Travelers Rest (21 page)

F
or a while now (he didn't know how long, he seemed to have lost the ability to track time altogether, and could tell that days were going by only because he had a pretty good beginning to a beard and it was itching mightily), he had been not doing much of anything but sitting around with Tiffany, “waiting out the storm,” as Tiffany put it, a strategy that, if you trusted Tiffany's word on the matter, showed infinite good sense. But he didn't trust Tiffany. Or Rose Blanchard. The two were in cahoots about something. You could see it in the way they looked at each other.

Tiffany was decent company, it turned out, if you could quit being angry and more or less accept the situation as inevitable—but he didn't want to accept the situation or believe it was inevitable. In his better, more alert moments, he reprimanded himself for his own weakness, his inability to make something happen that would shake him out of this, return him to the place where he could find Dewey and Julia and be the man, the father, the husband, even the brother he was before, or possibly a better version of all these things. But whenever this strong desire and fear gripped him, the only thing he knew to do was leave the hotel, try to notify someone, get some help, and it always turned out the same—the freezing cold, the panic, the onset of the whiteness, and then, inevitably, the return inside the hotel, where he would, inevitably, find himself sitting with Tiffany and, lately, Rose Blanchard, more drained, more scared, more confused and dazed and humbled than before…more accustomed to defeat. In his most lucid moments he imagined that he must be a lot like a drugged-up patient in an insane asylum, slow and listless in thought and action, muttering and shuffling, a speck of drool at the corner of his mouth.

It seemed to Tonio—and this was certainly part of why he didn't trust his host—that Tiffany wanted him to stay shut up in the hotel forever, chatting with him and Rose and drinking tea. After a certain period of time, after talking to Tiffany about what the fossil record suggested regarding the development of bipedalism in the great apes, or Etruscan pottery, or the rise of the great European industrial centers in the nineteenth century (Tiffany had a wide-ranging if superficial knowledge of virtually any subject Tonio could bring up, and he seemed interested in all of them to one degree or another), and to Rose about contemporary cinema and “the cult of instant celebrity,” both of which she held in disdain but wanted to know more about, as if, strangely, she was some sort of expatriate receiving word from home (Tiffany said of Rose's past only that she had been “on the stage”), his feelings of desperation, anger, impatience, outrage would resurface, and after shouting obscenities at Tiffany and apologizing to Rose, he would do, again, the only thing he could think to do, which was set off in the snow, raging and fuming, to find some help, after which he would wake up staring groggily at Rose's silver shoe and Tiffany's pipe tobacco on the marble table and enjoying the comforts of a warm, crackling fire in the fireplace, and the whole cycle would begin again. They were very good at casting their spell, making you feel as though nothing existed outside this room and their cups of tea and their conversation and Tiffany's occasional “nips” or “fingers” of brandy, which he offered to Tonio and Rose as if he were up to something naughty.

But he had lately hatched a plan. The solution, he believed now, was to be disciplined enough to hold back, to wait until his strength had been completely restored and his will absolutely cemented to the completion of the task, which was this—to go resolutely out into the snow, to continue down the alley that seemed to want to lead him somewhere, to keep from surrendering to the panic that seized him when he thought he was lost and freezing, to resist, most of all, the door that offered him reentry and the long, white funnel it led to. He would have to keep going, stay on the path until he arrived at a destination where he could get help, or, if his instincts were wrong, be prepared to freeze to death curled up somewhere all alone like any other animal. He would not be the first creature to suffer such a fate, and he had decided firmly that he would rather die that way than live without Dewey (or, more accurately, live a life in which he knew that he had failed to save Dewey), and maybe, he had begun to think, without his wife, although he had never thought of giving up his life for her before. It had always been part of his basic understanding of himself that he would instinctively, if the moment ever arose, suffer any physical injury no matter how severe in order to save his son, and in fact he had dreams in which this occurred—the snake about to strike, the bus plowing heedlessly down the city street close to the curb, the tornado bearing down upon them in the open field. For some reason, though, it had never occurred to him that this same obligation should extend to Julia, and yet in the past few days he had found himself imagining scenarios—crazed kidnapper, roaring conflagration, avalanche of snow—in which he would rush to Julia's aid without considering his own safety.

