to his physician: please go downstairs, have a sherry, and then look at me again.”
Dulcy picked herself up off the floor. Walton, who’d never been good with punch lines, had managed to remember the quote, but not what had happened after the sherry.
“I don’t drink,” said the doctor. “And you’ve been dead on your feet for years. Try to meet the end with some relief.”
At four a.m., Dulcy opened her eyes. Victor was sitting in a chair by her bed with his head in his hands. She shut her eyes again and pretended to sleep. When she heard him leave, she locked the door, though she knew she’d done this before; he had a key. Now she wedged the chair he’d been sitting in under the knob. She stared at the door into Walton’s room, but it was hinged out, and there was no way to block it. She doubted it mattered: Victor had never entered Walton’s bedroom, and she thought he never would.
•••
Walton said the seizure was a mild thing, a shit burlesque . He wrote a succinct note.
Dear Dr. Dagglesby:
Your suggestions for my treatment are ludicrous and outdated. Finer doctors on several continents have elaborated on the flaws in these techniques. Your comments that I have reached a “nadir,” and that this is my “final struggle,” are equally misplaced. I feel quite well, and believe my recent troubles might be put down to the effort of a Pacific voyage and adulterated medication. That having been said, I appreciate your brevity, and your personal bravery in making these statements to my face.
W. Remfrey (as dictated to my daughter, Miss Leda Remfrey)
Walton managed outrage in the letter, but once he’d finished dictating, he curled onto his side and shut his eyes. “Would you like to talk, Dad?”
“No, dear. I would rather not even think.”
Dulcy left him alone. It was a strange, warm day. Victor was in the gymnasium again—tadoom , tadoom , tadoom , a tribal drum from the world’s least primal human. Henning would be with him, trying to talk his employer through the end of things; she’d heard some of it at breakfast. If Victor sold the newspaper, and one of the hotels, they might slide through.
“I don’t want to sell,” said Victor. He’d acted as if nothing had happened the night before, but she knew he was no sleepwalker. He stirred spoon after spoon of sugar into his oatmeal. “I want to buy. I want to crack his skull open and pull the memory free.”
Henning poured fresh coffee into Dulcy’s cup. She watched the liquid, not his face.
“You and I will go out tonight, Hen,” said Victor.
They wouldn’t bother following her through the city that day. Dulcy wrapped up and took the staff stairs all the way down. Fluttering leaves, seabirds, blue sky: she stopped at the pharmacy and a newsagent, studied shoes in a shop window, and eventually found herself in a pier restaurant with fish and chips and a beer, postponing a first effort at a telegram with a three-day-old New York Times . And there was Carrie, far down a society column:
Mr. and Mrs. Philip Lorrimer of Philadelphia announce the engagement of their son, Alfred, to Miss Clarissa Remfrey of Westfield, New York. A wedding is planned for summer, after Miss Remfrey’s period of mourning for her late grandmother, Mrs. Elam Bliss (née Martha Wooster).
Wise of her not to bother asking for Walton’s approval. Carrie loved this world, even though she was only attached by Martha’s threadbare family. Dulcy’s telegram would ruin all of this.
C— Must come. No choice. You needn’t stay till the end.
Dulcy scratched this out. She needed to take a firmer line.
C— No chance of improvement. You must come now.
She ordered a second beer and read items she never bothered with: business pages, household tips, politics, sporting columns. James Jeffries was considering retirement. Victor had taken Dulcy to a Jeffries bout during the last summer of their engagement; Jeffries had won against a New Zealander named Fitzsimmons while Dulcy held her fingers over her eyes, chugging champagne and queasy with the subtext: Victor had killed a boy, Stinson Vanderzee, in a boxing match at Princeton, and she couldn’t imagine why he’d want to see this. Vanderzee had officially died of nephritis six months later, but he’d been simpleminded after the fight, and everyone knew he’d drunk himself to death out of despair and befuddlement. But Victor watched the Jeffries fight like a child watches fireworks, and every day in Seattle he either pounded the big bag or the chauffeur. This was one task Henning, who coached from the side, flatly refused. “Have you ever practiced with him?” she’d asked once.
“I used to. I began to dislike it.” Henning was good at letting a world float away, without explanation.
Victor had no spots, no visible scars or unbalanced physical feature. During the Jeffries bout, he boasted that he’d never bled during a boxing match, which made her skin shimmy. A few minutes later, she managed, “But what about the boy?”
“Oh, Vanderzee never bled,” said Victor. “He barely bruised. Who knows what really happened.”
The problem of Victor, besides everything else: he wanted; he didn’t want. She tried again to remember how it might have been that she’d found him interesting, before the world had swiveled and stopped giving him what he wanted, before he killed another boy, before he sent his proxy to London after Dulcy, out of longing but primed for revenge. He had looks, and money, and what she had assumed was just an edge of the strange. She had enjoyed the way other women watched him, and she’d liked the fact that he paid such close attention to her without descending into sappiness or obvious, ardent manipulation. He was observant about politics and finance and things that didn’t include emotion. He read books, and when they’d talked about history and culture and countries, she only gradually realized he’d never see any of them, that he truly hated travel. He thought this would be no problem for Dulcy, who’d tired of tagging after her father around the globe.
“But I love to travel,” said Dulcy. “I simply don’t want to travel with him anymore. I don’t want to have to take care of someone. I don’t want to have to worry.”
“Well, then, I’ll do it,” said Victor. “I will do anything for you.”
Victor believed in other types of activity: sit-ups, push-ups, pullups. He was a good tennis player, but any sport had to be planned out, nothing impromptu, variables limited. He would swim, but in a pool, not an ocean; he would walk, but not happily in tall grass. And he would box, wearing gloves: boxing had begun as therapy gone wrong. Touching another body, even in a game, was a struggle. He had wild urges and crawling skin; no one had worn his surfaces down. He needed a cocoon to muffle the world, and she guessed that he believed knowing her well would make key parts of life—her body, for instance—approachable. If his mother had been locked in a bin before he turned one, things might have been different, but Dulcy thought he’d been born this way. He could dust a kiss on her hair, touch her through cloth, but any moment of real contact was a little like a stabbing, an act of will, body over mind.
She’d caught Victor reading romantic novels as how-to manuals, with palpable disbelief. There was always a tension between what he wanted and what he knew was expected. Above his desk, he’d pinned a handwritten quote from Lafcadio Hearn:
Everyone has an inner life of his own, which no other eye can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed, although occasionally when we create something beautiful, we
