by Jess Walter
Still, I was saddened by the time we had lost. The years apart, the secret we had borne the way these two men would bear Jules’s dead body. The invention after Mother died, when Jules urged me to leave Mullan, saying I could pass for Italian because of Mother’s coloring, move somewhere and start over, not the daughter of an Indian tramp and a Tunisian Gypsy but a good Catholic girl. I took the name Gemma from a neighbor in Mullan. Jules liked it, said it meant precious. Jewels and Gems, the two of us.
Jules found a woman in Spokane to take me in, and she brought me to Mass and taught me enough Italian to be my finishing teacher. Her neighbor had a nephew who had lost his first wife in childbirth, this bull of a man whose family, Tursi, was Tuscan. That was how I met Domenico. I liked the look of him the minute he came calling. Secure and sturdy. He asked for my hand after just three weeks. I hadn’t even spent half my boarding money. Except for missing Jules, I was never unhappy with my decision, especially when Elena was born.
Uncle Jules was my idea, and Aunt Agnella, whom I invented by splitting my mother in two—kindly sister Agitta and shrewish Agnella. At first Jules fought it, said it was better if he just drifted away and allowed me to live this new life. But I insisted, and eventually he was glad for it. Especially in the last few years, with the girls, and Dom agreeable to his visits, Jules became part of our family. I think we both had a sense of peace, of landing safely on some other shore.
Jules and I were never anything but uncle and niece after that—even when it was just the two of us. I even began to believe we could separate Mother from her angry half—separate the pretty young girl who ran away from a brutal father from the common-law wife who harangued Jules for not supporting us better. Sometimes it bothered me that my daughters wouldn’t know Jules was their grandfather and that they were part Indian—but what was life if not one invention after another?
Out the window I saw the coroner and the funeral man walking back toward the house.
I bent down to the old man’s ear, and I said goodbye in his language, the one I had promised never to use—the one he’d feared would get me a beating or land me in a reservation boarding school. My mother hated the old tongue, “like someone choking on a bone,” she said, but I always thought of it as music. Jules only taught me a few phrases, but I sometimes hummed them to myself, and I sang the words now that I knew best, for I used to say them every time he walked away in the spring—kw hin x̣menč, mestm̓—their sweet click on my tongue.
13
Rye couldn’t tell if Mrs. Ricci was crying or yelling or both. “Piccolo brutto!” She cupped his face, hugged him, then slapped him. “Pensavo fossi morto!”
“Sorry I didn’t rake the leaves before I went to jail,” Rye said.
Then Rye’s lawyer proved his value yet again; Latin wasn’t his only trick. “Mi dispiace, signora. Sono il suo avvocato, Fred Moore. Ryan era in prigione—ma non era colpa sua.”
“Prigione!”
“Si, ma non ha fatto nulla di sbagliato. Anche suo fratello, Gregory. La polizia era molto brutale! Ryan era trionfante in tribunal. Molto trionfante!”
Mrs. Ricci cupped Rye’s face again. “Oh, Marco! Oh, mio povero Geno!”
She went to the kitchen to make him some food, and Rye showed his lawyer around back, to the porch where he and Gig slept. Mr. Moore looked at the cots, bindles shoved under them, and the few belongings they’d managed to squirrel away—on Rye’s side, a pair of summer pants, a set of utensils he may or may not have stolen from a café in Pullman, a baseball he’d found in the grass, and the only thing he’d brought from Montana—a small pencil drawing his father had done of two horses. Mr. Moore looked at the picture of the horses, then turned to Gig’s side of the room, extra clothing, a hairbrush, a poster advertising that bill of depravity at the Comique Theater—Ursula the Great’s name across the top.
The lawyer ran his hand along Ursula’s name and then reached down for Gig’s prized possession, Volumes I and III of War and Peace, published in America in 1903 by Scribner’s Sons in a five-volume set, as part of the larger Complete Works of Count Tolstoy.
“Those are Gig’s books,” Rye said. “He says it’s two fifths of the finest novel ever written. He’s on the lookout for the rest.”
The lawyer turned the volume over in his hands.