Currently, the discussion with Tiffany and Rose had drifted into the area of animism, or “life force,” and Tonio grew bored, having listened to Julia cover this ground too often. But the subject seemed to excite Tiffany immensely. On certain topics, Tiffany seemed merely to be making polite conversation, while others roused in him a passionate intensity. You could gauge his level of excitement, Tonio had figured out, by how hard he puffed on his pipe, the bowl glowing bright orange whenever he got really worked up, as if the color of his emotions appeared in the pipe instead of on his cheeks. Tiffany had suggested that maybe Tonio couldn't appreciate the concept of said “life force” because “scientists” (as he insisted on referring to Tonio) lacked the requisite imagination, to which Tonio replied that in fact animism was
invented
by an anthropologist, or at least the term was.

“A smart man, then,” Tiffany said.

“He didn't
believe
in animism, Tiffany,” Tonio said. He tried, in general, to mask his irritation, but at times Tiffany's smug layman's views, well-informed as they often were, got too much under his skin. “He wasn't an animist
himself.
He used it as a term to describe the religious beliefs of primitive cultures.
Primitive.
He saw all religions as the persistence of earlier, survivalist beliefs.”

Tiffany puffed away like a bellows, exhausting the orange glow in the bowl. He tapped out the pipe and immediately refilled it from his small leather pouch, sneaking a quick peek at Rose, who sat across from Tonio in a velvet armchair, her teacup in one hand, her saucer in the other. Clearly she was as bored with the proceedings as Tonio, and she wouldn't hesitate to let Tiffany know this in a minute—she was almost always prickly with Tiffany and invariably deferential and flattering toward Tonio, which Tonio assumed was a contrivance on the part of them both. He didn't believe in Rose Blanchard's admiration for him any more than he believed in Tiffany's desire to help him find his family again. The only thing that was hard to figure out was whether Tiffany had designs on Rose himself, whether his sneaky glances were an actual attempt to gauge her reactions to what he was saying, or whether they were merely a part of the surreptitious communication they seemed to carry on all the time, obviously trying to signal each other regarding Tonio's current mental state, whether he seemed adequately pacified.

Tiffany lit his pipe and shook out the match and took two big puffs. “Perhaps I should bring out the brandy and the playing cards,” he said.

“Perhaps you should,” Rose said. She smiled knowingly at Tonio, as if they were in perfect agreement on the subject of Tiffany's long-windedness. As if they were in perfect agreement on everything under the sun and moon.

“Very well,” Tiffany said, with obvious irritation. He made it halfway to the drawer behind the front desk where he kept the brandy but then came back and sat down again. “But I don't understand why people find it so strange,” he said. “It's been a mystery to me all these years. Why shouldn't the earth be alive in its own way? How can a living thing come from a dead thing? As I've acknowledged, I'm not a scientist, and I am prepared to bow humbly before another man's expert opinion, if he can demonstrate the truth of it to me. But there are many things the scientists do not know. And one of the questions I have not heard answered to my satisfaction is how something stagnant, inert, fixed, dead, should give birth to so many living and moving things. The earth gives us life, and the natural end of life is death, and death is nothing more than an extended kind of sleep, and sleep is the gateway to dreaming, and dreams are nothing more than disguised memories, and memories, finally, are all that we have left in the world. All these things are in essence the same thing. And why shouldn't there be a nexus, a place where they all come together as one?”

The room was quiet for a moment while no one attempted to answer. The fire crackled in the fireplace. Rose yawned.

“My apologies,” Tiffany said, and he tapped out his pipe in a silver ashtray on the table and went to get the brandy and the playing cards.

Rose put down her teacup and saucer and leaned across the table toward Tonio. “He really is brilliant, you know?” She turned halfway to watch Tiffany going about his business. “He drives me crazy, but he really does have a wonderful mind. So chock-full of”—she shook her head back and forth dramatically, as if searching desperately for the right word—“things.”

Yeah, his mind was full of “things,” all right, they could agree on that much. Tonio sat quietly and observed the same scene it felt like he'd been observing for a good portion of his life now: the period furniture, the crackling fire, the snow outside the window. He did not look at Rose Blanchard, because he found her unsettling. The reason wasn't that she was attractive—she
was
attractive, beautiful, even, according to most men's standards, probably, but attractive women didn't usually unsettle him, and there was no good reason that Rose should. He was still capable of hiding behind his academic disinterest and his intellectual superiority and his emotional grayness the same way he always had been. He still knew the routine, even if he hadn't been himself much lately. No, there was something else, and it must have something to do with the way she treated him so familiarly and the fact that he too had thought at first that he'd known her elsewhere. He kept looking, for instance, at those silver shoes, which were embedded in his memory someplace.

