?
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 dark red bits of hot pepper. “Miserable girl,” the doctor had said. Walton had slapped him.
This new doctor, who staggered whenever he turned his head and steamed with the afternoon rain, wasn’t capable of giving an insult. “Mr. Remfrey, have your hands always shaken like that?”
“Of course not.”
“If your daughter wouldn’t mind leaving the room, it would be helpful to examine other areas.”
“Fuck yourself,” said Walton. “I am intact and unsored.”
The doctor, showing a bit of spine, marched over to the open French window and latched it.
“Well, what shall we do?” asked Dulcy.
“Morphine,” said the doctor. “With a regular emetic.”
“Your mother was an inbred whore,” said Walton, ratcheting himself out of bed to reopen the window. “Heal thyself, cretin.”
Walton worried about his eye falling out, but he had no notion that his brain was losing control of his limbs. He stalked up and down the halls of Victor’s apartment like a marionette. Dulcy made his nurses take him outside, and though he moved along with some of his old pace, the foot slap continued. “But I’m dead if I don’t walk,” he said. “I need the air.”
Victor insisted on interviewing staff personally, probably with an eye for spies, and chose a dimpled redhead for a nighttime nurse. “This won’t do, will it?” asked Henning, his eyes sad.
“No,” said Dulcy.
Henning hired the next applicant, a stout Bavarian with bottlebrush hair. She carried her own metallic thermometer, and Walton, without his glasses, went into a frenzy: the giant woman would put the giant needle in his cock, kill it for good.
Not such a bad idea, dozens of women too late. He moved quickly; she rarely had a chance to warn them.
???