the long hours before the reply, Dulcy imagined the wizened engineer studying the slip of paper.
Accounts here? How ill? Waht did he leave? Will advise on new prospects.
It was her turn to stare at a piece of paper. When she took Walton his lunch that day, she tidied his room, piled books by topic and color, and rattled on about wanting to be organized so they could leave soon. Did he have keys for a bank box or hotel box in Cape Town or Johannesburg, keys for her to keep from the last trip? Any bit of information she should pass on to Robert if Walton had some sad turn of health?
“Why would I keep a box in a tottery country like that, dear?” asked Walton. “And Robert knows to tell you everything.”
For the next round of wires, Dulcy was given permission to be circumspect but honest about the degree of Walton’s illness and the missing funds, and Woolcock sounded authentically frayed, even in telegramese:
I cannot believe. I will be discreet. Will he recover?
Dulcy didn’t know. That night she once again heard Victor in the gym, drumming on the punching bag while Henning talked through the rage, soothing, singsong, matter-of-fact. When they stopped, she listened to all the usual noises—drunks, wagons, ships’ horns; Seattle was a small city, but still a city—and sorted through the receipts in the brown book, peering down through the glasses she had too much vanity to wear in public.
She came up with nothing. Walton had docked in Cape Town on September 5 and checked in to the Mount Nelson Hotel. The next day, while Martha was beginning to die back in Westfield, he’d set up an account at Bank of Africa and given the bookbinder fifty pounds. This was mind-boggling: Dulcy wondered if the notebooks had gotten wet on the trip over, or if some blow to the head had driven Walton into this extravagance. He’d picked up the tab for a table of six that night at the Mount Nelson—Woolcock would have made the trip south from the Transvaal to meet him—and the next day he’d consulted a doctor she remembered too well, and then headed north to the mines, a two-day journey.
There was nothing about meeting the buyers on September 12, nothing about a transfer of nine hundred thousand pounds. A good hotel in Johannesburg and another doctor there, and then a train ticket south again, and two nights back in Cape Town. And then, after all this activity, nothing but receipts for a train to Port Elizabeth and stubs from that beach town—laundry, an Indian meal, whiskey, a pharmacist’s tab for a stomach fizz, morphine, and mercury. She looked in the black book and all the others, but there was no entry for any of those days, because all the notebooks but the brown were at the binder’s. He’d rendered himself mute—how had he possibly spent his time if he wasn’t recording his time?
A week later, he was back at the Mount Nelson. She imagined him wandering through Africa’s spring in the linen suits she’d found crumpled in his trunk, his mind filled with silk samples and women rather than mines. On September 27 he paid the Cape Town bookbinder one hundred pounds, and on September 28 he boarded his first ship home. There was nothing in the notebook to show if he’d left for even a moment when the ship docked in Australia or Hawaii.
Ides, wind, brain rot. He hadn’t lost anything important before, not even a pair of eyeglasses, but here they were.
Even when you are positive that a person has syphilis, it is not always best to say so... Indeed, in practising medicine, you will see and understand many sins and blemishes of which you must appear oblivious.
—Daniel W. Cathell, 1882
chapter 3
The Deep Yellow Book of Cures
•
Walton may have told Victor that he’d been cured by a fever treatment in Italy, but he knew better, whether or not he’d speak the truth out loud. Syphilis killed everyone, fast, slow, showily, invisibly. It had killed Dulcy’s twin brother and sister soon after birth, and it had killed her mother Philomela a few years later. The yellow book was filled with happy theories—written with a flourish, in a large hand—that Walton later covered with crabbed rage, big black hindsight X s, and brutal details: cock oozes, chancre on tongue, the lump on my ass cheek tells me their lie . He’d attempted lymph and blood inoculation, fever treatment, platinum, tellurium, vanadium, gold, every purgative in current use. He read historical accounts of the guaiacum cure and had Woolcock buy a lignum vitae plantation in Nicaragua near the harbor of Bluefields, where they’d first landed to cross the Isthmus in 1867.
Walton had either been lucky for twenty years or his energetic search for new treatment had been at least partially successful. He had recovered from palsies, bouts of mercury poisoning (ointments were the recognized treatment, but he’d tried older methods of inhaling or injecting; mercury always worked, after a fashion, but it deafened him, damaged his kidneys, and ulcerated his mouth), and a considerable amount of what was known as “excitability.” He had yet to experience a stroke, blackened teeth, blindness, meningitis, or—until now—memory loss. Unlike William Lobb (a fellow Cornishman), Calamity Jane, Oscar Wilde, Paul Gauguin, Randolph Churchill, or the thousands of other men and women who died from syphilis each year, he was still alive.
But the symptoms of tabes dorsalis—spinal neurosyphilis, wasting, and paralysis—had begun. Before, whenever Walton fretted about numbness while traveling, they would abandon a disappointing earthquake (or an earthquake that disappointed Walton’s theories) for a progressive clinic staffed by intelligent men. In Zurich, Berlin, Madrid, Walton was always reassured that there had been no measurable change. Dulcy would remind him that the numbness in his hand might have been caused by a binge of rant-writing to geology journals, or that the tingling in his foot had first appeared after a slide down half an Ottoman mountain, but a doctor was always more convincing with the same explanation. But now movement gave Walton away: some atrophy of the nervous system gave him a herky-jerky walk, so that he misjudged distance and slapped his feet down, and he had a strange way of moving his jaw when he was thinking.
In Seattle, Victor, a Princeton man, sought out Ivy League talent. The doctor was elegant but spent more time talking to Victor than to Walton. After her father left the room, Dulcy, on the far side of the room—she always took the far wall with Victor—watched as the doctor laughed—ho , ho , ho—patted Victor’s arm, and brought up a promising new treatment involving cobra venom.
Victor jerked his arm away. “My father’s tried that,” Dulcy said. “I would like a realistic appraisal of his condition.”
The physician shrugged and looked for his hat. “He’s dying.”
The next doctor to visit the hotel apartment was a frayed mess from Philadelphia, a Swarthmore man who insisted on talking to the patient directly, and he very tentatively suggested that Walton was doomed. He had gray sponges of hair above each ear, and nothing on top.
“Fool,” said Walton. “Find someone who knows their business, Henning.”
The doctor’s smelly bag made her think of an English expatriate who’d tended to Walton in Greece. That doctor had just come from the amputation of a tumorous foot, a souvenir he’d forgotten by the time he’d asked Dulcy to reach into his bag for a set of calipers. Her first feeling had been surprise, even a little wonder and humor, but the ragged filaments of tendon had done her in, and before she could budge she’d vomited into the bag.
“Serves you right,” Walton had said to the doctor.
Dulcy had knelt in the mess, focusing woozily on her lunch of greens and orzo, and threw up again: shreds of lamb and