“He doesn’t usually like people touching it,” Rye said, “but you being a lawyer, it’s probably okay.”
Fred Moore carefully put the book back with such a pitying look on his face that Rye felt compelled to point out the window to the grove of trees behind the house. “Mrs. Ricci is selling us that little piece back there. Gig and I are planning to build a house—well, we were, I mean, before all this started.”
This didn’t seem to alleviate Mr. Moore’s pity, and he turned away. “I’m sorry about Jules, Ryan,” he said. “And your brother. I’m going to get Gregory out of jail, and you’ll be working on your house by spring.”
“Spring,” Rye repeated.
The back door opened just enough for Mrs. Ricci to slide a bowl of noodles and some bread out; then, without a word, she closed the door. Rye jumped up and had a forkful before he’d looked up at his lawyer. “I’m sorry. Did you want some?”
“You go ahead. Eat up.”
Fred Moore said he’d check on Gig’s case the next day, and he left, glancing back once at Rye’s sleeping arrangements. When Rye’s lawyer and his dinner were both gone, he collapsed back onto his cot. It was like an entire life had been lived in this one day, the schoolhouse, court and his lawyer, the redoubtable Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and then seeing Jules dead like that. And to end this day here, on the porch without Gig—Rye felt lost and alone. He leaned back in his nest of blankets and fell straight into sleep, dreamless and black.
He wasn’t sure how long he was out, but then it was late morning and the sun was flashing through the porch window and Mrs. Ricci was shaking him awake in frantic Italian: “Donna! In una grande machina!” He got the first word. Woman.
He sat up. He must have slept sixteen hours. He felt panic that he’d missed something. Then he remembered that Gurley Flynn had wanted to talk to him about accompanying her on the trip to raise money for the lawyer. But here? Now? Rye felt disoriented. “Tell her I’ll be right out, Mrs. Ricci,” he said.
“Si, Geno,” Mrs. Ricci answered, and went back inside. She left a glass of milk and a biscuit, and Rye made quick work of them. He looked at the stack of neat clothes piled at the foot of the bed, the bowler hat he’d worn the day before smack on top.
Rye went out back and used the outhouse, cleaned up as best he could, powdered and dressed in the clothes Mr. Moore had given him, which smelled fresh and fit fine, if a bit loose in the seat. He hitched the pants with the new set of braces that Mr. Moore had provided. He had everything but shoes. He laced up his old boots and put on the gray coat. He slicked down his hair with water, set the bowler on top, and caught his faint reflection in Mrs. Ricci’s back window: a fine gentleman—
The back door was open, and Rye walked into Mrs. Ricci’s kitchen, then through the house and into the parlor. And there, sitting in a chair with her hands in a muff, looking around the room, was Ursula the Great.
“Oh, hello, Miss—” He’d begun speaking without knowing what came next, and so he said, “Great.”
14
Life is slow until it isn’t; Rye wondered if that was what people meant by fate, life speeding up like the view from an express train. Or maybe fate was a fancy motor car driven by a silent man in white gloves, for once Rye climbed in, there was no choice—you held on and rattled over cobblestones and streetcar tracks, around horses and carriages, nothing to do but shrug and think, So this is it, one day on a ball field, next a sweatbox, then snuggled into the leather backseat of a pup-pupping automobile with Ursula the Great—buffeted by wind while she squeezed his arm like she was his girl, the two of them chauffeured by this serious man in a driver’s cap and goggles, who gave Rye the warmest scarf and gloves and
now motored them around buggies and trucks and lampposts, heads turning like royalty was passing, for this had to be the finest car in town, and they traveled through neighborhoods and years, up the South Hill to the grandest boulevard overlooking downtown and the whole river valley.
There were other autos on the street, but those lesser vehicles were chuddering old Tin Lizzies and delivery trucks, nothing like this long, fancy dragon.
“This is the Peerless seven-passenger Touring!” the driver called over his shoulder, over the wind and the thupping motor. “Out of Cleveland! Ohio! Shipped piece by piece! Built on the spot by a specialist! Only vehicle of its kind in the state!”