He hazarded a glance at her now. It was strange that he perceived something indecent about her, almost, when she would have been considered downright demure by any contemporary standard. She was elegant and charming, her attentions were discreet, she dressed modestly and tastefully as far as Tonio could tell. But there was something that made him feel indecent when he looked at her. There she was now in her white dress, her blonde hair pinned up, no plunging neckline, no skin showing, it wasn't like she was wearing a bikini, for God's sake, but still…she was getting to him in a way he wasn't used to. And the smile on her face proved it. She knew what she was doing.

She reached across the table and touched his hand where it rested on the arm of the sofa. “Can I speak to you later, alone?” she asked him.

Right then Tiffany sat down, placing three snifters and a bottle on the table. The wind blew outside and the snowdrifts sifted up against the windowpane. The fire guttered as the wind reached down the chimney and the open flue. A clock sounded the time from the corner of the room.

“It
has
been quite snowy,” Tiffany said. “I don't know when I've seen the like.” He unstoppered the bottle and filled the glasses and held up his own to the firelight. “Cheers,” he said. “To us.”

T
he dinner had proved as wondrous as advertised and then some, with a host of servers (some of whom Addison recognized from the mine, their beards trimmed and hair carefully managed, in most cases not too badly, for the occasion) and a great deal of clattering and shouting emerging from the large and rather festive kitchen, so that the quartet that played throughout the feast had a good bit to do to be heard over the noise and the conversation. Addison and his wife were seated near the middle of the long table with a territorial senator, Mr. Faiser, and his wife, whose name Addison forgot as soon as he heard it, so nervous was he about the proper employment of the various utensils set before him, the likelihood of getting crumbs in his mustache. He was certain to come off as a rube, but he hoped to avoid seeming downright vulgar. Some others at the table appeared as perturbed and bewildered as he did, newly minted gentlemen like himself uncomfortable in their coats and tails, their foreheads shining brilliantly from the slight misapplication of Macassar oil. But there were also those who felt perfectly at home, as Tiffany obviously did, grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate their superior breeding, the social refinements learned in Boston, New York, London, Paris, and transported here by historical accident or economic necessity.

To Julia's right sat an actual French marquis, the Marquis de Mores, who, fascinated by tales of the American West, had crossed the Atlantic, laid claim to nearly fifty thousand acres of Dakota grazing land, and built a château along the banks of the Little Missouri River. Throughout dinner, the marquis kept up a lively conversation with Julia—his own wife, to whom Addison himself sometimes found it difficult to speak a dozen words—on a variety of subjects including French poetry and Virginia colonial architecture and possibly several others that Addison couldn't pick up because they
began speaking French.
It was both galling and humbling to realize that he had not even known his wife spoke French, a language of which he did not know the first words himself. And so he kept quiet almost throughout dinner.

Then the dancing began. The dance program, which was printed on ornamental cards for all the guests and distributed at table, contained just one dance, a kind of quadrille, that Addison knew, and when the first waltzes began he realized upon seeing the skill of some of the dancers that he would not even attempt the quadrille, much less any of the others, and he hoped his wife would not ask him to. She did not. She danced more than once with both Tiffany and the Marquis de Mores, and he watched her with mingled pride and embarrassment. She was easily the most elegant of the dancers on the floor, and he felt ashamed that he was not able to offer her this sort of pleasure, but he saw at the same time that her attentions to the marquis, who was more forward and probably more drunk than Addison would have liked, were utterly correct and merely formal. Her dark hair curled over her forehead very prettily, and with her petite figure she glided through the room like a windup ballerina. The eyes of everyone in the room would have been trained on his wife, he felt, had it not been for the presence of Rose Blanchard.

His experience had been so slight, and of such a different order than he would have preferred, that it was hard for him to judge Miss Blanchard the way, perhaps, another man would—the Marquis de Mores, for instance. To Mr. Addison's way of seeing things, his wife was every bit Miss Blanchard's equal, but to the senator, to the banker from Spokane Falls, to the newspaper editor from Portland, to the waiters who were still busy bringing out silver trays of champagne and sweets, to the musicians who tracked her movements from behind their instruments, to, above all, the Harrington boy, who had managed to get quite drunk somehow while sitting on a chair in the corner, and who blushed and squirmed each time she raised her two little fingers to wave at him as she twirled around the room, Rose Blanchard was clearly the main attraction.

Yes, one could easily see that Miss Blanchard's looks were more superficially appealing, but Addison found the stage makeup and the bountiful blonde curls and the puffed-up bustle of her dress garish and even tawdry in comparison with his wife's smart, trim ballroom dress, which was alluring without being salacious. Were even these wealthy, important men so easily fooled by that kind of artifice? By the same darkened eyes and powdered cheeks and swelling bodices that you could find in the town's whorehouses? Or was it Miss Blanchard's face that had such a strong influence? She was pretty, undoubtedly, but she lacked the refinement he prized so much in his wife. He was proud of Julia now, watching her and the marquis execute the intricate steps of a dance he'd never seen before, and which the majority of the guests were not even attempting. At least the marquis seemed to share his appreciation for her.

