sick; he anticipated her loveliness and her laziness; he raged at her lack of interest in travel and the lack of balls in her beaux.
Of Philomela: They should have named her Filamenta. There is nothing to her. What am I to do? I tried this joke on her, and she grew angry, then justas suddenly good fun. And later: Of course I am guilty. I have killed her, sooner or later. I have some relief in the notion that she has never really lived, anyway.
Of his father-in-law Elam: My, how he’ll hate me when he knows what I’ve done to his daughter.
Of Martha: Last night, watching her tease the girls on the porch about spiders, it finally occurred to me that we would have done much better together than I ever did with the daughter. Of course she lacks my kind of curiosity, but still I had a pleasant rest this afternoon imagining an awakening.
Every time Walton saw Woolcock after an absence, he was sure that Woolcock’s nose had grown, and he’d pasted in a profile with penciled measurements: he thought his friend suffered from the same disease as J. P. Morgan. Dulcy’s eyes slid over her section, but one entry from the end of 1901 caught her. After the engagement was broken, after she’d hidden in Westfield, she’d returned to the city to sail to Southampton and Africa, as had been planned for months. Walton, still ignorant of the pregnancy, had been enraged—there was no way for him to disentangle his financial ties with Victor, and the situation was wretched and awkward. Walton and Henning met for a drink (and perhaps a ramble, but she’d have to cross—reference with the black book).
I confessed my fears, not that he should feel sympathy; I said I wished to make her change her mind, but Falk said she should not, she was better off even if she ’s ruined. He maintains that M is an angry man, a violent man who has killed two others in fights, when drunk enough to erupt; after the break with D, he had Falk bring him a girl, and he beat her . He can achieve the mechanics of the act, but he cannot truly enjoy it, and Falk maintains that sooner or later he would lash out at Dulcy in this manner.
At any rate , it ’s done.
She left the notebooks out for Lewis to read. A few nights later, he said, “You have to get rid of these, Dulcy. You can’t have your father’s name everywhere in this house. Anyone you hired to clean, anyone with a nose who finds a way in while we’re traveling, will see that name.”
But she couldn’t cope with the idea of destroying them, or even ripping Walton’s name out, and so the next morning they carried his notebooks and trunk out into the framed-in side of the greenhouse that Durr had vacated. They piled the trunk with pots and bags of soil and plant potions, the cane furniture that Dulcy planned to lounge on someday, but bits of Lewis’s new knowledge leaked out over the next weeks: Would she ever want to go to Constantinople again? Did she want to try making cassis that fall?
They went to the fair and watched the horse races, and Dulcy, scanning the vegetable entries, felt smug. Lewis, in a period of literally rude good health, worked every day and came to the house every evening. She was sure she’d love him even if she didn’t get to see him climb a wall nightly for her benefit, but there was something wonderful about the way he crested the thing, dropped, and pulled off his collar while he was still walking toward her. Maybe this was the only point left to him keeping a room in the hotel: silliness, abandon. Let us unfetter each other, he said, moving down the buttons on her blouse.
From the shady bedroom they could see the minister at his kitchen table, staring fixedly at Dulcy’s street-side porch, or sometimes watch from the bed while the couple tweezered leaves off their velvet lawn. “What’s her given name, anyway?”
Dulcy had no idea. They lay across the bed on their stomachs and watched Brach’s cat as it traveled along the rock wall. “He likes me better than that old shit,” said Dulcy.
“Of course he does. Did you have one when you were a kid?”
“I did,” she said. “A gray longhair named Puck and a black cat named Bucca Dhu,” the only animal Walton had ever liked enough to name. “And I had a crow named Pixie and a turtle named Piss-Willie. And spaniels named Pearl and Earl and an Airedale named Maude.”
“Jesus,” said Lewis. “What’s a Bucca Dhu?”
“A storm fairy. Did you have pets?”
“My father had setters. I had good mutts and a cat. My sisters called it Percival.”
“What did you call it?”
He grinned. “Dick.”
Lewis said he might write about Brach, if only he could bear the idea of inhabiting that brain. He’d thought about writing a series of interconnected short stories, profiles of real people. He showed her a few pages about Durr in Peking, during the Boxer Rebellion, trying to do the right thing, remonstrating fellow soldiers who killed on a whim, loving the food despite the ruin of his intestines. When the German ambassador was assassinated, and the odds of being hacked to bits became overwhelming, he’d stopped caring. Lewis said you could watch Durr’s eyes while he talked about it, and wonder what else they’d seen, and let your mind swivel about. A person could be in Africa or Asia as a tourist, and see awful things, and think they knew how bad it can be, but it was different to be there as a soldier, watching a bunkmate kill someone for amusement, or wondering what it would be like to be torn apart.
He wrote a little about his father, trying to imagine how his father could have forgotten his world enough to fall in love with his mother. But the problem was opaque: Lewis barely remembered his mother, and this version of his father was unrecognizable. If he’d been a man who’d invited empathy, ever professed to have an imagination or shown love, something might have been possible. “I don’t want to write about an idea,” he snapped. “I’d wind up with something completely symbolic and idiotic. And I can’t imagine being someone like him.”
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