Rye wondered at the kind of man who could afford to hire someone to yell out his bragging for him. “I could see six passengers,” he said quietly to Miss Ursula, “but you’d have to drag the seventh.”
It was ice cold in the open air, and Ursula just kept pulling him closer by his hostage arm. “Thank you for coming. I’ve been worried about Gregory.”
“Gig can handle himself,” Rye said, and wondered if it was true.
“I hope you’re right.” She nestled even closer.
When she glanced up at the driver, Rye took in her whole face and thought how funny the word beautiful was, that it could mean such different things. The stark contrast of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s black hair and eyes against that pale Irish skin or Ursula’s scarlet hair and pink lips and high flushed cheeks. She looked at him looking at her, and before he could turn away, their eyes locked, and she glanced down at his lips. Rye wondered if she did this to make men think about kissing her, because it certainly made him think that, then he felt awful for even thinking about kissing his brother’s girl.
“I went to see Gregory at the jail,” she said. She swallowed and glanced up at the driver. “They are being treated brutally in there. It is barbaric. But he was happy to know you’d gotten out. He asked me to talk to you and make sure you knew that he was fine.”
“Thank you,” Rye said, though he was filled with jealousy and wondered how Ursula had managed to get in to see Gig when they were on lockdown.
“He also told me about the house you hope to build one day,” she said.
“He did?”
“Yes, he’d like to build a real home for you, Ryan.” She smiled and squeezed his arm again. Rye could feel her breath on his face.
Hearing about his brother’s feelings from Ursula was strange. Like Rye was overhearing a conversation that wasn’t meant for him. He had to remind himself that less than two weeks ago this woman had chosen a rich mining man over Gig.
He wished he could show her that he and Gig weren’t all orphan-on-the-bum sorrow. That they were actually adventuring brothers. But he was at a loss as to how to make that case in the back of a rumbling seven-person automobile. Some nameless ache hit him, and he imagined Gig and Ursula making a house together, her cooking dinner—and felt a swirling confusion: his arm pressed in her bosom. Rye wasn’t sure if he wanted to be kissed by this woman or mothered.
“What is it, Ryan?” she asked, and she squeezed his arm even tighter, and he thought, When we separate, my arm might go with her.
The driver shifted to go uphill and Rye had to yell over the sound of the motor. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course!” she said.
“It’s about the cougar!”
“Oh,” she said, “that,” and loosened her grip. She must’ve heard this question a hundred times, because she turned away and looked out the window. “There’s meat sewn in the corset,” she said more quietly. “Beef liver and offal.” She shrugged. “Provides some extra here, too.” She patted her chest. “The cat knows that if he growls but refrains from biting, he’ll get a fine meal.” And now she glanced at the driver again. “Me, too, I guess. If I growl but don’t bite, I get to eat.”
The car slowed then, and Rye looked up. They were on a street of mansions lined with shade trees and massive gates. The driver wheeled the Peerless Touring into a turnout. The home went on forever, dormers and rooflines making it look like three houses had collided—not just the grandest home Rye had ever seen but, he knew in that moment, the grandest home he would ever see.
He couldn’t take the entire house in, but the front seemed to cover half the block. It was three stories, with turrets and balconies and rows of exterior arches. It was an unusual coral color, like a castle from another land, the buildings behind it painted the same: a carriage house, a shop, and a gardener’s bungalow. Rye realized he was gaping and closed his mouth.
Thank God for the paid braggart driver or Rye never would have known the house was “constructed entirely of sandstone imported from Italy” or that its style “suggested Spanish and Moorish influences with classical elements.”
“I was thinking Moorish,” Rye muttered.
The driver went on about how the arches referenced an estate called Alhambra, a Spanish palace belonging to Charles the Fifth.
The driver opened the back door of the Peerless Touring and they climbed out, Rye grateful to have Mr. Moore’s bowler on his head as they climbed the steps, the driver leading them to a set of double doors adorned with silver knockers inlaid with gold sculpted horses. Then he pushed on both doors and the building didn’t open so much as unfold, reveal itself to Rye, the first image one that would endure for him—gold.
