February 4, 1797, Quito, 40,000. Humboldt’s notes.
February 4 to 7, and March 1 and March 28, 1783, Calabria, 50,000. I can discern no directional pattern.
February 16, 1810, Crete, 2,000. Accompanied by a wave.
February 20, 1835, Concepción, 50. See CD’s notes.
February 28, 1780, Persia, 200,000.
March 3, 1901, Parkfield, California,?
—from Walton Remfrey ’s red notebook
chapter 4
Windows
•
Walton was fond of round numbers. When a news account of a disaster cited “thousands,” he entered 10,000 in the red notebook, the thickest of the dozen. When dates were unclear, he invariably chose those with the most resonance, the anniversary of another earthquake or a moment that coincided with an eruption a thousand miles away. He tended to include small earthquakes in Europe and North America, while an event in Asia or South America needed hundreds of fatalities to earn an entry. If he could find no fatalities in a Western quake, he still put a question mark: no one could be sure that a miner somewhere hadn’t had a rock drop on his head, or that a fisherman hadn’t been swallowed by a wave.
The list was organized by season, rather than by area or by year, because after his first earthquake in 1868, Walton had become convinced that events were likelier in times of flux—fall and spring—than solstices. By 1872 he’d decided that it was all about the moon, all a matter of magnetism: ocean tides were echoed under the crust in magma. Even when he’d realized there was no pattern in historical accounts, he continued to maintain that events like the Corinth quake near the winter solstice of 856 were an anomaly, and he remained in love with nature’s machines of destruction. He traveled to earthquake and volcano sites searching for variables—vulcanism, tides, storms on the sun, orbits of other planets, fermenting rocks—and he believed that a code would make itself clear someday. The earth knew what it was doing, and shivered in concert, with a goal in mind.
By the end, he believed:
that earthquakes and vulcanism were all of one piece;
that gravity and tides informed the movement of magma;
that certain elements akin to uranium, as yet largely unidentified, actually fermented, and acted, under the considerable pressure of the earth’s mantle and lower crust, not unlike soda when it came in contact with vinegar. This led to subsets: the notion that magnetism and vulcanism happened because of a chemical reaction, or
the notion that it happened because the inside of the earth was alive with microscopic organisms.
He also believed:
that some minerals had been created by these tiny microorganisms in caves underground, and
that some minerals had been created by impacts and fires from meteorites and comets, and
that other minerals had been carried into older rocks as microscopic seeds by water, which cracked open these rocks, allowing these seeds to fill these cracks and mature as veins, and
that the earth had once been upside down (or was currently upside down, and had once been right side up), and
that amber and tiger’s eye and lapis and opals and turquoise came from ancient drowned crustaceans and forests, still remembered in myth.
Someone’s myth. Walton had listened to the nurses who’d pummeled and plunged him in Europe and Asia and Africa: these were the stories Henning patiently transcribed, thinking that someday he could make them visible. A woman in Danzig had told Walton of an amber forest under the Baltic, surrounding a drowned castle; a woman in Syria told of the sap of blue roses melting into lapis; a woman in Ceylon spoke of shimmering tigers transformed to wood. “It would be convenient if I could believe in gods and the whole load,” said Walton. “But I can’t, and so I’ll pick and choose, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” said Dulcy. One of the only things that could make their existence worse would be Walton finding God. Once, in London, he’d parked her at the British Library, and after hours reading current geologic journals, she’d realized they had nothing in common with her father’s version of events. It was a daunting moment—they were in this together. “The minerals in water aren’t alive, Dad,” she said.
“They are,” he said. “Pure science. But for the stories—I can’t believe the bit about opals and fossil teeth anymore. I’ve seen the veins—simply not so. Perhaps ground shell, washed down crevasses in some great flood. But we forget old fables at our peril.”