The expansive room was warm with life, and Addison leaned back in his chair with his legs and arms crossed in front of him, and he watched his wife move in slow, precise circles around the room while the snow flew by the windows in a dark world that seemed to have nothing to do with this lighted place. A feeling of tranquility and assurance descended on him, clearing his mind of the usual doubts and worries. Under the influence of Tiffany's champagne it was easy to contemplate a future in which he and his wife would achieve a desirable harmony, in which they could regularly attend fine parties like this one—finer, in the bigger, finer cities of the world for which this current life in this half-formed town was but a simple preparation—and afterward gaze together at snow out the window, snow in Boston, snow in Paris, snow in Vienna, and smile at something absurd that had been said by an acquaintance at dinner, while he helped unpin her dress and brush her hair, and they would fall eagerly into each other's arms with the city dark and restless beneath them.

This reverie was interrupted by a hand on his coat sleeve, and he turned to see Rose Blanchard seated next to him, smiling at him with her bright eyes, in the same way he had just imagined his wife doing. It was rather disconcerting.

“You look lost,” she said to him, and patted his arm with her small white hand, the perfectly curved fingernails like smoothed claws, softened until they were no longer dangerous. He was irritated to feel heat rush up under his shirt collar, the back of his neck turn moist, a blush no doubt coloring his cheeks. Was it a sort of magic that made men respond to her this way? He had thought he was immune.

“Not at all,” he said with a pinched smile.

She smiled gently back at him. Her hand still rested lightly on his arm, and he became conscious of the gaze of other men and women around the room, and he saw a few turn toward their companions, lean in with a hand on an arm, whisper confidentially—
To whom is Miss Blanchard speaking?
or
Why is she speaking to Mr. Addison?
And something expanded in his chest, as if he were gaining power and strength while the famed actress sat next to him. It disturbed him how quickly he could forget to look for his wife across the room.

“Lonely, then,” Rose Blanchard said. “I meant no offense.”

“Not at all,” he said cautiously, and then realized those were the same words with which he had responded to her first statement. He shifted his legs uncomfortably. Her smile showed just a hint of amusement. “I'm not at all lonely, thank you,” he said stiffly. “I'm afraid I'm not much of a dancer, but I enjoy watching. Mr. Tiffany has created quite a spectacle here in our modest town. We are still very rough and very new, and Mr. Tiffany's hotel and his grand opening will undoubtedly apply a little polish.”

He had almost no time to congratulate himself on this little speech. Right then, as if on cue, the main doors to the ballroom burst open, and five men in boots and rough wool coats strode into the room, shouting and weaving somewhat dangerously through the dancers and onlookers, the tables set with candelabras and silver serving trays. It was bound to happen, and Addison was secretly pleased as he watched Tiffany's rapid advance on the invaders. It was a situation Addison hoped to avoid becoming involved in directly, but he would involve himself if necessary. He recognized at least two of the miners at this distance, and probably had a passing acquaintance with all of them. No matter Tiffany's thoughts on the subject or his lofty intentions, the mine still ran this town and not the other way around. He would go point that out to Tiffany if he had to. As long as they behaved themselves, the miners were staying. Addison would see to that.

He was surprised to hear Miss Blanchard laughing heartily behind him. When he turned, her face was alight with pleasure. It was the same glow of mischief he'd spied earlier when he found her in the upstairs room with Tiffany. She seemed to greatly enjoy watching Tiffany's attempts to handle his predicament. With one raised hand he tried to slow the miners' advance, while with the other he waved encouragement to the musicians to continue, all the while glancing over his shoulder with strained geniality at his guests, who were by now aware of the interruption. And listening to Miss Blanchard's low and somehow musical laugh, Addison felt an undeniable attraction now, not to her made-up image and her fame, but to that part of her that he could tell ran much deeper, an earthier element akin to his own leanings toward the unpolished and unrefined. He recognized something in Miss Blanchard that he missed in his relations with Julia, and he turned his gaze sadly toward the windows and the snow. It was as if he had become aware of a high wall he would never breach.

“I'm sorry,” Rose Blanchard said. “Alfred plans everything so scrupulously. I shouldn't be laughing at his expense.”

“It
is
marvelous,” Addison said. “He deserves credit. No one else could have done this.”