Gold light and gold fixtures and gold furniture, burlap wallpaper painted gold across a wide two-story landing, crystal chandeliers hanging between two grand round staircases, each with shiny black railings above a marble floor, those steps curling away into untold second-story riches. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The tables and chairs lining the entryway, the rugs, everything was gilded on its edges. Four servants were lined up waiting, the first a young man holding out his hands for coats and hats and gloves and scarves. “Can I keep my hat?” Rye asked, worried about the rat’s nest beneath.
“Of course, Mr. Dolan,” the coat man said.
The lord of the house was nowhere in sight, and unsure what to do now, Rye stepped up to get a look at one of the two dazzling staircases, wide enough for ten men at the bottom but narrowing as it curled up and around. He looked deep into the black shiny railing, expecting to see himself, but whatever that black stone was, it gobbled up light and reflection like a deep cave.
“Onyx,” the driver said. “Each of the house’s nine fireplaces is also constructed of Brazilian onyx.”
“Did he run out of gold?” Rye asked.
The bragging driver made a noise that might’ve been a laugh, and when Rye turned back, the driver was handing the servant his own hat and gloves and coat. Beneath his wool coat, he wore a velvet dinner jacket, and Rye thought he seemed older than he had in the car—fifty, perhaps. The other servants all faced him and waited. “Heat some brandy,” the driver said, “and some tea for Ursula,” one of the waiting women nodding and backing away, and Rye saw that even Ursula the Great was watching the driver, and he understood, finally, just as the man offered his hand.
“Lemuel Brand,” he said. “You’ll forgive me for not introducing myself earlier, but I am still getting used to motoring by myself.”
Rye glanced over at Ursula, remembering her promise that night “not to bed the man,” but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
Then Lem Brand waved his arm around the room like a magician and said, “Welcome to Alhambra, Mr. Dolan.”
15
It seemed funny, as they walked the grounds, that Rye had imagined Lem Brand would hire someone to brag for him—he would have been just as likely to hire someone to draw his breaths. He gushed with pride over every aspect of his estate: here, a two-story carriage house with room for four premier autos and an apartment for his mechanic; there, Spanish stables for two of the finest breeding horses in the western United States; up there, a sledding hill and archery course. He described everything with such care (“a footbridge made from Amazon rosewood assembled with no nails or screws”), it was
as if he’d built it with his own hands.
Ursula stayed a few steps behind as they walked; clearly, she’d had this tour before. They were also trailed by several members of the house staff, led by a thick man with bushy eyebrows who introduced himself simply as Willard and who had a pistol strapped beneath his long coat. He eyed Rye suspiciously as they walked.
They looped back into the house, where Rye was shown one treasure after another: a stained-glass window twice his height, silk curtains from Java, crystal lamps from Paris, a thirty-person dining table cut from the Bavarian forests of a “lesser duke,” a Patagonia cherrywood grandfather clock that cost twenty thousand dollars. When Rye stopped to stare at a forest of tall orchids in vases, Lem Brand put a hand on his shoulder. “You have a good eye, Ryan,” he said, “Anyone can buy a clock, but find fresh orchids in winter? That’s the true test of a man’s means.”
The estate was overwhelming, and Rye felt a kind of dazzled panic—like a hungry man trying not to eat too fast. Finally, they settled into what Lem Brand called the main library, which, like the landing, was two stories tall, but felt to Rye as cozy as a pair of new socks. The walls were floor-to-twenty-foot-ceiling with books, and books disappeared into the sky, leather-bound volumes climbing and climbing, a sliding ladder to reach them all. A fire burned in the onyx fireplace. It was the warmest room Rye had ever been in—he felt sleep come on the moment he sat down, and he covered a yawn.
“Happens to me every time,” Lem Brand said, the enveloping warmth coming from heated water that ran through pipes in the floor as well as the radiators, and just then a servant arrived with a tray of French cookies and gold-lined snifters of a warm, sweet drink—Rye looked up and the servant said, almost apologetically, “Brandy, sir”—which they sipped in the soft chairs.