He wouldn’t forget anything, and he liked his nightmares. Every Cornish bugaboo from childhood, every phantasm glimpsed in the ocean, every dead body was given its own place, its own rosary bead. He’d grown up in the dark, underground. Dulcy, having been down in mines only a handful of times when she was a child, believed in forgetting, but she couldn’t begrudge him any mumbo jumbo, because the sense of the old world waiting at the end of the tunnel or bottom of a shaft had been overwhelming, a given. She’d heard the hot, wet walls gnash their teeth. Everything that had gone before had come here to hide; everything that might be alive could rise up from these places again.
Therefore, when Walton began having child-sized nightmares about sexually rampant witches and goblins coming to take him home, such screaming fits that Victor decamped for a different hotel one night, Dulcy sent another ultimatum to Carrie, and she wired her brothers as well. She did not show the response—bring him to New York—to Walton; any slight chance she could bundle him on a train would evaporate if he heard that tone. But when a letter arrived from his brother, Christopher, Walton read it off and on all day long.
I have been thinking of a visit in the spring, given that neither of us is spring-like. Dulcinea was kind enough to let me know that you have been to Africa again, and your mother-in-law has gone to heaven (or some other strange afterlife with rich food and good manners) or hell; I hope you are sobbing yourself to sleep on her behalf, and I hope you are well, but I doubt both.
We have had a shooting star this last week which seemed to land at the entrance of an old mine filled with buried dead men: even I felt some excitement. Some melted rock and burned trees on the ground, as if it exploded just before impact.
Jane has gone to visit our Marcia in Veracruz, where she has been delivered of a boy. They intend to move to New York, and I am melancholic, but that will give us two reasons to visit.
With love from the small boy
“Why visit now?” asked Walton. “Do you suppose he’s ill?”
She sometimes forgot how selective his mind had become. He reached for the gray notebook. “I’m happy he’s bringing his lazy ass north, but I’d thought perhaps we’ll visit him instead. I’ll even sit in his silly church for one of his rants. Remember how lovely that route is, Galveston or the Keys to Veracruz and then up the mountains?”
Walton loved Christopher, despite seeing no point in God. That night when Dulcy brought his medicine, he talked about how fragile his brother had been as a motherless little boy (as if Walton, three years older, had been above all that) and how given to visions, but how brave. Once they ran away from the workhouse with Woolcock and a few other boys and hid in an old tin mine on the outskirts of Redruth, diggings so old—Roman, at least—that they reached the tunnel through a crack under a churchyard wall. Christopher was only five, but he was the best and fastest at finding food or water or wood to burn—he would slide into the rector’s house for bread, into the church for water from the font; he would light bits of wood and walk down into the old mine to see the things from stories, and once he came back with an amber bead that looked like a dog’s head. One of the older boys had tried to take it, and Christopher had bitten the boy’s hand. The next morning, they were plucked out of their cave and returned to the workhouse, and a week later the older boy’s arm was amputated for infection.
Dulcy imagined Christopher, a good Christian, had felt guilt. “
Not a moment of it,” said Walton. “Even when the boy died. He’d tried to crush Chris’s little head. Bitten, a bitter pill, but the boy was a rabbit, then rabid. Rapidly.” He laughed, surprised at himself. “Chris has the bead still. Do you remember the thing dangling in his kitchen window?”
He turned his head to his own windows now, a wall of Puget Sound sleet. He had a fever again. Dream, memory: she found more retellings in the notebooks, stories about men being steamed to death, a man engine rising on a cable like a flaming bird cage, a note from Walton’s uncle describing, as requested, the manner of Walton and Christopher’s father’s death, when Christopher was not yet born: badly, burning underground. Finally, next to a clipping about a boy’s death from blood poisoning, she found a story from a Penzance paper, about six small boys who’d run from the workhouse, hidden in an abandoned mine, and nearly died before the elder found a way out.
Nothing was ever quite the way he told it.
