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.
I can, thought Dulcy. That’s the point.
That evening he sent Henning. This was their first real conversation: Henning said that Victor would like her to know that he would never do anything “like that ” again, that by having “accepted ” him, she had cured him.
“Cured?”
Henning writhed in the chair, without visible movement. She waited until he finally looked at her directly. “Do you think I should change my mind?” asked Dulcy.
“No,” he said, reaching for his hat. He seemed relieved by the question. “He’ll only ever touch you when he’s angry or drunk.”
She went back to the farm. Martha, not understanding Dulcy’s reasons, was smug—she hadn’t liked Victor, and Dulcy now found this reassuring rather than maddening. Carrie passed on rumors from the city, sometimes out of kindness, and sometimes out of spite: people said Dulcy was a cold fish; that she’d had affairs during her travels with her father and fretted that Victor would discover the truth; that she’d been worried about all the normal things marriage entailed (this last was especially amusing). There had to be an explanation: all that money, and good looks. They didn’t usually go together. Why ever had Dulcy let that one go?
But as stories of Victor’s unraveling had begun to float up to Westfield—fights, some eruption at a whorehouse—any notion that she was in the wrong was lost to growing panic. Dulcy and Walton were due to leave for London and Portugal and Africa, a trip they’d planned as a last hurrah before the wedding was canceled. Now Dulcy slipped into the city a day early, and saw a doctor a friend had recommended, and understood she wasn’t free of Victor, after all. She told Walton—who’d had the sense to not tell Victor about Dulcy’s presence, or the trip—they’d have to delay, but Walton reacted to the news of her condition by telegramming a London doctor and booking them onto an even earlier ship. They were gone by nightfall.
•••
In Seattle, three years later, Dulcy was careful with her telegram, and Woolcock wired back immediately—
Dulce all grand hell of a turnaround, fine deal made, hope the Lord is happy, ask the Da when he’ll voyage next? Keeping mine eyes on happy places Huns and Sows haven’t noticed yet.
“Sows?” asked Victor.
“The English,” said Dulcy.
Henning looked amused, in a shuttered way. “Would he say more if you pretended to be your father?” asked Victor.
“I won’t,” she said.
“Mr. Woolcock wouldn’t feel the need to explain to Walton,” said Henning.
She’d be half in love with Henning, if he didn’t terrify her. She wrote again to Robert Woolcock:
Da ill now