Across the room, Tiffany had managed to forge a compromise with the miners, who were now seated along the wall near the kitchen entrance drinking tentatively from champagne flutes. One of them accepted a bottle passed to him surreptitiously by young Harrington.

“Alfred has always demonstrated a certain fondness for the dramatic gesture,” Miss Blanchard said.

She seemed perched quite comfortably on the edge of her seat, the long train of her skirt spread out behind her. Guiltily, Addison scanned the room for his wife, whom he spotted near the musicians, talking to the senator's wife. Just then, her eyes happened to meet his, and he felt for one fleeting moment the thrill of being caught doing something of which a jealous spouse would not approve—but then she offered him the same polite smile as always, as if it would never occur to her to find Rose Blanchard threatening, or to care.

Miss Blanchard's eyes flashed attentively at this silent exchange, with what feeling behind them he couldn't tell. She said nothing, but continued to sit next to him in a kind of relaxed intimacy, as if it were she who was his wife instead of Julia. And for a moment he allowed himself to imagine that that was the case, that he shared with this woman the long familiarity and easy companionship he had dreamed, a short while ago, of having with his wife.

But it did not help him much in the present moment. He was still casting about for something to say, and his eyes settled on Tiffany, who seemed, oddly, to be taking a break from the proceedings, standing idly by a window, his hand on the windowsill, in an attitude of apparent boredom. “And how are you acquainted with Mr. Tiffany?” he heard himself ask Miss Blanchard. At the window Tiffany brushed his hair back with one hand, surveyed the room briefly, took out his pocket watch and consulted it, wound the watch and put it back in his pocket again. Miss Blanchard had not spoken but she sighed softly and he looked over to see on her face an undeniable expression of sadness.

“It's me, Anthony,” she said. “This is me you're speaking to. Pretend we're in the lobby drinking tea.”

In some dreamlike way he found himself staring at the snow. The noises in the room—the slow waltz the musicians played and the spiral of the dance, the way the ladies' skirts bloomed outward like the opening of flowers, the nervous buzz of conversation in the ballroom, the bustling clatter in the kitchen and the loud talk of the miners, who could no longer contain their excitement at finding themselves in such a grand place in the middle of so much wilderness—whirlpooled down and down and his vision of the lights and the colors slipped to the edges of the sensate world, as if all of it were merely hovering somewhere slightly below and behind him, and all that remained was the light gravitational pull of the earth on the frozen atmosphere above it, the silent progress of the white flakes toward the ground.

“I don't know what you mean,” he said as evenly as he could, looking straight ahead at nothing, feeling weightless and adrift.

Again he felt her hand on his arm. “We have an appointment later this evening, you and me,” she said. “It's the same appointment as always.” Her soft fingers reached inside the cuff of his shirtsleeve and rested lightly on his pulse. “I'm afraid you'll never miss it no matter how hard you try.”

He had never learned to swim, but once his father had taken him on a boat ride in the Wisconsin Dells, and he remembered now how it felt to be carried along rapidly on the stream, floating free above the water, a tiny rippling beneath the boat's surface. The night was turning out like that, just something underneath him, something he skimmed along on top of, his wife, Julia, there on the other side of the room, just someone he passed by on the way to something or somewhere else, and Rose Blanchard's hand on his wrist, connected to him at the point where his blood flowed, was all that was real or that mattered, and he tried to bring himself into the moment with her, understand what she was saying.

“I want to help you this time if I can,” she said, and she squeezed his arm tight and leaned in close. “You tried to help me.”

Now the people around the room stared at him in earnest, but it didn't matter. His eyes were trained on some spot on the ballroom floor, but his head stirred with images: the boy he'd seen from the window, the same boy but in a different place, by the ocean, looking out at the water, his hand resting lightly on the boy's hair; his wife, Julia, but somewhere else, across a table drinking steaming tea or coffee from an unusual cup; himself facing a roomful of young people, speaking to them in a lecture hall; Rose Blanchard, again and again, more familiar to him suddenly than anyone he'd ever known. The images lay on top of one another like thin transparencies, all in his mind at once as if he could see from multiple sets of eyes, or from the eyes of many people. He felt that if he fixed his concentration on any one of these images it would lead him to still more images, to things recollected in the dim caverns of his mind, faint shadows of his former self or other selves. He was a man who had managed his life carefully, taking chances only when necessary, only calculated risks, and he was scared of what was happening to him now, and because he was scared he paid no attention to the shocked gaze of the people in the room when he turned toward Miss Blanchard and nervously held her hand. “When I saw you in the snow,” he said to her.