•••
A week later, on December 10, Clarissa Mabena Galatea Remfrey arrived in Seattle. Carrie was tall, blond, and twenty-two, customarily cheerful and beautiful and soulful; she aimed to please, and she often took the unhappiest person at a party to one side. Other people saw pure empathy, but Dulcy recognized curiosity, and some of Walton’s love of disaster and despair.
But now she was in a state of tamped-down rage over her ruined holiday season, the delay in her engagement planning, a problem she had yet to confess. One meeting with Walton, who maundered on about thousand-year-old Persian earthquakes, put her facedown on a bed. “If he’s going to die anyway, I wish he’d get it done with, and we could go home, and I could reason things out with Alfred.”
“What do you need to reason about?”
“I’d like to shorten the engagement. I’d like a winter wedding.”
So many things made Dulcy angry. “Why on earth would you rush into a bad idea?”
And Carrie told her. The whole notion that watery, soothing Alfred could impregnate someone in advance of Episcopalian marital bondage was so stunning—Alfred wielding his tremulous nib, Carrie actually willing to touch it—that Dulcy (who’d never told her sister anything about what had happened with Victor) laughed in disbelief, and Carrie, her father’s daughter, promptly locked herself into the bathroom.
Dulcy talked through the door until Carrie emerged and took her through every bad option. The truth might stun Alfred, too, though as a physician Dulcy hoped he understood cause and effect. He clearly lacked much talent for observation. During a week in Westfield that July, Alfred hadn’t seemed to recognize the nature of Walton’s illness, despite his future father-in-law’s shaking hands and metallic whiff.
But Carrie said she loved him. He wasn’t caustic or strange or ill. She couldn’t bear Walton (or Dulcy, probably) for more than a few days, and she couldn’t live with her aunts in Westfield, and she couldn’t endure her tight-laced sisters-in-law in the city. She hoped Alfred didn’t mind that this had happened. She said she wouldn’t consider ending the pregnancy because she was afraid of pain.
Dulcy wasn’t sure how the pain qualification would play out when Carrie found herself in labor for a full-term baby. Maybe she couldn’t remember their balloon-shaped screaming mother or the dead twins, but Dulcy did, and she could not imagine Carrie undergoing any of it. Everything about her sister was beautifully attenuated—fine-boned arms and high cheekbones and a dancer’s neck. Dulcy was four inches shorter and three years older. She was nice looking, but when she and Carrie were together, she was invisible. The same blood that made Walton look like a walking stick made Carrie look like a queen, while Dulcy was left with Walton’s coloring and the padded but quick frame of Martha.
Carrie’s presence made the apartment a little happier. Victor treated her to monologues on business and society, which gave Henning a little time away, and Walton talked her into endless gin games. Even the news (not shared with Victor or Henning) that Carrie was pregnant didn’t dent the mood—Walton stared at the ceiling for a few moments and then said, “Who am I to judge?” Emil the cook was still away mopping up his dead brother’s affairs, and Dulcy had real fun for a few days—sweet moist clams, crabs that rippled across the floor at Carrie’s ankles, beautiful smoked mackerel, the prettiest salmon she’d ever seen in her life. Walton and Victor both had trouble with the shape of things, and for them she made quenelles and soufflés and polite lumps bathed in cream, suspended in chowder, or fried crisp.
Oysters, caviar, abalone, Dungeness. “Dear,” said Walton. “You’ll give yourself gout.”
On nights when Henning and Victor were off banqueting, or threatening partners, or making peace with and promises to investors and Verity, she and Carrie would wait until the floor was quiet, the bottlebrush nurse and Walton both snoring, and pad down the dark hallway to the kitchen. Dulcy would make Carrie beautiful piles of food, and Carrie would eat all of it, and talk about how much she’d loved Martha, about how she wouldn’t know what to do with a baby without Martha.
“Don’t be a fretful mess,” said Dulcy, because she wanted to cry. “You’ll be a fine mother.”
“Not like Mama?”
“Not like Mama.”
“She was only a mess because Dad made her sick. It’s difficult not to hate him sometimes,” said Carrie, after a moment. She slathered chutney on her melted cheese. “I’ll be a grand bully like Martha, and Alfred will be a wonderful father.”
Martha would have eaten Alfred in a single glance, with a cream sauce, and forced Carrie to look for a better mate. Martha had disdain for “mental wrecks,” even her invalid daughter, and especially the neurotic engineer who’d married and killed Philomela. On her dressing table, she kept a silver-framed photo of a brother who had died in the Civil War. The photograph of the brother who’d fought in the same war and died ten years later of drink was kept in a drawer.
“We could go live somewhere else,” said Dulcy. “We could run away.”
“No, I want Alfred,” said Carrie. “You’ll see. He’s a fine man.” She’d popped out of her mood, and she read aloud from the Herald about a cotillion, rolling names like Orme and Stuyvesant. Parrots as party favors, a truffle-laden menu. She tried for ridicule, reading with long, fey syllables, but she would miss this life terribly. Carrie had brought along the dress she’d ordered for the season, but she knew the waist wouldn’t fit for long.
They heard the elevator churn, and they put down their plates. Dulcy pushed the light button and they sat in the dark, listening to the opening elevator door and Victor, drunk and in mid-rant: the Portland people should understand the situation had changed. Their precious exposition would have to find new moneybags, and Henning should retrieve his cash—
“There’s no point,” said Henning. “Perhaps if I leave it with them, I’ll have some profit.”
His Swedish accent came out when he drank, an up-and-down pattern to a sentence, ending at something close to a question. “And that ass from the Washington Hotel,” said Victor. “How dare he not trust me? Arrogant little Mick. I want you to throw him off a dock.”
“No,” said Henning. “It won’t do you any good.” He walked away, the long, thumping stride.
Dulcy thought she could still hear Victor breathing, hear rage, but this was impossible: the hall was carpeted, life muffled and smothered. Carrie, frozen in her chair, stared up at the glow of the skylight with wider eyes, and when the door at the end of the hall finally clicked shut, she said, “Where is the money?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know everything about Dad.”
“Never. No one does.”
“Maybe you are well away from him.” But she didn’t mean Walton.
•••
Walton was dreamy and sluggish for a few days after Carrie’s arrival, and then he dropped into a higher fever and had a series of seizures. He muttered about mines, but he
called them Wheal Charlotte and Tolvadden and Wheal Neptune, Cornish mines from his childhood. He asked for music, and Henning found a violinist, but the man did not know any Vivaldi and was banished after an hour. Vivaldi had been born during an earthquake in Venice, or so Walton had been told during a stay in a clinic in Trieste. Walton was peeved that Victor couldn’t hire Fritz Kreisler to play for him.
•••
Henning roamed Seattle and returned with a cellist. They had peace, each in a different pocket of the sitting room, scribbling: Dulcy writing her aunts in Westfield to say that they should prepare a room for Walton, Victor writing his creditors, Henning taking notes on a Danish play, Carrie agonizing through a draft of a letter to Alfred about his impending fatherhood. They all scratched paper, but Walton, king of the notebooks, simply listened to the cello propped in a wing chair in the winter sunlight, tears rolling out of his closed eyes.
Dulcy’s heart surged, a stab of panic: you can know a situation won’t end well, and survive a slow, downward drip, but the moment, for whatever reason, was a jolt—Walton looked dead, and looked like he knew it. But everyone else was oblivious, buried in private miseries or daydreams. Carrie snuffled and balled up a sheet and began another draft. Victor had a finger stuffed in his ear. Henning hummed again, out of tune.
Henning didn’t know he’d always only be Victor’s attack dog, thought Dulcy. And a new thought: Walton didn’t know that Victor was only trying to keep him alive for the money.
•••
At Christmas, Walton gave them poems he’d copied onto pretty paper.
To Carrie:
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you,
None has understood you, but I understand you,
None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself,
None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you.
To Victor:
Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave;
The Widow Nash: A Novel Page 7
